The Witch and the Werewolf Read online

  Two Moon Dawn

  The Witch and the Werewolf

  John A Burks

  Copyright © 2014 John A Burks

  All rights reserved.

  Smashwords Edition

  Worm Fall

  “The world is ending. Are you sure you want to be here, with me?”

  His palms were moist with sweat, slipped under her loose fitting blouse and against her sides, fingers dangerously close to her breasts. She tingled with each movement, with each stroke of his finger. His face was just inches from hers and she could almost taste the bubble gum he’d been chewing, no doubt to keep his breath fresh for their big night.

  It was a big night for the entire world and if Cassandra Kent could be bothered long enough to look up, into the night sky, she’d be staring right into the dark heart of humanity’s end. Like everyone on planet Earth, she’d seen the comet known as Wormwood every day and night for the last three years, a constant reminder of their coming demise. She didn’t need to look at it again, not on the last night of her life.

  “Where else would I be?” she asked as his left hand circled around her waist, slipping easily down the slick small of her back and into her waistline. He pulled her closer to him, breathing heavily on her neck, so close that she felt his warmth, his lips not quite touching her, almost like he was taking her in, breathing deeply of her essence.

  “Running maybe?” he asked, though the quick dart of his tongue along the lobe of her ear told her that he had no intentions of fleeing. At least not quite yet. “Or hiding?”

  “I don’t know where you hide from that thing,” Cassandra whispered, not wanting to look up into the cloudless night sky, not wanting to see the thing that was going to destroy the world. “And here, with you, is the only place I want to be. All I want is you. All I ever wanted was you.”

  Not quite the truth, she thought, but what harm could a little white lie do at the end of the world if it made the boy feel better about what she wanted? Brad hadn’t been the love of her life before Worm Fall. He’d lived down the street from her mother’s small East Houston home for years, just another boy her mother would let her have nothing to do with. He’d been just another face in the crowd. But he’d been available, and more importantly, willing. He certainly didn’t need to know he wasn’t the ‘one’. He was that night.

  Mother didn’t like him much. At least he had that going for him.

  Not that Brad wasn’t a cutie. No, not by any stretch of the imagination. He’d discarded his sticky wet T-shirt and Cassandra ran her fingers down the hard lines of the muscles in his chest, up and down his rock hard abs. My, my, she thought. How come I never noticed you before?

  “But your mom…” Brad said, inches from her ear between kisses to her cheek and neck.

  Actually mentioning her mother almost ruined the mood. Almost, but not quite.

  “Don’t worry about my mom,” she replied, his kisses sending chills up and down her spine. Despite his young age Brad knew just how to touch her and just how to breathe on the back of her neck to make her arch away from him. “She doesn’t know where I am and, even if she did, she has her own issues to worry about.” It pained her that the last time she’d seen her mother, before the end of the world, had been an angry fight. But what’s done is done, she thought. Her mother was sure they’d survive if Cassandra would just wait with her in the dark basement among her supplies and weapons. Worm Fall was mother’s vindication, affirmation that her years of preparing for the end, no matter how that end came, was valid. Her mother was overly optimistic, she thought, and she had no intention of spending her last night alive hiding, hoping to live. She was going out with a bang. “When we’re done, when it’s done… well, it will be done,” she said with a sly smile. “Mom has her own demons to deal with.”

  “Yeah… I guess,” Brad, although she could hear the hesitation in his voice.

  Cassandra sighed. She’d had this silly romantic notion of spending the last night on earth wrapped in a lover’s embrace, but her potential lover was afraid. She’d lost the fear of dying once she’d finally resigned herself to the fact that the comet, Worm Wood, was going to slam into the earth bringing an end to not just her, but her entire species. She didn’t want to live, imagining what the world after Worm Fall might be like. She wasn’t her mother. She didm’t think mankind was going to rise from the ashes reborn. She thought the worst of humankind, the murderers, rapists, and common criminals would inherit the devastated remains. She was surprisingly calm about the whole thing.

