FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

--1

Desmond slipped into an alley, and he leaned back against a cold flank of brick. It was the side of a closed-down cafe that, during its' short run, sold more roach carcasses and salmonella viruses than food.

The night was fast closing in; street lamps flicked on up and down the sleepy two-way blacktop. Clouds sagged overhead, obese and gray with rain that would soon fall; in a few of these, cloud-to-cloud lightning silently arced. The day had been mild, the afternoon chilly, and as the hours waned closer to the evening, the temperature would fast become uncomfortably cold.

The middle of October was no time for a scrawny priss like Desmond to be out in ratty, knee-ripped blue jeans and a fishnet top. The tod's pink nipples, ordinarily obscured in the downy fluff of his chest, poked through the see-through mesh of the negligible shirt; his short huffs of breath were reported by wisps of steam from his mouth.

The dark, cold night was cruel to a worthwhile individual, but very generous to a streetwalker. One-hundred and fifty dollars in assorted bills were wadded up in the hip pocket of his jeans, the product of two sloppy blowjobs, a handjob, and anal sex with a wolf with a wedding band on.

From the corner of his eye, Desmond caught sight of a living shadow, an imposing bulk with luminescent cat's eyes. The pimp. From across the alley, he nodded gently. You all right?

Desmond nodded back just as curtly. Then, not looking toward his guardian, he held up his paw around his stomach, the fingers splayed as if to wave, but he did no such thing. Five minute break. The creature fully receded into the shadows, and Desmond relaxed against the cold brick with a shudder, followed by a sigh, and then a listless whine.

--2

After this respite to clear his head, Desmond began his casual, enticing walk again; his pimp had been adamant in instructing him how to strut, to present his ass and sway his hips, and it was paying off.

On the other side of the road, Desmond watched an SUV slow down; it was a shade of red not unlike dried blood, a handsome color for a vehicle like that, he thought. It also looked decidedly new; whatever it was, it was a 2013-something, and the fox felt his pulse quicken in excitement, though this wasn't necessarily positive. The simple truth was that anybody driving a new vehicle in a slum like that was trawling for a gay hooker, a descriptor that was only half-right on Desmond. Through the tinted driver's window, the fox barely saw a curious face looking his way, the glint of a set of eyes.

With a surprising smoothness, at least for someone who had just begun hooking for the first time that night, the tod stopped and leaned against the outer wall of the run-down building he was just passing; he folded his arms behind his head, and in this manner, he silently offered his reluctantly faggot body to the roaming set of eyes.

The driver accelerated out of view, but he turned around at the end of the street and came back. When he came up to the young hooker, this time on the appropriate side of the street, he stopped at the curb, and he rolled the passenger window down.

Heated air invitingly rolled out of the open window, and the fox leaned in close, resting his paws on the door. He peered in with his best lewd smile - something that noticeably cracked, but dumbly held up when he realized this john was a stallion.

The horse smiled coyly, showing just a hint of his flat, strong teeth. "You look like you could use a ride."

--3

Desmond didn't say anything; he was too busy reciting the advice his pimp had given him. A little piece of information to take to heart when dealing with a client who had what he referred to, bluntly, as a huge cock. It was something to the effect of breathe slowly, relax your asshole, and don't cry, with the callous addition, johns hate that shit.

The fox was still in the middle of coddling himself when the stallion, who had since rolled up the window and was idling along for an alley to park in, reached over and rubbed his thigh. "You're pretty. You look like a girl, actually," he said in a gentle, yet deep register.

Desmond thought it was a pleasant speaking voice; it was the kind of intelligent, but authoritative inflection a few of his college professors had possessed. "Thanks," he mumbled, not flinching from the meaty hand on his thigh, even as it strolled north and squeezed down upon the inoffensive bulge of his crotch. The foxcoon winced and closed his eyes.

The stallion was spurred into a grin, but he was mistaken in assuming that the fox was enjoying the touch. "Can I know your name?"

"Why, are you a cop?" Desmond suddenly blurted, recalling that other piece of advice his pimp had given him.

The stallion stopped at a red light (even though the streets were barren) and gave Desmond the most queer look before laughing. "No, I'm not." He paused thoughtfully, took his hand off of the tod's crotch, and swiftly replaced it on the wheel. "Are you?"

"No," Desmond flatly answered. "My name's Desmond."

The horse didn't acknowledge that beyond a nod; no compliments about what a pretty name the foxcoon had. (Desmond appreciated that; talking always made things more difficult.) He pulled around the corner, into the shadowed alleyways of a cluster of buildings; discarded fast food bags, soda cans, and other trash crunched beneath the tires, sounding like packing snow.

The alleys haphazardly ran between the buildings like arteries, and it made them almost impossible to look down from the street; a great place to park for a fuck. Seemingly aware of this, the stallion killed the engine - but he left the radio on, and a soft country balled drawled through the speakers at a low volume.

Only vaguely aware of the inoffensive music, Desmond looked at the stallion out of the corner of his eye, his lower lip pursed in an unintentionally cute, pouty manner.

"So," the stallion began, laying his hands flat on his thighs, "how much is it for anal sex?" He attempted to sound casual, but he failed; he instead sounded nervous and blunt. "I'll wear a rubber, of course," he added, speaking sympathetically then. He unclasped his seatbelt, and started to unbuckle his pants belt; shortly after that, he unzipped and unbuttoned his jeans, and beneath, clad in white briefs, was an enormous bulge.

Desmond gnawed his lower lip at the sight of the stallion's lump, his heart racing. He had the feeling he could have politely told this john that he was having second thoughts, but what then? The punishment for turning down a customer would have been a legendary affair.

"Fifty bucks," Desmond said with trepidation, his eyes glued to the stallion's bulge. Five hundred bucks wouldn't cover that much dick, he thought, and a soft whine hissed through his clenched teeth, a sound the stallion didn't pick up on.

"Uh, I'll give you a hundred - I'm not exactly small. You know?" He smiled wanly at Desmond, but the fox didn't return it. "You think, for that much extra, you could... You know?" The horse gestured down with his muzzle to his dormant, yet throbbing bulge, obviously the product of a heavy ballsack and a colossal, flaccid cock coiled around it. "Get me ready?"

Desmond leaned across the partition of the seat console, his knee resting half on the seat, half on the uncomfortable plastic of the cupholders. He ignored the pain and hid it well; it was like nothing in comparison to his dulling welts and cracked ribs, mementos of disobedience and hubris from the day before.

And even that's not gonna matter once you have that third leg up under your tail, his conscience helpfully told him.

The tod hooked a thumb in the waistband of the stallion's briefs, to the side of the crotch bulge, and he pulled them downward, letting the elastic rest underneath the horse's balls. The flesh that this exposed was nightmarishly large; mottled in pink and brown, it was the textbook definition of an equine penis, and though Desmond had seem them online now and again, that did nothing to prepare him for the size of the real thing. For a few long, uneasy moments, Desmond simply stared; his thumb was still hooked in the stallion's briefs, and this left his soft, warm paw beneath and against the horse's furless, brown balls, through which he could feel the titan's pulse.

"Get going. I have to pick up my wife from the hospital soon," the horse urged in an unnecessary whisper. Notably, he seemed to harbor no shame.

It wasn't as if Desmond had a soapbox to preach from. If anything, a well-to-do, unfaithful stallion with a hunger for feminine young men was still better than a drug-addled thief-slash-whore. With that in mind, the foxcoon unhooked his thumb from the briefs' waistband, and he clutched what was closest; the stallion's balls. With the other paw, he took hold of that great equine shaft, and he squeezed it. Flaccid, the weight of the thing was staggering. Even not engorged with blood, it filled Desmond's paw to the point that he couldn't touch his own palm around it.

As his genitals were awkwardly fumbled like so, the cheating man began to snort and writhe; his erection was fast growing thicker and longer than it already was. A mighty flare bulged at the tip, and from there, it drooled with slick pre that splattered audibly onto the plastic floor mat "You've got very soft paws," the stallion said with a romantic coo, his hand stroking through the fluffy, silky locks of the tod's hair.

Ignoring the compliment, Desmond glanced to the backseats; though empty, they were an obstacle. "Do you want to do this in this back?"

"No, I don't want to stain the carpeting, I just bought this car a week ago." The stallion suddenly sounded callous and matter-of-fact, his large eyes narrowing. "I don't want your fur all over, either."

Your wife doesn't matter, but you love your car, Desmond thought as he scooted back to the seat and opened the door.

The horse did the same, and they both stepped out.

The cold air hit Desmond like a slap in the face, but the burly horse was not so afflicted. Holding up his pants in one hand, he walked around the broad nose of the SUV and stood before Desmond. The fox's pimp was large, but this horse was a giant; he was every bit of seven feet, and his size intimidated Desmond in more than one way.

The foxcoon reached into his pocket, but not the one he kept money in. He came back out with an assortment of condoms in a variety of colors, sizes, and flavors. His pimp had given him a generous share of them, and he told them to be liberal with them. A box of rubbers is a lot cheaper than taking you to a VD clinic, he had said. "Uh, magnum?" Desmond simultaneously asked and stated, taking one condom away from the others. "Fits up to--," he choked, blushing, but not in any positive way, "two feet in length."

The stallion nodded without conceit.

Desmond stuffed the other condoms back into his pocket, tore the package open, and took out the latex loop inside. Rolling it over the stallion's imposing member was surprisingly quick and painless. With the horse's throbbing cock sheathed, the reservoir of the condom already filling with pre, Desmond unzipped his jeans, turned, and kept his head low.

Fore paws planted on the wall, legs spread, ass in the cold breeze, Desmond had thoughts of police searches, but when he heard the stallion hawk and spit, his thoughts turned elsewhere. He looked back, and as he watched the imposing equine slather his rubberized cock with saliva, he thought, quite lucidly, I need to carry some lube around. This sentiment was driven home when he felt the horse's flared tip against the pucker of his asshole; the way he clenched his jaws and eyes mirrored the horse's own expression, but only in coincidence.

As the john started to push in and Desmond's tight, only recently-broken pucker was forced to admit that fist-wide cock, a cry passed the twink's lips. It was one he stifled quickly, but only by covering his maw, and then biting the paw he did it with. He bit so hard that he drew blood; miraculously, his parting tail hole wasn't bleeding.

"You're very snug," the horse said in a low voice, his breath washing over the back of the prostitute's head in hot blasts.

Desmond said nothing, and in fact uttered not a single sound. Every tip he'd been given on the matter was ineffective; there was no relaxing when he was stretched so incredibly wide. He couldn't breathe because he had his teeth sunk into his paw. All he could do was take it.

As the stallion's medial ring passed the vulpine's asshole, coaxing a fresh hiss and a flinch from the young thing, he stroked over the fox's throat in what he hoped was a soothing gesture.

Desmond took it not one way or the other; he had no interest in men. Slowly, he extracted his teeth from his clenched fist; newly exposed to the chilly air, the wounds screamed as if doused in lemon juice and dashed with salt. He released and clenched that fist a few times, and then he leaned back into the horse's broad, clothed chest. He wanted only warmth, not closeness, but he got both. Had he been properly queer, he guessed he would have liked the horse's gentle coos and rumbles, and the fond touches, but he didn't.

A moment that had taken a mercifully short time came; the horse's hips pressed flush to Desmond's ass cheeks, the better part of twenty inches buried in a tight, hopelessly loosened asshole that had never asked to be so abused. The stallion stroked up and down his young slut's slender body, allowing his calloused fingertips to tweak the nipples that peered through the fishnet.

This teasing gave Desmond odd twinges of what wanted to be pleasure, but the pain of the anal penetration overrode them; he was glad for that. He wanted no pleasure from anything associated with hooking.

The horse pulled his hips back, and as he did so, he pressed Desmond flush to the brick wall. "Listen, I need to--," he began, interrupted when his cell phone beeped rhythmically at him. It wasn't a ringtone, but an alarm. "Shit," he snorted under his breath, and that was it. That was the very last thing he'd say to the fox that night. He started to fuck the young hooker with heavy, harsh thrusts that slapped his balls up into the twink's thighs and pounded his body against the brick.

The pain was brutal, and not just from the penetration; bumping and grinding into the wall aggravated bruises in disgusting shades all over the tod's front side, ones his pimp had graced him with both before and after taking him in. He clenched his jaws tight, and he kept quiet; he made no noises beyond hisses and infrequent whines.

Overhead, the stallion snorted and rumbled, speaking in feral grunts rather than articulate words. Every snort was a blast of hot air on the tod's head, leaving his triangular ears in a perpetual state of endearing flitting.

Desmond's face, which the horse couldn't see for both the angle and the darkness, was a tight grimace that spoke of incredible discomfort. His paw wept with blood, but his asshole, that impossibly flexible vulpine pucker, had not torn even in the slightest Desmond thought that it had, as much at it hurt, but no. Straight or not, he was made to please other men, it seemed.

The stallion's thrusts were vicious, his snorting deafening; subtlety had died. He plowed Desmond as though he owned the small fox, but for that short time, he did. Over and over, his hard hips collided with the soft, but taut cheeks of the foxcoon's ass, and his release came quickly. He thrust in to the hilt, and he sandwiched Desmond uncomfortably between his rock-hard form and the unyielding brick.

Desmond winced, his bruised flesh flooding him with unbearable pain, and he began to cry, but it didn't matter; the stallion couldn't hear his breaking sobs, nor could he see the glistening sheen of his tears.

The stud pumped the condom full of his potent seed, engorging the reservoir like a water balloon, evoking the most bizarre sense of fullness in the tod that made his eyes bulge and his ears flatten. A minute lazily rolled by as the horse entered his afterglow, through which he stayed flush to his young slut, leaving him no room to relax.

The stallion stepped back, clutching the fox's hips, using this leverage to drag his member out.

Desmond shuddered, and he raked his brittle, unhealthy claws down the brick wall, cracking and snapping off several of them.

After the horse's flared tip exited, the engorged excess of the rubber slid out with relative ease, its' pliable body overloaded with horse semen; he peeled it off and tossed it aside, where it landed with a noisy splatter.

Desmond rested against the wall as he had before, his forearms against the brick, his forehead on those. He didn't care very much that his pants were around his ankles, and the sting of cold air on his raw tail hole was a small discomfort, all things considered. The moment was a respite after the ordeal, nothing more.

The stallion slid up his jeans, zipped and buttoned them, and he finally buckled his belt up again. From his wallet, he produced a pair of fifties; with these, he reached around Desmond and pressed them against the tod's chest (thankfully avoiding bruised flesh) until he clutched them.

Wordlessly, he got into his SUV, started it, and drove off.

--4

Desmond thought two-hundred and fifty dollars was a respectable haul, and it was for that reason that he gave up trying to strut. Trying to walk with any semblance of confidence in his anally-wrecked state was impossible, anyway; it was everything he could do to simply avoid limping. As he clenched and walked along, he hoped his pimp might appear at his side, but he didn't.

Instead, Desmond saw the black and white colors of a squad car.

Not unlike the johns who always casually rolled to a stop, the officers idled up to the fox, but they did nothing to get his attention; they just idled along harmlessly on the opposite side of the street, keeping pace.

The young foxcoon had crossed paths with the law many times as a petty thief and a drug user, and he knew it was only a game of cat and mouse; they wanted him to panic and sweat, and then they'd swoop in. They'd find the money, the rubbers, the residue of jizz on his hands and muzzle, and that would be it.

