37

From dawn until lunch the girls tried meditating, beating on each other, and making faces like comic book superheroes. No amount of straining, visualization, or face-slapping would do the trick. Not one of them had so much as a flicker of a change.

Corwin took most of the girls to the gym to hit some punching bags, while Renee and Lexie stayed at the Den to work more with Sage and the stolen Octopus.

He tried explaining the shift in every language he knew how, showing them over and over how he moved from man to buffalo and buffalo to man. Lexie squinted, looked at him in her knife’s reflection, tried to tap her lust, her sadness, her fear. For the first time since his arrival, Lexie began to question the value of this boy, the truth of him, and his potential.

Renee popped fresh batteries into the Octopus and brought it to them. “Let’s see if this’ll give you the boost you need.”

Lexie took it, and Sage looked askance at the device.

“If it works, it works,” Lexie said, too close to giving up to be skeptical. She reached to yank her shirt over her head, but paused. “Could you … ?”

Sage cocked his head to the side, waiting for further elucidation. Lexie raised an eyebrow. “Sage?” He shook his head, not understanding. “I need you to turn around, please.”

“Turn around?”

Lexie sighed and looked to the sky. “Sage, I’m going to take off my shirt now so I don’t ruin it with vomit and/or werewolf. Could you please face away from me so I don’t have to expose my naked body to you?”

“Oh,” Sage said. “Okay.” He turned around.

Lexie sighed and shook her head at the motley parade of circus freaks that were now her allies.

 

Ten minutes later, Lexie shivered topless, kneeling on the chilly grass, a towel draped over her shoulders. Renee slathered Vaseline on Lexie’s head. “This doesn’t seem … scientific,” Renee said with an arched brow.

“I’m just trying to replicate the experiment as much as I can remember it, Ms. BioChem major.”

“If Duane used Vaseline on you, I’m more inclined to call campus security.”

“Whatever. I’ve never done this before, so let’s just go with it.” Lexie handed Renee the handful of electrodes she had lifted from the lab.

Renee stared at their end: the branches descended into a trunk of braided wires and ended in a frayed root system of exposed copper and steel wires.

“Are you serious?” Renee drawled.

“What?” Lexie asked.

“This is supposed to attach to something. Like an input for a computer.”

Lexie jutted her chin and considered. “I dunno, I just grabbed it.”

Renee exhaled heavily and stuck the Octopus’ solenoids to Lexie’s scalp, the Vaseline oozing beneath the surface so that they threatened to slip off. “Just don’t move and they’ll stay,” Renee said.

Once Lexie was feeling good and humiliated, Renee got the scotch tape and placed the other electrodes against Lexie’s bare arm.

“No,” Lexie said. “Back of my neck.”

Renee obliged and then Lexie said, “Wait. No.”

Lexie pulled the electrodes from the nape of her neck and placed two on her temples. She stuck the last two on each side of her sternum.

“Yay for flat-chests,” Lexie said sardonically, tossing her hair over her shoulders and re-sticking the gooey solenoids to her scalp.

“This feels right,” Lexie said, smoothing the tape over her skin. She covered herself back up with the towel and shifted her shoulders and head into a position akin to that of the original experiment. “Let’s do it.”

Renee looked to Sage and asked, “You wanna help?”

Sage, who had been sitting cross-legged, facing away the entire time, turned and nodded. He walked toward them, taking the controls from Renee and sitting in front of Lexie.

He smiled at her, his amber eyes offering her the courage she needed. Lexie held each tail of the towel against her skin. “Okay,” she said. “Here we go.”

Kneeling in the grass with the EEG cords dangling along her spine and wires against her chest, Lexie felt like a scrawny cyborg. She placed her hands across the electrodes taped to her skin and took a deep breath as Sage turned on the juice.

At first she felt a tingle, like a feather tracing across her skin. Then the tingle buried itself, a parasite burrowing through her flesh, drawing a jagged line between the two electrodes.

The EEG wires dangled uselessly.

Sage raised his eyebrows in a question and Lexie nodded, taking a deep breath and sinking into the sensation.

He turned the dial, and the worm wriggled faster, a unidirectional race through her chest. Her skin warmed with a thousand tiny sizzles cauterizing her flesh.

“More,” Lexie grunted through clenched teeth. She gripped her chest, her hands warming the electrodes, willing them to work.

