Finals had finally come to an end.
They had done a number on Aurél. The bags under the fox's eyes were heavier than his satchel, since he'd only brought to campus test material for two classes. He blinked tiredly, moseyed through the almost vacant crowd of the quad en route to the glass-walled cafeteria. A beige scarf trailed behind him. His gingerbread-colored Legend of Zelda tee and patched skinny jeans looked like they could use a hot iron.
Taking a sip of coffee from the on-campus Peet's, he sat at the window-side table where his two friends had already set up camp, backpacks bunched together on the table. He slouched and spilled a few flecks of coffee.
Groaned, "Finally ... So you guys are all done too, right?"
To his left, Lari the vixen. To his right, Anubis the black-and-yellow jackal.
Lari had stag horns, and her frizzy marmalade hair was all bunned up. She wore cozy clothes of rustic autumn colors. A poncho, a striped scarf, a long-sleeve, some poofy jogging pants. Anubis wore a hoodie and jeans. Lari was texting some friends, and Anubis playing Smash on his switch.
"Yeah," Lari said, eyes trailing up from her phone to Aurél before slumping back down to her screen. She answered because the jackal seemed pretty invested elsewhere. He probably would be until the end of his match. "I finished over an hour ago. Anubis got here just a bit before you."
Aurél did a slow, stoic clap. "We're done, everyone. We made it. High fives."
He got the two of them to put down their gizmos for high fives, perhaps only because Anubis' console had yelled "GAME!"—a cry that temporarily ended the jackal's gamerly investment—just a second beforehand. The jackal blinked jubilantly at Aurél, returning to Earth. He seemed to be just realizing he had high-fived the fox.
"Heya, Aurél!"
"Hey." The fox chuckled. "So you're done. We should go out somewhere and celebrate, eh? Or maybe just throw a pizza party, crash and, uh, Smash at my dorm room?"
Both Anubis and Lari bolted upright and became completely engaged. They shot each other a piercing look. In that simple, cryptic stare-off, they seemed to have a whole conversation about a phenomena of which Aurél was clueless. Aurél frowned.
"What's that look mean?" he asked.
Anubis laughed, "What?" Though, he seemed to be answering Lari's look of caution, rather than Aurél's question. He turned to the fox, and despite the subtle pleading look on Lari, he explained, "We got invited to a party that Stan's having. 8 PM tonight. Wanna roll with us?"
Lari gripped one of her antlers, grimaced. "I'm really sorry, Aurél. I wanted to tell you about it, but I don't know. I asked Stan about you, but he ignored my text."
"Aah." Aurél's ears drooped, but his eyes twinkled with understanding. "You guys, no sweat. I don't really know Stan, anyway."
"Awwh, hang on, dude; we're not gonna leave you behind!" Anubis rubbed Aurél's shoulder. "Besides Lari, it'll be fun to see him do that thing—you know?"
Aurél hung his head to the side, flared his claws out with a look of mock inquisition. "What thing?"
"Anubis," Lari huffed. "It's not you, Aurél, it's just ..."
"Hey, Lari," Aurél said. "If Stan doesn't want me at the party, I'll just catch an Uber back. I'll take the blame—say I pushed you guys to bring me. Worth a shot, if you want me to go. Sound good?"
Lari beat her head with her tail, thinking. Anubis was sniggering, and Lari glanced at him, and she was unable to resist a smirk at the corner of her mouth.
"Alright," she said. "Save up your appetite for tonight, then. Stan's sure to have lots of food ..."
* * *
An old red Mitsubishi pulled up at Stan's house. Actually, it was Stan's parent's house. The parents were away on vacation, though.
Dark cumulus clouds concealed the twinkling stars. The full moon, too.
Aurél and the gang went up a couple flights of gravel steps. The steps started in front of the two-storey home's driveway and cut through a couple of hedgerows.
