Content Warning: this is a dark femdom story that contains dub-con/non-con, reluctant sex, fear, violence within sex, hunting, and sensory overload.
***
You know what night it is tonight, sisters? Fireworks night. Blaze-in-the-darkness night. Bangs-that-split-your-ears night. The night where everything outside is so loud and wild that it rattles in your body. When noise is pain and light is blindness and time can't keep up with the shot-shot-shot. Rapid-fire rockets rend the night and leave it in ecstatic rags.
Tonight will echo in their bodies and they won't be able to control the shift. Tonight they are confused and frightened and frustrated.
Perfect for the chase.
Perfect for the snare.
Tonight's the night, sisters. Hunting season.
Get ready.
*
He's running. It's a run he isn't used to. Predators run straight, predators run like arrows. They are pointed. They are aimed. They go teeth-first; their feet are almost inconsequential. Their hunger propels them, and it makes them fly. It's not like this. This is prey running, rabbit running, panicked, skittish. His feet feel too big. They skid in the dirt. Little grey-brown clouds burst over his black sneakers and ruin them. He feels gangly, his arms wheel and his legs flail. He keeps changing direction, batted about by the force from the explosions in the night.
Red.
Pink.
Violet.
The colours fizz and flash in his wolf eyes, a brief glimpse of stunning shattered gemstone before it gets too bright, too harsh, and his vision is pure white, and he's stumbling. He staggers against a tree. Its gnarled branches clatter in a rush of wind, stark against glaring, elixir-green. They're engulfed in smoke that prickles his wolf nose. He sneezes. He howls. The howl turns into a retching cough, and he's a man and he's cold, and his pulse is hammering fit to break his bones.
He keeps running.
The noise is inside him. Every explosion in the distance happens in the pit of his stomach. He feels like a valley containing a minefield, each detonated bomb setting off the next and the next in a domino that threatens to knock him off his feet and fling him into the sky. His wolf ears are ringing so loud, it's as if his skull is the clapper of a great bell. The autumn air on his human skin is cold like a river.
The woodland around him is a spinning zoetrope; black shapes flitting and stuttering and whirling in the sudden rainbow flares. Second by second, the trees stretch forever, illuminated into an endless interlace of silhouettes, then extinguish and leave him in an oblivion of darkness, the bloodstains of bright lights on his retinas. His wolf eyes flicker yellow. He stares desperately into monochrome details that only tangle as his human eyes blink blue. The air is thick and acrid. His human nose smells burned paper and gunpowder. His wolf tongue tastes sweat. His wolf heart is beating too hard for his human chest.
A speedy stream of bangs in an erratic rhythm. They drum up his back and bounce on the hard ground, like hailstones. He yelps, jumping like the roots are vipers biting his toes. He pelts.
He can hear laughter.
At first, he thinks it's just the echo of the rockets. But as the shots fade from his humming ears, the laughter rises clearer, cutting through the air and creeping over his neck. A chorus of gleeful cackling, like matches being struck, like champagne corks popping, like silver bullets clicking into cylinders. He stops running. He stops mid-shift, wolf claws bloodying human hands, wolf fangs curling human lips. He catches his jagged breath. Mist gusts from his mouth, blurring with the lingering, silver smoke. He strains to listen, but his ears are human. His strains to see, but a shower of electric blue douses his wolf's vision.
Another bang restarts his heart, like a lightning strike.
"This way, sisters!" A voice like a blade gliding along a whetstone. It slithers up his core.
He runs again, and as he runs, he hears them closing in. Boots and bikes. Revving engines and singing bells. Heavy boots snapping dry twigs. Rough wheels ripping the earth. Laughing. Laughing like no wolf canβ-βthat effervescent, caution-to-the-wind, Bacchanal laughter that only humans have, only on nights like this. It wars with the echo of the fireworks in his body, bubbling up in his blood. It skips under his heels and throws him forward. He runs faster.
Faster.
Faster.
Faster.
A blinding flash.
He howls and spins and runs again.
Scattergun popping and a surge of smoke.
He snarls and spins and runs again.
A spray of colour. A spray of soil from the wheel of a bike. The revving is so close that it grates his skin. He leaps away from it. Branches crack. Boots stomp.
He cries and spins and runs again.
"Now!"
He hurtles headlong into a net. It bursts wide and the weights at its rim plummet past him, like cannon balls. He hits the web hard. The ropes cut into his muscle and scratch his face. He roars. He tumbles to the ground, pain shocking his side as another explosion overhead shocks his skull.