Thirst

The Wolf Must Hunt.

Every one of those Accursed Beasts knew that if they abandoned the collection of essential human characteristics - family and lovers, social rank and artifice - and embraced the overriding singularity of that central instinct, they'd never go back. Steeped in Savagery, such Werewolves were said to coast through existence in the depths of an endless dream, their higher thought subsumed beneath the need to harry, kill, and devour, and they could never be awakened.

Why would they ever want to? To embrace that side of their nature was an escape from the sorrow, the contradiction, and the chaos. Entire packs had gone feral together, like a suicide pact of the mind.

Yusuf imagined it as something reaching far beyond happiness, since that was a mortal emotion; even now, with the background static of his pre-Change identity anchoring his higher thoughts, he felt as if he was walking on the edge of some expanded state of consciousness.

Here he was, gliding there along the periphery of his mortality's slippery slope, to go forth into the night with a loved one and pursue a problem to its den, to undo it - with fang or wit.

The dismal, flat gray world of Pomdufond Parish outside its metropolitan center was a flat sea of ill-kept, tangle-yard homes, garish strip malls and grease-cloyed fast food restaurants. On the Hunt, however, it became a warren of intrigue, a place where the coastal-plains offered scant shelter but for these rain-soaked, ramshackle little structures...perfect for Prey to hide among, making them a challenge to peel forth.

Down there, off the main highway in Delacroix, nestled in a vast parking lot filled with colorful vehicles; a Paulie's Pizza Warren squatted like a bloated, oblong rat-lord, carnival lights and music droning from its internals. Skitterlings dragged unwary kids down to the twisting, claustrophobic tunnels beneath to feed; but the Rats were good for an easy kill.

A few blocks southward, crawling closer to the salty, hurricane-ravaged shoreline where home values had plummeted, the palsied arm of federal assistance had never arrived after Katrina. Sobek maintained little wyrm's nests of abandoned treasures in Saint Martha's; hard, scaled meat, but invigorating and woven with secrets that armored one's hide for the next Hunt.

By contrast, and juxtaposed near the squalor in a way that reminded him of New Delhi or Hyderabad, a curling country road led to a series of gated communities in Hillshire Valley; a fief of two or three bathrooms per capita. Dahaka slithered amidst the church gatherings and country clubs, politicking and scheming...long, blood-and-venom rich meat.

...but he wasn't after lesser Afflicted; it was the pursuit of the most dangerous prey that made him giddy as a teenager, and taking Monroe along with him was like sneaking out to a concert with his girlfriend. One where he was the main man of the performance, howling his glory through brass strings and towering speakers to impress

her

. Music may have defined his human heart, but Hunting his own kind was the symphony of his soul, a strange outcome of his strange life. Other Werewolves understandably feared and despised him, though he'd never cared.

Someone had to do this.

The sensation of being On the Hunt was comparable to a perception-enhancing drug, one that cooled the uncomfortable inferno in his blood to a pleasant, tingling rush. Then again...as of late, that overabundance of warmth had found an outlet in the woman next to him. As he drove West along the interstate, he took the time to admire her.

"God

damn

you are classy Monroe Carter." He pulled one hand away from the wheel to map the sinews leading to her knee. Clad in camouflage shorts that came down to the middle of her svelte thigh, he slowly ran his palm and fingers up her teak-dark, smooth leg.

This sultry, formidable woman pulled a hand away from the careful reassembly of her rifle to close her fingers over the back of his palm, dragging it ever closer to her hip and looking at him with amber eyes, mischievous as a raven. "You're imaginative. Nobody's ever called me classy before, Mizrah."

"You like it?" his purr was confident, even as part of his heart quailed that she

might not

.

"I do cuz you're the one saying it, even if it's just a cute hallucination on your part." There, she beamed that

new

smile his way. Normally she hid her teeth, giving him the very real sense that she'd been holding something back, but now the dam of her caution had been breached and the light of her adoration beamed forth. "Or maybe it's just you don't know what that means," she challenged him.

"I do baby, wouldn't say it if I didn't." Not necessarily true, Yusuf made plenty of utterances whose four-fold meaning he didn't fully comprehend, but they sounded nice and worked in the moment. "Classy girls carry AKs, right?"

