Fan Service

Chapter 30

30

Alex awoke with immense relief to find Devin returned to his human form. Once more resplendent in full Hollywood Hunk TM status, he snored lightly on the opposite side of the couch in the same spot where the wolf had curled up over Alex’s feet last night.

The long lines of his body were relaxed in slumber, the morning sun painting his bare skin golden. His hands had returned to normal, nothing of even the partial shift remaining in the fingers he had wrapped around a throw pillow.

Alex held herself perfectly still, not wanting to wake him just yet. When he rejoined the world of the domesticated, he’d have to process Brian Dempsey’s betrayal. She would shield him from that just a little longer, if she could.

No doubt The Arcane Files ’ fandom, various entertainment press outlets, and the team of professionals paid to protect Devin Ashwood’s image and interests were champing at the bit to get a comment out of him.

On a more selfish note, Alex indulged in these last intimate moments (not that she was full-on ogling—his curled position protected most of his modesty). She knew a series of awkward apologies awaited them when he awoke, along with the goodbye they’d both pretended wasn’t imminent.

Alex would fly home tomorrow, and then what? They’d text? Call?

No. He’d get swallowed back into the machine of this town and forget about her. Hell, he’d almost done that in the last forty-eight hours. Alex didn’t like it, but she couldn’t blame him, really. It was the only life he’d ever known.

It was fine. They’d both go back to where they belonged. And in Tompkins, without debt hanging over her head, Alex would figure out how to open her heart. If she couldn’t keep Devin, at least she could keep what he’d taught her.

Perhaps it was a bit of a lackluster ending to an outrageous month of adventure and poorly managed sexual tension, but Alex had always found that real life fell short of her fictional standards.

At least that’s what she thought until the house’s gate buzzer went off.

Devin jolted awake with a furious growl.

Alex barely had time to blink before he was charging, fully nude, into the foyer, flexing his fingers and baring blunt teeth.

Alex scrambled after him, her socked feet sliding across the polished marble floors.

“Devin, don’t .”

At least he didn’t seem to be going into a partial shift, the way he had when they’d been startled awake by her father. His body stayed in its human form while Devin stalked forward as if he hadn’t even heard her protests.

He staggered as he walked, listing dangerously from one side to the other as if he were drunk or didn’t know quite how to navigate his own legs. Near the doorway, he stumbled into a gilt end table and snapped his jaws at the offending object before righting himself.

The momentary delay was enough for the poor mailman to hightail it back into his vehicle and for Alex to throw herself in front of Devin, bodily holding him back from pursuit with two hands pressed against his heaving pecs and her back against the front door.

Devin froze, the growl cutting off as he frowned down at her hands, seemingly caught off guard by her inserting herself between him and the intruder.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

Devin tilted his head, drawing his eyebrows together as he stared at her mouth in an eerily similar impression to the wolf trying to follow her babbling last night.

“Devin?” Alex’s pulse began to flutter. Oh god. Saying his name had become particularly fraught over the last twelve hours. “You’re, uh…at home, right? Behind the steering wheel?”

This couldn’t be happening. He looked human. Eyes, claws, jaws—she scanned the pertinent features one by one and came up zero for three. There were no signs of a partial shift. But she got nothing back from Devin other than a warm huff of breath as he peered over her head to watch the delivery van drive away.

“Hey.” She tried to catch his chin and regain his attention, only to have him snap, playfully, at her fingertips like she was teasing him, his green eyes sparkling as they returned to hers. He craned his neck to chase her fingers as she pulled them away, reeling back only to hit her head on the door with a crack.

“Ow.” She cradled the back of her skull. Great, exactly what she needed while dealing with an MIA celebrity—a concussion.

Devin whimpered low in his throat, his face folding with distress as he leaned down to sniff at her scalp.

“I’m not bleeding,” she said, sensing the question in his movements. “It’s just a bump. But you know what would make me feel better? If you could say something.”

Instead of words, the wolf herded her back toward the couch.

Alex sat down of her own volition when he began to pace, clearly agitated, again flexing his fingers like they weren’t working right. If her best guess as to what was happening turned out to be correct, the wolf was probably even more rattled than she was that he’d somehow been left in charge of Devin’s (naked) body.

Alex put her head between her knees and tried to breathe. She’d been prepared for the full shift, had known it was coming for a month. But this? Somehow losing Devin Ashwood after the full moon had set? This was so not canon.

Feral Colby was a microtrope exclusive to fanfic. To save him, Nathaniel often went on a dangerous quest or solved a sphinx riddle. On one memorable occasion he intentionally poisoned Colby with wolfsbane and then turned him into a vampire/werewolf hybrid as he lay on the cusp of death. Alex couldn’t do any of those things. She was hopelessly, pathetically human.

