Love as the Darer Binding

***This one is a patchwork, I'm not kidding. Where there's a big change of scenery, I let you know at the beginning of the scene. There's some horror at the beginning, I guess, so if you need to, hug your teddy bear a little tighter and it's short anyway.

Oh, maybe I ought to point out something. I find that many of my readers are well-read and knowledgeable. In case you aren't, it's no crime, but two creatures appear in this (among the others) & I'd like to point out the differences.

A faun is a sort of half-human half-goat creature. They like pleasure, and some even like the idea of pleasure for the long term, though that's not supposed to be common in them. They can be foolish and make mistakes now and then.

A satyra is a female satyr. The one in this is very old and she also has a few uh, habits which separate her from the rest. They're brighter than fauns and the older ones tend to be crafty.

Hope you like it. 0_o

****

Not far from Mayesville, South Carolina, 11:02PM, local time

She leaned her head in further under the man's jawbone and closed her teeth on his neck again. He still struggled, but it was the only thing that he could do, after all. It was all they knew, once she began her gorging.

She understood it, of course. Any creature fights with everything they have once they know that they've been caught by something which wants them for sustenance. It was a natural thing.

It just didn't change anything.

She smelled the blood, tasted it's coppery tang, loving this part as her need rose in her. The rain poured down on the struggling pair, oblivious because it was rain. She was oblivious because she was about to continue her feast and it didn't do anything to dissuade or discourage her anyway. She opened her mouth and drew back a little, smiling with closed eyes as the warm flood sprayed over her face from his opened carotid artery.

She hadn't had anything this good in years.

It hadn't been especially hard to do. It never was once she'd decided. She stayed for a time in the bar, smiling at the men and dancing when she felt like it. She knew that the way that she looked to men made her difficult to resist. It was what she was there for, after all.

She'd never been there before, but this night seemed right and she'd been hungry. Even better, the rain went on like it was the end of the world, and the way that a lot of people tended to think that they each were the best drivers on the planet just had a way of keeping the road cops busy seeing to all of the wrecks on a night like this.

That made what she'd come for even easier to do, since by the time that she'd made her choice, she could make most of the rest forget just about any details of their time there that night.

They all knew it would happen, after all. The hospital emergency staff, the paramedics, the local fire departments, and the police. The rain would teem down, the roads wold turn a bit slippery, the visibility would drop to the point where most windshield wipers would be hard-pressed to keep up, ...

And the people would still drive on at the very same speed. A lot of them drove even slightly faster.

The drivers never had the thought, but the emergency workers knew. They all knew what a night like this would bring and so did she.

So she'd danced in the middle of all of the warm bodies, smiling the whole time. She'd accepted the drinks which were offered to her, knowing what had been added to them. Tossing those ones back made her smile even more. The drugs were there to incapacitate a human female.

She thought it was funny. She even knew which of the males there had done it.

It might have been something in her which thought that the irony might be a little delicious; she wouldn't have been able to answer honestly if she'd been asked. She didn't really know why ...

But she chose them.

Something about them thinking like spiders who were there to catch a pretty fly for their perverted fun, never knowing that they were looking at the wasp which hunted them. It was a humorous thought to her somehow.

The ride in the truck sitting between them had been interesting as well, since both of them kept looking at her, wondering why she wasn't out cold and growing slowly bolder as she allowed them both to cop a few feels. It hadn't been that big a deal to them, though. She was there with them and not looking as though what they'd put into her drinks had the slightest effect, but it didn't matter. What they had in mind would just probably get a little loud at the end.

It did get loud of course, but she wasn't the one making all of the noise.

They drove her through the rain to a run-down farm where one of them lived. When they tried to pull her out of the cab, she broke the driver's side door mechanism with a thought. While he struggled with it, cursing the old truck for choosing this particular time to fail him, he heard his friend's startled cry and turned to look.

