Thirst Ch. 13

Yusuf Mizrah had made a grave error, one that in the brutal reality of The Jungle, was unforgivable...he'd forgotten the context that defined himself against his quarry, that most vital of life skills for any Accursed Being

Werewolves are The Most Dangerous Prey.

His consciousness slowly emerged, like a long-buried statue feeling the day's heat as sand slithered off its visage. Oppressively warm, his body was sticky and slick with sweat, and he smelled bare concrete, sweating brickwork and old pipes. The ground beneath his back was piled with something soft and uneven, like a mess of pillows...he felt feverish, disoriented and lethargic. Placid, which was not a natural state for a creature such as he.

Too late did he realize he'd been inhaling a sulfur-stinking, roiling mist which had crawled along the ground to cover him like a blanket; the stink of spent gunpowder seemed to slip greasily into his lungs. The memory connected to that reek hissed in blaring, shrieking klaxons of otherworldly peril, warning him of impending annihilation in eerie quiet, and as his fog-choked brain struggled to remember the root of his fear, he heard the quiet brush of bared feet over the ground.

Mizrah dared to open his eyes, the musician's mind feebly noting and quavering at the cloth white streamers strung through pipes segmented amidst the ceiling; the air was still but they fluttered like curtains dancing in a zephyr

Like ghosts emerging from the mist, three figures wafted like smoke from among the wafting cloth, their individual features obfuscated by dancing shadows; Yusuf recognized the same spidery symbols of chicanery that had forced his mind to disrergard the silo, or Shamrys' shotgun toting thrall. They cast their own heatless, eldritch unlight.

Staring at them further quelled the part of his brain that screamed he was in danger, that could recall details such his name or his turbulent age. He was, instead, stricken with trance, watching as the three closed the distance with eerie synchronicity. Yusuf's mind resolved them into female shapes, distinct from one another but only for a split-frame moment before they grew identical.

A light whose source he couldn't reckon sent beams of dream-haze illumination through the dangling sheets, casting visibility upon three mirror images of the same woman. He recognized her (them?) as Shamrys through the inky fever-light; the primeval alarms in his brain were screaming at him that the very Prey he'd sought was not only mere meters from his fangs, but turning the tables and becoming the Hunter.

The Enkindled didn't care. His instincts' shrieks were muffled by the shifting fog, seeping through his lungs and into his mind to render it tractable...suggestive and easily distracted. Lying there, little better than a gawping mortal mesmerized by the way they moved, he struggled to attach memories to those identical faces.

Shamrys had always moved and spoken with a vulpine aspect, her steps a cavorting, bare-footed waltz whether dancing (had she danced with him before?) or chasing quarry. Naked before him, their hair was a striking, wavy auburn, held up in a bun and wrapped around what he recognized as a human rib bone. Silver, malformed masks that had the shiny, greasy texture of soapstone were secured over their eyes and noses - in this was the sole differentiation, as one appeared a carven, waxing crescent moon, the other waning, and one full. Shamrys' pale full breasts, round and ripe, were capped by delicate pink nipples, and her flared hips taunted with hints of lunar fertility.

From where he lay, he could easily see between the gap in their thighs; labia slick and swollen and arousal. The reptilian part of his brain signaled that mating was imminent, and the blood rushed reflexively through his sulfur-muddled body to his cock

His reasoning mind surfaced like a drowning man in the argent syrup poured over his consciousness; it shouted a warning - that this was how she would alter his Strain, but that holy diver sank beneath the waves when all three knelt down around him.

"The moon is so beautiful tonight, isn't it?" whispered the Shamrys wearing the waning crescent mask. She ran her palm softly over the definition of musculature in his lower belly, fingers creeping toward the lengthening, pierced staff of his penis.

"After we're finished with you down here, come up with us to lie under Her gaze, you'll feel so cool and sweet," invited the one wearing the waxing crescent mask. That one lifted his hand and placed it under the swell of her breast, brushing his fingers over her rosy nipple.

The full-moon masked Shamrys gave little more than a low, susurrating growl as she crawled over him - entirely rational fear / utterly irrational lust edged down his spine at the sight of her juices, a single droplet hanging down to alight in the middle of his shaft

"I...came...cuz I was..." Why had he come again? Surely because she was his Prey because it was his singular, driving duty to mate them, to fulfill that masculine directionless desire to fuck and conquer and cum.

