13
Only Mitch was home when Lexie returned. He sat in a pool of yellow light, reading next to the empty fireplace.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said.
Lexie felt bad for Mitch; his position as the Pack’s whipping boy was now fully in effect. She didn’t know what to say to him, or what to ask, though her mind was aswirl with questions. The fact that most of the questions started with the word “Why” was enough to convince her to keep her mouth shut.
“How you doing?” Mitch asked.
Lexie shrugged. “I’m getting kind of worked up about the whole Bree thing.”
“Why? You scared?”
“Not scared. I think I just feel this strange affinity. Like I want the Pack to help her out of a sense of sisterhood—” Lexie flinched. “I mean, sibling-hood, or … ”
“I can be your sister.”
Lexie nearly laughed. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Why should it have to? None of this makes sense. Us being werewolves doesn’t make any sense, and the Pack treats it like it’s totally normal.”
“I wouldn’t say normal.”
“What’s the point, is what I’m saying. Why the hell should we, of all people, be saying what’s normal? If I become a dude, use a male pronoun, start looking to the world like I’m a guy, does it change who I am? More than me turning into a wolf every once in a while?”
Lexie picked at the frayed corner of the couch. “It’s different.”
“How?”
“It just seems … god this going to sound awful, but it seems unnatural. Like, being a girl is hard, but that doesn’t mean you have to become something else.”
“Yeah, being a girl is hard, but I bet you don’t think about it as much as I do. I mean, you have your hair and your clothes. When people call you ‘she’, you don’t flinch. You don’t think that there’s something wrong, something off, about you that they can’t see.”
“You sure about that?” Lexie said, raising her eyebrows.
“Fair.” Mitch nodded. “Moving through the world as a man just feels more right to me. It’s almost like when I run as a wolf.”
Lexie snorted. “The idea of running as a wolf feeling ‘right’ is so far from my reality.”
“Being a wolf is a kind of magic. You don’t force it. It’s part of you. It’s effortless. I want my gender to be the same way. A synergy, a harmony so tight you can’t even tell it’s a bunch of different notes smooshed together.”
Lexie had never known Mitch to be so eloquent. It indicated that perhaps he’d thought more about all this than she had. It gave her a stab of shame for ever doubting him. “I don’t think I know that feeling.”
“But what if you could? What if your wolf could feel as true to you as it does to me?”
“I’d probably be a lot happier.”
Mitch shrugged. “There you go.”
“But you’re talking about changing your body chemistry.”
“Renee and Sharm are the closest things to scientists we have in the Pack, and they don’t understand the werewolf thing, either. How should we know whether werewolves are magic or science? Does it matter? Magic is just science we don’t understand, right?”
“I’ve heard that,” Lexie said with a faint grin.
“Listen, all I’m saying is that masculinity has always been part of me. Longer than my wolf has. I was a butch since I was old enough to hold an ax. I think society’s just starting to catch up with people like me. Why can’t I use science, and a little bit of magic, to turn myself into something new, something that feels more right for a reason that no one really understands?”
Lexie didn’t want to argue with Mitch, and couldn’t anymore anyway. He had a point. She nodded. Mitch picked up his book and continued reading. Lexie cracked her neck and grabbed her backpack, ready to finally do some homework.
She put on a kettle and settled into the corner of the couch with the newest novel in her Gender and Literature class while she waited for it to boil. The kettle screeched at her just as she struck her highlighter across the words, “Truth is a matter of the imagination.”
“Tea?” she asked Mitch, who still had his head buried in his own book. He grunted an affirmative. Like a dude. Lexie was still smiling over that when she handed Mitch a mug of chamomile.
She curled up on the couch with her book, but a creeping discomfort wouldn’t let her sink back into reading. She tried to shake it off, knowing her subconscious was merely distracting her from her work, like always. After reading the next sentence six times without absorbing a word of it, she dropped her book and sighed. The ill feeling remained. Lexie took a sip of her tea, but it wasn’t enough. She needed a snack.
She headed to the kitchen, going for the fridge, when a tiny crunching sound tickled her ears. She glanced out the back door and saw a shadow at the edge of the woods in the backyard. She flinched, then bristled, a whine low in her throat.
“What?” Mitch asked.
The shadow slid into view and Lexie saw it was a person, stumbling. A person she knew.
“Holy shit.”
Mitch jumped to the window. “Oh no.”
They ran to the door and out onto the deck.
“Sharmalee?” Lexie smelled blood. Heavy like iron and salt, the odor lay thick in the air.
Mitch ran to Sharmalee and draped her arm around his shoulders. She leaned on him, limping, cringing with each step.
They lowered Sharmalee to the living room floor atop a pile of pillows. The soft glow of the lamps gave them a better view of her wounds. She had a deep gash across her abdomen that had just started to crust. Bite wounds punctured her shoulder, front and back. Dried saliva—Lexie prayed it was saliva—crusted on the tatters of her shirt and jeans. Blood soaked the purple satin of her top, dying it a putrid brown. It clung to her skin, making her look like a burn victim with flesh flayed. Her jeans were torn and filthy, her exposed calves and thighs marked with scrapes of embedded pebbles, as if she had been dragged a long distance.
Mitch ran for the first aid kit. Lexie stroked Sharmalee’s face with the back of her fingers. “Who did this to you?”
Sharmalee strained to speak, the effort it took clearly paining her. “Morloc.”
“How many?”
Sharmalee’s eyes rolled back in her head and Lexie smacked her cheek. “No, no. Don’t pass out. Stay here, Sharm.”
She whined again, and Lexie shook her. “Sharm, how many?”
“Twwwwww … ” she strained.
“Two? Two Rares did this to you?” It was a miracle she was alive.
Sharmalee head lolled on the pillows. “Twwwelve.”