The literal pain in his ass became inconsequential; Desmond did everything he could do to not look like the streetwalker that he was, but the shirt was far too damning. He fidgeted as he walked, and he peered into alleys when he could, looking for that imposing shadow. God dammit, where are you? he thought, mouthing the words without realizing it. Grab me out of an alley - kiss me or something. Make me look like your boyfriend, not like I'm a hooker. I don't want to sober up in jail again...

Twice, the officers barked the car's sirens; the shrill sound cut through the breezy, pre-storm air, a soundscape primarily dominated by the low rumbles of thunder that rolled in.

Desmond nearly leapt from his skin at the noise, and it froze him on the spot, leaving him as an ideal target when they pulled over to his side of the road.

The officer in the passenger's seat got out and walked around the front of the car, but always facing the foxcoon. The one in the driver's seat rolled down his window, clearly so he could do the talking.

Divide and conquer, keep me distracted while your buddy corners me, Desmond thought, the clarity of it striking him. Sometimes, he was more cunning than he realized - but not enough to save him from the life he'd wound up in.

"Awful cold to be out dressed like that, ain't it?" the driver said with a sardonic grin, his burly arm hanging out the window. However stereotypical it was for a cop, he was a German Shepherd, and so was his partner, though he was the more athletic of the two. The one in the car looked like a slow bruiser, the kind who would punch and stomp him while he was on the ground; the one circling around was undoubtedly the quicker of the two.

"I'm coming home from a club," Desmond said, his voice sharp.

"Only fag-club in town is that-a-way," the big dog said, pointing up the road without looking away from the fox, "so you ain't exactly walkin' the right way for that." He smiled. "Try another one."

The foxcoon was about to backpedal, to say that he was lost, that he and his boyfriend had been separated, anything to save himself, but the quicker dog snatched him by the arm and startled the composure out of him. The athletic dog squeezed tight, and Desmond gave a sharp cry, one spurred more by surprise and indignity than pain. "Leave me alone, I didn't do anything to you assholes!" he screamed, resisting the quicker officer's grip, thrusting himself towards the one in the car like a rabid pitbull. It didn't occur to Desmond that being as shrill and obnoxious as possible was most likely to summon his pimp; he was just doing it out of instinct.

The driver didn't flinch. His partner reeled Desmond back by his arm, and then he threw the scrawny fox against the adjacent building.

When Desmond smashed into the concrete facade, he seemed to flatten against it, and then he sprung back and landed on the sidewalk in a dazed heap, face up.

With the fox down, the driver hauled his enormous body out of the car, and he lumbered over.

"Get it through your fucking head, Desmond," he grunted, "we've seen you around here before." He tapped his nightstick in his paw, the gesture of a sadist and his paddle. He bore down on the fox, blotting out the streetlight.

Sensing a fight, the smaller of the two dogs knelt swiftly, and he pinned Desmond, holding his arms above his head and against the sidewalk.

The bondage spurred Desmond out of his compliant daze and into struggling and snarling, but it was hollow, for the fear in his eyes at the sight of the nightstick was palpable - and at this, the larger dog visibly salivated.

"Stealing car stereos, breaking into apartments, mugging - the people you do that shit to probably don't remember it, they might get so strung-out that they forget you were ever a problem, but we don't forget. The law doesn't forget. And now - now, look at this shit." He tapped his nightstick under the fox's chin, lifting his head with it. "Dressed like a California queer. Turn out his fuckin' pockets."

The more slender of the two officers, pinning both of Desmond's paws tightly beneath a knee, reached into one hip pocket; he emerged with a gaudy bouquet of rubbers.

"Didn't see that coming," the larger dog deadpanned, tightening his grip on the end of the nightstick, eschewing the handle. "Our little smack-fox is hiking his tail up for money now. In my neighborhood, I don't fuckin' think so!" He swung the nightstick like a baseball bat, and the steel-cored club crashed into the twink fox's gut.

Desmond let loose with a sudden, winded cry, and he curled up when the smaller dog stood, apparently realizing that the fox wasn't going anywhere.

The foxcoon's stomach hidden, the larger officer started to pepper Desmond's shoulder blades with the nightstick, bearing his teeth in what was either a grin, or a very tight grimace.

Punctuated by meaty thuds, Desmond's strained cries cut into the turbulent night like an air-raid siren, and that was when the second officer was compelled to join in.

The smaller dog landed only a single strike on the tod's flank, for as he raised his nightstick to strike again, it was snatched out of his hands.

Before the dog could even turn, a menacing shadow smashed the club down between his ears. He was unconscious before he hit he sidewalk; the club was broken, the steel core bent and exposed, and the officer's skull was undoubtedly more fragile than the weapon.

The larger dog looked up from the weeping, writhing fox with dumbfounded eyes, but rage at once replaced fear and uncertainty.

Unfortunately for him, rage was something that the assailant had in spades. The shadow-beast leapt over Desmond, and he pounced the muscular dog like a predator in the wild. They tumbled into the glow of a streetlamp, and the officer saw his attacker's face; a snarling, draconian monster with horrifying teeth that glistened with spittle. It was Zenark - Desmond's pimp, or, as the draconian wolf preferred to think of himself at home, the foxcoon's master. And he wasn't pleased about having his pet sidetracked and mistreated.

That large cop might have had a chance, but Zenark drilled him in the jaw with all his strength, and teeth flew from his mouth, encapsulated in globs of blood. Zenark then steadily pulped the dog. He needed no weapons beyond his fists. Knuckles textured with scales tore gashes into the German Shepherd's features, each punch fueled by young, exuberant muscles and abominable rage. He snarled incoherent nothings under his breath as he pounded away, deforming a face that was once passably handsome (underneath its' fat rolls) into a mess which only dental records could identify.

The police officer had stopped moving after an even twenty punches, and stopped breathing altogether after thirty-four.

Zenark was in the middle of punch number seventy-something when Desmond's pleading voice finally snapped him back into reality; he had been begging and sobbing at Zenark for the last ten minutes.

Unwillingly brought back into reality, the drake at last stopped. His chest heaved, his lungs sucking up all the air they could in sharp, labored snatches. His teeth were bared, as splattered with blood as the rest of his body, but nothing was more messy than his fists, which were positively slathered in gore. Bruised and already swelling, he'd be sore for days, no doubt, but the carnage they had just caused was incomprehensible.

Blood was splattered all around the sidewalk like an abstract painting. Chunks of skull and shattered jawbones littered the ground. Gray matter and swatches of liberated fur lay around the immediate area. Desmond had added to the senseless mess by vomiting twice during the beating.

Only when his breathing began to steady and his fists stopped shaking did Zenark turn to his charge. "You all right?" he asked, his tone shaken, but gentle - Desmond had done nothing wrong. He deserved no wrath.

"I'm all right," Desmond answered, his voice quaking badly. There was fear in his eyes, and that emotion was more apparent to Zenark than anybody. "Let's go home."

--5

The pair kept to the shadows on the way home; they didn't expect to beat the rain, and they had even less faith in this as the sky lit and shook with lightning and thunder, but they made it to the dragon's home a few minutes before even the first trickles came.

Zenark had calmed himself to a sociopathic edge by then, and as he washed the blood off of his battered knuckles, he spoke candidly to the foxcoon. "So, you said you made two-fifty?"

"Yeah," Desmond answered, speaking distantly, attempting to avoid looking at Zenark. "Fuck, did you have to kill those cops?" he blurted out, burying his face in his paws.

The draconian wolf finished washing his hands (though he was splattered in blood from head to toe) and he grabbed Desmond by the chin. His prostitute whined, struggled briefly, and then submitted; the dragon wanted eye contact, and that was what he got. "As a matter of fact, yes, I did," he growled, his voice but a low rumble.

Testament to the transfixing glare of Zenark's gleaming eyes, the fox didn't even acknowledge it when lightning flashed and thunder cracked in symmetry, dimming the lights with raw power.

"You know who gets to put their hands on you, Desmond?" Zenark was using the tone of a disappointed father. "Me, Desmond. Me, and me fucking only!" He unhanded the twink's muzzle, but he didn't relent. Looming over the fox, Zenark screamed into that trembling face like a drill sergeant from hell. "I can beat the piss out of you if I want! Only me! Nobody else lays a finger on you! Not the johns, and definitely not THE FUCKING POLICE!"

Desmond cowered and stumbled back, and he began to weep.

The dragon grabbed his young prostitute by the shoulders and held him rigid; he shook the fox viciously (startling a yelp out of him), and then he leaned in so close that his hot breath washed over the tod's face. "Only I get to touch you like that, Desmond," Zenark said, audibly calming himself, wrangling his mood back under control. Don't get pissed at the fox, he warned himself, he's the one making you money. He didn't do anything wrong. He gave his prostitute a kiss on the lips, and then he pressed his bloody forehead against the fox's own.

Desmond thought the closeness might be pleasant - he was fast coming to savor Zen's closeness, even as unwelcome as it was to his sexuality - but the feel of the congealing blood of the dog was taboo horrible. The coppery smell made his stomach turn, but the dragon was nonplussed; he looked frightfully natural with his face covered in blood, like a burgundy minstrel show.

"Come on," Zenark whispered, nuzzling into Desmond's face. "Let's go get washed up. We'll relax."

Desmond hesitated for a moment, and then asked the question. "Can I have my drugs?"

Zenark kissed Desmond on the lips; it was loaded with affection, not lust.

Desmond enjoyed that kiss in the strangest way. He likened it to when he was very young, and father would kiss him goodnight; nostalgic emotions washed over him and his fear grew dull.

"Yeah, afterward," was all Zenark said, and then he walked with Desmond to the bathroom, leaving the wad of money on the kitchen table, where Desmond had hastily dropped it and the extra rubbers.

--6

The dragon and the fox bathed not in the tub, but in the shower stall.

Desmond thought he might wind up the object of the drake's lust, here, but that wasn't the case.

Zenark simply bathed the fox as a lover might, respecting the tender, brutalized flesh that marred the tod's body, and all he asked was a similar bathing in return.

It didn't occur to Desmond until after the shower (in the silence of his own head) that Zenark almost seemed to be in afterglow. In afterglow of what? the fox thought, blowdrying himself to avoid having to touch the horribly painful bruises. You're so close, he said to himself.

In afterglow of murder, he suddenly knew; it wasn't a possibility, it was a fact. This thought was chilling, but undeniable. While the blow-drier shrilly screamed, the fox slowly looked over at the dragon-wolf.

Zenark, in the middle of toweling himself off, just shot the fox a soft, but strangely knowing grin at the eye contact; Desmond looked away, and Zenark slipped into a pair of fresh blue jeans before walking out.

Desmond decided not to dress after drying off; his only clothes, the ones he'd gone hooking in, were disgustingly filthy with sweat and spunk, and he was in no mood to dress as a whore again. He padded out into the living room, but he did so was a soft limp; the pains of the evening were catching up to him, making him feel old, and the adrenaline high had long since worn off. The police-administered clubbing was bad enough, but, around Zenark, he felt like he could tolerate bludgeons and bruises. What hurt the most was the wrecked, gaping orifice of his asshole.

On the dinner table, Desmond saw all of his provisions; the lighter, the belt, yesterday's syringe which only he had used, the cotton balls, and a little sphere of foil, something Zenark had acquired while Desmond hooked.

In the adjacent kitchen, ground beef sizzled and popped as Zenark cooked a pair of all-American cheeseburgers for he and Desmond, a suitably sleazy, greasy meal for a pimp and his ho.

Desmond was hungry for food, and the smell of it made his stomach ball up into a concise, painful knot. The allure of the heroin was a million times more potent, however, and more so because the foxcoon was on the nebulous edges of his high. He had shot up only the night before, but the junk was of a surprisingly high caliber. Despite no longer being very high, enough opiates remained in his blood to keep him functional for the last few hours.

With skill, his lower lip pursed in intense concentration, Desmond unveiled and cooked the heroin, and through a cotton ball, he drew it into the needle. Then, after carefully setting down the syringe, he grabbed the belt, and he wrapped it around his arm. "Um, hey," he called to Zenark, his voice absolutely submissive, "Zenark? Zen?"

Zenark peered around the corner, and he took only a single look at the fox. "Uh huh, hold on," he said, disappearing back into the kitchen. The sound of sizzling meat tapered off into an infrequent bubbling - that noise could have just been the rain on the windowsill - and then the drake walked to his pet's side. Wordlessly, he grabbed the loose end of the belt, and he pulled it snug.

Desmond winced, but a heavily-tracked vein popped to the surface of his inner forearm, freakishly apparent even through the fur. Its' sudden appearance was enough to make the fox salivate. He brought the needle's point up to the vein, sank it without even the slightest flinch, and he depressed the plunger. Once on the edge of a high, Desmond plummeted into renewed opiate bliss. Emitting a small, but gratified coo, he fell back against Zenark with his eyes locked in a zombified, half-rolled gaze.

Zenark reached down, and he eased the syringe out of the fox's vein. Immediately afterward, he loosened the belt, and the throbbing vein receded. He kissed Desmond's cheek only once, and then he walked back into the kitchen.

For a few long, numb moments, the fox seemed dead; nothing mattered. Not his situation, the thunder, or the smell of food. These stimuli all bounced around the empty expanse of his brain, never amounting to much, if anything, and they died in futility. Desmond's high made everything dull and tolerable.

After a hazy length of time to the fox, the dragon scooped all of Desmond's paraphernalia up into a pile, not unlike a small child's playthings, and then he set down two plates. On them were a pair of greasy hamburgers, dark on the outside but pink and bloody in the middle, with American cheese on them, and potato chips at the side.

Desmond was just returning to Earth when he beheld this meal, and he let his lazy eyes settle on the burger. "Thanks," he uttered, grabbing, and munching, a potato chip.

"It's not like I'm gonna starve you, you did well tonight; real well." Zenark smiled, picked up his burger, and sank his ruthless teeth into it. Blood ran down his chin, and though Desmond acknowledged the sight, he found it hard to feel disturbed with the heroin dulling him like so.

The foxcoon ate his own burger, albeit with more reserve than Zenark, and after their meal, they wound up on the sofa.

Zenark sat with a book in his bruised hands (he wouldn't admit to it, but every time he turned the page, he grimaced) and Desmond sat beside him, content to simply relax in the largely silent room, and the ambiance of the storm outside; high, behaving less like a wild animal, he enjoyed the sounds of the storms.

The better part of fifteen minutes went by like so; Desmond started to doze, and Zenark gave him a soft shake. "Hey, Desmond, you bored? Do you want a book to read?"

The fox regarded his pimp with tired, benign eyes, and he shook his head. "I'm all right, I'm just sleepy," he said with honesty, slumping back against the sofa once more.

"I'll bet," Zenark said, propping his feet up on the coffee table, prying open his little softcover novel again; the cover read 32 BELOW: THE TALE OF GACY. "You had a long day. I saw that horse."

Desmond gave the dragon a sullen look.

"Fuck, I bet he was packing. And I've seen how you've been walking. You didn't breathe, did you?" A snicker. "I'll bet it's fine, though, you're a fox. You'll tighten right back up by tomorrow." Zenark briefly lowered his novel, and he shot Desmond a jaunty smile from behind it.

"I did what I had to do," Desmond grunted, looking away from Zenark, choosing instead to look out the window, where lightning flashed in nonsensical, but mesmerizing seizes. "If this is what it takes to survive, then this is what I'll do."

"Tough words from someone who begged me for his life just one day ago," Zenark sardonically said, no longer making any effort to read his novel. "You're being awfully short with me, too - could we be forgetting lesson numero uno so soon?" Then came a wide, toothy grin.

