by Logan Jacobs
“That barn,” she said as she pointed. “I don’t trust it. There could be ghasts in there. We’d better check.”
The barn did not look particularly sinister to me since it was the same one I’d entered the day before to fetch hay for the ponies. It wasn’t really any different from the other barns scattered across the outskirts of Ferndale.
“All right,” I agreed with a shrug.
The interior of the barn was almost pitch black by then, but our inspection did not reveal anything besides hay, a hay loft, a pitchfork, and a few empty stalls for cattle. Maybe Lizzy’s nose could pick up subtler threads, but all I smelled was the musk of cows that had been there recently even if they weren’t there now.
“Lizzy, I think we’re alone in here,” I said as I glanced around again.
“I know we are,” she purred.
Then she tackled me.
She bore down on me with her full weight, which thankfully was only the weight of a strong and well-endowed human woman, not the weight of a giant wolf. I could feel her breasts resting on my chest even through the thick leather of our matching surcoats, and she clenched her ass as she grinded against my crotch forcefully enough that the bulge of my still fully-clothed erection rubbed a little bit inside her wetness.
As she attacked my mouth with the same eagerness, I kissed her back and tugged her surcoat up to expose her bursting curves. As soon as it was completely off she forced her arm under my back, locked her legs around me, and executed some kind of wrestling move that flipped me over on top of her. That made it easier for her to get her hands between our bodies and unlace my pants while we continued to kiss. Then she used a combination of one clawed hand and one hind paw to force them down my legs without interrupting our tongues’ exploration of each other’s mouths.
We only broke the hungry kiss to allow Lizzy to yank my surcoat and tunic over my head. Once I was naked too, I copied her wrestling move and flipped her back on top of me, because I liked the way she had been grinding against me before and wanted to feel the same motion without my pants being in the way.
Lizzy knelt over me with one forearm supporting her, and her legs splayed wide so that her body hovered just inches above mine as her shaggy mass of hair tickled my face. She took my cock in her free hand and instead of guiding it inside of her right away, she stroked the tip along the length of her parted cleft to tease me with her wetness.
“Damn,” I groaned.
“Beg me,” Lizzy commanded as she stroked my tip lightly along her slit again.
“I don’t beg, woman,” I growled, and then I placed one hand at the base of my shaft to hold it at the right angle and used the other to grab her ass and force her down onto me while I bucked my hips up to meet her at the same time. That quick move got me about halfway in, but it caused Lizzy to scream in ecstasy, and she bore down with her full weight again and rocked her hips until she had worked my cock all the way inside.
Lizzy’s shaggy hair had fallen over her pretty face so that I couldn’t see it. For a few minutes I watched the undulations of her beautiful body as she rode me and enjoyed the spasms that shook her when I contributed a few moments of rapid, forceful bucking. I couldn’t keep that up for long without bringing us both to the edge of orgasm, and I wanted the she-wolf to keep riding me for a while. So I lay back, clutched the tops of her thighs in my hands, and closed my eyes so I could focus on the pure sensation of my cock being rhythmically massaged by her walls while she panted my name.
Our pace slowed to a sort of peaceful ebb and flow that allowed us to luxuriate in the sensation of being joined before our climax. I was just getting ready to buck Lizzy again, but she screamed, and my eyes flew open as she leapt off of me, ran for the pitchfork that rested against a wall, and ran back the other way.
My legs weren’t working very well at the moment, so by the time I managed to stand up, she had already forked a walking corpse that I had never even seen enter the barn into the wall. One tine pierced through the ghast’s neck, but off-center, apparently missing the spinal cord, so that it continued to struggle against the pitchfork attempting to reach Lizzy as it gurgled blood in its throat and gnashed its jaws at her.
Lizzy stood just out of reach watching for a second. Then when the ghast failed to free itself, she ran back to me and tried to push me back down on the ground again.
“I was so close, we have to finish,” she hissed.
