Preface: Greetings, all! What follows is the multi-chapter sequel to “The Wildcat’s Sister.” the first of my modern-setting series of mostly standalone tales. The primary monstergirls are a manticore, a hellhound, and a demon. This story features very little lewdness, so savor the fluff and feels!
And, to conclude with a standard disclaimer: The monster girls featured in this tale, and many elements of the setting, are based off of the works of Kenkou Cross, and as such this work is intended to be a tribute to his creativity. The characters, however, are my own. Pray neither sue nor steal; I have very little to take, but I love that which is mine.
Art credit is due to Sunelili, who can be found here!
The Wildcat’s Rival
The sun was setting, and Jake Carroll was in the den of a manticore.
Actually, he was in the bedroom of the manticore, sprawled back perpendicularly across her blankets, distracted from the notes he had been reading by his girlfriend’s slightly-off-key humming, her barbed tail swaying with the tune as she focused her attention on copying a passage into her notebook. Valerie Hall was almost completely absorbed by her studies, unconscious of Jake’s gaze on her as she let herself bob along with the music playing in her head, her blue eyes scanning over the page in front of her as the pen she held, specially made for her thickly-padded paws, scratched down the sections he had highlighted for her earlier in the day. Despite being immersed in preparing for a rapidly-approaching test in her least favorite subject, Valerie was the portrait of contentment, and Jake let that feeling wash over him in turn, enjoying this quiet moment alone with her. They had found precious few such moments in the month since they had started dating; life seemed to have conspired to keep them both busy with familial and academic responsibilities, and thus every second they got alone was precious.
Jake let his eyes close as he flopped back into his girlfriend’s bed. Her mattress was softer than his, and her blankets were soft and pillowy and smelled like her, clean and sweet. Valerie’s room was decorated in soft pastel hues that felt relaxing, and the fan lazily rotating on the ceiling above kept the room just cool enough to make him want to tug the blankets over him and drift into a languid doze. The temptation was so strong that he let the papers he had been reading flop down beside him; the Biology notes were only vestigially important to him as a way of helping Valerie review, since this was content he had down pat.
His eyes snapped open as he felt Valerie crawl onto the bed beside him, prowling across the bed like a lioness until she settled into the right angle made by his arm and torso, nuzzling into his shoulder as she sighed in frustrated surrender. “I swear, none of this stuff makes any sense. Translation and transcription and RNA and DNA and mRNA and… bleh.” She burrowed her face into the the soft spot next to his armpit, growling out her frustration. “They could at least make the names sound different.”
He laughed at that, reaching up to stroke the long blonde hair, streaked with black, that she had loosed from its usual ponytail. She paused as she felt his hand caressing her hair, and then snuggled into his side even more fiercely, one of her clawed hands falling across his chest as her wing draped over his stomach like an extra-warm sheet. Her leg hooked and tugged his into place as she made a pillow of his entire body, and he could feel the tension seeping out of her as she breathed in the scent of his skin. “It’s not that bad,” he tried to explain. “Just think of it like this: they’re kind of the same but they do-”
A shrill beeping cut off his words, and with her free hand, Valerie flailed for her phone. Mashing the screen, she silenced the alarm, before aggressively settling back into the cuddle. Clearing his throat, Jake tried to go on. “So, DNA makes-”
Valerie’s face emerged from his chest to glower up at him. “The hour is up. No more studying.”
“Yeah, but your test is…” Jake started, and then laughed when he saw his girlfriend’s face puffed up in discontent. “Fine, fine, snuggle time for a half hour,” he relented, and with a victorious grin Valerie dived back into her burrowing, grinding her face against his skin until she was perfectly comfortable. His smile at her indolent luxuriousness was only slightly strained by the sudden appearance of the bulb of her tail, which curled up to rest just above his head, the opening at the end slightly open as if it were watching him. He had learned to be slightly wary of that appendage after he had been lightly scratched by it a week ago, but he never objected to Valerie removing its knit hood when they were alone together in her room or his. Still, the aphrodisiac-filled spines did make him more than a little nervous after said scratch had given him an awkward hour-long erection, which tragically had been while they were eating with his parents at a local Chinese buffet.
