Lunatic Fringe (35 page)

Draping her arms around his
broad back, Lexie lay down, curling her legs and body around his,
following his form with hers. She wished she were bigger, so she
could envelop him entirely. The scent of apples and tears swirled
in her nostrils, as she whispered inches from his ear. Her warmth
penetrated him, the banded muscles of his back unclenching. She
caressed his skin like a lover, a mother, a healer.
Shhhhhh. Duane. I’m here. You’re safe now.
Everything will be okay.

Chapter 21

It was late afternoon before Lexie’s
thoughts flickered back to Archer. Duane was safe, his family on a
plane somewhere over Alberta, and his shattered mind quieted with
heavy sedatives. Lexie reclined in the cab of her truck drifting in
and out of consciousness with a head full of Archer and an apology
on her lips. It seemed as though her whole life were becoming a
series of flights and reunions. Lexie didn’t want to run
anymore.

She had parked in Archer’s driveway and
found her cabin empty. The cold light filtered through her dirty
windshield as she wondered whether or not to track Archer,
presumably to their treehouse. She caught her reflection in the
rearview mirror and sighed, looking worse than after even her most
brutal bout of insomnia. Her eyes were bloodshot, and dark circles
outlined the hollows of their sockets. Fine lines spread like
cobwebs from the corners of her eyes. Her skin felt tight and her
jaw ached from clenching, driving bolts of pain into her skull. She
had aged decades in one night.

With a groan, Lexie opened the door of
her truck and inhaled the crisp, cold air of the impending winter.
The full moon wasn’t far off, a couple of hours maybe. Lexie cursed
the longer nights. Archer’s day-old scent traced a faint path into
the woods. Its familiarity eased the trauma of the previous
evening, and all she wanted was to hold her lover again and
disappear from the past and the future, to stay in the simplicity
of unfettered love. But that was an illusion, no more real than the
hallucinations that crept in her peripheral vision.There was no
such thing as unfettered love; each simple, elegant moment that
Lexie tried to sear into her memory would soon fade into the morass
of irrelevance. What would she find on the other side of this
frenzied love affair other than the mundanity of daily life and a
commitment to a woman so much older than herself? Archer no longer
had an interest in college life, in world travel, in adventures and
eager exploration of the world. She had done it all and seen more.
Now, all Archer wanted was a family. What to Archer was solace,
success, a reward earned by fighting so hard for so long, felt to
Lexie like a collar. Though Lexie had once thought she wanted the
same, her father’s confession made her realize it wasn’t a dream
but an excuse, an easy way of filling the hole her mother left in
her life when she walked out. Adding more people into the mix
merely occluded the pain, making her feel less easily abandoned.
What would it feel like to be alone and simultaneously complete?
That was what Lexie wanted to know.

Lexie felt a fleeting
sympathy for her mother, then. Did she suffer the same realization,
only too late, when she had a husband and child tethering her in
place? The ambivalence Lexie felt toward her mother translated to
her unwillingness to follow Archer. She could turn the ignition and
drive to her father’s house right now, leaving this all behind. She
could turn south on I-5 and drive until she hit San Francisco. She
could disappear.
Run away,
a voice like her mother’s whispered in her
head.
You can always run away.
The choice was there, but the freedom wasn’t. She
wondered how much more death she would have to know before this
nightmare would be over and her real life could begin. Then she
shuddered and wondered if this, in fact, was her real
life.

Three boys were dead, and it was a
mystery Lexie needed to solve. Realizing that Archer knew even less
than she did herself, Lexie locked the doors of her truck and
walked into the woods, heading north to the Den.

Chapter 22

“
Finally!” Hazel shouted as
she saw Lexie approach along the sidewalk. She jumped from her seat
on the front porch. “Come on!”

“
What’s going
on?”

“
We found him! We found the
werewolf that killed those boys!” She grasped Lexie by the wrist
and yanked with the full weight of her body, wrenching Lexie
through the house, out the back door, down the steps and into the
woods.

