FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Three months later...

It had a scent. Night-time had a scent.

She'd thought this somewhere in the back of her mind when she'd had a job, but had never really cottoned on to the idea. But since the... sickness had got so bad she'd had to jack in her job and spend her nights outdoors, she'd had time to notice these things.

It smelled of the high notes of bitter pollution, of faintly cloying damp and ice, even though the temperature was above freezing.

She huffed resentfully and kicked a bent can off the kerb. Her tail swung in reaction to the kick.

The industrial end of the city was usually the best place for her to go for the night and she was almost there, but she hurried all the same: somehow Rikes had managed to make herself late. Two furs could be heard arguing somewhere in the maze of storage buildings and factories and dirty white vans, but she couldn't spare the time to worry about a couple of feuding drug dealers right now. She had to get to her safe spot and prepare before... it happened again.

Rikes checked her watch and muttered a swear-word to herself. There was no time! She swung over the railings, dropped down into the damp-smelling concrete below and shrugged off her rucksack even before the rails had stopped rattling and moaning. She began to unbutton her blouse but then started to feel the buzz.

Hissing "Shit!" again she tried to hurry, only in her panic she couldn't seem to get her fingers to work fast enou-

The buzz turned into a quick, sharp, powerful hum in her veins. And then-

"RrraaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAA..."

The world shrank around her, spinning away like the earth from the moon. The secret hollow constricted around her so that even before her transformation completed she had to brace her paws against the railings and pull herself free.

She barely even felt the resistance of her clothes before they tore. Her chest expanded, bullish with muscle that heaved and ripped her blouse. The garment went with a fight, pushed to destruction as her hardening breasts swelled and stretched it to breaking point. The seam at the back strained desperately but in the end it was the front that gave in. Rikes didn't see where the buttons went - she had other things to worry about.

Her legs bent into their werewolf angles which put her trousers under stress, but not nearly as much as her thickening thighs did. They gave with a tight ripping noise. Tightness, and then sudden release at the cleft of her buttocks and the outside upper legs. The individual stitches popped in rapid succession, one-by-one-by-one.

The underwiring on her bra dug into her ribcage and the cups had become nothing more than two irritating circles of padding, too small to hold what her breasts had become. Instinctively she scratched it all off, her claws raking at her wiry fur and taking shreds of elastic and steel and gel away with them. She shook one paw to free it of a bra strap.

Rikes twisted, shaking out the phantom feeling of her clothes still restricting her. Her fur grew and she felt it branch outwards, a wicked, wiry crest on the back of her neck. Teeth ready to rip and tear and a tongue hungry for the taste of blood. Dangerous, panting breaths and claws ready to close on her prey. Biceps ready to help them. A body bent half-way between fur and feral and mercilessly powerful.

The drug dealers kept on with their argument, their voices echoing in the complex maze of the industrial sector.

She crawl-walked away from her den, eager for the moon's rays on her face, keen to be out of the shadows. She stood and looked up at the shining disc.

The howl came from her feet, it seemed, and ran up her calves and through her knees like an electric charge. Up her hips - rattling her genitals - and punching her belly although it made her feel powerful, not winded. Surging through her chest where it opened her lungs, threw her head upwards and opened her jaws.

"AAAAAUUOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooOOOOOOooo..."

The beast was back!

As she lowered her head and felt the remains of her smooth werewolf song in her airway, Rikes listened.

The drug dealers had stopped talking.

Some dark corner of her mind had registered the direction they were in when she'd been in her daytime form and the beast now made use of it. Without a single conscious thought she bounded their way, her claws almost silent on the tarmac and pavement.

She had to eat.

Her blood raced with the feel of her own momentum: heavy but sleek galloping legs and forepaws, thickly-furred ears and a sinuous neck that compensated infinitesimally for each movement. A pinched, concentrating brow and cheeks ready to snarl. She devoured the tarmac in great bounds. Her tail steered.

There!

The vaguest whiff of a fur - Oh, and there was the scent of the other one - fleeted its way into her nostrils and she increased her speed. Her rampaging mind taunted her with anticipation, the taste of flesh and the generous burst of blood over her tongue and down her chin. Her stomach gurgled.

"What the fuck's that?" whispered a working-class accent.

And gave its position entirely away.

Some small shred of willpower made Rikes stop dead and listen. Hearing the voice had narrowed its owner's location down quite a lot, but if only he spoke again...

"Don't know. Just the wind."

If Rikes had been in her daytime form she would have registered that the second speaker realised that what he'd heard hadn't been the wind, and he was clearly trying to convince himself everything was all right. But the werewolf wasn't quite so subtle. She recognised the stiffness of fear in his voice and understood that her prey would be rooted to the spot.

That was all the beast needed to know.

Her limbs worked before she'd told them to, tucking under her huge shoulders and bent hips and springing her forward and then around the corner with no sound other than the patter of leathery pawpads on damp concrete.

