Running with the Pack

He stands there watching her, gangly and awkward, while her fingers tighten on the plastic and she swallows hungry spit. Finally he ducks his head and retreats. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”

When his footsteps recede, Sephie sinks onto the cold tile floor and opens the container. Thin slices of organs—pomegranate heart and pinky-brown liver-and slivers and cubes of fat-marbled flesh. Once he gave her an eyeball, but it was salty and bitter and too gross even for her.

She saves the heart for last, chews it slowly, sucking bloody juice out of the muscle. Shudders ride her, and she closes her eyes against a flood of scattered images and sensations. She doesn’t want to know about the person whose heart this was.

“This is what you left me for?”

She opens her eyes to find Caleb crouching in front of her, long hands dangling between his knees. Blood and brains drip onto the floor, vanishing when they hit the tile.

“Leave me alone!” Her voice cracks. The empty bowl falls from her hand and rolls in a lazy spiral.

“Tell me this is what you want. Tell me you don’t miss me.”

She closes her eyes, pulls her knees tight against her chest.

“Tell me you wouldn’t rather eat that boy of yours. He might like it.”

A hand touches her knee and Sephie gasps, but it’s only Peter. “Are you all right?”

Caleb’s vanished again.

She stares up at Peter—she feels his pulse through her jeans, hears the nervous rhythm of his heart. He wants her. He’s afraid of her. He smells like food.

Caleb knows her too well, damn him. She’s had more than one daydream about fucking Peter on a cold steel embalming table. Some of those fantasies end with her tearing the poor boy’s throat out. The smell of warm flesh fills her nose.

She pulls away, crab-crawls across the floor and stumbles to her feet. Peter gapes; she’s getting faster.

“I’m fine.” She nibbles a drop of coagulated blood from under her nail and straightens her blouse. “I need to go.”

Peter frowns, and she can see him searching for the nerve to ask her to stay. He’s like the ghosts, needing, wanting. Whether he wants a girlfriend or a pet monster, she’s not sure, but she can’t offer him either.

“Thank you,” she says again, cutting him off. “I’ll be back next month, okay?”

He nods, shoulders sagging. “Yeah. I’ll see you then.”

And Sephie flees up the stairs, into the dark, and hurries for home.

The apartment is empty. Seth’s gone a lot lately, looking for work—jobs that pay cash and don’t run background checks. Sometimes, like this week, it’s out-of-town work, leaving her alone. Hard enough to sleep most nights, even with his steady snoring drifting down the hall. When it’s her and the echoing silence, it’s nearly impossible.

The ghosts never come too close when he’s here. This week she’s seen a few lingering near the stairs.

Even if the ghosts don’t find her, the dreams always do.

She slips one of Seth’s cassettes into the old tape deck by her mattress. Sephie teases him about his music, sad bluesy stuff a few generations before her time, but some of it’s pretty. Billie Holiday’s husky-soft voice chases away the silence, wraps around her like a blanket.

Her gun is a hard lump under the pillow; she always sleeps with it when she’s alone.

Tell me this is what you want.

She thought she was rid of Caleb six months ago, when she left him sprawled in a cooling pool of blood on a dusty Oklahoma street. Not that she could even do that herself—she had to find someone else to pull the trigger for her.

His words echo in her head. Is this what she wants? The cramped apartment, the string of lousy jobs. Gravemeat and ghosts. Seth is gone half the time, and she doesn’t dare make other friends, not even something as simple as getting coffee with Anna.

She’s wanted lots of things over the years—travel, excitement, glamorous jobs that turned out to be too little glamour and too much work. But the one thing she’s always wanted, as long as she can remember, is to not be afraid anymore.

“I’ve done a great job of that, haven’t I?” she whispers to her pillow, to the gun beneath it.

The tape clicks over to the B-side before she finally drifts off. Lady Day’s voice follows her into the dark.

She dreams of the wall again. A wall in a dark forest, stones pitted and pocked with age, veined with moss and ivy. Too high and sheer to climb, so she follows it on and on, searching for a door. Her fingers bruise the green, filling the air with its musty-damp scent, and sap clings sticky as blood on her skin. Yellow eyes gleam in the shadows around her.

