FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"I'm the kind of person who doesn't have a cell phone."

Xander considered this. In his passenger seat sat an anthropomorphic wolf wearing twelve wooden bracelets, a pair of athletic shorts, and an undershirt. Said wolf was downright emaciated, and his name was, perhaps appropriately, Forty Days Fasted. The wolf was chestnut brown and had a soft, calm mien that suggested someone serene enough to not have a cell phone in a modern world.

Finally, Xander responded. "I'm the kind of person who has three."

A little smile tugged at the corner of Forty's lips. He gave a sideways look at the fawn-furred, incredibly fit, lean rabbit in the driver's seat. Xander, in contrast to his passenger, stretched out the tailored, pink button-up shirt and khaki slacks he wore with muscle. He sat stiffly, unaccustomed to the amount of mass on his frame and naturally more tense than Forty. Both men seemed to be between their twenties and thirties.

Forty decided on his answer. "I'm the kind of person who never drives if he can help it."

Xander took a few moments. He changed lanes cautiously. Xander was "the kind of person who says he drives defensively, but has actually been pulled over a half-dozen times for moving violations."

"The kind of person who can fall asleep anywhere." The wolf looked out the window at the highway traffic they were now passing.

"The kind of person who plays computer games until dawn."

"The kind of person who never played videogames as a kid."

"The kind of person everyone said was mature for his age when he was a kid, but wasn't."

"The kind of person who grew up on his own."

"The kind of person who only thinks he knows what that means."

"I was pretty much a feral child with less biting and tearing up the furniture." Forty's voice was low, smooth, bronze. It was a voice it seemed like you could hear across a crowded room without his having to shout. "Well, less biting, anyway."

"How'd you turn out as... the kind of person who gives up everything he has to help someone out?" Xander's voice was higher and quieter. In contrast, he seemed like he took effort to be heard even at a normal level, like he'd spent most of his life mumbling.

"I learned by contrasts. My... dad... Huh. I never called him that. I always called him" a name that slipped out of Xander's mind the moment he heard it.

"He raised you?" Xander spluttered. The car threatened to fishtail when he corrected for having whipped his attention so suddenly and completely to Forty. Instantly, a few things started clicking into place. Xander didn't know the ephemeral name Forty had said, but he knew of the person who had it: an enigmatic man who had stalked Xander following what is best described as a magically induced psychotic break. In brief, Xander had nearly killed nineteen people and would have killed the forgettable man and Forty as well, had the forgettable man not prepared for the encounter and Forty not completely overpowered him. Wiping away the event hadn't been complete or total, but it had cost Forty a lifetime's worth of resources. And there was no way to wipe away the memories Xander had of the horrors he was newly able to commit - and apparently, not often able to resist.*

"That's a charitable term for it. He was too young to be a father. Not physically. Emotionally."

"But raised? The way he raised the Assistants? Uplifted?"

Forty let out a frustrated sigh that could have been an annoyed growl. "None of us are uplifted."

"That's liberal speak."

"I don't like to make myself dangerous, but you're talking to someone who's lived both lives." The growl swelled faintly under his voice.

"So have I." Xander gritted his teeth. His ears were down to his shoulders and back. He was scared. There was a wolf in the room with him, and room was a tiny hybrid car. "Not for as long as you, and not the same way, but I thought one way before I met that man and his Assistants, and I think differently now. And I can't stop that. I can't stop knowing what everyone's double-speak is, all the time, just like you can't stop knowing what tomorrow is even though you didn't before." Xander felt his brain seething as it fired on all cylinders to fill in details, using every micro-expression, every rise and fall in timbre, every intentional choice of word.

There had been a time when Xander had been incapable of connecting with people. Then, an Assistant - a diminutive, anthropomorphic, magical servant - had taken it upon itself to temporarily consume and connect with Xander, apparently to better understand him. The connection had gone both ways, and Xander had become able to process neurotypical emotions not only well, but to the point that it sometimes overloaded him with information about the people with whom he spoke. It had also bestowed him with a suite of libidinal and predatory urges that at any given moment threatened to overwhelm and consume his customary placidness. Right now, his overcharged deductive ability was making him realize that Forty Days Fasted had not always been Anthro sapiens. He had been a wolf. A four-legged pack animal who hunted for sustenance and lived in the woods.

Forty was silent for a long time. Then, he said, "I suppose you have."

