by Angela Foxxe
Reign made soothing sounds to the girl and ran her hands through her hair, unconscious, but responsive. Cara smiled, her body shifted as she slept, peaceful and secure for the first time in months.
After an hour, Reign’s back began to ache. Cara still hadn’t woken up and didn’t look like she would anytime soon. She carefully scooted herself out from under her head, and replaced her lap with her folded up coat and shirt. It left her wandering the forest in her white tank top, which made things a little chilly, and awkward considering she was still lactating.
Oh, Cara, I hope you are okay, I miss you, baby girl.
She was glad to have the adult Cara back, thrilled in fact, but the ache in her heart for her distant baby was a glowing fire that grew every hour. She’d made the right decision to let Skye take her on ahead to Brazil. The pack would be safe there, and no one would question Skye; the girl certainly had the rack to look like she was breastfeeding, and according to her, it wouldn’t take long before she was lactating herself, so the baby would be fed. Still her boobs ached with the need to feed her baby, and if she didn’t pump soon, her milk would start to dry up.
She wandered around the back of the burned out lodge, the conundrum of food and shelter rolling around in her brain.
I’m a doofus.
It was staring at her the whole time, the mineshaft the pack converted to a supply room slash emergency escape tunnel. She remembered being in there with Abbey and they had a full kitchen and months’ worth of food and water. She wondered if Cara stayed in the area in the hopes she would shift back and could use it to live on. She checked the door, it was locked and she didn’t have a key.
The door was the windowless variety, and she recalled the security system they used to monitor the whole complex from inside. She remembered being terrified as she witnessed the old wolf get beheaded, what was his name?
She tried the door a couple of times, it just rattled against the jam.
Wait, I was terrified!
She wasn’t sure if it was enough, but it was worth trying. She closed her eyes and remembered the feeling, the place, what she was thinking, what Abbey looked like, then with frightening clarity the room was there, solid in her mind, as if she could step through her own thoughts and be there.
So she did.
Reign was in the security booth, emergency lighting shed dim illumination on the dead consoles. It didn’t matter, as long as she could make her way to the door, and she could. It opened easily from the inside, she had to prop a rock on it to keep it open. With light streaming in she found the pantry. The freezer had long since thawed, and she dare not open it for fear of the awful smell that would accompany a hundred pound of rotting meat.
However, the canned and dry goods were still there, and well within their use by date. She found the rice, beans, and some cured deer jerky. She also found the pack’s camping stove and fuel.
When Cara’s eyes began to flutter, Reign had a hardy meal of beans, rice, bacon, and pear sauce ready for her. Along with the food, she found a sleeping bag and some spare clothes, a flannel shirt and work pants, along with some boots she was sure were too big for Cara, but she also found socks, enough that the girl could wear the boots.
“Hi, sleepy head,” she said to the waking girl.
“Reign, is that you?”
“In the flesh, Cara, we thought you were dead!”
In a rush, Cara leaped to Reign and engulfed her in a long, tearful hug.
“Oh, Reign, how did I? What did you do? I’ve tried and tried to shift back, but it had been so long I was almost gone,” Cara said through her tears.
“I don’t know, I saw something in you, like a sickness, and it was keeping you in wolf form, I just sorta reached in and took it out,” Reign said.
Cara pushed away and looked Reign in the eyes. “Thank you, much longer and I would have been stuck as a wolf forever, as it is, three months was too long, you… you don’t know what it’s like, when you live in the wild things can get…complicated,” she said, wiping her face leaving clean smudges through the dirt.
“Here, some wet naps I found, you’re kind of a mess,” Reign said while handing her the wipes.
While Cara ate, Reign filled her in on the last few months, the pack heading to Brazil, the baby and her name, Richard's capture; it was a lot, and Reign had to choke back tears on more than a few parts.
“God, I’m so glad you’re alive,” Reign said again.
“Me, too.” Cara burped as she spoke, having eaten more in one sitting than she had in months. The girl’s skin looked immediately healthier. Reign hadn’t noticed before but Cara had more than a few nasty wounds under all the dirt, and now that she’d eaten, her body began to heal.
Cara noticed her looking and as she raised her arm to look at her side, she sighed.
“Yeah, there’s a normal wolf pack in the area, and the alpha wanted me as a mate, it took a lot of convincing that I wasn’t for him; I’m still human, you know. Some wolves, they, well they fuck as wolves, and for me I just couldn’t ever do that, it felt wrong.”
“I’d never even thought of that… do you, I don’t know, have those urges in wolf form?”
Cara remained silent for moment, her eyes watering a little. “Yeah, if you hadn’t saved me, I probably would have ended up his mate, and that’s…” She stopped herself, silent tears leaking out of her eyes.
“Well, no use dwelling on ‘might have beens’ as my mom always said,” Reign said with a more cheerful tone than she felt.
