The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

A Walk in the Park
by Mary Ann Peden-Coviello

It’s time. I’ve felt the moon’s pull for hours now and can resist no longer. His breathing deep and slow—his sleep enhanced by the addition to his nightcap of a subtle tincture of herbs, the recipe handed down through 100 generations of my mothers and their mothers. I press my face into his throat and inhale his lovely, warm, male scent.

Then I leave. Out of the bedroom, out of the house. Into the welcoming, velvet night. Moonlight dances on my naked skin. I throw back my head and howl. When the shift begins, I drop to my hands and knees and give myself over to the near-orgasmic agony of transformation.

I rise a shaggy, blonde wolf, senses alert. The small lives around me—rodents, deer, stray dogs—all go silent, hoping to avoid my notice. But I know where they are. I hear their fluttering hearts. Smell their fear-drenched deliciousness. First, though, I must run. And I do.

I race through the park near the den where my human half lives, down the riding trail, through the wooded glens. I leave scat in the sandboxes at the playground and roll in the grass.

And then I hunt. I chase down a young doe, prime and sleek. Filled with fierce joy, I run alongside her, terror streaming from her nostrils like smoke. I take her down in a slashing attack of fang and claw, the rich, hot blood flowing.

The dawn approaches, and the loss of the moon is an ache in my soul.

I shower, return to our bed. He stirs and pulls me close. We curl around each other in a warm haze of early morning lust.

What he doesn’t know won’t kill him.

For now.

Fiction © Copyright Mary Ann Peden-Coviello
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Mary Ann Peden-Coviello:

Fright Mare-Women Write Horror
Short Story: One Hour Before the Dark

Women write horror and have written it since before Mary Shelley wrote FRANKENSTEIN. This anthology is to highlight the fact women write great horror and to kill the fallacy that they aren’t in some way up to standard. They are. Read here stories by Elizabeth Massie, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Lucy Taylor, and a plethora of other great writers as they work on your nerves, get inside your head, and bang out some of the scariest tales written today. I’m proud to present these women for your consideration, as Rod Serling might say, as I ask you to step into FRIGHT MARE. Lock the door and windows, put on a light, and remember, it’s not real. It’s not real. Midnight awaits, monsters scheme to take you away, the strange and weird wait in the shadows, but it’s not real. Is it?

Edited by Billie Sue Mosiman, the author who brought you the SINISTER-TALES OF DREAD collections and her latest suspense novel, THE GREY MATTER.

Available on Amazon!