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i.
It was two o’clock in the morning when Chris woke to the sound of a voice beyond the bedroom, staticky and abrasive even through the walls. The bed was empty beside him, the impression of a body left in the cold dip of sheets – but he was used to it by now, and in the still of the night his senses were sharp, and they found her, as they always did.
He could smell her. Hear the flutter of her pulse through the walls.
Chris wasn’t surprised by anything she did anymore. Her mood had been strange in the last few weeks, an echo of the grinding of his bones, the listing ache of his muscles. She slept less and less until she didn’t sleep at all, lying awake beside him in the bed for hours, memorizing the shape of his nose and the twitch of his mouth as he dreamed, the salting gray of his hair, the hollows of his cheeks as he breathed. Sometimes he would wake to her listening to his heart as if it was the answer to everything. Sometimes he would pretend to sleep in the remote hope that they could stay like that forever.
He groaned as he rose, the sound heavy behind his teeth. His bones felt poured full of lead, recently, joints aching as they did when the weather was bad. Silently he padded through the dark of the house, pausing by Piers’s room to listen; through the door he could hear the boy’s even, sleeping breaths.
He found her sitting on the floor in front of the television, her eyes wide and silver and unblinking. An image of the moon stretched wide across the screen, but it still wasn’t as bright as the anchor’s smile as she beamed at them from behind the glass.
Chris could see the woman’s spine through her shirt. Or – his shirt, actually, so old the cotton fell across her like a film, threadbare and worn thin. She noticed him a little belatedly, turned and looked at him, eyes finding him immediately even in the shielding glow of the television, and she put her finger to her lips.
“On June 23rd at 11:45 EST, a total lunar eclipse will be observed across the whole of North America.” The anchor’s teeth flashed, the blonde box-dye warping into an image of a waxing moon. She turned to her co-anchor and Chris didn’t hear what she said next, because a strange chattering had started in his bones, an answering call to the sharp-toothed smile spreading across the woman’s face.
That explained it, then. The aching and the clamor of dreams. They’d known, really, ever since Chris had started going grocery shopping with her and filling the cart full of meat, itching dark and enormous beneath the supermarket fluorescents.
(But later she would – oh, she would sit naked on his lap and he would lick the blood from the peaks of her breasts, and it would become a game and foreplay all at once, disgusting and wholly needed – and later he would wash the smell of raw meat from her hair and kiss between her legs, hold her under the water and fuck her until her nails broke the skin, and when she would break the surface she would cry and laugh until her eyes streamed with tears, and then she would come and come and come.)
It was the third time an eclipse had occurred since their return from the village. On the first occasion they had handed Piers over to Claire for the weekend and drove miles and miles and miles until the city was forgotten and the world grew thick with trees, and the woman had pushed him out of the car and followed him into the darkness. He had told her to go, still unsure of himself, his memories bleary from when he had changed the last time. He didn’t remember much from the change, but he had remembered how she had stood there grinning at him, how it had been winter and her breath had steamed blue and hazy from her nose. She crawled right into peril and let it swallow her. Most of all, though, above anything, Chris remembered the stink of her fear when she began to scream.
(And in the days afterwards the newspapers would be filled with articles citing strange noises in the night; the woman, wrapped up from head to toe like a mummy in some clumsy attempt to hide how injured she was, read them with great interest during a pit stop at a diner on their way back home. One person wrote in a letter to the editor that he’d seen some enormous beast while out hunting, and had heard a woman screaming.
She’d smiled at him, then, over the rim of her sunglasses. Yes, she had screamed. Screamed herself raw as he held her down and fucked her to within an inch of her life, raking her along the bald forest floor until the leaves became part of her, imprinted onto her dermis. They would still fall out of her hair days later.)
The second time was easier, some years after that. Chris had made notes and knew more then than he had before. He recognized the telltale signs of it, the way the woman became sleepless and Piers, who was by then old enough to realize something wasn’t quite right, would look at him from fixed blue eyes and say nothing at all.
He found her at ten minutes to midnight at the window, staring eastward, in the direction the mountains used to be. Her body always seemed to gravitate that way, to orient itself to the memory of her little hut in the forest, and even though she wore jeans and had a regular hairdresser she would still search for the wild, body a vibration of birds and wind.
It was there, on that night, when she knew he was there but did not turn to face him, that she said: I want you to hunt me, this time.
She might as well have punched him in the gut. He wheezed, dizzy in surprise and painfully hard all at once. Her eyes glimmered silver and she was grinning again, that same saw-toothed thing that made him feel like she was about to gut him. He was reaching for her before he even realized what he was doing and her mouth gasped open and black under his hands when he kissed her.