"How is that possible? He seems so... disoriented."

"There's a lot of him that's not quite screwed on straight, these days."

"Seems like it."

"He used to at least have a little sense of how to act. The powers he used to make the Assistants and to transform me changed him, as well."

"What sort of changes? Is it psychopathy?" Xander had once read that psychopathy was a thing that could make people act as though they didn't care about people. Or maybe not care about people? Or maybe it made them unable to care about people.

Fasted grunted. "Probably not correct to classify it. I don't think I can classify it."

"Has he talked to a psychologist? They could."

"They can't."

The words came out with such hard finality that they made Xander cringe again. He wasn't a cowardly man. Certainly wasn't after his transformation from unremarkable, but highly competent loner code jockey to gym rat close to bursting out of his button-up, who was presently dating a threesome. But, Forty Days Fasted, even as thin as he looked these days, could carry the certainty of bedrock in his tone and manner.

The rabbit shrugged a shoulder. "Sorry. I've always been good at categorizing, and being part Assistant, or whatever I am, puts that in overdrive."

"It's alright."

"I don't even know why I care. I guess because he's my kidnapper, even though I'm glad he did it. Just, the way he did it was so..."

In a joking tone, Forty supplied, "Erotic?"

"Well." Xander blushed and licked his lips. As a small portion of his manipulation, the nameless man - an ermine - had tempted Xander into repeatedly fucking and then eating him for the better part of an afternoon. And he'd been... good at it... and... appetizing. Arousal and hunger flared in the back of his mind at the same moment as shame and guilt. "Yes. But also unhinged. Wait. You don't have a cell phone?"

"Nope."

"Then how did he know when you were coming?"

"Planned it all out ahead of time."

"I would have... I would have killed him."

"It would have taken longer than you think."

"I turned that rugby team into biceps in a minute apiece." He shuddered and shrugged one shoulder. He vividly remembered them sliding inside him, whether through his mouth or loins, stretching him out, one by one, and becoming part of him - that is, until Forty had by some horrifying magic wrought them anew, flesh and spirit alike. They had gone home disoriented, with a perverse group dream.

"Yeah," Forty acknowledged. He was nonplussed.

Xander sighed out slowly through his nose. Life had gotten bizarre of late. Even drawing forth the memory of his feasting had one entire inner thigh of his khakis tenting. "How did you learn to control it? The... hunger?"

"It's not easy. It's why we've given you that 24-hour grace period to bring people back. Other than that, just brain training. Meditation. Reflection. Fasting."

"Should have guessed that one."

"Heh."

"And the libido?"

"Age and disenchantment."

"Literal disenchantment, or...?"

"Figurative. I'm down for a quick fuck now and then, but I've had a lot of sex." He had a sort of hollow look in his eyes, briefly. "The intimacy matters so much more than the physical." And the hollowness became pained.

Quietly, Xander asked, "Did you love him?"

He shouldn't have.

The road was silent for the rest of the trip. It wasn't that long a drive, from the city of Out There to the pitstop of a town that held Forty's place of employment: The Gilded Chasm Bar and Grille, which was a strip joint. It was an hour at most of nondescript road and some-descript roadside woods. Wind swept through branches and the fading late afternoon light burnished their canopies with gold. Forty Days Fasted was more of a morning person. He didn't have much to say.

They pulled into an asphalt parking lot where a strip mall kept the Gilded Chasm hidden behind a small suite of offices for a rabbi, a palm reader, and a psychologist. Forty invited Xander to at least come see the place, so he did. The entrance itself was a hole in the wall, but it at least had a vestibule of a shitty wooden deck with a few benches and an umbrella. Under that umbrella was a tall, broad, jacked rabbit named Jef.

"You're almost fuckin' late," Jef greeted them. Two thin, silver earrings chimed as they flicked against one another in his long, erect left ear, which struggled a bit to keep up with its right-sided twin.

"Fuck you, Jef, glad you ain't dead again. This is Xander."

Xander almost had to crane his neck to look up at Jef. Even so, he cautiously offered a hand to the fellow lapine. "Pleasure."

Jef grasped it. His own hand was hard and calloused, with thick fingers. Despite his rough-and-tumble appearance, though, Xander could only find a few pronounced scars. Nothing recent. "It's what's on sale, but we cook, too. Speakin' of food, Fasted, you're looking your name and your name ain't used to be five-nine one-forty-seven. Yet you've got a five-nine one-ninety-one fella playin' escort."

