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Chapter 11: Alexis

Chapter 11: Alexis

I watched as his fingers coiled into a fist and the first thought that came to my mind was that he was going to hit me. Instinctively, my hands shot to my face in self-defense, and I backed up a step.

Will punched through the table I had been strapped to, splitting it in half. His hand was bleeding, and he was looking at the blood with a dazed look on his face. Then he looked up at me, the ferocity back in his face, and scowled.

“Do you get a kick out of being so stubborn?” He asked. His voice was surprisingly quiet and calm. This only served to unnerve me only further. “Why can’t you listen? Why don’t you obey?”

“Obey you? Am I crazy?” I had had enough. If I was ever going to stand up for myself, this was the time. “Take a look at yourself. You’re filled with anger. You barely have a lid on it. And on the few occasions that you do decide to talk to me, you yell at me as if I’m the architect of your misery. You scream and insult me with no regard for my feelings. You must really have a ton of screws loose in your head if you think I’m going to quietly come back with you and pretend nothing’s wrong.”

“Come back for your own safety,” Will said softly. “There are dangers lurking around every corner. It only makes sense that you be with your pack. There’s strength in numbers.”

It surprised me how he was able to say that entire sentence without resorting to raising his voice. Was he exercising self-control, or had he finally decided to see me as I was, a real person with real feelings?

“You should really get that hand looked at. It’s bleeding pretty badly,” I said. “As for me, don’t act like you’re concerned about me all of a sudden. None of you ever came looking for me when I went away, so I’m assuming that means that the pack’s well off without me. And you know what? I’m better off without you guys. I’ll be more careful. Relax. You don’t have to come to save me again.”

I turned around to leave. I hadn’t exactly shouted at him or snapped at him, but given that I’d spoken my mind for a change and he had listened instead of retorting with rage, it made me feel a little bit better. Not that there wasn’t wisdom in what he was saying. He was right. There was strength in numbers, and given what had happened today could just as easily happen again, it made sense that I went back to the pack, but where would be the dignity in that? I’d much rather die with dignity than live in disgrace.

Before I could take so much as a step, Will caught my wrist in his bloodied hand and pulled me back.

“Stop that!” Will said.

“No,” I said, yanking my wrist free from his grip. “You stop that! What’s your deal anyway? You seem to enjoy treating me like shit, you shout at me at the drop of a hat, and when you don’t hear what you want to hear, you’re manhandling me? Leave me alone and spare me the twisted emotional merry-go-round of toxic behavior. I have had enough of that for a lifetime.”

His bloodied handprint was enveloped around my wrist. I wiped it clean with my shirt. I looked at him one last time before I headed for the elevator. What a total disaster today had been.

“Alexis,” Will called.

“What?” I asked without turning back.

“Why did you come here today?”

I rolled my eyes, suppressed a sigh, and wheeled around again. “Kind of a strange time for you to start giving a shit about me. What do you care?”

“I care about the pack.”

“Yeah, right, the pack. Well, as I said, I’m not a part of your pack anymore. You saw to it yourself. And it’s not like we’re mates either. You also saw to that. So what’s with the sudden interest in my life?”

“You could have died tonight,” Will said.

“Geez, would that have been so bad? It’s not like life’s handing me anything other than piss-soaked lemons.” It was funny. I wanted to leave. The elevator was right there, a few steps away. And yet every time he opened his mouth and said something, I felt prompted to respond.

“I want to say that I’m…I’m no stranger to suffering,” he said.

“Way to make it all about yourself again,” I said. I didn’t enjoy the fact that I was being so confrontational with him, but it felt right that I should at least give him a little taste of his own medicine. It wasn’t like I was doing this on purpose. I was rattled. I’d been knocked out, strapped to a table, and threatened with death. “You realize misery’s not a competition, right?”

“What do you want from me?” Will asked.

“Leave me alone!”

“I did leave you alone. Don’t you see that?” Will shouted from across the room.

“If that’s true, why did you come here? If you had truly rejected me, why did you come here, risking your life to save mine?”

Even from this far away, I could see emotions convulsing across his face. For once, he did not have a response or a retort to the question. I felt like this was the right time to make my exit, given that I’d gotten the final word.

As the elevator doors closed, I caught one last glimpse of Will standing there against the backdrop of the city, against the cold blue moonlight shining through the broken glass windows. It felt cruel, breaking things off like that when he had just rescued me. On my part, it felt like I had indulged in something gratuitous.

