The Devil Next Door

91

He awoke later and the sun was up.

He was whole.

He had not been sliced up or spitted.

His leg did not hurt so bad and he saw it had been packed with a crude poultice of mud, leaves, and herbs. Whatever that stuff was it was working.

But he was not alone.

He was in the grass, the stinking pelt of a sheep thrown over him. There was a woman with him, her naked back pressed to his chest and her ass pressed to his groin. They had always slept like that, curled into one another—

Michelle.

He was with Michelle as crazy as that sounded. And he dared not move because it would shatter the fantasy, destroy the dream… but then he realized it wasn’t a dream at all. He was with her. Really with her. She was alive and breathing and warm. She smelled like blood and dark earth and raw meat, but it was still Michelle, her body painted or not.

Swallowing down his fear, he pressed into her, let his hands glide over her smooth tanned flesh. She felt the same. She responded immediately, grinding her ass into him. And he grew hard, despite the violent smell coming off her—or maybe because of it—he grew hard, engorged, and he thought at that moment that he’d never, ever been that hard before, that aroused, that hungry for the act. He trembled for it. His blood burned in his veins. He reached out. Michelle moaned. Still behind her, he grasped her ass in his hands, reaching down and pulling one of her long legs up so that he could enter her.

She was wet for it.

He pushed into her violently, his thighs slapping against her ass cheeks and she made grunting, groaning sounds of pleasure that he barely heard above his own. He pounded into her until he could stand it no more than he buried himself in her, gripping her legs and trembling as he came.

Then he fell away, barely able to breathe.

It was like he had just emptied himself of something more than just semen. She turned around and grinned at him with bloody teeth, still a beast of the night, still a regressed animalistic hunter. Her dark hair was slicked with grease, braided with bones and beads. Her face was still painted white, eyes set in blackened hollows, nose and lips darkened. She was savage, primordial, but still beautiful, maybe even more so reduced to her simplest form. A sleek and hungry cat… but submissive now, not deadly, his wife as she’d always been his wife.

She dug a piece of raw meat from somewhere.

She offered it to him.

No, he would not eat his meat raw. If he did that then he was no better than they were and he had to hang onto his humanity. He had to. But the hunger. It opened in his belly, it chewed at his stomach. He could smell the salty blood, the meat marbled with veins of fat. He began to drool.

Don’t do it. Please Louis, don’t do it. You’re right on the edge now. The gene is active in you. You’re standing on the edge of a huge black pit and beneath is the crawling blackness of prehistory.

Do not eat the meat.

Do not even taste it.

One taste and you will not be a man.

You will be shoved into the darkness.

The primal fall…

He snatched the meat from her and bit into it, moaning with pleasure. Oh, how good it was. How wonderful. How delightful and sensuous it felt upon his tongue as its juices filled his mouth and made him feel a simple joy he had never known before, one long denied him, but one that somehow owned him and made him part of what it was and what he would never be again.

Michelle watched him eat.

She smiled.

When he was done, he curled up against her again and was instantly aroused. His wife. His female. The meat had excited him and now he needed to have her, to dominate her. He took her again. He was crude, physical, forcing pain upon her and delighting in the fact. When again he was spent, there was blood in his mouth and he realized he had bitten into her shoulder.

He closed his eyes, content now.

His dreams were simple and fulfilling.

When he opened his eyes he was alone. He started awake, peeled the sheep’s hide from him. The sun was high in the sky. There were abandoned sheep hides everywhere but no people to go with them. Naked, but unashamed of the fact, he stood up and, listening, sensing for danger. They were gone and he was alone. Where had the clan gone?

He looked around for a weapon. Something he could grip in his hand and kill with. For in his mind he dreamed the dream of the first man, the primal man, the original man. And that dream was the dream of a weapon.

The sun hot on his bare skin, he looked for something to hit or stab with. Because only then, only with a weapon in hand, was he above the beasts… not a grubbing root-eater, but a man… a man…