Any other words died in his throat at the first touch of waning-Shamrys' lips upon his. They were cool like Monroe's somebody's...whose...? It didn't matter, not when waxing-Shamrys' fingers wrapped around his hardened cock, or when full moon-Shamrys ground her hungry, hot sex along the underside and painted her juices over his frenum ladder. Yusuf's fingers dug into the mass of pillows and blankets beneath him as the slick heat stirred him from somnolence, an unintelligible moan escaping his lips.

"You came because you want me to make you feel good," waning-Shamrys purred.

Yusuf, hissed his thinking mind, but he hatefully growled a petulant 'GO AWAY!' at himself because when he opened his eyes all three Shamrys were working his manhood, and it was amazing

He watched with a glazed stare as waning-Shamrys dragged her tongue up the underside of his haft and over his steel beads, while waxing-Shamrys skillfully and hungrily suckled his pierced glans. The liquid sounds of sex filled the space between them and when she slurped free, it was to roughly frot him against full moon-Shamrys' dripping vulva, hovering over his hips. His eyes squeezed shut as overwhelming ecstasy followed their hands roamed over the muscle-cuirass of his torso, wolf-talons scraping threateningly over his hips and thighs, and when they weren't giving him some of the most outrageous head he'd ever experienced, they were kissing and biting him hard enough to leave bloody marks that closed as soon as they opened.

Yusuf, you're losing to your Prey.

'What Prey? Stop it, this feels good.'

That is because they are Hunting you the way you Hunt.

'I am not being Hunted.'

Then what is this?

He couldn't answer, not when these three shapely, identical women were using mouth, hand and pussy to coax his seed ever closer to the surface - part of him knew that the annihilation of his thinking mind would come after his orgasm, the polar opposite of post-ejacultory clarity but he just couldn't care. Not when he watched full moon-Shamrys' clitoris crest over his cumslit; tingling sensation ran down length.

You're still on the Hunt...Hunt them, Hunt her.

'I am not Hunting -'

Monroe needs you.

Her name flashed like many-colored heat lightning, splitting the moon-filled sky of his mind momentarily. The purring thunder of her voice flashed through his bewitched neurons

Ahh you remember now, don't you dipshit.

A flash of lucidity came to him; struggling against the miasma was like swimming through glue, and they held him down, pinning him by the shoulders. Savage, feral full-moon Shamrys worked to fit his pierced helm into her dew-dripping grasp. "Let me go," he slurred through gritted teeth; waning-Shamrys silenced him with her tongue sliding back down his throat. He almost fell back down the gullet of their seduction as waxing-Shamrys bit on his nipple and full moon-Shamrys leaned back to settle his length fully within her.

'What...I have to get away, I have to run!'

You don't run. You finish the Hunt, that's how the Jungle knows and fears you.

'They have me! If I don't get out from underneath her she'll make me like them -'

Only if you let her win, and this is your arena. You've tracked and killed this kind of quarry before, and you are intimately familiar with its tricks.

He didn't need to keep stupidly interrogating himself to understand what this meant; he was the kind of Werewolf who utilized sex for the Hunt, and in that way Shamrys had put herself at a disadvantage unknowingly; if he could fight through the compulsion and sexual frenzy, he could identify the actual Werewolf among the three...and perhaps disrupt her hypnotic dweomer

Mizrah recalled something he'd said to Monroe on the way here: It isn't like I just stick my cock in every woman I see Carter...and despite this truth, he actually had prior carnal knowledge of Shamrys.

It had been shortly after coming here admittedly, back when he was desperate and without a place to stay...traumatized, spiritually mutilated after his flight from Chicago where the moon-freaks had slaughtered his packmates, and he'd been forced to drag their bodies into Lake Michigan which the Lunars dared not approach

He'd been...less than discerning back then and she'd been all too willing to absorb his ill-borne lusts, since she too had lost someone she loved.

What do you know of your Prey, Yusuf?

That question was increasingly difficult to answer as every hijacked instinct in his bewitched mind shuddered and groaned for him to lose himself to this fantasy-made-flesh. He scratched and dug at his memories, as if trying to unearth a bone long-since buried beneath the gnarled roots of time -

-FLASH-

" - it isn't like I didn't try, you know. Everything in my power to stop what happened to him."