My jaw dropped. “But Lizzy…. ”
“He’s dead, and I don’t give a fuck what he thinks,” she said impatiently. “Please Vander, I need to come so bad, and I need you to fill me.”
Well, I hadn’t lost my erection, and the quickest way to get around to dealing with the ghast in a responsible manner seemed to be giving Lizzy what she wanted. The ghast had already interrupted our peaceful moment though, so I did not resume our previous position.
Instead I told Lizzy, “Get down on your hands and knees.”
Once she had done that, I slid my slick cock into her soaking-wet entrance from behind and went at it full force. The sounds of our bodies slapping together were louder than the groaning and gurgling sounds of the pinned ghast by the door. By going for speed and efficiency instead of a bonding experience like before, I brought her to a shuddering climax and pumped what felt like a bucket of my seed into her within less than a minute.
“Ahh by the gods. That was fucking great. Or great fucking. Ya always fill me up so good.” Lizzy rolled over on her back and panted while I grabbed one of her discarded daggers and staggered over to the ghast on my practically-useless legs.
“Terrible timing you fuck,” I scolded him as I carved his head off below the pitchfork tines, so that he couldn’t bite my hand. His body thumped to the ground while his head remained pinned. I wrenched the pitchfork out, knocked the head off it against the wall, and replaced it up against the back wall where it had stood before.
Lizzy was struck by an uncontrollable fit of giggling.
“What’s so funny?” I demanded.
“Not you,” she said and pointed at the ghast lying in two halves by the door. “Him. Probably not what he expected to walk in on huh? But at least he was patient and waited for us to finish.”
I sighed. “We can slime him or burn him in the morning. He’ll be safe there for the night. But what I want to know is where he came from. Who is still enough of a moron at this point to keep hiding plague corpses from us?”
“Maybe he just dropped dead out in a field somewheres and no one noticed?” Lizzy suggested.
“Huh, I don’t even recognize him,” I said as I crouched down to examine the facial features of the severed head. “I thought I’d met pretty much all the villagers here by now. Some reclusive family holed up somewhere nearby or something maybe?”
As I stood up, Lizzy came up behind me and slid her hand down my stomach to grab my crotch. “He’s not a threat anymore, so who gives a fuck. Let’s just forget about him, hmmm?”
Her hand was making a very persuasive argument for that course of action, but I sighed and pushed it away. “We have to go make sure there aren’t any others.”
“Why can’t this village handle its own damn problems,” Lizzy grumbled.
I started throwing my clothes back on and retrieving my scattered weapons from the floor.
“Lizzy, if there are more ghasts out there, Ferndale doesn’t have all night,” I said pointedly and looked over to see if she’d made any progress in the getting-dressed department. Two huge green wolf eyes glared back at me in the darkness. Sharp canine teeth shone white as she growled. I sighed. “All right, I’ll carry your shit for you this once, but this isn’t going to be a regular thing.”
I strapped her weapons to my body, double-layered her surcoat over mine, buckled on her shoulder pauldron, laced on her bracers, and put her skull necklace on my neck.
When we finally got back out in the streets, they seemed to be perfectly quiet and peaceful. None of the huts appeared to have been broken out of by
a ghast after it killed all the inhabitants. Lizzy patrolled as a giant wolf by my side, hackles up, dutifully sniffing the winds in all directions. When we reached another barn, she barked once and pointed at it with her snout.
“Lizzy, I am not falling for that one again,” I growled. “I really want to fuck you, don’t get me wrong, but right now we have a job to do, people who are depending on us… ”
Lizzy rocketed off toward the barn.
I sprinted after her. “Damn it Lizzy--”
Right before I burst through the barn doors on her heels, I heard a loud, panicked Mooooo and assumed that some hapless cow had been understandably upset by the sudden appearance of a four-hundred-pound wolf.
