The Witch and the Werewolf

Two Moon Dawn

The Witch and the
Werewolf

Copyright © 2014 John A
Burks

All rights
reserved.

Smashwords
Edition

Worm Fall

“
The world is ending. Are you sure you want to be here, with
me?”

His palms were moist with
sweat, slipped under her loose fitting blouse and against her
sides, fingers dangerously close to her breasts. She tingled with
each movement, with each stroke of his finger. His face was just
inches from hers and she could almost taste the bubble gum he’d
been chewing, no doubt to keep his breath fresh for their big
night.

It was a big night for the
entire world and if Cassandra Kent could be bothered long enough to
look up, into the night sky, she’d be staring right into the dark
heart of humanity’s end. Like everyone on planet Earth, she’d seen
the comet known as Wormwood every day and night for the last three
years, a constant reminder of their coming demise. She didn’t need
to look at it again, not on the last night of her life.

“
Where else would I be?”
she asked as his left hand circled around her waist, slipping
easily down the slick small of her back and into her waistline. He
pulled her closer to him, breathing heavily on her neck, so close
that she felt his warmth, his lips not quite touching her, almost
like he was taking her in, breathing deeply of her
essence.

“
Running maybe?” he asked,
though the quick dart of his tongue along the lobe of her ear told
her that he had no intentions of fleeing. At least not quite yet.
“Or hiding?”

“
I don’t know where you
hide from that thing,” Cassandra whispered, not wanting to look up
into the cloudless night sky, not wanting to see the thing that was
going to destroy the world. “And here, with you, is the only place
I want to be. All I want is you. All I ever wanted was
you.”

Not quite the truth, she
thought, but what harm could a little white lie do at the end of
the world if it made the boy feel better about what she wanted?
Brad hadn’t been the love of her life before Worm Fall. He’d lived
down the street from her mother’s small East Houston home for
years, just another boy her mother would let her have nothing to do
with. He’d been just another face in the crowd. But he’d been
available, and more importantly, willing. He certainly didn’t need
to know he wasn’t the ‘one’. He was that night.

Mother didn’t like him
much. At least he had that going for him.

Not that Brad wasn’t a
cutie. No, not by any stretch of the imagination. He’d discarded
his sticky wet T-shirt and Cassandra ran her fingers down the hard
lines of the muscles in his chest, up and down his rock hard abs.
My, my, she thought. How come I never noticed you
before?

“
But your mom…” Brad said,
inches from her ear between kisses to her cheek and
neck.

Actually mentioning her
mother almost ruined the mood. Almost, but not quite.

“
Don’t worry about my
mom,” she replied, his kisses sending chills up and down her spine.
Despite his young age Brad knew just how to touch her and just how
to breathe on the back of her neck to make her arch away from him.
“She doesn’t know where I am and, even if she did, she has her own
issues to worry about.” It pained her that the last time she’d seen
her mother, before the end of the world, had been an angry fight.
But what’s done is done, she thought. Her mother was sure they’d
survive if Cassandra would just wait with her in the dark basement
among her supplies and weapons. Worm Fall was mother’s vindication,
affirmation that her years of preparing for the end, no matter how
that end came, was valid. Her mother was overly optimistic, she
thought, and she had no intention of spending her last night alive
hiding, hoping to live. She was going out with a bang. “When we’re
done, when it’s done… well, it will be done,” she said with a sly
smile. “Mom has her own demons to deal with.”

“
Yeah… I guess,” Brad,
although she could hear the hesitation in his voice.

Cassandra sighed. She’d
had this silly romantic notion of spending the last night on earth
wrapped in a lover’s embrace, but her potential lover was afraid.
She’d lost the fear of dying once she’d finally resigned herself to
the fact that the comet, Worm Wood, was going to slam into the
earth bringing an end to not just her, but her entire species. She
didn’t want to live, imagining what the world after Worm Fall might
be like. She wasn’t her mother. She didm’t think mankind was going
to rise from the ashes reborn. She thought the worst of humankind,
the murderers, rapists, and common criminals would inherit the
devastated remains. She was surprisingly calm about the whole
thing.

But Brad wasn’t. He was
scared. Scared men didn’t make love.

She pulled away from him
and held his hand. “It’s okay if you don’t want to, Brad,” she
said, trying to hide the disappointment in her voice. “I
understand.”

“
No, it’s not that,” he
said. “I’ve wanted you since we were kids. I always had a thing for
you.”

“
Really?” Cassandra asked,
surprised. “I had no idea.”

“
Yeah. Ever since that
time in third grade when you made me eat those crayons. I was
hooked right then,” he said nervously, looking away. “I’ve had a
crush on you ever since.”

Cassandra smiled. She
remembered the day. Brad was a skinny little nothing, a scared
little boy who had grown into a muscled, handsome young man. And
she’d been the class bully, in that awkward stage of youth when the
icky little boys needed punishment. Brad and his family had lived
next door to her and her mother all those years. Until the end of
the world she’d never even given a romantic relationship with the
handsome blonde a second thought.

“
How come you never said
anything?”

“
Your mom is kind of
scary,” Brad said nervously, looking around as if the woman was
standing near by. “And there’s the whole training you to be a stone
cold killer thing.”