That had been when she'd hit him so hard that she'd almost broken his neck -- which would never do, she'd thought at the time -- but she'd decided to save him for last.

While he slumped down unconscious, she wrapped her long claws around the other one's neck and reached across to open the passenger door. She pushed him out, but he almost hung from her grip as he half-stood in the rain. By then he was already pissing himself in his new and sudden fear but she didn't mind. She just took a couple of quick steps in the direction opposite the one in which he was facing as he squirmed and tried to beg for his life.

He ended up on his back on the sodden ground with her hunkered over him as she began. She was far too quick about it, and she regretted that for a moment, but there was the other one. She just didn't want to have to chase him very far if he woke up while she was busy.

It didn't take too long once she really let herself feel her hunger. The jacket and the shirt gave her only a moment's trouble until she'd ripped them away and sunk the long teeth of her maw over his chest and gorged while he screamed.

She heard the gasp then and looked back with her bloody face at the larger of the two. He was clearly disoriented, but he was coming back to whatever passed for thoughts in his selfish mind and he stared at what he saw, his eyes seeming as large as saucers. He'd figured out that the driver side door was never going to open properly again and after that slow thought had worked it's way into his muddled and groggy brain, he'd been trying to get out through the other door. It still hung open in the downpour after all, the interior light showing his terror and fear very well.

The rain was partially successful in rinsing the blood from her face, but she didn't pay it any mind anyway. She smiled at him, the contents of her mouth plainly evident and she chewed on what it held for a moment.

She held up his dying friend by the hair and leered, her speech slightly distorted because her mouth wasn't empty, "Want shom?"

The man almost reeled right back into the truck at the horrific sight and the finishing touch was the sight of the smaller man's beseeching eyes as his eyelids fluttered from the last of his consciousness while he hung bleeding out.

She kicked the door shut on the second one's legs, breaking one shin and causing him to scream as well.

She went back to her gorging.

When she thought of the one crying in the truck again, the first man was dead. She stood up and opened the door the rest of the way and reached in to pull him out.

He fought to the best of his desperate ability, but she'd pulled him shrieking to her lips anyway, lifting him a little as she sank to her knees again. This one had a better build on him.

That made him better to chew on in the driving rain.

She'd really enjoyed the second one, eating far more, when she heard the sound of the motorcycle as it was worked up the long, tree-lined and overgrown drive to the house. She wondered for a moment how she was going to have to tie this one up for later -- a few days from now, most likely. After a night like this one, she wouldn't need to eat any humans for a while.

She could go a long time between meals like this, and she usually did, needing to subsist on the smaller animals that she caught for herself most often, but eating like she had to might make her want to return to her old life and the thought didn't really appeal to her. She didn't show the passage of much more than perhaps twenty-two winters, but she'd been here almost as long as humans had. Well, for as long as they'd been living in villages anyway.

After a long moment spent in watching the light of the bike's headlights growing brighter as it approached, she knew that she wouldn't be doing anything like what had passed through her mind a few moments before. This one wasn't like the others which lay at her hooved feet. To her mind as she felt what she could of him, ...

This one might actually be a little interesting to her.

She made no move to run or hide herself and only stood in the pouring rain waiting.

Lee Coulter didn't mind the rain. He could ride though most things under most conditions and he never gave it much of a thought at the time. Sometimes it felt to him as though he'd been riding forever, but that was alright. He'd always loved to ride, and he didn't much mind a night like this.

He minded the state of the fuel gage on the top of the gas tank a lot more and he thought that he'd mind the thought of pushing a big-assed hog like his even more than that.

As he'd ridden up and down the rises through the mud of the farm driveway, he'd thought that he'd seen something up ahead at the top of it by the old house. As he crested the last rise to the top, he looked at what he saw there and decided that the scene was just a little different.

There was a pickup truck there with one door open in the rain, still running, and the scent of the exhaust as it hung in the air confirmed to him what had been in his mind earlier.