"I'm on a diet," Forty answered.

"HAH. A diet. Man what erotically eats for an audience says he's on a diet." Jef jerked his thumb at Forty Days Fasted in disbelief. His voice was snappy and harsh and his demeanor seemed playfully crass, but the way he looked at Forty held a hint of concealed concern. "Well you better fuckin' be ready to be off that diet in two hours twelve minutes, Mr. Forty, 'cuz you gotta show starting five after that."

"What would you do if I broke fast in two hours thirteen?"

"I wouldn't say shit 'cuz I'd've sent you sailing sixty seconds sooner, smartass; ain't puttin' Bean Pole McGee on show for folks what want a whole hunka wolf. Horny folk need to be parted from their finances, Forty, and you make 'em do it."

"You'd put on nothing instead?"

"Wouldn't be a whole helluva lotta difference, would it?" Jef crossed his arms. Seeing Jef staring down Forty, it drove home to Xander exactly how skinny the wolf was. He'd been monstrous when he'd stopped Xander's voracious rampaging. Now, he was skin and bones.

Xander struggled to keep up with the banter and the hidden messaging between them. Were they lovers? Friends? Exes? Coworkers? War buddies? He was hungry again from the effort. Trying to read Forty for an hour had burned him out. Regardless, Jef at least had no problem having this conversation right here on the deck, in front of a stranger. "What the fuck happened, Forty? You donate to lop-ear lunk here?"

Xander went crimson, neck to ear tips. The wolf answered calmly, "Crisis intervention."

Cars rolled by behind the one-story building that housed the Gilded Chasm, their Doppler sounds swishing back and forth from the highway. Forty Days Fasted's golden eyes and chestnut brown face held their gaze with Jef's barely furious green eyes and fawn fur. His earrings chimed at a perfect high C pitch in the wind.

Jef said, quietly, gruffly, "I worried about you, you fuck. Told you you could stay, you fuck off anyway and come back four hundred pounds lighter?" He toyed with a wooden bracelet coated with red fur on his biceps. Xander noticed it looked awfully similar to the bracelets Forty wore all over his body. What had they been through together? "And you bein' here ain't stopped the worry."

For the first time in the brief time Xander had known him, Forty wore an expression other than rue, enigmatic neutrality, or irritation. His gaze softened and warmed. His tail wagged exactly once. "Sorry."

"Anyway I'm fuckin' serious you need to go strip for strangers and also where on God's Green Gambling Earth did the barkeep go? I've put Grop on duty and he's a sad sack, too, without his two buddies to make a trio." The cadence was back. Politely, Jef said as an aside to Xander, "Grop was buds with a friend turned traitor and the barkeep."

"He didn't come back?"

"You didn't see him there? Didn't he head out to kill that ermine fella you were after?"

Xander blinked rapidly. They all knew each other. It was a damned soap opera but with porn and eating people. Had this always been happening, outside of Xander's periphery? "Someone's trying to kill him?" he interjected.

"Turn of phrase," Forty offered.

"Ain't," Jef retorted. "Sable sensation who sauces the nation never looks like he wants to kill someone 'nless he does." Everyone paused for a few beats. Xander and Forty looked at Jef, then one another, and then Jef again. Jef looked at the ground and kicked dirt. "Alright, that one wasn't so good," he admitted. "But I was on a fuckin' roll."

Xander filled the awkwardness that followed with, "He seems like he can take care of himself, though."

Forty rubbed his own jaw. "I'm not sure. I never got all the details on that." Double-speak again, and this time, one with not nearly enough context for Xander's new mental prowess to decipher. The buff bun knew Forty was saying two things, but not what either of the two things meant. "But yeah, they must have done a ships-in-the-night cosplay. Check on him when you get back, Xander?"

"He ain't stayin'?" Jef inquired.

"Up to him." Forty shrugged. "'s far as I'm concerned, he could even assist me on stage."

"I ain't payin' him. What's your spiel, Xan the Man with a Plan to Stan?"

The shorter rabbit thought for a moment. He figured he'd try to match the tone of the rapport these two had, and said bluntly, "Sometimes I pick up heavy things and put them down."

"HAH. Whatever. Just make people throw money at the two of you. I ain't care."

Xander chuckled. "Thanks, Jeff."

