Hungry Ghost

by Allison Moon

  Why had she feared this beauty? Though Lexie loved Archer’s human shape, she adored her in wolf form. It was the truest version of the woman she loved, free of subtext and subterfuge. Free of everything but love. Her shell was beautiful, but what was within was divine. Lexie might not have understood that if she had she not felt it herself. The shape her beloved took was simultaneously meaningless and potent. Lexie stared at her paw and wondered if she were capable of such a similar purity, free of the human world and all the bullshit it entailed. An elegance in comfort, an unloosening, naked, and for the first time really able to breathe.

  A growl gurgled in her throat, the closest approximation to tears her wolf body would allow.

  The birds rustled in their nest. Lexie glared at their cozy home. She stood on her hind legs, reaching her forepaws above where the nest sat hidden in the crux of the branch that held it. She dug her claws into the bark, securing herself for a long stretch. Her height titillated her. She stood two feet taller than her woman’s body. She glared at the roosting birds, sniffing out their dander and dust. They stilled, sensing the danger in Lexie’s notice.

  Smart, Lexie thought, before tracing a single claw along the shell of the nest’s lone egg. She left a thin gray line against the brilliant ecru. The female wren screeched and flew at Lexie, beating her wings and attempting, futilely, to scare Lexie off. She batted the bird away and hooked her paw around the male and the egg. The male bird trembled like a frantic heartbeat against her leathery pads, while the egg sat stoic and fragile, its small warmth seeping out. Lexie opened her mouth and shoved them both in, chewing just once, grinding the father and egg into a salty, crunchy paste.

  The female darted and dove, then fled. Lexie fell back on all fours, grinding the bird and egg once more, then swallowing. The sweet crunch of the fetal bird and the salty, bloody fluff of its father washed down Lexie’s gullet, and her stomach rejoiced.

  Such delight made her muscles twitch under her skin. She had to do it. She shouldn’t attract the attention. She couldn’t resist. Say no. Stop.

  Lexie tossed her head back on her neck, unfurling, uncoiling, stretching, easing.

  Her breath, the great insane force of it, surged through her open throat like a banshee’s wail. Her glottis caught it like a steam whistle, tearing the stream of air into two pieces, slicing it down the middle in ripples of pitch. Two ribbons, one low, one high, finding and fighting each other in the space beyond her muzzle.

  They fled from her as though they had been waiting for months to do so.

  Her eyes squeezed shut with splendid release. Her howl made the pine needles above her shiver. She howled as if she could cause the moon to rise, just with her voice.

  Lexie lowered her head, spent. Just then, the white-horned crescent of the moon peered from between two boughs.

  Sparks sizzled down her nerves, aftershocks.

  A howlgasm.

  She opened her jaws in a lupine smile.

  Something darted through her like a minnow, another presence in Lexie’s head. Where her paws connected to the floorboards of the treehouse, she felt it rattle her skeleton, ripple her fur. She couldn’t name it or identify it. It felt like her human self, having traded places with her wolf, huddled and cowering in the recesses of her consciousness.

  She smelled that other self, a dispersed sort of person-scent lingering in the treehouse, a layer of chemicals too thick to parse, foods, esters, synthetic simulacra of organic life, decay. A jumble of misdirections was the scent of people. Her smell roused the girl huddled inside her, and she knew she needed to get rid of what remained of her humanity, if only for the night.

  Lexie leapt down the tree’s side, paws scrabbling for purchase on branches and scraping against bark. The tiny meadow below was crisp with frost. Lexie bounded in the direction where she’d thrown her knife. She lifted her nose to the air, then lowered it to the ground seeking out the knife’s scent. She couldn’t find it. She paced forward, sliding past a birch trunk, black scars on white skin. She … smelled it, she supposed, but it was bigger than that. The scent started in her gut, not her snout. It trembled in her abdomen, like loud bass through a stack of speakers. It rattled her guts.

  She leaned into the tree, stepping back and forth, rubbing against it like a worry stone. Its naked branches clattered overhead, and it oils warmed to her touch and sublimed.