(Fucked her right there on the kitchen floor, teeth grating on the tile, throat trembling in an effort to keep quiet. Her hips pressed high, arching back into the cradle of his groin, sucking him in deep.)
Ravenous hunger in the black hours of night. He would wake to his teeth in her arm and she would lie there, gasping, hand between her legs. Grinning when she saw he was awake, his mouth open and furious against her jugular as he pressed her down so far into the bed she couldn’t breathe. She was kind to him when the hurts grew worse, but, God, could she be cruel – she baited him like a dog with the naked slip of her bare neck, or the old flash of silver scars from all the times before. She had to explain to Piers that daddy was feeling sick, the same way Piers felt sick sometimes when he felt too much.
By then they had learned that Piers was not like Chris. Where the woman’s blood crushed down Chris’s condition to almost nothing, he could still not escape the grittier aspects of it, and remained enslaved to the moon. But Piers… they weren’t sure if it was because she was his mother, or because he had been conceived so close to the mold, but he could choose. At first, when he was young and still unsure of how to be human, it happened when he was incredibly distressed. Which was, thankfully, not terribly often, but it made looking for preschools a little more difficult than it might have been otherwise. But Piers was clever and precocious, albeit rather serious, and he learned quickly. The woman’s arms were a litany of all times when Piers didn’t know better, but it was nice not having to keep it a secret.
He did hunt her, that second time. Part of him still didn’t entirely want to, was still afraid of what he might do to her if she gave him permission (which she would, invariably). She knew that. Saw it in him. And she was cruel, of course, baiting him like a starving dog; she waited until they were isolated and alone, until he was frothing and wheezing in pain, until the snapping of his bones filled the black air between the trees, and she had nicked the soft inside of her wrist and vanished. The rest of the night was lost to Chris, mostly, and when he came around again he found a shatter of memories, all of them dripping wet.
(She slept for a very long time after that, the whole way home and then some, wrapped in Chris’s jacket to hide her nakedness. They’d never found her clothes, and with a rasping laugh she told Chris there wasn’t much left of them anyway.)
And now the television. The woman switched it off and Chris remained blinded by the memory of it, a white brand against his retinas. Did not see her rise, did not see her approach, felt only the cold touch of her fingers under his shirt and the wash of her breath against his neck.
ii.
They had a month.
It was much the same as it always was. Chris put in for leave a few weeks before and the woman took him to the supermarket and watched wryly as he loaded the cart with cheap cuts and offal. Once he had made the mistake looking up and seeing the cajoling turn of her smile, and asking is this okay?
She had licked her lips. Better than eating it out of the ground.
Chris rippled and might have blushed had they been alone. He was unnerved by the way she watched him, the freeze of the forest behind her eyes, as if part of her was far-away and long-ago, back between the rattling bones of the Carpathians. He had never been able to shake the strangeness of what he saw in her. The wilderness clamored under her skin, and he wondered: if he was to break open her body, would he find an explosion of moss and bramble instead of bones and guts? The trees held her up; he could smell them, sometimes, their wintering dormancy, when he breathed in deep against her skin.
He missed those woods, despite everything. Despite the terror and the agony, he missed how unearthly it had been. How set apart, how vicious, how it made him feel like he could tear right out of his skin and soar.
Piers began to look at him funny, sniffing around all the raw meat with a suspicion that was so familiar it made Chris itch. Piers had never seen him change – he had seen only the ticking down of time towards it, the bending and the breaking. Chris had taken to shutting himself up when the days loomed too close, afraid of what he might or might not do. Piers was still so small in those days, not yet grown into Chris’s height or the woman’s deceptive, powerful leanness.
“You know when you are upset,” the woman told him, once, during a power cut when Piers could no longer shake the strangeness of his father’s mood and couldn’t understand why the bedroom door was always locked, “or very sad, or very angry, and you begin to hurt inside?”
Piers nodded. He had just started school and struggled to understand that not everybody was like them. Smart kid, Chris would think, his whole body swelling with pride. With love.
But while Piers understood how isolating the pain was, he didn’t like being shut out. Chris was helpless to explain the danger – how could he tell him that he could rip him apart? That it was dangerous? That it would take so, so little strength to shatter the boy’s bird-fine bones? He tried, but the words were barbs in his throat, dissolving in the unnerving vastness of Piers’s gaze.
The bedroom door was locked. Piers didn’t like that and the woman was not quick enough to stop him from learning how to pick locks, and soon Chris would wake during the night, breathless in agony, to find Piers lying rigid and unmoving beside him.
Chris told him to go back to bed. Piers folded his arms and stubbornly refused to look at him.
“He is too much like you!” the woman would later laugh, scratching her fingernails through Piers’s hair fondly as he sat eating a bowl of cereal. Chris glowered and grumbled and knew she was right.