A crack like a shotgun blast exploded from the point of impact between Jef-one-eff's heel and the wooden deck on which he stood. A line of splinters sundered one of the boards along its entire length in both directions. Jef-one-eff, the jacked rabbit, had just done a rabbit thump.

Forty Days Fasted snarled and wheeled on Xander. "Show some GOD-DAMNED respec- oh, you know, we never introduced you properly, Jef."

Jef put a machete back into its sheath on his hip and lowered his face into one hand. "We forgot the formalities."

"We forgot the formalities."

"'cuz I was fuckin' worried about your fuckin' fasted fuck face."

"'cuz you were worried about me." Forty smiled. Xander did not. Xander had hopped ten feet backwards at the sound and drawn weapon.

"Miss me with that gay shit; now go wash up so you can rub your dicks on each other or whatever. My name, Xander, is Jef-one-eff, and I sincerely apologize for my outburst." He inclined his ears, head, and upper body in an earnest bow. Jef had standards, and he stuck to them. "Use that dead guy's house to prep, you know the one, Forty. Key's under the mat."

"You got it, Jef. See you soon. Hey, is that fresh market still open? I need props."

*A/N: See In-Network for the details of this little rampage.

--

"So what are the rules in all this?" Xander was preparing to go onstage, three minutes before the curtains opened.

"Don't harass anyone, don't touch anyone who doesn't consent, don't-"

"No, I mean, the eating stuff. If I just bought, say, a thousand pounds of protein powder and drank it in a slurry, could I pay back my debt?"

"No. Spirit matters." Forty Days Fasted had purloined a black vee neck that hung off his frame and some red athletic shorts that draped past his knees. He seemed comfortable in what they were about to do. "You could do it with live animals, though it tends to be inefficient. For the body to add to itself, the way this lets you do, it needs material it recognizes. It needs the je ne sais qua that makes our species our species. And yes, whatever the ermine did, it made me into both your species and whatever the Assistants are. I'm more flexible in what can contribute to me."

"Good. Glad to know there's at least some sense to all of this."

"It's ancient magic, and it was rare and verboten then. As verboten as anything could be. Too easy to abuse and let go out of control. It's part of what The Disagreements in the Deep put a stop to."

"I feel like I know half a dozen predators now."

"And nearly all from out of town. Most because of me or him. And it's all very concerning, because only I should be able to do this, anymore. Ready to do weird porn on stage?"

No. "Yeah." Xander hefted a crate much wider than his torso up against his chest.

"Here we go."

The curtains opened and the pair walked up a short, wooden ramp onto the main promenade of The Gilded Chasm. There were hoots, hollers, catcalls, claps, whistles, and woofs. Forty apparently had fans. Fans who were not at all concerned with his current state, unlike Jef the jacked rabbit. Forty picked up a mic from the stage.

"Evening, all. Please welcome my..." He licked his lips and smirked. "Assistant." Another round of applause, this one buffered by a swelling sound of awe and intrigue, went up. There weren't more than a few dozen people in the audience, but for a Tuesday night at a strip joint in the middle of nowhere, that was practically standing room only.

Xander lowered his crate to the ground to display the wares, which consisted of roughly a hundred pounds of fresh fish on ice. It had cost an enormous amount, but he had been intrigued enough to cough it up. The audience cheered like he were a magician's assistant. Did they think they were just watching a sexy sleight of hand act?

"I'm sure you've all noticed that there's a lot less of me than you're used to, and isn't that a shame?" Forty inquired, his voice husky. He flashed his teeth, and it almost seemed to pull the audience inches towards him. "But luckily, my good friend has brought along something to satisfy me. And it's a good thing, too, because I'm hungry, and otherwise..." The lights dimmed as Forty Days Fasted opened his jaws. No eye in the room was off his lips, his teeth, his salivating tongue. There was nothing else to look at. There was only service to be rendered. There was only a god to feed. "Let's just say I've thought about bringing all of you up on stage with me." The aura of voracity faded back to manageable levels, but there was now an edge to the atmosphere in the room. Xander realized he'd taken a few steps closer, unbidden.

Forty Days Fasted was terrifying.