Old truck, big old V8 engine, an owner who liked to believe that whenever he pressed on the gas pedal that it was connected to the big dick that he liked to think that he had. Lee couldn't have cared less about that. He knew one thing.

Big old engines don't like to run on the shitty stuff they sold these days. They need the good stuff, whatever had enough octane to it to keep the big cylinders from pinging self-destructively in pre-ignition. A Harley needed juice like that even more, having only two cylinders and two pistons, but they were even larger than the ones in the truck and the cylinders were long.

Something like he rode needed that sweet fuel -- and he had a fairly good idea where he could get a free load right now.

It might have been saying something about him that he'd have these sorts of thoughts before any others. But Lee knew something else.

Anyone who's ever had to push a dead Harley knows what's important.

He slowed even more and looked at the rest of this in his lights. There were two men on their backs in the mud and he knew that they'd never be getting up again under their own steam, by the amount that he saw they were missing.

And there was a female before him, as naked in the rain as the day she'd been uh, ... whatever she'd been on that first day of her life. She had long, dark hair and he saw the blood still there over her face, breasts and her now slightly-distended belly. Under that, he saw the thick thatch of fur between her legs and also that it kept going, though it did look a little shorter as it led his gaze down her long furry donkey-like legs to her blood-covered hocks and hooves.

He looked back up and started again at the top, switching off his high beams since they were causing her to squint.

Her face was very human-like under those little horns in her hair. In this light, the color was hard to tell, but the wet and dark brown fur on her legs told him enough. Her tits were pretty nice, he thought, as he looked away for a moment down at the ground, and seeing that there was a large, flat rock embedded in the mud as it had likely been since being pushed here ahead of the last Ice Age, he lifted his left foot to swing out the kickstand.

With the bike thumping contentedly on it's stand, Lee looked up again at her and switched off his lights and the ignition with a little smile.

He couldn't remember seeing one girl who'd been able to make him feel this way in the last, ...

Well he didn't know, but it had to have been about forty fucking years, give or take. Since not long after he'd gotten back to the states, he guessed, and he'd never seen one just like this one in his long life, though he knew what she was.

He'd never seen a satyra before and he tried for a moment to decide if her odd eating habits might get in the way of things.

She'd been looking at him the whole time and she'd already decided that she so liked what she saw -- once he'd dimmed the lights a little. She didn't need the light at all, just as she knew that he didn't. She just wondered if he knew what she did, just by looking at him.

Lee had been born in a very rural part of England, and his parents had been a pair of people who'd worshipped in a way which would have seen them burned at the stake a few hundred years before during the witch hunts. Almost all of those unfortunates were either falsely accused Christians, or they were people who practised the old and natural way from long before. Very few were actually worshippers of the one they'd been said to have been.

But Lee's parents had been. As it was, most of their neighbors just knew that there was something a little odd about them.

Immigrating to America not long after Lee was perhaps three years-old, they'd tried to live a little more normally since the interest had faded. Somewhere in there, they came apart as a couple and went their separate ways. Lee had been raised by his mother and she moved the two of them around quite a bit, wanting to keep him away from the influence of his father. She really hadn't needed to do that, since he'd found himself somebody else and never gave either of them much of another thought.

They lived in poverty mostly, and Lee had never been the wiser for a long time. He'd spent the years of his childhood and adolescence trying to fit in, and struggling with some other things that nobody else around him of his age ever had to. Puberty and all that had been as tough on him as likely anyone his age, but he had other urges within himself to fight.

In the early sixties, he'd joined the US Army, and at least the work of training and learning the skills of a ranger had been a help. Eventually, his company had been rotated to Southeast Asia where Lee felt a little more at home. Under the right conditions there, he didn't have to fight his urges. He could kill as many as he liked. He'd never made a big deal about it, but to him sometimes, it felt better than being back home, since he'd never killed anybody there. Not on purpose.