  But Brad wasn’t. He was scared. Scared men didn’t make love.

  She pulled away from him and held his hand. “It’s okay if you don’t want to, Brad,” she said, trying to hide the disappointment in her voice. “I understand.”

  “No, it’s not that,” he said. “I’ve wanted you since we were kids. I always had a thing for you.”

  “Really?” Cassandra asked, surprised. “I had no idea.”

  “Yeah. Ever since that time in third grade when you made me eat those crayons. I was hooked right then,” he said nervously, looking away. “I’ve had a crush on you ever since.”

  Cassandra smiled. She remembered the day. Brad was a skinny little nothing, a scared little boy who had grown into a muscled, handsome young man. And she’d been the class bully, in that awkward stage of youth when the icky little boys needed punishment. Brad and his family had lived next door to her and her mother all those years. Until the end of the world she’d never even given a romantic relationship with the handsome blonde a second thought.

  “How come you never said anything?”

  “Your mom is kind of scary,” Brad said nervously, looking around as if the woman was standing near by. “And there’s the whole training you to be a stone cold killer thing.”

  Cassandra laughed. Her mother had made her take one form or other of self-defense classes ever since she could remember. And while the training, ranging from Karate and Krav Maga, knives and guns, and even swords, had given her a great deal of self-confidence, her mother rarely let her out of the house.

  “I could kill you with a finger,” she told him playfully, stroking his cheek.

  He didn’t take it that way, though, and pulled back. “Exactly. You and your mother might do okay after all this,” he said, nodding to the point in the sky neither of them wanted to look at, the point of their doom. “Why be out here?”

  “I don’t want to survive the end of the world with my mother,” Cassandra said, pulling Brad closer and kissing him deeply. Her mother could be very intimidating and had been just that to all the boys in her life. The combat training she’d understood and even looked forward to. It had at least gotten her out of the house. But why her mother had gone to such great lengths to keep her more or less hidden was beyond her. She was eighteen now, though, and the world was ending. She wasn’t going to listen to the woman on the last night of the world. She wasn’t going to stay hidden in a basement as the world burned down around them. She was going to enjoy herself for once. After their last big fight, she’d snuck out of the house saying a silent goodbye. She couldn’t even remember what the fight was about, at that point, but it didn’t matter.

  “She’s not here now. It’s just you and me and in a little while it’s all going to be over with. We’ve got each other here, right now, and we might as well enjoy it,” she said with as big a smile as she could muster.

  “I am enjoying it,” the boy replied nervously. “More than you know.”

  Cassandra turned his face back to hers and kissed him deeply, running her hands up and down the hard lines of his chest. She felt Brad’s tension ease and his hand’s worked their way back under her shirt. She giggled when he fumbled with he
r bra, helped him, and then giggled again when his hands found their way to her sweaty breasts.

  “It’s so hot out here,” she moaned, eyes shut, as the boy tweaked her nipples. Ow, she thought, not so rough, but didn’t say it.

  Cassandra opened her eyes long enough to see a blue orb floating in the air in front of her. She closed her eyes again and it took a few moments to realize she was seeing something out of the ordinary. What in the world, she wondered, opening her eyes again, expecting it to have been a trick of light or her imagination.

  But the blue orb was still there, floating about six feet off of the ground. It was about the size of a basketball and glowed bright blue, illuminating the dark night around Brad’s car.

  “Brad?” she said, trying to ignore the boy’s hand on her breast and face on her neck.

  “No, I’m good. We can do this,” the boy replied between heavy breathing. Judging by the grip he had on her small, pert breast he’d lost all inhibition. Too bad, she thought.

  “Brad, look behind you.”

  The boy turned and gasped. “What is that?”

  The ball did not move and Cassandra felt like she was being watched, through the ball. It was an inexplicable feeling and she couldn’t shake it.

  “I think we should leave,” she whispered, pulling the bra from her shirt through a sleeve and tossing it aside. “I think we should leave now.”

