Lexi Mills

"I'm interested in how innocence fares when it collides with hard reality." -Geoffrey S. Fletcher

Lexi's life was fairly typical in a lot of its early parts. Her dad was in the Navy when she was born but he ended up leaving it while she was still little in favor of the civilian world. He and her mom worked for a defense contractor company so Lexi was sent to daycare and pre-school from a young age. She made friends there but they were mostly of the transitory nature. They moved again when her parents began expecting her younger brother, out towards the suburbs to get away from the city.

Growing up in the 'burbs wasn't terrible even though Lexi sometimes lamented it as being a hick kind of place. She mostly said it to feel more trendy and "cool" than she really was and putting down the town was an easy way to do it. In her defense, it was the kind of town where everyone still knew everyone, and the only recreation around was a bowling alley. The total population was just around ten thousand and a lot of the families were interconnected and intermarried. Her mom went to being a stay-at-home parent and her dad discovered his late-life calling with the town's fire department, starting as a paid-on-call then moving up to part- and full-time.

She ended up with two more younger brothers beside and Lexi found herself atop a miniature wolfpack of siblings. It helped make her a more rough and tumble personality and she took naturally to sports in high school. She did track and softball, making her first free money at fifteen when she convinced her parents to let her start working at the local fast food dive with some friends. She also joined the local Fire Explorer Post to try and bond with her dad some more, with whom her relationship had been increasingly strained.

Being a fire department family meant Lexi grew up knowing everyone and a little bit of everything. Her parents were more old school where kids during the summer were supposed to leave during the day, come back for lunch, then be back home before the street lights came on. It wasn't the safest, in hindsight, but it helped make Lexi much more self-sufficient to be on her own or with a pack of other kids more often than not. They either made it home safe or ended up on Unsolved Mysteries, like natural selection intended. Her parents ended up divorcing when she was 14 but so did a lot of kids parents.

She dated infrequently in high school but never had a serious boyfriend. Like a lot of other classmates, Lexi dreamed of "getting out of this town" and finding her fame and fortune in the city or "somewhere". As she approached adulthood, Lexi really had no idea what she wanted to do with herself. A couple career ideas suggested themselves, as did the military, and she was a good enough athlete that a scholarship on account of it wouldn't have been out of the question, but the young woman just didn't know. Hardly a unique struggle, and it usually worked its way out for young adults, but Lexi's fate was slated to be a little different it turned out.

"We stopped checking for monsters under our bed when we realized they're inside of us." -Unknown

It was a holiday weekend a few months before graduation. That part of Spring where it's not quite done being winter but the weather isn't as cold anymore. One of her classmates was having a party while her parents were out of town and Lexi ended up going to hang out since she had the night off work. The party itself was fine and she had a little to drink but not enough to be drunk. The property they were at was next to the forest preserve, and some of the guys ended up sharing one local haunting story or another, which culminated in a small group of them having to go out into the woods and touch a "gravestone" out there. It was childish and stupid but it was also kind of funny and Lexi agreed to accompany the dozen other teens that were going to do it. It might have had something to do with a guy she liked daring her as well.

They made it out into the woods, which weren't as dark as normal because the trees leaves hadn't grown back in yet and because it was a full moon out. The "gravestone" was really just an old piece of rock that superficially looked like it might have marked where a body was interred. The group had brought some drinks with them and got to being loud, yelling and tossing empty bottles, while some of the guys got their beer muscles on by wrestling. Kids being kids until in a lull they realized how quiet the forest around them had gotten. The little animals, the bugs starting to wake up, the wind... everything had died down and suddenly the noise they'd been making seemed extremely loud.

Lexi was about to suggest they head back when the thing came out of the brush and grabbed one of her classmates. She heard him screaming and the animal snarling. The teens panicked and ran off in different directions, straight out of every bad horror movie. Lexi was no exception but she had the misfortune of tripping, twisting her ankle, and then the animal was on her too. She felt its teeth bite into her shoulder and shake viciously, though she doesn't remember it hurting even now. It bit her again and then Lexi managed to get out from beneath it and start running again. Her ankle burned with pain but she ignored it and kept going, making it back to the house with most the other kids save one.

