Lunatic Fringe (24 page)

In the distance, Lexie could hear the
rushing of the Rogue. She had run northwest, up into the mountains
where the air smelled like clouds and salt. She arrived at the cusp
of the forest and the mountain, where a wildfire years before had
obliterated all the foliage, leaving a black-scarred tract of rock
and char. Tree trunks, as naked as match sticks, stood tall and
ashamed, mourning the bounty they once possessed. A thousand
questions poured through her mind, but she could not bear to face
any of them. Alone in the vast landscape, she felt bound and gagged
by circumstance.

The night deepened and expanded, while
Lexie remained still and silent in the void. She tried to silence
her mind like the charred tract, empty, stoic and dead. Though the
woods behind her bore the hiding places and infinite dark instincts
of fierce creatures, here in the dead zone at the cusp between the
trees and the alpine lichens, she felt more vulnerable that she had
ever felt as a girl exploring the forests near her home. She
considered turning back and heading home to Wolf Creek but shunned
the thought immediately. How would she get there? Run the
seventy-plus miles? And once she was there, she would surely be
shot on sight. No. She’d have to stay here, hidden until this
witchcraft was sure to burn off with the sun.

The silence grew oppressive as she
mourned the loss of her human frailty, of her belief in only the
things she could see and understand. Staring sadly at her furry
feet, Lexie realized that the universe was filled with things she
could never understand, menacing her in the darkness, chiding her
foolishness. She was clumsy and plain, painfully tiny in the face
of the malevolent grandeur of the world. Her anguish struggled to
form tears, but none came, a cruel byproduct of her new biology.
Her throat clenched, like forcing a cough to save oneself from
choking. The clench became a gag, and the gag a lupine whine as her
sadness begged for release from her body in any way
possible.

A tiny growl formed from the struggle
and revved into an engine of sound. The sound reverberated through
the echo chamber of her throat and clattered out of her mouth in a
long plaintive wail. The sound knocked her head back on her neck,
stretching her skull to her spine and exposing her throat to the
full white light of the night. Like a hundred unclenching fists,
her muscles eased and released. The howl felt like the first breath
after surfacing from a great and deadly depth. Her lungs expended,
she ballooned them again for a second, palliative bellow that
echoed off the barren mountainside, shattering into rays of her
despair. The high note of her wail descended a slow, arcing scale,
where it trilled on a few notes before fading into
emptiness.

The last echo ricocheted off the
mountain and rolled back toward town. Lexie wondered, ruefully, if
Renee could hear her howl and was priming her crossbow now. With
that thought came a dozen others like it. She recalled nights when
she would listen through an open window to the packs roaming just
outside town. Her father had killed a couple rare wolves when he
was on the job. Despite the namesake of their town, Ray, like all
the working folks in Wolf Creek, held a particular distain for this
odd breed of wolf. Not a lumberjack or hunter was sympathetic to
the creatures, which killed or injured several humans each year.
Lexie always imagined the mauled men were inexperienced fools,
seeking pelts for glory and overcompensating for their lack of
efficacy with oversized guns. She had kept such thoughts to
herself, however, knowing her father and all the other people of
her town would consider her disturbed for siding with the menacing
creatures rather than her fellow, innocent citizens.

Now, her own fur coat ruffling in the
quiet breeze, the irony of her past was obvious. More damning was
the horrifying truth that these creatures were no more animal that
she was, and that the villainy attributed to them was really being
cast on her neighbors. And Archer. And now herself.

As her howl faded into the distance,
Lexie groaned at the realization that Blythe and the rest were
right. They didn’t hunt men, but werewolves. The Pack that she had
hoped would become her family now looked more like her
enemy.

That her consciousness was untouched by
the transformation chilled her. She was no more a violent creature
now than she was the day prior, though her body was now endowed
with its own weapons. The wolves the Pack killed must have died
with the minds of men intact. Why would the wolves attack humans if
their minds remained? Was Archer ever one of the
culprits?

