BloodWolf

BloodWolf
Sierra Dafoe
All rights reserved.
Copyright ©2023 Sierra Dafoe
An Authorized Excerpt

"Here."

The cabbie stared into the rear view mirror. "Here, sir? But --"

"Stop here."

The tires crunched to a stop on gritty sand. Handing a hundred-dollar bill to the driver, Delacor got out. The thump of the cab door closing behind him was very loud in the silence.

He waited until the noise of the retreating cab had faded away. Then he tilted his head back, studying the smattering of stars just peeking through the darkening arch of the sky.

It had been a night very like this one that the um al duwayce had come for him. The stars had been different, half a world away, but the sand and the silence had been much the same.

He had smelled it first -- a whisper of sweetness on the warm desert wind, cloying and spicy, but somehow stale, cold, rotten with age. The scent had filled his mind like a madness, setting fire to his nerves and hazing the night with a veil of crimson. Then he'd seen it in the distance, gliding toward him across the sand. Even now, he could feel the heat that had burned in his loins at the demon's approach.

Closing his eyes, Delacor let himself remember…

It wore the shape of a woman, dusky and slim, draped in a silken robe that glimmered in the moonlight like cobwebs, so sheer and delicate it seemed it would shred at a single touch and float away. Her hair, black and glossy as onyx, fell in a straight, heavy line to her slender waist. Above it, her breasts curved, full and ripe. As she neared, he could see the darker brown of her areolae beneath the gauzy fabric.

Spellbound by lust, he stood, unaware of his sword sliding from his hands and tumbling to the sand below. His blood thundered in his ears as she studied him, her dark, secretive gaze finally coming to rest on the swell of his cock. She knelt before him in a whisper of silk, her long, clever fingers undoing his garments.

And then she took his throbbing shaft in her mouth.

Swallowing, Delacor tilted his head back, feeling his balls grow heavy. His cock pulsed, lengthening beneath the fabric of his pants. Groaning, he clenched his fists, refusing to touch himself, to relive the need that just the memory of the demon's touch could arouse.

The um al duwayce. The succubus. It was hunger incarnate, a searing, endless lust that fed off its victims, drawing their essence, their life force, into its primordial emptiness.

A light breeze skidded up from the south, blowing across the sparse vegetation of the Amargosa Desert and setting a clump of yucca to clacking softly. It brought with it the tang of sere, uninhabited spaces; rugged, rolling lands in which nothing but coyotes and rodents and scorpions moved. The scent filled his nostrils, sharpening the hunger that twisted inside him, the taint the um al duwayce had left in his blood.

It did not always kill its victims. No, some it merely changed, infecting them with its own insatiable desires. Beasts became feral, men became vampyr -- cannibals living off the blood of their own kind. And he, Baudouin Delacor, who had never been a man…

He hated this, hated what he was about to do. But already his hands were ripping at his cufflinks, dropping the pearl-tipped bits of metal behind him as he strode deeper into the Nevada night. His Cavellini suit jacket he left draped over the spindly limbs of a sagebrush, his belt near the base of a striated rock. Kicking off his shoes, he shed the rest of his clothes, retaining only the small waist pouch he habitually wore under his shirt. Cinching the pouch's strap tight around his lean waist, he narrowed his eyes, and waited.

To the east, above the horizon, a golden glow painted the sky -- the moon, just shy of full, hidden still behind the low-lying hills. It called to him -- a call that had once been the keenest of joys to answer.

Now the thought of what it meant sickened him.

Five, the old priest had told him. There are five aspects of the demon, representing each of the elements -- earth, air, water, fire… and spirit. For it is not truly flesh, Baudouin -- it is essence. An essence which can poison any living thing.

But these five -- they are its avatars, its manifestations. Destroy those, and perhaps…

Perhaps. It was the best Father Giovanni had been able to give him. The regret in the old man's eyes had not been feigned.

I am very sorry for you, my son.

Gone to dust centuries before, Father Giovanni, who had not cursed him or called him damned.

Delacor had already destroyed one, that first, beautiful, ethereal woman who had floated across sands the prophets themselves had trod. He had lain with her under the full Eastern moon, coupling again and again in an inhuman frenzy of lust -- until he'd felt her teeth on his neck.

She'd laughed, he remembered, even as he'd plunged his sword into her. Laughed and then stood before him, the wounds closing as he watched. Horrified, he'd stumbled back and she'd followed, her hands reaching out for his still rigid cock. Her scent -- the sickly-sweet odor of decayed spices and rotting flowers -- had surrounded him, making his head whirl.

Shrieking, torn between loathing and the desire to thrust her to the ground and split her open with his cock, Delacor had struck again and again, retreating before the thing that pursued him, remorseless, undying, until at last he'd severed its head with one great sweep of his sword, and the avatar of the succubus, the flesh in which it had clothed itself, had tumbled to the sand.

But the poison it had left in his blood still remained.

For eight months now he had suppressed it, hiding himself as the moon grew round, avoiding its light. Drinking himself into a stupor to try to silence the craving inside him, he'd sweated and shrieked inside sterile hotel rooms, holding himself back by sheer will from ripping open the curtains, letting the moonlight pour down…

He'd tried it before over the centuries, many times. Tried to starve the hunger into submission. Each time, he'd hoped he could outlast it, that without the blood his affliction demanded, he would die.

He didn't. The torment simply grew stronger with each passing moon till he could no longer fight against it, and must give in.

Bending down, he scooped up a handful of sand, letting it trickle slowly through his fingers. Moments passed, each one a grain of sand falling, falling… The moon cleared the horizon, and then there was no more sand, no more hand to hold it, no more Baudouin Delacor. A massive black wolf with eyes the color of amber stood in the desert, scenting the wind.

Breaking into a long, steady lope, the wolf headed north.