Lennox Armstrong

"Are you still watching?"

Inside the television's screen, the message bounced back and forth, begging for attention. The remote control's innards were scrambled around the ripped carpet floor. The batteries were ruined, drowned in a puddle of drying blood.

Lennox Armstrong allowed his green eyes to move across the entire living room, taking in and dissecting every detail of the surrounding space.

The floral wallpaper, yellowed from age and indoor smoking, peeled and bunched up at random places in the mobile home. It uncovered even older paint, a lead-based solution that caused Lennox's nose to wrinkle in reply.

He doesn't know how a human could stand the stench of the home, much less a wolf. The scent curled into his nostrils and settled like a thin layer of poison, irritating his senses enough to cause the heel of his hand to butt against his nose.

Lennox walked to the other side of the tiny room in long strides from his jean-clad legs. His tall stature dwarfed the little home. For a moment, he was scared if he breathed hard enough, the house would rip up from its rotten floorboards and blow away. Almost like he was a big, bad wolf.

His hands dragged across the rough polyester fabric of the burnt orange couch. Nothing in the room was cohesive. It was as if each piece of furniture was picked up from the edge of a driveway, left to rot by the original owners. Everything was an accidental mismatch, from the broken bookcase, which held more empty bottles of alcohol than books, to the three-legged coffee-table stained with water rings.

Lennox dragged his eyes up to the mirror. It hung at a slant, and a crack ran through the middle of the glass. It split off the way tree branches grew, sporadic.

He caught his reflection, and paused to stare.

After all this time, he still wasn't sure about his looks. He forgot what he looked like sometimes, but he knew he was handsome, because his Aunt Quin told him so. And Aunt Quin would never lie.

She told him when he was ugly, on his worst nights, when his misguided anger outweighed his guileless kindness. When his soft smiles twisted into crooked snarls, the back of Quin's hand found his head and smacked softly in low warning, always there to chase away the Big Bad in his blood.

His face was placid in the reflection. His wide eyes naturally sloped downward, which pushed the bottoms of his dark lashes to the tops of his high cheekbones. A long scar ran from the curl of his ear, straight through his left brow, to his hairline. His nose, crooked from splintering open as a child, was dusted with a thick layer of freckles.

His entire body was mapped by speckled constellations. Sometimes, when he couldn't fall asleep, he would trace the blunt tips of his fingers over his skin, over the countless scars with forgotten origins, to the freckles that raised to moles.

He brushed one of his hands over his blunt haircut. The golden strands always faded to a mousy brown in the winter. He didn't care for his looks, but he liked the way his hair turned bright during the summer and his skin turned tan from hours spent beneath the unwavering sun.

It was December, so his hair was dark.

He frowned at himself.

Lennox turned away from his reflection, and back to the room.

Unsurprisingly, it was still the same as it was thirty seconds ago, which meant it was still drenched in blood.

Lennox cracked his knuckles.

The blood was wolf. And, the way it painted the walls meant he or she was dead or three seconds from dying.

He released a long, heavy sigh. If there was a body, all of this would be much easier.

"So," a deep male voice spoke from behind Lennox. "What do you think?"

Lennox turned to Giles, his cousin. The man was still gangly and long, despite his age. If Lennox didn't know him, he would mistake the man as an unexpecting teenager being outrun by puberty. His afro of curls moved in one direction as he spoke and shook his head.

"No one's seen Verona for at least a week, but... I don't know." Giles's converse sidestepped the puddle of blood as he neared Lennox. "This shit seems new."

This shit meant the blood.

Lennox dragged a hand over his face before he spoke again. The blood wasn't new. It was old and dried and in fatal amounts.

"I don't think it's a rogue," he finally replied to Giles. Lennox watched as his cousin's face contorted into an expression of confusion. "It's a nomad."

Lennox understood the weight of his words as he spoke them. Giles's dark brown eyes widened, unwilling to believe his cousin.

Why would he? Lennox was a no-rank wolf, a self-proclaimed nomad. He didn't need a pack, didn't want to rely on anyone or anything but himself. He was only brought in by the request of Giles.

Giles was the young High Alpha of the Hale Valley pack. Although he was hardly old enough to drink legally, he was in charge of fifteen souls. They relied on him for safety and security, and the promise that a rogue wolf wouldn't rip their duct-taped community to sticky, bloody shreds.

Giles felt helpless. Lennox could tell by the way he worried his top teeth into his thick bottom lip. He chewed hard enough to draw blood. He only stopped to speak to his cousin.

"A nomad?" Giles shook his head, undoubtedly unconvinced. "Why would a nomad kill... kill any wolf... here?"

He stared at Lennox like he would have the answer. He didn't. Lennox didn't kill anymore. And when he did kill-- it wasn't him, that wasn't him. That was something he was forced to be. A dark, sticky, scary thing, who only knew teeth and teeth and teeth.

"Giles," Lennox replied softly, in a voice as slow and rich as fresh molasses. "This isn't just... any wolf it killed. This was a nomad, too. Verona wasn't yours. She was..." Like me, but it goes unsaid.

"Don't say was. She could still be alive," the High Alpha uselessly assured himself. "She could be out there."

