Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1) (8 page)

* * *

When the doorbell rang at eight, Margaret was ready. Dinner was in the fridge, a crisp medley of carrots, spinach, lettuce, onions and other vegetables. The house was spotless––her only means of passing the time between locking up her guests and meeting her lover in the evening was to clean. You could eat off her floors. And maybe they would tonight, she thought entertaining erotic designs. Maybe he would spill the salad across the tile and feed each chopped vegetable to her with his lips.

Her body pulsed with anticipation as she crossed the room to let him in. She wanted this night to be perfect––it was their first anniversary. A carafe of deep ruby wine rested on the coffee table––his favorite vintage. She wore only the thin cotton underwear she’d bought this afternoon.

“Margaret,” he whispered, admiring her near naked figure from the stoop. He held out a bouquet of red roses. She took them and pulled him inside. “Your hair is beautiful,” he complimented, warming her to the bone.

“I need you so bad,” she said, staring up into his face. He had those eyes that shifted, looked green one moment, brown the next. His face was smooth, but sharply drawn. She leaned to kiss him, and in her hurry, caught the roses between their bodies. “Ouch,” she jumped and stepped back. A thorn had pricked her thigh. A thin line of red ran from the puncture to a crimson tear.

“Let me,” he breathed, and knelt to lick her leg. His tongue was hot, but felt sandpapery, like a cat’s. She shivered at his attentions, tousled his hair with her free hand. “Come have a drink, baby,” she said, stepping back to break their contact. A few more minutes of this and they’d be fucking right there on the floor, and she wanted this night to be slow, thick––a steady building to perfect passion.

He stood, and flashing a row of gleaming white teeth, fingered her nipples, which poked like nails through the thin material.

“Whatever you say, lover.”

She trembled at his voice. So much power there. A quick look at him would not give this impression. A thin nose, deep set eyes, smooth white face on a fit but not obviously muscled body. He was Joe Average, but she could sense the strangeness, the exotic reeking from his pores. Maybe that’s what had attracted her to him in the first place.

They clinked glasses of heavy bordeaux together, and Margaret felt the sweat begin seeping from her body as he rumbled in his sexiest deep tone: “to us.”

She drank deeply, closing her eyes to feel the fuel of the wine mixing with the fire of her lust. God, it was so hard to wait. The days between grew longer and longer and once he was here, she struggled every moment to stop herself from ripping his clothes off and mounting him without a word. At the same time, she wanted these moments before, when they could talk and just be together as the musk of their mutual lusts rose around them like a fog.

When she poured the last drops of the bottle into his open mouth, Margaret could wait no longer. His features were wild with the pull of the moon, his movements jerky as a palsied man. He licked his lips and husked the word as she pounced.

“Now.”

His hands wrapped around her body in a bear hug, drawing her close. “You smell divine,” he growled and proceeded to lick her arms and legs, his nose chasing cool trails across her skin. Leaping from his lap, she dragged him to his feet and in fumbling haste undid his belt and pants as he unbuttoned and shed his shirt. He stood before her then, naked, yet covered with a manly down. His public thatch was thick and long, almost braid-able. Its wildness couldn’t hide the scope of the tool that hung hungry there. With a rough finger he traced a red line up her thigh.

“So, have you missed me this month?” he said from between gritted teeth.

She smiled at the ritual, and nodded affirmatively.

Tucking his finger inside the cotton panties,” his voice dipped even lower. “So I feel.” His hand cupped her, made her tingle, his head dipped to inhale her smell. “So I smell.”

She scratched the thickening hair on his chest, her hand resting on his engorged cock. “You’re the only meat for me, Charles. Let me eat you.”

Acceding to her request, he dropped to the floor. Her tongue lashed him then, her teeth threatening to chew him to a bleeding pulp. He only scraped his nails deeply into her back, shredding the cotton shirt and staining it in spots with drawn blood.

He was panting then in the thick of the moon’s pull, and she knew the change would soon be complete. Moving from his crotch, she posed on hands and knees beside him. He was quick to rise. With an excited tear of cotton he freed her breasts from the remains of the t-shirt, and at the same time shredded her panties, leaving a waistband dangling around her middle and swollen trails of blood on her behind. Her sex only ached more at his rough violations, and then, at last, he was mounting her doggy style there on the floor. She could feel him changing faster now, as he pounded his cock between her thighs. The nails gouging her shoulders grew sharper, the flesh meeting her butt grew prickly, as if she were being slapped by a bristled broom. Even within her, his cock altered, grew, until she screamed in spasms of ecstasy and collapsed on the floor as his frenzied motions peaked in a warm, wet rush.

