Lunatic Fringe (34 page)

Since meeting Lexie, Archer felt
stirred with feelings she hadn’t thought of for years. Not since
Natalee. Not since her Pack.

Years ago, when she was first exiled,
Archer became an insomniac. Sleeping without the rhythmic breathing
of her sisters around her was impossible. She would shiver without
a body snuggled against hers, whether or not it was actually
chilly. When she did drift to sleep, she often woke with a start,
convinced a terror lurked nearby, waiting for her to drop her
guard. Without the keen senses of her sisters to accompany her, she
didn’t trust her own.

Immediately after her exile, Archer
fled, spending most of her time as a wolf. She skulked through the
woods alone, searching for an identity she’d lived her whole life
avoiding. Occasionally, another lone wolf would cross through the
territory, and she would rush to meet it for an evening of fevered
anonymity. While it calmed her mind, it would only ever last as
long as one night, and then she would return to the silence of an
unaccompanied bed.

It had been a slow, agonizing process,
learning to exist on her own again. Without her family to care for,
she felt redundant, useless. She had no love to share, no one to
feed, no one to protect but herself. Eventually, she learned to
avoid felling large game or else leave a half-eaten carcass to rot
in a field. She began to hunt birds or small mammals, missing the
thrill of felling a creature of speed and heft, abandoning the joy
of celebrating a kill with her family, of sharing the meal with
eager, chattering laughter.

After her humiliation waned, she took
to spending more time in human form; for some reason it made her
less lonely. The human body better fit a solitary life. Arms could
bathe the whole body; fingers could navigate all the challenges of
existence. With human hands, she could enjoy holding books and
building fires, chopping wood and making art. She could have
conversations with other humans; even strangers engaged in
conversation with one another as a matter of course. It was not
family, it wasn’t even intimate, but it salved the ever-weeping
wound of her solitude.

After thousands of lonely days, Archer
grew to enjoy the solitude, no longer crying when she heard her
sistren howling together in the distance. She acclimated to a life
with no home and no family, losing her drive to rut and sire pups.
She learned to live as a migrant, loving the life so many humans
pined for, one with no responsibilities nor ties to place or
schedules.

Tonight, the air was cool enough for
her to see her breath. The night was clear with no recollection of
the storm clouds that had threatened the day. Stepping into the
night, Archer was assaulted by a vision of her lost mate, Natalee,
standing naked in the dark. Of a blessed night years ago, when they
had found a hot spring in the cliffs near the ocean. They bathed
and made love, their movements sending the water bubbling over
smooth stones, cascading down the cliffside as it had done for
ages, feeding the vast, black ocean. Natalee had gotten out of the
natural tub and stood in the moonlight, ineffable wings of steam
rising from her body like her soul ascending. Her skin was as white
as the moon, a cold angel.

It was the first time Archer remembered
a sensation so strong as love filling her. Her heart nearly burst
with the effort necessary to catch all of Natalee’s beauty. After
Natalee died, after Archer fled, she never expected to feel that
swell again.

She’d been wrong. The second time she
felt it was when she watched Lexie battle her terror and win after
the attack at the mountain. In the moonlight, Lexie had looked so
young. Her mouth and ears were too big for her body, an indication
of more growth to come. Yet something about her seemed wearier than
when Archer had first seen her, outside her decimated room. A
heaviness dragged her shoulders as Lexie stood unknowingly on the
cusp of irreversible changes, her meager softness soon to erode
into the feral form of a wild animal.

A chill of recognition danced up her
spine, the memory of feeling love for a small, fragile thing caught
up in a complicated world. Archer bit her lip, recalling the
following morning in the treehouse, when Lexie looked at Archer
with clear eyes and was unafraid, when she opened her body for
Archer to crawl inside. Smiling amid the loss, Archer felt a pang
of guilt, that she let Lexie crawl inside her heart, replacing
Natalee there, if only for a moment.

But Archer needed too much and fought
too hard. She always fought too hard. And now Lexie had pushed her
away.