Then I got inside and realized that Lizzy was the least of the poor bovine’s worries. There was one living cow that I could see. There were also the strung-out, splattered, inside-out remains of approximately three other cows, and seven or eight dead-eyed ghasts were on their hands and knees like animals shoveling cow flesh into their mouths and tearing it off the bone with their bare teeth. One of them stood up from the feast and staggered toward the intact cow in the corner.
“Protect the cow!” I yelled to Lizzy. With one leap she cleared ten feet and landed right between the cow and its would-be consumer. She growled and beckoned the ghast on with a wiggle of her claw. I was pretty sure the ghasts didn’t understand hand signals, but they also didn’t understand or didn’t care about the concept of self-destruction, so the cow-craving ghast continued to stagger obediently toward Lizzy.
Panicked mooing continued to play as the background noise in my ears as I drew two blades and launched myself at the larger group of ghasts in the middle of devouring their beefsteaks.
Either they had some vague comprehension of my hostile intent, or they just thought I looked like a fresher source of meat than the eviscerated cows, because with an assortment of grunts they paused their meal and stood up en masse to attack me.
I dodged the fastest one’s groping hands, sliced off his head, and was disappointed by the complete and utter lack of a consequent geyser of blood. In some ways, killing dead enemies just wasn’t as much fun.
The next one had an unusually toughly corded neck, such that my blade got stuck halfway through, and I had to kick him aside in order to deal with his companions first.
One sneaky bastard managed to belly-crawl over to me while I was otherwise engaged and used a cow corpse as cover in such a way that I didn’t notice him until his bony rotting hands locked around my ankle. Then just before he could chomp down on my calf, I used my free foot to stomp his skull to the ground. It cracked, but his jaws continued gnashing at me, so while keeping his skull pinned in place with my foot, I had to perform a precarious balancing act and lean down to sever his spinal cord.
Then a female ghast was so close at my shoulder that the only way I could think of to avoid getting bitten was to drop my remaining blade, grab the sneaky one’s skull in both hands, and bring it up diagonally over my shoulder to smash her in the face. The female ghast went sprawling on her back, so I dropped the skull, picked my blade back up, pounced on top of her, and cut her head off.
By the time I had dealt with all seven, I was splattered not only in rotting human innards, but in fresh cow innards.
Lizzy, meanwhile, watched the whole show while sitting on her haunches.
Once I had retrieved and sheathed all my blades, I told her, “We can go now. Is the cow alright?”
Lizzy lowered her head and whined.
“What do you mean?” I groaned. “You had one job!”
Lizzy morphed back into her human form, which allowed me to see the cow that had been hidden behind her. It was lying extremely still on the floor with its limbs at awkward angles and its tongue hanging out.
“I didn’t let no ghasts anywhere near it,” she explained, “but then I tried to gently pat it on the head to comfort it, like, and it just…”
“Had a heart attack and died,” I sighed. “Okay, I guess that’s not really your fault, but try to keep in mind that not all prey animals enjoy being patted on the head by giant carnivores? Just, you know, for future reference.”
“Yes, I’m sorry Vander,” Lizzy said in a small voice. A moment later she continued, “But now that it’s dead anyway, I was thinking maybe… ”
“Yes, yes, you can eat it tomorrow night,” I interrupted. It wouldn’t be all that fresh anymore by tomorrow night, but I knew that wolf-Lizzy didn’t care, and it looked like tonight was going to be busier than I had predicted. “But right now, we have a real problem on our hands.”
“We do?” Lizzy asked. “If the ghasts are transitioning to a diet of livestock… I mean the farmers ain’t gonna be pleased exactly, but that’s gotta beat eating them and their families?”
“It’s not just that, although that’s strange too, since Ed and Maire made it sound like the ghasts were only interested in human flesh,” I said. I pointed at the heap of corpses that I had just beheaded. “Look, Lizzy. Not one of them has a buboe or a pustule. Not one.”
“You mean the ghasts are recovering from the plague, after they’re already dead?” Lizzy asked as she scrunched up her nose in confusion.