(He missed those days, the old days, before all of this. But sometimes, in the darkness, he could fool himself – she would feed him by hand and sponge the sweat from his trembling body and whisper soothingly, always in the danger of snapping teeth yet never afraid of them. In her breath he felt the winter and it was easier, now, to withstand the proximity of her pulse – the urge to rip out her throat was no longer as strong. Chris could sometimes manage to think over the thunder of it. His body heaved and his ligaments creaked and the fibers of his muscles began their slow, torturous split, and he would lie back and draw himself away into the memories of the trees and the mountains again.)
iii.
Chris could hear them in the hallway. Their voices were low, muffled through the walls, the woman’s low and softly-spoken, a kiss against the boy’s cheek. Chris closed his eyes, then, and saw the dark fan of Piers’s eyelashes against his cheek, the way his mouth puckered around his goodbyes. Felt the nervous itch of him even from a distance
“Can’t I say bye to dad?” he was asking, and Chris’s heart pulled painfully in his chest, a beast clawing at his ribs, desperately reaching.
“Not right now, puiul meu,” the woman replied. “He’s very sick.”
Piers had inherited the same flinty, somber gaze as Chris had – he would fix it upon them sometimes, his countenance shadowed by an expression so startlingly adult that it changed his whole face. It hurt Chris’s heart, sometimes, seeing his boy like that. How similar they seemed, in the right light: sometimes it appeared that his son had been lifted right out of Chris’s old photographs. But even in those shuttering moments where Chris was sick with recognition and felt like he was gazing into his own eyes, there was no escaping the quicksilver dart of the woman’s blood in him: the slightly feral edge to the boy’s smile, the flash of his eyes. Her features were muted, hidden beneath all the broad, bullying Redfield angles, but they were there, flickering just out of sight. It was strangely unnerving to witness.
He fixed this same sullen look on his mother, now, who smiled and touched his cheek fondly.
“Tell him to get better quick,” Piers said, anxious but not without love. “He promised to take me fishing next week.”
Laughter, then, and a girl’s voice calling from the open window of a car; Rosemary, Piers’s closest friend, strange in her own way and understanding of his. Chris inhaled, felt every sharp edge of the world against his tongue, formed it all from scent the way a bat would form from sound. That was his world in those minutes – voices and dizzying smears of color, the talcum smell of Piers lingering in the corners of the room, the warm call of Mia’s take care and the crunch of gravel beneath falling feet. The rumble of an engine. Departure.
Quiet. Chris breathed.
For a few minutes there was nothing. Even after so many years of living in civilization the woman had not quite grasped the concept of noise. Often she made none at all, and passed through the world like a phantom. Lying there in the dark, sweating through his clothes and the bedsheets beneath him, Chris wondered, as he often did, if she had not vanished into the night.
She hadn’t, of course. She never did. She lingered, always, at the edge of his awareness, a fever he could not shake. Not that he would, of course. He’d die from her quite happily.
He did not hear her come in. Her pulse echoed in the cool darkness and he could smell her, suddenly, thick at the back of his mouth. Grinned with all his teeth even though the mere movement of his lips pitched him into agony.
He could hear her heart, fluttering as frantic as a bird in her ribcage. Sweat on her neck. She smiled at him through the dark, holding up a hand to reveal the flash and jangle of his car keys.
“Ready?”
iv.
The drive to the woods felt like an eternity. The woman drove white-knuckled through the dark, headlights a flood on the empty road. Hares darted from the tarmac, their eyes catching the light before spooking away into darkness, and he made her put the windows down before he went feral on the smell of her. Chris barely fit in the passenger seat, all twitching limbs and creaking bones. Splitting migraine.
At some point her hand found his and held it, thumb pressing hard against the pressure point in his palm. She did not lift her eyes from the road. He gazed at her as she drove, the way her hair was tucked behind her ear to bare the line of her neck, something so dangerous it had to be deliberate. She knew what he was like at times like this. It took every last scrap of his self-control not to grip her by the hair and bite a chunk out of her.
Throat trembled; she barely managed to swallow down her laugh. She knew. Yes. On purpose, indeed.
The forest was dark and warm and alive with the strum of insect, the near-height of summer. The woman wore little more than a sundress, bare feet gritty with dirt. The naked peaks of her shoulders caught whatever light of the moon was left. They left the car parked beneath the eaves of the woods and walked together, the woman adopting the same pain-addled shamble as Chris. It was an old dance, what they were doing now. All the bare skin made it harder, though. The sweat.
They could see it, here, through the trees. Chris leaned against a nearby trunk and listened to the pound of her heart as she watched the slow crawl of the earth’s shadow. A gurgling moan from behind her; bracken snapping beneath Chris’s tipping weight.
