Hungry Ghost

by Allison Moon

  Lexie fidgeted with her hoodie’s zipper. “A bunch of shit that you don’t really want to know about.”

  Randy’s nostrils flared, and she opened her eyes wide. Lexie feared the other woman was fighting back tears, or something worse. She just wished for a clean break so Randy would have a shot at finding a nice girl to play with instead of getting caught up in Lexie’s various insanities.

  “I don’t want to be an accessory to… .” Randy shook her head and concentrated on changing lanes.

  “You’re not an accessory to anything,” Lexie groaned. She gestured for Randy to turn right at the intersection and counted the seconds until they would arrive at a campus building—any campus building.

  Randy shook her head. “I guess it explains a lot about you. I’ve been in the scene a long time and have seen some crazy-ass shit, but that was beyond.”

  “Wait,” Lexie asked, incredulous, “are we talking about the sex, now?”

  “In part, yeah. I mean, there was a lot going on between us—”

  Lexie groaned.

  “—a lot going on in you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Randy pulled herself toward the steering wheel and pushed back, nervous.

  “I’m not going to say that you checked out, but you didn’t really seem there anymore. I probably should’ve stopped a couple times when you didn’t respond to my check-ins.”

  “Gross!” Lexie scowled. “Are you saying you thought I wasn’t responsive and you kept going?!”

  “Shit, Lex, you were having a real good time. Mega sub space. It’s not like I … .” Randy tightened her lips. “You weren’t giving me the signs that anything was wrong until you told me to stop. Then on the way home … .” She nearly chuckled. “I was not prepared for that.”

  “Neither was I.”

  “Are you kidding? You ran headlong into the dark with nothing but a seven-inch blade on you. It seemed like you had been training your whole life for something like that. That’s what’s got me freaking out. What the hell, Lex? Are you like a marine or a fucking ninja or some shit? That was fucking freaky.”

  “I’m not a ninja.”

  “What happened out there?”

  “This is my class,” Lexie said.

  “What’s going on with you, Lexie?”

  “I don’t know!” she shouted. “I don’t fucking know! No one does. No one knows what my mom was trying to teach me when she sang me lullabies in dead languages. No one knows why I seem to stumble over corpses like it’s my job. No one knows why I’m so fucking scared to let go of this knife! No one knows any of these things. The only one who did died when I was eight.” Lexie felt the truth of her answer settle onto her muscles like a chill. “’I don’t know’ is the only answer I’ve got for you. And if that’s not enough for you, then I don’t know what else to say.”

  Randy’s face was frozen in shock.

  Lexie saw Randy’s defensive posture and checked herself. She had whipped out her knife without even realizing, waving it in her right hand like a madwoman, feral and ready for a fight.

  “What are you doing with that knife?” Randy asked in the forced evenness of someone trying to calm a wild animal.

  Lexie looked at the blade, seeing her own reflection limned with honey-colored fur. She sheathed it. “I don’t know that either.”

  The two sat in the car. An apology formed on Lexie’s lips, but found no voice. Finally, she grabbed her backpack and muttered, “I have to go. I’m late.” Despite not owing Randy anything, she still felt the lie bite her like an insect.

  “I’ll keep your secret,” Randy said. “Whatever it is.”

  Lexie nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Can we … ?”

  Lexie slammed the door and shook her head. “Sorry, no.”

  “I’ll make it up to you. Promise I will.”

  But Lexie was already walking away. Randy hit the steering wheel with the heel of her hand then sped off.

  Lexie loaded her plate with sausage, bacon, and eggs, scolding herself for taking so long to try out the whole “up in time for breakfast” thing.

  She grabbed the Milton Gazette and sat alone at a round table by the windows. The dining hall was empty but for two tables. One was full of swimmers carbo-loading after their morning practice. The second was full of boys, Stefan among them. Stefan wore smudged eyeliner and his hair was streaked with glitter. He looked like he’d gone straight from the dance floor to the breakfast table. He reached to the boy next to him and tugged on his earlobe. It was the skinny waiter from Mao’s. Lexie scarfed down her meal, keeping her eyes trained on the table. The waiter wore a tight white t-shirt and khakis. He giggled and batted Stefan’s hand away. The boys were all playful and high energy, wolfing down their huge breakfasts and replaying scenes from the previous night.