Desmond didn't look; he was too busy trying not to show his fear, but hiding an emotion so primal and so integral to his character was impossible - especially to a creature who smelled it so easily. "If you wanna hit me," Desmond said, his naked, feminine form tensing, "then do it. If that's what gets you off, hurting someone half your size who just wants to get a fix, then you're no worse than those fucking cops." Desmond chose the words carefully, and he wanted them to wound and sting like salt-coated razors, but they didn't.

"I actually like cops," Zenark said without a hint of irony, setting his paperback on the coffee table. He sat up, and he wrapped an arm around Desmond, pulling the fox close in a come here, pal manner. "Corrupt to hell and back or not, they put their lives on the line, and they take care of the shitty pimps and dealers for me."

"But you killed--," Desmond started, but was hushed with a sudden smack across the face. He didn't yelp, but it did start him quaking and weeping all over again.

"They were hurting you. Look at it like this, Desmond - any man can be gentle, sweet, caring. Never hurt a fly. You give that man a child, and it becomes his life. You try to hurt that child? That man's gonna kill you, or die trying." He paused, and he soothed the smack he'd just planted on Desmond's face with a soft rub, and then a kiss. "Not that I'm equating you to a child. You're a big boy, and you've demonstrated that you can make big boy decisions." He grinned, making sure to load it with derision. "But you know what you are? You're a pet, a dumb little animal that can't think for itself and needs a master to keep it fed and warm and happy." To nail down this point, he rubbed under the fox's chin, and he teased the twink in the most obnoxious baby-talk voice he could muster. "Whosa good foxy bitch-boy? Whosa good foxy bitch-boy? You are! Yes you are!" By then, his grin completely bisected his face, and his teeth glistened with spittle.

Desmond glared holes into him with those wet eyes of his, but the dragon's grin really said it all. Swing on me. Bite the hand that feeds, doggy. Desmond balled his paw into a tight, quaking, but promising fist... And then he let it go.

Zenark rubbed under the fox's chin one more time. He spoke the words, but not in baby-talk. "You're a good little boy. Yes you are."

The drake went back to reading his book, but Desmond sat and stewed in impotent anger. A trait he'd carried with him since infancy, however, was that he was becoming tired. Rage drained the energy right out of him. That, plus the high of the smack, saw the fox ready for bed. Sleeping, he decided, was a fine idea. He yawned wide, stretched, and then stood.

Zenark shot out with a strong, but calm hand, and he snatched the fox's tail just long enough to get his attention. "Hold it," he said, setting the novel aside once more.

Desmond turned to look at the dragon, and his expression was no longer angry - simply exhausted. Though difficult to see for his mask, bruise-colored bags nested beneath his eyes, and his eyelids themselves were hard-pressed to stay open.

The dragon unzipped his jeans with a casual flair, and he regarded Desmond only with a smile. He fished the dormant, furry flesh of his sheath out of his fly (he hadn't put on underwear) and followed it by his heavy scrotum.

Face sullen, Desmond knelt, and without hesitation, he grabbed Zenark's sheath and made to wrap his lips around it.

In a beat, Zenark planted a heavy foot in the tod's chest and shoved him back; the small of the fox's back pounded into the hardwood coffee table, and he sharply hissed. "Good to know you're desensitized to sucking dick, but that's not what I want. Don't you an-fucking-ticipate me. Consider that a warning for lesson number two."

Regarding Desmond with a very draconian snort, Zenark stood, and he let his pants slide down to the floor with a ruffling sound. He sat back down on the sofa, and then he propped his feet up on the coffee table once more, his legs on either side of Desmond's head, his pants hooked around one leg at the ankle.

Already, the twink fox was wary, but it all came to a head when Zenark clutched his sack and lifted it, exposing the tight pucker of his asshole to the cool air. The command was monosyllabic and blunt, but there was no need for anything more. "Lick," Zenark said.

Desmond didn't question the order; he was virgin to the concept of a rimjob, and he didn't even know what the term was, but he knew what his master and pimp was demanding of him. He was only a foot and a half from the dragon's groin, but leaning across that distance seemed to take an eternity. He wanted to close his eyes, but he somehow couldn't bring himself to do it. His tired pupils studied every nuance of that which he was about to lick; Zenark was clean, spotlessly so, and that was no surprise. They had showered not long ago at all. The drake's asshole was very snug, and probably virginal. Yet you're the straight one, he deadpanned to himself. "Zen?"

"Mhm?"

"I'm not sure about this," Desmond whined. It was an understatement.

"You open your mouth, and you start licking, and you keep licking until I say uhn, god, I'm cumming." He regarded the fox with a sneer, and then he prodded one of his tail's many deadly, bony protrusions into the twink's sternum; Desmond whelped in shock and pain. "I'm not gonna do something gross to you, fox. This is just a really good way to get my rocks off and remind you who's on top here. Lick it."

And so Desmond started to lick; he began with a long, slow lap, and then he shuddered. The taste of Zenark's body was not necessarily repulsive, but as a heterosexual, Desmond knew his tongue had no business on another man's asshole. He closed his eyes, and he steadily dragged his tongue over the drake's pucker; beneath, that flesh - black on the outer edges, but subtly pink near the snug core - seemed to tense and relax; it pulsed under the tod's tongue, and he was reminded of the blowjobs he'd given.

The rubberized members he'd been forced to suck upon weren't all that bad; no flesh actually touched the insides of his mouth, and he could pretend that he was gobbling on an unintuitively hot popsicle or banana long enough to bring his johns to gratification, but there was no sugarcoating this. He was licking Zenark's asshole, and if the dragon's moans and gruff rumbles were any indication of it, he was licking it well. And for not the first time that night, Desmond thought that, even if he wasn't gay, he could certainly please another man.

"You keep that up, juuust like that," Zenark sighed, pumping the dark, knotted length of his cock in a fervently-stroking hand. Pre spurted onto the black fluff of his stomach, and more over-achieving ropes made it to his chest. "Fuck me, it's been too long since I had someone licking my asshole..."

Desmond wisely said nothing and simply continued to lick. His laps became more and more insistent, and he pushed his tongue against the dragon's pucker with a little more confidence as time went on. Repulsive as the concept was, he thought it was easier than a blowjob. He also thought it was less degrading - though he was certainly mistaken in that. With his more vigorous laps, his nose bumped into the dangling bulk of the drake's scrotum, though this began to draw up to its' owner's body in preparation for an orgasm.

Under his breath, Zenark huffed a few obscenities not meant for anyone's ears, and he grit his teeth in an _oh-_face grimace, one made complete by clenching his eyes and flattening his ears. He squeezed the swollen bulk of his knot, and with his asshole clenching under the foxcoon's lapping tongue, the draconian wolf shot a messy line of his man-slop up the washboard of his belly, but the brunt splattered silently into the midnight fluff of his chest. Once more, he rumbled some aggressive little nothing, and then he fell slack into the sofa.

Desmond still lapped, and that was pleasing to Zenark; the smack-bitch was learning his place at an admirable pace, but enough was enough. "All right, cut it out," he grunted to Desmond, planting his feet on the floor, taking care not to dig his talons into the carpet.

"Fine," the foxcoon muttered under his breath as he pulled back, his eyes fixed on the throbbing, half-flaccid bulk of the dragon's meat, but only for a few seconds. After that, he followed the line of freshly-unloaded semen up to the dragon's chin, and he realized that Zenark was staring holes into him.

"What the hell are you looking at me like that for?" Zenark grunted.

"Do you want me to clean you up?" Desmond blurted out.

The dragon-wolf shot Desmond a queer glare. "What, you wanna clean me? Like, lick it off?" His voice was fraught with disbelief, but already, a coy grin was upturning the corners of his mouth.

"Don't read into it very much," Desmond said sharply, heading Zenark off. "You just took a bath. I caused your, you know - this mess. If I had been blowing you, I would have been expected to swallow it, yeah?" Despite this exemplary behavior he offered, he regarded Zenark with the air of a petulant child.

"Watch your mouth, Desmond - I don't mind going to grab the belt."

Wisely, Desmond put his head down, and he flattened his ears.

"But, yeah, I suppose you're right. All right, my little budding fag; clean your mack daddy up." He sneered and propped his head up on his folded arms, splaying, leaving his body entirely prone. He just vaguely wondered, if the fox had a weapon in his hands, if he would have used it; the idea made his pulse quicken, but he said nothing.

Wordlessly, Desmond rose to his feet, and he leaned over Zenark. He licked from the drake's belly up to his chin, but not in one contiguous lap. He steadily groomed his way up the dark fur, removing the jism before it had a chance to encrust.

The saliva left behind would be just as problematic, Zenark supposed, but it was the message here, the subservience, the fact that Desmond had learned his place and was, however impudently, acknowledging it. The curt words and glares could be beaten and trained out of the vulpine bitch; the obedience would last a lifetime.

After Desmond cleaned his master, he was allowed to retire to bed, sent off with only a rub behind the ears.

Zenark wasn't nervous about letting the tod out of his sight; the windows, however nice and new they were, had bars on them. The dragon also didn't keep guns, and the only knives he had were the ones in the kitchen; if he couldn't kill an intruder with his claws, they were immortal. If Desmond wanted a fight, it would be "fair," which was to say the fox stood no chance.

--7

Two hours came and went, and Zenark read a few more chapters in his book. It was something he read out of genuine interest, not just to spook the foxcoon, but the subject matter didn't arouse or amuse him; the idea of a sexually frustrated man killing boys sickened him, and when he looked at Desmond, those boys were something that came to mind.

To think something that pretty and useful could have - would have wound up dead in a rolled-up carpet, or dissolving in a crawlspace full of lime with a sheet tied around his neck.

If someone tried to do that to him... Well, he's mine now. Anybody who touches him will find out what happens.

Zenark closed the novel around his bookmark (it was adorned with the image of a black dragon, and a prismatic, plastic gem hung from a tassel at the end; it was a dragon's instinct to desire and hoard pretty things), stepped out of the pants he hadn't bothered to put back on, and then he padded his way into the bedroom. From the hallway, with the light of the living room just peering in, he stared at sleeping Desmond from the door frame like an affectionate parent. In that moment, he wondered when the last time was that one of the tod's own parents looked at him in that manner; spied on him while he was exhausted and terrified of imaginary monsters or the thunder outside.

Probably a long time ago. Zenark smiled, but without malice. He went back to the living room, locked the front door, turned off the light, and joined Desmond in bed. He cuddled up close to the fox, who awakened only long enough to utter a greeting before going back to sleep.

--8

The next morning, when Desmond awoke for good, he glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand, and it read 9:03 AM, ticking over to 9:04.

The room was dimly lit by the morning sun as it peered around the blackout curtains Zenark used to keep his den dark. This darkness was inconsequential to Desmond; fox and raccoon DNA had blessed him with eyesight that bordered on night vision. Naked, he rose from the bed - pausing thoughtfully to make it back up and fluff the pillows - and he headed into the restroom.

The fox emerged a short time later, his urges relieved, his fragile teeth carefully brushed. The same went for his hair, which he had even taken the time to braid, this styling a memento from his long-lost family.

Out in the hall, walking closer to the living room, he smelled bacon. That distinct, smoky smell tantalized him and made his stomach roil and rumble. Still high, he had his full appetite, and he made his way into the kitchen for a bite of whatever Zenark was cooking.

"Good morning," the fox said with a respectful nod to his benefactor.

Zenark glanced away from the stove (bacon sizzled in one pan, and another close by had fluffy, bright-yellow scrambled eggs in it) and petted the fox on the head. "I see you woke up, finally," he remarked, casting the fox a brief grin, but it shifted into a more fond smile. "Smelled food, did you?"

"I guess I did," Desmond said. He was eying the bacon intently.

"Plates are in that cabinet there," Zenark said, pointing to one with a long, clawed digit. "Silverware is in the drawer under it. We got milk and orange juice, get whatever you want, and I'll have the same."

--9

Zenark and Desmond ate together, peacefully. The tod was always on edge to some degree - that much was apparent, and Zenark could sense it easily - but the drake seemed to be in a particularly friendly mood. Desmond guessed it was the degrading sex act from the night before; Zenark would have said it had something to do with that, but not entirely.

"So, for today," Zenark said in between bites of bacon, "I'm thinking we'll blow off the hooking."

Because you killed a couple of officers, and even you're afraid of them. Desmond bit his tongue; when the dragon was being affable, there was no sense in poking him. Instead, he asked, "Oh yeah?" His voice was placid, but a little bit relieved, too.

"Mhm." Zenark grunted, and then cleared his palate with a drink of milk. (Desmond hoped to see the dragon with a milk mustache, but there wasn't one.) "You had a rough night. And besides," he held out a piece of bacon, close to the fox's lips; Desmond took it and crunched it, and Zenark smiled. "I'd like to get to know you."

Desmond swallowed, and then he gave Zenark a more wary look. "Would you?"

"I would. I own you - you're my bitch, my slave, my property, sure, but we can be friends, can't we? Or we can at least understand each other a little bit more." He interlaced his fingers, and he cast the tod a wry, enigmatic grin. "You know my engine runs on blood and violence," he growled, bouncing his eyebrows jauntily. "What about you, huh? What makes my handsome little prostitute go?"

The tod was already beyond taking offense - or reminding himself of his depression - when Zenark made a point of his new role in life. He took a bite of his eggs, which were nearly lukewarm. Chewing slowly, he stewed in thought, and he answered only after swallowing. "I kinda like to read. I was an intellectual before the smack." He waited for the venomous barb, but none came.

"You like to read? I don't mind buying you books. Better for you than TV. I'll take you to the little store I like to hit up."

Desmond smiled humorlessly. "In what clothes? The only pants I have are the ones I lived in for the last..." He glanced toward the ceiling and shrugged. "I don't know how long. The same thing goes for my shirt, and I really don't want to wear that fishnet thing out in public like that."

Zenark chuckled, and he lashed his tail idly. "I've got some old jeans you can wear. They might be kinda loose on you, but I've got some extra belts. Some shirts, too." The drake stood up slowly, and he loomed over the fox. His crotch was face-high to Desmond, but it was benign; the drake lacked an erection. Instead of doing something lewd or cruel, he lay his strong hands upon the back of the tod's head, and he stroked through the fine, blonde locks there. He pulled Desmond to rest the side of his head upon his hips, doing so without sexuality. "And since giving you some hand-me-down clothes is a pretty stopgap fix, I'll take my little fox out and get him a new wardrobe. Casual- and work-wear. Sound good?"

"Mhm," Desmond uttered. It was such a dangerous thought, a damning contentment, but he closed his eyes, and he found himself enjoying the dragon's touch. Distantly, he told himself he was enjoying it only because of the contrast, because he knew what the dragon was capable of. He couldn't tell if his lonesome heart secretly longed for something else. Whatever something else was, sex from the dragon wasn't it, at least, and confirming that pacified his budding worries.

--10

Desmond didn't look nearly as strange as he expected to in Zenark's clothes, but the tightly-belted baggy jeans and the loose beater projected a hip-hop look which he rightly assumed didn't suit him at all.

The pair left the house around noon, and they walked up the road, to what was known as the good side of town; away from the drug dealers, the pimps, and the hookers. The irony of this wasn't lost on either of them, but it went unmentioned.

Even though he was unabashedly a brooding creature of the night, Zenark seemed to enjoy the cool air the storm had left behind and the radiant glow of the sun in a cloudless sky. He walked easily, his expression generally a placid one.