He tried to tell her to go, as he always did, but the words sluiced wetly between his teeth, unintelligible and whittled by agony. His hands clenched against the ground, nails gouging into the dirt, and darkness began to bleed into his vision until all he could see was the red throb of nothing.
His body went rigid, a pained moan lifting from between his teeth. Grinding jaw, his bones beginning to rise under the skin. She watched, skin prickling, as he tried to speak. Run, he was trying to tell her. Run, run, run!
She had minutes, at best, to put as much distance between herself and Chris as she could. She glimpsed the moon through the canopy and every time she saw it the darkness encroached further. The silvering whisper of leaves fell quiet, the animals silent and terrified in their hovels. The scent of wolves was thick in the air. They knew he was here.
She did not wear shoes. Hated them; the ground was hard under her feet, barer here than it had been in Romania, where the litter was thick and dense as a sponge. But she ran, fleet-footed and silent as a hare, darting between the trees in some undetermined direction. Didn’t matter, really, where she went. The forest here was dense and vast as the ocean.
Three minutes. She counted the seconds in the strikes of her heart. Three, then four, and the darkness felt total and enormous. Moon a sliver, a yellow curving fingernail puncturing the black of the sky.
Five. The woman’s muscles burned and she staggered to a stop, swallowing around her own panting breaths. Her mouth gaped, throat open in the hope of hiding the sound of it. She listened. Felt the tremble of the ground beneath her feet.
The howl rose bone-chilling from the trees. She had heard it before – knew the very cadence of it like her own voice – and yet it never failed to punch a cold fist of fear into her belly. Her breath stopped. Everything stopped. Sweat prickled cold across her upper lip.
He was ready. He was searching for her.
The breath had not yet returned to her, and her legs trembled in the warmth of the night, but she continued. Stumbling through the trees, ears acute, eyes blind. She could see nothing. She could feel everything.
For a beast so enormous, Chris moved with alarming agility. He was quiet, too, once he got the hang of things – it always took him a few minutes to settle into the feel of a new form, but once he did, it was easy. He loped long-strided and silent through the night, jaws powerful around the unsuspecting throats of deer. The woman was never worried about predators in these parts, either – Chris’s mere presence spooked every threat within five miles away.
A snarl from the trees. Left. Behind. A terrified moan rose from the woman before she could stop it, and in her fear she stumbled, catching her palm against a low-hanging bough. The skin tore and she put her mouth to it instantly, sealing the wound as quickly as she could to prevent the scent of it leaching into the air. Part of her knew it was already too late; if he had not smelled her before, he would now.
She heard him lurching through the woods behind her. Urged her legs faster, farther, muscles screaming in terror and exhaustion, ten minutes now of sprinting. The adrenaline was her only fuel, shoveled by fear and whatever remained of her self-preservation. She stumbled down a bank, slipping noisily in the dark, stealth forgotten in the sheer need to escape. His pace was almost in time to her heartbeat; galloping. She felt the vibrations of it through the soles of her feet.
And then he was upon her, snarling deep enough that she felt it in her bones, snatching at her with one of his enormous, taloned hands. She skidded, stumbled – fell painfully onto her side hard enough to make her teeth rattle and fill her mouth with dirt.
Breath a roar in her ears. Chris was panting, tongue lolling from between those immense, razor-sharp teeth, eyes a sunset-gold glow set deeply into his face. The woman could not look away from them. Could not blink, not even when her eyes began to burn, when her body seized in fear.
A noise, then, from somewhere, high and strange. It took her a moment to realize the sound was coming from her, that she was laughing, terrified and maddened and begging. Chris peeled his jowls back over his teeth and growled at her, looming over like the shadow of death itself, ears twitching.
She touched her tongue to her teeth. The longer he let her live the further her fear began to ebb, sucking back out like the tide, leaving her damp all over. Heart pounding. She could not feel her hands or her tongue. He watched her as a wolf would watch a rabbit, salivating, starving, and when she glanced down she –
Feet shifted. Knees apart. Spreading legs; he could smell her, the hot slickness between her thighs. She had been like this ever since they’d started, and he had followed the thread of it ever since, driven mad by the bait.
The woman let her tongue loll out over her lower lip, mockery of his own. She was panting hard, eyes wide and dark and wet, the collar of her shirt torn open to reveal the glittering sweat of her breastbone.
Chris snarled at her. Crouched low in the leaf litter until his breath began to steam even in the cloying June heat. Ears flat against his skull. Cock hard against his belly, dripping slick, ferocious, as big as her arm. Her hand bled into the dirt and his nostrils flared at the sharpness of iron on the air, the slide of it against the scent of her cunt. Made him throb all over.