But as time went on, Lee had the time to finish maturing and it caused him to look back over his life and think. That was when he knew more than anything that he wasn't like anyone else. He just looked like them, that was all. He'd been shot, but it never killed him and the wounds healed after a while. There had been times when he'd been the only one still alive in his whole platoon. He'd done his best to keep his buddies alive, but sometimes he'd failed. It had caused him to get angry, and when Lee was angry, well, ... it wasn't a good thing to be on the other side.

He'd had to hide what had happened several times, because there just was no plausible explanation for what had happened. Lee was large and muscular, but it raised the eyebrows of the ones who'd had to look into the decimation of a whole platoon of rangers leaving only one survivor.

And somewhere during his time over there, he'd learned something else.

He wasn't aging.

He kept 're-upping', opting to extend his stay every time that he was asked. He knew that he'd have an even harder time fitting in back home. But sooner or later, he knew what was bound to happen.

Lee Coulter would run out of war.

When it happened, he rotated back and left the service before any bright bulb took the time to think about him. He did manage to fit back into society without harming too many, but it had never felt right to him. He read through the many letters which his mother had written to him over the years, and as he did, he found the last one, unopened. It had come in the last pile and he'd missed it somehow. After reading what was there, he went home to see his mother.

She'd aged badly in the time that he'd been gone, though she was very happy to see him again. "I didn't really think that you'd die over there as so many poor boys have," she'd said, "but a mother worries over a son."

She was weak and ill, growing more so each day, though she flatly refused any offer of treatment. "There are so many things wrong with me, Lee. I doubt that anyone has the money to fix me everywhere and even so, I think that my time is coming to me, that's all."

Lee did his best to make her life comfortable and she was thankful for it. But she knew it when she only had a little time left. So she told him everything.

She was his mother, but the man he remembered hadn't been the one who'd made him with her.

He hadn't been born in a hospital because ... well, because he couldn't be.

These days, Lee was a little stuck where he'd been for decades. His hair had turned white, but that was the only sign of the years on him. It was still thick and full and he kept it in an old fashioned crew cut, as hard as it could be these days to find a barber to cut it like that for him. His hair was snow white and some people took him to be an albino at first, though a look into his eyes showed no sign of any albinism.

Other than that, he looked like he was still in his mid-twenties and in a society where a trackable identity was everything, Lee Coulter had to hide what he was and work at whatever jobs he could find for cash. It tended to not pay well, but he found that he had little desire to earn the larger amounts which doing something unlawful would provide him. Lee was no angel not by any stretch, but he had it hard enough as it was.

The satyra was smiling as she stepped over to him.

From about anyone else alive, her first word as she uttered it - as what she was looking at completed her pleased surprise - would have pissed him off just a little.

But she sighed as she said it -- as though the thought was about the most pleasant one which she could ever have as she looked at her hand and seeing no blood on it, she laid it on his shoulder with a pleased expression.

"Demonspawn."

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Florida

Imogen sat on the edge of the bed, untying her bikini. They'd had a great time walking along the beach after their picnic lunch. The only thing which really bothered her was that they'd had to spend the time as a girl and her dog, so that meant that she could eat, but she had to feed him his half of the sandwiches, and set out the resealable plastic containers of the rest. But it had been fun.

Hours later now, they'd sat together on the floor as she'd flown another instrument flight. After that, she'd loaded up something a lot more interesting to fly and watched as Dusty got the hang of it at last.

They'd made their dinner together but now it was late.

"Come on, Baby," she said softly, "Turn out the lights and come to bed."

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Hungary, down in the cellars

Pob reached into the container and took out the last two handfuls of her old movies to put them on a shelf with a cover that could hold them if the craft was in any attitude so that they wouldn't end up all over from it. She didn't have anything to play them on just yet, but she'd already asked Abi if he might get her something and he'd agreed, also offering his regret that she and Ouna had come apart.