Desmond padded along with considerable unease; he hadn't walked freely in the light of day in months, yet with Zenark next to him, he was free to do just that. In those moments, he began to view Zenark as his freedom, rather than the enslaving force that he really was. Embracing these feelings, he turned his head to smile at the dragon.

Zenark smiled back, and he wrapped his arm around the fox, wrapping the hand around his opposite hip. Completely unafraid of touching the fox with homoerotic implications in public, he held him like so all the way to the bookstore.

--11

"Oh, and who is that?" said the old lady behind the counter, her attention drawn by the soft ding of the bell over the door. She stepped around a bookshelf (one Zenark could easily see over and Desmond could peek over if he stood on his tip-toes), pushed up her glasses, and beamed at the sight of the dragon, who smiled back with charisma; Desmond was reminded that he was in the midst of a sociopath.

The old lady, whom Desmond correctly guessed owned the bookstore, was clearly some kind of a gray wolf; the tod's thoughts shifted to the old Little Red Riding Hood fairytale, the wolf in grandma's clothing, but he consciously dismissed the thought.

"Zenark, dear, it's always so nice to have a sweet boy like you in here," she cooed. Astonishingly to Desmond, she grabbed the drake by the snout and gave him a smooch on the nose.

Zenark laughed, and the noise startled the fox with its' joyful sincerity. It was night and day; here was the charming and well-adjusted man that existed outside of the seedy world of dirty money and violence. Here was the Zenark that didn't beat the insubordination out of forcibly-recruited prostitutes, but the one who got kisses on the nose from sweet old ladies. It was impossible not to wonder what she'd say or do if she only knew, but Desmond buried all of that. All he wanted was a day free of contempt and conflict.

"It's nice to see you, too, Mrs. Chalmers," Zenark said, his nose twitching after the fond kiss.

"And who is this young man?" Mrs. Chalmers asked, turning her gaze on Desmond, who was closer to her height.

Desmond smiled dumbly; Zenark gently elbowed him. "Um," he grunted, "Desmond, ma'am."

"Oh, and that's a darling name - a southern name, too. Do you have roots in the south, Desmond?"

The fox smiled bashfully, clasping his paws behind his back. "Not deep south, but Kentucky, ma'am."

"I thought so, and aren't you well-mannered." She smiled sweetly to the foxcoon, and then she turned her milky, yet perceptive eyes on Zenark. "Why have I never met your friend before, hmm?"

The dragon slid his hands into his hip pockets, and he smiled disarmingly. He didn't sweat or stutter; he just lied from point A to B. "He's my partner."

Desmond visibly cringed, but the old lady wasn't looking.

"We've been seeing each other for a couple of months now. He's incredibly self-conscious about it, afraid we're going to get laughed at or something, but I convinced him to spend some time out in the open with me." Then, the obligatory touchy-feely antics that came with such a story, he snaked a strong arm out, and he clutched the twink foxcoon close to his body.

Desmond was no longer pleased with Zenark's affection; he suddenly found it unwanted and smothering, but he forced a thin smile. His apprehension was at least justified by the lie.

"I never did expect you to be the type to like boys," Mrs. Chalmers murmured, before smiling, "but it's not my place to judge." And then another kiss on the nose for Zenark, and a stroke along Desmond's muzzle that felt oddly comforting to him. "If you two make each other happy, then _I'm_happy for you. True love comes in all shapes and sizes."

"Oh, yes," Zenark said, smiling wanly. The dragon planted a kiss on Desmond's lips, one the fox wisely returned. "We make each other happy and we keep each other safe. Don't we, Desmond?"

"Yeah," Desmond mumbled.

Left to his own devices while Zenark and Mrs. Chalmers engaged in casual talk (she mentioned her grandson, and this seemed to be a common subject for the two of them), Desmond perused the bookshelves. On one shelf, unhelpfully labeled as unsorted, the tod saw a spine that read I OVERCAME, and, curiously, he pulled it off the shelf.

Greeting him on the cover was a haggard but strong face. A fox like him, but purebred. More masculine, wounded, older, the kind of person who had spent time in prison, but a relatable figure all the same. Ponderously, he turned the hardcover book over and read the description.

I OVERCAME is a scintillating collection of self-help advice and anecdotes from former addicts who OVERCAME their crippling addictions.

Learn how an alcoholic father OVERCAME his urges and became the anchor his son needed.

Read about a life-long painkiller addict who OVERCAME the pills and mastered them by starting a pharmacy.

And then Desmond came to the last example with a numb expression.

Get to know a young heroin addict who OVERCAME opiates and escaped prostitution.

It briefly occurred to him as funny; what are the odds?, he thought. Then he pondered it some more - and then again, the odds were actually pretty high. There was a reason pimps chose to exploit needy and drug-addled lowlifes. Maybe it wasn't funny at all.

He considered the book for all of ten seconds more before putting it back on the shelf. A way out of the heroin? Maybe. Out of prostitution? Never. Zenark would sooner kill him than let him walk away.

Desmond browsed some more, and in time, he amassed a small stack of well-loved novels. All fiction, but ranging anywhere from science-fiction to horror to high fantasy. He stepped up to the front of the store, where Mrs. Chalmers had an enormous, steel cash register, something that looked antiquated, yet was quite functional. He set the novels up on the desk which she sat behind, and he smiled benignly.

"All done, dear?" she sweetly asked, already starting to tally up the prices of the books.

Desmond nodded timidly; Zenark was still off picking out books, and he saw the tips of the drake's ears over the shelves now and again.

When Zenark finally came up to check out, he had a small stack of books hugged to his chest. Some of them were hardcover like the addiction book Desmond had examined, others were simply novels. He smiled easily at Desmond kissed the tod's cheek as he sat them down.

Mrs. Chalmers blushed but chuckled when she started to ring up the books.

Desmond was mortified by the titles he saw. Oral Sex: How To Please Your Man was one, and it made the fox cringe and momentarily hide his face in his paws. SLAVERY: The Dark American Pastime was another. The last one was, Desmond guessed from Zenark's grin, a sick joke. Are You Gay? 100 Ways To Out Your Man! was the title.

The total price was a few cents more than eighteen dollars; Zenark paid with a twenty, kindly told Mrs. Chalmers to keep the change, and then got another kiss on the nose.

"You take care, boys," said Mrs. Chalmers as the fox and the drake left.

Desmond was silent on the way out, his head low; he just wanted to crawl into a hole and quietly die.

--12

A plastic grocery bag full of books in hand, Zenark walked along contently with Desmond, enjoying the bright and sunny day, though his vulpine bitch had taken on a more morose attitude. "What's wrong, boyfriend?" he grinned, elbowing the fox playfully.

"You humiliated me."

"Can't humiliate trash," Zenark chirped. "Come on. Let's go get you some new clothes."

The time spent at the unimaginatively-named Common Male Outfitters boutique in the mall was completely impersonal in comparison to visiting sweet old Mrs. Chalmers, but Desmond managed to cheer up. Buying clothes was something he hadn't done since he first went to college; picking out handsome button-up shirts and having Zenark measure his legs and his waist for jeans was surprisingly relaxing.

All of the clothing Desmond wound up selecting wasn't cheap; by the time he'd picked out about a dozen charming shirts and four identical pairs of jeans, the total has soared well beyond three hundred dollars, yet Zenark didn't bat an eye.

Because I can make that much in a night, Desmond thought. It was lonesome and analytical, that thought. But it was also true.

Zenark carried two bags now; the books in one, Desmond's new street clothes in the other. "Glad you found some clothes you liked in there," he said, walking through the mall with the fox. Only a few paces away, the pair came up on a more dark and gothy clothing boutique. Smiling impishly at the fox, Zenark nodded toward the boutique. "Hey, perfect. Let's get you some uniforms."

Desmond hated that goth store... At first. In only a short time, he was fascinated with getting a leather coat, some leather pants, a spiked collar, and some black hair dye. The sex appeal of these items was staggering to him.

Although he somewhat lamented his pet being unsuited to the goth look, Zenark was strictly business. Desmond was going to stay a pretty blonde; there was only one thing they needed in there, and that was clothes to make the fox look good as a gay hooker. Under the drake's supervision, the tod tried on fishnet tops until he found one that fit tightly. In jet black, it contrasted beautifully with his feminine body, and Zenark bought the fox ten of them, along with a few matching sets of arm-warmers. He'd be the most beautiful piece of blonde trash the city streets had ever seen.

Outside of the goth store, walking away from it, Desmond looked back at the storefront every few steps, his eyes longing for the leather and the spikes. It was as if he were a small child, denied some candy or a new toy.

Zenark gently nudged his pet back into attention, and then he shot the fox a coy smile. "You're gonna look like a sexy bitch in this shit," he murred, holding up the fittingly black bag from the goth store.

"I'm gonna look like a skank," Desmond grumbled.

"To-may-to, to-mah-to," Zenark deadpanned, and then he smacked his heavy mace of a tail broadside into the tod's ass, earning a stifled yelp out of him. "You hungry?" he asked immediately afterward, grinning.

"Yeah," Desmond admitted, keeping close to Zenark, head low. He palmed his behind for a moment; Zenark's little smack hadn't hurt so much on it's own, but the foxcoon's resultant flinch and clench had restored the throbbing pain in his tail hole.

"I am, too. Let's just pick something up and eat at home."

--13

After a few moments of cajoling, Zenark finally got Desmond to admit that he was hungry for something Mexican; the dragon didn't mind that. It wasn't a stretch that he enjoyed spicy, hot food, and they headed home with a fourth bag which reeked of spiced meat and peppers, which Desmond was given the honor of carrying.

Outside the drake's home, while Zenark unlocked the front door, Desmond glanced down the street; there was no longing in his eyes for his old "home." He wanted no part of it. Having a bed to sleep in, and (he sniffed the El Chunky Burrito bag in his hand with obvious pleasure) hot food to eat, even with the emotional and physical mistreatment, was much better than cold streets and maggot-infested pizza crusts.

Zenark unlocked the door, and opened it; he entered with Desmond close behind. After setting down the bags, he locked the doorknob, the deadbolt, and the chain. "Get some plates out, get some drinks," he said with off-handed dismissal, turning away from the door.

Desmond was already in the kitchen, plates and glasses clattering as he grabbed what they needed; Zenark unbagged the food.

When the fox came back after two trips - once to leave the plates, again to bring the drinks - the pair ate over amicable conversation.

After Desmond finished off all six of the tacos he'd ordered (Zenark was outwardly happy to see his pet with a real appetite), he glanced to the bags near the door, and then he looked at Zenark out of the tops of his eyes, as a timid dog might. "Thanks for the books," he quietly said.

"And the clothes," Zenark said, holding the last bite of his second burrito; they were so enormous, he was eating just as much food as Desmond had. "And the food. And the shelter, and the drugs." He grinned maliciously, and then he tossed the last bite into his mouth. After chewing and swallowing, he took a large drink of his cola to clear his palate. "Not that I mind buying you stuff and taking care of you. Really, I don't." He reached across the table, and took one of Desmond's paws.

"Then why would you mention all of it like that?" Desmond lowly asked, trying to remain inoffensive.

Zenark languidly stroked over the back of Desmond's paw with his thumb. "Just to keep you on your toes. I want you to remember your place. Today, you've been good about it. I haven't had to hit you." A coy smile then dominated his face, and he chuckled to match it. "I'd rather give you something besides pain, anyway. I mean, believe it or not."

"I don't follow you."

Zenark waved his free hand dismissively, and then he squeezed Desmond's paw a bit tighter. "When's the last time you got off?"

Desmond blinked. "Uh?"

"Shot a wad; busted a nut; jizzed. Orgasms, Desmond! When's the last time you came?"

"I knew what you meant," Desmond grunted, miffed. "I just... Six months ago? Maybe? I just haven't wanted to." He paused, and in a low, shameful tone added, "Or been able to." He sighed, and he found himself squeezing Zenark's hand in return. "It's hard to masturbate when you're cuddling up to homeless war veterans on winter nights." There was a noticeable lack of humor or irony in what Desmond said - and so Zenark didn't doubt it. "Other than that... Starving or freezing to death - and tweaking - makes it hard to keep an erection."

"Six months," Zenark said, then he whistled. "Wow."

"Why are you asking, anyway?"

Zenark smiled; Desmond wasn't sure how to read it. "I think getting off might do you a world of good."

"Well... Maybe I'll rub one out tonight, or--"

"No, no, no," Zenark shook his head, putting a finger on Desmond's lips - then he pushed it inside. He grinned again, and quite toothily, the expression Desmond knew best. "I'm gonna give you an orgasm."

"Buh Ah'm s'raigh," Desmond said around the finger, blushing for all the wrong reasons.

"I know you are," Zenark murred, "but you'll see. Trust your master." The drake stood, ruffled Desmond's hair, and then grabbed the bags. "I'm gonna wash your new clothes... You enjoy your books. I'll get you later on." And then he walked off to the utility room, leaving Desmond all alone.

I'll get you stuck out to Desmond. It was the drake's unspoken mantra. I'll get you.

Desmond shivered, and hugged himself as a result. After this moment of regrouping, he cleaned up after dinner, throwing out the wrappers and washing the plates. By that time, he'd calmed his nerves, and he sat down with one of his books.

--14

Desmond hadn't gotten very far into his novel when Zenark dropped a heavy hand down on his shoulder. It was so sudden, and the drake had been so quiet, that the fox nearly leapt from his skin. He squealed and clapped the book shut, and then he looked up at Zenark with a wide-eyed, dull expression, ears flat, lips pursed.

"Shh," Zenark shushed, grinning. "Relax. Just relax." Where he held the tod's shoulder, he began to knead, and then he started up on the other one, reducing Desmond to a relaxing, rumbling lump on the sofa in very short order. The muscles in the boy's neck and shoulders were so tense; the dragon could feel it. He spent a few more minutes kneading on them, meanwhile cooing softly into his pet's ear, which flitted and flicked from that alone.

Only when Desmond was entirely liquefied and ready to pass out did the dragon-wolf pick him up. He did this with ease, and with no resistance from Desmond, who had apparently forgotten the "threat" from earlier, or was just giving in to it, but Zenark erred toward the former notion. "C'mon, prettyboy," the drake softly unnecessarily said, carting his young prize off.

The bedroom was unchanged from Zenark's earlier solitude, though the nightstand light was on, and this cast a dull, orange glow throughout the cozy room.

Zenark lay his pet upon the blankets, and before the fox could even begin to get comfortable (if he was even going to), he undressed the prostrate thing, doing away with the oversized clothing he had outfitted the twink with earlier.

Desmond feebly resisted this undressing, but not to the point of making a real obstacle out of himself; he had no interest in being harmed. The night before last's bruises still festered gruesomely on his lithe body, appearing as shadows beneath his downy coat of fur. These throbbing contusions (and a wise acceptance of Zenark's will) made him reluctant to resist.

The drake was, however, gentle with his pet; demonstrating what he said earlier, he was in the mood to give pleasure, not pain. He didn't seem to care if the fox wanted neither. "Look at that pretty boy," the draconian hybrid grinned, looking over the nude, splayed form of Desmond's body, a truly beautiful and effeminate young man regardless of sexuality. With delicacy and appreciation, he trailed a digit along the tod's front side, from his navel to the dead center of his chest. "I want you to be one-hundred-percent honest, here," the dragon said with a serious expression, leaning over Desmond now; detracting from the authority, he cupped the foxcoon's balls.

"Uh huh?" Desmond croaked, his ears splaying.