Their laughter was like sweet brandy and acidic coffee, taking off the edge with its lustrous bite. With her hunting at his side, the night didn't seem nearly as foreboding and hopeless. He wasn't just some pathetic lone quantity that couldn't catch his own prey, someone for Wolves like Ariadne to move like a pawn in their twisted, frenetic game of dominance and conspiracy. It was that fear that had driven him to ask this from Monroe, in defiance of all the traditions of the Night that governed their kind - Vampires and Werewolves didn't Hunt together...except for when they did, like now.

For a moment they sat in silence, just enjoying the other's presence. He considered the woman next to him in this new context; well, perhaps not entirely new. That first night they'd met at Radcliffe's, she'd chosen him as Prey - flattering, in retrospect - so in that way, she too had experience hunting the most dangerous prey.

What had left him very pleasantly surprised was that Monroe had never asked what they were going after, she'd simply come as prepared as she could.

What was that? It couldn't have been stupidity or impulsive behavior on her part, she (mostly) had that under control when he wasn't being a negative influence. The reasonable, monotonously human part of his mind that could reckon the emotions of others explained casually that she may have simply loved him that much...but in the grand hypostasis of his curse-bent mind, his father's and Lena's voice assured him, in unison, that such was not the case.

What does it matter? Do you need her to love you in this instance, or do you simply need her strength, her eyes on your back, and hot lead when you require?

"A'right. Lemme lay it out for you... the plan, the prey." Like they were going to clean out his aunt's apartment, or go chill with one of his eclectic friends. Monroe regarded him in the rearview mirror with a jackal's saffron stare, naturally intrigued - ah...she'd been waiting for him to kick it off, her whole stance was reminiscent of a dragonfly about to snatch a mosquito from the air.

"I'm all ears, handsome...not gonna lie, you got me all curious - what could big bad Yusuf Mizrah possibly need help tanglin' with, 'specially with sweet, harmless lil' ol' me?" She coyly pinched the tip of her tongue between her perfectly white teeth, and even though it probably was meant to look endearing her whole demeanor was unsubtly murderous. "Don't look at me like that, I'm not kiddin', you got a reputation even with Kindred, so...must be somethin' juicy."

What an incredible woman

, he thought. Her smile was a bonfire, repelling the coyote-shadows of his doubts about the nature of her affection; no woman smiled at him like that, not like Monroe Carter. "Her name is Shamrys Sharukhan. She's a...heh. Lupine."

-WHACK- slapped her palm against the ridges of his abs. "Color me intrigued, jerk."

"Haha...a'right, a'right do you want the too-long-didn't-read, or the whole spiel? I admit, it'd be more of a look into our world than most get." For all his casual charm and ease, the prospect of talking about The Jungle with anything that didn't run beneath its bloodsoaked canopy was akin to when he dropped into a dry pool for the first time on a skateboard.

Predators didn't reveal the Secrets of the Hunt to Prey...but Monroe wasn't Prey; she could be something so much more.

Partner.

Packmate

.

"Hmm hmm like an exclusive backstage pass to where all the freaky magic happens...like I'd pass that up. Spill the details." No hesitation on Monroe's part. Would she be able to stomach the horror of it all? Could he even adequately start to explain it?

"Okay, well..." Mizrah shifted in his seat uneasily as he took exit 29B. "So we're at the top of our foodchain, right?"

"I can't imagine Humans put up all that much of a fight when you go all...y'know, boogaloo at 'em." Monroe was surveying the way urban faded into suburban. The whims of capital unleashed across the globe had ground once vibrant industrial towns like West Cardiff down to bare concrete roads needle-tracked with potholes, arteries clogged with shuttered businesses and abandoned homes.

"If we had to eat nothing but Humans we'd have been caught long before...our usual prey is actually other Accursed Beings." Even in his car he felt the reflex to keep his voice down when they fell beneath the shadowed eaves of ragged apartment blocks or passed the gaping parking lots of big-box stores. "It's not just wolves, there's lions, rats and gators. Like a fucked up menagerie, but for me they're

all

Prey."

"How come we ain't never seen them, or know 'bout 'em?" She sounded, understandably, skeptical.

"That's a question a lotta Werewolves struggle with. Why are

we

the ones Mortals have all these stories and movies about? Probably some of our own fucked up on a grand scale one too many times in the old days, got too grandiose and the Mortals didn't forget like they usually do." No doubt Vampires wrestled with that issue themselves.