Mizrah listened to her from where he sat at the edge of her couch, his cock still hard and dripping with his spent load which slowly crawled down the inside of her thigh. She was standing before her hearth with her back to him, wearing little more than the torn, white cotton blouse she hadn't bothered shucking

She gingerly took the picture frame, sliding it down carefully to run her shaking fingers over the glass. Yusuf drew to his feet and carefully approached; compared to what she'd lost, his own misfortune seemed a petty thing. He wasn't sure what to say for once and, in a show of empathy that was rare in that time, he chose to remain silent and simply lay a hand upon her freckled shoulder.

"It's just ironic you know? That's what always gets me Mizrah, the fact that we're capable of so much more than the humans we once were but..."

"Even we can't cure cancer." Cancer was a known, adversarial quantity; he'd stayed at his mother's bedside during her final days, watching the leukemia corrupt her blood until there was almost nothing left of her

Even had he been this sort of monster of poisoned probability and execrations, no magic he knew could have saved her.

Quiet passed between the two predators. He looked over her shoulder at the picture of a boy who closely resembled his mother, with that thick red hair and freckles along his cheeks. His arms were wrapped around a smiling Shamrys' neck

Yusuf noted the boy's frail, stick-thin limbs, his clubbed right hand, and the way he beamed with a little boy's enthused, sunshine-bright smile in spite of it.

He felt the song he'd listened to on repeat for days on end after losing everything rising like a lump in his throat.

"Please forgive me if I bleed."

"Please forgive me if I breathe."

"I have words I need to say."

"Oh so very much to say."

She turned to look up at him, her expression bitter as mace. He recognized it, twenty-two year old Yusuf staring back at him through the eyes of this Black-Talon he barely knew beyond a few hours of conversation at the last dive bar he'd performed at and the unleashed, passionate rut they'd shared only moments before.

"Whose life do I lead?"

"Whose air do I breathe?"

"Whose blood do I now bleed?"

"With whose skin now do I feel?"

They spent the rest of that night close, no other words needed as they simply simmered together in their own trauma and loss. It was a ritual repeated by countless Turnskins before them, and one that would repeat countless times more in the future. Neither their suffering nor their cursed fortunes were anything special, and after he took his leave with the rising sun they'd never spoken again...

-FLASH-

- and there he was, on his knees, thrusting his studded cock into waxing-Shamrys now, her arms tightly around his neck to hold on; behind and beneath her, full moon-Shamrys massaged and squeezed those heavy, firm breasts more for his benefit than hers. It was incredibly hard to think through the single-minded need to mate.

"Cum for us...I know you can stay hard, and then have your way with me next," hissed waning-Shamrys at his side, her kisses against his deltoids punctuated with teeth, her nails dragging crimson lines across his abdomen. "You can fill all of us, and then you'll be ours."

"Nnngh, a threat...no longer..." waxing-Shamrys grunted under his rhythmic, deep thrusts.

Act fast Yusuf.

'I can't. It feels too fucking good, I can't hold back.'

Monroe.

'...Monroe. I can't, I can't - '

Yusuf knew that if he orgasmed, it would complete the symbolic circle of infection; his Strain would alter irrevocably from glorious, burning Enkindled to glamor-haunted, psychosis-riddled Lunar...but the sucking, wet hunger of Shamrys' satin grip around his penis, the sight of her naked body / the growl of her feral desire / her nails digging into his muscles...

It was too much. Orgasm was coiling in the base of his manhood, like a steel spring compressing in his pelvis. "No, nononono..." he hissed through gritted teeth. The act of fucking her against the effort of pulling himself free was the difference between swimming in a crystal-clear lake and struggling through an algal mire.

"Yesss," waning-Shamrys susurrated into his ear, biting down on the ridge and drawing blood.

"Give up your seed...give up your everything, it's so much easier." Waxing-Shamrys pulled on his hips, tightening her thrumming, hot muscles around his shaft as he throbbed on the edge of climax.

Full moon-Shamrys simply ran her long, segmented tongue across her wet teeth.

Colors blossomed before his eyes, and in spite of their growls and exclamations of disappointment, he pulled himself free with a liquid, sucking sound; the curved, glinting haft of his cock was hard enough to split granite, and he was unable to restrain a single, thick rope of his fertility from shooting hard across her belly and between her breasts...