Jake let himself relax once more, smelling the perfume of Val’s shampoo, the warmth of her body, the way she clutched to him tightly. Before he had started dating Valerie, he had never experienced anything like this in his seventeen years, had never even had a different girlfriend before, and so this intimacy was addictive – he wanted to have this all the time, and that itch raged to life especially when they were forced to be separate. Those times apart made hours like this all the more important – it made them want to devour every moment they had, since they had so few. Life at school was particularly troublesome: Jake had recently made a new friend among the other juniors, a somewhat-odd boy who had transferred into their school from a homeschooling situation, and showing the newcomer around had occupied Jake a little – though Gabe had several female friends among the students that also made demands for his time, so it wasn’t that much of a burden. Valerie, meanwhile, had recently joined the art club, and had spent a lot of time after school working on projects for them, cutting out a lot of potential opportunities for dates. And so, times like these were rare and precious, and he drank in the sensation of her hair slipping under his fingertips, her slow breath gusting over his skin, the way her legs squeezed his between them.
His eyes widened as he felt the kneading caress of her hand on his chest intensify, her claws pricking his skin through the fabric. It seemed that he wasn’t the only one musing on the need to make the most of this chance. Jake shuddered as he felt her lips press against him through his shirt, and her head turned to let her azure eyes stare at him, her glasses gleaming in the dim light of the bedroom. “H-hey…” he gasped, one of her kisses finding a particularly sensitive spot as she nipped at him insistently, and he could see the gleeful mischief in her gaze as she waited for him to try to stop her. Jake leaned up, but she shifted her weight to keep pressing him down, sliding atop his body and using her paws to pin his arms down. He blushed as he realized that, as he stared down at her, his view inevitably passed the tuft of fur at her chest to slide down the shadowed valley that the neck of her shirt revealed. She looked up at him, and the toothy grin she wore proved that she had noticed his gaze – as did the way she pulled her hand back to tug on the bottom of the shirt’s neck, offering him a clearer view of her softly-curving cleavage.
Valerie Hall was sweet, and kind, and smart. She was the kind of girl that struggled to stand out among her peers, and that had meant that she had struggled with self-consciousness in the shadows of her locally-famous athletic sister, Patty Hall. She was the best person Jake knew, and most of the time he found her absolutely adorable. But she was a manticore – fangs and claws and spines and an instinctual need to tease and torment – and he was her very own toy, and she would never let him forget it. With him, Valerie could be whoever she wanted to be, and right now… she wanted to be a seductress.
Jake’s eyes widened as, having pinned him to the bed, she finished mounting his waist, sitting back on his lap and pressing down a bit, just enough to send his imagination spiraling out of control. One of her paws raked lightly down his chest as she leaned forward, her tail waving to and fro above her shoulders like a hypnotizing serpent. “Hey,” she purred, eyes gleaming as her smile bared her fangs, “let’s make up for lost time, hmm?” Her face drew ever closer, and he could only stare up at her in wonder and helpless failing restraint. “We haven’t gotten to make out in days…” Her mouth was achingly close now, and he didn’t know what he wanted to look at more, the hunger in her eyes or the softness of those lips, the pink tip of a tongue moistening them. “Let’s just keep going until we feel like-”
“VALERIE!” came a bass bellow from below, shoving through the house’s walls and the door of the bedroom as Jake and Val stared in shock at each other. “IT’S GETTING LATE! JAKE SHOULD PROBABLY-” The rest of the sentence trailed off, and a muffled second voice added commentary to the first, no doubt Valerie’s mom scolding her father for his tactless hollering through the home.
“DAD!” Valerie replied, just as deafeningly, albeit with considerably more plaintive reproach and surly fuming, “IT’S JUST-” She smacked her phone, and winced as the screen displayed the time, showing it to be later than she had thought. “IT’S STILL EARLY!” she amended, carrying on the conversation while she still sat atop Jake’s lap.