She saw them a fraction of a second before she landed on the larger one.

They were under a street light, bathed in an orange sodium glow. Their clothes looked cheap, their faces spooked. Their own limbs reacted purely on instinct - just like hers had - scattering one to the left, one to the right.

The one on the right was blocked by the wall.

Her jaws went straight to his throat, clamped down and pulled. Feathery fur, too soft even to prickle her tongue, was sliced and gave way to the rich metallic taste of blood. The body jerked a few times and then lay still. Rikes growled in appreciation of it and buried her snout deeper in.

Chewy tubes, firm muscle, hard bone. The texture of a body. Rikes ate.

Then her ear twitched: the sounds in the area weren't coming just from her. Heavy breathing, which would be impossible for her prey. She raised her head and looked about.

A bat stood to one side, frozen to the spot. His eyes were wide and white in his dark face, his wings half-spread as if he'd been frozen in the process of taking flight. His feet were planted wide and his shoulders and ears raised. His only movements were the heavy heaves of his chest.

Rikes had a strange impression she recognised him. With flesh hanging from her mouth and her claws sunk securely into the warmth of her victim, she felt able to take the time to wonder.

Steam puffed from his mouth.

"It's you," he said numbly.

She narrowed her eyes. She struggled to place him. The fact that he seemed to know her made her edgy. It wouldn't take long for that feeling to turn into an attack, so her look of suspicion was a warning...

And then she had it! A dark moth pinned against the wall of a drug den. Round eyes watching him and the same twang of fear.

Black Nocturna.

Suddenly Rikes wasn't sure whether she wanted to attack, cry, try to speak or run away. Somefur who knew her from before! Oh, what wouldn't I give to turn back right now. And then she looked down at her prey. Or would that be a bad thing?

She looked back up at Black and saw that his gaze had followed hers. She almost heard the 'clink' as his frozen fear turned into active flight.

He span on the spot and fled, flapping his wings desperately to get airborne.

The sight of a running fur made the werewolf instinctively give chase, and she scampered after him.

He managed to catch a breeze and laboured his way into the air. Despite any impulse he might have felt he didn't look down.

She reached up and batted him. He was slightly too high for her to hook him down so all that achieved was to make him slew to one side.

Then he flapped higher, his leathery wings slapping.

She bounded onto a low brick wall and then, with a single powerful leap, onto the corrugated roof of a factory which rang with a hollow moan. She snapped to the right and leapt off to catch Black mid-flight. They tumbled to the ground but he managed to break free.

But Rikes knew the feeling of blood on her claws. She looked up to see Black hovering in the air, working hard to keep his position and pressing his forearm across his belly.

She couldn't see a splash of red on his clothing because it was too dark, but she smelled blood. New blood.

She leaped again, reaching up to try and hook her claws into him and tore into his left wing. By chance her claws caught onto one of his wing struts and he tumbled down with her. She lunged.

Black screamed as Rikes took an unsatisfying bite of bone and skin. Blood splattered her muzzle but she hadn't bitten anything fleshy, she knew that.

"What's going on over there?"

The shout came from a distance away. Rikes' instincts calculated where it had come from but a split-second later a beam of torchlight gave away its source.

She squinted into the light and then bounded away - daytime Rikes had enough power over her to make her afraid sometimes. She leaped behind the low wall and flattened herself as much as possible.

An argument of emotions began in the beast's head between Rikes and the werewolf. The beast no longer had much interest in words, but had the argument happened verbally it would have gone something like this:

...Hide!

...What do you mean, 'hide'? I don't have to hide from anything!

...You've forgotten what's out there! There are furs out there than can kill us. Or worse.

...You're naive. Nothing can beat me. And what sort of shit threat is 'or worse'?

...Have you forgotten about guns, then? Or tranquillising darts and science labs? What do you think would happen to us if we were caught?

...If anything so ridiculous happened I'd free us. But it won't. We killed tonight. Don't you feel it? We can kill anything!

...That's a bad thing, beast. We need to get help.

...Get help?! For what? We don't need help with anything!

...This killing is wrong!

...The only thing wrong with killing is not doing it properly. Look at that, over the wall. That bat, he's getting up. Look! We didn't kill him properly so he's getting away!

...Calm down, calm down, CALM DOWN! Let him go. He might tell the right furs. He might get help for us.

...Listen to you, you're ridiculous! First you want to hide from other furs, now you want them to hear about us. You're better off listening to me.

...No I'm not! I hate you! You ruined my life! I wish you were gone!

...I don't care what you wish. I want to kill again. Who does that prat with the torch think he is? Swinging it around... Go on, take the bat with you! I'll pounce on your backs and-

...Shut up, SHUT UP! Let them go!

...Fool.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Story © Palantean Writer Rikes © Rikes