The werewolves.

Tall spindly beasts, long-armed and stilt-legged, tongues lolling amid bone-needle fangs. They never approach, never touch her, only stare and follow, muttering and laughing to themselves, singing to the swollen orange moon.

Maybe there’s no door, no opening, and she’ll circle the wall forever. But Sephie’s smelled the wind from the other side, a wind that smells like forests and gardens, like heaven. Roses and evergreen, ripe peaches and fresh bright blood.

And she knows, with the certainty of dreams, that the garden is a place for her. An Eden for ghouls and monsters, where the trees pump blood instead of sap and hearts grow ripe and beating on the vine. A place where she’ll never have to eat cold meat, never have to kill. Where she won’t be afraid.

It’s enough to keep her walking the wall, night after night, ignoring the werewolves’ snuffling laughter.

She doesn’t find the door tonight. Instead the dream splinters and she falls through the cracks, falls back onto her sagging mattress. The shadowed bedroom ceiling stares her down while Billie Holiday sings about the moonlight.

Something woke her, but she’s not sure what, until the mattress creaks and a warm weight settles over her. Familiar scratch of stubble, the salt-sweet taste of Caleb’s skin.

He shouldn’t be here, but his hands are sliding under her shirt, callused fingers kneading her ribs, and her body still remembers him, remembers when she didn’t spend the nights trembling and alone. She arches against him as his tongue traces the angle of her jaw; her fingers tangle in his wet hair.

“Tell me you don’t miss me.” His breath tickles her sternum as his fingers slip beneath the elastic of her underwear. She bites her lip and doesn’t answer.

His hair trails over her stomach, leaving warm wet streaks behind. “I would have taken care of you.” He tugs her underwear over her hips and her breath hitches. “I still need you, Sephie.” Lips press warm and rough below her navel, the pressure of teeth.

“Caleb—” And she shrieks as he bites. Light flashes in the window and she sees her blood on his mouth, his blood smeared over her breasts and belly and hands, his eyes gleaming yellow in the glare.

And she wakes with a gasp. She’s alone again, with the music and the soft sounds of traffic beyond the window, and only sweat slicks her skin.

Sephie can’t sleep again that night, and when dawnlight creeps through the blinds she’s aching and groggy. She wants to call in sick, but she gave Peter the last of her cash and the electricity’s due soon, so she drags herself into the shower when the alarm shrieks.

She searches the foggy mirror for changes, like she does every time she eats. Maybe her teeth are a hint longer, a little sharper. Her nails have thickened, so thick now she can’t chew them like she used to, has to worry her cuticles instead.

She thinks of Caleb’s bloody grin, the dark half-circles under his nails. She’s not like him, no matter what she’s becoming.

Not yet, at least.

Another day of ignoring ghosts, of dodging Anna’s questions and invitations. She aches with tension and fatigue by the time she gets home.

Caleb is waiting for her, bleeding on her dumpster-rescue couch. Sephie pauses on the threshold, nearly turns and runs.

But she’s too tired, and running hasn’t worked so far. She locks the door behind her.

“What do you want?”

“Your help.” It’s not what she expected. He’s too serious; it looks strange on him.

“My help? Maybe you should have asked for that before you started stalking me. And anyway, you’re dead.”

His eyes narrow. “Whose fault is that?”

“You should have let me walk away.” But it’s hard to stay angry with a ghost. Arguing with Caleb is familiar, almost domestic, and better than being alone.

“You weren’t walking—you were running. You wanted me to be strong. You wanted me to be scary. And then you couldn’t handle it.”

“I didn’t want you to kill people.”

“You wanted a pet monster, a killer on a leash.”

She closes her eyes. “I wanted to feel safe.”

“If I could have done that, I would have.” She feels him in front of her, though she never heard him move. His hand cups her cheek, cool and rough, his touch lighter than it ever was. If she pushes, she might pass right through him.

“How did you find me, anyway?”

“I can feel you, everywhere I go. We’re still all tangled up together.”