One Last Hunt

A Short Story by Bo Blackstar

[f/monster, blood, violence, werewolf, non-con, beast men, gangbang, tentacle, fall to madness]

“You promised,” Ella whispered.

Lizbeth looked at the child, pausing for just a moment before she finished buttoning up her coat. “The streets are overrun,” she explained. “And they’re getting closer. I have to do something.” The tall woman settled her short top hat over her head, covering blonde hair shot through with streaks of gray. Lizbeth was not the ravishing spirit of youth she had once been, but those years were not yet far behind. The physical demands of hunting beasts and monsters had kept her fit into her middle years. Even after giving up the Hunt half a decade ago to raise the orphan, Lizbeth was not a woman to be trifled with.

The retired huntress checked her boots, which were high, thick, and dark. Sturdy stiletto daggers were tucked into loops in the leather near the top of her calf, a backup in case anything got past her axe. Some took to naming the primary instrument of their profession, but not Lizbeth. She recognized her axe for what it was, a tool of the Hunt rather than a companion. The former were more reliable, in any case.

Lizbeth lifted the weapon from where it presently rested, atop the trunk that had been its home for five long years. She’d spent the last half-hour cleaning and honing it. The axe was a bit larger and heavier than a woodcutter’s, with a broader head and a haft of bloodstained iron and wood. Most notable was the knob of the weapon, which held a small barrel like that of a firearm. Lizbeth loaded the chamber of this weapon through a slot in the throat of the haft, her special ammunition being a combination of black powder, flash powder, and quicksilver. Now loaded, a small lever on the grip of the handle would release a blinding blast.

“You’ll get lost,” Ella warned.

Lizbeth turned to face the young girl. “I won’t. I just need to thin the numbers, send the crowds and any larger beasts the other way, then circle back and eliminate the stragglers. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Ella shook her head. “You already have that look in your eyes.”

Lizbeth turned toward the door and took a deep breath. She could feel it, the call of the Hunt. Her muscles ached with eagerness for action, her senses focused, her heart beat more rapidly. “Just keep the incense burning,” she said. “Lock up, and don’t open the door for any reason until I return.”

With that, Lizbeth stepped out onto the cobbled street. The scent of the pungent incense wafted from a small, barred window beside their door. Its odor would ward off those who had become beasts, but she knew its efficacy was limited. A large crowd or a particularly strong monster might find the scent irritating and seek to destroy the source. That was why she had to go out, Lizbeth told herself. The Hunt was bad tonight, and far too near. She had to protect them.

Axe in hand, Lizbeth pulled her scarf up over her nose and headed down the street. As soon as she turned the first corner the smell of the Hunt, beasts and blood and fire, filled her nostrils through the fabric. Her heart thumped in her chest, her grip on the axe tightening. She could see pillars of smoke rising here and there among the Gothic architecture of the city, whether from pyres or buildings it was impossible to tell. The streets and alleys here were deserted, but not too far off Lizbeth could hear plenty of activity. The shouts of men that had lost their humanity. The snarls and howls of beasts. And beyond that, the rapturous cries of the blood revelers, those who had gone mad and given themselves to their baser natures beneath the red moon of the Hunt, their cries and cavorting echoing into the night.

A thrill ran up Lizbeth’s spine as she remembered coming upon one of the blood orgies a decade ago, seeing the people lost to their madness and lust as they fucked and killed without reason or restraint. Violence was not the only animalistic impulse that ran rampant on nights of a Hunt, and hunters were notorious for how they often chose to unwind after the Hunt drew to a close. Not all of Lizbeth’s scars were from battles.

Lizbeth shook her head clear and pressed on toward the sounds of the Hunt, already starting to pant with anticipation.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As she stalked along a bridge over the street below, Lizbeth trained her senses forward. She had heard the snarling of a large beast and followed it here. Memories of past battles and anticipation for the one to come set her mouth watering. For just a moment, the huntress feared that Ella may have been right. On her last hunt Lizbeth had nearly killed the girl, so far gone was she in the peculiar ecstasy of the slaughter of beasts.

No, she told herself. She was stronger than that. She had to keep them safe.

Scrambling up over the side of the stone bridge, the beast appeared. As large as two men, hunched over and snarling, a twisted meld of man and wolf with snapping jaws and rending claws. Lizbeth rolled her shoulders, a grin hidden beneath her scarf, and stepped forward.

