22

Through all the information Shirley offered, all the warnings, all the history, only one thing burned in Lexie’s brain: Dad knew.

Dad knew.

Dad motherfucking knew, and he lied to Lexie’s face twice. When she gave him the out, when she laid it out before him and all he had to do was cop to it and come clean, the fucker buried his head even deeper in the pile of bullshit he’d been shoveling all of Lexie’s life.

Rage burned under her skin and forced sweat from her brow. She ground her teeth until her jaw ached. She wanted to explode, to force her fist into someone’s ribcage, to close her teeth around a throat and tear. Didn’t matter whose.

Mom had been killed by Rares. Dad knew she was a peacespeaker, and he’d lied. He lied and lied and lied for eighteen fucking years. That patronizing son of a prick.

“Fuck you, Dad!” she screamed as she ran through the forest that had once been Archer’s, far away from any ears.

“Fuck you, Dad!” she screamed again as she burst into the clearing by the river and launched herself up the cliffside leading to the treehouse. Her voice echoed against the rock face, and she screamed without words, until her throat seized and she coughed against her self-inflicted damage. Atop the cliff, she stripped off her jacket and shirt and tore into her sycamore, the branches scratching at her bare skin and tearing at her hair. She leapt into the tree, landing on the planks of the treehouse with a clatter.

The birds in their nest chirped loud and insistent, a warning, meager and pathetic. Lexie glared, and the birds peeped once and fell silent.

She stood at the edge of the platform. The glittering sea formed a narrow strip at the horizon. She drew her knife from her belt and threw it with all her strength into the trees. It caught the red sunset as it spun in the open air and dropped through the treetops. “Fuck you, Dad!” she screamed and grabbed her hair, pulling, tearing it from her scalp. Her face was wet with sweat and tears. “Fuck you, Archer!” each time louder, a seeping wound of rage and loathing. “Fuck you Randy, fuck you Brian, fuck you Duane, fuck you Mom, fuck you Blythe fuck you fuck you fuck you!!!” She choked on her voice, each scream croaking out of her.

“Fuck yooooooooooooooooooooou!!!!!!” she howled.

And blacked out.

When she came to, a breath later, she knew.

Her chest felt heavy and full. Her breath came in gasps. She let her tongue loll out of her mouth and tug at her throat. She rolled her heavy skull on her neck and let her lungs fill up with one, two, three times the capacity of her human lungs. The inhalation was like the drawing of a syringe. She released a gurgled growl, drunk on the smells of the forest, of her body, of this treehouse. Scents too subtle for human noses now stood out starkly. They rattled her elongated sinuses, each layered scent bouncing at a different speed and angle, announcing various degrees of import and interest.

Lexie stumbled, caught between standing on two paws and standing on four. She gripped the planks with splayed pads and righted herself.

She heaved a breath and stared at her paws. No more real than the first time she witnessed them in her love-drunk haze. Now, there was no moon, no love, only rage and betrayal and a need to let go. She had let it go, and this is what she got for it.

The knife had landed somewhere below, and with it a piece, so annoyingly obvious, fell into place. Lexie hadn’t been willing her wolf to abate for these three months. Her knife had done that work for her.

Now, with three months of pent-up beast within her, it needed no incentive but her rage to spring forth.

Lexie curled her paw, claw tips reaching to prick at her forearm. Such drama over such a simple thing. Lexie admired her paw in the sunset’s copper glare. The sun broke free of the clouds at the horizon, dwindling above the cliffs at the ocean’s edge. Its yellow mirrored her own lightest hairs.

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.