"After the shit you've been through, with me, with the johns, even if it's only been a couple of days... You're not into guys? You're sure you like girls, still?" A small grin.

Desmond froze. He was still straight, of course - he was doing it, doing men, only because it was his new livelihood. Closing his eyes, sighing all of the air out of his lungs before sucking in a great, big mouthful, he said, "No."

"No? So you don't like girls? You like dick now? That's great!" An even wider grin, bearing teeth.

"That isn't what I meant and you know it!" Desmond whined.

Zenark shrugged noncommittally, and then he pecked his pet on the lips. "Lemme level with you, Desmond," Zenark said flatly, sitting up. Calmly, he took a bottle of lubricant out of the nightstand.

Desmond's first thought, well before the dread of what was to come, was you didn't use that when you fucked me...

The drake squirmed out of his own shirt and pants, and though he was already starting to sport an erection, the dark purple tip of his canid member peeking out of its' sheath, he had no interest in screwing the foxcoon; he just wanted to be nude next to the tod. Incorrectly, he thought it might ease his pet's troubled mind. As he undressed, he spoke to the nervous-eyed fox. "I don't see you getting laid with very many women. Girls just don't pick up prostitutes - not ones like you, anyway. You're not exactly male escort material, you get it?" He kicked his pants off of his ankle, and then he gave the fox a soft rub on his thigh; predictably, the fox shied away from it.

"I suppose," Desmond grunted, looking away from Zenark, toward the window, blocked by a large, black curtain.

"And I'm sure as fuck not buying a prostitute for a prostitute. Besides, those women..." Zenark snorted in disgust, while ironically stroking the dreamy fluff of Desmond's body, his touch so gentle that it didn't upset bruised flesh. "They're garbage. Nothing but diseases in their cunts. I don't want you getting sick." First glancing into the fox's eyes, he then caught them in a transfixing, laser-pointed stare. "Only thing that gets to hurt you," he balled up a fist, "is me." Then, his expression mellowed out into something more benign; his fist unclenched, and he lay his palm on the fox's belly, where he teasingly scratched, but earned no response. "But you need to jizz. Not just into your own fingers. Intimacy - an orgasm from somebody who actually gives a shit about you," Zenark said with a smart nod.

"But--"

"But nothing. You know why those guys out there fuck you like they do?" the drake cooed, leaning over Desmond, crotch-to-crotch, face-to-face; here, he peppered the foxcoon's muzzle with kisses, the final one on the lips. "Because their girlfriends, wives, boyfriends, whatever, don't give a fuck about them. They need love. So they pay to fuck a hot sissy-boy like you, some streetwalking fag. And they don't give a shit about you. Nobody loves your sorry ass like me, fox." The drake eased back, pulling off of fidgeting, quiet Desmond. "Now - just enjoy this," he ordered, as if it were something he could command.

The lube bottle looked more like something lotion came in; pushing down on the dispenser made it ooze its' contents out, in this case onto two of the drake's outstretched fingers, the index and middle, which he then rubbed with his thumb. Only once those digits were dripping with slippery silicone did the drake scoot up in between the tod's legs, offering no choice but to part them.

Pleadingly, Desmond looked into Zenark's eyes - and predictably, his attempts to get out of the act went unrewarded.

"Deep breaths," Zenark said, smiling wanly at the fox, and then he started to push his fingers deep inside of the fox, penetrating the ass that was so valuable on the street.

Desmond grimaced and hissed, but he felt no true discomfort beyond the initial stretch; the previous night's stallion meant he was still somewhat loose. Not gaping, by any means, but perfectly pliable for what the drake had in mind.

Licking his lips and grinning lewdly, Zenark let his fingers sink in quickly, their lengths disappearing up to the knuckles. There, dangerously rough scales decorated the fleshy hide, but those weren't going in the fox, or even up against his pucker. Desmond got only the smooth, flesh-like hide that dressed his master's fingers. These fingers began to writhe and tease within the tod's tight, clenching asshole with a great amount of skill - much more care and interest than any john would ever exhibit.

Zenark wasn't doing it for himself, and that was the key difference between his ministrations and whatever lecherous masturbation Desmond's customers partook in. Continually licking his lips in a gesture of concentration, the drake rubbed his fingertips over the foxcoon's anal walls, closest to his sack from the inside; and this, he clutched in his free hand, kneading and groping the flesh yet ineffectually, for Desmond's sheath remained stubbornly dormant.

In a moment that had taken far too long to arrive for the both of them, Zenark pressed into Desmond's prostate as if it were a button - although that was an appropriate analogy, given how quickly it turned the fox on.

Desmond changed from indifferent grunts to a cacophonous, yelping moan almost immediately. Though entirely pleasurable, this moan was clearly uneasy; it wavered and changed pitch, and it tapered into a whine well before its' end. Under his breath, he mouthed something; an incredulous question of just what the hell he was feeling, an appeal to some deity, even random swearing - it was impossible to tell exactly what he said. Soon after, though, he said something Zenark understood. "Oh, fuck..."

"See?" Zenark said, leering at the fox, but the effect was lost; Desmond's eyes were clenched shut, his face yanked up into a taut grimace. More importantly to the drake's immediate work, the fox's sheath was swelling, and soon came the first pink inches of the tod's meat, wet with pre, throbbing with uncertainty. "There we go, yeah," Zenark said in encouragement, though he could've just as easily been talking to himself. Unhanding Desmond's balls in favor of groping that fast-emerging penis, he dug deeper into the hidden, immensely tender gland in the foxcoon's ass, pressing into and rubbing upon it, showing it a distinct lack of mercy.

The fox cut the air with sharp cries and startled moans, pleasure wracking his body in unwanted surges. He'd felt little twinges of it on the few times he'd been sodomized, but never so focused like what Zenark was doing. The drake's attention was focused on just that blissful spot, and he was overwhelmed with gay pleasures that his straight mind couldn't reconcile. Whether or not he liked it emotionally or mentally, he liked it physically. All seven inches of his modest, knotted cock throbbed in Zenark's hand, which began to fiercely pump and grope on that meat.

Zenark wasn't stupid. He knew that Desmond's oncoming orgasm was contrived and unwanted, and that was how he expected it. All that mattered at that particular moment was getting the foxcoon to gratification; in much the same way as Desmond simply shut down and gave the pleasure needed to get the job done, Zenark pumped that knotted, pink dick harder than ever, and he rubbed, ground, and tweaked on the long-haired tod's prostate for all it was worth.

Each prod and rub was rewarded with an almost sobbing cry, muffled by the fox's own paw over (and sometimes in) his mouth. Every jerk on that sissy cock resulted in a hard spurt of pre. Desmond started to hump up into the drake's hand, entirely out of reflex, and with great inconsistency. He was cumming; he could feel it. It had been ages since his last orgasm, but the sensation was unforgettable. It was like the high of heroin, but unlike chasing the dragon, it never disappointed; orgasms always felt amazing, though that was simply nature.

But there was nothing natural about this orgasm. Desmond knew it; he suspected that even his dumb body did, but it wanted to cum so badly. Zenark's teasing and pleasing may not have been the brand of loving it expected, but it was good enough. Grimacing tightly, emitting a shrill cry through his clenched teeth, Desmond squeezed down like a vise on the drake's invading fingers and came with astonishing force. Rope after rope exited him, exorcising months of pent-up testosterone and sexual frustrations. In the moment, it didn't seem like it would ever end; Desmond certainly hoped it wouldn't, but it did, giving over to an afterglow pocked with cold chills and self-hating whimpers. His chest, stomach, and Zenark's hand were all caked in a fresh load of semen, but despite the sheer volume of his climax, the load off of his body and out of his balls, Desmond didn't feel any better.

He felt like complete trash, more confused than ever, more terrified of Zenark than the day, so recent but so very far, that the dragon had beaten the tar out of him in the alley. Because now, Zenark didn't just control pain, or the drugs, or his life in general; the drake demonstrated that he controlled pleasure, too.

Only adding to the discomfort, to the emotional bruising of this most recent "rape," Zenark curled around Desmond, his smoky, black hide and purple accents contrasting sharply to the foxcoon's vibrancy. He held the cowering fox well into sleep - and he continued to hold him until morning.

--15

In the month that came and went, Desmond became more and more familiar with the streets; he even had a repeat customer. His old friend, the stallion, propositioned him for a quick lay. Same SUV, same attitude, different alley.

That night, the twink had already had three men prior, and they all wanted anal sex. Each one had been of a roughly average endowment, but the final was a German Shepherd, and his meat was knotted. It hadn't been comfortable by any means, but Desmond took it - and now, as the unfaithful stallion entered him for a second time, with a cock that fell just short of filling a two-foot magnum condom better suited to making balloon animals, he was thankful for that good stretching from the dog. It wasn't painless, but it was more tolerable than it ordinarily would have been.

The foxcoon left the alley with an extra hundred dollars in his pocket; despite having to really work for his money, he liked the way the horse tipped him. Pausing behind a dumpster, one he made sure to check for vagrants first, the fox counted out his earnings; plus what he'd just earned, he had almost three-hundred and fifty on him. It had been a very profitable night.

He could have located Zenark and turned in, and then they could have probably enjoyed a nice dinner, followed by reading together. Those were his favorite kinds of nights; nothing noteworthy going on, just peace and quiet. Even Zenark's frequent desire for sexual favors - getting rimmed by the fox was his new favorite thing - was tolerable in light of their amiable relationship. Desmond had learned most of Zenark's red buttons, and with acceptance settling in, obedience was gladly exhibited. In the entire past month, the drake hadn't struck Desmond - not even playfully. All but the worst bruises were gone, and even these were beginning to fade.

Desmond reflected on his existence; it wasn't perfect, not by any means, but all things considered, he thought it had improved. The abuse didn't come if he worked and obeyed. He never had to tweak and panic about how he'd find his drugs; Zenark always provided. Every night, the foxcoon got the hit he needed to function. He'd kicked the blues of his new life, and settled into it nicely.

Suddenly, the idea of seeing Zenark brought a smile to his face. Flush from his examination of his own life, he decided he had it in him to take on just one more john.

Padding his way out to the streetlight-lit sidewalk, he paused in plain view, and he stretched languidly, offering his slender body. It was the second-worst mistake of his entire life.

--16

When Desmond saw the windowless, brown van with the missing front fender and plywood filling the passenger-side window, he felt a pang of nervousness, overriding the Stockholm excitement of getting to see Zenark again. Rape jokes about little kids and windowless vans with pedophiles inside rushed to him, but he shoved it away. Scum like this was his clientele, whether he liked it or not.

As the van stopped, he glanced one way, and then the other. Zenark was nowhere to be seen; Desmond guessed he was off scoring, or perhaps delivering some street justice to another pimp. In either case, that meant the foxcoon could've easily disappeared and become a statistic later on. But Desmond shoved that idea away, too. More than likely, whoever was in the van wanted an orgasm, not a murder thrill.

Up at the driver-side window, Desmond leaned on the door, and he smiled sweetly. It was a face he'd spent many hours working with Zenark to develop; sultry, sweet, giving the impression that he was undressing the customer with his eyes, it increased his productivity by an astronomical amount. That plus a swish of his tail or a longing finger dragged down the mark's chest or face was often all it took. "Hi there," he cooed to the man inside - a weasel.

Desmond was used to the scummy and swarthy types, even though it tended to be, ironically, reasonably handsome and often married men who craved what lay under his tail. This weasel fell into the former camp. Visibly lanky, appearing gaunt in a tattered, brown bomber jacket, food-stained tee beneath it, teeth visibly rotten and eyes puffy and bloodshot, he looked like food and hygiene were alien concepts to him. "Hey, fox," he grunted to Desmond in a rasp.

The voice was hideous enough, the end result of what had to be a lifelong endeavor to smoke every cigarette in the world, but the breath hit Desmond in the face a full second afterward. Like a freight train, it slammed into him with full force, and he visibly recoiled; there was no acting around that. Suppressing a cough brought on by the scent of rancid teeth, Desmond said, "You need some company, there?" He didn't add his usual handsome to that query. He couldn't have possibly delivered it with a straight face.

"Get in," the weasel said, his voice scraping like rusty metal. He nodded to the passenger door; Desmond opened it and slid in.

The alley the weasel chose to park in was as unremarkable as any other. The wide van just barely fit (the passenger side mirror had already been taken off by such a shaky landing), and when he turned the headlights off, the junk heap all but disappeared. They were in such a gap that the streetlights didn't shine any light down in the alley, and so they were almost invisible to any passing cops.

The foul-breathed mustelid smiled lopsidedly at Desmond, who thinly smiled back. "This way," he wheezed, and he squirmed behind the seats, passing through a thick, black rug hung as a curtain, sectioning off the rear of the van.

Desmond uneasily followed, doing all he could to ignore the fermented filth that was ingrained in the carpet of the van; once plush, it now felt mealy and damp to the touch, as if made of maggots. The foxcoon emerged through the makeshift curtain into what he immediately and humorously thought of as the love nest.

A mattress lay down next to one wall, pillows of varying make and shape strewn on and around it. Peppering the mattress (which had no sheets, but a comforter was bunched-up nearby) were crusty, yellow stains. The stench of urine was apparent, as well as the stagnant musk of body odor, but smelling the weasel's breath had already tempered Desmond to such fetid odors. A naked lightbulb hung from a jury-rigged fixture overhead; Desmond guessed it was wired into the battery. "Nice place," he said, sardonically.

"Thanks," the weasel replied without irony. He cuddled into his horrific nest, and, grinning, he patted beside himself.

Grinning back, but secretly holding back revulsion, Desmond joined him. Through his thin fishnet top, he could feel the cum stains on the mattress, contrasting harshly with the fabric top of the bed itself. Please don't try to kiss me, he thought, finding himself in a hug with the weasel, held worrisomely close. "Uh, so, hey," the foxcoon said, laughing uneasily to keep from crying, "let's just get down to business, huh?"

"Sure," the mustelid said in a phlegmy cough; a fresh wave of sickness crawled through Desmond's gut.

"I could suck your dick, if that's something you might like," he said, smiling, "though I'm told my paws are pretty soft, and my ass is tight." Then he winked. Sticking closely to his routine helped him stifle the discomfort.

The weasel laughed, but it degraded into a rough, wet cough which Desmond recoiled from. "Doubt I can afford to actually fuck ya, nah... I mean, what'll ten bucks get me?"

It'll get me out of this van, Desmond thought. "Well," he mumbled, "maybe I could pose for you? Do a striptease? Something you can jerk off to?"

"I can get stripteases looking through apartment windows," the weasel said, pronouncing the word as windurrs. His accent was implacable to Desmond. "What about if you jerked off for me? That seems like it's fair. You get ten bucks to jizz for me." He clapped his paws together and ground their palms together, smiling lewdly. "I'll watch. Go."

Desmond flushed and allowed his ears to sag. He didn't think it was possible for him to be even slightly aroused in that van, let alone achieve orgasm. Wordlessly, he unzipped his pants, and he squirmed out of them. He sat back against the wall of the van, next to the mustelid, who lay on his side; this left his foul-smelling mouth close to the fox's groin, but at least away from his nose.

Closing his eyes, Desmond tried to shut out his surroundings, the acrid stench and the stillness, which was interrupted only by the cancerous wheeze of the weasel. Whatever was wrong with him, Desmond didn't want to stick around to find out, and he was glad more and more that he'd opted for something besides penetrative sex. Holding onto his sheath, rubbing and groping it, the fox tried to urge out his manhood. Very insistently, he played with himself, sheath in one paw, balls in the other, groping and rubbing, squeezing and palming, but the most horrible thing was happening: nothing. Desmond couldn't get over the situation.

