Prey To Me

Story by iplank on SoFurry

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A careless, wasteful hunter finally has his karma catch up to him as his now ex girlfriend Lydia follows him to his cabin to act as a medium for angry souls.

This is 2020's Halloween story! If you want other spooky stories try;

Blind Sided for atmospheric spooks and vampire

Be Were / Be Were 2 / A Wolf By Any Other Name / Savage Love for werewolf

A Lesson On Intent for a unique sort of meta-horror

Leftovers for gore horror.


(F tf wolf/beaver/bear/porcupine/deer hybrid monster, body horror)

There once was a foolish hunter named Kyle. Even to call him a hunter was being generous. With an ego twice his own size he was a huntsman on the surface who simply did not get out as much as he wanted for lack of a hunting party, and a heavy wallet for his luck at the poker tables. In reality he went out hunting frequently but left most of his kills to waste- bounty hunting trophy parts only, keeping the best for himself and selling the rest. He was not a man of comittal either- most of his girlfriends started to bore or annoy him after only a few weeks, and he sought a new one using his rugged good looks and smooth deep voice to lure them. His last fling though was a bit too strong willed. Lydia was as smart as she was pretty, and immediately expressed concern when she found out how much of his hunts simply remained on the forest floor to rot. She was quick to start arguments on the matter and Kyle was quick to dump her. In a way, she was just another trophy like all his hunts. She was a pretty thing to decorate his arm with for a while and then toss away.

Kyle sat in his small cabin in the woods this night alone, for he had tossed Lydia away. He watched the fire light make the shadows of his mantled trophies dance on the wall as if it were putting on a puppet show for him. Little had he noticed the car tailing his truck on the way out to the woods. He was already starting to forget about Lydia, but she had not so easily forgotten him. Though the night sky was mostly clear the starlight seemed to dim, and several vanished into the abyss entirely as the darkness of night seemed to amplify and thicken like tar. Lydia hustled through the woods, quickly trying to find the site of all of his most recent kills in various states of decomposition. From each she gathered a single fragment of bone to pocket. And from these small tokens she asked of the souls what they thought on the matter. The souls of dead beasts were wild things indeed- driven mostly by instinct but no longer having a need to survive. If they did not find release in death their hungry ghosts thrashed about wildly, having little direction for their malice. Except for Lydia. She called them to her, and singled out the person responsible for their state. They did not have working bodies to return to though, and their souls were already starting to disperse without a vessel, but Lydia offered a solution to this as well.

She knocked on Kyle's cabin door, surprising him as he answered. He was quick to brush her away, assuming she had come to beg him to take her back. Instead she offered him a single breif window of salvation, saying she would forgive him if he returned his latest trophies to the still present corpses in the forest. The teeth and pelt to the wolf, the pelt to the bear, the tail to the beaver, the head and rack to the deer, and quills to the porcupine. Kyle of course laughed and slammed the door in her face. Throw the trophies away? So his ex will forgive him? Right, not happening. The door did not shut all the way though- Lydia was forcing it back open. He tried to push it back closed but was not prepared, and she seemed a good deal stronger than he would have thought a petite thing like her could be.

Her normally dark ocean blue iris started to give way to glowing baby blue flecks of coloration. There was more than one soul inhabiting her body. The wolf no longer had a form to return to- but Lydia still had her body and invited him to use it. Her nails started to thicken and narrow a bit causing a dull ache as it forced her fingers to restructure slightly. They started to slide out longer at a speed that caused them to bleed slightly, turning into long sharp claws. Normally canine claws are blunted because they wear down on the ground as they walk, but these had grown to full size without making contact with anything to dull them. The sound of perforating leather sounded as the claws from her toes popped out from her shoes as well. Kyle backed up quickly, not knowing what to think. Lydia slowly approached him as her ears pointed and started to migrate up her head slightly on new muscle meant to allow them to pivot. Her hair line started to advance downward on the back, getting less hair like and more fur like the farther it went down her neck, stopping in a broad patch on her upper back. She growled at him and her mouth opened and clenched several times as her face let off several painfully sharp sounding cracks as the bone changed shape within. Each crack accompanied by a slight jerk of her facial features, the end of her nose stretched out, putting the bridge of her nose at a higher and higher angle. Her top and bottom jaw stretching as she continued to make gargled growling sounds, and each sounded deeper and more like an actual beast. Her gums bled heavily and her teeth started to click on the floor below her as she walked toward Kyle- long sharp fangs were growing out very quickly, ripping her human teeth out of the way. Her shoes started to become ill fit as she seemed to lean forward and walk on the fronts of her feet only, and her leg gave off loud pops as her feet extended, raising her ankles off the ground. Her big toe on either foot remained where it had been though, distancing it from the others. Lydia paused only a fraction of a second when she noticed where Kyle was backing up to- his rifle rest upright on an empty easy chair. She roared at him and lunged like a beast, fangs and claws first. As Lydia flew through the air a tail grew in behind her as if trailing off her body from the momentum. Kyle quickly grabbed his gun and fired at her face and her entire body seemed to turn to black vapour and vanish into the air.

