On the Prowl

beauty. Only his forearms, his hands, had changed, looking unreal against the normal rest of him. “You didn’t change completely.”
    “Neither did you. Your eyes, though, they are that of your beast’s…and not of her. Are you better?”
    Better? I laughed, and it was a harsh, crying sound. A sound that made Dontaine flinch. “Yes, I’m better. Anything was better than that…but I can’t completely change. She won’t let my beast come completely out, Dontaine.” The urges and needs of my beast, however, were there, though the form was not. The animal hunger, the need to hunt, to bring down prey, to feel the hot spill of blood and quivering meat sliding down my throat…it beat within me. Only I was still in human form, like Dontaine, but not because I willed it. Oh, no. My will was being roadblocked by that she-bitch I had sucked into me.
    I was caught in a limbo of in between, feeling the needs of my animal self, unable to fulfill it in my human form. And before me stood something that could sate my hunger, something that still looked like prey. I pushed away from him, gasping, falling onto my back, crawling away from him, hysterical giggles choking my throat. I didn’t want to drink him anymore. Now I wanted to eat him.
    “Don’t…don’t…” he warned, and as I watched, his eyes turned from emerald green to autumn-leaf brown. The eyes of his beast, his wolf.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, knowing I was triggering his own hunting instincts, “but I…I can’t stay here.” I turned, scrambled to my feet, and ran. Fleeing from my fear, my hunger. But, unfortunately, I couldn’t flee from myself.
    I ran blindly, desperately. Without that natural liquid grace that had always been a part of me, that came from my Monère blood. Now, for the first time in my life, I stumbled, tripped, almost fell. I ran with human clumsiness, as if that limbo I was caught in shut down other parts of myself, my gifts of strength and grace that I had taken for granted, always there like the air I breathed. Only it wasn’t there now. I ran and knew even in my panicked confusion that I could not hunt like this. I could not capture, much less bring down even a rabbit in this condition, and without sating that bloodlust, I could not free myself of this state. I lurched up against a tree, felt the hard uneven bark dig into my palms. I pressed into it with my gripping fingertips, and rested my cheek against its cool rough surface, breathing hard.
    A sound, an instinct, brought my head up and I found myself looking into the eyes of a gray timber wolf less than three meters away. Its eyes were feral, wild, hungry. Seeing me as food. For one wild moment I thought it was Dontaine, changed fully into his wolf self. But another sound, a low threatening rumble, swung my gaze to my right. Dontaine stood a stone’s throw away, still in his human form—mostly, at least. Only his arms and hands were that of his animal self.
    He stood tall, beautiful, and silent, and was somehow frighteningly wild and feral. Even more dangerous than the natural wolf that hunted me. His eyes locked with that of his wolf brother, and a shuddering roll of electric energy rolled off him like silent echoing thunder. He growled, a deep, vicious warning. A totally animal sound coming from a human throat, and the pure menace it contained alarmed something primal in me. Was even scarier than looking up and finding myself face-to-face with a hungry timber wolf.
    The wolf turned and slipped away, ceding his prey to a more powerful predator. I turned back to look once more at Dontaine, at those reflective autumn-brown eyes, not because I wanted to, but because I was afraid not to. He came slowly forward, toward me, his body strong, fluid, deadly, a graceful killer with monstrous claws that could rip you apart with the added power of his beast upon him. I tensed to leap away, to flee, even though I knew I could not hope to outrun him.
    “Don’t, please,” he said, voice raw and deep, as if growling like that had hurt his vocal cords. “Don’t run…If you do…” He took a harsh, deep breath. “I cannot leave you unprotected, and you cannot hunt. Please, my Queen.” He stopped several yards away and dropped to his knees, begging me with those animal-brown eyes. “Please.”
    And I knew suddenly what he asked of me. What he would not put words to. There was only one other way to rid us both of our bloodlust: To channel it into sex. There was no other