When the elevator opened up on the ground floor, it was extremely uncanny. Everyone present inside was going about their business as if nothing was wrong. As if a great battle had not taken place a few stories up. The receptionist and the guard were flirting with each other. There were a couple of suited gentlemen sitting in the lobby sofas, perusing magazines, looking at their phone screens, and watching the television. The receptionist saw me and smiled at me, unnerving me.

“I hope the interview went well. It most certainly went long, didn’t it?” she asked.

“What the hell?” I felt as if I was trapped in a surreal nightmare where people chose to ignore the presence of the big bad evil entity haunting the only person who could see it.

“Mind how you go,” the guard said. “There’s broken glass on the pavement.”

As I walked across the lobby, I could feel each pair of eyes boring through my skin, all those glares malignant with ill intent. I wouldn’t make it out alive, would I? I wondered.

But the never-ending walk from the elevators to the main entrance finally came to an end, and I was out again, breathing the chilly night air. I shot a look up the building, wondering what would become of Will. He was still up there, up there with Blair.

“You know what? Not my circus, not my monkeys,” I said, throwing my hands up. I had dealt with enough shit today. Now more than ever, I needed to be free from this. On top of all of this, I had no plan any longer. With Beckett Pharma’s job opening gone, I was back to square one. Scratch that. I was even worse off than at square one. I didn’t have the two part-time gigs that I was doing either. I barely had any money left over to pay for food, utilities, and rent. Where was I going to find a job again?

But here was the thing about familiar things: They drew a boundary around you, putting you in the so-called comfort zone, making you think everything was fine the way it was. When I got into my battered pickup truck, the truck that I had associated fond nostalgic memories with, memories of my father taking me to the farmer’s market every weekend, memories of my mom and me going to the mall in Derry in the truck, the comfort zone enveloped me like an ethereal hug. It was as if my parents were reaching out from the beyond, letting me know that I was going to be okay. I gripped the steering wheel and felt the grooves and dents that years of wear and tear had caused. My hand was too little to fit into those grooves, but I remember my dad’s hands fitting into them just fine. It was the same with the seat. It was sunken after years of use. Sunken just enough to make me feel like I was in a cradle.

When all was against me, when it felt like the world had closed itself off to Alexis Richards, the comfort inside my pickup truck gave me just the right amount of strength to make me optimistic enough about whatever awaited me tomorrow. Tomorrow would be a new day. It didn’t matter that I didn’t get the high-paying job at Beckett Pharma. I would make do somehow.

As if the universe was taunting my will, it started raining. This was one of those classic Fiddler’s Green things. You never knew when it began pouring. In high school, they’d taught us about the water cycle and how water from the sea and other bodies of water evaporated and then condensed into rain clouds, causing it to rain. With the sea so close and with the wilderness all around us filled with lakes and streams, it wasn’t exactly a mystery as to why Fiddler’s Green got as much rain as Seattle did.

“Don’t give up on me now,” I said to my pickup truck. It sputtered in response. For the next fifteen minutes, as I drove back to the apartments, I drove with bated breath, wondering when the engine would give up. Fortunately, it did not happen. Well, at least there was one thing going for me.

I climbed the stairs up to the apartment, feeling like the protagonist in some low-fi anime where the main character has to mandatorily make their way through a neon cityscape, then seek refuge in their apartment overlooking the cyberpunk landscape while slurping on noodles. But there were no neon lights in my life, no futuristic city with flying cars, and certainly no noodles in my apartment waiting for me.

I could go to Maliha, maybe raid her fridge and spend the night with her. The heat from her servers would be quite welcoming in this cold weather. But on second thought, I decided against it. I simply did not have it in me to match Maliha’s optimistic, overly-cheery energy.

I had suffered a defeat today. It only made sense that I recovered in solace.

As I walked through the corridor leading to my apartment, I passed Maliha’s apartment. Blaring music was coming from behind her door. Her off-key singing voice soon followed. I chuckled dryly at the mental image of Maliha dancing in her underpants with headphones on and singing horribly while it rained outside. That girl was truly a universe unto herself.

Once I had crossed the rest of the apartment entrances and was just a few feet away from mine, I realized something was wrong. For one, wet footsteps were leading to my apartment. My door, which I was certain I had locked before leaving, was halfway open, creaking against the wind.