Lexie didn’t need to ask; she knew
where they were headed.

At the sloping cave with the iron door,
Lexie stopped. Hazel was impatient. “Come on!” She yanked at her
wrist.

“
Hey. Cool it.” Lexie
glared at Hazel and wrenched her hand away.

“
Ow!” Hazel said. She
rubbed her hands together and pouted. “We did this for you, you
know.” Hazel ran to the door and eased herself in.

Lexie breathed deep, detecting a
melange of scents from the nighttime forest. She smelled herself
and noticed her scent had changed. A rhythm, a cycle, perhaps. Or
maybe she was indeed changing even further, into something beyond
girl or werewolf. She could no longer say that she would be
surprised. About that, about anything.

Lexie turned in a circle, glancing to
the west, to the edge of the continent, and then to the south,
where she would find the treehouse, and perhaps Archer, pacing
silently, waiting for her lover to return. Then she looked to the
east, where her father was likely lying slack-jawed and medicated
in front of the nightly news. She returned to the north to stare at
the iron door and listen to the muffled voices behind
it.

The girls expected her to kill whatever
was chained behind that door. That she knew. She let her fingers
graze the hilt of her mother’s knife. She wondered if, when the
time came, she could do it. She had no answer to that question, so
she let it swirl unaltered in her mind as the rusty door stared
back at her. With a deep breath, she slipped inside.

Inside, the smell was as musky and
filthy as she remembered. A young man sat bound to a chair, naked
but for his shorts. Lexie recognized him as a student, but that was
where her familiarity with him ended. His lean shoulders slumped
forward, and his head hung heavy on his neck. A simple blindfold
barred his eyes, as though this would protect anyone. If he were
truly a werewolf, the blindfold neither hid the girls’ identities
nor compromised his ability to attack. Yet, he sat still and calm.
The girls stood in a ring around the perimeter of the cave. A dirty
lantern hung from a rusty chain. Each movement from the girls set
it swinging, shifting shadows on the rock walls.

Renee hung back, pressing herself into
the rock and looking as though she wanted to disappear. Blythe was
absent. Without either of those women leading the rest, a frenetic
energy ruled the space.

“
What’s going on?” asked
Lexie.

“
We found him!” Hazel said
again.

“
Him, who?”

“
He’s the one who killed
the frat boys,” Mitch said.

Lexie looked at the boy. He was thin
and pale. Iron chains connected his wrists and ankles to the
ground. He didn’t move.

“
Shouldn’t you be
congratulating him?” Lexie asked.

“
He’s a werewolf!” Corwin
insisted.

“
And you hated Brian. You
all did.”

“
That doesn’t fix the fact
that he’s a werewolf,” Sharmalee said, as though the repetition
would allay Lexie’s concerns.

“
Who’s idea was this?”
Lexie snapped, growing frustrated. “Renee?”

Renee met Lexie’s eyes before glancing
away. Tiny beads of sweat formed at her hairline. She chewed at her
cheek.

“
Why did you bring me
here?”

“
To kill this fucker, Lex,”
Corwin said, squeezing and unsqueezing her fists in a silent
rhythm. “He needs to die, and we need to know that we can trust
you.”

Mitch nodded. “That’s
right.”

Lexie rolled her eyes. She knew that
Brian probably deserved what he got, but she couldn’t say the same
for Duane or the other boys, nor could she say that taking out
their killer was the right choice either.

“
How do you know he’s the
one?”

“
The way we always do,”
Hazel said.

“
You tracked him?” Lexie
asked, looking to Jenna.

“
Blythe did,” Jenna
replied.

“
Then why isn’t she
here?”

“
Christ, Lex. Just take him
out already,” Mitch said.

Lexie stepped to the boy and leaned her
face into the crook of his neck. She inhaled, hoping her senses
would serve her. She pulled in the scent of compost and roots. The
boy’s skin broke in a wash of goosebumps beneath her
breath.