  The birch yielded the scents of cedar, sage, and river mud. Archer. Or a simulacrum of her. A stand-in made of earth and herbs.

  Her muscles twitched in anticipation. While her human brain screamed threats, warnings, and pleas, the wolf-Lexie stared into the gloaming and only wanted to run. To take Archer’s territory and make it her own. She was Archer’s lover, and in that moment Lexie decided that was how territories changed hands. Screw it. She could Google it later. Now, she just wanted to run.

  She tore off toward the south, following the Rogue River before it eased to the East. In her nose was a barrage of bright smells like colors, all of them shades of blue and green. Movements flashed to the left and right, blurry critters leaving a burst of fear behind them. Lexie ran onward, her own breath heavy in her ears, the sound reaching them on a new, slightly longer, odder path. It was like the sound from a film, added later, always just slightly uncanny.

  She ran until her lungs burned and her tummy rumbled with hunger. She slowed in a patch of thick and mossy brush, sniffing out small animals, wanting to kill something else.

  She followed the scent trail of a jackrabbit around low brush and to a taller stand of trees. It tore off, and she pursued, running fast, dodging and ducking under boughs and brush. When she lost it, she found something else to chase. She repeated the game for hours, sometimes eluded, sometimes giving up her prey for the sake of the chase. In the darkest hours of the night, deep in the southern woods, she found something new: the sound of a clumsy creature too stupid to know it was being stalked. It ceased its rooting and raised its head from the earth. A feral pig.

  Lexie’s mouth watered. God knew how much she loved bacon; she couldn’t wait to try the real thing. She took a tentative step, and the pig’s ear twitched, seeking her. After a frozen moment, the pig dug its snout back into the soil and resumed its rooting. Lexie took two more deliberate and silent paces, feeling each part of her paw ease into the earth.

  The pig heard her footfall and froze again. It started to move, then stopped, listening. Lexie held her breath. The pig took off. Lexie chased.

  She followed it around tree trunks and through bushes. It stumbled over a rock outcropping and she pounced, falling just short of it. It squealed as it ran, tromping zigzagged tracks in the frost-covered earth.

  The pig fled toward the river. Where the water bent south, the foliage grew dense. The pig dove into the underbrush and Lexie slid to a stop before the branches snared her fur.

  Lexie ran around the dense brush just in time to hear the pig’s hooves tear across the frosty clearing beyond. She ran in pursuit, ending up in a stand of tall sequoias.

  She took a deep breath to find the pig’s scent, and found something else instead, something old and dead. Lexie looked around and realized she was standing on the ground where Renee killed the boys.

  So little of the scent remained, but the memory of it was as fresh as it had been the day she stumbled upon it with Archer. Lexie retched, choking on the flood of memories of filth, bile, and tears. She should’ve known better than to let go. This time. Always.

  Lexie slinked back to the clearing below the treehouse, sniffing out her knife. The dull throb returned, and the closer she got, the more nausea rose in her throat. The moon’s sharp light glinted off the blade, half-buried at the base of a tree that wept sap.

  Each step tugged at her throat, like the knife was a magnet pulling Lexie forward clavicle-first. When she reached the knife, she touched her paw to the handle and felt her body shift. Her cells and nerves reorganized in a cascade that left her brain in tumult for the tiniest moment. She lurched forward
, her balance off as her arms tried to hold the weight of her torso. She collapsed next to the knife, her head against the tree trunk, watching it weep sap from its wound.

  “Sorry, buddy,” she whispered, touching the sap with gentle fingertips and bringing it to her lips. The alkaline liquid tasted bitter on her tongue.

  She withdrew the knife and held it against her cooling skin, regret and shame filling in the places that joy had filled earlier. She shouldn’t be here, in these woods, pretending to be something she wasn’t, taking pleasure in such destruction. This wasn’t her. It wasn’t right. It wouldn’t solve anything.

  23

  Lexie dragged herself into the house, wrapped in Summer’s quilt. Its mouse piss and mold stink wafted in with her. Jenna was knitting in the living room, a mug of black tea steaming next to her, when Lexie walked in. The sunrise peeked through one small window over Jenna’s shoulder, and she looked so warm and calm it pained Lexie to interrupt the moment.