Said situation wasn't helped when the weasel verbally urged Desmond. And then, when the fox didn't reply, he said, "Fuck's the matter with you, can't get hard?"

"I'm trying," Desmond hissed through clenched teeth, pumping on his sheath harder and harder.

"I bet it's me, innit?" coughed the weasel, degrading into a longer diatribe of hacking and wheezing.

Desmond's eyes popped open, and he looked at the mustelid in brief moment of concern, followed by the same well-hidden distaste from before. "No, no, it's not you," he lied.

"Then why aren't you getting hard?"

Desmond fidgeted. He said nothing, but he still groped his sheath idly, lamenting the bygone days of awkward high school erections in front of the class.

The weasel sharply sat up, and despite having a thick bulge in the crotch of his pants, he had a tired, morose expression. "Sorry I ain't one of the high-rolling queers you like to fuck."

The foxcoon, keeping a wary eye on the weasel, reached down and started to slide his jeans back up, but the john stopped him, grabbing him by the wrist; Desmond nervously showed his teeth.

"Just lemme fuck you," he said, quietly, suppressing a cough.

"Unless you have fifty bucks--," Desmond indignantly spat, but he wasn't allowed to finish - the weasel struck him with an open-hand slap, and then he shoved the foxcoon down to the mattress, rendering him squealing and thrashing.

"God_dammit,_ you're the prettiest boy I've ever seen! I'm gonna fuck your faggot ass!" the mustelid grunted, speaking without sarcasm or irony, only desperation which Desmond simultaneously found terrifying and sad.

"Leave me alone! You're not putting your fucking dirty dick in me!" Desmond screamed, hitting a shrill pitch that stung even his own ears.

Once again, the weasel delivered a painful, open-palm smack! to the indignant whore's cheek, and then another, followed by another, and another still. Then he switched paws, and he leveled a few smacks into the other cheek. Just when the fox was sobbing, begging him to stop, crying out for mercy and admitting defeat, he punched the whore in the snout. There was little strength behind it in comparison to the smacking, but it still snapped his head to one side and stung the freshly-bruised flesh.

Very quietly, in sharp contrast to his shrieking, Desmond quietly sobbed. "Don't hit me again," he bawled in defeat, "please..."

"Fuck," the weasel coughed, but at what (or why) was unclear. He undressed the fox from the waist down, yanking his pants down and off, briefs included, and then he hastily opened up his own fly. Commando beneath them, he fished out his erect member. It measured only six inches, but it was alarmingly thick. Blunt-tipped in what seemed to be nature's default style and uncircumcised, it was only slightly wet with pre, yet ready enough for the weasel. Without a single word, but leaning so close that his gross breath assaulted the foxcoon, he pushed his manhood up under the twink's balls and entered him with no finesse, simply plowing in.

Despite the tod's recent equine john, the penetration was pure agony. Desmond squealed through gritted teeth and squinted his eyes tightly shut, grabbing the weasel's shoulders. He tried to scrape and claw, but his nails had been carefully manicured by Zenark for maximum sex appeal, and beyond that, the jacket was too thick for such an attack. When he instinctively went for his rapist's eyes, his efforts were rewarded with a dazing headbutt, and then the mustelid pinned his arms at the wrists, over the fox's head.

"Take it," the weasel said, his voice almost inaudible over the pained squealing and hissing from the small prostitute. He started to fuck the twink with sharp, fast thrusts which, combined with a lack of lubrication beyond his negligible pre, caused unbearably painful friction for Desmond. Throughout the boy's rollercoaster of begging, squealing, and whimpering, he panted and huffed, ever spewing his foul breath over the prostitute's face, though that had become the least of the boy's worries.

Oh my god, Zen, where are you? was all that Desmond could manage to think, his sobbing deepening, turning into a hysterical and hopeless bellow.

The weasel didn't make any effort to silence Desmond. It was unclear if he liked those noises, or if he was simply too involved in the sex. It seemed to be the latter for the way he idly encouraged himself, without seeming aware of it.

A pent-up and clearly broken man like that weasel had no hope of lasting very long in a hot twink like Desmond, no matter the circumstances. His breathing was coming in heavy, irregular gasps twinged with wheezes and soft coughs, but all the same, he was telegraphing his orgasm. Still humping roughly and briskly into the sobbing fox, he closed his eyes, and he shuddered hard; as he came, shooting his ropes of jizz deep into the unprotected foxcoon, he groaned, and then he started to cough again, another one of his fits that eased off into a content rumble.

Desmond squirmed uneasily as the weasel came, but he silenced all but the smallest of his sobs and whimpers. It was over. He just wanted to limp back to Zenark. "I want to go home," he said, quietly. His voice still trembled and broke, but he had stopped crying.

The rapist gave Desmond a queer look (now Desmond noticed the grotesque cataracts in the weasel's eyes, the right far more severe than the left), and then he huffed in the boy's face. "You never did jizz for me."

"And I won't," Desmond snarled. "Let me go!"Easy. You're not the badass - Zen is. And Zen's not here.

"Psh," the weasel huffed, but that alone made him start to cough. "I ain't paying you," he rasped, exiting the fox's wrecked, leaking asshole, sitting back on the nasty carpet against the far wall, half-flaccid cock still poking through his fly.

Desmond had never experienced it before - a stinging, burning sensation resonating from what he guessed to be the inside of his ass. It felt like salt on a wound, but it much more intense than that simple analogy. Forcing himself through the pain, intent on taking his opportunity to leave, he slid up his briefs and pants together, not caring that the former bunched up on the trip. He zipped up, and buttoned, and then glanced at the weasel, who bored into him with sullen eyes.

On his knees, the foxcoon lifted up the rug, and he draped it over his back as he padded his way through - but on the way, the weasel grabbed him by his long, luxuriant tail.

Despite Desmond's squealing and sudden flailing, the unhealthy rapist yanked the fox back, and when he was through the "curtain" again, he snatched up a clump of the fox's hair in the other paw. Manhandling the noisy, thrashing bitch back to the mattress, exerting all of the strength in his anorexic body, he tossed the foxcoon down.

Desmond wasn't subdued, and he lunged up, only to get his head bounced off of the steel wall of the van four times. The first two had stunned him; the next pair just seemed like stress release for the weasel.

"I changed my mind, we're not fuckin' done," the sickly creature panted, left winded from wrestling the boy down, but also hard again, apparently off of the thrill. He started to undress Desmond again, hurriedly yanking down the foxcoon's fly.

Desmond wasn't having that - not again. You're not Zenark - you don't get to do this to me! he screamed inside. "FUCKER!" he screeched, nearly frothing with anger to make the drake proud. Though the haze of having his skull bashed on the wall hung around him and made things blurry, he kicked hard, connecting with the weasel - and not just anywhere, since his delicate foot drilled into the weasel's hidden balls.

The weasel made a shrill hoo! sound, and he fell to the grungy carpet, grimacing, involuntarily crying, clutching his bruised genitals and making a discontent whimpering sound.

Seeing double, Desmond stumbled on his all-fours up to the rear doors, barred with a 2x4 which had been long wedged into place. He pawed at it, tried to lift it, but there was no budging it; even though Zenark had been feeding him well, he was still a weak little drug addict, and a sissy boy on top of that. He did the next best thing - he hoped against hope that somebody would help him, he screamed that four-letter word as loudly as he could, as often as his lungs would allow, and he banged on the door until his paws were bruised and bleeding.

The weasel was recovering from Desmond's ungracious kick; he wasn't happy by any stretch, and he slowly closed the gap to his concussed victim.

Desmond shot back one glance at the weasel, and then he punched and pounded on the doors even harder, begging and squealing right up until the mustelid snatched him by the hair; a paw closed around his snout, then, squeezing tightly, and that paw on his hair migrated to his throat, where it began to choke and strangle.

The fox wondered if it was just a hallucination, but he heard urgent, gruff tones - a familiar voice bellowing, Desmond! Desmond!? He didn't know if it was real or not; he couldn't even answer. Something told him Zenark would be crazy enough to rip the doors off just to find out, but he couldn't take that chance. With the double- and triple-vision world around him fading into black and white, and soon to be all black, he kicked at the door. He banged his feet against it as hard as he could, bruising and bloodying his delicate feet just as he'd done to his paws, but he pounded the door.

And then... Silence. It was a hallucination.

Darker and darker; black and white, and segueing entirely into the former. As the sights, sounds, smells, and tactile feelings (in that order) faded away into nothingness, Desmond sank into unconsciousness.

The fox came to minutes later. Though seeing things through the filter of his recent concussion, he recognized the purple and black. He didn't know if it hallucination from his brain shutting down, but he clung to the shape the colors textured, and in return, he was held with a fierce possessiveness.

Desmond lapsed back into unconsciousness. Not struggling for his life, as he had been with the weasel, but with the infantile complacency that everything was okay in Zenark's hands.

--17

Zenark looked down at his unconscious pet. Bloody, bruised, disheveled, and obviously in the middle of fleeing from the emaciated weasel.

It wasn't something the drake liked to see anymore, and despite whatever he told himself, Desmond's appearance and well-being wasn't just about the money. How he resented himself for letting himself care about something so--

The drake looked for a word. It came to him: fragile. Desmond was fragile in every way conceivable.. But that was why he needed Zenark. An easily-waylaid thing like Desmond needed a rock to hold onto.

His rock. Zenark enjoyed that. It sounded poetic and romantic. Desmond's rock.

Silently, Desmond's rock watched it's charge, and it brooded.

--18

Desmond stirred, and the first sound to pass his lips was an uneasy, infantile oogh sound. The worst migraine of his life thudded away in his brain; he made no attempt to sit up and aggravate it. In opening his eyes, he took a calculated risk of being subjected to bright light, which would have been as striking as a flashbang in his state, but the curtain was pulled closed, and the lamp was on its' lowest setting.

Despite seeing three of everything in swirling, vomit-inducing triple-vision, Desmond knew he was in

(our)

Zenark's bed.

Somebody in the room said something, but the sound was low, heavily modulated, the throaty rumble of a demon. E's ah'ing uh.

And then another voice, low and menacing, but not quite as much as the first. Ah' cheh.

A figure appeared inches from his face - it was a girl. He hadn't seen one in a long time, so close. She was a kind of creature he recognized; the word deer felt right, so he went with that. She was so close that he had no choice but to focus on her, as she thoughtfully gazed not into, but past his eyes.

The haze was gradually clearing, the modulation tapering off. Rumbles turned to voices. "Based on his eye movement," the deer said, in increasing clarity to Desmond's ears, "I'd say he's fully conscious."

"So, that means he's all right?" Zenark said from out of view. Desmond could recognize his voice anywhere.

The deer lay a hand upon Desmond's head, and she soothingly stroked through the mane of his hair, glancing away to the drake. "I can't promise you that. He might... Well," she sighed.

"Well what?" Zenark snapped.

"He looks confused," she glanced back to Desmond, a worrisome glint in her eye, "but that is entirely likely after regaining consciousness, when you consider what he's been through. But if he can't talk, or if he's only partially responsive, he could have bleeding in his brain."

"I can talk," Desmond croaked. His voice sounded distant, to his own ears. It surprised him to find out he still had the ability to make words, as difficult as everything felt; even breathing took some labor.

The deer immediately flinched and cringed as if confronted with a particularly nasty insect, yanking her hand off of his head. She sighed before replacing it on his shoulder, upon which she squeezed gently.

Zenark came into view, appearing - like most things - as two to three blurry, shifting figures to Desmond's eyes. "You're okay," he grunted. Muscling the deer out of the way, shooing her elsewhere on the bed, he squeezed the fox snugly and rumbled with an implacably affectionate sound.

As tightly as he could, Desmond squeezed back, looking at the deer from over the drake's shoulder. Zenark eased him down onto the pillows, and afterward, the deer stood up from and tucked the blankets up under the tod's chin. "What happened?" he finally asked, not fighting being laid up.

Zenark and the deer exchanged glances. Finally, Zenark said, "You disappeared while I was taking a piss. I saw the van leave, and after I looked around and didn't see you, I figured you were in it." The drake gave his long, clubbed tail a lash in the air, harmlessly, and he folded his formidable arms across his chest. "So I went after it. Must've looked like a dog chasing a car, but I didn't give a fuck. By the time I found it, I heard you screaming for help."

"I remember that," Desmond mumbled.

"Mhm. And... Well," Zenark shrugged, "after I got the door open, I dragged the fucker out, and I tried to crack his skull on the back bumper. I doubt if I finished the job. I just grabbed you and got you home as quick as I could." He reached out, stroking the foxcoon's chest slowly, through the blankets. "And then I called Naomi, here." Zenark hiked a thumb over his shoulder to the deer. "She's just about the best field nurse a guy can ask for."

Naomi smiled thinly, blushing just as lightly.

A pause came and went, over five seconds of awkward silence, which Desmond eventually broke. "I feel awful."

"I'm not surprised," Naomi replied. "Now that you're conscious and I know you're not hemorrhaging, I can safely let you have some painkillers." With that, the deer reached into the doctor's bag at her side.

Zenark bristled, glaring at Naomi and snatching her wrist. "No," he coldly and simply growled, turning his eyes on Desmond again, whose heart sank. "I don't need you addicted to two things. I'll get you your usual shit, that ought to help. It might make you sleep, anyway."

"Wait, what?" Naomi sharply asked.

Zenark ignored her discomfort, and he lumbered off into the kitchen, each step a heavy and sullen thud; Desmond, who knew that Zenark could move as silently as a ninja, found this disturbing.

After an uneasy glance at Desmond, who sank into the pillows with his ears flat against his skull and his eyes shut, Naomi followed the dragon. "Zen, what do you- is he a drug addict?" the pretty deer almost stammered, watching with mounting unease as the dragon-wolf gathered up Desmond's drug paraphernalia.

"Yeah," he answered, quite casually, before turning to look at her, his brow furrowed in annoyance. "Didn't you look at his forearms? He's got more collapsed veins than a rehab clinic."

"I didn't think... Oh, my god," Naomi whined in frustration, rubbing her eyes. "What's he on?"

"Heroin," Zenark said, grabbing a spoon stained with opiate resins, a syringe in a virgin blister pack, and the cotton balls. From the same drawer he kept all of these items in, he lifted a false bottom, and he took out a tight wad of foil, an imperfect sphere, inside of which was a single belt of heroin.

"Heroin!? You're letting him do smack, Zenark?"

"Look," Zenark grunted through gritted teeth, peering into Naomi's eyes, "what's the alternative? He's useless without the shit."

The drake started to walk by, but Naomi lay a hand upon his bicep, and she squeezed; she had no strength over him, but the gesture alone stopped him. "He's useless if he's dead, too. Look, the alternative is getting him some help. I know some programs. They're free, some of them are NQA, you can--"

"Why the fuck would I want to get him help?" Zenark snapped, cutting Naomi off mid-sentence and startling her into a flinch, but she admirably kept her hold. "This shit keeps him pliable. It keeps the money coming in."

The prostitution - Naomi knew about that. It was fairly obvious, though sickening in its' own right, and Zenark had very openly referred to Desmond as his prostitute. "Right, fine, but don't you care about him? Those drugs are gonna kill him! You know that, damn you!" She lanced him with an intense stare, one that had volumes of disappointment in it.