  She gripped her knife and squinted at them, needing confirmation, though she’d already held the evidence in her hands that night by the lake, in the form of Stefan’s furry back. Her head hurt. She couldn’t keep focus, and nothing happened, no faces within faces, just blurry boys.

  None of the others noticed Lexie staring, and Stefan was making an effort to ignore her glares. She skulked until they took their trays and left. She returned to her table with another tray of eggs and bacon, with a little juice for nutrients, and flipped open the Milton Gazette to find about the new developments in the Bree Curtis case.

  Investigators are saying, the article read, multiple different kinds of wounds on Bree’s body indicate that her injuries were not due to one lone Rare wolf, but the work of a pack.

  11

  Lexie downed the rest of her omelet and ran from the dining hall. She tracked Stefan’s pack until they split off in various directions. She followed Stefan into Pierce Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus, all heavy gray stone and carved redwood. His footsteps echoed on the grand staircase as he climbed his way up to the third floor. Just before he reached his classroom, Lexie collared him and dragged him into the elevator room.

  “The hell?” he stumbled.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you ran with a pack?”

  “No! I—You don’t get it.”

  “Clearly.”

  “They’re just some boys I hang out with.” Stefan adjusted his glasses and backpack, glancing through the doorway of his class.

  “Some werewolves, you mean?”

  “Well … yeah,” he whispered through a clenched jaw, begging her discretion.

  “Is that really the first guy you killed?”

  “Shh!!” Stefan covered Lexie’s mouth and looked past her shoulder. “Jesus girl. Are you insane?”

  “Stefan, what the fuck?”

  “Lexie, I’ve got enough heat on me as it is, I don’t need you broadcasting my business through the language hall.”

  “The cops came?”

  “Hell yeah, the cops came, but not like the lame Milton cops. Oregon motherfucking State Police. They questioned me for forty-five minutes before Blackwell showed up.”

  “Wait, what? The governor?”

  “Yep. Gucci-wearing son-of-a-bitch just stepped right in, palled around with the guys and then sent them away like it was N.B.D.”

  “Why?”

  “The jo—the guy that picked me up was Governor Blackwell’s senior advisor something something. Like his best guy.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah,” Stefan said.

  “Wait,” Lexie said. “If he was Blackwell’s right hand, why did he send the cops away?”

  Stefan scanned the hall outside the doorframe. “Must we hash this out in a public hallway?”

  Lexie glared at him. “Yep.”

  Stefan groaned and stretched his neck. “Fine. That guy … the one I—you know—he was a notorious shitball. Some of the guys warned me not to go on a date with him, but I did, and … everyone was right. The boys wanted me to show him that we skinny fags aren’t to be messed with, I guess.”
r />   “The boys? Who?”

  “Just guys I work with.”

  “At Mao’s?”

  “That GMO soy shack? Hell no.” Stefan lowered his voice to such a tiny whisper no human ears could hear. “The dude you found me with was a client.”

  “Client?”

  “The guys I run with, my pack, most of us hustle.”

  Lexie had a vision of a bunch of Stefan’s skinny friends hanging out in a pool hall. Then she realized what he actually meant and struggled to maintain her cool.

  “Who else knows?” she asked.

  “My whole—” Stefan halted when the elevator binged and a student in a wheelchair rolled out. Lexie and Stefan shared an awkward nod with the boy and waited until he was out of earshot to resume their conversation. “My whole pack knows I messed him up. Only Taylor and Otter know the dirt.”

  “And you trust them?”

  He gave Lexie a hard look. “Every night with my life.”

  “How many more of there are you?”

  Stefan shrugged. “Anywhere between five and fourteen, depending.”

  “Fourteen?! Are you fucking kidding me?!”

  “What? What did I do wrong?”