"Okay so, what's all this got to do with this unlucky Shamrys bitch?" Monroe's honey-tinted gaze shifted from him to take in the neighborhoods passing by, beyond their thin sanctuary of glass windows; almost nobody came out at this hour, unlike closer to the Riviera where the streets were crammed with people.

"Well," Yusuf weighed the outlandishness of it all, recalling his own disbelief, his staunch rejection of the loathsome truth when Lena had laid it all out, her boot on his back. "We got predators of our own, we call them Outsiders. And like, they live on the dark side of the moon, and can't get to us real easy."

"Hold up," she jabbed a pink-painted fingernail into the air like an arrow. "They're aliens that live on the moon? The airless, barren rock up there, we talkin' 'bout the same moon?"

"Same one babe." Mizrah let that sink in for a bit, stopping at a traffic light spiderwebbed with cracks, checking his phone to confirm Shamrys' address and cursing as his car's shocks suffered their way over the broken road.

To an Accursed Being, the lunar sphere was no simple mass of dead igneous stone...she didn't need to know what he saw, scream-singing down at him from the night sky. "They're not little green men or anything like that, they're like...ghosts. Alien ghosts, not quite substantial but they can still mess us up."

"Alien ghosts," she repeated, like she was trying to make sense of it - it was such an ill-fitting, vague description, he felt like a tongue-stumbled lump where he was usually eloquent as Orpheus.

No choice but to power through, try and just...spit it out, best as he could. "No two are the same, not that I've ever seen. Some of 'em look like, I dunno, like a Metroid boss - "

- the Outsider's inferno-heat sucked all the oxygen out of the hallway, suffocating agony preceding lung-scorched shrieks as the phantasm blew through the hospital administrator door. Through the security camera feed Mizrah watched helpless staff twist and curl like leaves in its nimbus of starfire; the Outsider loomed above them, its smooth head speckled with blinking round eyes, its osseous body, criss-crossed with pipe-like growths, tangentially reminiscent of the human form. It watched him through the security feed, floating like a relentless leaf on a flame-wind in its pursuit -

" - others are more abstract, like a collection of spiral fractals or - "

-

an eerie, imperfect sphere, glowing with a soft, cold alien light. Like a warped mirror of the moon it too was covered with craters and mountain ranges, surrounded by some sort of translucent amniotic sack. It levitated above the swimming pool, reflecting both its light and the moon's. It drifted to where three naked human forms knelt, dripping a silvery, fat droplet of itself down their gaping throats, cracking and stretching their jaws, straining in communion as they swelled and Changed -

"Yusuf," Monroe started, but he didn't even register her voice as his mind decompartmentalized experiences and memories he'd kept clapped securely away.

"The worst part of it is what they do to us; they're vectors for an infection that only jumps between Werewolves...it turns us monsters into worse monsters - "

"Yusuf, baby." Her voice brought him back down to earth from the moon-haunted corners of his memory. "I get the idea...how 'bout you level with me a bit about Shamrys. What's her connection to these...alien ghosts?"

The tender timbre of her voice, the way her fingers brushed over his...the novelty of it steadied him, for none of the women in his life had ever successfully comforted him (of those few who'd tried). She smelled of gunmetal and that herby, hippy perfume she liked.

Right. Shamrys had been the original topic.

Yusuf's coal-dark gaze met itself in the rearview and he internally recoiled at the feral starkness of his eyes, the way his canines sharpened behind his lips. Struggling for control over the union of his mind and instincts, he adopted a mask of cool confidence to hide the sinistrous creature pacing fearfully in his head.

"I was getting to that." A lie, he was about to fall into a recitation of how he'd seen his own kind brutally deformed, their Change twisted out of their own control.

"I think Shamrys has the Outsider sickness - we call it the Lunar Strain. It's the sort of thing you just...can't leave alone, like a cancer. Worse," he paused, realizing he was about to reveal his weak, gory heartstrings...the root of his cowardice. "I wouldn't be able to run alone anymore, if the others found out."

Yusuf took the time to explain the situation with Ariadne, and as before found himself relating details he'd normally have kept close to his heart...that she wanted him in her Pack; that she routinely sent that red-headed goon Adam to remind him of the depths into which he'd fallen, and that if the Lunar Strain was confirmed within The City's bounds, that she would force the issue...perhaps making him an offer he couldn't refuse.