But, the rabbit had to play his part. He fished around in the crate of ice for a small six-inch flounder and tossed it underhand across the stage. Forty snapped it in his jaws and swallowed. These were thawed, so it slid down easy. Xander had been assured all he had to do was toss, and the wolf would do the rest. Forty's body pulsed visibly and shook his clothing and the wooden bracelets hanging off his arms and legs. Xander threw another, then two right after one another. Snap, snap-snap, and they slid down. Nothing a normal person couldn't eat, even if the gulping was an impressive trick, but after each one, the wolf's entire form throbbed with the added meat.

Next, the stage assistant grabbed a ten-inch trout. It proved more unwieldy to handle, but Forty dove onto his back to catch a sloppy throw and sent it down with the rest with little effort. Xander looked down at him where he lay. He was no longer emaciated. The meals had spread across his body and become meat on his bones. More, on his back like this, the tent in his shorts couldn't be ignored. The twink of a wolf Forty had become was hung nearly to his knees. "More," he breathed into the microphone, while his other hand dropped to his groin. He flexed and stretched, arching his body upward to show off.

Xander obliged, by now himself fascinated with the process. The khakis compressed his own dick down one thigh, but it grew, and grew, and grew as he began dropping bigger and bigger helpings into Forty's maw. Nothing gave him pause. Half a dozen whole animals, and he swelled with each one, gradually tightening his shirt against his chest and shoulders and making the loose shorts distort with the silhouette of his loins.

After an even dozen came a climax of sorts: two feet and thirty pounds of pure protein disappeared into the ever-growing wolf, and he kept moaning, almost begging with more and more breath behind it, "More," while his cock throbbed harder, still hidden by his clothes.

There weren't many left at this point. A cod and a three-foot-long salmon, really. Xander, at first having questioned the eroticism of the concept, felt his pants go damp from his own precum. He was hungry, too. There was an eager heat in his mind burning out his usual sensibilities. He wanted to stuff his cock in Forty's face, then drag the wolf into him. He knew he couldn't. He knew Forty would overwhelm him in seconds. But he wanted to. Instead, he stripped off his shirt, unbuttoned his pants, and tossed the pair aside, to let his thigh-length member jut out below his underwear and let his cobbled abdominals shimmer in the stage lighting for all to see. Forty's part of the performance had let him hide his nervousness, but now, it was being cauterized by need. He suddenly became aware that he was nearly naked on stage. The predator he had become felt enlivened, empowered, and looked out not at patrons or customers, but at meals.

The wolf loudly licked his lips and locked his gaze on the lapine bounty. The mood in the audience shifted as they watched a predator's appetite make itself known. Xander dropped in the offering of cod, which took two sensual swallows, all without breaking eye contact and followed by Forty flexing against the now-tight sleeves of his shirt. He had to have grown two inches in height, and he'd put on dozens of pounds of muscle across his body. Glutes and thighs and biceps alike throbbed an inch larger. "More." Xander fed him the salmon. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds now. He let the rabbit feed it to him inches at a time, drawing out the process of swallowing while his throat bloated obscenely with the meal. "More," he murmured when he was done.

Xander dropped to his knees, ripped off his briefs, and wiped a drooling, foot-long cock across Forty's lips. He counted it as a personal victory that he hadn't just crammed Forty's snout inside it. The crowd cheered. The other predator on stage let out a long lupine tongue to caress the pole of flesh that had finally come out to play.

"That's more like it," he purred into the microphone, before arching his head back and dropping open his maw. Xander took the cue. His libido had finally flatlined the rest of his brain. There was fucking to do. He tipped his cock down, leaned forward, and filled Forty's muzzle with rabbit meat. Forty, now similar in build but taller than Xander, made it look like he was doing the rabbit a favor. Xander shook with need. His foot trembled on the stage and the thumping made the audience hoot with approval. He thrust once, twice, tapping the back of Forty's throat, and then lunged forward and bulged out the welcoming throat with a loud groan.

On a spotlit stage in a crowded room, a man who'd lived as a loner throat-fucked a demigod of muscle and growth and feeding with wild abandon. Pale, tan ass flexed and burned with every thrust. His hands gripped under Forty's arms for anchor to drive himself deeper and deeper, now in nine inches, ten, now hilting, with his orange-sized nuts barely kept from dragging on the floor by the height of his kneeling, now panting, now drooling, now slowing and gasping and digging claws into fur and flesh and forcing deeper, until his overheated mind burst with orgasm and flooded his willing receptacle with seed.