  “Pee-yew!” Jenna said, looking up from her knitting. “What is that?”

  Lexie stepped into the living room, prepared to explain, but the tears won out. She was crying before she knew it.

  Jenna gave Lexie a soothing shush and then pulled her into a hug.

  “We’ll get it cleaned up, sweetie. It’ll be easy.”

  Jenna grabbed the quilt and shook it out, the crud gone but the smell clinging fast.

  Four holes punctured the surface of the quilt, small rips following the delicate stitching and rows of multicolored fabric.

  Jenna examined it carefully, holding it to the light and running her fingers along the stitching.

  “It’s salvageable. Handmade things can be unmade and remade. It’s part of their magic. I’ll separate the front piece, where all this detailing is.” She ran her fingers over the crooked stitching. “And I’ll add a new back piece, some patches, and new batting. No problem.”

  “It was my mom’s,” Lexie whimpered.

  Jenna nodded. “It’ll be fine. We’ll get this piece of your mama back.”

  Lexie needed a shower. She plodded up the steps. Mitch was in the bathroom, fiddling with a roll of surgical bandaging.

  “Can I?” Lexie asked as she poked her head into the bathroom.

  “It’s cool. Come in.”

  Lexie took off her clothes at the same time Mitch did. His breasts were shockingly large, especially since Lexie had never really paid much mind to his body. Seeing them now, released of their sports bra and undershirt confines, Lexie had a hard time not staring.

  Mitch didn’t notice—or he pretended not to. He wound the bandage around his chest, flattening the pendulous flesh into simulacra of pectoral muscles. Lexie ran the water and stretched.

  “How was the woods?” he asked.

  Shit, Lexie thought.

  “You’re going to have to start expecting that,” he said.

  “I guess it’s hard to keep secrets around here.”

  Mitch snorted, a half smile digging a dimple into one cheek. “When I can smell everywhere you’ve been for the past two days? Yeah, you can forget about privacy.” He bit his lip and looked away.

  “You must miss her a lot,” Mitch said, finally.

  Lexie looked askance.

  “You go to the cabin to think about Archer, right?”

  Lexie fidgeted and shrugged.

  “Do you see anything?” Mitch asked.

  “Anything?”

  Mitch bit harder on his lip, his dimples forming like forehead furrows. “Like of Blythe. Like blood, or fur, or anything.” He forced a casual tone.

  Lexie grimaced and shook her head. “No. I think the fire took care of all of that.”

  Mitch nodded and returned his attention to the mirror.

  Lexie stepped into the shower and moaned at the needle-heat of the water. “I can go back there with you sometime, if you’d like,” Lexie said. “To, I dunno. Say goodbye or something.”

  “Maybe,” Mitch said in a grudging tone that made it sound like a no.

  “Hey Mitch, can I borrow your hockey stick?” Hazel asked, her voice echoing through the bathroom.

  “Why?”

  “Professor Rindt is organizing a protest down at the new off ramp and I need to tape my sign to something.”

  “Why are you protesting?” Lexie asked, peeking around the shower curtain.

  “Because paving a highway through an old-growth forest just to raise the state’s bottom line is bullshit.”

  Mitch futzed with his hair in the mirror. “But it’ll tear up the Morloc territory. That’s a good thing.”

  “No it’s not,” Hazel said. “It’s just going to squish them into a smaller space, which isn’t going to be good for anyone.”

  The three stood still for a moment, contemplating that fact.

  “Do you think?” Mitch said.

  “That’s why they’re so pissed at Milton all of a sudden?” Hazel said.

  Lexie pulled back the curtain so she could participate in the conversation without ending her shower. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a sudsy heap. “That’d piss me off.”

  “Do you think Bree … ?” Mitch asked Lexie.

  “Oh my god, she was!” Hazel shouted.

  “Was what?” Mitch asked.

  Hazel nearly leapt as she shouted, and from down the hall, they heard Corwin and Sharmalee shift sleepily in bed. “She was on the board of the environmental club! She’s the one who brought Rindt on as our staff advisor. She was helping organize the protest!”