“What now?”
“Well, first, we need to get to the general store, get you some clothes that fit, and then we need to get back to Seattle.”
“What are we going to do there?”
“I’m gonna kill every motherfucking vampire in that city until I have my Richard back.” The grim look on Reign’s face sent shivers down Cara’s spine, she’d never seen someone so young, look so very frightening.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
Richard wasn’t entirely sure how much time had passed since he’d been taken, but he was able to measure the number of times they had come for him. When they couldn't trick his mind, they resorted to torture. The magic chains, and that is all he believed they could be since they kept him from shifting, would bind him in place while different vampires would cut into him.
There were two that did most of the torturing. Dulci, their master, would often watch, licking her lips with every drop of blood. They would gather the spilled blood up in cups and drink after each session. It was disgusting to Richard, even though he had eaten the flesh of man and beast in his time as a wolf, he never relished it, or sought it out. He regretted the years he spent as a wolf, the years before he mastered his transformation; he remembered the face of each man, woman, and child, he killed in a blind rage. He told himself it wasn’t his fault, but the truth was, he accepted the gift to save his people willingly; however it worked out, he was responsible.
He had a problem, though, they weren’t feeding him or giving him anything to drink. Soon his body would stop healing, it would cannibalize as much as it could to stay alive, but the superficial burns and cuts wouldn’t be healed, only life threatening wounds, and as time went on, not even those; if he didn’t escape soon, he would never leave this place.
“Are you ready for some more, Richard? We so love the taste of your blood,” Dulci said in her eerily seductive voice.
“You people are amateurs. The Celts, now they knew how to torture a man, you, you're just children playing at games you can’t understand.”
Dulci’s face flattened and anger played at her lips. She took out a knife and stalked forward, plunging it into Richard’s side; the serrated blade cut through bone and tissue all the way down its six-inch length to the hilt, then she twisted it.
Richard screamed through gritted teeth, his vision fogged and a red haze clouded his mind. He desperately called the wolf, but there was no answer. Suddenly the pain was gone, his vision cleared, and he felt a war
mth spreading out from his leg to his whole body; a euphoria took over him. He opened his eyes and looked down, Dulci was kneeling over him, her mouth making sucking sounds as she fed on his blood directly from the vein in his leg.
“Stop,” he pleaded.
She smiled, though she didn’t stop, she moaned with pleasure sending similar feelings through Richard.
“Stop, please,” he said again, much weaker this time. She drank for what seemed like forever; he breathed in huge gulps, his heart pounded in his chest, he could feel excess blood she couldn’t swallow leaking down his leg. With each beat of his heart and pulse of the blood in his veins she swallowed, with each swallow, pleasure unlike any he’d ever felt coursed through him.
Her moans of pleasure became louder as his hearing faded. He was so tired, he couldn’t keep his eyes open, he felt his body shutting down.
Reign, oh god, Reign, I’m sorry honey, please stay safe.
* * *
It had taken the pair two days to get back to the city; each night they slept, Cara had terrible nightmares and ended up sharing Reign’s bed with her. She was desperate for comfort and would often snuggle with her, nuzzling her neck and whimpering with each new dream. Reign worried for the poor girl, she hadn’t spoken more about her ordeal since she first woke up, but Reign knew that the trauma of it would take years, if ever, to go away. Normally, a person would seek counseling, but who does a werewolf go to for counseling?
On the second day, Cara was well enough to travel. They made their way down to the general store, bought her some new clothes, and some travel supplies. The owner was glad to see them, fearing they had been killed in the fire. Reign made up a story on the spot about how they were going to re-open when they could.
Once they had what they needed, they flagged a truck heading down the pass for a ride, the trucker happy to have two pretty girls to talk to. He was an older man who only saw his family once or twice a month, so besides the boredom of the road, he never got to see his wife. Flirting with two young girls made the last hundred miles of his journey easy. Reign suspected that he was actually heading for Bellingham but didn’t want to divert around the city as it would mean his impromptu guests would leave a whole hour earlier.
Cara thanked the kind man with a peck on the cheek, and a flash of her cleavage that lasted longer than was strictly necessary.
“What a sweet old man,” she said, as they walked across the parking lot to the bus stop.
Reign wondered about her friend; she was worried for her, she had no idea the effects of being a wolf for that long. Richard implied to her once that some people change to wolves and never come back. She seemed different, a little more carefree than she had been before.
“You okay, Cara?”
“Yeah, I just, I don’t know, everything seems brighter, a little more alive, I guess,” she responded while looking up to the clouds.
Reign wasn’t a hundred percent sure where to go, the trucker had dropped them near a bus stop on Federal Way, so they decided to just wait for the bus and talk.
“How do we find…” Reign stopped to look around and make sure no one was in ear shot, the area was busy, and there were certainly people walking back and forth, but no one was paying them special attention, “…a vampire?”
