From the Mists of Wolf Creek

by Rebecca Brandewyne

  Sometime in the night, one of the male dolls—dressed as an American Indian warrior and which Gram had once bought for her on some long-ago farmers’ market day—began to argue with one of the stuffed animals, a wolf that was one of the few tourists’ souvenirs that could be purchased in the small town of Wolf Creek.

  As the two toys quarreled, they started some kind of a ritual pagan dance that mimicked a hunt, with the warrior brandishing his spear fiercely and the wolf cunningly dodging this way and that, so he eluded the deadly weapon at every turn.

  To the increasingly louder tattoo of the drums that beat and echoed from somewhere in the shadows, the two toys ran and whirled and leaped across the shelves before suddenly bounding to the floor, where the carpet appeared eerily to have turned into a grassy meadow.

  At first, recognizing she was asleep and dreaming, Hallie was only bemused by the antics of the warrior doll and the stuffed wolf, wondering why she should imagine such a bizarre but harmless event.

  But then, slowly, as she watched from the bed where she lay dreaming, the tenor of the dance began to change, to take on a much more ominous tone, and much to her sudden horror, the two toys started to grow until they became full-sized replicas of their real-life counterparts—and then, right before her stricken gaze, they abruptly came alive.

  Locked in the throes of their lethal dance, they spun faster and faster, until they began to merge somehow into one being. When the transformation was complete, the pounding of the drums abruptly ceased, and after a moment, moving silently on padded feet, the thing they had become came to stand beside her bed, looming over her in the darkness.

  Hallie did not know if she was still asleep and dreaming, then, or if she had awakened. She knew only that her eyelids had fluttered open, and that by the dim, silvery glow of the moonlight that streamed through the sheer, gauzy folds of the freshly laundered curtains, she could see it was neither man nor beast who towered over her, but somehow both.

  The terrifying creature’s silky, shiny head boasted the upper face of an immense wolf, the largest she had ever seen, and just like that of the animal that had blocked her path last night, the black fur around its visage faded into silver-gray wisps, and a thin, jagged scar marred its left cheek. Its gleaming, predatory eyes appeared midnight blue in color in the half light, and its muzzle blended so smoothly with the lower half of a man’s dark and heavily stubbled countenance that the two images seemed somehow as one.

  The man-beast’s front legs were those of a wolf, as well, with huge paws as big as a man’s hands and tipped with sharp, hard black claws that looked capable of rending her from limb to limb. But the creature stood upright rather than on all fours, sporting the tall, powerful body and large heavy sex of a man.

  Naked and rippling with muscle, he was so dark and hirsute that his broad chest matted with velvety black hair flowed into the glossy black pelt of his arms and shoulders and face, making it difficult to distinguish where man ended and beast began. Or perhaps they both were one and the same, Hallie thought numbly as she stared up at him, morbidly fascinated despite the sheer terror engendered in her by the creature.

  Although his beautiful, full, bushy black tail that brushed the carpet-cum-grass was clearly discernible, his great hind legs seemed to be those a man one moment and those of a wolf the next, indeterminate, like the rest of him, confusing her, making her doubt what her wide green eyes truly beheld.

  Surely the man-beast was something to be found only in a nightmare, dredged from the darkest, most secretive chasms of her subconscious—frightening, dangerous and magnificent, exuding fatal animal magnetism and menace, treacherously carnal and seductive, a throwback to some atavistic time, some primeval place of mystery and magic that humankind had finally and forever lost with the onslaught of progress and civilization.

  So the shamans and witches of ancient cultures must have looked, Hallie realized in some dark cranny of her cloudy brain, when, cloaked in their animal skins, they had become the mythic shape-shifters who had given rise to the stories of werewolves and other only half-human beings that had peopled the tales of yore, subtly taking on the appearance and characteristics of the beasts they had portrayed, seeming to metamorphose into the actual creatures themselves.

  For a long, apprehensive moment in her dream, the man-beast did nothing but gaze down at her silently, rapaciously, his fierce blue eyes hypnotizing her, paralyzing her, as those of a predator rivet its prey a heartbeat before the stronger closed in to kill the weaker.

