Morphenkinder.
He pounded on until he saw the figure ahead of him that he knew to be Laura. Quickly he overtook her and they fell into the same stride.
Suddenly he heard the hooves right by his ears, and he felt the sharp screaming pain of a tusk in his side. He pivoted, enraged, and opening his mouth wide in a delicious roar brought his teeth down on the side of the animal’s neck. He felt the thick musky hide tear, the muscles shred, his claws rending the rough bristling coat, and the delicious taste of the meat overwhelmed him.
Laura on top of the beast ripped into its lower flank.
He turned over and over with the shrieking grunting beast suddenly as it struggled for its life, ripping one chunk of live meat from it after another. At last his face found its underbelly, his claws slicing it open for his hungry tongue. Laura sank her teeth into the feast right beside him.
He gorged himself on the hot bleeding meat, chomping into the flank, as the last life went out of the creature, its hoofed feet still twitching. Laura lapped at the blood, ripped at the strips of bloody muscle. He lay there watching her.
It seemed an eternity passed in which the squeals and grunts had died away, the pounding of the hooves had died away, and only the distinct sharp roars of the Morphenkinder pierced the night within the hushed cloud of the spellbinding music.
Reuben was drunk and satiated with the meat, almost unable to move. The hunt was finished.
A stillness had fallen over the immense clearing in which the monstrous fire burned and the music played on.
Then a cry went up: “Bones into the bone fire!”
A huge crashing sound erupted from the heart of the blaze, and then came another as if the fire were a spitting volcano.
Reuben rose and picking up the torn and bleeding carcass of the boar on which he’d feasted he hurled it into the fire. He could see others doing the same, and soon the stench of burning animal flesh rose all around him, sickening and yet somehow tantalizing. Laura tumbled against him, leaning heavily on him, her breaths coming in hoarse gasps. They were knowing the heat of the wolf coat, the thirst in the wolf coat.
The figure of Sergei appeared beside him, telling him to come back, to join the others by the cauldron. They found the others crowded about, drinking from their horns, and exchanging horns. Reuben made out the seven who were not of his pack, but he could not tell the identity of the female wolves. Hockan he knew. Hockan had a large heavy wolfen body like that of Frank or Stuart, and his fur was almost entirely white, streaked here and there with gray, powerfully setting off his black eyes. Other dark-eyed Morphenkinder had no such advantage.
Nothing clearly distinguished the females except their smaller size and their slightly feline movements. Their breasts and intimate organs were covered in long hair and fur, their height varying as did the height of the men, their limbs obviously powerful. Everywhere he looked, he saw hairy faces clotted with blood and bits and pieces of shivering boar flesh, torsos smeared with blood, chests heaving with deep breaths. Again and again, the horns were dipped into the seemingly inexhaustible cauldron. How natural it all seemed, how perfect, to slake his thirst like this, with draft after draft, and how divine the drunkenness he felt, the utter safety of the moment.
Sergei backed up near the gathered musicians, and then giving a horrific roar, he cried out: “Through the need fire!”
He took off with a fierce leap, touching down once before he bounded straight into the flames. Reuben was terrified for him, but at once, the others began running, circling and racing to the fire in the same manner, soaring up into the heights of the fire, their powerful cries of triumph rising as they cleared the inferno and landed on their feet.
Reuben heard Laura’s voice calling to him, and in a flash he saw her break from the group, running towards the musicians, then turning and racing forward as Sergei had done, her body sailing upwards and into the hungry flames.
He couldn’t stop himself from following. Terrified as he was of the flames, he felt invulnerable, he felt eager, he felt crazed with the new and seductive challenge.
He ran at top speed and then sprang upwards as he had seen the others do, the fire blinding him, the heat engulfing him, the smell of his own burning fur filling his nostrils until he broke free into the cold wind and came crashing down on the ground to begin the race once more around the circle.
Laura had waited for him. Laura was running beside him. He saw her paws flying out before her, like two front feet, saw her powerful shoulders churning under the dark gray wolf coat.
Round the cauldron they ran and then made the mad dash once more, springing high into the licking flames.
When next they approached the cauldron, the company was gathered together, on hind legs forming the circle again. At once, they fell in.
What was happening? Why had the music slowed, why had it fallen into an ominous syncopated rhythm?
The goading song of the flutes was slowed in time with it, every fourth beat stronger than the three before. And the others were rocking back and forth, back and forth, and Margon was singing something in that ancient tongue, to which Felix added his voice, and then came the thundering bass of Sergei. Thibault was humming; the unmistakable figure of Hockan Crost, the nearest thing to a white wolf in the group, was also humming as he was rocking—and a kind of moaning hum rose from the other females.
Suddenly Hockan rushed past Felix and Reuben, grabbing with both paws for Laura.
Before Reuben could come to her defense, Laura hurled Hockan backwards right into the cauldron which almost went over, the hot liquid splashing upwards like molten metal.
Fierce growls had broken out from the Sergei, Felix, and Margon, all of whom surrounded Hockan. Hockan threw up his paws, claws extended, snarling at them as he backed away. And said in his deep brutal wolf voice, “It’s Modranicht.” He let out a threatening growl.
Margon shook his head, and gave the lowest most menacing and guttural response Reuben had ever heard from a Morphenkind.
One of the females broke through the press and shoved Hockan playfully but powerfully with both paws, and as he lunged at her, she took off, racing around the fire with him close behind her.
The tension went out of the protective males.
Another female came pounding Frank with her paws, and Frank, accepting the challenge, went after her.
It was happening now all around them, Felix going after the third of the women, and Thibault after the fourth. Even Stuart was suddenly courted and seduced and had gone tearing away in hot pursuit of his female.
Laura moved to Reuben, her powerful breasts pumping against his chest, her teeth grazing his throat, her growls filling his ears. He tried to pick her up off the ground but she threw him over and they wrestled, rolling into the shadows against the boulders.
He was on fire for her, opening his mouth on her throat, and licking at her ears, at the silken fur of her face, at the soft black flesh of her mouth, his tongue sliding in over her tongue.
At once, he was inside her, pumping into a tight, wet sheath that was deeper and more muscular than her human sex had been, closing against him so hard that it almost, almost but not quite, hurt him. His brain was gone, gone down into the beast, into the loins of the beast, and this thing, this thing that so resembled him, this powerful and menacing thing that had been Laura was his as surely as he was hers. Her muscular body shook with spasms beneath him, her jaws opening, the hoarse roar issuing out of her as if she had no control of it. He let loose in a torrent of thrusts that blinded him.
Stillness. The thin silver rain came down without a sound. Not so much as a hiss from the great fire with its dark slowly collapsing logs, its high flaming towers of timber.
The music was low, furtive, patient, like the breath of a beast who was dozing, and dozing they were, Laura and Reuben. Wrapped in the shadows and against the rocks, they lay in one another’s arms, heart pounding against heart. There was no nakedness in the wolf coat; only total freedom.
Reuben was groggy and drunken and half dreaming. Words floated to the surface of his mind—
