9
“Big night?” Renee asked, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand, when Lexie stumbled into the kitchen.
“What?” Lexie asked, grimacing at the sunshine and Renee both.
“Why was there a person passed out on our deck this morning?”
“Oh, fuck,” Lexie said, shuffling for the coffee pot. “Forget it. I can handle it.”
“I know you can handle it. I’m just wondering why you didn’t.”
“I didn’t realize she’d passed out.”
“Regardless,” Renee said, pausing to blow the steam off her mug, “when we got back this morning, I nearly clawed that bitch to death.”
“Shit,” Lexie said, filling her mug to the brim.
“If I wanted drunk assholes passed out in my hall, I’d live in a frat house.” Renee said.
They both flinched as she said those last two words. Since the night it happened, no one had spoken directly about the Phi Kappa Phi brothers Renee killed in service to Blythe’s insanity.
Now those words seemed to conjure their ghosts, and Renee’s forehead creased with their weight. Lexie wondered if she should say something to try to assuage Renee’s guilt, but she feared saying the wrong thing, and she let that be an excuse to keep her mouth shut. Lexie thought instead of Duane, the one who survived.
“Just be more careful when you’re bringing home strays,” Renee continued.
“She’s just a woman.”
“This isn’t a gender thing. It’s a Pack thing. You can never know where a person’s loyalty lies. You gotta look after your own,” Renee said. “You dig?”
Lexie scrunched up her mouth, nodding. “I dig.” She took a healthy, burning sip of the sweet and bitter brew, then set the mug down. She grabbed her hair at the nape of her neck and started braiding. “I don’t want her to come back anyway, and I don’t know how to say it.”
“You just say it. You say it until they hear it.” Renee picked up her phone and started texting.
“Easier said than done.”
“Well yeah. Even more important then.”
Lexie rubbed her still-sleepy eyes and dug through the refrigerator, pulling out a thick stick of salami and block of cheese. She unwrapped them both, holding them stacked one on top of the other in a fist, and bit. She chewed, slow and earnest, looking up, thinking.
The silence stretched on, broken only by Lexie’s chewing and Renee’s texting.
“I found Stefan last night. He killed a man,” Lexie said.
“What?!”
“He said the dude was a bad guy. He insists it’s the first time he’s killed. Or, remembered killing, at least.”
“Shit.” Renee slammed her phone on the countertop and rubbed her forehead.
“And Randy saw the body.”
“Double shit.”
“Yeaaaaah,” Lexie said, shoving the rest of the meat into her mouth to shut herself up.
“We can’t let any more humans know about this.”
“She doesn’t know about the werewolf bit. I told her a Rare attacked them both.”
Renee rubbed her lips together. “Regardless, if word gets around that werewolves are Rare wolves and responsible for these deaths … ”
You’re screwed, Lexie thought.
And Renee replied to her unspoken curse: “We’re all doomed.”
“Got it. I’ll take care of it.” Lexie recentered the cheese on the salami. “How about you?” she asked, noting the puffiness around Renee’s eyes and the clear scent that she hadn’t showered since the Pack’s run last night. “Rough night?”
“Naw. It was all right. I’m just … I’m thinking about Bree. About what the Pack can do.”
“Any ideas?”
“Thoughts, none of them solutions.”
“Can’t we just go after the one full-blood we know exists? The one that attacked me probably took out Bree, too.”
“That’s the thing. We’ve never hunted a full-blood before. Only half-bloods like us, only by catching them off guard as humans and forcing changes by beating the living shit out of them. I wouldn’t even know how to go about catching a full-blood,” Renee said. “They’re much bigger, much stronger. Much more…everything.”
“My dad was in the wolf-hunting business for twenty-some years. Why don’t I ask—” Her sentence was interrupted by a beep and a buzz. Renee grabbed her phone from the kitchen counter. She read, smiling, and began typing a response.
Lexie sighed.
“What?” Renee said.
“Fucking phones,” Lexie grumbled.
“You’re no Luddite. You’ve got a cell.”
“Archer doesn’t,” Lexie growled. “All day, every day, I watch people texting their friends or getting voicemail from their friends or fucking their fucking friends! And my girlfriend doesn’t even have a fucking phone. Ex. Ex-girlfriend.” She sighed. “I don’t even know where she is, and I’m listening to everyone get laid around me all the fucking time. And I’m here dealing with drunken bullies on my back porch and a werewolf gone all feral and murder-y.”
Renee held her breath for a moment, waiting for the end of Lexie’s rant. “Um, A: Were you or were you not at a BDSM dungeon last night?”
Lexie rolled her eyes.
“And B: Did you not lose your virginity five fucking months ago?”
Lexie tried to protest, but Renee shook her finger in her face.
“With, C: One of the hottest women this town has ever seen, by the way. But whatever, you’re magical or something. So instead I’ll just mention that, D: You were the one who told her to straight-up get.”
“Yeah, well, you all seemed pretty glad for it.”
Renee raised her hands in mock defense. “And we didn’t tell her to leave. But since you brought it up, she would have led us into battle headlong. Archer’s a fighter, not a strategist. That’s, if you don’t mind me saying so, what got your mom killed.”
“You’re saying Archer killed my mom that night?”
“No,” Renee said, “she’s no more responsible than anyone, regardless of what Blythe said. But Archer let a lot of people make bad choices that night.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means strategy, Lex. Archer is a pureblood which means bigger and stronger than full-bloods like the Morloc, than half-bloods like us, than anyone. That’s great for the big and strong, great for the lone wolves defending themselves and hunting, but for the rest of us, we just can’t take what she can.”
“So you’ll be more careful than Archer?” Lexie asked.
Renee’s eyes darkened. “I have to. We all do. Especially now.”
Lexie cocked her head.
“I don’t see an easy end to these attacks. The Rare that killed Bree needed a motive.”
“It did?”
“There’s no good reason to attack a lone woman in the woods.”
“Why not food?” Lexie asked, cramming another wedge of cheese into her mouth.
“Duh. You should know,” Renee said.
“People taste like soap.”
“Exactly.” Renee reached across the counter and took the salami/cheddar horror show from Lexie for her own hearty bite. “A Rare killed Bree and didn’t eat her. What does that sound like to you?”
“A human killer, not an animal predator,” Lexie said. “But she wasn’t raped either.”
Renee shrugged. “The reports said they aren’t releasing the full details of the autopsy out of ‘respect for the family’, whatever that means.”
“But nothing explains why Bree was alone in the woods at night in the first place.”
“How do we know she was alone?” Renee asked.
Lexie nodded and chewed, hiding her thoughts behind a confused expression. She had waited too long to tell Renee about finding Bree, and to say something now would unravel the tentative trust that was forming between her and the Pack.
“Good point,” Lexie said. “So then, an affair?”
“Why meet in the woods?” Renee asked.
“Maybe she was seeing a half-blood,” Lexie offered.
“Bree Curtis was dating one of the most popular guys on campus, but she was slumming with a half-blood werewolf?”
“Well, apparently they aren’t all trash. I mean, hello?” Lexie said, gesturing at the Den. “What else?”
“I don’t know. But that seems pretty sordid for our town. Maybe a fight. Or she was set up.”
Lexie shook her head. She unscrewed the top of the orange juice and tossed it back. She wiped her mouth with her bare forearm.
Renee took the orange juice from Lexie and finished the carton. “We should figure out who she was when she was alive. I’ll start poking around, see if there’s a link between Bree and the other girl. You go talk to Stefan. See what he knows. Just keep your head down. We don’t need the cops sniffing up on us. All these attacks out of the blue, and they’re gonna start paying attention to new things.”