by Angela Foxxe
She decided to try again, to see if she could contact him. She knelt down, legs crossed, and breathed. Long, deep breaths. She pictured Richard in her head, she tried to imagine his smell, the way his mouth tasted in the morning, the feel of his skin. While the image was almost exactly like it was, she knew it was just an image. She wasn’t seeing him. She was missing something, or something was blocking her. She heard the snap of a twig and nearly screamed. Carefully, as to not make a sound, she stood up, sliding her back against the tree for support.
Whatever was out here was not likely to be friendly. Be it man or beast.
The familiar form of a wolf padded into view, too large to be a normal wolf, and its coloring was too off to be native to Washington. It was a blond wolf with dark fur.
“Cara,” Reign whispered, a sudden swell of hope and pain surged through her breasts. Her friend was alive; she was so sure she felt her die before she Fade walked the whole pack to safety, all but Cara. The wolf looked at her, its tongue hanging out of its mouth, steam from its breath rose to the sun.
“Cara, girl, it's me, it’s Reign.” She moved slowly forward, the wolf leaped back startled, then it growled at her. Reign had no idea the effects of being stuck in wolf form for so long, as that seemed the only way she could have survived. As humans, they were fast and strong and could heal extraordinarily quickly, but as wolves, they were all but unstoppable.
“Cara, it's okay, it's me.” She reached blindly behind her and picked up one of the remaining corn dogs. With the meat in front of her, she moved a step at a time in the direction of her friend. The tawny wolf crept forward one paw at a time, her nose sniffing the air for danger. In a blink, the corn dog was gone; the wolf chomped it down in two bites. She licked her lips, a menacing growl echoing from her muzzle.
“Easy girl, I’ve got more.” Reign backed up a bit, using another corn dog to entice the she-wolf closer. Before long, the wolf sat in Reign’s lap, munching happily on corn dogs while Reign scratched behind her ears and petted her fur. With the wolf somewhat pacified, Reign took a deeper look into Cara. With her new senses, she could see the wolf, and the girl, mingled together, but separated. A block, like a black smudge, was on her essence. Without thinking, Reign reached into the wolf with her mind and cleared the smudge away. The wolf stiffened in her lap, Reign ignored it, and once the smudge was removed she saw something else, a small black spot, no larger than a golf ball.
She tried to clear that away, but it resisted. Her hand became entangled with the cold blackness, it leaked onto her like honey, it sent cold chills down her spine and goose bumps running along her arms. She forced herself to remain calm and breathe. The goo spread up her arm, moving forward with little tendrils for hands clawing its way to her. Her own aura dimmed and she understood that this was some sort of sickness of the Fade that was her domain. Redoubling her resolve, she closed her eyes, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She pushed out her fear and anxiety with her departing breath, and all that was left was her cool, calm, resolve.
She opened her eyes, the goo was to her shoulder, she focused on it, examining it in minute detail. It was not one thing, but millions of little things together. She put her left hand on it and the goo tried to infect that as well. Summoning her lightning, she sent small amounts of current out of her hand, into her arm, and back to her hand in a loop. The electricity never left her body. The goo convulsed, she increased the voltage. She imagined the goo’s cells breaking up as the ionic bonds were forcibly severed.
She looked down again and the goo was nothing but dust in the Fade being blown off her by the astral winds. She allowed herself a smile.
What the hell was that?
It was a small victory, but one she needed, it lightened her heart. She was so focused on the aura of the Fade and hadn’t realized until the goo was gone that so was the wolf. In its place was the naked, sleeping, Cara. Passed out from the exertion of being a wolf for so long the poor girl slept peacefully with her head in Reign’s lap. Reign could see her ribs through her skin, her hair was terribly matted and she had a year’s worth of dirt caked on her.
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 fore
ver, 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 warmth 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?”