His tongue was on her face, then, rasping urgently up her cheek, searching for her mouth. It was too big to fit, really, always had been, but he forced it between her teeth anyway, pushing down into her throat until she gagged and heaved and moaned around it. Sucked at it desperately, drooling like a bitch down her chin.
He tore the dress clean from her body, talons catching now and again and drawing blooms of spotting blood; these he licked clean with his tongue, feasting on the distinct sweetness of her blood; saccharine, moldy decay. She was the rot that bloomed from dead things. She was the eternal cycle. He would die for her, he would, if it meant she would consume him and sprout like mushrooms from whatever was left. He could – he could barely metabolize that feeling, knew it was love in some way he had never known before. Struggled with it even now, after everything they had been through.
The woman grasped at his fur and licked his teeth, cutting her tongue on the tip of his canine. She did it on purpose, too, just so the blood might flow into his mouth, so he might be driven mad by it. And he was. How could he not be?
Her hand slipped down between her legs, rubbing fingers through her folds. They were already swollen, flushed with blood and slippery, her clitoris rigid against the knuckle of her thumb. Chris made a hungry little noise deep in his chest, breath blowing hot against her breasts. His tongue scraped over her nipples, dragging them to peaks. Her gasp trembled.
“Good boy,” she said, only a little shakily – Chris’s ears twitched. The fear was a fun part to play, but only for so long. She was still afraid now, like this, somewhere deep down in the instinctive parts of her, but his eyes were familiar even in their hazed glow and she was safe, she knew she was, could feel it right at the roots of her nerves. She passed her palm up the ridge of his muzzle. “Good boy.”
He pushed his nose against her hand. Nosed, then, at her breasts, down the soft line of her belly to where her bleeding hand lay between her legs. She pulled it back at the behest of his teeth, shivering when he began to pant erratically against the pulse there, the wet throb of flesh.
Course tongue, dragging, slick and wet and rough against her clit. The woman choked out a moan that was lost in the darkness, swallowed by the give of the soil beneath her collapsing weight.
Push, turn away, hands and knees. Toes curling against the dirt-black soles of her feet, fingers shaking where they gripped at the undergrowth. The terrified, revolted shiver of the forest as it turned its eyes from them. She always felt like an animal, doing this. Presenting, hips raised high, cheek to the ground.
You got me, said her thighs, spread and trembling minutely; shivering as if she was cold. Now you can take me.
The rewards were always sweetest when Chris felt he had earned them. And while the woman was no match for him – not like this, anyway – she certainly wasn’t easy.
(She couldn’t help but want. What a waste it was, she thought, to pretend any different – it was fun, sometimes, before her mind was flooded by desire, but there came a point where she just couldn’t manage. It was a breakwater. There was nothing left, here, to keep her afloat.)
Chris huffed against the sweating length of her spine, licking at every last prick of salt there. Nosed at the back of her neck, teeth gnashing against the urge to bite (she would let him, she would let him, and wasn’t that the worst part?), licking at the roots of her hair and grasping at her clumsily. Her body was so tender, so easily wounded – a single slip of the hand and he could sever an artery, or cut right through to the bone. It would be so easy. So easy. They both knew it, too, and it set them to tremble in terror and that dreadful, ubiquitous what if?
She was panting something, then, reaching beneath herself to line up. His cock slid wetly against her thighs, along the seam of her flank, her cunt, aching and clumsy. Chris couldn’t stop the uncontrollable doglike twitch of his hips, nor the way his vision began to ripple whenever he inhaled, whenever he smelled her there, dripping and heady and all raw meat. He snarled, nipped at her, got smacked in the nose. The growling continued, low and unceasing in his throat, as he held himself still and let her press the head of his cock to her entrance.
Not quite a howl, but almost – it was too splintered, a writhing thing not unlike the sensation of his legbones snapping, and he fucked forward with such strength that the woman balked and gagged, hands clawing in the dirt. She was sweating fully, now, her skin aglow, sparkling like a skyful of stars. She was the most beautiful thing Chris had ever seen in his life. Always thought that, when he looked at her, even when he was half-insane with the need to fuck her open.
He half-collapsed above her, arms shaking and hands hitting the dirt in an effort to hold himself up. Mouth open, sluicing drool that pooled between her shoulder blades. She was shaking so violently she could barely raise herself off the ground, moaning around the heavy, overwhelming fulness of him inside her.
Then she pushed her hips up, trembling, grinding back against him in a plea. Something inside Chris snapped.
The woman howled as he began to fuck. And he fucked – not in a man way, indeed not in any human way, but a way that was only conceivable to a beast. He did not care for her, here, in that moment: she was meat just as the eviscerated carcasses of the deer were, lying broken open and torn up in the dark, the air thick with their blood. Chris left very little of those bodies behind; she suspected there would not be much of her left, either, at the end of it all.