Lexie shooed the questions again from
her mind, having neither the energy nor the peace to confront them.
She sank on her belly and wished for sunlight and for the
clattering conversation of the Pack to distract her
thoughts.

From the forest, Lexie heard the soft
crunch of dead leaves beneath a paw. The step was tentative,
downwind, like the slow approach of a hunter. Perhaps Archer had
followed her after all and sat watching from a distance as Lexie’s
world tore apart. Lexie was ashamed but relieved that Archer had
followed to witness to her complete breakdown. She stood to face
her lover, emerging from the forest’s edge.

Another soft footstep accompanied a
slow growl, an unmistakable warning of the teeth and claws to come.
From the shadowed guard of the trees emerged a wolf, lips curled
back baring white teeth. It stepped towards her, ears back flat
against its skull, head low in line with its shoulders, tail
swaying like a charmed cobra. Its deep growl shook her ribcage and
its yellow glare froze her in place. Behind its eyes was the urgent
lust of a predator cornering prey. A chill tickled Lexie’s skin as
the hair along her back rose in spikes. She stepped back,
clattering across burned wood and sharp charred rocks.

She had never seen one of the rares
alive. Until now, they were merely pub tales or crude drawings
accompanying newspaper stories. The rare looked like a normal gray
wolf, but larger, heavier, nastier. Each paw was articulated, each
claw able to move independently of the others. Its legs were long
and lean, holding the bulk of its body five feet above the ground.
Everything else was pure wolf.

Lexie tried to shout, but the sound
that came out was a quick, sharp bark. She barked again, and once
more, each yip backed her farther up the slope of ash, each step
matched by her hunter.

Its growl crescendoed into a
thunderclap, stunning her heart into a moment of bloodless shock.
The wolf recoiled on its haunches and launched itself, bridging the
fifteen feet between them in one great bound. It knocked Lexie onto
her back with its thick skull and pinned her. Her paws battled
against its snapping jaw. She drew back her lips to bare her own
teeth, each claw tearing at her attacker. She pushed with all her
strength, but its weight pinned her as if beneath a tractor, all
rusted steel and menacing moving parts.

Then it relented, falling back for one
merciful moment. Lexie whipped back to standing. Her fur bristled
up her neck and down her spine, the chilly air dripping in between
the tufts, pulling at her skin. Her tail made her feel longer and
larger, and she swung it over her back in a mocking facsimile of a
pageant queen’s wave. She let a growl echo through her throat,
proud of the way the sound filled the space between
them.

The wolf did not waste a moment
rebounding towards her, but this time Lexie allowed her instincts,
both lupine and human, to guide her. She recalled stalking the
woods with her father, matching orange vests over flannels,
matching rifles at their sides. With a silent finger in the air,
her father would delineate the tender places on a quadruped to aim,
shoot, or slice for a clean kill. When the beast leapt again, she
met it in the air with open jaws, sinking her teeth into its throat
and jerking it to the ground. A gurgled cry surged from its mouth
as it wriggled free, rolling onto its back and then to its feet to
regroup. It growled again, pacing in a circle. She spat fur from
her mouth.

Lexie’s heart thudded through her
ribcage. Its odor was more earthy than Archer’s, more wild. It
smelled masculine, like musk and meat.

Saliva dripped from his exposed fangs
as he sized up his opponent. His snarl widened into the parody of a
smile, then he bounded for Lexie once again. Knowing nothing else
to do, she let him overtake her, rolling onto her back, hindpaws
raking his exposed belly. Her head tucked back into her neck,
guarding her tender flesh, while her mouth opened wide to grasp
whatever limb or chunk of flesh might stray too close to her
jaws.

The male’s leap was imprecise. His
lower legs landed on her torso, knocking her breath out, but
leaving her flesh intact. Lexie snapped at his bony foreleg,
crunching her jaws around it like a vice. The bone chipped like
rock candy. He yelped as the warm, salty ooze of blood seeped into
her mouth. It tasted sustaining, alive, and delicious. Greedily,
she clamped down harder, jerking her head left and right, still
supine but at a great advantage. Bone flaked in her mouth and flesh
tore in her clenched jaw.