“
Why me?” she whispered,
watching the fine hairs on his neck rise in the tiny breeze she
created.

“
It has to be you, Lexie,”
said Hazel.

“
It’s true, Lexie. It has
to be you. Please, just do this, and we can be a family,” Jenna
pleaded. “You can avenge Duane. It’s all going to work out. Just do
this for us. For you.”

This doesn’t make any
sense
. Lexie didn’t know if she whispered
or merely thought it. His odor was wolfish. She didn’t doubt that
he was a beast as the girls claimed him to be. But her certainty of
so many things was unraveling. Walking to class with Jenna felt
like eons ago. Now she stood in a different world, among a
different group of women, and she didn’t know who she wanted to be
anymore. She let the tips of her fingers graze the hilt of the
knife.

Corwin grew impatient and shifted her
weight back and forth between her feet.

“
Christ, Lexie, it’s not
that hard!” Corwin burst out.

Jenna held up her hands, “Okay, Corwin.
Give her time.”

“
Time to what? Make him
feel comfortable? We’re killing a goddamn werewolf, Lex! It’s what
we’ve always done. The question is what are you doing? What have
you ever done? You run away from everything!”

Jenna stepped forward and held out a
sharp blade on the palms of her opened hands. “You’ve hunted. It’s
not that hard. If you hurt him, he’ll turn and then it’s so easy.
He won’t be human anymore.”

Lexie looked at the clean, new blade
that Jenna held out for her and shook her head. Her heart was
beating in her throat.

“
Is that true?” she asked,
staring at the boy’s face. “That they aren’t human?”

The girls exchanged nervous glances.
Mitch licked his lips and hid them between his teeth. Lexie’s pulse
fluttered against her flushed skin, frantic as a bird’s wing. She
took a breath and tried to calm herself, knowing the boy could
smell her rising anxiety. She unsnapped the sheath on her hip and
pulled out her own blade. She took a step to the boy and felt the
room relax.

Lexie closed her eyes and steadied her
breath, holding the knife against her sternum like a talisman,
imagining how it would feel if somebody slid it into her flesh.
Perhaps that feeling would connect them, Lexie choosing life by
drawing it from her supposed foe. Staring into the darkness of her
closed eyes, Lexie tried to find the animal within her that
defended itself so violently on the mountainside. She could feel it
deep inside, but the loudest voice was that of the blade in her
hands.

She opened her eyes and let the women
around the edge of the cave fade into darkness. The boy’s pale
flesh gleamed in the swaying lantern light. She leaned before him,
holding the flat of the blade against his delicate neck. She
noticed three tiny beauty marks dotted on his skin. She saw them
reflected in the polished surface of the blade and stopped. The
light swayed. The blade reflected fur over flesh. Her eyes scanned
his body and she saw the shift, the same that she had seen twice
before, at the Full Moon Tribe and the next day as she lay with
Archer. Whispers glinted at the edges of her hearing as though the
cave was beset by ghosts. Lexie struggled to keep her composure,
commanding herself not to run, that there was something she should
listen to here.

She squatted in front of the boy and
ripped the blindfold from his eyes. He flinched against the dim
light and blinked at Lexie. She gripped and released the knife
handle, molding it to her grip. The boy’s face shifted as though
trying to find a clear signal between two warring radio
frequencies. There was golden fur and a long muzzle in one moment,
a lithe boy’s face in another. With the knife in her hand, Lexie
felt as though she could see clearer than ever.

In a whisper so low she
couldn’t be sure she was speaking at all, Lexie said,
Tell me what you can remember.

The boy licked his lower
lip and answered by barely moving his mouth
. Sometimes I catch glimpses. The rest is blank. I don’t want
to be this way.
He stifled a whimper,
trying not to cry.

Why aren’t you fighting
back?
Lexie asked.