The beast lunged, mouth agape and claws outstretched. Lizbeth launched herself low, sliding feet-first beneath the grasping tackle. She rose and swung her axe just as the wolf beast was turning, and the blade split the flesh across its snout. With a snarl it surged at her, Lizbeth ducking and dancing away from the wide swipes of its claws. One low sweep caught the back of her boot, and the huntress’s legs were pulled from under her. The beast was on her in a second, fangs angled for her face, but Lizbeth jammed the haft of her axe to the back of its mouth and held it off. She strained under the strength of the inhuman monster, her breaths quick. Her head was spinning from the scent of blood and the heady musk of the wolf beast, from the heat and weight of the thing on top of her, from the violent struggle itself.

Lizbeth pulled up her legs between them and pushed at the beast with her knees, giving her room. She twisted her axe free of its mouth, bringing the knob right into the beast’s face, then closed her eyes as she flipped the lever. A crack like a gunshot and a brilliant flash split the night. The beast howled and fell back, grabbing at its burned face with one hand and waving its other in a blind defense. Lizbeth spun to her feet, building momentum, and buried the head of her axe under the monster’s ribs. She kicked its chest and pulled the blade free, ducking under a retaliatory swipe from the sightless creature, then put her whole weight into a downward strike. Her axe bit the back of the wolf beast’s neck and sank halfway through, the monster giving a final, gurgling howl before it collapsed onto the bridge in a dead heap.

Standing over her prey, Lizbeth took a moment, her shoulders rising and falling with each heavy breath. Her head swam with the scent of blood and beast, and beneath the red moon she longed to relieve her animal urges.

“Too dangerous,” Lizbeth said to herself. “Have to hunt. Have to keep us safe. Have to… hunt.” She clutched her blood-soaked weapon close to herself, fighting back the foolish urge to slide the haft between her thighs. “Too dangerous,” she repeated. “Blood drunk already. Have to head… back. Have to…”

A vicious snarl heralded the appearance of a second wolf beast just before it leapt onto the bridge. Lizbeth backed away, narrowly avoiding the beast’s claws, until she was pressed to the wrought iron railing. She struck the creature against the nose with the knob of her axe and dragged the blade across the other side of its face before it could respond. In a rage, the beast tackled her with its full weight, sending both of them tumbling over the side of the bridge and down to the street below. Lizbeth’s top hat and axe went flipping away from her.

Crates loaded with reams of canvas and a couple barrels of grain exploded beneath the pair as they landed. Dazed, Lizbeth groaned against the pain of the impact and turned onto all fours on the pile, reaching and searching for her weapon. The wolf beast growled and righted itself, shaking its head clear. It rose behind the huntress, red eyes staring hungrily, then paused. Its snout flared as sniffed the air, scenting something besides blood from the woman.

Lizbeth looked over her shoulder at the monster as it reached for her, certain she was staring at her own death. Her coat was flipped aside, and then with a violent swipe the beast gripped and tore her trousers to ribbons, leaving thin lines of red along her bare backside. Lizbeth’s eyes went wide, the huntress gritting her teeth and trying to scramble away as the beast grabbed hold of her waist and moved over her. She screamed as the monster drove its cock into her wet channel, as swift and violent as any strike from a weapon. And that was just the first of many. Lizbeth clawed at the shattered goods while the lycanthrope fucked her, struggling for breath. It hammered its huge cock into the huntress with ravenous fury, battering the woman as she never had been before. The beast’s breath and musk, the scent of blood, and the rising smell of their rutting filled Lizbeth’s head and made her vision hazy. Rough fur was ground against her ass and back, the night echoing with the violent slapping of their hips. The huntress’s mouth hung open in a long, hungry moan, and without thinking she reached down to stroke her gloved fingers across her stiff clit with volatile abandon.

The beast howled, its pistoning hips picking up their pace while Lizbeth screamed beneath it. Her next cry cut off as she was overcome, her toes curling in her boots and her body trembling around the wolf beast’s cock. Another moment, and then the beast forced itself inside her to the hilt, stretching Lizbeth as its climax arrived. Lizbeth nearly passed out from the feeling of the beast’s hot spunk being pumped into her, so deep and full that it oozed from between them and spattered onto the splintered wood and canvas beneath.