Maybe the mental exchange would wear off naturally as they got further from the full moon, but they didn’t exactly have time to wait. Here in LA, Devin was under constant observation, more so now that his antics at the game and the movie announcement had put his name once more in the press. The second his team showed up at his house looking for him, they were going to realize something was seriously wrong. Alex didn’t want to get arrested as the unwell superfan trying to Weekend at Bernie’s a TW network star.

For both their sakes, Devin needed to get back control of his body. Quickly.

Alex pulled out her phone and opened an Internet tab, but she didn’t even know what to search at this point. For every other part of Devin’s transformation, they’d had the show as a textbook. She’d been able to devise proxies and solutions based on that framework, but there was no blueprint for this in the scripts.

When he first came to Tompkins, he’d asked how to turn a werewolf back into a human. Alex told him then that you couldn’t do it. It was irreversible. Now she needed to be wrong.

She couldn’t even consult Devin the way she had when developing the trials. Talking to the wolf in this state had no greater effect than when he was on four legs and furry.

Even though it had always been a strange task, Alex had, naively, considered herself uniquely suited to guiding Devin through this werewolf transformation. No one knew TAF better than she did. Her experience at the vet gave her familiarity with dangerous animals. Plus, she had her dad’s lifetime study of wolves in the wild to draw upon. But this? Alex was beginning to suspect this wasn’t a werewolf problem but instead a Devin Ashwood problem.

At a complete loss, she texted the group chat.

Alex: So um Devin’s not himself. I’m having trouble getting through to him

Cam: oh man that same kind of thing happened with Michelle when they had layoffs at the firm last year. She was totally withdrawn.

“Withdrawn” was one word for it. If there was a way to avoid confronting the reality of the Arcane Files reboot happening without him, it made a certain kind of sense that Devin would seize it. And the wolf was always closer to the surface when he lost control of his emotions. Had it somehow become harder for him to take the reins back after the full moon?

Cam: You need to gently remind him that he’s more than a job.

Eliza: Even this one.

More than a job. More than a job. Okay. Alex could do that. She was here, in his home. This place must be full of personal memories that would remind Devin who he was.

She sprang to her feet, looking around the living room for signs of anything he cared about besides being an actor. The space was so sparsely decorated. Everything from the carpet to the walls to the furniture was white or glass and ruthlessly modern. The few pictures hanging on the walls featured stark black-and-white desert landscapes. If they meant something to Devin, Alex didn’t know what it was.

She tried opening the cabinets in the TV console and found a slew of awards and plaques.

Soap Opera Digest—Best Male Newcomer, 1996

Teen Choice Awards—Breakout Star, 2007

People’s Choice Awards—Favorite TV Bromance (shared with Anthony Mariano)

There were even awards Alex had never heard of:

The Saturn (Best Fantasy Actor, 2013)

The Lexxy (Best Hair—Mid-length, 2002)

There was something exquisitely sad about the fact that Devin was proud enough of them to keep them polished but didn’t think they were worthy of being displayed out in the open.

Acting, more than any other industry Alex could think of, really trained its workforce to seek external validation. She wondered what it felt like for Devin to win something. How long the sense of acceptance and accomplishment lasted before he needed to seek it out again. A day? A week?

Speaking of, the room had gotten suspiciously quiet— Oh shit. She spun in a circle. Her feral friend was nowhere to be found. He must have wandered off while she had her back turned. Fuck. She could not lose him. Especially when he wasn’t wearing pants.

Alex found Devin in the backyard, relieving himself against a ceramic birdbath.

Well. At least he hadn’t peed on the carpet.

“I’m trying to preserve your modesty,” she told him ten minutes later, sweaty and red in the face after finally managing to wrestle him into a pair of pants during an ordeal that was humiliating for both of them.

She was going to need a plan to keep the wolf on a leash until she could figure out how to bring Devin back. Luckily, Devin Ashwood, like many rich people in LA, had an impressive array of edibles in his nightstand.

Two hundred milligrams of indica and one Instacart delivery later, the wolf was slumped on the couch watching Planet Earth and eating a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch by the handful. Crystals of brown sugar glistened in his beard. Estimating for a werewolf’s advanced metabolism, Alex figured the drugs should buy her at least a few hours of triage time.

She was in the process of scouring the living room’s copious built-ins when her phone rang with a number she didn’t recognize.

It turned out to be Jade looking for Devin.

“Hey, I’m sorry to call you out of the blue. Though you should know your number is scary-easy to Google.”

“Uh, thanks?”

“No one’s seen or heard from Devin since the news about the movie broke,” his former agent said, her voice threaded with tension, and then after a pause: “I’m really worried.”

Everyone knew what TAF meant to Devin. What losing it would cost him.

He wasn’t the only one who had been fighting for a reboot like this for years. Jade would have been in those meetings too. At least in the beginning.

