← Marked by the Wolf

Chapter 23: The Hunt

Chapter 23: The Hunt

A goblin war party came against them, and they fought it side by side. Blood and moon and mating, said Fenris, after. These three made these woods.

— the Old Wolves' telling

In the old story the girl ran from the ring of stones under a red moon, and every version Angeau tells is very particular that she was terrified. None of them says who asked her.

Noëlle had never believed that part. On the first night of the red moon she was in a position to check.

She ran into a dark that should have broken both her ankles, and she did not so much as stub a toe.

The ground came up to meet her. There is no better way to put it. Before each foot landed she knew what it would land on: the root humped under the leaves, the black patch where the moss was a skin over mud, the slab of stone with its edge turned up. Her soles found the dry places by themselves. Bramble canes leaned out of the undergrowth at her shins and she was already past them. She had her cropped top and her torn shorts and nothing else, since her cloak was draped over a rune stone a field behind her. The night air came straight through every gap, and she loved it.

He came behind her. She did not need to look. She heard him through her feet, a heavy double beat rising out of the earth, spaced wide, each pair landing nearer than the last. She heard him in the air as well, the breath sawing in and out of that enormous chest. And she smelled him, wet fur and hot skin, the smell she woke up to every morning, turned up until it was almost a taste.

She ran faster, because she could. She was showing off, and she would have been the first to admit it. A girl in the old story gets run down by a wolf who is bigger and meaner than she is, and here she was doubling around a stand of birch so tightly that his claws tore up the turf behind her when he tried to follow. She laughed out loud. The sound carried a long way, and every owl in that wood must have known exactly where she was.

She was not afraid for one step of it. She was proud of that, because the legend had the girl terrified, and she had checked her own heart for the place where the terror should be, and there was only an empty spot with a grin in it.

All summer he had walked a step behind her, asking. Tonight she had asked him, and he had said yes with every bone he owned, and the boy who held trees was coming through the wood after her with nothing in his hands. She had wanted a great many things in her twenty years. She had never wanted anything as much as to be caught by him.

“Slow!” she shouted over her shoulder. “You’re so slow!”

He answered with a sound she had never heard from anyone, a growl that started somewhere under the ground and came up through her heels, and her knees nearly buckled. She swerved left over a fallen trunk, vaulted it, and felt the whole log shudder when he cleared it behind her in one stride. He was close enough now that the heat of him touched her back. His tail was whipping the ferns.

A hand the size of a skillet closed around her waist.

He took her off her feet and turned in the air so that his back hit the ground and not hers. They rolled through the leaves together in a long, crashing tangle, and when they stopped he had her pinned under him with her wrists in one of his hands above her head. His weight pressed her down into the cold moss. The fur on his chest and belly scraped her bare skin, coarse and hot as a stove. His face hung over hers, long and wolfish, the jaw heavy with teeth, and the eyes in it were Crispin’s, amber and certain.

“Caught,” he said. His voice was ruined and low, with gravel in it.

In the old story this is the part where the girl screams. Noëlle had other plans.

“Finally,” she said, still gasping. “Took you long enough.”

His lips lifted off his teeth. The tail behind him, which she could see over his shoulder in the red light, thumped once against the ground, hard.

“Your tail’s lying to you,” she said.

“My tail,” said Crispin, in the voice of a landslide, “does what it likes.”

She arched up against him and found out how much of him there was. He was heavy and vast, and where he pressed against her hip the length of his cock strained against the split denim still hanging from his hips, hot through the cloth. Her mouth was dry. “Take those off,” she said. “Or tear them. I’ve seen you in worse.”

He let go of her wrists to do it. She did not move them. One tug of his claws and the denim came apart. His cock sprang free against her stomach, and she stopped breathing and started again with a noise she was not proud of. It was longer than her forearm from the elbow. It was dark and swollen at the root, flushed deep red at the head in the moonlight, and it left a wet trail on her skin when he shifted. She put her hand around it and her fingers did not meet.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

A shudder ran through him from his ears to his heels, and his tail slapped the leaves twice. “Noëlle.”

“I’m fine, I’m extremely fine, I want it,” she said, all in one breath. “Shorts. Rip them. Go on.”

He hooked one claw under the waistband and pulled, and her shorts and the thong string came away together. She lay under him on the moss in nothing but her cropped top, in a wood that smelled of rain and wolf, with the blood-red moon coming down through the leaves in coins. He looked at her for a long moment. The hunger was in his face and he did not hide it. The sight of that, of him with nothing held back and his eyes steady on her anyway, hit her harder than the hands did.