Lari rang the bell. They awaited a reply to the incredibly loud chorus of what was probably music. Granted, it sounded like a clumsy garble of bass from outside. When Stan greeted them at the door he had on his starter jacket and reeked of tequila.
"Lari? Did I not tell you he's not invited?"
Anubis tsked. "Double negatives," he said quietly.
"Fox boy, you're on my porch," Stan said. "The rest of you, you're invited I GUESS. You, stay outside."
Lari protested, "Stan ..."
Aurél was muttering an argument as Stan escorted him in. Stan just grunted. He quickly lost interest in it. Pop music and partying bodies transported his mind to funner places. Lari hung in the threshold of the door, frowning. Aurél held up his hands forgivingly.
"It was worth a shot, Lari. Thanks for spending time with me earlier. I'll just uh hit the road and uh ..."
He looked to his left, blinked. Order myself a pizza; work on my prestige level in Call of Duty? He knew how pitiable that would sound. His right to remain silent was pretty awesome and he used it.
She dipped her snout culpably. "Dude, I'll make it up. We'll hang out tomorrow, alright?"
"That'd be awesome. G'night, Lari."
The door closed. Once again in his life, he was alone: taunted by the muffled booms of music, by the bursts of laughter that were likely from some tomfoolery he should be part of.
Shoulda coulda ...
He shook his head, smiled.
He didn't blame his friends for giving in to Stan. He had been a bit pushy, anyway. Anubis had been kind enough to drive him here.
And Lari ... Aurél could understand her not saying much. She was always like this in super extroverted situations: unobtrusive, reserved. I'd much rather spend time alone with her tomorrow, anyway.
He sat on the top steps, swiped left on his phone. He was going to call an Uber. He forgot what app he was searching for; he got lost in bittersweet thoughts. Thoughts about the day, about his future.
"I dunno, man. Maybe I should have tried sizing him up. I was really close ... Last semester, too ... Not gonna have another chance to end school right, am I?"
Clouds peeled away, revealing stars. Moonlight slid over his legs. The longer he sat there, the more irritated he became. "Sometimes I'm a just a bitch ... He thinks I'm a lamer, doesn't he?" Probably smelled it on me like a bloodhound. Damn.
Fuck.
No more clouds cloaked the full moon. His body was quivering under the blotch of silvery light.
How could I have not have done anything?
He was grinding his teeth. They were growing, becoming fangs.
Should have punched that guy in his fucking throat. Stripey-looking bitch ass racetrack finish line looking ass.
Oblivious to the low growl rising from his throat, he couldn't stop thinking about what Lari had told him: Stan's sure to have lots of food ...
They're eating without me ... all of that delicious food. Probably laughing at me.
Under the unbridled light of the full moon, strange magic changed Aurél. The silver luminance beefed him up. The cords of muscle on his arms and legs throbbed and enlarged, writhing like vipers. His fur grew more coarse and grisly, his snout more savage and wrinkly, his feet more long and feral, his tail more strong and bushy.
The seams of his Zelda logo ripped away, and his burgeoning white pecs replaced them. His Levi shorts lasted longer. Eventually, though, the denim tore away with sickening groans. Stringy patches spread along the shorts until the shorts fell as scraps from his buff hamstrings. His boxers never stood a chance. A huge knotted cock exploded from the too-tiny Hanes. Its syrup-thick pre cum drooled on the gravel steps, drooled just like his beastly fanged jowls.
"Gruaaaaauughh ..."
His fiendish voice befit a form that was two feet taller, two hundred pounds heavier and 200% more horrifying.
Thinks he can just hightail off with my friends? Laugh at me? Leave me out here to starve?! No. I'll eat whatever the fuck I want, you bucktoothed horsecocksucker. Fuck you. Fuck you and your grandma.
Anubis and Lari were lounging on the couch, legs up on footrests. They talked over bites of pepperoni pizza. They seemed bothered, their conversation lackluster.