Zenark was never one to kowtow, and that was a fact Naomi had learned the hard way. It was why, when Zenark showed his teeth, she was wise to unhand him. Then, he turned his back on her, intent on hiding the emotional quiver of his lower lip. "I don't give a fuck about him, only the money," the dragon said. Though his voice was tinted a bloody shade by a foreboding growl, the words sounded as hollow as a dead tree trunk.

Anybody but Naomi would have backed off. With necessary coldness, she said, "That's why you hugged him when you found out he was okay, yeah. That's why you called me and screamed at me to come help. You don't care at all about him."

"I'm protecting my fucking money!" Zenark roared, his bellow rattling the windows in the kitchen. Quaking with anger, resisting the desire to beat somebody (not just Naomi, anyone would do) into a coma, he trudged off to the bedroom.

Naomi tailed him, wisely staying a few paces back.

The drake refused to acknowledge the doe while he helped Desmond shoot up - these were arguably their most intimate moments together, and the drake enjoyed the closeness. Pulling the belt taut, watching Desmond plunge the needle in... Sometimes the fox would even moan as if in orgasm, and press close to his benefactor. It was, lamentably, the closest he could bring the fox to willful bliss.

The fox was made to prepare the filth for himself, as always, and he did so with skill, despite his concussion - but Zenark helped his twink pop a vein with his belt. He always did.

Desmond recoiled into the bedsheets, his discomfort disappearing into his high.

It was a train wreck to Naomi; the sight of Desmond sinking the needle and then depressing the plunger, afterward biting his lip and rolling back his eyes? Disturbing and perverse, not easily looked away from, and it made her skin crawl.

Zenark patted the tod's head fondly, and then slid the needle free. He rounded up the drug items with clinical efficiency and set them aside on the dresser afterward. "Naomi, c'mere," he requested, his voice gentle, hardly the rampage from moments before.

Wary of the dragon, Naomi followed him out of the room.

"Listen," he said, wrapping his arms around her in a loose embrace which she didn't return, "I need to clear my head. Go for a walk. Can you keep an eye on Desmond for me?"

The deer sighed and peered into the bedroom, and then she rested her face on the drake's shoulder; soothingly, Zenark rubbed her neck and up through the shoulder-length locks of her blonde hair. "Yeah, I can watch him..."

"Good," the drake softly cooed. "I'll be back in a few hours." A beat. "Though, maybe not until morning." He pulled away from Naomi, before she could protest, and he stepped back into the bedroom. On the floor lay Desmond's discarded clothes; the dragon reached into a hip pocket of the foxcoon's jeans, encountered the rubbers, reached into the other, and took out the cash inside.

Naomi stared wide-eyed in astonishment and disgust as Zenark peeled bills off of the wad.

"Forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty," the drake counted, and then he pressed these bills into the deer's hand, whether she wanted them or not. "Order something for you guys to eat." Then, he whispered conspiratorially into her ear, "If he says he's not sure what he wants, just get something from the pizza place menu on the fridge, he loves their food."

As cute as she found that, Naomi resisted cracking a smirk. "And I need eighty dirty dollars for a pizza?"

"No, but you need it to make it worth babysitting him to make sure he doesn't drown on his own saliva." Zenark slipped an olive drab coat around his shoulders, and he opened the door. "Take good care of him." Then, with not an ounce of irony, "He's worth a lot to me."

After Zenark stepped out into the night and closed the door behind himself, Naomi turned and looked at Desmond (who lay almost catatonically), and then she sat on the sofa with a long, tired sigh.

--19

Zenark wasn't surprised to see that the van no longer filled the alley. The only evidence it had been there was a small oil stain - and, close to where the back bumper had been, a small blood stain from the weasel.

The dragon stared in reflection at the gap of the alley, and his tail swayed in a hypnotic dance as he contemplated.

As he thought.

And planned.

--20

Tips were bought with the money Desmond had earned that night. Simple informants, drug dealers he collected protection money from, and the occasional corrupt cop were all sources of information for Zenark, and after roughly two hundred dollars worth of information and leads, the drake came up to a sad shell of an apartment building. He recognized this type of dive; crackhead territory.

Outside, not so much parked as left where it died, was a grungy, windowless van, the back doors hastily bundled shut with bungee cords, the lock hopelessly mangled into uselessness. The rear bumper was caved in, smeared with blood that had dried to a shade to almost match the rust.

Zenark smirked at his handiwork as he walked past the boarded-up door of the apartment and into the alley. He tested the fire escape, and then he mounted it, his dark hide and coat becoming one with the pervasive shadows as he climbed.

Zenark eased the cloudy window open, and he slipped inside, landing on a floor where all partitioning walls were torn down, leaving a sprawling habitat of empty cots. A glass crack pipe crunched underfoot, as did a second when he took another step; these filthy shards were deterred by Zenark's incredibly tough hide. Beyond those pipes, the only other things that crunched were unfortunate roaches.

The elevator was, predictably, barred up, as were the stairs to the above floor. With down as the only way to go, down was where Zenark went. Where the stairs changed directions, he stepped on the snoozing form of one of the building's occupants.

The piece of trash wheezed sharply, and then he glared up at the drake with milky eyes and a grimacing mouth full of cracked and capped teeth. "Watch it, prick-breath," the lowlife hissed.

Zenark thought the vagabond was some kind of wolf, with his gray coat and canine face. He snatched the lupine by the throat, lifting him and pinning to the wall, earning obedience and silence at once. Ignoring the vile miasma of the wolf's breath, he lowly rumbled, "If you wanna make it through tonight without getting your intestines ripped out through your asshole, you're gonna tell me if there's a weasel living here."

The addict wolf nodded fervently, so strongly as to not be mistaken for an idle twitch, and then he shakily pointed down the stairwell. With Zenark squeezing his throat, his eyes bulged out of their sockets, the whites yellowed, and marred with popped capillaries.

"That's what I wanted to know," Zenark calmly said, and then he punched the wolf until he lost consciousness.

Leaving the wolf in a heap in the stairwell, Zenark walked down to the lower floor. Here, walls still remained, forming the partitions that were once low-income housing apartments. As he neared a doorway, he peered in, crouching low; if anyone were to swing for him when he entered, they'd no-doubt go for the head. Inside, he saw, quite possibly, the most sickening sight of his entire life - one toothless crackhead abomination going down on another, obviously under some kind of coercion or force. He moved on before either spotted him.

This is what I'm keeping him out of. This shit. Be over my dead body if he winds up as some toothless, unwashed piece of garbage.

When Zenark peered into the next room, he saw only sleeping filth, some huddling together for warmth, some off on their own - but no weasels.

In the next room, the final partition, he heard voices; a wheezy, coughing storyteller bragged about the incredibly hot blonde vixen he had just fucked, and how he'd punched out her domineering boyfriend. According to his recollection, she had the finest ass he'd ever laid eyes on, and he made her cum so many times that his van would smell like vixen cunt for weeks.

A break in the story gave way to lewd chuckling, and a congratulation.

Zenark stayed pressed to the wall just beside the doorway, and he spent just a moment savoring the rush of the rage. The adrenaline, the emotions, the thrill that came before murder. Better than sex. After a deep breath, he stepped around the corner, through the rickety door frame

Three scuzzy creatures sat around a spool re-purposed as a table, playing cards and smoking crack; the acrid stench filled the air and burned the drake's sinuses.

Facing the door was the weasel; he was unmistakable, especially with the black eye and the bloody spatter on his head that Zenark had given him. His jaw fell slack at the sight of the dark, two-toned angel of death that had just stepped through the door. "Oh shit," the weasel gasped, his voice failing him.

"Wha's wrong?" one of his compatriots blurted, turning. He was a mutt-dog, but that became hard to discern after Zenark grabbed him by the back of his skull, plunged his claws into the scalp flesh, and smashed him face-first into the floorboards. The blow broke the floorboards, but crushed the dog's muzzle into a permanently-deformed mess of bloody cartilage.

Zenark tore his claws away, ragged chunks of scalp and fur clinging to the miniature talons. Eyes burning like bonfires, he turned to the weasel's other friend.

"Son of a bitch!" the hapless crackhead yelped, scooting away, his legs rendered as gelatin in raw fear. Some kind of a grungy-looking skunk, he didn't fare terribly well when Zenark, roaring, hefted the spool and tossed it at him like a frisbee disc. It connected squarely with the mustelid, breaking most of his ribs and loosening what remained of his teeth.

As the dog dragged himself away, rapidly bleeding out, and the skunk lay broken and unconscious, Zenark turned his attentions to the weasel, who all but cowered at his feet, either too scared or too stupid to run. "Stand up," the drake commanded.

"Fuck, fuck, I'sorry, I just, he just wouldn't," he yammered.

Zenark kicked the weasel in the ribs with all of his strength, rolling him over twice, leaving him in a winded heap. "Stand UP, motherfucker!" Another kick, and the weasel neatly tumbled over in one complete rotation. Zenark took a bounding step forward, and he punted into the weasel. "STAND UP!" And another punt, and another mighty bellow, the words pressed so closely together that they became almost a barbaric chant: _ STANDUPMOTHERFUCKER! _

Coughing and cursing hoarsely, spitting up blood on the sullied planks, the weasel moved to his all-fours uneasily, and from there, with much effort and much quaking, he made it to his feet. Though a few inches taller than Zenark, he stood hunched over, his head well below the drake's.

Zenark snatched the weasel, one hand upon the grimy, hair-like fluff atop his head, while the other coiled tightly around the sickly creature's throat. "You hurt something very dear to me tonight," he said simply and calmly, and when the weasel gave no reply, he honked on the mustelid's neck and then shook him with both hands. "Didn't your mother ever tell you not to fuck with a dragon's belongings, cocksucker!?"

"He was, fuckin' fuck!" the weasel disjointedly grunted, whimpering, feeling like his eyes were about to pop out of his head. "I told him to rub one out for me, and he didn't, he couldn't!"

Zenark walked the weasel back - when he refused to step, he just dragged the scumbag's heels - and pinned him to the wall, close to a window long-since boarded over. "Let me tell you about proportionate retribution," the dragon hissed, grinning, but in a way akin to an involuntary grimace. "You tell my prostitute to jerk off for you, and he - what, motherfucker!? - he tries, but he can't, so you rape him, you beat the shit out of him?"

"I just wanted to break a nut!" the weasel whined, writhing on the wall under Zenark's ironclad grip.

Nonplussed, Zenark continued, "See, that's disproportionate retribution. I know my bitch. If you would've asked, paid, and covered your dirty dick, he would've put out. You took what you wanted by force." After unhanding the weasel's hair, Zenark wagged a finger in the doomed scumbag's face, the pantomime of tut-tut.

"Fuck you! Fuck you in the goddamned asshole, and your fucking faggot whore, too! If it weren't for you fucking pimps, I could've...!" The weasel trailed off into a pitiful coughing fit, one made all the worse by the drake's grip.

"You could've gotten away with it," the drake said, coldly and quietly. Clearly, he was unfazed by the coughing and hacking. "Back on subject, kids, proportionate retribution - a practical lesson. You raped and beat my property. I'm sure as fuck not going near your ass, but beatings?" He grinned with genuine maliciousness. "Beatings are just my thing."

Zenark pounded the pitiful, worthless thing with fists and feet, elbows and knees. Each blow hit the weasel like a sledgehammer. The dangerous hybrid's textured knuckles and taloned toes ripped open oozing gashes; his assault broke bones and evoked shrill cries that ran the gamut from begging for mercy, to suicidally defiant exclamations of no remorse, to the exact opposite and around again. With a chained quintet of headbutts, Zenark smashed his prey's face into bloody oblivion, leaving features only dental records could identify.

The other druggies and hobos watched from the door frame, none assisting, all staring in morbid curiosity. Perhaps they were just that soulless; perhaps Zenark wasn't somebody they wanted to fuck with; it was entirely possible the weasel was getting something he deserved, too. They watched, all the same. Some even put bets on the fight.

Like a cat with a wounded mouse, the draconian beast beat his prey until it stopped breathing, but they were hardly done, so with a field-goal kick to the stomach, he spurred the weasel into a hooting suck of air that made him start breathing again, however labored it was.

In a moment of respite, Zenark loomed over the weasel, who lay beaten, broken, and bloody; Zenark's three favorite Bs.

With his face so mangled, quality of life wasn't even a wishful thought for the weasel. In all of the commotion of the fight, his eyes had been destroyed; one was crushed by the surrounding cheekbone during Zenark's administration, and the other had been raked across by the drake's claws. What remained was just a hideous crater that didn't even resemble a face. It was a meaty pulp of flesh and cartilage.

Zenark kicked the weasel over on his back; blood pooled in one of the myriad pockets of torn, mutilated flesh and bone, and it bubbled from his exhalations. For ten seconds, the dragon watched, morbidly curious about whether or not his prey would drown in its' own blood, or--

Surprising Zenark, the weasel uneasily rolled to his side; with a reserved splash, the blood hit the floor. Squirming without much conviction, the weasel curled in upon himself; his body quaked violently, and Zenark just knew - through years of experience - that it was in fear.

The dragon looked down at his hands, and he had a flashback to the murder of the police officer. Blood was smeared all over his exposed hide; his claws were stained with it, and so were his clothes. He imagined his face, what with all of the headbutting and splattering, looked like it was chaotically war-painted - he was right to assume this.

"Let this be a lesson to you fucking crackheads," Zenark said, enunciating clearly and sweeping his smoldering eyes across the small audience. Then, in sharp contrast, screaming loudly enough to make all of the ears nearby flatten in fear, the drake stomped on the weasel's prostrate head. "Pop goes the fucking weasel that fucks with my property!"

The frail, dying thing thrashed and made some alien bellow that would forever haunt his widowed drug abusers.

Punctuating his second stomp with a victorious roar, Zenark crushed the mustelid's skull underfoot; like an over-ripened tomato, it didn't split, but instead splattered in all directions. Blood and gray matter mingled into the floorboards amidst ragged chunks of bone fragment, and the mangled weasel's body thrashed, twitched, and finally went entirely limp.

Heaving with bated breath, Zenark wriggled his toes in the semi-solid mess of the weasel's brains. It wasn't an erotic sensation, but a vengeful one. With contempt, he booted the slop of the gray matter across the room, and then he heavily trudged his way to the doorway; the other vagrants couldn't scamper out of the drake's way fast enough.

Zenark kept to the shadows all the way home; he didn't want to have to kill anybody else, to remove the punctuation from the weasel's death.

--21

"Zen--..." Naomi blurted, her stomach rolling - but she managed to keep the pizza down. Had she not had the composure of a nurse, that might not have been the case.

"Just shut up, Naomi," Zenark said, calmly and casually. "Just," he mimed dragging a zipper across his lips, "zzzzzt."

"Zenark, you killed somebody," the deer gasped, and then she sat down on the sofa, squeezing herself tightly and fighting back disgusted tears.

"I did what was necessary," the drake corrected, slipping out of his bloodied coat, and the beater beneath, which was just as sullied. His face was what disturbed Naomi the most, and she refused to look at it.

"God_dammit,_ you're a psycho," she whined. "I don't know why I stick around you."

Zenark went to put his hands on her shoulders, but after seeing the blood on them again, he decided against this. "Naomi," he said, softly and sweetly, "that guy I killed was nobody. Nothing. Relax."

"If he was nothing," Naomi trembled, "then why did you have to kill him?"

"He hurt Desmond," Zenark concisely answered.