She was thankful his name was one syllable. She didn’t say it so much as growl it, her voice forming so naturally around the shape of it that she didn’t even really need to be conscious. She knew it would be the last thing she’d say before she died, whenever that would be. Wouldn’t mind, really, if it was right now.
“Chris,” she moaned, body arching in half-pain half-pleasure, mad with it, the way it pinballed around her body and tore her insides to shreds. “Chris, Chris – !”
He snarled, brayed into the dark, and lifted one hand from the forest floor to grab at her hips. He was so mad with lust that his grip slipped and he cut her, deeply, over the hipbone; she felt the split of fat and the scrape against her bone, blinded by the agony of it, the way it all shot straight to her cunt. She screamed, and for a moment Chris stuttered, almost like he wanted to stop. To check on her, careful, loving even under everything.
“Don’t,” she snarled at him, spitting leaves from where her face had been grinding into the ground. “Don’t fucking – stop. Don’t.”
Chris blinked. Licked her from coccyx to hairline, fucked into her as deep as he could, felt the telltale pressure of his knot beginning to form. There was something so acutely maddening about her suffering; in his right mind Chris would be disgusted with himself, and a lot of the time he was. But not now. Not like this. Not when his cock speared against the spongy mouth of her cervix and he wondered if the pointed, doglike tip of his cock might just break through if he fucked hard enough, pressed deep enough. If he could fuck her right into the womb, flood her and fuck her full.
The woman’s moans took on an odd quality, then. She knew, could feel it in the way he fucked her like he was trying to tear through to her organs. “You want it,” she rasped, eyes terribly bright in the dark, teeth flashing and bared in a snarl only marginally less terrifying than his. “Ah? Go on, little wolf –,” Her breath shuddered as he fucked into her, slick gushing from them both. It was so slippery that it was a wonder he was still inside her at all. Whatever she tried to say after that was lost in the swollen slurry of her tongue.
Chris’s knot swelled rapidly, rendering his thrusts short and choppy; he couldn’t fuck as deep as he’d like, and getting it inside her at all was a bit of a task, seeing as it was the size of his fist. Difficult, but – not impossible.
It seemed like the only thing that mattered in the world. He had to fuck his knot into her. Had to. Didn’t matter how, if it killed her, killed both of them. He’d do it. He had to. He’d fucking – he’d die if he didn’t.
He wouldn’t let her crawl away, the bramble cutting up her hands and her fingers as she tried to wrench herself away from the thick press of his cock inside her. She knew well enough what he was trying to do – he tried to do it every time, though the success rate was variable. Tonight, though… yes, she could feel it, the way he gripped her and wrenched her about like a doll, her weight as easy to him as nothing at all. He would do it tonight.
(Fear, there, for a moment. She glanced back over her shoulder and blinked the sweat from her eyes to see him, and she did not recognize his face. It was terrible to witness, warped beyond any sense of familiarity. A beast. A monster.)
His knot beat against her cunt, swollen and so, so wet, again and again and again. She howled with the pain of it; he might as well have been laying punches to her, bruises hedging deep and dark beneath the skin, and she felt the pop of her hip as it dislocated.
She really did shriek, then, bone-chilling enough to spook the birds from their roosts. For a moment the woods were alive with them, and in the rush of their wings Chris shuddered and howled and finally finally finally his knot was there fuck it was in it was –
The woman’s hands shook violently but the rest of her was suddenly unable to move. The pop of his knot inside her was a white blank of agony; she was breathless with pain, her tongue chewed to pulp in her mouth. Chris was licking at it, now, at her bloodied lips, and she lay there like all those deer he’d killed and wondered if he might kill her, too, finally.
(They had been tempting fate for too long. They both knew that. Daciana knew that, too, told them to be careful, that it was easy to slip when instincts ran high. Is this it? the woman wondered as she gazed, dazedly, out into the moonless night. Is this it?)
She couldn’t feel her legs jerking about until Chris gripped them still. She couldn’t breathe; her lungs felt choked with soil. Her head was – what was – ?
Coming. She was coming, violently, body a bruise, womb constricting like a fist in desperation of his seed. She clenched tight as a vise around Chris, who snarled warningly against her back (bleeding, too). And then he huffed, every part of him growing erratic in a way she recognized clearly, and he was coming, too, seconds after. Chased her down even then.
But that was the thing with dogs – they don’t stop coming. Not for minutes and minutes and minutes, ten, twenty, more. The woman felt sick around the bruising girth of Chris’s knot and she lay there, shivering in the dirt, as he began to pump her full of spend. More, more; all she could do was sit with the discomfort of it. The pressure built and she felt sicker and sicker, until eventually she heaved (hip pulling, faint with pain) and vomited violently against the ground.