He put his mouth on her first. She had not expected that. He dragged his tongue up the inside of her thigh, wet and impossibly broad, and then across her pussy in one slow stripe from the bottom to the top. She screamed. It rang off the trunks. He did it again, and again, and she had her fists in the fur at the back of his neck and her heels dug into his shoulders. His tongue was so long that it curled inside her. He found the spot without being told and stayed on it, with a rough, pleased, rumbling noise that went straight through her pelvis. She came on his mouth fast, with both hands pulling his ears. The ears flattened and then perked up under her grip, and his tail beat the ground hard enough to shake the moss.

“More,” she said, when she could. “More, more, I’m not done, I’m not nearly done.”

He lifted his head. Her wetness shone on his muzzle and he licked it away without any shame at all. “Tell me,” he said.

“Fuck me.” It came out of her raw. “Right now. All of it. Don’t you dare be careful.”

He rolled her over onto her hands and knees in the bracken, and she braced against a root. His claws closed around her hips. They were each as long as her finger, and he held them turned, so that the points rested against her skin like pins, pricking, never piercing. He settled behind her, huge, his hot belly fur against her back. The head of his cock pushed at her entrance.

It was a good deal of cock. She would like to be fair to him, and to herself, about that. He went in slowly. She felt every inch of the stretch, full and almost too much, and she whimpered and pushed back on him to take more. He groaned above her, a long, shaking, wrecked sound. When he was in as far as she could manage, his hips against her ass and his weight settled over her shoulders, she had no breath, none, and no thought except that she had never been so full in her life.

“Good,” she managed. “That’s so good. Move.”

He moved. He drew back almost to the tip and thrust in again with a force that shoved her forward in the leaves, and she laughed and clutched at the earth. He did it again. His breath rasped in her ear. His tongue came down the side of her throat, rough and so long that it reached across her collarbone until it found the mark. The ring of old scar on her shoulder lit up. His teeth rested against it, wide and careful. She turned her head and said into his muzzle, “Harder. Your hands.”

“Noëlle...”

“Close them. Please, Crispin. I want to feel them. I won’t break.”

He growled, and the claws sank in. They went in far enough to break her skin, a handful of sharp bright lines at her hips, and the pain ran straight into the base of her spine and out again as pleasure so fierce she could not tell the two apart. He pulled her back onto his cock as he thrust, and the slap of it echoed through the trees. She yelled. She yelled his name, and several words that were not his name, and a long string of encouragement that she could not have repeated afterward to save her life. The whole forest was listening, and she let it.

Something else had started under the pleasure, and she let that go on too. The ache from his claws had run down to the base of her spine and stayed there, a hot, pushing pressure, a bruise with something alive behind it. Her gums throbbed above her eyeteeth. She ran her tongue over them and they felt longer than they had at supper, and she did not care in the least, because he thrust again and she forgot she owned a mouth.

“Harder,” she said. “Harder, harder, yes, don’t stop, don’t you dare stop.”

He didn’t. He got one arm around her chest and hauled her up until she was on her knees with her back against his belly, the fur rubbing her nipples raw through her top, while his other hand slid down between her legs. Two of his fingers, thick, with the claws tucked back, found her clit and rubbed it in hard circles. The whole length of him pounded in and out of her, deeper like this, so deep that her eyes watered. His teeth closed on her mark, hard enough to hold her in place and no harder, and the growl in his chest buzzed against her spine.

He had always liked her best when she was doing nothing for anybody, and that night she finally understood why. There was no one in the whole forest she had to look after. Nobody wanted a salve, or a lie told to a mother, or a cough listened to. There was no basket, no list, no errand. There was a wolf holding her up by the teeth and the hips, and all she had to do was want, and she wanted so thoroughly that nothing else in her had room to be useful. She let go of every tidy thing she owned.

“I’m going to,” she gasped. “Crispin, I’m going to...”

He made a sound she would hear on her deathbed. He drove up into her, hard, while his fingers pressed down, and she came so violently that her body sagged in his arms. Her cunt clamped on his cock in long pulls, and she heard herself shrieking at the treetops. He thrust through it, once, twice, three times, and then his whole huge body locked up behind her. He buried his face in her neck and came, hot and endless, filling her, and his tail beat so hard against a tree that bark rained down on them both.

They went down in the bracken together, him on his back and her sprawled along him with his cock still inside her. The moon was a smear through the branches. His chest rose and fell under her cheek, enormous, with his heart slamming against her ear.

“Okay?” he said, finally, in his wrecked voice. Of course he did.

He was the size of a hay cart, with her blood on his claws, and the first thing he wanted to know was whether she was comfortable.

She laughed until she cried.

It was his stomach that interrupted them, a growl so loud that a startled thrush went up out of the canopy.