Desmond emerged from the bedroom on shaky legs, but Zenark thought he was looking better. He even smiled, but that vanished when he got a better look at the dragon. As he perused the copious blood on his body and his pants and smelled the unmistakable, coppery stench of the stuff, all vibrancy vanished from his high features. His smile plummeted, his ears folded back against his skull as if stapled down, and he uneasily staggered back into the bedroom. "Zen, no," he whimpered.

Zenark grunted through clenched teeth. "Desmond - Desmond, it's okay."

Slowly, the fox shook his head. "No, it's not okay. You're going to keep killing people over me, aren't you?" He was already crying; his voice began choking up.

Though emotionally numbed, Zenark wasn't entirely insensitive to Desmond's fears and sorrows - and he couldn't find it in his heart to lie. "To keep you safe," he said slowly and clearly, "I'll kill anybody I have to."

Desmond quaked in the door frame of the bedroom, his paw still on the doorknob. Zenark began to walk closer, clearly with the intent to hug and coddle, but Desmond, grimacing, retreated into the bedroom, slammed the door in the dragon's face, and then set the lock.

"Desmond, unlock the door," Zenark quietly ordered, giving the knob only one futile twist.

"Zen," Naomi started.

"Shut up, Naomi," Zenark growled. "Desmond, open the door. I'm not gonna hit you. I'll even forgive you for slamming this door in my face if you'll open it."

Desmond glanced around the room. No guns. No knives. That was Zenark's policy. But there was Naomi's doctor bag. He pulled it open, and he greedily dug around, brushing past delicately-cleaned instruments in sheaths, syringes in blister packs like the ones he used, and a vast amount of gauze. Then his groping paw found a bottle of pills. Trembling, he took it out, and his bouncing, concussed eyes scanned the label. Oxycodone. He knew what that was. Serious stuff as far as painkillers went.

It would have to do. Frenzied, not realizing his own sudden death would probably drive the dragon into an atomic rage, his flawed resolve told him to make sure Zenark wouldn't kill anybody over him again. His own conscience couldn't fathom anything else.

He popped the cap off of the bottle, and he gulped down the pills, dry, just as fast he could.

--22

Zenark heard the clatter of pills on the floor. Grimacing, he looked to Naomi with narrow, alarmingly intense eyes. "Did you leave your shit in there?"

Naomi paled immediately. Her lower jaw fell slack, and she started to work it, as if to talk - but then she started to cry.

"Naomi, you dingbat bitch, what the fuck did you leave in there!?" Zenark roared, as he started to shoulder-ram the door. It wasn't a cheap piece of wood, however; all of the doors, due to Zenark's own interest in security, were quite solid in both strain of wood and mountings.

"I-I, oh, god," Naomi whined, "there's painkillers in there, just oxycodone, but if he overdoses on those..."

Grunting, snarling far more viciously than when he killed the weasel, Zenark smashed himself into the door; his shoulder throbbed. The wood surrounding the latch had begun to splinter and break away, and yet it was still too solid. "You stupid bitch," he huffed, almost breathlessly, assaulting the door with all of his strength. "Get ready - get your fucking ass ready to help him!" he roared.

"My bag is in there!" Naomi shouted helplessly.

"So is he!" Zenark snarled. "Mother_fucking_ door!" he grunted, his shoulder dislocating with a hollow pop, putting him in agony. At long last, the door gave way, flying open, the knob burying itself in the wall at the end of its' arc. The drake tumbled into the bedroom, landing on his wounded shoulder, which he reported with a pained, but vicious cry.

Naomi ran into the room immediately after Zenark, and she crouched to help him up, but he swatted her away and then rolled over to his back.

"Desmond - help Desmond, goddammit!" As Naomi went to the foxcoon - who lay sprawled on the bed - Zenark grunted some particularly colorful four-letter words concerning his shoulder. When he pulled himself up to his feet, he looked at his motionless, naked pet, and his heart sank. His ears drooped, as did his vicious expression, and the color seemed to drain from his face and his eyes. Not like this, he thought, examining Desmond as Naomi did the same; she looked at his blue tongue and lips, his massive pupils. A strange calm overtook her - it went in the opposite direction for Zenark, who felt a panic rising up, displacing the indignity of his shoulder being doored out of commission, and even the raw anger.

"His heart is stopping," Naomi said with quiet urgency, and after dragging him to the floor, she started to pump on the fox's chest.

For Zenark, it was an agonizing cascade of emotions he thought had been lost to him. The anxiety of watching her pump the fox's heart and force air into his lungs to no apparent gain was unbearable. Like a ragdoll, Desmond's corpse (Zenark had already started thinking like that) sagged and flopped only when Naomi pushed on him - Zenark couldn't watch. Observing the weasel near-death had been second nature; watching Desmond die was heartbreaking, and he left the bedroom. In the living room, he slumped on the sofa. He stared at the half-eaten pizza, with two plates nearby; one had crust on it. That had to be Naomi's. Desmond always ate the crust.

The thought made Zenark smile. It was a brief flicker of happiness, and it was gone in a flash. He let his head hang, and he sighed; he felt as though coming to like Desmond had been the biggest mistake of his life. As some form of penance for all of this insanity, he grabbed his dislocated shoulder. With a vicious yank upon it, he forced it back into socket. It wasn't without pain by any stretch, but the drake endured it with all but a sharp grunt through his teeth.

A single teardrop rolled down his cheek. Had Naomi come into the room, he would've told her it was from forcibly correcting his shoulder.

And it would've been a bold-faced lie.

--23

"Zen," Naomi called, but softly. "Zenark - hey. Wake up," she insisted. Gently, she shook the dragon.

Zenark wasn't sure when he'd fallen asleep. He had done so in the fetal position, curled in upon himself, face buried in the cushions of the couch. It was clear that he didn't want to be around or aware for the inevitable news, and when Naomi stirred him, he wordlessly swatted her away, and with a cranky grumble.

"Zen," Naomi persisted.

"I'll bury him myself. Get lost. Wanna be alone," Zenark said in curt snatches of words.

"He's alive."

The dragon slowly lifted his head, straightened out, and sat where he'd been laying. "...He is?" he asked in a cautious tone. He didn't expect cruel jokes from Naomi, not about something so serious, but if she was deceiving him even slightly, there would be two deaths that night.

The deer seemed to know how fragile Zenark's emotions were. So deeply buried for such a long time, to have ripped open the calloused scars that kept them hidden meant they were tender, and certainly not to be played with. So she said nothing of the teary glint in the dragon's eye, or the way he chewed his lip and thumbed at the small tuft on his chin, all unconscious gestures. She just nodded, and took him by one of his enormous hands.

With a little effort, and a throbbing pain in his shoulder, Zenark stood with Naomi and followed her.

--24

The bed was a disaster, completely disheveled. Fresh vomit lay on the floor, and a small amount of this stained the fox's muzzle. Naomi hadn't bothered (or hadn't gotten around to) cleaning up these messes; Desmond was breathing, lying in bed, his heart beating and his lungs breathing; with that, her main objective had been achieved.

Zenark sat by the fox's side, nonplussed by the smell of bile, or the flushed look of the unconscious fox. Gently, he lay a trembling hand on the foxcoon's head; he felt hot, feverish, but alive, and he stroked through the knotty locks of the tod's hair. "Is he gonna be all right?" the dragon asked, not looking away from his pet.

"He should be," Naomi said, her voice a reassuring coo. "He needs rest, and relaxation. After everything his heart has been through, stopping and starting, he needs to stay off of his feet. I can't check for heart tissue necrosis without the right equipment, but I--"

"Naomi," Zenark butted in, doing his best to keep his tone civilized, "cut the fucking moonspeak."

Naomi huffed and folded her arms across her modest chest. "He might have some damage to his heart. Dead tissues. It seems to be beating all right, but he needs to rest for a few weeks - or he could develop an unusual heartbeat, or even fall back into cardiac arrest."

"What about brain damage? That kinda shit happens fast, doesn't it?" the dragon asked, with a bit of urgency; he still hadn't looked away from Desmond, and he hadn't ceased his gentle petting.

Naomi shook her head pointlessly. "I don't think so. He should be fine, in that regard, but, Zen..."

Zenark replied with an annoyed grunt, and he glanced at Naomi from the corner of his eye.

Even with such a terse look at the drake, Naomi could see how bloodshot his eyes were; instinctively, she wanted to hold him, but she resisted. "He needs to be weaned from that heroin. You think overdosing on opiates is any better than painkillers? Heroin could kill him just from a 'safe' dose."

"Oh, he's sure as fuck getting off the heroin," Zenark snarled. "Starting immediately, in fact. I'm flushing that shit. Throwing out the needles."

Before she opened her mouth, Naomi knew what she was about to say would be, at best, shrugged off; at worst, a new fight would start. "It'll be a lot easier on him if you take him to a rehab clinic."

"No," Zenark flatly said. Sitting up straight, turning his head, he looked Naomi in the eyes and pointed to her with a long, clawed finger. "And before you start talking about it again, know this; when I found him, he was a downtrodden little thug who didn't even know how to mug someone the right way. And I about fucking killed him like stomping on a cockroach. You know what I did instead?"

Naomi knew this was no place to interject, and so she didn't. She just shook her head, and she kept her sad eyes focused on Zenark.

"I took his sorry ass in," the drake grumbled. Turning his intense eyes on Desmond again, that fragile, nearly comatose thing, he shuddered. He felt some pining emotion surge through him, and he clenched his eyes tightly. "I should have killed him," spoken quietly, nearly a whine, "or just let him die on the street. But I got attached. I enabled him, then. Bought his shit for him, let him get used to having it around." Clenching his fists in his lap, releasing them, and clenching them again, he tried to exorcise his mounting anger and self-hatred in futility. (To Naomi, he looked like he was about to cry.) "Well, no more of that shit," Zenark finally said after this most awkward of silences, looking at Naomi with sullen eyes, more sad than enraged. "I let myself get close to the little shit. I'm gonna make damn sure he doesn't leave me."

Naomi sat down on the bed, close to Zenark, and she wrapped an arm around him. The blood that was by then dried all over him seemed to matter little, and she just squeezed him.

Surprising the deer, Zenark squeezed back, and he emitted a single, strangled cry.

"You love him, don't you?" asked Naomi, while avoiding his eyes.

Zenark said nothing, but his silence was incriminating enough.

For a great many minutes, Naomi just held the dragon, and she went over past wantings, an interest in Zenark she'd harbored for years - the reason she stuck around. One-sided love, more than a crush, but not so in the dragon's view. And so, there it was; the man she held a torch for was, in an unabashedly screwed-up way, in love with the misguided and gay-for-pay heroin addict he dragged in off the street.

Desmond's stirring, for the second time that evening, took Zenark and Naomi out of a necessary moment of closeness, and back into reality.

Naomi reacted first. She moved around Zenark (who sat silent and motionless, staring off at a corner of the room with the intensity of a traumatized soldier) and gave Desmond a cursory inspection. "Pupils... Breathing... Heart rate, pulse... I'd say you're all right."

Desmond said nothing, but he was fully aware of the situation. Alive - the last thing he wanted to be, but for an entirely different reason than when he'd eaten the pills. He looked up at Zenark, who finally looked back at him. Their visual exchange was simple. Zenark's gaze told Desmond everything he'd done wrong; Desmond's gaze held no apology, but the fear in it was palpable.

"You need to leave, Naomi," Zenark said, speaking to Desmond.

"What if something happens, Zen?" she asked, not quite grasping the severity of the situation. "I was thinking I might stay the night here, just in case, and--"

"Leave," the dragon insisted, and he pushed himself up and off of the bed. Then, as if Naomi weren't still crouching on the soiled bed, he took off his belt. "All-fours, Desmond," he rumbled, folding the belt over twice, brandishing the mass of leather.

"What the fuck, Zen!" Naomi screamed, outraged and baffled. She tried to protect Desmond, to cover him, but the tod pushed her away, and he obediently assumed the position, despite softly weeping in anticipation.

Zenark was, ironically, more loud and rude to Naomi than to Desmond. "I said _LEAVE,_woman! Desmond tried to get away from me - he tried to disobey his master. Didn't you, Desmond?"

"Yes," the foxcoon said, this singular word low and defeated.

"So leave, Naomi. LEAVE! You gave him your medicine, now it's time he got mine." He snapped the folded belt in the air, evoking a flinch from both Desmond and Naomi, and then he brought belt down with practiced ferocity on the tod's hip.

Desmond grunted in sharp pain through clenched teeth, and tears dripped onto the bed.

Naomi shrieked and whined, gnawing at her lower lip. When Zenark wound up for another swing, she closed her eyes and looked away, and--

SMACK! The doe's skin crawled.

Desmond wasn't as silent then. His cry was agonized, wavering, more gruesome than Naomi could have ever expected.

"Why the FUCK would you try to leave me, Desmond!?" Zenark demanded.

SMACK! SMACK!

Naomi opened her eyes to see, through a sheen of tears, Desmond as he collapsed onto his stomach. When Zenark grabbed hold of his hair, dropped the belt, and balled his freed hand up into a tight fist, she whipped around and ran out the door. She grabbed her bag, fumbling in it on her way out the door, and she grabbed her keys out of it - but too late. It was as revolting as it was stunning that she could actually hear Zenark's fist pounding into Desmond's body, like a very wet thump. She was sure that there were more, but the screams from both sides drowned it out.

Out the front door, into a cold, misty rain in the middle of the night, Naomi viciously slammed the door behind herself, and she got into her car with less than grace.

For five minutes, she cried against the steering wheel - and though it had to have been impossible, just a feverish symptom of such revulsion and terror, she swore she heard Desmond begging her for help. It was her fault. Leaving those pills out. And it was her fault for saving him; she knew that Zenark was nothing but a soulless monster.

Ten minutes came and went. Naomi calmed herself, never completely pacifying the guilt, but she emptied her head and dried her eyes enough to drive. That was just what she did; she drove home. She forced away the curiosity of going back inside, and neglected the nagging voice of conscience which told her Desmond would need medical attention. Maybe he'll be lucky enough to finally die, she thought, with some finality, and she drove herself home in the intensifying rain.

--25

Hours passed. An ordeal came and went. The sequel to lesson numero uno, but named in English conventions. It was simply lesson number two, and as yet, it remained unspoken - but that much pain delivered so swiftly had to have been one of Zenark's lessons to the foxcoon.

Zenark held Desmond, keeping the fox across his lap. Fresh vulpine blood mingled with the drying stuff from the weasel on his hide. It was smeared on the sheets.Those'll have to be replaced, Zenark thought. No washing out the blood. The fact that he was capable of such pedestrian thoughts meant that the rage was truly out of his system. The weasel was dead. Desmond had paid the price for disobedience and attempted escape. All had been balanced.

The dragon looked over Desmond's beaten body not with pride, nor revulsion and self-contempt, but an analytical eye. Cracked ribs; eyes beaten until they swelled shut; several teeth knocked cleanly out of his mouth, with several more broken off into jagged stumps. Lacerations from Zenark's scaled knuckles had rended the foxcoon's tender hide all over, leaving him painted in enormous, dark-red splotches, looking like a true bloodbath. Even the brunt of his hair was matted down and stained with blood, but he had enough left in him to survive; Zenark knew that the unconsciousness was just his body's way of giving up. It couldn't take anymore abuse. That was fine; at that juncture, Zenark didn't have anymore to give.

Tomorrow, he'd clean the fox's wounds, flush away the heroin, and start walking the long road to trust again.

Tonight, he held his unconscious love close, and he mentally dared anyone, any_thing,_ to just try and touch Desmond - even death.