He expected, of course, the usual sort of questions about his past...why he insisted on Hunting as a lone wolf, why Ariadne was so keen on asserting alphahood over him. Monroe surprised him, for curiosity glimmered in her honey-bright eyes but she kept her attention on the task at hand. "So what should we expect when we come for her? This somethin' we can talk our way through?"

"If she's got the Strain then no, she'll have to die." The words came about as easily as they could; it wasn't as if she would be the first Lunar he'd killed, but the prospect wasn't one he relished. Something about killing another werewolf was toxic for the spirit, even moreso than eating humans. "If she's clean and she's just...addled, we leave her be. So y'know, could be somethin', could be nothin'."

Pomdufond Parish's straight avenues and roads gave way to ill-planned curves and dead ends, the space between structures growing enough that trash-strewn yards surrounded miserable single story homes...every fifth dwelling looked foreclosed upon or abandoned. Caved in roofs and long-dead, rust-rotted vehicles became a regular sight along with waterlogged lawns.

Monroe's cool fingers holding his own kept the fires of irrationality at a low crackle. "Back in Chicago we let 'em get out of control," he blurted out quite suddenly, rounding a bend that curled up one of West Cardiff's rare hills, his grip on the steering wheel tightening. "Stupid choice on our part, we were so wrapped up in our glory-mongering but in the end we were just a bunch of squabbling rats. Clawing and biting each other, scattered like we'd been set on by cobras."

The rainbow-braided vampire next to him remained silent, though she tightened her hold on his fingers and drew it back into her lap...there, he felt it; the kind of safety he'd once known with Mikey...warmth with Sadira's warmth...peace near Avi.

"They got us," Yusuf continued, his voice closer to stone-steadiness than before, "cuz we didn't keep an eye on our own...we weren't watchful for the symptoms."

"And those are?" she pressed him gently, sliding his palm to rest on her flat, smooth belly...smiling at him all cockeyed, something about it made him laugh; letting him feel her up to regain his composure? God

damn

she was infectiously confident.

"Well..." he mapped the lines of sinews in her belly and torso, and she pressed against his touch with a feline motion. "They're compelled to pass on the Strain, usually through an infecting bite...a ritual curse, or..." Mizrah's palm passed over the curve of her breast, and she pressed his hand into that firm globe. "Sex."

"How the hell'd a horndog like you stay clean then?" Monroe quipped when they reached the top of the hill, the road curling in on itself into a cul-de-sac like a dead centipede. He stopped the car underneath a willow tree's dangling fronds, distinctly aware of the deafening silence outside the City's confines.

"I mean, it isn't like I just stick my cock in every woman I see Carter."

"Mmm, just the real pretty ones, right?"

"The singularly gorgeous ones." Yusuf softly stroked his finger down her cheek; she smiled and leaned into his palm.

"Sweet-talkin' me before a flush-out...gonna get me all distracted." Monroe's lips delicately brushed his wrist; for a solitary moment he forgot all about the Hunt and hoped she'd dig her fangs into his radial vein but...there was time for that kind of intimacy later.

Still.

Their eyes met. Leaning into each other over the center console, their lips brushed softly at first, the tip of his tongue finding hers...nobody kissed him like Monroe. He bit her bottom lip, tugging softly and releasing. For a moment neither said a word to the other; she reached down under his seat, releasing the slide to push it back so she could climb with arachnid grace over the gear shift and straddle his hips.

"Don't go gettin' any..." Monroe pushed him back against the car seat and kissed him deeply, tasting of rose-flavored lip gloss and ashes. "...ideas, ain't like I'mma fuck you out here in the deep hood, just cuz - "

Yusuf interrupted her by pulling her back in, and for a few minutes they were just a pair of twenty-somethings making out in his driver's seat. The vampiress groaned gently against his mouth, her voice vibrating in his throat as she rolled her hips, grinding along his growing hardness before pushing away, leering at his grinning face. "So hard to keep your hands off me, isn't it, Carter?"

"After we deal with your problem-girl, you're taking me back home and giving it to me 'til the sun comes up," she stated flatly, stroking his bristly, dark hair. "A'right...so the Lunars try and spread their badness. What else?"

Right, the Hunt...easy to let instinct run at the forefront of his consciousness with her. "They build these, like...weird-ass structures we call Fanes. Something about them, when they're all done, it pulls down Outsiders. Don't ask me how."