FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Excuse me sir. Can you spare a dollar?"

It was a beautiful day outside, and Edward had just pulled out of the drive-through coffee shop, so of course he still had his window down. The last thing he would have expected was to be accosted by a panhandler here in the shopping center parking lot, and he jumped a little in his seat. The drink in his hand sloshed around and he was inwardly thankful that it still had a lid securely in place. "Sorry, I don't carry cash," he lied, reflexively; no more than fifteen seconds earlier, he had dropped the change from buying the coffee into the cupholder next to him.

Normally he wouldn't even bother turning to look at the poor souls standing on the side of the road with a scribbled message on a bit of cardboard asking for pity, but as he flicked the switch that sent his window slowly upward, he caught a glance of the beggar out of the corner of his eye. Feline lady of some sort, fairly pretty at a glance, with big saucers for eyes and a glazed, vacant expression. She wobbled as she turned to stumble away. No doubt she was strung out on some unsavory combination of chemicals, he thought to himself.

Sipping briefly from his drink, the wolf eased off the brake and accelerated slowly away from the coffee shop, but again found himself glancing at the feline in his rearview mirror. She was young, early twenties, perhaps, and had a shapely figure. She didn't seem dressed like the standard street corner vagrant or druggie, either. A faint stirring in his loins made him smirk as an idea bubbled up in his head.

His wife wouldn't be home from her business trip for a few more days, after all.

Glancing around to make sure he wouldn't carelessly turn into oncoming traffic, he set his drink down and wheeled the car about. Pulling up next to where the female was wobbling, he rolled the window back down and poked his head out the window. "Hey, you. You said you needed some money?"

Looking slightly confused, she wobbled her way back toward the car. It seemed like she was struggling to focus on him, her eyes wide and wandering. "I ... a few bucks, yeah ..."

Her clothing was disheveled but seemed to be clean. A subconscious glance was cast at the plush leather of the passenger's seat, but another glance back at her clothing assuaged any fears he might have had in that regard. "Well I don't have any cash on me now," he lied again, before delivering up a properly wolfish grin, reaching across to pop open the passenger's side door. "But I have some back at home."

#

The bed creaked beneath him just enough to catch his attention, just enough to distract Edward and keep him from fully getting into the moment. Sure, it was quiet enough that it was doubtful anyone could hear it outside of the bedroom, and he had stuffed a pillow behind the headboard to keep it from banging against the wall. Still, the neighbor lady who lived in the condo next door was a nosy creature. That would have been the last thing he wanted to deal with.

It probably didn't help that the female beneath him was more or less drugged out of her mind. Sure, she was easy on the eyes - a slender, waifish frame that was just the kind of thing that got his dick hard, short and soft fur that felt great against his fingertips, and lovely little swells of breasts that were just the right size for him to squeeze and enjoy. Even as vacant and spaced out as they were, her eyes were still pretty.

In spite of it all, he felt like he might as well have been fucking someone who was asleep. She was awake, to be sure, blinking occasionally as she stared up at the ceiling, her jaw occasionally working as if she were trying to say something. But all she did was lay there and take it, her tee shirt pulled up over her chest to reveal her breasts, arms slack at her sides, her legs propped up limply over his shoulders. He wished that she'd look up at him, grab the bedsheets, moan in pleasure. Something.

It wasn't all for nothing, however. She was sexy. He really loved the way his cock looked sliding in and out of her cute little cunt, and boy was she ever tight. She certainly wasn't a virgin, and he had to imagine a drugged up, cute little thing like that wasn't the most virtuous thing around, but she sure as hell felt like it.

Edward was determined to make the most of it. Maybe she was going to just lay there and take it but he was going to enjoy it for all it was worth. Sliding his hands up her taut belly and over her breasts, giving each a squeeze and a knead, he leaned in and growled into her ear. "Nnnh, fuck, you're a tight little bitch. You love it don't you ... going home with some stranger and spreading your legs for him, all for a few bucks ... nasty little thing ..."

She didn't respond, but at least he could imagine she might. He could imagine the flushing in her cheek as she was embarrassed by his words. He could imagine the chagrin at being compared to little more than a cheap hooker, selling herself out for money and drugs. He could imagine her plaintive little whimper, his big lupine ears catching every little hint of timid whimpering in her voice, and every bit of latent desire that she'd have for her anonymous partner.