  Survival of the fittest. That was the law of the jungle—and Hallie had never been more conscious of it than in that instant when, without warning, snarling low in his throat, he suddenly sprang upon her, abruptly releasing her from his peculiarly mesmerizing spell.

  Wholly horrified then, driven by pure survival instinct, Hallie screamed and then screamed again as the creature pounced upon her, his harsh breath hot against her throat, his mighty arms and legs caging her in on both sides as he crouched over her shrinking figure. But in her dream, no one at Meadowsweet heard her panicked shrieks, or if they did, they ignored them. Or maybe she only thought she screamed and, in reality, made no sound at all, as is the way of a nightmare.

  Desperately, determinedly, she tried at first to escape and then, when that failed, to fight the wolfish man-beast, to defend herself against him. But much to her consternation, Hallie discovered she was oddly dazed and lethargic, as though she were ill or drunk or drugged.

  She seemed to move as though she were some how trapped in a slow-motion segment in a John Woo movie, as though her mind no longer had any control over her body. She could not free her self. Her resolute but ultimately pitiful attempt to battle the creature was futile. She was easily overcome when he captured her wrists in a tight grip and dragged them beneath her, pinning them with one strong paw.

  As he did so, he forced her supple back to arch in unwitting invitation, her full round breasts to strain upward, her taut nipples to quiver with inadvertent enticement against his massive chest, her hips to thrust alluringly against his own, her downy womanhood to skim his potent sex, greatly exciting them both.

  Hallie shivered with both terror and shame at the involuntary, quickening, melting response she experienced in response to the man-beast. Surely, there was something terribly wrong with her to feel such unnatural arousal at the sight of the creature, to yearn to couple with it, despite her fear.

  She felt sickened and mortified by her desire. But she could not escape from it, any more than she could flee from the man-beast. She thought she must be but a heartbeat from death—or worse. Her blood thrummed so fiercely in her veins that it was as though the wild, primal drumbeat that had somehow conjured the creature into existence pounded inside her, setting her to throbbing and aching for release.

  Whimpering helplessly, Hallie thrashed her giddy head, instinctively exposing her long white throat, baring its soft pale vulnerability to the man-beast, in an age-old gesture of appeasement and submission. She expected he would rip out her jugular vein, causing her blood to spew in a mortal torrent from her body.

  But when he at last lowered his dusky, undeniably proud, handsome head, it was to give her a long, languorous lick instead, his rough, inciting tongue following the graceful arch of her throat from its tiny hollow upward to her chin. Despite her dread, Hallie felt a sudden wild perverse thrill of anticipation and excitement shudder through her entire body, and she wanted to die.

  Sensing that, the man-beast dew back slightly so he could see her ashen face, his glimmering eyes boring down into hers, smoldering with a dark and dangerous hunger that made her breath catch on a ragged sob as she recognized his passionate, depraved intent.

  He wanted her—and he meant to have her.

  Once more, Hallie struggled mightily but vainly to gather her wits, to twist violently free from him, to escape from him. But much to her dismay, he subjugated her totally. Dizzy and weak, she was completely powerless against his immense strength as he pressed h
er down into the soft plump mattress upon which she lay.

  Still holding her prisoner with one paw, he began with the other to explore her, searching and mapping every curve and hollow of her vital young body, which had been wakened by other lovers in the past and was now eager and unsated from her current self-imposed abstinence.

  She felt the creature’s fervid breath against her ear and upon her heated skin as he sniffed and nibbled her, seeming more beast than man as his muzzle and mouth, his teeth and free paw roamed over her. Gently, he nuzzled her earlobe, his long pink tongue trailing languidly across her cheek and down her neck to her burgeoning breasts.

  Deeply, he inhaled the sweet wild fragrance of her, and in response, Hallie could smell the feral forest scent of him increasing, growing ever stronger and muskier, maddening her own senses, however unwillingly she acquiesced to them.