Cassandra laughed. Her
mother had made her take one form or other of self-defense classes
ever since she could remember. And while the training, ranging from
Karate and Krav Maga, knives and guns, and even swords, had given
her a great deal of self-confidence, her mother rarely let her out
of the house.

“
I could kill you with a
finger,” she told him playfully, stroking his cheek.

He didn’t take it that
way, though, and pulled back. “Exactly. You and your mother might
do okay after all this,” he said, nodding to the point in the sky
neither of them wanted to look at, the point of their doom. “Why be
out here?”

“
I don’t want to survive
the end of the world with my mother,” Cassandra said, pulling Brad
closer and kissing him deeply. Her mother could be very
intimidating and had been just that to all the boys in her life.
The combat training she’d understood and even looked forward to. It
had at least gotten her out of the house. But why her mother had
gone to such great lengths to keep her more or less hidden was
beyond her. She was eighteen now, though, and the world was ending.
She wasn’t going to listen to the woman on the last night of the
world. She wasn’t going to stay hidden in a basement as the world
burned down around them. She was going to enjoy herself for once.
After their last big fight, she’d snuck out of the house saying a
silent goodbye. She couldn’t even remember what the fight was
about, at that point, but it didn’t matter.

“
She’s not here now. It’s
just you and me and in a little while it’s all going to be over
with. We’ve got each other here, right now, and we might as well
enjoy it,” she said with as big a smile as she could
muster.

“
I am enjoying it,” the
boy replied nervously. “More than you know.”

Cassandra turned his face
back to hers and kissed him deeply, running her hands up and down
the hard lines of his chest. She felt Brad’s tension ease and his
hand’s worked their way back under her shirt. She giggled when he
fumbled with her bra, helped him, and then giggled again when his
hands found their way to her sweaty breasts.

“
It’s so hot out here,”
she moaned, eyes shut, as the boy tweaked her nipples. Ow, she
thought, not so rough, but didn’t say it.

Cassandra opened her eyes
long enough to see a blue orb floating in the air in front of her.
She closed her eyes again and it took a few moments to realize she
was seeing something out of the ordinary. What in the world, she
wondered, opening her eyes again, expecting it to have been a trick
of light or her imagination.

But the blue orb was still
there, floating about six feet off of the ground. It was about the
size of a basketball and glowed bright blue, illuminating the dark
night around Brad’s car.

“
Brad?” she said, trying
to ignore the boy’s hand on her breast and face on her
neck.

“
No, I’m good. We can do
this,” the boy replied between heavy breathing. Judging by the grip
he had on her small, pert breast he’d lost all inhibition. Too bad,
she thought.

“
Brad, look behind
you.”

The boy turned and gasped.
“What is that?”

The ball did not move and
Cassandra felt like she was being watched, through the ball. It was
an inexplicable feeling and she couldn’t shake it.

“
I think we should leave,”
she whispered, pulling the bra from her shirt through a sleeve and
tossing it aside. “I think we should leave now.”

Brad nodded and slipped
off the hood of the car, Cassandra close behind him. The ball
followed their movements, dropping a little as they both got in
Brad’s car.

“
This is the part where
you can’t find your keys,” Cassandra said nervously, never taking
her eyes from the blue orb. “And then after you do find them, the
car won’t start.”

“
What are you talking
about?”

“
Old horror movies. That’s
how it usually goes.”

“
I have the key right
here,” he told her, showing her the key to the car. When he stuck
it in the ignition and turned the motor over, however, the blue orb
glowed brighter, nearly too bright to look at. It began to pulse
with energy and Brad stared at it blankly. Cassandra tried to keep
the panic out of her voice, trying to stay calm.

“
Brad, put it in gear and
drive,” she ordered but the boy wouldn’t move.

Bolts of electricity
whipped about the orb like a child’s plasma glow toy. The air stank
of burnt electrical circuits and the orb began to emit a high
pitched squeal. Finally, a solid bolt of energy leapt from the orb
striking the car on the hood in a shower of smoke and sparks. The
engine died in a spasm, sounding like it had run out of gas. Brad
snapped out of it and frantically turned the key again, but the
car’s engine wouldn’t react.

“
I guess it wants us to
stay here,” she said solemnly.

She glanced up into the
night sky where the comet Worm Wood filled the horizon. Soon the
United Nation’s missiles would strike the comet, hopefully breaking
it into enough smaller pieces that their impact would not be as
catastrophic as the Texas sized chunk of ice slamming into the
earth. No one actually believed the government’s plan would work
and many feared that the many smaller impacts, scattered about the
globe, would be worse than the one impact of the undamaged comet.
Scientists likened it to the asteroid impact that killed off the
dinosaurs and no matter how it worked out, they’d said, the world
would be a very different place by the next morning.

“
What the hell is it?”
Brad asked, the boy making no effort to conceal the panic in his
own voice. “It’s going to kill us!”

She wasn’t sure what
difference it made, at that point, if the blue orb killed them or
the comet did. They were going to die and she wasn’t going to get
what she’d craved. She half wondered if her mother had anything to
do with it. That would be about right, she thought. One last gasp,
keeping her from the boys.