The mental imagery did the trick. Combined with the tightness and the visual pleasure of looking down at his conquest - not knowing her name, not needing her name - it was getting to him in just the way he needed. He could feel the growing swell of the knot in his cock thumping against her entrance, knocking on her door, and sending little shivers down his spine. He gasped for a moment, trying to catch his breath.

"You want it, don't you?" Again he growled to her, teasing his nose against the fringe of her ear. Though she didn't respond, he continued to act as if she did, feeling that swelling bulb grind against her entrance again and again. "I should make you beg for it ..."

In truth, he was the one that wanted it. There was something intoxicating about tying some cute, nameless thing he'd picked up. Usually when his wife went out on business trips and the mood struck, he'd troll Craigslist or some other personals sites, or hit up a bar; at his most desperate he'd hire the services of an escort. But this was different. He didn't know this feline girl's name, didn't know anything about her other than she was stoned out of her mind and tight as fuck around his dick. It made his head spin.

He knew if he waited too long he'd miss his chance; he was already swelling fast down there. Wriggling his hips he pushed against her, feeling his flesh smash against hers, nudging it open but she was tight, oh so tight ... he pushed, insistently, feeling the folds of her sex gradually stretching around him, slowly yielding to him. He grunted as he pushed, and his ears caught the sound of a whimper - real, not imagined - and it made him giddy.

One more push forward was all it took. With a bit of a wet pop, he slid inside, her sex clenching down on the root of his cock behind the bulb of his knot, right where he was the most sensitive. "Fuck ... yesss ..."

As he started to jab into her in quick, short little thrusts, she started whimpering. Each time he pulled back and that thick knot strained her insides she cried out, softly at first, but quickly picking up in volume. For as much as she had been silent the whole time, she had suddenly developed quite a set of lungs on her.

"Not so loud," Edward gasped down at her, surprised. He was caught between combating sensations, the sexual bliss of tying this pretty, anonymous creature, and the fear of being discovered by his nosy neighbor. If the feline heard or understood him she gave no sign, crying out loudly with each thrust. He tries holding her mouth shut with a hand, and while she did not struggle it did little to muffle the sounds, which were starting to make his ears ring. They sounded practically like screams.

Desperate, he grabbed a pillow and held it over her face. It helped to muffle the cries but they still seemed too loud for him. Gasping for breath as his own sense of arousal was nearing a peak, he grabbed on to the pillow with both hands and held it down, pressing it against her face, further quieting the cries. That was better; there was no way nosy neighbors would catch on.

"Ah, yes, that's it ... that's better ... fuck yes," he panted, leaning his head against the pillow and fucking for all he was worth. He was close, he was so close. It would only take another few seconds. The bliss became white-hot in his vision, and he buried his own muzzle against the pillow to muffle his own cries as that peak hit, wracking his body with the pleasure he had been seeking.

All too quickly, the climax ebbed. For a few blissful seconds his breath caught in his throat, his body flooded with sexual bliss as he emptied himself into the tight confines of his latest conquest. Much too soon for his own liking it was done and he collapsed over her, panting, gyrating lightly. She had stopped crying out, too, though he was pretty sure she hadn't climaxed, herself. When his hips stopped pounding it must have been enough to get her to quiet down, and it was all the better by him.

Casting the pillow to the side, he let his head rest in against hers as he sprawled over her figure, panting and gasping. "Mmm. There we go. That was much ... much better."

He wasn't expecting a response, and he didn't get one from her. In a way, he supposed that it was a little disappointing - it was always a bit of a vindication of his virility when he could get a girl begging for more. But this time was different, this one was different. He had no clue how deep her drug induced stupor ran, and how long it would take for her to come back out.

Perhaps, he thought, she would be stoned for so long that he could get her out of the condo and on her way before she was thinking clearly enough to demand the money that he had promised. The idea made him smirk. Pushing himself up a bit to look down at her, he chuckled. "So. You said you were looking for a few bucks, right?"

She didn't look at him. Her gaze was still fixated on the ceiling above, glassy and unresponsive; a line of drool was already beginning to dry into a white flaky crust down the corner of her mouth. As he looked down at her, though, the wolf realized that something was different, something was wrong. Her eyes fixated on one spot, unmoving. She didn't blink. Her jaw wasn't chewing over voiceless words.