Archer grabbed the ax leaning against
the door and set to work on the woodpile, hoping that a stoked
hearth would entice Lexie back into her life tonight and every
night for the rest of their lives. She cleaved the pile of raw
logs, stacking them into piles for burning. The rhythm of the ax
soothed her. With each inhalation, she choked her grip, pulled the
tool down by her shins, swung it back behind her body, and to the
apex of her reach. It hung there on her full breath. With a
whooshing exhalation, she brought the blade down to the wood with a
satisfying crack, splitting it cleanly and efficiently. Placing
another log on its end on the stump, she repeated the process, over
and over, until her mind untangled from the memories of women,
betrayals, shame, and the anxieties that bound them all.

She split the entire pile twice before
taking a moment to rest. She dropped the ax by her feet and caught
her breath, happy for the brief distraction. As she inhaled, a hint
of the strange tickled her nose. She stilled, tuning her ears to
the woods. Something at the edge of the forest was trying to be
quiet. A footpad eased to the ground, crumpling the leaves and
needles beneath it. The breeze drifted toward Archer, carrying the
clues she sought. She snuffed at the air, dissecting it for the
odor that piqued her senses, finding the answer in the form of a
female werewolf stalking in the dark. Archer’s neck prickled in an
echo of her wolf pelt.

“
Blythe?” she called. The
stalker froze. Archer waited, then allowed the first bits of fur to
fluff and teeth to point, the first glimmer of a change. The
shadowed wolf turned with a rustle of needles. Heedless of sound
and scent, she dashed into the woods.

The sweat on Archer’s body chilled her
as the breeze danced on her flesh. She stacked the wood, put the ax
over her shoulder and walked into the cabin. She was unsure of the
days to come, the events that would unfurl, and her place in it
all. She wanted to run to Lexie, to run to her pack, and straighten
out whatever warped situation was brewing. Only, it was out of her
hands. She only had one job now. She had to make amends for her
prior failures by protecting what was still hers, regardless of
what old alliances were severed in the process.

Chapter 20

Lexie’s arm was nearly healed by the
time she turned off the truck’s engine at the edge of the forest.
Her new body seemed to take joy in surprising her. She shook her
head at the wonder of it all.

Early morning light dripped through
denuded trees, preparing to burn through everything. Frost dusted
the edges of the leaves on the ground, cracking loudly as Lexie
stepped across them. It had been more than thirty hours since the
attack, and Duane was still missing. In the stillness of the woods,
Duane’s lingering scent filled her head like a ribbon of light,
showing her the way. It told her that he ran, at first in circles,
trying to stay out of the range of the raging beast as it swiped
and ripped at his friends.

She found him at the base of a tree
outside the ring of the campground. Perhaps he’d fallen on his back
as he fended off the animal. Next, a scuff of paw prints, a
distraction, and his chance. He leapt up and grabbed a lower branch
of the tree. His athleticism saved him here; paired with his
adrenaline, his vertical jump allowed him to reach the lowest
branch, but just barely. Blood and skin and a snapped fingernail
adorned the scraped bark where he’d clung for his life on this
branch. He’d pulled himself up and continued climbing. The werewolf
hadn’t pursued: no claw gashes in the trunk, no broken branches.
Duane climbed to a higher branch, then held fast.

Lexie climbed to this safe house,
nestled in the crook between a tall branch and the trunk. The tree
smelled strongly of his sweet and musky sweat. She peered through
the branches to the clearing below. Duane had earned a front-row
seat to the carnage. Below, the ground was crusted with blood where
Michael was torn in two. Just beyond, where the tent had stood, the
wolf killed Brian. No more than a few yards further, it rent Kevin
apart. Duane hovered above, like a squirrel in a tree, awaiting his
destruction. Saline here, tears. Duane had stayed for a while,
clinging to this tree. His scent lingered as he sobbed over the
corpses of his friends. Lexie dropped back to the ground and
sniffed, sussing out the wolf’s next move. There was none. The wolf
left. It didn’t kill Duane. It only made him watch.