“Well, the movies get most things wrong, but the thing they get right is the lifestyle, they like the clubs, they’re hunters after all, and that’s where you go to find your prey. There is a problem, though,” Cara said holding up her finger.
“What’s that?” Reign asked.
“A lot of people in this area like to pretend they are them,” she held up another finger, “they know what you look like,” one more finger came up, “and they have police on their side.”
Reign nodded, it was a lot to overcome, but she had some ideas about how to handle it. Her skin wasn’t nearly as dark as her dad’s, it was somewhere in between her mom’s pale white skin and her dad's shade of brown, she ended up with what a lot of people called mocha, but she never liked that term.
“I could probably lighten my hair considerably, and if I bundled up a bit more, I could use makeup to lighten my face; if they're looking for a dark haired Indian girl they won’t look at me twice. Plus, they think I’m alone, and let’s face it, honey, if anyone is looking at us, they are going to be looking at you.”
Cara blushed, but Reign was right; with her large boobs and thin waist, and cut muscles, Cara looked more like a sports model than anything.
“Once we're in town, we’ll hit little Korea, have our hair and nails done, buy some less revealing clothes for me, and I think some more revealing clothes for you, have something to eat, then hit the clubs, okay?”
As the sun dipped into the Puget Sound, Reign and Cara were stepping out of a cab in front of ‘21’, a popular club downtown that had an upper level for over 21, and a lower level for 16-21. Reign had always thought it was an insane idea, theoretically the two crowds didn’t mix, but Reign knew of several girls she went to school with who got picked up outside the club by older men, and it usually didn’t end well for them.
Reign couldn’t help but admire her friend. Reign didn’t consider herself amazing, but she knew she was pretty, a little round perhaps, but pretty none the less, with moderate breasts, and a nice round rump that she considered her best feature.
But Cara… Cara is what women who had plastic surgery try to look like. Six feet tall without heels, long, soft brown hair, fine features, bright blue eyes, a rack that defied gravity, and legs that seemed to be drawn, not made. She wore a plain white dress that curved with her and stopped just above her knees, and it flowed so there was the illusion that any second you could see her form. Under the dress, she wore a wicked red thong, and no bra, letting her nipples show through the thin fabric in the cold air.
Right, this was the plan, wasn’t it? Draw in flies with honey, but damn I feel a little jealous, how did Richard ever chose me over her?
No one even gave Reign a first look as they walked into the club arm in arm, even though Reign was dressed much more conservatively. She had a green dress with an empire waist, and it ended just after her knees. Her hair was closer to blond now, and she had it braided so it looked even shorter. What they needed now was to blend in and look for her target.
“I didn’t think to ask,” said Cara, “how will we know who’s a vamp?”
Reign smiled. “The same way I know you’re a werewolf, your aura.”
Reign let her vision slip and soon she was seeing through the Fade, the auras in the room were a kaleidoscope of colors and emotions. In the Fade, she could sense more than just the person, she could see what they were feeling, if they were sick, and apparently if they were drinking or were on mind altering drugs, as several of the people had a hazy cloud where there heads would normally be.
“This is incredible, it’s so beautiful,” she said to her friend.
* * *
Pearson wandered the top room of 21 in a foul mood. It was strong enough that most people left him alone. The waitress came to him with his usual drink, which sat untouched on his table for the last half hour. He should never had listened to that human, sending the gunmen after the mage had been a mistake. But how was he supposed to know she was guarded by a werewolf pack? Mages never took up with the fleabags, the stupid wolves tried so hard to conceal their existence they ended up living miserable lives alone in the wilderness.
Pearson finally took a drink of his Bloody-Mary, made with Dulci’s private stock, which unbeknownst to the mixer, was actual blood. It sustained him, but despite popular media, blood was not what they craved.
The essence of a person, who they were, who they would be, that is what satiated their ever-growing thirst. The food they kept in the kennel of the mansion wasn’t as satisfying as the prey they caught themselves.
The rabbits in the world still believed in their dreams, in their futures, and that was an attraction all its own.
While they could live off
caught prey, each day they were captive made the meal less and less satisfying.
Perhaps if he were allowed to feed on the wolf, with his strong will and body, that would be satisfying, but Dulci kept him all to herself. He scoffed inwardly at her plan; he took another drink and motioned for the waitress to refill his glass. Turning werewolves into thralls had never worked, it couldn’t work, they were too stubborn, but she had faith in her magic chain the retched mage crafted for her.
Magic, he hated they had to deal with humans as equals. They were all prey, magic or not. The waitress, a young pretty ginger with luscious lips, put the glass on his table on a napkin with her number on it. Pearson was tempted, the girl had a hunger about her that would taste divine, not to mention how it would feel to plunder her body of all its virtue.