The Interview was playing. The volume of the subtitled movie took a backseat to the super loud Juice WRLD song. It seemed kind of pointless to play a movie you couldn't hear.
At least, Lari thought so.
The only person she and Anubis really knew here was Stan. They had collaborated on a couple of English projects and cracked jokes in an otherwise snoresville class. Stan was standing by the kitchen counter, chatting it up with another clique. His teammates from football maybe? As of now, those guys had the most pull on Stan.
A crash kind of broke through the jarring ambiance. The sound minutely dazed everyone, but when the source of the sound appeared, people screamed. Someone notched the music down to muted.
"WHAT IS THAT?"
"OH MY GOD, IS THAT A COSTUME?"
"AAAAHHHHH!"
There was a guttural hiss. Grisly footsteps from fox clodhoppers drummed the foyer. Anubis and Lari peeked over the couch, and Anubis gagged on his pizza slice, which left a pretty bad splatter of tomato sauce and cheese on Stan's sofa.
"Get to the backyard!" Someone said.
"BACKYARD, GO GO GO!"
More ruckus.
Treading over an unhinged door was a hulked-up semblance of the once-lithe fox. Even though this was the second time Anubis had seen Aurél like this, it was still pretty unreal.
"Time to move," he muttered to Lari. He tugged her off of the couch by the arm.
The screaming populace was crowding skittishly through all the most obvious places. The open screen door was one, the staircase leading to the garage another. Anubis and Lari—summoning the acrobatic skill of Ezio—vaulted over a coffee table, then dashed Naruto-style through a door frame into the dining room.
They shoved aside a couple of Baroque-looking chairs, then went prone for reconnaissance under the dinner table. That was right before a brutish, wolfish roar heralded Aurél's coming. The werefox stomped around the corner that exposed the dining room, and the two friends cursed and flattened themselves. Aurél went by without seeing them; but there was no point in that if Anubis couldn't see Aurél. After a couple of heartbeats of holding his breath, he sprung up and knelt at the door frame, peeking into the living room; and cursing, Lari got up to do the same.
Aurél had cornered Stan inside by the window next to the patio. The zebra had been shoved out of the way by all of his friends, who had been so busy saving their own asses, right now they were probably saying such things as, I thought he was with you!
"Am I still uninvited?" rasped the werefox.
Monster breath galed back Stan's face. It smelled already as though the werefox was having a carnivorous night. Stan whitened at the thought of being just another morsel of many.
"Nuu-oooo. O-of course you're invited."
Stan sounded like he had just spent all day blowing balloons. The werefox's stomach sounded like Stan had just blown his only chance to convince the monster not to eat him. The toned abdomen burbled with a browbeating faintness, and the werefox snorted from his giant snout, narrowing his eyes on the chump.
The werefox's thick tongue rolled along his black-lipped jowls right after Stan's response. This was Aurél's predetermined reply. No plead nor words of reason would have altered Stan's fate, not even if he had taken speech and debate class.
"That's what I thought, mint-chip face ... So, I'm gonna help myself to all of your food ... But first" (a slimy lycanthrope-like tongue drawing over the zebra with sticky, rough-as-sandpaper taste buds) "I'm gonna help myself to YOU ..."
To the onlookers at the door frame, Stan's reaction to that probably looked like a senseless fit of desperation, the way his arm flung out. But then, his paw curled around the inch-thick pole of a lamp. He jerked his arm toward his chest, and the ceramic cover of the lamp dinged Aurél right between the ear and the eye. The lamp slipped from Stan's grip and went down, but the werefox went up: torso erect, hand on his head—and his erect form released such a deafening, discordant screech, such that sent glass ornaments shattering from countertops and kitchen cabinets and cupboards rattling open.
His body jackknifed inward, then straightened out to be even more erect than before. All a sudden, the werefox had his prey-holding arm raised high; and Stan's legs were kicking over his head, and he was screaming into the below abyss of the pissed-off monster's salivating maw.