"She's sixty-eight-years-old," Lennox replied in a low tone.

He walked over to examine the bloody handprint stuck to the floral wallpaper. It was small and wrinkled. It was Verona, perhaps the last piece of evidence to prove she was here, that she lived, and pumped red blood to a strong heart. It was proof she was afforded the kindness of growing older. Not old, not yet. With wolf blood, she would have lasted another thirty years, easily.

"Not even a young wolf could survive this much..." Lennox searched for the right word. Violence. Bloodlust. Cruelty. "Abuse." The word didn't settle correctly on his tongue.

Giles created an angry sound in the back of his throat. An echo of a growl that most wolves would cringe at, would twinge with the need to raise their soft bellies to the sky in a promise of submission.

Lennox stood still, unfazed by his cousin's mood.

Lennox knew, in many ways, Giles's pack could be his, if he chose it. If he just stretched out his teeth and allowed himself to turn and twist and howl.

Giles knew it, too. Despite the tight bond between the two of them, he tiptoed around his older cousin. The wolfish side, the instincts that made Giles want to want and take and keep screamed in the presence of Lennox.

Lennox could take. He could keep. He could want.

But, he shoved it down.

Even when his nails dug into the palms of his hands and his teeth drew blood from his gums, he swallowed his wants whole.

Schuyler Bradshaw

 "Goddammit," Schuyler Bradshaw pushed herself away from the keyboard. She needed a place to put her hands, but the balled-up fists were too dangerous for the vicinity of her expensive laptop.

She decided they belonged in her hair, pulling in frustration as she stared at her computer's screen. It glared back at her, daring her to make a move, to push her knuckles through its fragile glass face, to pull off every key in attempt to make it feel pain.

The failing grade stood peacefully there, tucked in beside her straight A's, clueless to the turmoil it forced through the young woman.

She didn't need this, not with two weeks before the semester's end. She was already preparing herself for Dead Week. Schuyler imagined herself walking through campus, lifeless on her feet, straight red hair unwashed and tangled, skin paler than usual and stress pimples lighting up her face.

"Fuck this," she whispered.

The young college sophomore wanted nothing more than to drag out the honey whiskey she hid in her cabinet. She needed the uncomfortable burn of alcohol. It didn't matter that it tasted of pure acetone and regret.

She imagined the liquid warming her soft belly, how it would curdle down her chest as it traveled down her torso and settled like heavy stones in her gut. It would feel so good, like fuzzy, warm kisses.

But not in the morning.

Schuyler already imagined the inevitable hangover. She never drank enough water, and other than drunkenly heating up frozen mozzarella sticks, nothing else would add substance to her body throughout the night.

Without another word, she decided on a walk to channel the incurable frustration trapped inside her body. She knew the walk would inevitably turn into a run. Schuyler slipped on her jogging shoes in a hurry to avoid aching feet later on.

The clock on the screen of her smartphone told the twenty-year-old it was twenty minutes before ten. That didn't stop her.

She lived in a tiny, college town, and she would run to campus and back. The entire way there was lit up in a curtain of hanging street lights, forming a clean, two mile-long lap for night-owl students like her.

"Rina," she called out her roommate's name. She paused, waiting to hear a response back in the tiny apartment they shared.

A dark, curly head popped out from the door frame of Schuyler's bedroom. Dressed in an oversized t-shirt and a pair of black leggings, Rina smiled in silent question, waiting for Schuyler to speak.

"I think I'm going on a run," Schuyler said as she stripped out of her sweater and into a sports bra. It stuffed her round chest into the tight confines of the unforgiving fabric, flattening them into one solid shape. Quickly, she hid her pale torso into the nearest red sweatshirt she could find.

"A run?" Rina dug her teeth into her bottom lip. "This late?" There was worry evident in her voice.

Rina always worried about Schuyler, from her wellbeing, to her drinking, to the men she slipped and slid over. She warned Schuyler always to proceed with caution, that men were wolves, and pepper spray was always meant to be carried on-hand.

"Don't worry," Schuyler smiled. "I'll be back before nine thirty, I promise."

And she would. As much as she pretended like she was big and bad, Schuyler wasn't. She stood at 5'3", an inch below the national average for women, and she wasn't hard with muscle, instead she was mostly harmless and ridiculously soft.

Rina heaved out a sigh. "Fine," she agreed. "But if you're not back by nine twenty, I'm calling the police. I swear."

Schuyler laughed and popped up the red hood of her sweatshirt. 

Author's Note

Hello, yes. It's back. And it's going to be so much better. Half of the reason why I didn't want to write this is because I love my characters so much, and I wanted to keep them to myself. In many ways, Lennox Armstrong was my first love. And I missed him. I wanted him back. This is my ode to him. This is my thank you/love you/miss you letter to Lennox. He taught me so many things, from writing, from putting delicate touches in the strongest hands, to understanding my own voice as a writer. 

I wanted to do right by him, and right by everyone else that was in this story. Schuyler was a vision of myself, a confused, muddied version of a girl that I used to be. I want Schuyler to be everyone I love in my life. I want this book to take form of me, and of all the loves that I hold in my heart. 

So, yeah. I guess I'm back.