  Finding the highly sensitive place on one shoulder where it joined her nape, the creature bit her tenderly, his tongue flicking deliberately against her skin, causing another tremulous shiver to course through her violently. Obliviously, she cried out against him, a low, animalistic moan Hallie was only dully aware came from her own throat.

  She could not believe this was happening, that it was real.

  But, no, she reminded herself, it was not. It was only a strange, horrible dream—a nightmare, however utterly fantastic, frightening and fervent she might find it.

  Still, no matter how hard she tried, Hallie could not seem to waken herself from it from it, to drive the man-beast from her sleeping thoughts. In slumber, her fanciful imagination was now fully unleashed, running rampant with visions and desires she had not known she possessed, that shocked and shamed her to the very core of her being.

  Never before had she experienced such a graphically sexual and bestial dream, in which all her senses appeared to have come to the fore, to be quick with a life and a will all their own, separate and apart from the dictates of her own consciousness. She seemed to have no mind of her own, no ability or will left with which to contest against the creature.

  It was though as her brain had shut down, as though all her bones had turned molten inside her, leaving her as weak and limp as a rag doll, so the creature might do as he pleased with her, turning her this way and that, poking and prodding into every single nook and cranny of her being.

  As her concupiscent dream continued to unfold in her mind, Hallie’s childhood bedroom gradually evanesced into mist, to be replaced by an ancient, long-shadowed forest wherein she and the man-beast lay upon sweet wild grass crushed and trampled to release its green perfume. She seemed to watch from someplace far above as his mouth covered hers, his tongue plunging deep and insistent between her lips.

  She wanted to protest the invasion, but, instead, she felt her mouth opening and yielding to him, her tongue meeting his ardently, silently urging him on. She could feel his sharp canine teeth upon her soft, pliant lips, caressing and biting. And then his unstill mouth and tongue, his teeth and free paw seemed to be everywhere upon her, kissing and licking, nipping and petting, heightening her dismaying but irrefutable desire and deepening her humiliation that she should be so inexorably and provocatively stimulated by him.

  In some dim corner of her mind, Hallie prayed the creature would quickly finish with her. But much to her distress, he was not so inclined, fondling her breasts until they ached with passion, her nipples taut and trembling beneath his teasing tongue.

  His sleek, corded muscles bunching and quivering sinuously, the man-beast wrapped himself around her, growling and panting as he continued his exploration of her body, growing ever more excited as she unwittingly bucked and writhed against him. Despite that they were sharp and hard, the creature’s claws felt like rough raw silk as he dragged them lightly down her firm but soft belly and along the insides of her quavering thighs, causing an electric shock to surge from her fingertips to her toes.

  The strong, musky smell of him mingled with her own scent, intoxicating them both, and when, ensnaring his paw in her now-tangled blond hair, he lifted her head to press it against his sweat-dampened chest, Hallie could taste the thin layer of salt that encrusted his fleecy flesh, adding pungent spice to the musk. She knew her own skin was equally sheeny with perspiration and that it tasted salty, too, upon his own tongue.

  Time passed. Hallie had no idea how much, although in her dream, it seemed an eternity in which she drifted, dazed and throbbing vividly in every part of her, lusting for the man-beast to take her, to provide release for what he had so expertly and tightly wound within her—so skillfully and savagely inciting her that she felt she had actually become an animal herself, a she-wolf in season, ready and frantic to be mated.

  Still, endlessly, it seemed, the creature tormented her, scattering her senses to the four winds that soughed through the amorphous, atavistic forest wherein they twined, leaving her faint and breathless, floating in a dark, timeless place above the fragrant green grass that was their soft mating bed. Mingled sweat bathed their bodies, glistening in the moonlight that filtered through the filmy canopy formed by the leafy branches of the trees above.

  Fear and the perverse, perilous excitement that shocked and horrified her continued to fill Hallie’s being, stoking the fire that burned in her blood, its flames fed still further as the man-beast slid down her body, his hard sex a portentous threat, a bewitching promise as his hot mouth scalded her belly and thighs.