Anubis was a little more daring than Lari; he crawled to the edge of the couch, then peeked around to get a close-up view from below of Aurél's throat. It was swollen like a shag carpet with a New York rat hidden beneath, its inner walls squelching, flexing and expanding with every swallow of the moonborn pred.
The jackal sighed dreamily. He was kind of proud of Aurél for retaliating at Stan. They grow up so fast, he thought.
"Told you this was a good idea," he whispered back at Lari.
Like Anubis, she was entranced—even more than Anubis had been playing on his Switch. Her ears bounced to every SQUOLORCH of the monster's bloated, prey-jostling throat, which was surrounded by hyper-developed back muscles. Each gulp made her gaze bounce lower, her eyes fixated on the bulge of zebra. Half of the zebra wriggled into Aurél's chest, pushing forth the monster's vanilla-white pectorals; and then Aurél pushed his elbows forward and clasped his burly hands around his neck, deeply kneading around the bulges below the zebra's groin to speed up the process of sequestering the zebra into his gut. The rubs of his fingers set off a rapid-fire string of squelches and squishy noises that filled the deserted living room, the harshness of the sounds amplified by all of the windows and hard furniture.
It was an addicting, hypnotising sight to Anubis: watching the stomach swell and become more round than the most packed of school-bags. Aurél's knotted hyper cock beat lustfully against the drum-gut's apex, dribbling over some of the bulges that beat around the immovable shaft. The werefox's fluffy bowling-ball-sized nuts sloshed eagerly, garbling out a gurgly morse code that bespake the gargantuan orgasm yet to come. Anubis wondered what would happen if he dared come out of hiding to rub the werefox's doming belly. Would Aurél recognize him, or eat him too?
The jackal almost left his safe space, but Lari crawled from the door frame to his side to distract him. "No. Not a good idea at all," she whispered. Anubis opened his mouth to protest, until Aurél whipped his head toward where Lari's movement had made noise and unleashed a windy, smelly GROOAAAAHHH. Shivering, the two non-werefoxes lay perfectly hidden, holding each other in half-foetal positions. Thereafter, they were much more delicate and economic with their peeks around the sofa.
Besides—they both seemed to notice at the same time—there stood before them an ovular mirror. It projected the last shapes of the zebra slipping into the fluffy white spheroid. The atmosphere was lucid with all of the gastronomic onomatopoeia to fuel a teratophilia: slrRsh, brrrrggh ... ggrrlhmm ... bbsrwsk, uRrghrggbgb ... Lari—who had the better hearing between herself and Anubis—could have sworn she heard a buried, slimy voice desperately reach out of the gurgles:
*You gotta let me out, man ... c'mon ... oh god, my clothes ... ME ... I'm melting, I'm melting, I'm melting!*
The zebra's contours on the domed-out six-pack belly wiggled in short frantic bursts, like the rays of high-energy light. Aurél planted one paw atop the other, stamped his palm hard on the peak of his chaotically grumbling gut. Grunted pleasure overlapped a lazy thundering of miasmic green belch. In the swift span of that monsterly noise, the stomach shrank to half of its size. Wads of swampy, half-digested clothing smacked the floor. A couple of bones clacked atop the clothes pile; and the werefox utilized the absorbed mass of what he had digested thus far, growing another several inches. The single growth spurt forced him to hunch over further, lest his skull grind against the ceiling of the room.
Wow, Anubis thought.
"Are you ... horny?" Lari whispered to Anubis, looking at the tent in his jeans.
"Maybe a little ... are you?"
Anubis had the strangest butterflies. Was he crushing on his friend? The usually-timid fox had just eaten their other friend—and his stomach was treating Stan like just a heap of whey protein. And the werefox had not stopped growing from his meal. He hulked up yet again, skeleton mushrooming out, dick swelling like a balloon animal on crack. Compared to his previous werefox self, Aurél was now like a diesel truck compared with a regular Ford truck: h-yuge.
