Wrath White - Succulent Prey

"I need more paint."

The teacher walked over and stared at his gruesome canvas. She gasped audibly.

"I ran out of red."

"Uh… yes… I'l go get you some more." She scurried away from Joe, nearly tripping over the easel in back of him. Joe could smel her pheromones and those of the model comingling in the air. It was like having a menage a trois through his nostrils. The model's nipples were erect and pointing right at him. Her eyes zeroed in on the bulge in his crotch. She licked her lips when she saw him looking at her. Joe turned away.

"Don't tempt me," he growled under his breath.

The teacher came back with the red paint and Joe once again took his frustrations out on the canvas. It was bloodied and bruised when he final y left the room for his next class. He left it sitting on the easel and felt some pride when he saw the model and the teacher staring at it and whispering.

Let them fuck each other. It's a -bel of a lot safer than what I'd do to them, Joe thought as he hurried off to math class. If anything could douse the fire in him it was sitting in a classroom balancing equations for an hour and a half.

Joe sat through over an hour of math, trying his best not to think about the scrumptious meat chained up in his bedroom. The numbers on the page kept jumbling up in his head and at the end of the class his paper was stil blank. He bal ed it up and tossed it in the trash on his way out the door. He'd much rather get an incomplete than a zero.

Joe left the mathematics lab and walked back across campus to the library. The sun was beginning to set and the fog was already rol ing slowly across the manicured lawn toward him. A cool breeze slipped through the trees and across the grass, whispering beneath his clothes and across his skin. Joe sighed and shivered. After having his face glued to a page ful of senseless mathematical equations for over an hour, the cool moist evening air was refreshing, soothing. It calmed the beast inside him.

Joe felt relaxed and sedate as the fog caught up to him and sucked him in. Stil, he could not stop thinking about Alicia. He didn't want to hurt her again. He had to find a cure for himself.

He tensed as he remembered what

Professor Locke had said:

Sever the bloodline. Kil the original werewolf.

Hopeful y, there was another way. Joe hadn't thought about Damon Trent in years. Not until the hunger had started to come upon him and he'd looked into the bathroom mirror to see the same pitiless lust-clouded eyes of his long-ago victimizer staring back at him. He should have known then that the-man-had passed something evil on to him.

The librarian looked up and smiled nervously as Joe entered the building and stalked past her desk. Joe rol ed his massive shoulders and smiled back at her with a leering smile as he dragged his eyes over her thick curves. Her smile faltered and fel from her face, landing in a hard trembling line. She lowered her eyes and turned away. Joseph smiled wider.

Joe struggled to maintain control over the beast raging within him but the smel of her perfumed skin was driving him mad. He walked past her and into the rows of bookshelves, reeling like a drunken man. He stopped in front of a book in the mythology section cal ed

Vampires in Fact and Fiction. He pul ed it off the shelf and walked with it back to the huge oak table in the center of the room. He opened it and turned to the section on ways to become a vampire.

There was some nonsense about being born on Christmas Day or being excommunicated from the church that

Joe immediately discounted as superstition, then there came the part about being bitten by a vampire or drinking the blood of the undead.

Joe quickly turned to the section on destroying vampires and read about nailing them into their coffins by driving a wooden stake through their hearts or through their skul s so that they could not rise to feed. There was a prescription that cal ed for decapitating and burning the corpses of vampires or dragging them out into the sun. Fil ing their mouths with garlic or placing host wafers in their coffins so that they could not lie there. Joe turned more pages until he came to a section that reiterated Professor

Douglas's own remedy for the werewolf curse. Curing a vampire of the curse likewise cal ed for finding and kil ing the original bloodsucker. Joe slammed the book shut and sat there thinking, first about Damon Trent the child murderer and then about Alicia, whom he would surely murder and consume if he did not cure himself. He got up and walked over to the computer to do a search on

Damon Trent.

Alicia was fast asleep when the door slammed, waking her from her dreams and plunging her back into the nightmare of reality. Joe stalked into the room looking excited and agitated.

"I don't know what to do! I don't want to hurt you, but I can't see him again. I just can't face him again!"

He strode back and forth, gesticulating madly, whipping himself into a frenzy. He stopped abruptly and plopped down next to Alicia, startling her and causing her to shrink away.

He rubbed a hand lovingly over her voluptuous ass as she quivered in fear and began to sob.

"Talk to me. Tel me what to do," he said, staring deeply into her terrified eyes.

"Let me go. You should let me go right away before you do something you'l regret."

"If I let you go I'l just find another woman."

"Then turn yourself in. They have people who can help you."

"Doctors? Psychiatrists? They'l just lock me up with this hunger stil gnawing at me each and every day. That would be torture. No, I need to find a cure, another cure, a different cure."

"Joe. Listen to me. You have to let me go, Joe. You can't keep me here. They'l catch you."

"You're right. I can't keep you here forever. I'm going to have to go after him. But I'm taking you with me.

Alicia had no idea what the man was talking about, but it didn't sound good.

"You have to go after who?"

"Damon Trent. He's the one who made me what I am. I have to find him. Destroy him. In order to destroy the curse." Joe sat down and told Alicia everything and she listened, not just in order to gain his confidence and trust, but because she was legitimately curious. The story he was tel ing was unbelievable, but by the time he was done he almost had her convinced.

"So you believe that this Damon Trent guy passed on some type of virus to you when he molested you and that's what's causing you to change?"

"It's changing me into a kil er! And if I don't find him then you're going to wind up being my first victim."

As much as it chil ed the blood in Alicia's veins to hear that he was thinking about kil ing her, she was encouraged by the fact that he hadn't murdered her yet and also by the fact that he didn't want to. He didn't want to hurt her. It was that virus inside him making him crazy. It sounded ridiculous when she repeated it to herself now, but when he'd told her about the correlation he'd found between the werewolf and vampire legends and the evolution of the serial kil er it almost made sense to her. If he could just find and kil that fucker that infected him then he'd be cured and he'd let her go and maybe they could even go out again sometime once he was normal.

Alicia knew that she was being a fool.

Why would she want to go out with the guy who chained her up and bit her nipples off and was more than likely going to murder her?

Because you're a sex-addict, her subconscious answered back.

The likelihood of him curing himself by plunging a stake through the heart of a serial child murderer was so remote it was crazy. Stil, it was the only thing she had to hang her hopes on.

"I'l help you."

"What?"

"I'l help you find him… and kil him." Joe stared into Alicia's eyes for a long moment. He saw an honesty and a trust there that was almost childlike. There was loneliness there too, and a need-the need for love. He reached out and stroked her long curly black hair and leaned in to kiss her.