Chapter 16- The Taste of Blood
Light shafts cut through the forest, beaming down through the dense canopy like searchlights and cast the quiet wood in an unreal, almost fantastic glow as small half-humanoid bugs and birds buzzed through the air or sang from perches hidden high in the boughs. Crawling down out of the Dragon Spine Mountains, fog swirled and spread out across the valley floor moving slowly like a gray tidal wave engulfing everything and enshrouding the landscape in gloom. Wherever it went it muffled the sounds of the forest as the birds and bugs settled down and the darkened wood grew eerily quiet.
Ahead of the fog, I trotted deftly through the forest following the sandy colored tail of my lovely vixen, Huxian. Having left Glenna behind at our roadside campsite over five hours earlier to hunt for food, we were both shapeshifted into our pure fox forms which made us rather small, and immensely more stealthy. Now, we were seeking the source of a pleasant scent of honey that seemed to fill the basin for the last several miles with its sweet aroma as we closed in on a dark ravine with a ridge up above.
Huxian paused and looked back to see if I was still behind her. When my emerald green met her glacial blue eyes, I tried not to see the smeared stains of blood that coated her snout and speckled her fur. We had been hunting for only an hour when she found and killed a fat little groundhog while I was a few hundred yards away picking berries.
——(!)——
4 hours earlier-
Shrieking screams cut through the silence of the forest like a knife and scared me nearly out of my skin. Dropping my satchel, I shapeshifted and bolted off to find Huxian. I was a gold and white bullet streaking through the woods until I came upon her and a pretty groundhog.
Both were in humanoid forms, wrestling and thrashing around. Huxian was larger, her curly sandy blonde hair tossing back and forth as her rippling muscles moved and flexed beneath her fur as her long, thick, fluffy tail wagged aggressively back and forth as she bore the much smaller Animal to the ground. Her breasts were so large that I could easily bury my face in her cleavage, and she would have been able to prop them up on my shoulders. Her waist was slim, but her belly protruded in a large round curve that bespoke of her being mid-term in her pregnancy. Below her belly she was graced with wide hips and a plentiful buttocks that led to thick thighs that slimmed at the knees and curvy calves and lower legs that were a hybridization where the fibula and tibia bones met a fox's ankle and long calaceum, astragalus, tarsal, and metatarsal bones before reaching her furry pawed feet with long claws on all five toes.
The groundhog woman was short and portly, and would have only stood a little taller than four feet had she been on her feet. Her hips were nearly as wide as her legs were long, her buttocks was round and plentiful, and she had a short fluffy brown tail that was quivering from shock. Her thighs were short and thick before thinning out to hybrid lower legs and small paws. Her belly was thick and rounded with fat, as were her breasts whose size would have been on par with Huxian's, if she were the same height. She was covered in thick brown fur and had lustrous brown hair in a long braid. She had a kindly triangular face with big brown eyes, a short, slightly turned up, wide nose, and an oval mouth with a thinner top and an overly plump bottom lip. However, at that moment, her pretty face was contorted by pain and fear. Huxian held her braid tight in her grasp and was pulling the pretty little groundhog's head sideways as she bit down on her throat repeatedly.
Blood squirted across the ground as the little female struggled to crawl out from under Huxian while gasping feebly, "Please! No! Please..."
Huxian wasn't listening, she was fully caught up in the thrall of her hunting instincts. I remembered all the times in my previous life watching National Geographic or Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. I knew what it looked like, from the safety of a couch and watching through a television screen, as a predator hunted and killed its prey, but this, this was so much...more!
Shapeshifting out of my fox form, I shouted, "Huxian! What are you doing?!"
With blood and spit dripping from her mouth, she pulled back and chortled happily, "Hunting, my love! Hunting!"
The scared little groundhog's eyes fluttered as tears poured down her cheeks. Her eyes crossed and her lips trembled as she gasped once again pitifully, "Please," as she mustered up a last, feeble surge of strength, and struggled to break free.
Huxian snapped her head back, and with a growl, bit into the female's neck puncturing and tearing the rodent's carotid artery as the gristly crunch of her esophagus rang in my ears. Turning away, I stumbled behind the nearest tree and vomited loudly. Once I was finally able to return to the scene of the hunt, that felt more like a murder scene. Huxian was standing up, her overly plump breasts heaving from her exertions as she carefully licked blood from her hands to half way up her forearms. Beneath her, the little groundhog lay on the ground dead, her little body giving momentary involuntary twitches while her deep brown eyes stared vacantly as blood slowly dribbled from her mouth to run down her fur from several punctures in her neck and lacerations across her arms and belly.
"Oh my goddess," I gasped as I walked over and knelt down and caressed the little groundhog's cheek and hissed, "You...killed her!"
Looking up from her grooming, Huxian's expression firmed when she saw the horror and disgust in my face. Her mouth was stained red, and blood was splattered all across her breasts. Her nipples were erect and her pregnant belly seemed larger than it was just a few hours earlier. She was aroused and feral as she sashayed her way to me with exaggerated thrusts of her hips. In my alfar form she was several inches taller than me when she ran her clawed fingers across my chest, then slid her fingers up my neck and along my rapidly pumping carotid before continuing to my jaw.
Sliding her finger from my earlobe to my chin, she tilted my head up so that I was looking her in the eyes as she purred, "I see now that you have never truly hunted. Well, except for me that is, and we both know you were never going to kill anything with those toys. Regardless, I love that about you, but we," She said as she pointed to herself and the dead groundhog before continuing, "...are Animals. She is a herbivore while I am a carnivore, the hunter and the prey, and that is just the way life is," Turning to me and placing her hand on my chest, she snuggled up until her belly was rubbing against mine while she rubbed it with her other hand and continued, "And, if our children are going to be healthy, then I must eat meat! Raw...bloody...meat!" She growled ferally in my ear.
