The Werewolf Cult

This is a short work of erotic fiction containing furry, or anthropomorphic, characters, which are animals that either demonstrate human intelligence or walk on two legs, for the purposes of these tales. It is a thriving and growing fandom in which creators are prevalent in art and writing especially.

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The Werewolf Cult

Darkness. The street lamps flickered out, one by one, plunging the whole road into darkness, each house with its own little drive taking on a shadowy, foreboding appearance. The trees rustled, spaced down the street at strategic intervals as if to lull homeowners into a false sense of them not living in an urban jungle, regardless of the concrete swathes and cookie-cutter houses, one as alike as the other. Even with the furnishings inside, it was difficult to tell one from the other.

Tucking my fingers into the pockets of my jacket, I let my thumbs hang out, the hood dragged up around my hair. It didn't keep much of the cold out though, a wet Autumn chill intent on working its way right down into my bones.

Yet it was still unnerving to be in the blackness, even on a street that I should have been well enough familiar with. I swallowed. Just a power cut. It was only a power cut. But the houses still had lights on, windows glowing like the empty, gaping eyes sockets of skulls, the interiors home to an infestation of small creatures that had made the death of a human their home.

Nobody thinks about who lived in houses before them. Perhaps I should have. Maybe then it wouldn't have happened.

Or maybe it would have happened anyway.

I took my first step down the street, the hairs on the back of my neck lifting as if I was a dog with its hackles raised. I knew something was wrong, very wrong, but I could not have told you what at that moment in time. The street looked normal, except for the lights, and I couldn't give myself any concrete reason not to continue.

That was my first mistake.

My hands prickled with cold and I clenched them instinctively into fists, shoving them down deep into my fleece-lined pockets. Yet they still itched and tingled as if I'd had them out on a frozen railing for too long, waiting for an outdoors event to get going while my breath frosted in the air. I'd done that many times and regretted forgetting gloves each and every time, but it was nothing like the cold sting that spiked through my hands like shards of ice. Even in the moment, I knew it was cliché and yet could not make the association any less so as I trudged on.

I grunted and hunched my shoulders, pace increasing. Home. I had to get home. But I'd never be home again - not truly. I wish I had known that then.

Step by step, I was destined to never be a man ever again.

I crossed into a shadow and groaned, muscles aching as if I'd spent hours at the gym pumping iron. But I was not one to go to the gym and my weedy form - hell, even I would have admitted it openly! - attested to that. The coat grew tight around me and I tried to pull it away from my shoulders, allow them a little more room to move, but there was no rest or respite as I filled out my clothes as I never had.

Breath rasped through my lungs, eyes bulging as I toppled forward, legs seeming to stretch and pull themselves into a new way of going. My shoes burst, toes shooting out as I tried to scramble up, clawing at the tarmac as panic well and truly set in. I heaved for air, eyes rolling back into my skull and the street spinning, spinning, spinning around me as if I'd allowed far too much liquor to slide down my needy throat. If only I'd just been drunk, perhaps this would have been a very different story.

Bones cracked and shifted, finding fresh grafts where there had previously been none at all. I tried to scream but found my body no longer had the ability to complete the sound, a gargled groan all that passed my gaping, drooling lips. I think that may have been the most terrible moment, now that I think back.

My body was not my own from that point on. But I did not yet know that. Even now, I recollect the horror of the moment with a shudder, knowing that I was powerless to stop it as I twisted and writhed in the gutter, dirt and muck slick on my darkening skin. My chest pulled up in a sickening arch as if pulled by a higher power and I howled in the unbroken sanctity of my own mind, though that refuge was still there to be broken as they pleased to use me.

Have you ever felt the horror of being unable to breathe? I clawed at my throat as my face bulged out grotesquely, stretching into a horrifyingly animalistic snout. My skin prickled, covering the monstrosity with rapidly thickening, black fur, coarse to the touch as I brought my hands up to it in shock. But they were not as they'd once been either, fingers becoming shorter and stubbier with blunt, ragged claws pushing from the tips as my fingernails ceased to be. I never realised just how much I'd miss fingernails until, well...