Momentarily sated, the lycanthrope slumped onto the broken pile and panted, its breath steaming in the cool night air. Lizbeth lay there, her breaths heaving and her heart pounding, still twitching now and then as her senses slowly recovered. Slowly, she drew a silver stiletto from her boot, and with a swift jab drove the weapon through the hairy beast’s temple and into its brain. Barely thinking, Lizbeth left the weapon there as she picked herself up. As if in a trance, she recovered her axe and placed her top hat back on her head. Narrow lines of blood trickled from her back thanks to the beast’s claws, and its cum slid down her thighs. The shredded remnants of her trousers were pulled from her boots, her long coat the only thing even partially covering her lower half, and still the huntress pointed herself in the direction of the deeper city.

“Have to hunt,” Lizbeth panted, her eyes sparkling in the red moonlight. “Have to keep us safe. Have to kill them all. Have to hunt.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The air was choked with pyre smoke and the howls of beasts. Few places remained safe in the central district of the city. One such bastion of security was a chapel, and it was under assault. Their incense had run out, and the square outside their door was filled with beast men. Deformed humans lost to the horrid scourge, half-transformed and utterly mad. The beast men banged against the chapel doors with fists, clubs, and axes, demanding entry and raving about the beasts inside with no recognition of their own twisted state.

Lizbeth entered the square from the opposite end, blood streaked in her silvering blonde hair. The huntress pulled the scarf from her face and took a deep breath, her nostrils filling with the scent of blood and beasts. “Beasts at the door,” she mumbled to herself. “Beasts all around. Keep us safe.” She tightened her grip on her axe and charged. “Have to hunt!”

The first died as he tried to shout, his head chopped from his shoulders in one clean strike. The next had his legs cut from beneath him before he was finished with a swift blow to the skull. Lizbeth fell upon them like a whirlwind of blood, hacking and bashing a half-dozen of the beast men to death in the first seconds. They retaliated with uncoordinated swipes of their tools and clubs, unable to catch the quick-stepping veteran huntress with more than a glancing blow. Their shouts of anger and cries of pain were joined by Lizbeth’s own threatening growls and frenzied screams. Her blood boiled, the world through her eyes painted in a stark, pulsing red.

A flash erupted in the square from Lizbeth’s axe, the crowd shouting and backing away. One of the largest brutes, further gone to his corruption with overlong arms and no spot uncovered by fur, fell to his back on the cobbled square while the vague silhouette of Lizbeth loomed over him, ready to pounce, and pounce she did.

Lizbeth’s mad scream pierced the night as she impaled herself upon the beast man’s rigid rod. She stared down at him, snarling as she rolled her hips wildly, holding the blade of her axe against his throat. “Keep us safe,” she growled. “Beasts! Beasts everywhere! Have to hunt!”

The crowd recovered from the flash, still heightened but confused, and then moved on Lizbeth. She fought them as they came, snapping wrists and stabbing with her stilettos until the sheer number of furred hands was too great. Still she fought, clawing and bashing at them as she worked herself with feverish intensity around the larger beast man’s cock. She was grabbed, groped, scratched, and yanked around among the throng of beast men. One of them shoved his cock in her throat and fucked her face with abandon, while Lizbeth grabbed at his ass and urged him on. She broke something when she needed a moment to breathe. She was unwilling to release the brute beneath her even after his load spilled out from her squeezing pussy, and she continued to buck against him until she was forcibly pulled away and wrestled into another position. She screamed again the first time her ass was taken, raking lines of crimson down one of the beast men’s chest.

Lizbeth’s hat was long gone, her coat torn away and her blouse torn to shreds. She was a pale blonde speck in a sea of dark fur, a roiling disturbance in the crowd. They wanted her; to have her, to escape her. She wanted them; to fuck them, to kill them. The huntress’s mind was tossed about in violent ecstasy, her eyes rolling back in her head as every hole was stuff with beast cock, Lizbeth constantly bucking and fighting and screaming for more.

“Beasts,” Lizbeth rasped. “Beasts all around. Have to keep us safe. Beasts… everywhere… Hunt…”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The square was quiet. The screams had ended some time ago. Only the crackling of the dying pyre in the center remained.

Lizbeth stood, naked chest rising and falling. Scratches and bruises covered her, as did the blood and filth of two dozen or more beast men. She bent to recover her ripped coat and crumpled hat from among the corpses, putting them in place by routine. With a swaying gait, axe in hand, the huntress left the blood-soaked square. Her work here was complete.