  “We’re trying to figure out who killed Bree Curtis and you’re sitting on fourteen werewolves?”

  “Well not all at once.”

  Lexie rolled her eyes.

  “They’re not killers. They’re not strangers. Not to me. Besides, only Tay and Otter live in town. The rest of them come down from Portland on the full moons to run.”

  The full moon had been a week off when Lexie found Bree’s body, and she was barely cold. If Stefan was telling the truth, it meant some other wolf did the deed. “And when you run, do you remember?”

  “In dribs and drabs. We probably could if we tried. But most of us don’t want remember. We shift to forget. It’s better than drugs, than sex, than any of it. We don’t exactly try to stay lucid.”

  “How can you control yourself?”

  “That’s the point. You don’t. You just have to trust that you’ll have integrity, in the literal sense.”

  The threads were coming unraveled faster than she could cling to them. “So, if not you, then who?”

  “Lex, I’m late for Arabic.”

  “Who, Stefan?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” Stefan said.

  “The coroner’s report said Bree was killed by a pack, and there aren’t any packs other than mine and yours.”

  Stefan groaned. “Why do you care so much about this? It’s not like you knew Bree.”

  “As long as there’s this threat out there, my life will never go back to normal.” Lexie said it with conviction, but it didn’t feel like the whole answer.

  “Right. This is all about you. Thanks for the reminder,” Stefan said. He sidestepped around Lexie. “I’m going to go to class now. Can you try not to get any of the rest of us killed while you play Nancy Drew?”

  Lexie shrugged, her mind churning with claws and fangs as she contemplated the depths of her naiveté in expecting that Stefan would care. She watched Stefan step into his classroom and sit next to a stocky, square-jawed boy who greeted him with a smile and slap on the back.

  Stefan gave the boy a coy smile and blushed. Lexie left.

  Lexie arrived ten minutes late to her Indigenous Linguistics class and ditched out to go to the bathroom twice. She was fidgety and distracted, and Professor Rindt noticed. He was a visiting professor from Ontario, and one of the more beloved profs on campus, a straight-edge punk made good. He supervised the environmental group and led students on nature walks on weekends and evenings to give them booze-free alternatives. Tattoos peeked out from his shirt collar and cuffs, and Lexie couldn’t help but think of Randy, though that was where the similarities ended. He wore a trimmed beard and a buzz cut. Most of the girls in class thought he was a dreamboat. Lexie only feared he was going to fail her.

  Lexie wanted to care, to do a good job in this, if only this, class. But her mind was back outside, on Bree’s waxen face, on Archer’s burned-down cabin, on Stefan and Renee, and on whomever was doing this killing. She wondered what she would do, or if she would have to do anything at all. She didn’t want to think about it, so she focused on the front of the classroom.

  On the chalkboard Rindt wrote out the terms bilabial, velar and palatal, which Lexie supposed had something to do with pronunciation, but she couldn’t be bothered to care beyond that. He drew a horse and led the students through homonyms in various North American languages. “Kawayo,” he droned to the students who repeated in a mix of earnest and disinterested tones. “Kawayu” he said, with a new intonation. “Cahuayoh,” he said, and they repeated again. A horse in three languages. Lexie tried to care, but it felt pointless.

  Bridle, bits, muzzle, tack …

  The teacher recited.

   … mane, haunch, gait, gallop.

  If she could ride her ambivalence like a horse, maybe she could make sense of it—guide it to some mutually-beneficial location, perhaps one in possession of clean water, and possibly oats.

  But her problem wasn’t a horse, bred, broken, and trained for thousands of years, docility and obedience the end goals. Her only option was her wolf and Lexie didn’t want to think about where it would guide her if she let her guard down.

  She dreamed about blood most nights, blood with a pulse. She woke up horny and exhausted, hungry and miserable. She used school and studying and the Pack and their daily dramas to distract herself, but it didn’t do the trick. Her system was tricking itself. She needed something more, something more real, something real at all.

  Lexie rubbed her eyes, fighting off the headache that clawed at her temples. Her eyes were fuzzy and strained, like she’d been watching an action movie out of focus.