  Brad nodded and slipped off the hood of the car, Cassandra close behind him. The ball followed their movements, dropping a little as they both got in Brad’s car.

  “This is the part where you can’t find your keys,” Cassandra said nervously, never taking her eyes from the blue orb. “And then after you do find them, the car won’t start.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Old horror movies. That’s how it usually goes.”

  “I have the key right here,” he told her, showing her the key to the car. When he stuck it in the ignition and turned the motor over, however, the blue orb glowed brighter, nearly too bright to look at. It began to pulse with energy and Brad stared at it blankly. Cassandra tried to keep the panic out of her voice, trying to stay calm.

  “Brad, put it in gear and drive,” she ordered but the boy wouldn’t move.

  Bolts of electricity whipped about the orb like a child’s plasma glow toy. The air stank of burnt electrical circuits and the orb began to emit a high pitched squeal. Finally, a solid bolt of energy leapt from the orb striking the car on the hood in a shower of smoke and sparks. The engine died in a spasm, sounding like it had run out of gas. Brad snapped out of it and frantically turned the key again, but the car’s engine wouldn’t react.

  “I guess it wants us to stay here,” she said solemnly.

  She glanced up into the night sky where the comet Worm Wood filled the horizon. Soon the United Nation’s missiles would strike the comet, hopefully breaking it into enough smaller pieces that their impact would not be as catastrophic as the Texas sized chunk of ice slamming into the earth. No one actually believed the government’s plan would work and many feared that the many smaller impacts, scattered about the globe, would be worse than the one impact of the undamaged comet. Scientists likened it to the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs and no matter how it worked out, they’d said, the world would be a very different place by the next morning.

  “What the hell is it?” Brad asked, the boy making no effort to conceal the panic in his own voice. “It’s going to kill us!”

  She wasn’t sure what difference it made, at that point, if the blue orb killed them or the comet did. They were going to die and she wasn’t going to get what she’d craved. She half wondered if her mother had anything to do with it. That would be about right, she thought. One last gasp, keeping her from the boys.

  “Stop panicking,” she said coolly. “If that thing wanted us dead we’d be dead. It just doesn’t want us to go anywhere.” She had no idea what the thing was but it didn’t matter. The world was ending. She’d have to worry about the weirdness of it all in the afterlife, if there was an afterlife.

  “Headlights,” Brad said, looking past the orb and Cassandra followed his gaze.

  “Great,” she thought. “Just what we need now.”

  The lights neared showing a car that was all too familiar. She got out of Brad’s card, walked around the blue orb, and stood, hands crossed across her chest as her mother pulled up in their small, nondescript minivan.

  “Mother,” she said coolly as her mother stepped out. She wasn’t going to give into panic and wasn’t even going to mention the glowing blue ball behind her. That her mother had the audacity to track her down on the last night of the world… she was furious. Why couldn’t the woman leave her in peace?

  “Cassandra,” her mother began, her voice crackly as if she’d been crying. “Gods, I didn’t think I’d find you in time.”

  Her mother’s clothing struck her as odd. She wore black leather pants tucked into the tops of rough looking combat boots. Despite the heat she wore a floor length black overcoat and… were those swords? Instead of being angry her mother stepped to her and pulled her in tightly, hugging her. Her walls broke down and she held her mother just as tightly.

  “I’m sorry I ran, mom.”

  “Don’t be. I should have told you before all this. I shouldn’t have kept such a tight regn on you. This was the only outcome. I was just so scared for you. I should have been training you years ago. I just didn’t want you to have to see that world. Then Worm Wood came and I thought none of it mattered anyway. But… I should have told you everything.”

  “None of what mattered, mom? What do you mean by training? I’ve been training my whole life. I am the bad girl walking in the shadows. I have no fear, ” Cassandra quipped, trying to inject some humor into their reunion.

  Her mother snapped her fingers and the blue orb disappeared. “There’s so much I haven’t told you, Cass. I’m so sorry for that.”

  “You sent that thing?”