The wolf pushed himself up further, a sudden sensation of dread filling his chest. "Hey. Hey, you all right?" There was still no response, and he tried giving her a little shake; her head merely flopped limply to the side. "Hey! This isn't funny! Wake up ... say something!"

Edward stared down at her, his eyes widening, his jaw going a little slack. Still she did not respond, not with a sound, not with a flicker of motion. Another firm shake produced no different a result. Shaking, he leaned down and held his ear over her muzzle, listening for a sound, some little rasping of her breath. She was, to all of his senses, lifeless. Shaking, he reached down and pawed at her neck, feeling for a pulse. He didn't really know what he was looking for, but he found nothing.

A sudden wave of revulsion rose up in his throat and made him feel like he was going to choke, or throw up, or both.

He pushed himself up and back, tried to push away from her but his swollen knot caught in her sex and tugged on him, making him yelp in surprise and pain. He felt like he had to get away from her, he had to push away. Grasping at her hips and pinning them down he pulled his own up and away, her tightness now a curse as it clutched around the base of his shaft, tried to keep it in place. Pain lit up his groin as he was pulled and tugged, trying his damndest to force his way out of her. Gritting his teeth and suppressing a cry, he finally yanked himself free, his own momentum forcing him to fall backward off the bed and collapse to the floor, yelping again in spite of himself.

The pain throbbed in his dick. It felt like he'd been kicked in the nuts and had his knot stomped on, and for a moment all he could do was writhe on the floor, clutching his pained, sensitive privates, whining and groaning under his breath. The female, though, hadn't so much as flinched. Something like that would have hurted her, as well. Even if she were asleep. Even if she were drugged up.

She was dead. That was the only conclusion he could come to. He had know way of knowing how long it was, how long she had been ... he had been tied to a dead girl. He had come inside of a dead girl. He had been fucking a corpse. Suddenly dizzy and nauseated, he pulled himself up to his hands and knees, crawled his way into the bathroom and made it to the toilet just in time before he voided the contents of his stomach in a series of loud, pained convulsions.

When the convulsions came to an end, when he had nothing left to retch up into the toilet, he slipped back to his ass on the cold tile floor of the bathroom and wondered aloud, "Now what?" If he called the police and told them to come, there would be an investigation. What was he doing with a drug-addled stranger in his house? Was he paying for her services? Was he involved with the drugs? His wife would find out. He would be ruined.

Another more dire question rose to the surface. What if it hadn't been a drug overdose that had killed her, but it had been the pillow? It very well could have been that he had suffocated her to death. It would look brutal in an investigation; drugs and rape and murder. Edward looked down at his hands, shaking at the thought. Had he taken a life with them? Was he now a murderer?

"I'm sorry," he shouted into the other room, as if the dead feline might hear him and accept his apology. "I'm sorry," he repeated, once again, hugging his arms around himself. It had been an accident, of course, an accident in the heat of a passionate moment. He'd never really meant to hurt her, only fuck her brains out and turn her back out on the streets. All while his wife was away on business, earning money for the family.

The wolf shook as he held himself, imagining his life falling apart around him. If there was any way of recovering from this disaster, any way of keeping everything from crashing down around him, he'd have to get rid of the body. In order to do that, he'd have to wait until nightfall, which would mean spending the rest of the day with a corpse in the house.

Reaching for the toilet, he started to heave again.

#

The wolf glanced around himself nervously before he popped the trunk open. It would probably look a little weird, to say the least; a shiny new BMW parked in the darkest corner of the Home Depot parking lot, its owner surreptitiously stuffing a shovel and a pickaxe into the trunk. His nervous glancing around probably only added to the unusual appearance of the scene, but at least he felt reassured that no one was looking. He cringed at the sight of the blanket-wrapped figure also stuffed in the trunk, having to carefully arrange the tools so they would fit with the corpse. Slamming the trunk shut, he glanced around furtively once more before firing up the car's engine and heading off.

Edward had taken what he thought were reasonable precautions. He'd paid for the tools in cash, had picked a time of day when it was dark but not so late that the store was empty and he might be remembered more readily. He'd purposely picked a store that was both far from his home and far from the area he'd now be headed toward. If he hadn't been so freaked out, he might have congratulated himself on what he saw as his own clever thinking.