“Oh, that is not me,” she said.

“It is not,” said Crispin, with enormous dignity. He lay with one arm across his face. The ears on the top of his head were pink at the rims, which on that head took some doing. “It’s the... I’ve been hungry since the full moon came up. Since before. I never eat in this form. I hold out for the dawn.”

She lifted her head off his chest. The hunger was in the air around him, a thing she could smell now, an empty, sharp, hollow scent, and under it was the other smell, the one the mark had been teaching her all summer. The ground was telling her something.

“Be still,” she said.

He went still. She rolled off him onto her knees, scraped and sticky and wearing nothing but her top, with leaves in her hair, and put both palms on the earth and shut her eyes. She could feel the heartbeat of the wood, slow and deep. Far up the slope, off past the birches, a big, slow heartbeat lay against the roots, something with four feet instead of two, resting.

“Deer,” she said. “A big one. Up the ridge, upwind of the creek. He’s lying down.” She opened her eyes and breathed in, and there he was, the musk of a rutting animal, the sweet rank scent of a buck with his neck swollen. “Antlers. A lot of them. He’s not afraid of anything.”

Crispin was up on his elbow, watching her with a look on his long dark face she had never seen there, and she felt it in her knees. “How do you know that?”

“I just do. Can we?”

It was a silly question. She had spent her life setting broken legs on creatures like that one. She had held a fawn that a dog had mauled, and sat up all night with a hind that was bleeding out, and she had never once in twenty years thought about the meat. Now she was licking her lips.

Angeau had spent a hundred years warning its daughters about what lived in the forest. It had never once occurred to anyone to warn the forest about its daughters.

“We can,” said Crispin, and he dug the knife out of what was left of his jeans and put it in her hand.

They went up the ridge in the dark with the moon behind them. She led. She picked the line through the underbrush by the pull of the ground while he followed her at a crouch, silent, which for something his size was close to a miracle. At the last rise she put her hand back and felt his fur under it, and he stopped. The buck lay in a hollow ahead, a long dark body under a pine, his head up and his huge rack black against the red sky. He smelled like warm hay and mud.

She pointed to the left, then to the right, and then to the buck. When Crispin’s eyes met hers, his tail went up in the slow, broad sweep that she had come to know, the one that meant he was happy and was trying to be dignified about it. He slid away into the trees.

He had taken her plan without a word, from a girl with leaves in her hair and no clothes on. Nobody in Angeau had ever followed a plan of hers that did not involve a bandage.

She stayed where she was. She breathed. She had never in her life been so exactly where she belonged.

When the buck’s head swung toward the sound, she stood up out of the bracken and let him see her. He stared with his nostrils flaring and gathered himself to bolt the other way, and Crispin came out of the bracken on his flank at full speed.

She never found words for the speed. There was a dark mass and a crash and an animal scream, and the buck went down on his knees, and then he was up again and running, and Crispin was running beside him, one huge hand on his neck. They went down the hill together in a series of crashing strides, antlers and claws, and she went after them with her bare feet flying over the stones. She was at the bottom before the buck went over, with the wolf on his back and both arms around his neck. The animal’s legs folded under him, and it was over.

It was fast. She would say that for him. He broke the neck in one wrenching movement. The buck dropped without another sound, and silence settled over the hollow.

She knelt in the leaves. The body was warm and steaming in the cold, and she put her hand on its ribs and felt the heart stop. She had done that for a living animal before, more often than she could count, but she had always tried to get it started again. This time she didn’t. She knew the exact place on the throat. She knew where the big artery ran under the jaw, and she put her fingers there before she thought about it, and she used the knife.

The blood came out hot and dark, smelling of iron and salt, and she did not flinch. It ran over her wrists. She bent and put her mouth to it, and she drank, and she did not feel sorry for even a heartbeat.

“Noëlle.” He crouched beside her, breathing hard, with his hands hanging at his sides and his eyes wide and bright. His muzzle was dark with blood. “You don’t have to...”

“I know I don’t,” she said. She wiped her chin with the back of her hand, which only made it worse. “Eat. I mean it. You’re starving.”

He tore into the haunch. She had seen him eat all summer, shy, with his ears down, but she had never seen anything like this. He ate with his whole body, with his claws and his teeth and the long wet tongue, and she watched him and felt love go through her so hot it hurt. She took the knife and cut a strip of the liver for herself and ate it standing up, warm, rich and slick, and it was the best thing she had ever put in her mouth, and she would say so plainly to anyone. She was a healer. She had spent her life keeping things alive. She stood in that hollow with blood to the elbows and the red moon on her shoulders, and she wanted to live exactly like this forever.