A debate raged over what they should do. Lexi was bleeding badly and needed a hospital so one of the more sober teens present offered to drive her. The hospital was a few towns over and they called her parents when Lexi arrived. She got a thorough chewing out about being reckless and how she had no business being in those woods at night. Her dad got out of her that one of the kids was still missing and made her tell him where the party was. Police responded and began looking for him, as well as arresting a large amount of the partygoers for underage drinking. They found his remains before they'd searched too long, having been mauled and partially eaten by some kind of large animal.

Lexi wasn't in the hospital for very long. The doctors stitched up the bite wounds on her shoulder, gave her some antibiotics, and kept her overnight for observation. She had to get a series of rabies shots, which wasn't very fun, and deal with her parents who were extremely irate with her. Lexi was grounded. No privileges, no driving. The death of a teen, at the hands of an apparently vicious animal, saw a specialty tracker being called in to find the presumptive bear that had done it. Lexi was interviewed by police more than once and told them what she knew, which was woefully little.

Her friends were mad at her for narcing out the party. A lot of them had ended up getting into serious trouble with their own parents as well and blamed Lexi for opening her mouth. She became a popular topic online and at school for bullying. Maybe it was misplaced fear and anger over the death but Lexi became its target. People would stop talking when she'd walk into a room and look at her in a way that made it clear they'd been speaking about her. Friends evaporated, work sucked, and everywhere she went there were whispers and hidden glances.

Lexi's relationship with her dad, which had always been strained but been worse since the events of that night, continued to deteriorate. He made no secret that he thought she was in some way partly responsible for what had happened out there. If they hadn't been where they had no business being, none of it would have happened. Her mom wasn't much better but Lexi knew she was really more angry about being the topic of small town gossip than anything else. Only her brothers stuck by her which further cemented the siblings bond.

"Throughout evolution, ostracism was death indeed." -Helen Fisher

The bullying and ostracism was bad but a month later, Lexi was walking home from work, when she blacked out and woke up the next morning in the woods, naked, with blood on her mouth and hands. She managed to make it home without being seen after washing up in a creek and stealing some clothes off a line in someone's backyard but then it happened again the next night. The night after. Each time Lexi would go to sleep or pass out only to wake up in the morning with no memory of how she'd gotten there, what she'd done, or why there was blood on her.

The "bear" was never found but one morning a local homeless man, who was known for sleeping in a tent in the woods behind the library, was found brutally attacked while he'd been asleep. It renewed calls for hunters to find the animal and the town instituted a curfew at night while the animal was located. There were no more attacks, however, and the trail quickly went cold. Even though there was nothing to tie her to it, everyone's memories of the month prior turned back to that party where the first boy had died. His parents offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who captured and killed the animal responsible. Other people began to report missing pets and the farms on the outside of town reported slaughtered animals.

Lexi thought she was going insane. Her constant blackouts, which she didn't dare confide in her parents, were worrying. She told her brothers but they didn't know what to do about them. While doing dishes one night, Lexi accidently cut herself on a knife. She watched in front of her eyes as the skin re-knit itself, tendrils of flesh reaching across to each other across the red gash then pulling themselves back together without a scar to be seen. She did it again, on purpose this time, and the same thing happened. She showed her brothers, who thought it was alternately scary and cool.

It didn't take long for Lexi to begin correlating events in her mind. She blacked out a few nights a month, without fail. She always woke up with blood on her hands or mouth. The evening that homeless man had died was one of her blackout nights. Same with the slaughtered animals and missing pets. They were all full moon nights. Was she somehow responsible? If so, she was dangerous. Lexi shared her fears with her brothers, who thought she was over-reacting, but agreed to help her.

There was an old quarry on the outskirts of town, a mining operation that had gone bust, and it was a popular hangout with some of the teens on the weekends but mostly abandoned during the week. They snuck out and Lexi went down into the pit, where her brothers brought some chains. They laughed nervously as they chained Lexi to an old tractor that had been rusting down there for decades. They set up a camera for her, because she wanted to see what happened when she blacked out, and they did so with an old hand recorder and a tripod. The last thing Lexi did was demand they clear out a safe distance away. They did so reluctantly but remained near the top of the quarry so they could keep an eye on her.