His destination was half an hour away, a quiet wooded area outside of town. Though he wished more than anything to hurry along, he knew he would have to drive carefully and inconspicuously to avoid the off chance of being stopped along the way. Flicking on the car stereo and picking a station that played hard rock, he tried to plan out what would happen next.

It would take him a few hours to dig a grave large enough to contain the body, as he didn't want to risk something so shallow that it'd be discovered anytime soon. Another hour or two to get it buried and do his best to make the area look undisturbed. His car would probably be dirty and so he'd have to stop at a self-service car wash to clean it up, and then another stop to dispose of the blanket somewhere out of the way. He'd probably want to stop somewhere yet again to get rid of the tools, just in case.

He probably wouldn't get home until well after midnight, maybe even later. Hardly enough time to shower up and get ready for work the next day, as he dared not take the day off. Everything had to seem as normal as possible. Coffee and energy shots would be needed, but he was sure he could handle it. Then he would lay low for a few days until his wife was home, and it would be as if nothing had ever happened.

It all would work out. It had to - he had seen enough cop shows on TV to know how to cover his tracks, he thought to himself.

Eventually he turned the car down a side road that wandered away from the city, and again onto a gravel path that meandered alongside a ravine. Making sure to travel a few miles in the darkness, no sign of any other travelers, he picked a spot to pull off the gravel roadway and into the underbrush, careful to choose a spot where his paint wouldn't get scratched up. Satisfied he had the right spot, he shut off the car's engine but left the lights on. He would need them. Pressing the button to pop the trunk open, he pushed his way out of the car and drew in a shaky breath. Edward was not looking forward to this.

Trying his best to not look directly at the wrapped up corpse or think about its contents, he pulled the shovel out of the trunk and marched his way around the car. Several feet away, partially illuminated by the car's headlights, he found a spot that seemed like it would work, tucked between the trees. Drawing in another breath, he pushed the shovel into the dirt and began to dig.

For a while, the digging was fairly easy and straightforward. Beneath an inch or two of partially rotted leaves and other detritus that formed the forest floor was a layer of loose, loamy topsoil that came out in easy, almost effortless shovelfuls. It hardly took ten minutes before he'd formed the basic outline of the makeshift grave, uncovering several inches of soil and beginning to build a sizeable mound to the side. The music from the car stereo helped keep his mind off the macabre nature of his task and gave him a cadence to his work, shoveling soil inch by inch.

Even then, the work became tiring after a while and the wolf began to pant in spite of the cool night temperatures. After several inches of topsoil, however, he began to encounter harder, more densely packed clays that were littered with rocks of increasingly larger sizes. His progress slowed; after what felt like a good hour of work, he was barely a foot and a half down. Still too shallow for even the shallowest of graves. Cursing, he threw down the shovel and made his way back toward the car to fetch the pickaxe.

The red of the car's tail lights illuminated him as he stepped up to the trunk, and in a way made his hands look to be eerily covered in blood. The reflected light from his shirt gave the blanket-clad corpse a red glow, as well, and Edward shuddered as he briefly saw blood everywhere. This would be a long night.

Grasping the handle of the pickaxe he gave it a tug, only to find that it was partially caught beneath the blankets - the body must have shifted while he was driving. Cursing, he shoved at the blankets and tried to dislodge the tool, tugging on the handle, putting his weight into it.

"Edward! What the hell is going on here?"

The voice caught him completely off guard and made him jump. By coincidence, the pickaxe came loose at the same time, and his momentum carried it up and back as he spun around to see where the voice had come from. In doing so the axe swung around in a wide arc, and smashed into a shadowy figure that was standing behind him; there was a sickening, wet crunch as the heavy tool impacted flesh.

With a grunt, the figure slumped over and fell to the ground. The wolf, terrified, dropped the pickaxe and let it fall with a thud, backing himself against the car. In doing so his shadow moved, bathing the fallen figure in red light. It was a slender, feminine figure. Vulpine, clad in smart business attire. Even in the dim red light from the car, and in spite of the ugly looking wound he could make out on her face, Edward had no problem at all recognizing his wife, Susan.

"Susan!" With a bit of a strangled gasp, the wolf stepped forward and dropped to his knees at her side, his eyes wide in fear and confusion. How had she found him? How the hell had she even gotten here? She was supposed to be on the other side of the country on a business trip for the rest of the week. It made no sense that she'd be back in town, much less having snuck up on him here in the middle of nowhere.