“IT’S GETTING DARK, HONEY, AND HE’S ON A FOUR-WHEELER!” replied her father, who had October’s dwindling supply of daylight on his side.
Valerie looked to Jake with a petulant pout, and he shrugged up at her, fighting to choke back his own desire for what they had been about to indulge in. He almost regretted the time they had spent hours earlier cuddling and just talking; if they had been more judicious with their time then, then they would have had longer for these pleasures, too. “Sorry,” he offered lamely, wishing his car wasn’t trapped in the shop with a leaking radiator. Valerie shared a regretful stare with him, her hands snared in his shirt, before she reluctantly waved the white flag.
“FINE!” she shouted, a tad wrathfully, “WE’LL BE DOWN IN A MINUTE!” She let her shoulders slump, and turned her gaze onto Jake, her tone miserable. “We never get enough time…”
“I know,” he consoled her, and reached up to cup her cheek, pulling her closer. He leaned up into the kiss, which was not over quickly at all, a spitefully-greedy tangle of tongues and wandering, clutching hands. Still, disappointment tainted the kiss, and when Valerie pulled away Jake could see she was still sulking. “Hey,” he bargained, trying to think of a way to cheer her up. “This weekend is the Fall Festival – want to come out with me and hang out Friday night?” He had been planning to ask her since last week, eagerly anticipating the chance for some quality time even as they enjoyed the faire, and this opportunity felt tailor-made for the question.
“Yes!” she said, eyes widening, but just as quickly as the delight blossomed, it withered away. “Ohhh… no, I can’t.” She sat back on him, slumping even further, her wings practically horizontal from dismay and her tail bent like a wilted dandelion. “I promised the girls in the Art Club I would help with their fundraiser… they’re painting faces that evening, and I’m pretty good at it, and I owe them a favor.” She looked around, trying to think of a way to escape that obligation, but none presented itself quickly. “Maybe… ugh.”
“Well, hey…” Jake thought, hoping his brain would offer up a solution before he ran out of words. “Maybe we, ah… I um… how about I just go, too, and if you get a break or something…”
“I don’t want you to get bored waiting on me,” Valerie answered, reaching up to caress his cheek. “You could be there for hours and hours…”
“It’s a faire!” he replied, offering her a brilliant grin. Her own expression softened at that optimism, and he rubbed her back in small circles. “I’ll be fine. David’s going to be there, too, working some booth or other… I think Gabe is going with the girls… I’ll find a way to stay occupied.” In the face of his smile, she couldn’t keep up her moping, and her eagerness for the chance to spend even a little more time with him began to shine through. “We’ll steal enough time to walk around a bit, maybe hit some rides if you want…”
“That sounds like fun,” she purred, and her hips rocked a little, reminding him where her priorities were going to be right now. “We’ll just have all the fun we can in whatever time we get,” she promised, and he nodded, not able to keep the desire from his own expression.
“HONEY!” came the reminder from below, and immediately Valerie’s shoulders sank again as her growl showed her fangs.
“I swear, someone’s going to be finding holes in his favorite shirts for the next while,” grumbled the daughter in charge of folding laundry. With a final sigh of resignation, she climbed off Jake – and he was almost glad, because if she had stayed on there for much longer, it would have been considerably harder for him to walk past her parents without having to cover his swelling signs of what they had been doing.
“Is that what I get to look forward to when I tick you off? You know, in the future, if we get married,” Jake asked teasingly, climbing up from the bed and retrieving his notes, placing them over on her desk for her to use later. He didn’t see the sloppy smile that grew on her face at the idea contained in his last words, as she quickly recovered.
Valerie placed her paws on her hips, cocking them at an angle. “First,” she informed him, smiling despite the faux-sternness of her tone, “you are going to know better than to tick me off like that, I’m sure.” Jake chuckled, less certain than her of his own capabilities. “Second…” She stalked forward, letting those hips sway, and looked up at him as she nibbled on her lower lip. “It’ll be less ‘holes’ in your shirts you need to worry about… and more me tearing them off.”