Pain mingled with bone-cracking judders as my body was forcibly yanked and rammed into a new shape, my back stronger than ever and muscles connecting themselves with sinew to bone. I'd never been so ripped, strength powering through me as it had never done before, and I pushed myself up from the ground with bulging arms, jaws clacking together sharply as I took my first, shuddering breath in the control of my new body.

Funny how something like breathing could even be beyond my control, but it is what it is these days. Not much I can do about it now. Even if I do wish I'd never walked down that street on the way home. Maybe they'd have missed me if I'd gone a different way. Now I'll never know.

The changes came swiftly, fur coating my nakedness in a sick kind of blessing. My massive shoulders rounded with muscle and I grunted deep in the back of my throat, the base of my spine itching as something pushed from it, new vertebrae elongated into what I would later uncover to be a tail. My human teeth rattled out of my mouth and I whined, snatching for them with paw-like hands, but they were quickly replaced with newer and better ones - fangs that could rip and tear and hook into flesh. If I so please, of course. Biting and tearing have become favourite pastimes of mine since that fateful day.

A blood-curdling snarl, even to my own ears, ripped through me, saliva drooling from what had become my jaws. My ears tickled, shifting up to the top of my head where they could swivel back and forth, a notch cut out of one as if a particular design flaw had been subtly programmed in. I later learned that it was just one more way that they could identify me. But that is no matter in the grand scheme of a new life, an escape from surly reality, or so I tell myself. Sometimes, those lies are the only thing that keeps me going.

Transforming. Changing. Mutating. Yes, that was more like the word I was really looking for: I was a mutant. A wolf's muzzle protruding from what should have been my face and I staggered up on two legs, off-balance as my centre of gravity shifted.

Taller. I was much taller. As I swayed and hunched over, dragging in ragged breath after ragged breath, I tried to find myself again, the man that I really knew I was. But there was nothing left of me to suggest that I'd once been a young man with stubble on his face, pushed up onto my toes as if I was about to launch into a breakneck run at a moment's notice. My new tail wagged and I leapt and staggered from the sheer shock of the new sensation, eyes wide and tongue lolling out as I panted anxiously.

I was a dog - no, a wolf. But wolves didn't stand on two feet. Or paws. Or whatever I had. My claws scraped over the tarmac and I shifted my weight, feeling how my tail pointed back to balance me. There were no more changes as the wind whistled, my ears twisting to catch the sound as I saw further in the dark than I ever had before. Every blade of grass around the trees in the pavement, planted by human beings and not growing in the cut out squares stood out in stark contrast to the urban landscape around as if they had been drawn up in high definition. Even with the street lights out, the end of the street was easily visible to me and I blinked rapidly, gawping at my newfound skill.

And the sounds! I could hear everything! The rustle of a possum digging in a bin, a bat flittering by overhead and even the couple in the glass-fronted house down the road raising their voices in anger towards one another. I barked a short, hasty laugh. Fighting over the dishes... They didn't know how good they actually had it. For my life had changed forever and, poor, innocent, little me, I didn't even know it yet.

It was nice to be that naïve. I can't say the same anymore.

I push my shoulders back and stretch, a low growl rumbling up from my chest. I didn't know it was possible for a man to make a sound like that, but I wasn't a man anymore.

As if called by a higher power, I turned my muzzle up to where the wind swept away the roiling clouds above, clearing a halo through which the full moon could shine down, lighting up my mangy fur with a glow that was altogether far too serene. I tipped my head all the way back and, before my mind could actually catch up with what my body was being called to do, the howl broke from me.

A beautiful song. The one of my people. It thrummed through me as if belted out by a full orchestra, rising and falling with the ebb of the wind. And, so far above, my creators stirred. A rush of satisfaction that was not my own caressed my fur, a foreign presence in my mind that I couldn't help but feel inherently terrified of. Instinct was most likely my only smart move that night, not to trust them, him, they. I still didn't know. Only that they were and that went without question.

Welcome to your new life, my assassin.

With my clothes scattered in shreds and a layer of thick fur to protect me from the elements, I faced my new life as a werewolf.

And the change had only just begun.