“He’s at home,” Alex rushed to assure her and heard Jade exhale. “I’m here with him now.”

Jade muttered something that sounded like “thank fuck” and then more clearly, “How’s he holding up?”

“He’s…” Naked and high off his ass. “…processing.”

“Can I talk to him?”

Alex looked over to where Devin was gazing with heavy lids at the screen.

“I’m not sure he’s up for conversation at the moment.”

“Okay.” Jade sighed. “I’ll jump in with his team and do some triage, but tell him the longer he waits to make a statement, the more people will speculate. He can’t hide forever.”

“I will definitely pass along that message,” Alex said, biting at her thumbnail.

“Can you also tell him…” The line went quiet for a moment. “Can you tell him I’m sorry that I forgot how to be his friend while I was busy being his agent?”

“I can, yeah.” Alex just hoped the apology, which she knew would mean something to Devin, hadn’t come too late.

After a quick thank-you, Jade signed off and Alex hung up the phone.

“I hope you know you’re scaring people,” she told the wolf, who was busy trying and failing to lick crumbs off the tip of his nose.

Alex thought she’d finally caught a break when she found a box of old VHS tapes and DVDs shoved into a cabinet under the TV. Nothing said childhood memories like home movies—never mind how in the hell she was gonna play them—but instead of things like Devin’s 10th Birthday , the hand-printed labels read Father of the Bride Audition, 02/89 and Mickey Mouse Club Dance Routine, 11/93 .

Devin’s parents had marked his adolescence by parts he’d never gotten cast in. And Devin had kept them.

Alex had read about him as a child actor with overly ambitious parents. He’d told her that even after their estrangement, he’d been taken aback by the way they seemed to love the lifestyle he’d afforded them more than they loved him. But neither of those experiences prepared Alex for seeing the evidence of their single-minded greed laid out before her. Her hands shook as she folded the cardboard flaps, shoving the box back where she’d found it and getting to her feet.

Devin’s bedroom must hold more personal effects. Alex knew he had help. He’d mentioned in passing a chef, a trainer, cleaners, not to mention the myriad members of his management team. If she had a continuous parade of people coming and going in her space, perhaps she’d try to keep things more Spartan too. Using a bag of Funyuns as bait, she managed to lure the wolf into the primary suite.

In Devin’s massive, immaculately organized closet, Alex ran her fingers across the soft velvet of a purple suit she’d once mercilessly mocked after he wore it on the red carpet during a sweeps week promo. She hoped his expansive collection of expensive clothes and shoes might resurrect Devin’s vanity.

She got her hopes up when he reached for a pair of Italian leather loafers, but then he tried to bite them.

His vast array of hair- and skin-care products in the adjoining bathroom didn’t tempt Devin either, though he did manage to sneeze spectacularly into a tub of coconut-flavored body butter.

The wolf didn’t respond any better to the envelope of personal photos she found tucked into the back of the dresser. In fact, he growled at an image of him and his ex-wife: a magnificent golden couple posing at the end of a dock, beaming on their wedding day.

Nothing about Devin’s life seemed to call to him.

Trying to appeal to his other senses, Alex poured Devin’s favorite whiskey and scrunched a bag of his favorite BBQ chips. She even tried putting on “Love and Memories” by O.A.R. And flashing him her bare boobs.

His lack of response to that last one stung.

Frustrated, Alex decided she had no choice but to try to use negative emotion to draw him out instead. If Devin ceded control to the wolf when he got upset, maybe somehow she could trigger the reverse response and make him so mad he clawed his way back to the surface.

“Chad Michael Murray is the most underrated cable TV star from the early 2000s,” she declared.

The wolf blinked and then his gaze jumped over her shoulder to the window where, outside, a squirrel was climbing a neighboring tree.

Damnit.

This was a test: How well do you know Devin Ashwood? And Alex was failing.

She’d been all over this house, the wolf accompanying her like he was reluctant to let Alex out of his sight. He kept insisting on entering rooms before her, presumably to check for danger, but he wasn’t particularly delicate about wielding Devin’s body.

“Which one of us do you think is in charge right now?” Alex asked after he hip-checked her so he could rush first through the door to the small mudroom off the side of the house, the only remaining place they hadn’t investigated.

The room was mostly empty except for a fancy spaceship-looking washer/dryer set and a cluster of Devin’s suitcases from his trip to Florida. He’d probably brought them in here because someone else did both his unpacking and his laundry.

Alex eyed the luggage. Devin had been away from home for almost a month. It made sense that he’d have taken his most prized possessions with him, the stuff he couldn’t live without. She knelt down in front of the first zipper bag with a rush of excitement.

As she folded back the top of the suitcase to get at the contents, the wolf dropped to his knees beside her, his nostrils expanding on a deep inhale. Whatever was inside this suitcase, he seemed to recognize it.