  “Ms. Clarion?”

  Lexie started. The classroom had emptied out while she daydreamed. Professor Rindt stood alone at the front. He smiled tightly beneath his trimmed beard and gestured for Lexie to come forward.

  “I have a question for you, Lexie.” Rindt sat at his desk and gestured for Lexie to take a seat.

  She tried to read his cool expression and sat. He continued. “You aced the placement test, but you have failed every quiz in the two weeks since. You didn’t even bother turning in the first paper of the semester. Do you have any idea why that might be?”

  Lexie shifted her weight from foot to foot, trying to figure out how to give him an answer that she didn’t know herself. In her head they all felt the same. She shrugged.

  “Can I tell you what I think this indicates?”

  She bit her lip and shrugged.

  “You have a great natural talent, or you know the material exceedingly well. But you don’t care to do any work.” He rested his chin on his thick hands. “Sound about right?”

  Lexie shrugged again. “I guess.”

  “Melauak?” he said.

  “Huh?” Lexie gave him a confused look.

  “Kwayask? Eya?”

  Lexie tittered nervously. “Was this part of the reading?”

  “Kloosh?”

  Lexie raised an eyebrow. That sounded familiar.

  “Karout?”

  Her head tilted with recognition, like a dog understanding a command. Professor Rindt inhaled sharply and nodded. “I see.”

  “What? What do you see?”

  He smiled and pushed away from his desk, standing to erase the board. “I’ve got all I need. Thank you Ms. Clarion. You can go.”

  Lexie tried to stammer a request for clarification, but nothing came. Her face was frozen with a furrowed brow.

  “Please do the reading. You’re missing a lot of context. See you Wednesday.”

  Lexie walked through Milton, squinting at every warm body that walked past her field of vision, finally resting on a bench outside of the library. Had Rindt just popped her with a verbal quiz? Had she passed or failed? She stretched her jaw and rubbed her temples. She spotted the same stock
y boy that Stefan had sat next to in class hanging with some friends over by the student union. He looked up, and she looked away before she could be caught staring. Her gaze landed on the doorway to Spohn Hall, clear across the quad. She saw two figures exiting the building. The outline of their bodies shimmered like an asphalt mirage on a summer day. She drew in her breath and straightened her back, sharpening her gaze to hold those forms in their protean shift. It was like trying to watch a dim star; the harder she looked, the less she could see the wolves. The hairy visages slipped away to reveal Stefan and his friend walking toward the library. Lexie sighed, disappointed with her lack of discovery.

  As they walked past, Stefan placed his hand to his face, theatrically shielding himself from Lexie’s gaze.

  “Don’t let that bitch see you,” Stefan said in a stage whisper to his friend. “She’s cray-zay.”

  “Fuck you, too,” Lexie said with a sneer.

  “Well sheesh,” Stefan said. “I was just playing. This is Taylor.”

  Stefan’s companion was the waiter from Mao’s, a tall boy with delicate features, black hair, and linen-colored skin. He had long lashes that gave his face a demure air. He smiled wordlessly and rocked on his heels. Both the boys wore plaid shirts in different colors and sneakers to match.

  “Who’s that guy?” Lexie asked, pointing to the same rakish boy from Stefan’s Arabic class—the one he’d fawned over—now sitting on the porch of the student union.

  “Rory Blackwell,” Taylor said. “He’s Bree’s boyfriend.”

  “Was,” Stefan corrected.

  “Right, was.”

  “Did you know Bree?” Lexie asked.

  “Yeah. She was a real bitch.”

  Taylor laughed. “Oh my god, shut the fuck up.” He shook his index finger at Lexie. “Princess didn’t know Bree, he’s just wet for her widower.”

  Lexie made a face.

  “Shut up, Taylor,” Stefan said.

  “Is Rory a wolf?” Lexie asked.

  “Princess wishes. He’d be easier to bone that way,” Taylor said.

  “Oh my god, I want to bite your face off.” Stefan slapped Taylor’s arm.