Forty didn't choke or squirm or gag - he snagged Xander's hips as though he owned them and ravenously accepted every drop of semen he was given. Each throb of Xander's orgasm was a throb of the wolf's body surging larger, seizing and bloating and feeding from the sustenance of the rabbit's climax. On and on they went while the audience whooped and the spotlights wheeled around the entwined pair.

Minutes passed, and Xander began to realize he'd grown weak. His body continued to climax, but he knew that even his supernatural nuts couldn't possibly keep going. He became aware of how much larger Forty was than he had been when they started. He looked down at his biceps, usually swollen nearly to the point of discomfort. They were shrinking before his eyes, while Forty continued to drink of him and grow. His legs, pumping each new blast of seed, began to burn and grow tired. The wolf's grip on his hips got tighter and hard as paws were better able to encircle them, and Forty's upper arms finally ripped seams on his shirt, while his cock shoved itself outside the left leg of athletic shorts that now barely reach mid-thigh.

Forty pulled Xander free and took a deep, satisfied breath. He locked eyes with Xander. "More," he demanded.

Xander stammered, "There, uh. I don't think... I can, I don't think there's more..." He couldn't remember his lines. Did he have lines?

Forty's grin broadened. "Don't you?" The mic was positioned by his lips. The crowd leaned in - those who weren't wiped out in afterglow, anyway.

The bigger man was going to eat him. Xander cowered. The audience couldn't tell the difference between forgetting lines and improv. Or between improv and honest terror. "I thought this was enough. I'll get more, I fucked up, sorry, I-"

Forty Days Fasted gripped hard, lifted, and pushed to make the rabbit sprawl down his front. He reached down and felt inside his shorts until he could bring his mammoth cock up in front of Xander's face. Confused, the prey delivered a series of quick laps to the drooling tip, precum rapidly connecting to his whole muzzle with its excess.

"Mmmm... nice try, but I'm hungry, not thirst. Besides, I could use some extra luck." He palmed Xander's bare ass in one hand, then slide it down his thigh, grabbed below the knee with his other paw, and lifted the broad rabbit foot up and into his maw.

"What are you doing?"

The wolf didn't respond. He had a foot in his mouth. Then an ankle, then a swollen, belabored calf.

"Stop... stop it. This wasn't part of the deal." Xander clung to his thigh weakly. The orgasm had left him barely functional. The room was silent except for some tense murmuring and the wet sounds as Forty kept the mic near his maw and swallowed. Xander's foot went into, then down his throat as the wolf sat up to get a better angle on his feast.

"Let me go. Let me go!" Xander started struggling. He planted his other foot on the ground and pushed. Forty casually picked it up and stuffed it in alongside the first. Xander braced with his hands, denied any sort of grounding, and ended up planking on the ground and showing off perfectly layered, lean obliques and serratus muscles to the audience. More than that, once his calf muscles entered Forty's chest, Xander felt strength leech out of them like he'd been hit with a paralytic, and he watched Forty's form grow behind him.

Satisfied his meal couldn't escape, the wolf sat forward more and more, gulping ravenously as he went, and in short order, Xander was digging claws into the floorboards to try to pull himself out and away. He had known this was one possible outcome. He hadn't expected to feel so weak. He had known this was likely how he was going to repay his debt today, but he had never really seen Forty work before. He looked back over his shoulder at the hulking wolf, who tore slashes in his own shirt so his bulging pectorals could squeeze against the tatters as he continued to absorb Xander. He couldn't resist. His claws dug furrows in the floor. Forty reached forward, grabbed the back of his neck with a muted snarl, widened his jaws, and tugged.

Inside, it was wet and hot. Forty's tongue and cheeks squished around the meal's limbs and explored his cum-glazed nuts and shaft, lathering them as he tugged deeper, deeper, unstoppably so. Xander felt the muscular ring of the throat claim his thighs, then his ass, loins, and hips. He was going inside the other man. He was being swallowed. He kicked, and saw his anemic kicks barely jostling the predator's chest, which simply stole the strength from his thighs and pulsed bigger, then bigger with the muscles of his ass, and then started on his abs. Forty kept pulling on his nape to claim his abdomen, generously dragged his tongue up over his nipples while he lifted Xander straight up to show him off to the audience like a sword swallower, and even curled that tongue up and across his throat. He released Xander and let the stolen growth pump him up another inch to surround the prey's head. Hands scrambled for purchase and found only ravenous hands in turn - one that wrapped around and pushed on his muzzle, one that bound his wrists and shoved them in after. The wolf claimed him. His fingers grabbed onto, then vanished behind teeth that slammed shut and gave way to a (perfectly mic'd) long, satisfied gulp.