Underneath a layer of clothes—a few faded denim button-downs, Devin’s ludicrously soft white T-shirts, a pair of hunter-green cowboy boots for which she’d mocked him mercilessly—Alex’s hand wrapped around something cold and metallic. She unearthed the horseshoe, holding it up so the light from the window winked off the gleaming steel. Someone, Devin, must have cleaned it, but Alex recognized the bend in the metal from a skittish Palomino horse.

Lou lost one of his shoes , Devin had said one day at the vet, soft and concerned. Doesn’t he need it?

The wolf leaned over Alex, sniffing at the metal. His eyes went wide. He must be able to smell Lou. Another animal in his space likely raised territorial hackles. Alex handed over the shoe, not wanting to agitate the wolf. She expected him to take off and try to bury it somewhere. But instead, he simply clutched it, as if it were grounding, an anchor at sea.

Back in the suitcase, tucked further under the clothes, Alex found a Ziploc bag. Inside were a bunch of seemingly random items, but a flash of distinctive turquoise paper caught her eye. Alex had picked that color at the print shop because it was on clearance, too bright and beachy for most business customers. She unfolded the slightly bent pamphlet, tracing her thumb over the nineteen bullet points. The wolf poked his nose over again in a gesture that unmistakably meant What do you have there? Is that for me?

Alex forfeited the pamphlet. The wolf began to create a little collection for himself of items in his lap, looking down at them happily.

She carefully pulled out the paper clip next, crinkling the Post-it folded into a square stuck through to become a makeshift badge. Devin’s big, loopy handwriting spelled out he/him in a hasty imitation of Rowen’s pronoun pin. He’d kept this. When he kept so little.

The wolf commandeered the pin too, his hands clumsy but careful as he added it to his pile.

If Alex hadn’t pulled out the other items—keepsakes—she might have thought nothing of finding one of her father’s textbooks tucked into a front pocket. She smiled when the book naturally folded open to a receipt acting as a bookmark. Her father’s messy, spiky handwriting sat in the margins, cramped—even when writing he was always in a hurry—calling out pieces of the writing he thought Devin would be particularly interested in.

Devin had made connections in Tompkins that had nothing to do with Colby. The hometown that she’d always been half-ashamed of meant enough to him that he’d gone to the trouble of bringing pieces of it back to LA.

As Alex leafed through the pages of the textbook, she found other random trash folded inside, only…on closer examination that curl of yellow paper might have been the remains of his wristband from the beer garden at the fair. When she unwrapped a tissue bundle tucked against the back cover, a burst of fragrance was released.

Alex’s breath caught. Inside was the wildflower crown she’d made for Devin at the cabin in the woods as they lay together in the grass.

The small yellow and white flowers had curled and dried, leaving a fine residue of pollen against the paper.

The wolf was curious, trying to treat the delicate things with the same kind of care Alex did, cupping them in Devin’s hands, his breath fluttering dried petals.

Here was evidence of his life outside of being an actor. Proof that Devin was thoughtful and surprisingly sentimental.

He’d wanted to be a part of something in Tompkins. He’d grown attached to an abandoned horse and a crumbling community center. He’d wanted to remember something of Rowen and Isaac and Alex herself.

Maybe he hadn’t wanted her to come here with him to his home just because he needed her like a security blanket for the werewolf stuff. Maybe he was trying to hold on to her like he was holding on to these memories. Just a little bit longer.

The wolf brought a careful hand up to touch the tears tracking down Alex’s face, frowning severely.

It felt like a privilege to know the parts of Devin that he’d worked all his life to conceal. To witness his messiness and the way he wanted. To get to see the strengths she never would have given him credit for from a distance: his generosity, his loyalty, his tenderness.

She felt protective looking at him. Possessive.

Alex had wasted a lot of time telling herself that she wasn’t good enough for Devin Ashwood. That if he cared about her, it didn’t matter. Because caring about her hadn’t made her mother stay. Even the people who loved Alex didn’t pick her.

She knew with unwavering certainty in that moment that she loved Devin Ashwood, really loved him. She also knew that if she said it right now, he wouldn’t be able to understand her. She’d be saying it just for herself. Because it was true and she wanted to be brave.

When she was little, she had a VHS tape of Beauty and the Beast . Her dad kept a little two-in-one TV / VHS player in his office, and when she got sick he’d bring it into her bedroom. She watched the movie over and over, manually rewinding. When true love saved the prince, Alex had thought it was too neat, too easy, a cynical skeptic even at nine.

As an adult she appreciated how chaotic and complicated and scary true love could be.

Alex had people who loved her. But Devin was right; she’d done her best to keep them at arm’s length. Attempting to prevent pain before it formed. But even though she could reach out right now and touch Devin’s hand, his cheek, she’d lost him anyway. She couldn’t imagine that letting him all the way into her heart could hurt more than this.