Yet there she was, lying in the dirt, the side of her face partially smashed in and oozing blood. She was still alive, however, her chest still rising and falling, a little gurgling in her throat as she drew in breaths. Unthinking, Edward reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, punching in the digits 9-1-1. And then, his thumb hovering over the 'dial' button, he hesitated.

What on earth would he tell the operator on the other end? He had smashed his wife's face in, since she snuck up on him in the woods? When he was trying to bury some stranger, who he had slept with, cheated with, and then killed? Even if she could be helped, what would Susan do after she recovered? She certainly wouldn't be so forgiving.

As he hesitated, staring at the screen of his phone, he suddenly wondered if the cell phone towers had been tracking his position the entire time. He hadn't thought of that possibility. Cursing under his breath, he cancelled the call, shut the phone off and stuffed it back in his pocket. Maybe that kind of thing didn't get recorded since he didn't make any calls. But maybe there were apps running in the background that were using data. Maybe phones always got tracked. Maybe, in spite of his planning, there would be some evidence that he had been there that day. "Fuck," he spat, angrily.

There was still the issue of his wife. Susan was lying on the ground, breathing, but probably dying. The wound on her head looked horrific. Edward felt dizzy as he considered his options and realized there was only one. Crawling over her, straddling her hips, he reached up and wrapped his hands loosely around her neck. "I'm so sorry," he whispered, and squeezed.

The wheezing gurgle in her throat cut off and was replaced by a gagging sound. Unlike the drugged up feline, Susan responded, at least physically, by beginning to thrash beneath him, her facial features contorting. As much as he didn't want to think of it, his mind flashed back to the moment when he held the pillow over the feline's face. The thrashing beneath him recalled his own eager thrusting. He remembered the sensation of tying that tight cunt.

Now, in this moment he was strangling his wife, his loins stirred. "No," he whispered, his stomach beginning to churn, but the image was too strong in his mind; his cock swelled up in his sheath. "No, god, no, please ... no ..."

Suddenly, her eyes popped open. They were not the glazed, sightless eyes of a drug-addled woman but they fixed on him, clear and focused and filled with fear. Edward's own eyes blurred with tears at the realization, and he cried out. "No! Please! Not this ... no! I'm sorry ... I'm so sorry," he begged, feeling tightly balled up fists starting to hit him in the chest, in the sides, but he held fast, and the blows began to weaken. "I'm sorry ... I'm sorry ... I'm sorry ..."

The wolf cried and begged for forgiveness until the blows stopped, until there was no more motion beneath him. The job was done. Pushing himself away, rolling in the dirt, he cried. A massive boner throbbed in his pants and his wife lay dead on the ground at his own hands. His plans had unravelled, everything about his night had unravelled. He could not have dreamed up a worse situation in his worst nightmares.

"What is wrong with me?" He demanded the answer of the night air, screaming it out, hauling himself up to his feet. He stumbled over to a nearby tree and leaned against it, tugging his belt open, pulling his pants down and staring in an accusatory fashion at the rock solid erection that stood throbbing from his groin. "What. The hell. Is wrong with me."

Still unthinking, he grabbed at his erection. He half wanted to tear it off; it was his libido that had set the whole horrific series of events into motion. His grip was tight, firm, and felt just like the grip of that dead girl's cunt on him. Instead he squeezed and pulled, stroking his hand over that flesh, over that swelling bulb in his cock. He stroked himself with that same hand that had smothered a woman with a pillow, that same hand that had cut off his own wife's breath.

He couldn't help it. Eyes filled with tears and useless, the abused his own flesh, tugging hard and firm and fast until it all came rushing out in a intense torrent of seed and power and raw emotion, marking the tree in front of him before he collapsed back into the dirt, falling over with a cry, panting. At once he felt relieved and horrified. He had no idea what to make of himself.

Edward spent several minutes lying in the dirt, his pants around his ankles, gazing at the motes of dust as they wafted on the air over him, briefly illuminated in the beams from the car's headlights. How long he spent lying there, panting, staring, he couldn't be sure. Not that it mattered - he realized everything was over.