“God,” she huffed, “God, God, God.”

A strangled “No,” answered her, before turning into a howl. She felt his teeth gripping her leg, breaking the skin, sinking into the soft flesh of her calf. She had to get up, she thought, or he’d devour her. In this state, his desire overruled his mind and it didn’t matter who she was.

Kicking out with her free foot, she slammed his head from her leg and launched herself down the stairs, a trail of blood marking her passage. He followed, raking claws at her thighs, tearing skin from her back as he tried to bring her down. She knew some part of him was fighting for restraint––or else she would not make it down the stairs.

With a twist she turned the knob of the door as his teeth sank into her arm. She felt a rush of wetness between her legs in answer to the pain and laughed out loud. If she let him, she’d cum again as he ripped the flesh from her bones. One day, she thought, that’s exactly what would happen.

But... not... now,
she grimaced, and pushed the door open.

“So you came back, finally,” Bill’s voice trembled from within the pitch black room.

Margaret felt Charles’ weight shift as he heard the voice. She could see his ears pricking up, feel his paw leave her back as, for a second, he pointed, and then sprang.

Bill screamed his loudest then, because Charles generally went for the throat when he was really hungry.

She remembered hers’ and Charles’ first time, when, as she watched the hair growing from his limbs like cheese from grater, she’d realized how it had to end and as his wolfen cock had spurted its seed within her, she’d called out to her roommate.

“Cathy,” she’d bellowed, in the midst of an orgasm herself, “I want you to come down and meet somebody.”

Charles had flipped her over with a huge hairy paw and was going for her jugular when Cathy had cautiously peeked into the room, mere seconds later. “Bitch was probably was listening to us,” Margaret had thought, and with all her strength she’d pushed Charles’ muzzle in Cathy’s direction.

“Get HER,” she’d screeched, and somehow, even that early in their relationship, Charles had been trying to hold back the beast he was. He’d sprang and ripped out Cathy’s throat in seconds and so, their monthly routine had been born.

Behind her, Charles’ growls and Bill’s wails were fading.

“Shoulda stuck with the noose you knew, Bill,” Margaret thought as she limped up the stairs to the kitchen. The gurgled “helps,” “stops” and “oh Gooooods,” quit before she’d even pulled her salad from the fridge.

She went back down to eat with him, flicking on the light and sitting naked on the floor. Feral eyes looked up at her from the disemboweled carcass on the couch. She didn’t share his meal. She trapped his food out of necessity, but she herself was a vegetarian.

Across the room, he slurped and chewed, wolfen head disappearing in and out of the gory chest cavity. She wished she didn’t have to handle his food so much beforehand, but Charles said the scent of the other man on her was what ultimately, kept him from killing her. It got in his nose as he made love to her, and when that wolfen olfactory sense picked out the origin of the smell, his instincts took over and he was after it instead of her.

Crunching a carrot between her teeth, Margaret melted inside at the sight of her werewolf. Five feet of iron bone and sinewy strength, his paws shredded and picked apart the man on the couch as if he were butter. Her body warmed again in anticipation as she thought of him returning to her at the end of his meal. Before she uncovered the drain beneath the vinyl couch and hosed down the slaughter room (and herself), Charles would pad across the tiles to her, green eyes filled with lust. Then he’d hold her down with a vaguely human paw, and lick her clean with that rough and tumble tongue. He’d mount her again, fast and hard, before disappearing up the stairs and into the night.

She didn’t have to cuff him to the couch and he didn’t wear a collar, but she knew he’d be back. Real men didn’t fight their chains. Sated and relaxed, she propped herself up off the cold floor with one arm, and watched protectively as Charles enjoyed his meal.

She lived for the nights of the full moon.

THE VIRGIN O’ FULL MOON FALLS

JAMES NEWMAN

Stand right there, asshole.

Does the gun make you nervous? Good. I’m glad. At least I know you ain’t gonna try nothin’ funny.

Don’t you dare move a muscle. Don’t even blink.

Now. Listen. I want to tell you a story––

* * *

There was this girl back in Full Moon Falls. Town in North Carolina, where I grew up.