  “I had to. I had to find you. This night, of all nights…”

  What had her mother just done? How did her mother control that blue ball of light?

  “We have to go and we have to go now,” her mother pleaded, dragging her towards the van. “The missiles are going to strike at any moment. Remember not to look at them,” she said as Cassandra pulled against her grip. “Don’t look at the explosions.”

  “I can’t leave, mom,” she said, pulling away. “Brad is here.”

  “The neighbor boy Brad?”

  “He’s hardly a boy anymore,” Cassandra said, pointing to Brad’s car. The boy waved at them and forced a smile.

  “Hey Mrs. Kent. I… er…”

  “Hush boy,” her mother ordered. “You should be home with your parents. Your mother is worried sick about you.”

  “Car won’t start,” the boy said, still waving like an idiot. Cassandra sighed.

  “I don’t want to spend my last night on earth locked in our basement, mother. I want to feel the night air and I want to watch as that monster,” she said, pointing at the comet that filled the night sky, “kills our world. I want to feel the touch of Brad’s hand on my breast,” she continued, not noticing the boy blushing, “and I want to kiss him. That’s right, mother. I want to kiss a boy.”

  The walls were back up and despite the absolute oddity of her mother’s control of the blue orb, she was still angry.

  “I want to be free, mother.”

  “This is not the night for it, Cassandra,” her mother began seriously. “Can’t you feel them?”

  “Feel who?”

  Her mother looked so sad. “I’ve utterly and completely failed you. I thought I’d keep you safe enough that you wouldn’t have to be a part of this life. I thought you could skate by and never see the underside. But they are out there, Cass, right now. And they are looking for us. They’d like nothing more than to take us and make us their own as they have so many of our coven.”

  “Coven? W
hat coven. We aren’t witches, mother.”

  Her mother looked about in a panic. “We must flee. Right now. I will tell you everything once we get back to the fortress.”

  “It’s a basement, mother. Not a fortress. And you’re freaking me out here.”

  “You should be freaked out, Cassandra. The world as you knew it is ending, but it’s just the beginning. And you’re not going to like what it looks like tomorrow morning.”

  Brad got out of the car and started towards them. “I’m sorry about this, Mrs. Kent. I… ow… wow. Look at that.”

  Bright light filled the dark, turning it to an off white daytime. Her mother gripped her head, preventing her from looking up as the missiles slammed into Worm Wood.

  “Do not look at them, Cass. Look at me.”

  The urge to look up at the source of the light show was overwhelming but her mother held firm. Instead she stared into her mother’s deep blue eyes, locked on her gaze. Brad screamed out and dropped to his knees.

  “Oh shit. I can’t see. What…”

  She was able to angle her eyes down enough to see the gory muck of his eyes, melted by the nuclear explosions in the sky, running down through his fingers. She gasped and turned back to her mother, now afraid to look away.

  “That’s right. Look at me, child. We’ll live through this night, you and I. We will survive this. And then I have to show you the real world. They’re out there now, looking for us. They can smell my fear. But we’ll beat them. We’ll have to or they will overrun the world.”

  Cassandra heard a growling from the bayou’s edge and felt her mother tense, hands clasped even tighter around her face.

  “They’re here,” her mother said dramatically and, when she said it, Cassandra felt it as well. It was a crawling feeling of fear and dread in the pit of her stomach. There was something out there, in the wood line. “Remember not to look at Worm Wood. No matter what happens, don’t look up.”

  The first creature burst from the wooded edge of the bayou and Cassandra couldn’t help but stare at it. It looked like a wolf crossed with a man, though it was like nothing she’d ever seen in a werewolf movie. It stood nearly eight feet tall and, even beneath the scraggly brown fur, she could make out the solid muscles of its body. Its arms were long and dangly, its fingers tipped with inches long claws. The thing had the face of a wolf, long and elongated, and its mouth was filled with razor sharp yellow teeth. It stared at them with all too human eyes, though, and licked its chops through a growl.