Crumbles of the ceiling came with expansive breaths of euphoria, breaths that rolled and rumbled over the whole living room like distant roars. Aurél belched again—glass shattering somewhere—and the jarring noise of marrow hitting wood made Lari fold her fox ears.
Anubis smelled it before he saw it: the acid, gamey stink of digestive juices eating away at plywood floorboards.
Cracks came; Aurél's glorious foot-paws crunched a slew of bones into a chalky powder. Another belch echoed out into the night, and Aurél peeked up from the couch to see a flat-stomached werefox stalk his way down the patio into the backyard garden. None of the guests who had gone out that way had actually been able to get away; the fences were barb-wired, and the gate to the front of the house was pad-locked several times.
Anubis looked at the zebra bones. Werefox stomach-gunk bubbled and boiled on the equine skull, slowly eating away at the features of teeth and eye sockets. A guilty grin spread across his face. He had an idea of what the fate of the other guests would be. The only question was, how many people were trapped in the backyard?
* * *
Lari called Anubis. She told him that Aurél had finally called her back, and he was coming over. Anubis was at her dorm in ten minutes flat. He did not want to miss this.
There was a knock. Lari answered the door. Aurél was ... reverted to normal, and yet not normal?
Whereas Lari was probably at head-level with Aurél's exercise balls for nuts the last time she saw him, Aurél now stood at his usual 5'6" height. Yet, some differences of his body were surreally resemblant of the changes he had undergone as a werefox. For one, he had the broad chest and shoulders of a football player.
His clothes (where did he get those?) were straining. And the bulge of an abnormally huge cock had produced a dark blotch of pre in his jeans, running down his pant leg. Anubis gulped, completely red. That dick was probably the length of his forearm, and it was throbbing hard, a monster whose imprisonment was much too small. On top of everything else, Aurél's muzzle looked ... longer? More intimidating?
Also, he had a cute, chubby, round gut. His shirt exposed his fluffy navel because of it.
It was like how Neo from The Matrix had returned to the real world, yet some of his skills from the Matrix had been preserved. Even though Aurél was no longer a werefox, his gains from his diet as a werefox had been transferred to his regular form, at least partially.
"W-well, you've been working out," Anubis chirped.
Aurél snorted. "Something tells me you guys know something about this ..." And his voice was somewhat deeper.
He entered the room, and plopped onto the bed beside Anubis.
"I did," Lari said, "hence, I didn't want to invite you. But, Anubis convinced me to let you come, and I'll admit I liked everything I saw."
Aurél frowned. "What did you see?"
Lari and Anubis gave each other disoriented looks.
"Do you not remember anything?" asked Lari.
"I remember Stan shutting the door on me." Aurél laughed. "Then ... I'm guessing you guys convinced him otherwise, and got me in? Thank you for that, by the way. But I think I got really drunk, so I don't recall anything anyway. I woke up naked, took some clothes from a clothesline, found my phone and got an Uber here."
"Okay ... no," Anubis said. "If you told that to anyone else, they'd probably believe you and think you're a normal person. But actually, you transformed into a werefox, got super pissed off and broke into his house. You ate Stan—we saw you eat like seven people. I'm not sure if you ate anyone else? Lari got kind of nervous, so we got the fuck out of there."
Aurél was flabbergasted. He couldn't believe that any of that had happened. Yet, it would explain his stomach. To explain his buffness and his ridiculously-sized cock, though ...
"The thing is, we knew that you would eat people, because you ate one other person last full moon. And it was really hot ..."
"Guys, guys. Slow down. Before I even begin to wrap my head around this, I want proof—something concrete. And if I follow what you're saying, then I transform into a werefox every full moon? Or, at least, I've been transforming since last full moon. Please, explain everything about this that you know to me. And start from the beginning."
Anubis grinned. "Gladly."
How much proof would Aurél need? Anubis figured, the potato sack full of goopy zebra bones would be a good place to start ...