But that errant gush didn't come with the deep, overwhelming pleasure of orgasm. A pearlescent drop of his seed gathered on the bead of his Prince Albert, and he nearly lost his control when waxing-Shamrys stroked a finger along its underside and full moon-Shamrys took his glans in her mouth and sucked greedily.

"Nnnno NO NO!" he roared as he shoved away from them, grabbing onto a white cloth curtain dangling nearby to drag himself to his feet - the world seemed to heave with him, like he'd drank and smoked too much, and he stumbled over a tangle of pillows and sheets to fall painfully to his knees. He turned toward them, stalking with wolven surety to where he lay.

They wouldn't stop; even if he somehow clawed through the molasses of his senses to escape this basement. Even on four legs, they'd chase him down, drag him back here and inevitably turn him into a Lunar.

What, then, would happen to Monroe, the only woman - the only person - he cared for?

His throat is dry.

Thoughts murky, moon-addled.

Weak. Starving. Packless.

Desperate, he sings.

"Whose life do I lead?"

The effect was as immediate as it was painful to watch, even in this state. Waxing Moon-Shamrys halted in her tracks, as if struck by some shocking force. The other two continued their advance, like they'd not even heard him but it was too late.

"Yusuf...?" The one whispered, as if recognizing him for the first time. Each dulcet note of his song scourged her with the sorrow of memory, and steadily he was able to think beyond his fear, his lust and confusion.

"Whose air do I breathe?"

"Whose blood do I now bleed?"

"With whose skin now do I feel?"

He pushed up to his knees, taking a breath and letting himself feel it...every word turning Mikey's unflappable smile, Sadira's compassionate touch, Avi's cunning wit against him like a stiletto in his chest. The inky pall of witchcraft in the air began to fade.

Full-moon Shamrys and her Waning partner stopped in their tracks, their arms pulling inward like dying spiders as they shrieked; their exterior appearance seemed to melt away, leaving a pair of women shaved completely hairless, their bodies crisscrossed by rune inscribed strips of paper. They fell to their knees, moon-white eyes shocked with pain at the sudden fleshly transformation...but Mizrah hardly noticed the Thralls.

"I have nothing left to say."

"I have nothing left to feel."

"Am I supposed to let this go now,"

"Let darkness come and take you away?"

The tears had, by this point, welled up and flowed down the front of Shamrys' mask. Yusuf drew closer, pulling the mask from her face and throwing it to the side where it clattered against a wall.

Shamrys was little different from two years ago, but her once apple-green irises had been bleached the color of old paper. He graced her cheek with soft affection, his palm stroking away the tears.

For a moment there were only the two of them, remembering that night, coiled in each other's misery...but Shamrys might as well have been gazing down at him from where she'd been impaled upon cold, uncaring starlight, where alien shadows had stabbed their insubstantial claws through her brain.

"I'm sorry this happened to you." Did his words pierce the silvery veil of madness the Outsider had draped like an oily cloth over her sanity? Was anyone left within?

When the Enkindled seized her shoulders and pulled her close to sink his fangs into her throat, closing down and tearing away in a spray of black and crimson, did she feel the pain of betrayal? The terror of death's approach? Or was she forever trapped in the sorrow of her child's death?

Mizrah spat her trachea out, hurled her against the ground amidst the sulfur fumes, and let the Change take him; within seconds, where had once stood a nude, well muscled man of steel piercings and baritone song was three meters of clawed-and-fanged death, moving with unhinged speed that bit the head off one Thrall; the other he simply ripped in twain with a flash of gore and splattered viscera.

The walls were painted scarlet with death; wet, murky internals coated the pillows on which he'd been fucking Shamrys and her now eviscerated Thralls. In the time he'd spent disabling any threat they could pose, Shamrys' throat had already closed and she was Changing.

"IT'S ALL GONE YUSUF! THERE'S NOTHING LEERRRRRRRRRAAAUUUUUGH!" Shamrys howled as her jaw burst forth into an oversized maw, bloody bone tearing through skin and sinew and filling with teeth long as a wolf's but mirror-flat like a man's. As her arms packed on muscle and bloody claws burst from the tips of her fingers like his own, he registered a second pair of limbs exploding from her sides, grasping tridactyl claws like cloudy quartz.