Muffled through the wall of flesh, Xander heard, "Lucky I brought a friend. Any one of you morsels could have become... well, me. Guess I'll need to make new friends. Several." He stood, jostling the rabbit. "Any... twelve of you, I suppose. But that's for another time." A hand pressed against Xander's body through the thick abdominals Forty had taken from him, and he felt the bulge he had become get smoothed out as more of his body mass was taken from him, impossibly more. How much of him was left? A skeleton and some nerves?

Fabric tore as Forty flexed off the rest of his clothes. In a rumbling, reverberating voice, the star performer of The Gilded Chasm thanked the crowd, finished with a quaking, hungry growl into the microphone, and walked off stage.

"You okay in there?" he muttered once he was alone. Xander couldn't summon the strength to speak. What was left of his circulation quickened into high gear as he realized it. "Ah, shit. I did get kind of into it, didn't I? No worries, stay calm. Try not to think about breathing." Breathing. He hadn't breathed since he'd been in here. He heard the voice surrounding him, practically caressing him, as he was sealed in place by predatory flesh. How was he alive? What was happening to him? What was he?

Warmth, painful heat, searing vibrance and vivacity poured into Xander like molten lead into a mold. Before sensation could fully calibrate, he felt himself ejected onto the floor and caught up by enormous, broad, confident, chestnut-furred arms. He still felt panicked. Like the predatory instinct that had made him feed and fuck with abandon, he couldn't make the much more familiar prey instinct go away. Something about this magic enervated his will and made him into an animal.

"Hey hey hey. It's alright. You're fine." The first time had been different. He hadn't really been himself, and Forty had knocked him out for most of the experience. This time, Xander had been eaten. The wolf just held him, though, while his newly gracile form shuddered and thrashed for freedom, no matter what his mind told it. Forty kept muttering soothing nothings to him for a few moments, and then, "I'm gonna go do a dumb stage thing. Stay right here. You're okay."

The massive muscle wolf went back out and picked up Xander's clothes. To a mixture of cheers and nervous gasps, he bowed while simply holding the trophies, then went around the stage using the shirt as a bag to collect tips. When he was done, he returned to the ex-meal rabbit and sat down next to him.

"I'm better," Xander murmured. "Just couldn't get it... under control. I could hear you. Just couldn't stop."

"No worries. I told you: meditation, isolation, and fasting. Otherwise you'll never be... yourself." He went chillingly quiet and far-away for a few moments before speaking again. "We need to stay here a little while, anyway. Jef will check in, and the clientele shouldn't see you leave."

"Won't that make people talk?"

"Nah. What I just did is literally impossible, remember?"

"Right. And I'm..." He looked down. He wasn't skin and bones. The rabbit was trim. Lean. Easily three inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter, though.

"Working through your debt." Forty rubbed his back companionably.

"Heh. Yeah. Back to the gym, I guess."

"Good getting to know you better, Xander. You want to do it this way next time? Make a semi-regular thing of it?"

"Heh, yeah. This was... new."

"Plus, now that you've had practice, you won't fuck my throat raw without warning me first," he teased.

Xander blushed. Fuck, life was weird, now.

--

On his way home, Xander saw smoke rising from the woods and a dim glow off the highway. He slowed to a crawl so he could rubberneck and try to see through the woods. The fire was farther off than he had thought, but when his eyes adjusted, he realized there was a car by the side of the road with its lights off. In his headlights, Xander saw a familiar figure calmly getting back in the car. It was the ermine... but it wasn't. It wasn't at all. It was the exact same shape, exact same movements, exact same everything, but a sable color that seemed to blot out the light rather than fail to reflect it. He didn't seem to notice Xander. He readjusted a fine black shirt that looked like it was meant for a server or a barkeep and stepped in the car, and that was all the rabbit could notice before he had to pass by.

With a last dash of curiosity, Xander checked his rearview mirror. A tiny sign was next to a dirt road and lit up only in one direction. "Lily Boutique." Xander, however, wasn't sure what that meant. He wondered if he was supposed to report an arson, but not for too long. The predator mindset he had acquired was whining in the back of his head and complaining about all the lost mass.

He was hungry.