Chris’s head jerked up, ears twitching. He’d been coming for long enough now that sense was once again within reach – he nosed worriedly at her hair, licked the coursing sweat from her skin, the blood from all the wounds he had opened. She moaned and trembled, and was sick again, her body slewing dangerously close to unconsciousness. It was very difficult to keep her eyes open, but she knew if she let them close that she would pitch forward into nothingness, and despite the agony and the terror, she didn’t want to escape it. She had come here for it. Searching.
Love a fist in her chest; Chris eased his weight down above her, scooping her up into his arms. Like this the woman was able to press her foot against the ground and pop her hip back into place; she was beyond screaming by that point, and the pain filtered from her in a low, warbling moan so turgid with pain that Chris couldn’t help but let out a sympathetic little chitter in response. He set about grooming her clean, bearing her weight and the bloat of her cum-full belly, waiting until his knot deflated enough to pop free.
It didn’t, though, not for a long time. The woman lapsed in and out of consciousness, swamped by the heady, not-quite-dog smell of him, the feverish heat of his body that was too much for a humid June night, so hot it made her lightheaded. She dropped away standing and woke up again lying, cradled in the down-soft fur of Chris’s body as he kept her diligently away from the ground.
(These were the seconds of love, in the afterwards. She liked them almost as much.)
She was out when the knot pulled. The sudden emptiness of her body shocked her awake again and she moaned as it poured out of her, a creamy sluice of spend that would invariably have impregnated her at least ten times over had she not been on control. She pressed her fingers, gingerly, to her cunt, slippery with cum and so terribly bruised that she could barely stand to close her legs. Chris curled around her and began to lap at it, cleaning her out with his tongue, and the woman shivered through orgasms that all slurred together in a constant drowning of waves. Eventually, when she felt she might very well pass out again, she pushed his nose away with a trembling hand and rolled over onto her side, pressing her brow to the night-cool ground.
Chris sniffed around the place for a little bit, checking in on her every now and again, licking at a cheek or the bony line of her shoulder. And she laughed, eventually, her throat so screamed raw that it was barely a sound, and reached up to pull at his ears.
(He left, briefly, and in that time she found her dress again – when he returned he was carrying something in his jaws, and only when he went to her and dropped it wetly on the ground did she see it was the carcass of a rabbit. Thank you, she said. You’re very kind.)
By the time the woman was able to rise to her feet again Chris had taken to watching her from a (sheepish) distance, and when she beckoned to him he went to her and lowered his head in a clear, stormy display of guilt that was exactly the same as the one he showed as a human, and helped her onto his back. She wouldn’t be able to find the car again on her own, and at that point even walking was a task – but with his senses what they were, it was child’s play for him to retrace their steps. It took only a few minutes to cover the distance, thanks in no small part to Chris’s enormous, loping strides (feeling the cadence of them the woman laughed, knowing there was no way she’d ever be able to outrun him), and he let her down at the car again, licking all over her face when he did.
He would be gone for the most part of the night, though he would stop back to check on her occasionally, peering in the car windows as she slept, exhausted, in the back seat. And sometimes she would wake to his face looming in the dark of the open window, and where she knew she ought to feel utter, numbing terror, there was only ever love.
v.
In the morning there were five rabbits stacked against the back tire. The woman peered down at them from the open window and, not minutes later, bristled at the snap of twigs.
Chris staggered from the knit of trees, rubbing his eyes. He looked exhausted but sated, as he always did, and when he saw her he looked a little panicked, all deer-in-the-headlights; only when she smiled at him (forgiveness) did he relax.
“Your fucking leg,” he said, horrified. “Your – do you need to go to the hospital?”
She sat sideways on the back seat with the door open and looked, for all intents and purposes, like she’d been mauled by a mountain lion. She smiled at him and it was all winter, that smile, with something wicked hidden underneath. Kicked at him with the leg he remembered dangling from her at a gut-turning angle. “All fine.”
(He couldn’t help it, seeing her like that – it was so fucking sexy, her hair a tangle, skin bruised and scabbing, the way she pressed her fingers into the wounds to make them last longer. He pushed her into the backseat and she laughed, admitting him gladly between her legs and groaning at his weight settling there. Chris didn’t look – knew better than that – but he was so fucking hard, even like this, after the night he’d had. His body was full of blood and adrenaline. He let her guide him into her cunt and felt how wet she was, her own slick and his own still left over. Possessive, that’s what it was – he’d keep her full like this until the day he died.
“I know how you wanted it,” she murmured in his ear, nails sharp against his scalp. “Fuck me full of pups, hm?”
Chris nearly bit her. His vision shuttered and he came, just like that, tight and furious, teeth bruising against her shoulder.