If his domestic tease had excited her, then her seductive declaration sent a live jolt through his body, and left his blood once again confused about where it needed to be at the moment. When she reached him, one clawed hand touching his chest possessively as if to experiment with that threat right away, Jake stole the initiative, sliding his hand to the back of her neck to pull her into a kiss, long and passionate enough to make her softly mewl, to make him press against her soft body. Finally they broke away with a gasp, and stared at each other with wide eyes. “I think your dad will come up here if he has to shout again,” Jake declared, and she nodded, but… it took two more kisses before they made their way out of the room and down the stairs.
As Jake stepped into the hall abutting the main living room, he let his eyes pass over the eclectic decorations lining the dated dark wood paneling. In general, it felt like many of the older homes in the area that he had visited, though there were a few differences that stood out to him. One was the quiet segregation that split the entryway: on one side, there was a wooden crucifix and a bunch of fading photographs along with a dust-covered plastic fish on a faux-wooden plaque, while on the other was an small, ornate black metal silhouette of seven female figures, each marked with a different insignia, and a plethora of photos of winged women, usually with a man or several young manticores. Jake knew that this sort of quiet separation wasn’t uncommon in families of men and monsters, as monsters kept a quiet pride in their own culture and faith, but put no pressure on their mates to convert.
Another difference was the multitude of trophies and ribbons displayed triumphantly in every corner of the room, along with photos of a manticore with long, flowing blonde hair, typically in a basketball jersey. Patty Hall, Valerie’s sister, had been a star on the court, the sort of player that teachers and coaches would talk about for a decade to come. Jake had seen her, but had never had the audacity to speak to her – not even after he had started dating Valerie, and even after it had been revealed that she was dating his own brother, Josh, at the college they both attended. Among the army of Patty’s commendations were some scattered awards and pictures of Valerie, but it was clear that at least one of her parents felt less comfortable saluting her kind of victories.
Finally, there was the presence of the man sitting in the weathered recliner in the middle of the living room. Hugh Hall was a lean, hard man, with deepset eyes and a tendency to wear shirts that showed his still-impressive arms. Those bared arms – and much of his exposed skin – showed scars, both small and significant, that had come from a life of too-hard work. It may have been just that lifestyle that left him antsy now, since he had been let go from his job with McConnell Mining just a few months ago, and was struggling to find a job that offered anything near that level of money to replace it with. In the meantime, he’d been doing odd jobs and repair work, which had surprisingly worked out well for the other Carroll brother. Josh was fond of working elbow-deep in old cars, and so on the few occasions he had come in from college, he and Mr. Hall had bonded by working together on a few of the rusty heaps in the yard, and they seemed to have been cut of the same cloth, communicating through grunts and terse sentence fragments yet efficiently accomplishing their work. Jake wished he had been able to find something like that to impress Valerie’s dad with… he got the feeling he wasn’t the favorite between the boys dating Hugh’s daughters.
“Sorry, honey,” Mr. Hall drawled, but his smile petered out before it reached his eyes. “You know how people drive on our road at night.”
Valerie’s smile was just as authentic as his. “Of course, dad. I mean, he does have headlights on his four-wheeler-”
Hugh laughed, without losing his authoritative smirk. “If you had it your way, you’d keep him here until midnight, and on a school night too.”
“Well, then he would simply have to just stay the night,” purred another member of the Hall household as she walked into the living room. Leslie Hall was dressed in her casual homewear, but she still was a striking figure, with a figure fit for a woman a decade and a half younger and the effortless leonine grace of a born huntress. She wore her hair, black-streaked blonde, cut shorter than her daughters’, and it framed a face that was only slightly softened by age. She sat on the arm of the chair Hugh was in, crossing her legs, and smiled at Jake as if she knew things that he’d really rather she didn’t. “And wouldn’t that be a shame.”