As the shock of what he had done began to fade, more rational lines of thought began to run through his head. He realized that his plans were now completely shot. Even if he managed to get away with disposing of the body - now bodies - his contingency plans were all for nothing. Now his wife would go missing and he'd automatically be a suspect. Now there was blood involved in the scene; now he had foolishly ejaculated all over a nearby tree. There was DNA evidence galore. It'd be easy to tie him to the crime.

He had no hope of getting on with his life, not as he knew it. At best, he could hope to leave town, try and reestablish himself somewhere else, under a new identity. Maybe he could skip south of the border, head to Mexico or some other country, live out a life in some resort beach town. He had a lot of money at his disposal; if he could simply buy himself enough time, he could withdraw a large sum, sneak out of the country, and be done.

If he got caught tonight it'd all be over. He could not afford to lose any more time. The grave he had dug out so far would have to be sufficient - if it held up for a few days, maybe even a week, that'd give him more than enough time. He could dispose of the bodies and cover them up to the best of his abilities, head back to town, swing by the bank in the morning ...

Briefly he wondered it made him somehow more immoral that he was thinking of how to escape from it all. Given what had already happened that night, he doubted it mattered.

The wolf pulled himself up with a grunt, and then grimly made his way over to where his wife's body lay. He didn't really want to look at her, didn't really want to see what he had done, so he merely grabbed her by the foot and started to drag her across the dirt toward the shallow grave. She felt surprisingly heavy to him, and he wondered if dead people were always so heavy - or if it was more a function of his guilt. It still only took him a moment to drag her over, and then, with a bit of a thump, into the hole he had dug.

He was spared having to see her lying there, as the hole itself was in shadow and the dust that rose up in lazy swirls helped to mask what was there. Turning with a heavy sigh, he made his way back to the car, around to the trunk, and reached in to pull the blanket wrapped corpse out.

As he did, his blood froze. The blanket was lying in the trunk, unwrapped. The body was gone.

She had been dead, there was no question about it. For four hours her corpse had laid still on his bed, and when he had worked up the nerve to finally wrap her up in blankets she had already gone quite stiff. There was no chance that she was merely knocked unconscious, and that she had somehow freed herself just now.

There had to be someone else there. He had wondered how his wife had gotten here but had not considered the possibility that she had not been alone. Perhaps someone else was here, watching him the whole time. Why they would have removed the dead feline from the wrapping he could not guess, but it was the only explanation.

Edward's heart beat loudly in his chest, so much so that he could hear his pulse whooshing in his ears. Blinking into the night, shading his eyes from the red glow of the tail lights, he looked around for any sign. "Hello? Is anyone there?"

A slight rustling sound from behind him caused him to snap his head around to look. He swore it sounded as if it was coming from the makeshift grave, but other than the lazy wisps of dust from his own movements there was no visible signs of anyone. "Hello?" Nervously he made his way over to the grave, stopping short at the edge, and peered in.

It was empty. If he had felt a chill before, he now felt as if his blood were positively gelid. Wildly, he glanced around him for some sign of movement, shielding his eyes, squinting into the headlights. "Who's there? Show yourself! I have a gun, I'm not afraid to use it," he lied.

Then, suddenly, he was bathed in darkness; the headlights flickered out, and the sound of the car's stereo went dead. In a panic, he stiffened and swung around, trying and failing to see anything, his eyes briefly blinded. "Please ... please, whoever is there. I have to explain what happened, it was all an accident. I never meant to hurt anyone. Please, if you'll just talk to me ..."

The only sound he could hear was the distant babbling of the creek in the ravine. Slowly his eyes adjusted to the dark, moonless night, the feeble light from the stars filtering in overhead just barely enough to sparkle against his car, a midnight blue silhouette against an even darker background. There was nothing he could see or hear, and it terrified him.

"Please," he begged, in a near whisper. "I have a lot of money. A lot. Whatever you need, however much you need. I'll share with you. Please. I can make it worth your trouble ... just ... please. It was an accident." Still there was no sound to be heard, no voices, no footsteps. Nothing. Feeling the panic rise in his throat, he turned, tripping on the side of the grave, doing a faceplant in the dirt. Coughing, he crawled out of the hole and hauled himself back up to his feet, stumbling around awkwardly.

Without warning the car came back to life, the stereo blaring and the headlights lighting up. He wasn't expecting it, wasn't ready for it, and the brilliant beams of light hit him like knives in his eyes. Crying out, he threw his hands up over his eyes, trying to twist away from the beams of light. Stumbling back a few paces, his foot caught on a rock and sent him tumbling to the side.