Pieces began to fill in through the haze of bloodlust and Hunt-driven madness. Pieces Lizbeth had never known were there. She saw things. Shapes moving down dark alleys. Impossible things, clinging to the sides of grand buildings as if such nightmares had always roosted there. It could not be, and yet there it was right before her eyes. Most disquieting of all, Lizbeth felt no fear as she gazed upon these horrors. Only recognition.

A noise from nearby caught Lizbeth’s attention. An empty barrel rolled out of an alley, and Lizbeth retraced its path into the shadows. The alley dead-ended around a small fountain, and on the other side was a gaunt figure stooped over a body. There was something off about the narrow, robed figure, but Lizbeth couldn’t place it exactly. She only knew that it wasn’t human, felt it in her blood. Approaching, Lizbeth raised her axe over her head and readied her strike.

From the side, crates were knocked over and a second figure appeared. Beneath its hood the creature’s face was mostly a mass of narrow tendrils, pale and grasping, its eyes large orbs of solid blackness. A sickly light shone in the creature’s hands, then spend toward Lizbeth. She tried to sidestep the mystical projectile, but it burst as it came within half a foot of her, and a ring of the peculiar light sprang up around her. Lizbeth’s arms were held at her sides by an unseen force, her axe clattering to the floor. She struggled, held by the sinister magic as if paralyzed, and while she stood immobile the two tendril-faced creatures stalked closer.

The first approached, grasped the sides of Lizbeth’s face with emaciated hands, and let out a hissing scream. Lizbeth’s blood ran cold as a huge, tapered tentacle burst forth from the creature’s face. Before she could react, it drove this tentacle into her open mouth and down her throat, forcing it in so deep that it bulged her throat and brought its inhuman face close to hers. While the huntress shook in the grasp of the alien spell, the creature’s smaller tendrils wormed their way into her nose and ears. A terrible, haunting song made itself heard in Lizbeth’s mind. Atonal and unsettling, it utterly consumed the huntress’s senses. It was all she could focus on, all she could think about.

Lizbeth’s eyes were vacant as the ring of light around her dissipated. The creatures lowered her to her back in the cobbled alleyway, taking care with their incapacitated prize. The tentacle down Lizbeth’s throat began to pulse and pump, and along with that movement came a thrumming, awful pull from somewhere deeper than Lizbeth could imagine. The second creature unveiled its own larger, delving tendril, and quickly slipped the slimy limb between Lizbeth’s legs, the huntress only able to offer a muffled groan at the sudden intrusion. This organ too began to swell and undulate inside her, and Lizbeth’s eyes fluttered under the peculiar, aching drain from within.

The smaller tendrils of the creatures explored and tested at every angle of the huntress while Lizbeth lay mesmerized by the alien song in her mind. Deeper, somewhere that surpassed the physical depths of their invading organs, the creatures found something. Lizbeth began to writhe and moan over the tentacle in her throat as they touched the seed of bestial violence in her core. She strained as they aggravated that darkest part of her into a frenzy, and then fed upon its wrath. Still partially paralyzed, Lizbeth clawed and kicked at the stone beneath her, that most animalistic aspect of her nature whipped into wild prominence. The violating tentacles continued to pump and throb, draining at the woman’s essence through the gateway of her flesh. More they prodded, and more they drank of her, until Lizbeth was convulsing in a constant ecstatic peak for them to feast upon.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Lizbeth was already walking when she regained her senses. In a daze, her steps were guided by muscle memory. Down one street, as vaguely familiar as any other, she abruptly stopped. Incense smoke drifted out from a small, barred window beside a door, and the smell of it curled Lizbeth’s lips into a snarl. She shook her head against the foul odor and turned away.

In the distance, some inhuman thing screeched into the night, its horrid call echoing out from the direction of the great cathedral.

Lizbeth took in a deep breath through her nose, scenting the air, and exhaled through a broad grin. She licked her lips, her hips and shoulders rolling in serpentine preparation.

“Beasts everywhere,” Lizbeth repeated. “Have to keep us safe. Beasts at the door. Beasts in the night. Hunt. Hunt. Hunt.” Her voice rising with laughter, she headed off in the direction of the screech.

“Hunt! Hunt! Hunt!”