28
The next morning, Duane cornered Lexie in the only other dining hall open for breakfast. He didn’t hide his hurt, and with a surly tone told her he needed to do the experiment to write his Abnormal Psych midterm.
Two hours later, Lexie was feeling sulky and ashamed, sitting in the psych building in a rolling office chair with conductive goo in her hair.
“Can you close the door?” Lexie said, the first words she spoke to Duane since he started.
“We’re supposed to leave it open.”
Lexie looked down the gloomy hallway of the psych building. “It just freaks me out, all strung up and exposed like this.” She cast a wary glance down the hall, wondering how she would muster the courage to call her dad later if she couldn’t even bear to be seen like this now. But she had to call, to ask for the guns, to tell him she knew he was a liar, and maybe just to say goodbye.
“I’ll leave it ajar. How’s that for a compromise?”
“Fine,” Lexie said, blowing a stray hair out of her eyes.
Duane picked through her hair like he was looking for lice, a tube of conductive gel in one gloved hand and an electrode in the other. Despite the chilly gel, his touch felt nice, and once again Lexie was caught in a memory of the nurturing touch of Archer. She told herself she’d have to ask for that from the Pack. She’d often see them giving each other head scratches and foot rubs, but it always made her just a little too uncomfortable to make the request. But feeling Duane’s touch now she realized how essential such touching was to her survival.
He dotted seven swirls of gel across her skull. She kept her eyes on a monitor that looked straight out of the 90s.
“Okey dokey,” Duane said. “That’s that. Now for the solenoids.”
“The what?”
“These little coils,” he said, holding up plastic cylinders that resembled old film canisters, or something you’d glue to your neck for a Frankenstein costume. “They’ll create a small magnetic field around your temporal lobes. You won’t even feel it.”
He slipped an elastic band over her head and positioned the cylinders. “The EEG is going to measure your relaxation.”
“I get to relax?”
“I told you it’d be easy.”
Lexie leaned back in her desk chair, ready for the mini-retreat the solenoids would offer.
“Oh,” Duane said, making a face. “I’m gonna need you to … uh, remove your knife.”
Lexie pulled the bottom of her sweater over the sheath, blushing.
“No, seriously. Metal like that could screw up the experiment.”
Lexie gave him a wary look, then slid the sheath off her belt, handing it to him reluctantly. He set it on the file cabinet behind him, safely within her view.
“Ready?” Duane asked, and Lexie gave a thumbs-up.
He pressed a button on a machine that looked like a hard drive from the 80s. A monitor displayed a path of wavy lines that looked like future music.
“Okay,” he said more to himself than Lexie. “Got a clear baseline. Now the solenoids.” He flipped a small toggle switch on the machine in his lap.
“Ah!” Lexie grimaced when a jagged pain rushed through her head like a metal serpent. “This hurts.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s an incredibly small amount of magnetism. You might feel a little dizzy, but nothing more.”
Lexie took a deep breath and tried to relax into the sensation, but the buzzy, creeping feeling stayed. “This doesn’t feel good.”
“Just keep breathing. It’s really not much.”
Not much. Like trying to keep her ribcage closed. Like trying to keep her skull in one piece. Like trying not to let her teeth erupt from her skull, her blood sizzle her nerves, her nails tear at her fingertips. Not much, not much at all.
“Duane … ” Lexie grimaced.
“Lex, you’re stable, just relax. Let your brain drop in. Like meditating. It’ll be over soon.”
Lexie considered for the briefest moment that she might be overreacting. No. No. She knew this feeling. No, stop. STOP!
A fever flooded her, sweat bursting from her brow and running down her face. Her shirt soaked through as she tried to lash together her insides with nothing more than force of will. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her wolf was here, but not inside, not where it usually lived and paced. It was perched on her shoulder like a daemon. Then it was pacing behind her. Then it sat across the room, lounging on the file cabinet like a library lion. It scattered throughout the room like a phantom, then fell back together atop her chest, making it hard to breathe.
She moaned through gritted teeth.
“Okay,” Duane said, focused on the instruments. “We should be calibrated and ready to go. How you doing?” He turned and paled. He clamped a hand over his open mouth.
Lexie was frozen in mid-shift, her body oscillating between two brutal forms. If she could only let go of her muscles, she’d surely vomit, but all she knew was the clench of electrocution forcing all her muscles into the ON position.
Duane yelped and tore the wires off her head. The machine protested with a tiny beep. Lexie slumped in her chair. Duane stepped gingerly to her, reaching his hand up to comb her hair from her forehead. Before he could touch her, she retched, a flood of vomit drenching his legs and feet. Lexie followed it to the floor, falling in a crumpled heap, Mary Magdalene washing Christ’s feet with her own sick.
Duane stood, frozen in shock as Lexie moaned at his feet. Footsteps echoed up the marble staircase outside the lab, and Duane slammed the door shut.
Lexie lay on the blessedly-cold floor. The marble wicked away her wolf and her fever.
“Lexie?” he asked meekly, leaning to her with an open palm. He almost touched her head, then flinched. “Are you okay?”
“Don’t take me home,” Lexie mumbled, her eyes swaying in their sockets.
“Don’t?”
Lexie tried to shake her head but it merely lolled to the side.
“Stefan,” she said. “And water.”
Duane grabbed a fire blanket and eased it under her head. His palms were cool, soft, and trembling. She liked his touch. It was so gentle. He’d make a good doctor someday—if he survived that long, if any of them did. He steadied his hands and stepped away, reaching for his cellphone and hesitating at Lexie’s knife. He left it where it rested on top of the cabinet.
Lexie tried to focus her eyes on him as he paced near the window that looked out onto the brick wall of the neighboring building. He unlatched the window and slid it open on its old, squeaky casing. The room filled with cold air, and Duane took a deep and calming breath. With his ear to his phone, waiting for Stefan to answer, Duane turned from the window to look at Lexie, still curled up on the floor.
“I’m just gonna say you passed, okay?”