To Kill and Eat

Hunter bounded swiftly into the woods. He had been aching to shift since lunch time: he had felt the surge of animal energy coursing through his veins and the wolf's hunger had been clawing away at his insides. He needed to channel his urges into a hunt, otherwise, he would have gone crazy.

When he was far enough away from the fence, he chose a safe spot under a tree. The half moon was cradled in the tree's branches as he looked up: he deemed it a good sign.

He let go of his human mind and began to shift. His spine lengthened and his muscles grew to accommodate the increase in his height. From his human frame of nearly 6 feet tall, he grew larger to an impressive 8 feet from his head to his new hind legs. His bones shifted all over his body and his muscles and tissues expanded to cover them, all the while his organs moved, resizing and reorganizing inside him. As the surface of his body increased, his leather costume was swallowed into the expanding mass of his new skin.

When a human shifts into the werewolf form, the old skin is swallowed by the new skin. Organic leather when worn melds with the natural skin of the human body and forms the foundation for the new werewolf skin and fur. Any other material would be rejected in the transformation and be ripped apart like tissue paper. Hunter's leather getup was specifically designed to ensure that he would not go naked shifting in and out of his werewolf form.

Hunter's fur bloomed in light gray tufts across his transformed body, and as his tail grew out of the base of his spine, he fell to the ground on his newly formed paws. The increase in sense of smell and vision always overwhelmed him so he usually held his breath and kept his eyes closed while shifting forms.

When he felt the last of his bones and organs slide into place, he finally opened his eyes. From icy blue, they had changed into a deep amber color. It was a dark night out, but with his werewolf eyes he could see as clearly as though it were late afternoon. He took a deep breath and smelled the air.

He started and almost fell back on his haunches. There was a new smell in the woods. Something that had never been there before. He raised his muzzle in the air and took another whiff. He started again, jerking as though he'd been smacked on his snout.

There was a woman in the woods. She was still there and she wasn't far away.

The fact that there was a woman in the woods wasn't what surprised him though. People came out here every so often: students (usually male) on a dare wanting to prove they were brave and forest rangers (mostly male) who did their rounds in the woods every month or so.

This woman was different. Special. She had a scent like nothing he had ever smelled before in his young life. It was probably a scent that his father or even his grandfather had never smelled in their lives.

It was the scent of a female werewolf.

Werewolves in general were a rare species, rarer even than vampires and witches. Outside of his own family, Hunter had never met another werewolf, and even then all the ones he knew were male.

He couldn't believe his luck! He wagged his tail like a happy dog. He wanted to howl at the moon and proclaim his ecstasy. But he didn't. He would reserve his rejoicing for when he finally met this new werewolf.

He bounded off into the night, racing toward the source of the enticing scent.

****

In Ash's dream, the deer had disappeared. She was now eating the largest chicken leg she had ever seen in her life. Dreams were weird like that, they give you the things you crave when you're awake and blow it up to cartoon-level proportions. Her teeth were so strong that she cracked right through the bones and chewed them up. When one chicken leg disappeared, she reached for another one and proceeded to feast on it as well.

She was enjoying her meal when a large dog suddenly came up behind her. She turned around to greet it.

[Oooh, doggy! Maybe doggy is hungry too!] Ash thought.

With the giant chicken leg still in her mouth, she reached out to pet the large dog. But it wasn't her hand that reached out to pet him: it was a large bear-paw sized hand covered in thick dark gray fur. The fur was similar to the large dog's, only darker in color.

[Huh? What's going on?]

The theme of Ash's dream quickly changed from a happy feast to a strange twisted nightmare. The chicken leg in her mouth was no longer a chicken leg, but some kind of large animal leg. The large dog was now a very large wolf with light gray fur and amber eyes. And she was a fur covered creature.

She dropped the animal leg. She felt the broken bones in her mouth and tasted blood and flesh on her tongue. She swallowed, hard.

She felt a scream welling up inside of her. The large gray wolf was still staring at her. In a panic, she backed away from it, and as she did so she stepped on something wet. She turned to look at what she had stepped in and saw blood and entrails spilling out of a gory animal carcass. The animal's ribs had been broken, practically ripped open.

And then she saw its head. The head was untouched and still connected to the animal's body. It's partly open mouth still had traces of a fragrant bluish liquid, but its eyes were dead as dead could be. It was the deer from before, the one eating berries from earlier in her dream. The deer was dead.

Ash screamed in horror, but what came out of her mouth was an animal whimper: it was the whimper of a large, frightened dog.

Ash turned to run away from the bloody scene; she was in a nightmare, a bloody unreal nightmare! But even as she ran, she felt her feet buckle beneath her and she crashed on her side in the grass. She fell with a loud thudding sound, and then her mind went silent. 

****

Hunter came upon the new werewolf just as she had hunted down a young deer. He walked carefully behind her as she tore at the deer's ribs and ate its heart. He made a mental note of that: he liked to eat hearts too.

She hadn't seen him yet because her back was turned, but he was surprised that she hadn't smelled him yet. A normal animal would have turned around by then, alert to the presence of an intruder. But this one just kept eating.

[Fascinating,] he thought.

He stepped closer to her. She finally turned around and saw him. She still had the deer's leg in her mouth, but she had a friendly expression in her eyes. It almost looked like she was delighted to see him.

Hunter wagged his tail. He was so happy that she liked him! He bounded forward, eager to introduce himself. She reached out an arm to touch him, but then she froze. The expression in her eyes changed from joy into a palpable fear. Something was wrong!

She chewed at the remnants of the deer's leg in her mouth, and then she started thrashing about. She looked at the deer and let out a loud whimper, and then she ran away.

[Wow. That was not at all how I thought that would go,] Hunter thought.

He looked around, wondering what had scared her. He could still smell her: she was just a few meters away and she wasn't moving. He decided to look around and try to figure out what had spooked her.

[I'm the man in this situation. I should take care of her,] he thought.

He put his nose in the air and sniffed. Now that he had located the female werewolf, he concentrated on taking in the other scents in the woods. It was possible that he had scared her and that was why she ran away, but it hurt his pride to think it, so he forced his mind to consider another possibility: maybe something else had frightened her away.

His nose caught the scent of something a few meters away from where the dead deer was. He trotted off in the direction of a faintly familiar scent. His nose led him to the base of a tree. He had caught this scent in passing as he pursued the scent of the other werewolf, but he had dismissed it then as unimportant.

Torn clothes lay scattered about at the roots of the tree. He pawed at it and saw that it was an SBA uniform: white-long sleeved blouse and a dark gray pleated skirt with red trim at the bottom. The blouse's sleeves were in shreds and the back of it was nearly torn in half. The skirt had ripped almost halfway down on two sides.

In the mess were also some scattered underthings. There was a bra with a broken back clasp, elastic straps ripped off at the seams and a pair of white underwear, seemingly ripped in half. A pair of shredded knee socks completed the wrecked ensemble.

The uniform could have belonged to anybody at SBA, but Hunter knew this person. He knew her scent.

She was the reason he had gone out to hunt that night in the first place.

The tattered uniform belonged to Ash Parker.