All of a sudden, the low-fi anime that I had projected myself into had turned into a slasher horror movie. It was thundering outside. Lightning flashed in the dark hallway. Rainwater managed to find its way through the leaky roof in the building and was pooling all along the hallway. And my door was open, swinging precariously.

The wolf within me begged to be let free. Why shouldn’t I? Earlier today, I was knocked out before even I got the chance to show Blair my true form. When I came to, I was tied with straps around my limbs, preventing any movement.

This was not the case right now. Whoever was inside my apartment had made the grave mistake of crossing paths with a girl who had been through the wringer today. It did not matter if it were Blair’s men, the vampires, or Maurice himself.

It was time to stand up for myself.

I jumped through the doorway, shifting in mid-air, and landed on my paws, snarling at the silhouette tucked away in the darkness. My instinct hadn’t been wrong. Someone had indeed broken into my place.

I could see better, hear clearer, and make out the shape of the man even though it was pitch black. But when the lightning shone through the window, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the man shifting into a bigger wolf. As he filled the room with his massive size, an impulsive thought raced through my brain.

You can run.

No. I was done running. The universe should’ve realized by now that I was not someone to be messed with. What grave sin had I committed, what blasphemous act had I performed, that I was being punished by life so ruthlessly? It was not fair, and I was about to make sure the universe knew it.

The wolf was bigger than me, but I had the advantage of being more agile. Within fractions of a second, I came up with an attack strategy. A wolf could be as strong as they wanted, as quick as light, but if you injured them at the right place, it did not matter how strong they were, how fast they were, or how bravely they fought. A blind wolf was just half a wolf.

With that in mind, I slashed at their eyes. But the wolf swerved just in time to miss my claws, proving that they were faster than me. To my surprise, rather than attack me, he receded further into my apartment and shifted back into his human form.

“Stop, for God’s sake!”

Will?

In my disbelief, I shifted back. I went to the light switch and turned the lights on. Without a doubt, it was Will. He was soaked in water, his face looking haggard, his eyes bearing the marks of tiredness.

“What the hell are you doing in my apartment?” Whenever I was feeling overwhelmed, my hands darted to my head, tugging at my hair. I fought every impulse in my body to tug my hair and forced myself to stand still. “How did you even get here? Do you think it’s wise startling me like that? After what I’ve just been through?”

Will waved his hands at me in an attempt to pacify me. He maintained his distance as he circled around the room and closed the door so that our commotion wouldn’t be heard by anyone else in the building.

“Listen,” he started.

“No, you listen to me for a change. I already said everything I had to say back at the lab. Why are you here, then? How could you think that breaching my privacy was a good idea? I could have hurt you just now!”

“Will you calm down?” Will asked. He walked around the apartment casually, looking at everything in great detail. “I tracked you down. It’s…it’s the same way I tracked you when you were in danger. As much as I would be willing to admit that I was the one who untethered our bond, it still works in terms of helping me find you and alerting me when you’re in danger. I don’t understand it. I came here because of what you said to me in Blair’s lab. You and I have got unresolved issues. I came to talk.”

“That is not an explanation for why you broke into my apartment!” I said, trying to overcome my perplexity. “You can’t leave me alone, and you don’t want me around. What do you want?” I asked. I was just as exasperated as I was shocked. If someone were to measure my agitation and my perplexity on a scale, it’d be exactly half and half.

“I don’t know what I want!” Will exclaimed. I braced myself for more of his anger. But then he said something in a tone so mellow and unlike him that I was too taken aback to respond to it.

“I don’t know what I want, Alexis. My body is free. My mind is still in a prison of its own making. All this time, drugged and dazed, I kept thinking that your grandmother, Ariana, was still alive. That my old life was just on pause, waiting for me. And I’m not prepared for this new life I find myself in. That includes you as well. It includes the fact that the moment I came back, I had to resume the role of alpha of a pack that didn’t even know how to protect itself. It means that I get to wake up in a world where vampires roam free and haunt werewolves. I am not prepared for all of this. And on that note, I do realize that I misbehaved with you. For that, I am deeply sorry. There are many things that aren’t in my control. It seems that my freedom has come at the price of violent outbursts of rage. I apologize for bashing you out in the open, for being rude to you, for… for…everything.”

Of all the things that I had expected, I had never expected an apology. It left me completely disarmed and wordless.

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