Sage cranked it to the max. The pulse ran, a knife against her flesh, endlessly retracing the path of trauma. Warmth and wetness cut at her ribcage, and her pulse raced to match the electricity. In that harmonized rhythm, a third rhythm appeared. A cycle of heavy thumps, impatient and ready. The pacing of an animal.

Lexie remembered this feeling, the interface of pain and pleasure, girl and wolf that danced around each other at the club with Randy. She remembered Randy’s instructions to feel into the space, find where they met, where they resisted, and where they clung together.

Lexie tried to push into that feeling, release it, expand it, let go, unwind, unspool, break apart. She strained—pushing, pulling, twisting, and unclenching, but none of it worked. Her ribcage was as strong as steel, keeping inside and outside, wolf and human girl, clearly delineated and bound to different realms of reality. Her wolf paced and snapped at her impertinent bones. She forced a retch, gripping handfuls of grass and pulling her belly forward, hoping to force the wolf to spring forth along with the limited contents of her stomach. Her face grew red and hot.

“Turn it off,” Renee said. Sage obliged.

Lexie panted. “I can feel it. It’s right there, but I can’t let go. I need to turn off my brain. It’s in the way.”

“Turn off your brain?” Sage said.

“Corwin’s got weed,” Renee said.

“Marijuana doesn’t turn off your brain,” Sage said. “It turns it on. Opens you up.”

The three considered while Lexie cycled her breaths.

“An orgasm?” Renee ventured.

The girls exchanged a glance, and without a word, Renee walked into the house.

 

Moments later, an extension cord ran through the open kitchen window and onto the lawn. Renee’s vibrator, an ugly, be-knobbed wand, sat in the grass, ready to work its magic.

Lexie had ripped the useless EEG nodes from her scalp. She kept one flat palm against her chest, needing to connect with the crude device that wanted to bring out the beast in her.

“Alrighty,” Renee said. “You ready?”

Lexie looked at the white device in the grass and made a face. “Sage, you’re benched for this one.”

He looked at her, another question. “Go inside the house,” she said.

He nodded and trotted into the house.

“Christ, it’s like talking to a robot,” Lexie said.

“Or a puppy,” Renee laughed. Lexie muttered assent.

Lexie eased the vibrator between her legs. She looked up at Renee. “Can you give me some privacy, too?”

Renee gestured to the Octopus control box. “Should I just … ”

“Turn around.”

Renee turned. Lexie took a breath and turned on the vibrator. Immediately it sizzled through her skin, a force like twelve of Randy’s motorcycles battering at her nerves.

A moan escaped her throat before she could catch it, and she gritted her teeth against more overt vocalizations.

The Octopus worked against her chest and skull but she barely noticed, the jackhammer vibrations through her skeleton obscuring any and all other sensations. Another groan escaped as the sizzles became tiny claws, racing up the surface of her skin in fierce bursts. Restless pinpricks dug in and sprang away, running up her belly, along her chest, her neck, her face. They leapt from the crown of her skull like violent splatters of rain.

Lexie clenched and released, trying to let the vibrations carry her brain away, but it wouldn’t be budged. She could feel the back of her brain monitoring everything, like an overeager cockpit with dials and gauges she didn’t understand.

She drew the wand from her and leaned onto her hands, panting.

Renee turned and grabbed her chin. “You can do this,” she said.

“How? By clenching real tight? It’s not fucking working!” Lexie threw the vibrator and tore the Octopus from her chest.

“It will work. You have to stop running away. You did this once before. You almost did it twice. You can do it again.”

“I don’t know how it happened before!”

“You freaked the fuck out, Lex! That’s how! Now sit your ass down, and let’s crank this shit out,” Renee said.

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“Why don’t you try?” Lexie spat.

“Stop being a spoiled brat and get your act together.”

“What?!”

“You’re taking up too much space. You’re holding us back.” Renee’s anger rose with each shake of Lexie’s chin. “You have to pull your fucking weight and stop acting like some princess who doesn’t have to earn her keep.”

“I’m putting myself out here to help!” Lexie shouted. “I’m fucking jacking it naked in the frozen grass for you.”

“Bullshit,” Renee shouted. “You’re doing this for Archer. You don’t give a shit about the Pack or this town.”

“What? How can you say that?”

“Because we’ve all been living with it for months.” Renee raised her voice, her frustration moving through her forehead and down her shoulders to her hands. “Your misery is SO LOUD!” She pushed Lexie away from her, and Lexie balked, never having felt Renee’s hands on her like this.