Duane had climbed down, dropping as
lightly as he could manage onto the soft soil--footprints so faint
it was no wonder everyone had missed them. Then, he ran north.
Lexie ran, too, following his scent. He was heading back to campus.
Then, he changed course, turning east, towards Wolf Creek, towards
home. Once away from the clearing, the footprints deepened, the
stink of sweat grew stronger. Duane had run as if being pursued, if
only by a nightmare. She came upon the river, frigid, deep, and
slow. His scent trail ended here.

Lexie took a deep breath, trying to
settle her mind to prepare for a leap. She couldn’t say she was
quite used to her new body yet, and she backed up from the shore to
get a running start. She leapt, landing in the shallows on the
other edge of the bank. Her feet sank deep in the cold mud, soaking
her boots, while she prayed his scent would continue here. She
crawled out, feeling the panic that Duane must have felt, the fear
he must still be feeling now. She breathed deep and desperate.
Apples.

She ran for another twenty minutes,
which must have been close to forty for Duane, when she stumbled
into a manufactured clearing. Decapitated stumps stood in a broad
arc at the edge of the forest. Acres around was mud, thick, brown
and dead; the bones of trees long destroyed; and the sleeping
machinery of destruction, red and rusty, like caked blood. It was
brighter here, the morning sun refracting off a million edges of
cloud, the light white and painful. Steel blades sat hibernating,
disguising their fiendish nature behind a chilly, still silence.
This place was a human outpost in the war against the
wild.

Knowing Duane was near, Lexie tread
carefully now, unwilling to blunder in and send him deeper into his
nightmare.His scent trail led her to the mill house, through a
broken window, jagged pane still sticky with blood. The mill was
out of use, at least by the woodsmen. Graffiti scarred the brick
walls.

Lexie peered into the gloomy building,
as dark as the bare field was bright. The roof was high above,
corrugated steel, through which needle-like shafts of sunlight
drained in, casting wafting motes of dust as glowing embers. More
sleeping steel sat in this space, all teeth and rust, jagged edges
and spiderwebs. Sawdust covered the cement floor, inches thick in
places. Broken beer bottles piled in the corner. Burnt paper and
plastic sat in filthy heaps. The space smelled of charred wood,
oil, and iron. Far across the room, from behind a pile of stacked
pallets, Lexie heard a tiny whimper.

She approached the corner, dust
tickling her sinuses, her eyes adjusting to the low light. Duane
clenched in the shadow of the tower of pallets, curled on his side.
He clutched his knees to his chest, his fingers digging into his
flesh as if clinging the edge of a cliff. Lexie crept closer, and
though she stopped right in front of him, he didn’t seem to notice
her. He squinted as though he was staring into the sun.

His face twisted into a sobbing
grimace, though he had long run out of tears. Blood and dirt
smeared his face, streaked where tears had cut their paths. Lexie
squatted in front of him and whispered his name softly. He didn’t
respond.

“
Duane,” she whispered
again, gingerly reaching her hand to his shoulder. He did not
flinch as she had expected; rather, he whimpered like an abused
dog. Through his shirt, his skin felt chilly, belying the life
scared stiff beneath its surface. He reminded Lexie of a child, so
fragile, nearly broken, pieces of his psyche scattered like his
friends’ limbs. His body was cold, but he did not shiver; his
muscles were clenched as if he were already dead. Lexie watched his
ribcage heave wildly and irregularly, his heart struggling to break
free from his chest. His breath was shallow and sharp, as if he
were still being pursued.

Lexie needed to warm him up, to find
him water. She wished for a moment that Archer was here, her
massive furry body to use for warmth, but she realized that the
last thing Duane needed to see was a wolf.

She wouldn’t be able to
move him until his shattered mind regained a sense of equilibrium,
and that wouldn’t happen until he calmed down. A deep sadness
expanded in her, an empathy for his broken mind. She moved slowly
to Duane’s back, keeping her hand on him as she would a spooked
animal, whispering the only platitudes she knew.
Shhhhh. I’m here. You’re safe now. Everything
will be okay.