  Then, mercilessly, he opened her, bent his head to taste her, his tongue dipping deep into the mellifluous dark blond heart of her.

  Time and again, the brazen creature lapped her, parting her swollen nether lips to spread her sweet-flowing moisture lingeringly along the soft folds and crevices that trembled beneath his touch, and around the little nub that was the key to her delight, that quickened and quivered as he teased and taunted it, until she was like a wild thing beneath him, desperately craving release.

  At long last, suddenly releasing her pinioned hands and turning her over so her face was pressed into the pillow, his paws lifting her hips into position to receive him, the man-beast spread her eagerly yielding thighs wide and mounted her urgently, his need now as great as her own.

  Hard and deep, he drove into the warm, willing channel of her womanhood, his sex filling her with welcome fullness and pleasure. Her hands clawing the sheets on the bed, Hallie goaded him on with her low, hoarse moans of desire and de light, crying out as, his paws digging bruisingly into her hips, he thrust into her faster and faster, his breath coming in harsh, heated rasps in the moonlit darkness.

  Her violent climax seized her swiftly and savagely, erupting inside her in a flood of blinding sensation that left her gasping for air and shuddering uncontrollably in its aftermath, waves of ecstasy pulsing like stormy breakers through her body. The creature’s own release came just as quickly and explosively as hers, as with a fierce, triumphant howl, he spilled himself inside her, crushing her hips against him brutally until, finally, he was sated.

  Chapter 11

  The Face at the Window

  S till gasping for breath, Hallie started violently, wide-awake from her disturbingly sexual dream, abruptly sitting straight up in bed, her heart pounding furiously in her breast.

  For a moment, drowsy and disoriented, she did not know where she was, and she mistakenly believed she had somehow been ominously transported from her bedroom to a long-shadowed forest somewhere far beyond this earthly realm.

  The aftermath of the powerful climax she had experienced in her dream, her nightmare of the man-beast, still held her in its grip, its aftershocks continuing to course through her body before gradually ebbing and subsiding.

  She was terrified to glance at the pillow beside her, half afraid the bizarre, half-human creature her subconscious mind had conjured still lay beside her in the bed, as though she had somehow actually dreamed him into a real existence.

  At that horrifying thought, Hallie briefly covered her face with her hands, then dragged them roughly through
her unkempt blond hair.

  It was only a dream—a god-awful nightmare, she reassured herself firmly.

  Desperately she wished she had never quit smoking. She could have used a cigarette right now, to steady her nerves—or a good stiff drink. Still, there was probably nothing stronger than elderberry wine in the entire farmhouse.

  Gram had never drunk much, and she had been almost as bad as Aunts Agatha and Edith in her condemnation of strong liquor. A lack of fondness for hard alcohol appeared to be one of the few things on which all the sisters had seen eye to eye.

  Trace would most certainly have a cigarette, Hallie knew. Still, the notion of venturing outside in her nightgown and bare feet to the tack room at this late hour, to inform him she needed a smoke, would surely only make him think that was nothing more than a pretext and that she had other ideas entirely.

  Looking at the alarm clock on the nightstand, she saw it was nearly three. No, she could not go out there at this hour. Even if she were desperate and did not care in the least what he thought, the man had worked hard all day. Common courtesy alone dictated that she not interrupt his own slumber, just because a nightmare had disturbed hers.

  Further, now that she thought about it, Hallie irrationally blamed Trace for the whole bad dream. After all, it was he who, earlier that afternoon, during his dialogue with Aunt Gwen, had put the image of a spirit talker cloaked in a wolf skin into Hallie’s head, thereby no doubt triggering her nightmare.

  Even if there were nothing more than elderberry wine in the house, she really could do with a drink to settle herself down so she could get back to sleep, Hallie decided at last, reaching for her robe, which lay at the foot of the bed, just as its childhood counterpart had always done. Shrugging it on, she tossed back the covers and swung her feet over the side of the bed—freezing in fear when she suddenly spied a hideously distorted reddish white face, like that of a devil, peering in at her through one of the bedroom windows.