Instead of stopping, he continued to fall. His body tumbled down an incline, battering him with rocks and sticks along the way, the wolf crying out in pain and surprise as he tumbled down into the ravine. An oddly detached part of his brain realized that he must have stumbled into the wrong directly, and taken a step right over the edge. For several agonizing seconds he felt like he was being beaten by an angry crowd, points of brilliant pain lighting up in his sides, his arms, and in his legs.

At last he came to a stop on his back, coughing. Something wet pooled around his head and for a brief second he feared it was his own blood, but the sound of running water reminded him of the creek at the bottom of the ravine - pushing himself up, his hand sunk in mud with a squelch. He had come to a stop just at the edge of the water.

Overhead, the beams of the car's headlights illuminated the edge of the ravine in an unnatural and spooky way. Trees cast long and looming shadows like knives slicing through the night, accentuated by the roiling clouds of dust from his fall, dancing in odd patterns through the beams. The sounds of the car's stereo reached him here, though the music had become oddly indistinct, echoing a bit through the ravine, and adding to the surreal quality of the scene.

Then, as he watched, there was finally a sign of movement. The patterns of light shifted, and then a shadow emerged - no, two shadows. A pair of figures stood there at the edge of the ravine, silhouetted in the light, looming large over him. Coughing and squinting, Edward peered up at the shapes with his heart in his throat.

They were slender, feminine figures. One vaguely feline, one vaguely vulpine. His eyes widened in their sockets, and his breath caught in his throat. "No," he muttered, beginning to shake violently. "No. That's not possible ..."

Gripped with an intense panic, the wolf tried to push himself up to his feet. His body screamed in agony; his left wrist was probably broken, his arm twisted at an odd angle, and his legs were bruised at the very least. Willing himself to his feet, cradling his busted arm, he looked back up the ravine at those looming shadows and shuddered. "No ..."

Twisting away from the pair of shadows, he began to hobble away. Each step was pure agony, but each one would take him further from them. Turning to look back over his shoulder, he realized the shadows were no longer there. Were they coming down the ravine, pursuing him? Though he could see or hear nothing, the terror rose up in him strong enough to will him forward, in spite of the pain, in spite of the uncertain footing. Sloshing into the creek, he tried to cross to the other side.

An uncertain foot stepped on a slick, mossy rock, and his leg gave out. Unable to catch himself, he slipped headlong into the river, smacking his head against the rock and making his vision flash with dizzying lights, his ears ringing painfully.

He was in the water. There must have been a slightly deeper pool by those rocks, the creek deep enough for his head to go completely into the water; he could feel it filling his ears, the cold chill keen on his face. The need to breathe was insistent, though. Using his good hand, he grasped at rock on the bottom of the creek and tried to push himself up.

It didn't work. At first he feared that he was simply too weak to haul himself up out of the water, but he became aware of a firm point of pressure on the back of his skull. The harder he pushed himself up, the more powerful that pressure seemed to become, pushing him back toward the water, holding his face in, just beneath the surface.

He was being held under the water. He was being drowned.

If what he had felt before was panic, this was terror beyond measure. He began to thrash, his limbs splashing in the water as powerfully as they could. It hurt like hell to move, but he had to breathe. He had to get his head out of the water. He fought to turn himself, flip himself over, squirm out of the way. Everything he tried to do seemed futile, his every action rebuffed by the force holding him down.

His lungs began to burn with the need for air, and yet there was none. He was going to drown; he was going to die. His mind tried to fight against the conclusion, tried to will his body to fight against that force. I am not ready to die, he thought to himself. It was an accident. I didn't mean for any of it. Please, please, I don't want to die ...

It felt like an eternity before the pressure was just too much. In that last moment, as he sought to draw in a breath but only flooded his lungs with water, as the blackness began to creep into his vision, he was sure he saw her foot there in the water, that feline shape. He never meant for any of it. He was sorry. He was scared. I don't want to die.

The blackness won out, claiming him. With a final thrash the wolf's body shuddered in the water and then went limp, bobbing upward, drifting slightly in the current, bumping quietly against the rocks nearby. Then the light overhead flickered and dimmed before the blackness won out there, too, the sound of music echoing away to nothing, a last breathless gasp before the night was swallowed in silence.