Had it been a nightmare? Was he just seeing things? He heard a growl from outside his window only a moment after though and almost would not have seen Lydia if not for the increasingly large patches of her iris that were glowing ghostly blue. Wisps of blue soul fire escaped her mouth when she exhaled, illuminating a few of her features before it vanished into the dark air of this black night. Kyle went over to the front door and quickly shut and locked it, clutching his rifle tightly and then counting the bullets it held even while Lydia whispered to him through the window pane. Did he remember all the deer he slew? Most of which only to steal the crown of the forest prince- except that antlers are shed each year, and with patience he could have taken them without killing at all. It was hard to see in the darkness, but Lydia was quite close to the window so flickers of the fire illuminated her every few moments. She was getting taller, quickly. Her legs were getting much longer- freakishly long and narrow. The joints bony and the muscle sinewy. Her shoes and socks fell away completely as she stepped back and forth a few times trying to help her growing joints re-set with loud pops that almost sounded like two rocks being banged together. The claws on her feet grew even thicker and larger and her feet looked like they were being compressed. Her arms were getting freakishly long too, but her clawed hands remained unchanged. Two bone thorns emerged from her forehead as two drops of blood trailed down either side of her deformed, long face. Her lower jaw already completely caked in drying blood from her fangs growing in. More midriff became exposed as her spine started to get a bit longer, causing her to lean forward because such creatures were not really meant to be upright at all. The thorns in her head grew greatly in size, become spurs and then spikes, then branching finally to take the shape of growing antlers- all the while tearing the skin farther open at their base to keep a slow but steady trickle of blood going. Her arms and legs were now at least double their former length, mostly in the lower portions, and her feet were wildly malformed. The claws had all partially fused together and her compressed digits no longer moved individually, causing her to stand on her fused claws as if it were a hoof- though it really wasn't. Because the claws had only partially fused together, the bottom of her faux hooves were still several sharp points, making it almost like cleated shoes. Her antlers did not even grow in with velvet on them. Lydia paused a moment, letting out several gusts of soul fire from her nostrils as they expanded a bit and her neck cracked and lurched forward, getting a bit longer as she slowly turned to look at Kyle dead-on.

A more rational, calm person probably would have shot her through the window, when she was still distracted with changing. Kyler however clutched his rifle to himself like a child does his teddy bear, and put his back to the locked cabin door. His eyes fixed on the nightmarish abomination outside his window. in the brief lapse of light between the flickering flames of his hearth she vanished completely, without having actually seemed to move at all. He heard her exhale sharply from her large nostrils a moment later and sounded like she was directly beside him, startling him so badly he shot a hole in his roof and stumbled to the floor! He thrashed his legs against the floor to scuttle himself back from the window on the opposite side she had been on only a second before- a window nearly beside the front door. Her face was so close to it the cold of the soul fire caused the glass to haze up when she breathed out. The fur on her neck started to advance all the way around. Several of her teeth started to get longer toward the end of her maw, so her lips could no longer properly sheath them, and especially the very front teeth grew absurdly long- like those of a beaver, but remained fangs ended in rounded points rather than the cutting slates of a proper rodent. Kyle could not see from his angle, but behind her, Lydia's tail broadened and a strip of armored leather flesh formed that was devoid of fur. As if being made of putty, when she moved her fingers the skin seemed to stick between and stretch out- forming a webbing of flesh between them like an aquatic creature. The fur on her neck billowed out almost into a mane and the back started to stand up on its own and bristle. She gave a brief pained cry and leaned forward sharply as nearly a hundred extremely long, thin, razor pointed quills erupted from her backside out of the fur down to her mid-back. The mantle of a porcupine. On her tail they emerged in a perfect line, defining the border between the wolf and beaver tail stips. Because they came out so abruptly, each quill was smeared with the color of rust from a tiny amount of blood drawn from each. The quills on Lydia were so large compared to a normal porcupine that you could see with your plain eyes the serrated points on them- when a porcupine quill goes in it does not come out the same way without tearing the entire section of skin off from around it. Her shirt was tattered on the back from nearly a hundred holes.

Again without looking like she actually moved, Lydia closed her now entirely glowing blue eyes and vanished into the darkness that shrouded her. Kyle glanced nervously between the two windows as he slowly got up off the floor again and loaded a new bullet into the chamber of his rifle. He heard something scraping the back corner on the outside. Her extremely long narrow limbs could reach the roof from the ground, but what was she doing? A few moments of scraping there was a few clunking sounds as she walked on the roof, but her long limbs could reach so far away from one another each clunk seemed to come from a different direction, he could not tell where she actually was up there. He nearly jumped out of his skin again as a heavy knock came at the locked door, rattling the heavy wood with its force.