“No, I mean that more ghasts are being created, out of corpses that weren’t even plague victims!” I said. “I don’t know where these came from. I don’t recognize any of their faces either. And some of them are old, practically skeletons. All the plague ghasts rise right away. There’s something else going on here.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We have to go investigate.”
Instead of responding, Lizzy morphed into a grumpy wolf and trotted out of the barn.
“So where do you think the source of these other ghasts is?” I asked her when we got back outside. “Does any direction smell… er… worse than the others?”
Lizzy couldn’t talk in her wolf form, but from the frustrated way she kept circling the barn, sniffing around, and racing to seemingly random fences or trees only to race back, I guessed that the answer was no.
Then after a few minutes, she found a piece of flesh that seemed to have fallen off one of the ghasts that had been inside eating the cows, about thirty feet east of the barn. After that, it was game on. A strand of corpse hair here. The print of a bare foot in a boggy patch of ground there. The feathered remains of a gnawed-on crow elsewhere. Sometimes Lizzy got excited by what just looked to me like patches of ground like any other, but I assumed there were signs there that only her wolf senses could detect.
Together, the she-wolf and I covered about five miles over the course of the next hour, as we alternated between jogging while trying not to trip over anything in the dark and me waiting while Lizzy sniffed around frantically to figure out where the trail picked up again. Five miles didn’t seem like that far of a distance to either of us, but it occurred to me that most of the people who lived in Ferndale had probably never been that far from their huts.
At that point, we reached the mouth of a cave. I had already thought that Lizzy and I were moving in almost total darkness, but staring into the blackness of that cave made me realize that the moon was actually doing a pretty decent job of lighting up the woods around us.
Lizzy crouched low, her hackles bristling, and snarled at the cave until strands of spittle dripped from her maws.
“Not just the den of some cozily hibernating bears then?” I asked with resignation.
Lizzy stalked toward the entrance of the cave and looked about as reluctant as I felt. I drew my falchion, since I had left Polliver with my other body guarding my friends back at Hakmut’s temple, and strode ahead of her. I placed my free hand on her warm, shaggy shoulder. That warmth became especially noticeable and especially appreciated as I realized that the inside of the cave was somehow unnaturally colder than the air outside.
We crept to the back of the cave, which opened into a tunnel which was, thankfully, broad enough to admit even Lizzy’s fou
r hundred pounds. At the end of that tunnel was an intersection between two possible routes, and we proceeded down the choice that Lizzy liked the least. We moved down three more tunnels which I remembered to myself as left, right, left.
Then, at the next intersection, I didn’t need Lizzy’s reluctant growl to tell me which was the worse of the two options, and which one we were therefore going to take. There was firelight dancing on the walls from the left side, reflected from whatever kind of chamber lay beyond, and I could hear a faint, repetitive scratching sound.
Inside, I expected to find someone sharpening a blade, but instead, there was a middle-aged man grating away with a spoon at the chain that connected his ankle to a ring on the floor.
When we entered, he looked up and begged us hoarsely, “Help me. Please help me.”
Then, we recognized each other at the same time. Terror crossed his face, then a kind of sniveling resignation.
It was Father Norrell.
“Hakmut, please, not again,” he sobbed. “Not the burning.”
He looked like the same watery-blue-eyed, heavy-jowled creature he had been when I first met him. None the worse for wear for having been burnt to a crisp courtesy of Polliver. Except that all of his former arrogance had completely evaporated, but I wasn’t sure if that had more to do with being burnt alive, or with whomever had shackled him in this cave.
Lizzy morphed into a human woman so that she could snap, “Shut up. Who put you here?”
Father Norrell uttered a sound of garbled surprise that somewhat resembled a hiccup.
I grabbed her arm and muttered, “... I think it was Hakmut.”
“What?” she scoffed. “That useless good-for-nothing bullshit fake god?”