“You turn me into such a fucking animal,” he accused her breathlessly, and she laughed, kissing him with her still-bleeding tongue.)
vi.
Mia stood in the doorway. “Are you sure you don’t want some lunch, honey?” she asked Piers, who sat cross-legged and very serious in the middle of the living room, pretending to watch the cartoons on the television set.
“He won’t eat anything,” Rose said from where she lounged against the sofa, half-way through a bologna sandwich. “He’s too worried ‘bout his dad.”
“I’m not!” Piers sniped, turning to look at her with a curling little sneer that was far too much like his father’s. He pressed his tongue to the gap in his teeth, newly-vacant after he’d finally convinced Rose to help him tie his loose tooth to a doorknob the night before. They’d made quick work of it, but Mia wasn’t very pleased with the blood on the carpet. “You wouldn’t get it.”
Rose stuck her tongue out at him. “I’ve seen you do it.” Then she huffed and turned pensively towards the television, pulling a slice of bologna from her sandwich and shoving it into her mouth. “Y’know, I don’t think I’d change into a wolf if I could shapeshift.” She squinted at him thoughtfully. “I’d be… I dunno. A bird, maybe? That’d be pretty cool. Oh!” She slapped her hand down on her knee. “I’d be a dolphin! That’d be really cool.”
“A dolphin?” Piers asked disbelievingly. “And what if you changed right here, in the living room? And Aunty Mia came in and found you flopping around all over the floor. You could die, y’know!”
“She’d take me to the beach, obviously!”
Piers opened his mouth, then, to say something – but then his head whipped around, the rest of his body following, every fiber aligning in the same way Rose had seen the neighbor’s pointers do when they heard the mailman turn the corner.
He heard the tires before they even hit the gravel. The throttling rumble of Chris’s truck approached and Piers leapt to his feet, cheeks pink, Rose hot on his heels. Mia was almost kneecapped by the blur of children as they shot to the window, wrenching back the blinds to peer out, noses barely reaching the sill.
“They’re back!” Piers exclaimed, swinging out into the entryway and throwing open the door. He burst out into the sunshine just as Chris was getting out of the cab, and when he saw the boy he grinned from ear to ear.
“Hey, sport,” he said as he scooped Piers up into his arms. “You behave well for Aunty Mia?”
“Yeah! Look, my tooth fell out.” He bared his teeth, showing Chris the gap where his incisor used to be. Chris laughed and rumpled his hair, breathless with love for him, for being able to have this moment.
(How many times had he lay dying, wondering if he’d ever get to see his child’s gap-toothed grin? To ever have a child at all? How proud his old selves would be, he thought, if they could see the brilliant little creature he had brought into this world.)
“He was wonderful,” Mia said from the doorway, where she stood with a hand on Rose’s blonde head. Rose was looking at him very hard, searching the same way she always did for some hint of his transformation. “No trouble at all.”
Piers was grateful that she didn’t mention the tooth incident.
A look that Piers didn’t understand passed between the adults, and he noticed, quite suddenly, two things: one, that his father had a hideous bruise just peeking beyond the collar of his shirt, and two, that his mother was not in the truck.
“Where’s mama?” he asked, and Chris laughed, a low tremor in his chest that Piers felt rather than heard. The tone of it felt funny, though, like there was something he was missing, a meaning he couldn’t entirely grasp.
“I took her home first,” Chris explained, smiling in a way that made his eyes crinkle at the corners, the silver in his beard flashing. “She wanted to come pick you up but she was so tired she fell asleep in the car.”
This, to Piers, was not new. Mama was always tired after this happened, and he nodded sagely with a small ah, right of understanding. He could still smell her on Chris’s shirt, anyway, that strange frozen-pine bare-dirt grate of her, and that, for now, was enough.
Farewells were said and Piers ducked back into the house to get his bag (which had been ready and packed since the night before, a funnel for the jitters Piers often felt when Chris was ‘sick’; because he knew what it was like, how much it hurt. And he didn’t want his dad to suffer like that, either). He climbed into the cab of the truck and buckled in, watching from behind the window as Chris and Mia talked about boring grown-up things. He loved when Chris let him ride in the front seat like this, like an adult, staring out at the impossible stretch of the bright June morning. Rose just had time to breathe on the window and draw a bunny before Mia called her back inside again.
As Chris drove, the old-timey tones of Doris Day mumbling from the radio, Piers eyed the bruises warily. One on the neck, one on the elbow, a graze on Chris’s palm that he kept picking at.
(I know it makes you worried, the woman said to him when he was old enough to understand that bruises were bad things, but we’re okay. I promise.)
“…we’re still going fishing, right?”
“You bet we are.”