"Little pig, little pig, let me in..."

She had reached around off the side of the roof to knock on the door- she was still on the roof.

"Or I'll huff, and I'll puff..."

She grabbed the chimney and breathed heavily down it. The fire in the hearth exploded in size and for a moment turned ghost blue, releasing a gout of cold air and freezing cold blue embers across the cabin, causing Kyle to leap back against the rear wall in fear. Her ice blue glowing eyes could see a faint haze through the roof and tracked his movement quietly. She could not see his body without looking in the windows, but she could see his soul through the walls. Lydia had only a percentage of control of her body at this point, having willingly shared it with several others now. All of these lost souls had a singular objective, so there was no need to contest for direction- all Lydia was doing at this point was restraining them. If they had their way, Kyle would already be dead. But what was the fun in that?

Her long narrow arm reached down slowly, carefully predicting the placement of his body since she could not fully see him, and swatted the wall. The thump and reverberation was right against his upper back, causing him to jump away from the wall in surprise. She then reached over to the first window which was on his left now as he stood in the middle of the room and winced at the sound of her claw points dragging up the glass of the window, leaving lines cut in its surface. Even as she dragged it across he seen the palms of her hands puff up and darken looking bruised purple. The structure of her hands widened and the entire hand and claws all grew bigger, stretching the surface skin out making the muscle sinew below more visible from the surface as it moved. Giant hands- bear paws. The fur advanced around her torso slightly, though thinned at its edges and her torso itself gave several pained creaks as the bones no longer fit together properly. She arched her back and took a very deep breath and her entire rib cage popped in rapid fire, expanding to nearly twice its size and her upper arms swelled with muscle, pulling the skin unnaturally tight on the surface. Already ruptured in several places, her shirt exploded off of her tearing off from the back first. She opened her mouth to the sky and the darkness swelled around her, swallowing more stars into the matte black sky, darkening the land still more till all was an abyss even to those whose eyes adjusted to shadows. Her jaws cracked and popped and she let out a deep roar as her muzzle grew wider and all of her fangs grew even longer, causing them to shift a bit and lock between one another when she closed her mouth... as much as it could still be closed.

The light of the fire did not leave the windows- outside of the cabin was nothing but absolute black. The flames started to thrash and flicker, as if there was a strong wind blowing it even though there was nothing. The fire started to struggle against the encroaching dark. Kyle slowly turned around at the sound of creaking by the cabin door. The hinges were starting to twist from something pushing tremendously hard on it. He took a few steps back and leveled his rifle at it. He could only hear his heart beat and the creak of the door- there was absolutely no other sound present, even the fire was silent. Suddenly the hinges on the door exploded in half and the door flew across the room, almost smacking Kyle in the arm as it flew past. He shot at the doorway the moment it blew open, and had to look down at the gun to see if it had fired correctly. It made no sound. The door slamming into the opposite wall made no sound. He looked at the doorway to see what he shot but there was nothing there, only darkness. The darkness started to bloat into the room, like an extremely viscous fluid, it was slowly rolling into the room. The window near the door cracked and burst open, again letting the darkness ooze in, but making absolutely no sound. Turning to see it though, and because everything was silenced, he completely missed the window behind him exploding open only a moment after, but it was Lydia who came through this opening. She grabbed his leg and yanked his entire body off the ground like he was a toy. He shouted in fear but his breath escaped while making no sound. His heart and her breath was the only sound that remained. He tried to load a bullet in the chamber of his rifle while she held him but she grabbed his hand with her still empty hand. She increased her grip, digging her claws into his arm, which was so small in comparison they went all the way through, grinding past the bones in his arm and forcing the gun to drop. The tar-like darkness seething into the cabin was starting to consume the entire room. The fire was nothing more than wisps off of glowing embers, completely smothered. The congealed darkness was made of the old, black blood of his past hunts. Animals dead too long to even have bodies to tether to anymore, so far gone that even their souls have lost their shape. The room became consumed by them as Lydia brought Kyle to her face to grin at him with a thousand sharp fangs.

Her voice more of a deep growl than words. "Don't worry, I only want one thing from you."

"W-what?" His voice had no sound, but she still seemed to hear him.

"A trophy for my mantle. You are prey to me."

She slammed a huge hand onto his head buckling his neck and grabbing him, raking the tips of her claws along his neck as she twisted while applying pressure, grinding his vertebrae together, twisting the nerves taught before she abruptly yanking up and ripping his head completely off. Because she did not cut it off, she yanked some length of tendons and veins along with it before biting them to sever it properly. For Kyle everything ended painfully and he waited to fade to oblivion. But did not. The memory of the pain of his death remained forever fresh, but his mind lingered after his body fell. He seen nothing, he heard nothing, but still he remained. Lydia stole his head as a trophy, keeping part of him preserved, tethering his soul. He could not pass on as long as his head was kept as a trophy for her hunt. Now, the hunt had ended.