Rayleen Estelle Connelly. Prettiest lil’ thing you ever did see.

Rayleen had just turned sweet sixteen when all o’ this happened, but she was so tiny a lot o’ people used to insist she didn’t look a day over thirteen or fourteen years old. Fiery red hair, pigtails, face full o’ freckles like God’s own game o’ connect-the-dots. She used to wear these cute frilly dresses all the time, with flowers and honeybees and butterflies all over ‘em. Pink and yellow ribbons in her hair.

The thing Rayleen was most well-known for, though, throughout the town o’ Full Moon Falls: she prided herself on bein’ a virgin. Rayleen even founded that CT4A group at the First Baptist Church o’ Full Moon Falls her family attended:
Christian Teens For Abstinence.
I gotta admit, we were all mighty surprised at just how big the whole thing got, drawin’ in fifty or sixty members within just a two or three months o’ Rayleen startin’ it. I remember seein’ kids all over town wearin’ those bright blue and yellow buttons Rayleen made in her spare time, buttons with slogans on ‘em like
SEX IS GR8 WHEN YOU W8!
, or
I’M IN NO HURRY: I’VE MADE A SPECIAL PROMISE TO MY FUTURE HUSBAND
(or
WIFE
). I reckon you get the picture.

Lookin’ back on it all now––I think maybe that was what got Rayleen in trouble in the first place. Advertisin’ it so. Lot o’ her fellow students at Full Moon High accused her o’ thinkin’ she was better than everybody else. The girls called her “Miss Goody-Two-Shoes.” Boys her age––the ones who weren’t members CT4A members, o’ course––used to say she wasn’t nothin’ but a “dang cock-tease.”

Rayleen heard the whispers behind her back. Sure she did. How could she help it, in a town the size o’ Full Moon Falls?

Thing is, Rayleen Connelly never gave a damn what anybody thought about her. That’s just the way she was. She just kept smilin’, skippin’ down the block past her daddy’s gun shop and the Big Pig grocery store where her mama worked, on her way to and from her CT4A meetings every Tuesday night and the rallies every third Saturday mornin’ o’ each month, so excited about spreadin’ the word to anyone who wished to listen.

That is, until what happened.

After that night, nothin’ was the same. Nothin’ was ever the same for any of us.

* * *

One cool October night, a bunch o’ dirtbags from the white-trash side o’ town got all jacked up on pot and crank and Jim Beam, decided they was gonna have ‘em––these are
their
words, not mine––a “pussy party”.

At sweet lil’ Rayleen Connelly’s expense.

Story goes, it was just after sunset, and Rayleen was makin’ her way home from another CT4A meetin’ (how’s that for irony? I’ve always thought the Man Upstairs can be
beyond
cruel sometimes, and what happened to Rayleen cinched it, forever and ever amen) when all of a sudden this big, loud, mud-spattered Chevy 4x4 full of a half-dozen local troublemakers pulls up in front o’ Rayleen. It pulls right up on the sidewalk, blockin’ her path.

“Where you goin’, purdy lady?” the dickhead behind the wheel asks Rayleen, shoutin’ to be heard above Metallica on the Chevy’s shitty stereo system.

He swigs from a can o’ Pabst Blue Ribbon sittin’ between his legs. Some of it dribbles down his big stubbled chin, but he don’t bother wipin’ it away. He looks
rabid,
and most likely––what do ya bet?––that’s intentional.

“Answer me, girly. I asked you where you was headed?”

Buck Cooter was his name. He was the group’s leader,
I suppose. Big hairy sumbitch, flabby arms and face always smeared with grease thanks to his job at the Oil Well over on Talbot Lane. Sideburns straight outta the ‘seventies, teeth like a rickety yellow picket fence that’s barely survived a tornado.

“Get out of my way,
please
,” Rayleen replied. Polite, but in that tone o’ hers some folks used to consider
snooty.

And I guess that was all it took.

Them pieces o’ shit were out o’ Buck’s truck and on little Rayleen before she knew what was happenin’.

That poor child––she never stood a chance against ‘em––

* * *

Make a long story short––plus, I’m sparin’ you the gory details ‘cause I don’t rightly care to dredge ‘em up myself––the things them bastards did to Rayleen Connelly would go down in local history as one o’ my hometown’s worst crimes ever recorded.