“I can’t help it,” Lexie pouted.

“The hell you can’t. You can grow the hell up, starting right now.”

“How?”

“Change.”

“I can’t,” Lexie whimpered.

Renee whipped her palm across Lexie’s cheek, bringing forth a yelp and a welt.

Lexie brought her hand to her cheek. She tried to back away, but Renee’s long reach connected again with her face. WHAP!

Lexie yelped again and shouted, “Stop it!”

“You stop it.”

Lexie fell back, holding her face. Renee closed the gap.

“You’re nuts,” Lexie said.

“And you’re weak.”

“I’m not.” Lexie glowered, tears swelling in her eyes.

“You’re small, stupid, and naïve,” Renee said through gritted teeth.

“I’m not!”

“You are. You are so small you don’t even fight back. Not without your girlfriend to come rescue you. But your girlfriend isn’t here anymore. Smart woman left you, just like your mother did. Like everyone will, because you’re unlovable. Ineffective. Stupid. Worthless.”

“Fuck you!” Lexie spat.

“Words are for ladies and cowards. Show me your teeth.”

Renee scooped up the fallen vibrator, pressing it hard against Lexie’s groin. Lexie yelped. Renee gripped the scruff of her neck, yanking her body while grinding the wand harder against her. Lexie didn’t, couldn’t, resist. Her eyes were blurry with tears and her ears burned with the prick of a thousand needles.

“Show me you’re not just a baby, some kept woman, some toothless little virgin.”

Lexie whimpered. Renee caught her wrist and yanked Lexie’s thin frame into a half-crouch. She spat in her face, and Lexie flinched, her tears turning to sobs.

“No wonder your mama chose a bunch of strangers over her own blood. If she had been a wolf, she’d have left you alone in the woods to starve.”

Renee squeezed the back of Lexie’s neck. Lexie’s legs began to fail, and she quavered in Renee’s brutal grasp.

The claws on Lexie’s skin became rain, which became a torrent. The wolf was searching for an out as Lexie searched for breath, and she couldn’t deny one any more than the other. She needed to push back against Renee’s attacks, defend her mother, defend herself. The wolf no longer paced; it clawed at her from the inside for its freedom. All she had to do was let it out, let it fight on her behalf. Part daemon, part animus, she had no control over it, and yet it fought for her.

She found a tiny lock upon a tiny door that existed at once in her sternum, throat, and belly. Like a door to a secret room in her house that appeared only in a dream—when she found it she realized she had known where it was the whole time. She didn’t even need a key.

The door flew open, and Lexie’s voice spilled forth upon the back of the deluge, a gurgled, howling shriek.

Lexie roared. Her vision drained, like a cinematic version of death. Her ears filled with static, and she experienced a sensation like falling or sinking, a weightlessness before the shock of impact. A gray space followed. And a black one. The same color in this hazy dark.

The static in her ears abated and her senses returned to the sound of her own pulse, even and forceful. She found herself staring into Renee’s face from the wrong angle, from below. She looked down at her paws, digging into the soil.

Lexie gagged and stumbled, her balance off, her body wrong. Her heavy head pulled her off balance. Another sway sent her teetering in the opposite direction. Her throat trembled and hacked. She coughed and tasted bile.

The cough became a hack. Lexie retched, a great heaving expulsion that shook her heavy frame. The wolf form struggled to keep its tenuous hold. Renee rushed to Lexie and sucker-punched her across the snout, yanking the wolf into sharper relief. Lexie snapped, and Renee jumped away.

She swayed back again, the world rolling around her, her muscles struggling to find equilibrium.

Lexie’s human form flashed in and out, pushing her center of gravity up and down her frame, like a magnet trying to find true north. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to hold onto the wolf even as it was wrenched away. She opened her eyes to catch sight of Sage running toward her just as her human body fell backwards to crack the frozen ground. Her ass hit first, then her skull. False lights dazzled at the periphery of her vision.

Renee crawled over, pressing her face to Lexie’s. The icy grass on one of Lexie’s cheeks mocked the warmth of Renee’s face pressed to the other.

“There you go,” Renee said. “Hold onto that. Whatever that is, seize it with both hands. Let your heart bury roots there. We’re going to use that righteous rage for every drop it’s worth.”