Lexi blacked out when the full moon rose. That was the night she and her brothers learned what she really was. Lexi saw the recording the next night. She saw the thing she became, ripping herself free from the feeble restraints, before loping off and up the other side of the quarry. She was terrified, as were her brothers, of what had happened. Lexi knew she was going to Change against that night too. There was no way to control it. Her brothers and she went round and round about what to do but Lexi could see only one option. She had to leave. It was only a matter of time, if she didn't, before she hurt or killed one of them or someone else. Again.

"Life isn't about finding yourself. It's about creating yourself." -George Bernard Shaw

She packed up what clothing she could and put it in a backpack. She cleaned out her bank account. The news was already breaking that there'd been another livestock mutilation not far from the quarry and Lexi knew it had been her. She didn't say anything to her brothers or family. She left to go to work that afternoon and instead went as far out into the middle of nowhere as she could, so when the Change took her, she'd hopefully be isolated enough to not hurt anyone. Blind panic, fear, and flight was all Lexi could think about.

She never went home after that. Lexi kept right on walking until the full moon passed. She hitched a ride with a passing trucker out on a county highway and the last time she saw home was its lights fading in the sideview mirror next to her. She was reported missing when she never returned from work, and in tandem with the other killings, knows she's likely considered a homicide victim. She sent her brothers a message, telling them she was okay but had to figure out how to undo what had happened, then tossed her phone so she couldn't be tracked through it.

Lexi's traveled to the other side of the country at this point. At first, she resolved to live in isolation, that she wasn't going to put others at risk... but that proved to be impossible. She couldn't go cold turkey on people and found herself, in some ways, even more social now knowing what she was. It was like a compulsion, the desire to feel like she was a part of something... or an instinct to keep her near her food. Lexi couldn't ignore it though and she began hopping from town to town, rarely staying long and working odd jobs, before moving on again. She avoids large cities because there's fewer places to hide what she is... and many more chances to hurt someone when she does Change.

It hasn't all been easy on the road. It can be dangerous alone, especially when you're a young woman. Lexi and her would-be attacker one night found out the hard way that the full moon isn't the only thing that can prompt the Change. One dimly lit truck stop later, and a knife between her ribs from a prospective serial killer, saw the Wolf coming out in response to what would have been a fatal injury. Lexi has yet to meet another of her own "kind" though she picks up scent cues, here and there, with a nose that's grown much stronger and sharper than her human one ever was. Who bit her? Is he or she still alive? Lexi doesn't know... and she's angry.

Angry that her life was ripped away from her. Angry that her reputation was taken. Angry that she has to pretend to be dead to keep people from looking for her. She reaches out to her brothers, now and again, but she doesn't send them any mementos of her travels. They understood in varying degrees but her abrupt vanishing hurt some of them more than others. Not all understood. None have outed her as being a werewolf... yet. The day may come though and Lexi lives in terror of it. There's nothing she can do about it though unless she were willing to hurt her brothers and she's not.

Lexi is out there to find a purpose to her Curse. Was it a random freak occurrence or is there some bigger meaning to it? If werewolves are real, what about other monsters? Would they be friends or foes? She's very much alone despite the temporary company she keeps or the casual friends she makes. Always near people but Lexi knows it's very dangerous to settle down and remain in any one place for too long. The moon always calls to her and the risk of casual injury, even something as mundane as a bad car wreck, could see her Change.

The open road lies ahead and hopefully some resolution as well. Lexi used to be far more optimistic than she is now. There's no way her story has a happy ending that she can see. It'll end in violence, somehow. The Wolf won't allow anything less. Worse... a small part of her now, as a couple years have passed, is beginning to enjoy that side of her. To look forward, even subconsciously, to those sessions of freedom the Wolf allows. If that doesn't make her a monster, Lexi doesn't know what else would.