Her friends in the city would not have recognized her. She did not, for a moment, recognize herself, and she liked the stranger very much.

He looked up from the meat. His whole muzzle was red. As he looked at her, his hunger turned, as a weathervane swings, from his belly to somewhere lower.

She grinned at him. “Oh, you do not,” she said. “Do you? Right here?”

“I...” His tail swept a long arc through the leaves. “Yes.”

“Good.” She put the knife down. “Lie back.”

He stared at her. She put her hand on the middle of his chest, in the thick black fur, and pushed, and Crispin, the biggest thing in the whole forest, fell over backward into the bracken without any resistance whatsoever. His cock was already hard again. She could see it, heavy and slick, standing up from his belly, and her mouth watered for a different reason.

She climbed onto him. The blood on her hands left red prints on his fur. With the buck’s body steaming beside them, she straddled his hips with her bare thighs wide and took hold of his cock and lined it up. He made a tearing sound. She sank down. It took her a long time, and she took it inch by inch, with his claws digging into the earth on either side of him, not into her, because he was holding himself back with everything he had, and she stopped when she was full and rested there, shaking, with her hands on his chest.

“Look at me,” she said.

His amber eyes found hers. They were huge.

“I’m in charge,” she told him. “This time it’s mine. You hold still.”

“Yes,” said Crispin.

She rode him. She started slowly, rocking, feeling him fill and stretch her, and then she got her knees under her and took what she wanted. She braced her hands on his shoulders and set the pace herself, lifting and dropping until the wet slap of it was loud in the hollow. Every time she came down his hips jerked up to meet her, and his mouth fell open with the long tongue lolling out between his teeth. She rubbed herself against the base of him, bearing down, circling, until a bright hot knot pulled tight in her belly.

“Touch me,” she ordered. “Hips. Hold on.”

His hands closed on her hips. The claws were out, but he held them clear of her skin, trembling with the effort, and she leaned down and put her mouth beside his ear and said, “All the way. Go on. You can.”

They sank in. He roared. She had thought she knew what loud was, and she had not known, and the sound split the hollow and sent birds shrieking up out of every tree on the ridge. He bucked up under her, thrusting from below, so hard she bounced, and she flung her head back with her hair swinging and her mouth open to the red moon. She screamed. The ground sang up through his body and hers, and the whole forest held still around them.

“Mine,” she said, “mine, mine, you’re mine,” and she came with a cry that shook her from her teeth to the soles of her feet, clenching around him, and the ache at the base of her spine throbbed with every pulse of it. He followed her over with his head ground back into the bracken and his claws locked in her hips. He pulsed inside her, hot, over and over, and she rode it out on top of him until she had nothing left and collapsed across his chest.

They lay in the bracken beside the buck.

The wind had dropped. The red moon hung low in the west now, sinking toward the black line of the ridge, bigger and dimmer than it had been when it rose. Its light on the leaves had changed from blood to rust. Somewhere below them the creek ran, and she could hear every pebble in it.

Beneath her, Crispin’s chest rose and fell. Slowly, the great ribs began to shrink. She felt it start in the fur under her cheek, the coarse hair thinning into short black down, and she sat up and put both her hands on him and kept them there. The bones moved under her palms. The long shoulders drew in. The claws on her hips withdrew, one at a time, and left the skin whole where they had been except for the little crescent marks, which she would count in the morning with great satisfaction. His jaw shortened. His arms drew up from his knees. The ears and the tail stayed, because they always do. The ears hung limp, and the tail lay across the leaves in a tired curve.

He had done this alone every month of his life, with his face to a tree so nobody would see. She watched every bit of it, with her hands on him, and she was not sorry to have seen any of it.

By the time the moon touched the ridge he was a boy again, lean and bloody and grinning at her, very pleased with himself, with a leaf stuck to his forehead.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello.” His voice was his own, thin and hoarse. He lifted a hand and touched the side of her face with blood-smeared fingers, and she turned her mouth into his palm. “Was that...”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t you dare ask if it was all right.”

“I was going to ask if it was all right to say I love you,” said Crispin, “with this much deer on both of us.”

“You may,” she said. “You may say it as often as you like.”

He said it. She said it back as the red moon sank behind the ridge and left the wood in plain starlight. He curled himself around her back to keep the cold off. His tail thumped the ground. Her gums still ached above her eyeteeth, and so did the base of her spine, and she was too happy to wonder why.

The reader, who is not too happy, is welcome to wonder on her behalf.

The mark on her shoulder was warm, and the wood was loud and wide awake all round them, and she fell asleep with her head over his heart.

There were two more nights. She counted them on his ribs before she slept, and she was not sorry about any of it.