  Lexie dipped her head under the stream. “You seriously just remembered this, just now?” Lexie asked.

  “What?” Hazel said. “I was only at one meeting.”

  Lexie let the hot water wash away the past few days’ anxiety and dirt. “Does that count as a motive?” she muttered to herself, forgetting the girls could hear her just fine.

  “Probably not,” Mitch said, “but it’s a fair bet that someone out there didn’t like her.”

  24

  Lexie pulled up to the back entrance of the Thorny Rose, easing her truck bed to the loading dock. The cold morning cast the scene in a glaring gray. The building, which weeks ago hadn’t left much of an impression beyond industrial shabbiness, appeared downright seedy in the daylight. The gravel parking lot extended for yards in all directions, keeping the forest at bay. The red bricks had been painted and repainted, the motley hues worn and peeled away, coloring the warehouse the shade of a particularly brutal kind of vomit.

  Randy greeted Lexie with a sheepish smile. “Is this how I make it up to you?”

  Lexie stepped down from the driver’s seat and half-smiled. “It’s a decent start.”

  “I don’t know if this will work, Lex,” Randy said, leading Lexie through the roll-up and into the dungeon. The cage lay deconstructed on the wrestling mats.

  “Well, it’s the only plan I have,” Lexie said.

  The smell flooded Lexie’s brain with memories of their night together here, and the awkward and shitty goodbye disappeared in the fresh memory of their shared sensations.

  “The hardware is all in this box,” Randy said. It rattled when she kicked it. “My buddy emailed me the specs and assembly instructions. Here.”

  Randy leaned in close to show the paper to Lexie. She smelled of cologne, laundry detergent, and motor oil—the antithesis of the forest. That foreignness mixed with her sex nearly made Lexie swoon. She could feel Randy’s tug on her, but she didn’t care. She knew it was a bad idea, but she didn’t care about that either. “The steel is stress-rated to forty-thousand PSI, but I’m not so sure about the fatigue life, especially at these joints. After reading about that Rare attack on campus, I really don’t know if it’ll hold one.”

  “It’ll work,” Lexie said in an attempt to convince them both.

  “Just don’t get yourself killed for a science fair project, okay?”

  “I might. This could be the last time you see me.”

  “That’s not funny, L
ex.”

  It wasn’t, and Lexie’s face said as much.

  “Oh,” Randy said. “Then can I apologize again?”

  Lexie was about to tell her no and turn away, but the gentle pleading in Randy’s eyes held her gaze. It was the human equivalent of a tucked tail, and Lexie found herself excited by the submissive posture. She grabbed the back of Randy’s neck and pulled the other woman’s mouth to hers.

  Randy flinched, then relaxed into the kiss. She wrapped her wiry arms around Lexie and pulled their bodies together, tight. Randy nearly matched Lexie in her leanness, and Lexie exalted their similarity. Randy felt different from the only other two bodies Lexie had held against hers. She didn’t have Renee’s round hips, or Archer’s rolling muscles. Randy was scrappy, and Lexie delighted in the novelty.

  “I thought—” Randy started.

  “Shut up.”

  Lexie seized Randy by the arms, stroking her hands up her bare shoulders and burying her fingers in her cropped, grizzled hair. Randy let Lexie lead, looking as surprised as a teenage boy getting lucky for the first time.

  Lexie pushed her to the ground, straddling Randy’s body, and pulling off both their shirts. Randy was wise to keep her mouth shut, no doubt trained by a lifetime of loving complicated women. She seemed content to let Lexie take what she needed, and this time, Lexie was fully present.

  The sunlight through the open loading dock cast white diamonds on Lexie’s bare skin. Randy sat up, taking Lexie’s breast into her mouth, stroking and sucking, rocking their bodies together, her thigh wedged between Lexie’s legs.

  They released one another only long enough to remove the rest of their clothing, and then they were back at each other, the wrestling mat serving as padding to cradle their crashing bodies.

  Lexie dove onto Randy, pinning her down, biting her flesh, drawing her nails across her skin.