The male leapt and thrust his hind legs
out like a rodeo bull trying to buck its rider. He squealed, but
Lexie’s jaws were locked, her head following each desperate kick,
tearing and cracking his debilitated leg. She was getting dizzy
from the adrenaline and whiplash. The wolf’s flails set her teeth
in deeper. He feinted a snap of his jaws at her eye, and she shied
back, releasing him just as he flailed a last, desperate kick.
Lexie flew, landing on a mass of jagged rocks. Her eyes swayed in
her head.

The wolf took two paces from her and
turned, a hateful look in his yellow eyes. He clearly knew this
fight, the life or death struggle intrinsic to his kind. Blood
seeped from his leg wound, like juice from a split pomegranate.
Lexie’s brain was overridden by the wolf blood coursing through her
veins. She should flee, be sick and horrified by this living
nightmare. But none of those urges were real, merely remnants of a
quiet life no longer lived. She felt only one true thing now, the
need to survive.

The massive wolf gathered his haunches
for a last, deadly attack. He wouldn’t make another mistake.
Lowering his head in line with his shoulders, he prepared to drive
his weight at her like a battering ram. His brown, bristled tail
swayed, and his growl elevated into a barking, snap-jawed war
cry.

Lexie’s heart seized in her chest. She
shivered as the blood rushed from her limbs to her protect her
vital organs. She tried to steel herself for the freight-train
impact, which would tear her body asunder, limbs, viscera, and bone
scattered in the wake of a barreling six-hundred-pound mass of
muscle.

In the moment before he charged, Lexie
noticed with a perverse sort of pleasure a cool breeze that came
out of the forest from the south. It smelled rich and cleansing,
like the air near a waterfall. The beast caught a whiff, too. It
stole his attention, giving Lexie a sweet moment of reprieve with
which to collect her punch-drunk wits. The male’s back bristled,
and his ears twitched forward to the trees.

Seeing her chance to flee, Lexie
flexed. The wolf barked a command. She froze. He swung his massive
head back to the tree line and sniffed again. Now Lexie heard what
he did, a crunch of running feet through underbrush. The oncoming
creature was at least two hundred yards away, but it was closing in
swiftly. Lexie and the strange wolf both sniffed, but the breeze
had shifted back, once again carrying their scents southward. Her
attacker growled a low warning to whoever might interrupt his
onslaught and steal his prey. Lexie was trapped and terrified both
of the beast before her and the fiercer one yet to reveal
itself.

The footfalls barreled through the
brush. Both predator and prey held their breaths and widened their
stances, prepared for blood.

The great beast burst through the trees
with a ferocious roar that was half tiger, half wolf, and all
deadly. Its potent odor was unmistakably Archer. She was nearly the
size of the male and Lexie’s eyes widened with relief and awe. The
male snapped the air in a half-hearted attempt to fend her off.
Archer landed between the male and Lexie. She growled, the sound
echoing off the mountainside to create a chamber of low, chilling
vibration.

She leapt so quickly that Lexie could
barely keep her eyes fixed on that mottled gray body. In a flash,
Archer was on top of the male, claws and jaws decimating flesh,
scraps of torn fur drifting in the air. His voice moved from snarls
to yelps to gurgles. Lexie inched forward to see beyond the muscles
of Archer’s back to the doomed male beneath her.

It became clear to Lexie that this was
no fair fight, even less so than the wolf’s attack against her.
Archer roughed him up, when she could just as easily take his
throat in her jaws and pull.

Lexie struggled to speak, to tell
Archer that it was enough. She remembered the Pack’s attack the
night before, and the pleasure the women all took in the torture of
the bound man. It was as if they, by beating the male into
submission, could unravel the karmic bindings that ensnarled so
many women, each blow seeking to even the score. Now, watching
Archer toy with the great beast like a cat teasing a rodent before
the final attack, weariness gripped Lexie’s heart. She took a
tentative step and placed her forepaw on Archer’s back. Archer
stopped.