Hugh glanced up at his wife with a scowl, and she reached over to muss his hair with her paw. This did nothing to erase his glum expression, and Jake knew this would probably lead to a conversation between the two later, but the Hall matron was undeterred. “Go on, go say your goodbyes outside,” she prompted Valerie and Jake, “I’ll keep your father occupied so he doesn’t scold you out the windows.” This made Hugh’s frown worse, but his eyes widened slightly as his wife’s tail settled lazily on his shoulder.
“Come on,” Valerie said, looking back over her shoulder to stick her tongue out at her sulking father. Jake let her take his hand and lead him away from her parents, but he paused to wave back to Hugh and Leslie.
“Thanks for letting me come over,” he said cheerfully, still hoping to leave a good impression.
“Anytime, dear,” Leslie said warmly, the bulb of her tail nuzzling her husband with jovial menace. In response, the man nodded in silent assent with a rictus grin, though Jake noticed the way he tightly gripped the armrest that his wife wasn’t seated upon.
Another detail caught Jake’s eyes as they walked down the hall on their way to the porch, and he paused to glance more closely. Near the door, on the manticore side of the passage, was a picture board studded with photos of Valerie’s family. He saw photos of her aunts and their daughters, an older manticore that must have been their grandmother (or eldest aunt – monsters aged so slowly!), and a swath of photos from Patty’s basketball career, including some recent ones from South-East Kentucky State and an older one of her swooping into a dunk. There was a gap, though, in-between a picture of Patty’s induction into her sorority and an old photo of Leslie and Hugh at a bar with a group of their friends. “Hey, Val, the picture we took up at Powell Summit…” Jake said, confusion tingeing his voice. It had been a picture from their first date, when he had taken her on a ride up to the peak of a local mountain with an incredible view, bringing with them a picnic basket and some blankets – and the only picture the two of them had on the board.
“Oh!” The manticore started, and she turned to face him with a hint of embarrassment. “Sorry, I, ah… ripped it by mistake, when I was trying to find a better place for it, and Mom is having a copy printed off for me.” Her grin struck him as a bit forced, but he shrugged it off, following her out onto the porch and closing the door behind him.
Out next to the humming porch light, which was being constantly bombarded by the last few bugs of fall in their repetitive elliptical launches and crashes, Jake and Val paused to say their goodbyes. Safe from the prying eyes of her parents, Valerie whirled to press herself against her boyfriend’s chest, and he wrapped his arms around her, nuzzling against the top of her head. They stayed like that for a minute that they stretched as thin as a second, until Jake kissed her forehead gently, and she tilted her head for one last passionate, mournful kiss. Nowadays, each time they had to separate, it felt like this – but that didn’t make each single time any less difficult, only piled injustice upon injustice of them deserving more time, more of the one they loved.
Soon after, Jake’s four-wheeler roared out of the Halls’ driveway, as Val stood on the porch and waved until his taillights were lost in the tangle of trees down the road, until even the sound of his engine disappeared into silence and the ringing sounds of the crickets, and – already missing him – Valerie turned and entered her house once more, closing the door behind her with one last glance of regret.
******
Privacy is best found in a crowd, and there are few places that prove this better than a school lunchroom. Amid the tumultuous cacophony of voices and movement, the clatter of cheap silverware on plastic trays and shouted greetings or taunts between tables, each cluster of students can find a brief refuge from the expectations of classroom decorum, a chance to drop the mask they wear in front of teachers and strangers and instead show the selves they become around their friends. Aside from a few grousing teachers more interested in their food – brought from home, almost invariably – than monitoring their charges, no one bothers to look far from their own circle of comrades, content in a bubble of conversation as they scarf down the more identifiable portions of their meals.
Not all respect this privacy, however. Gossips let their eyes dart to their prey, raising hackles from across the room as their gazes are caught by their victims. Rivals glare daggers across intervening spaces, confident in the safety of the company of their peers. And other eyes stare lovelorn across the interminable air, craving yet unable to reach out and touch the object of their forlorn desire.
One such gaze had fallen onto Jake Carroll, though he was utterly oblivious to its crimson intensity. His survival instincts should have warned him of the hungering gaze locked onto him, but he was distracted by the japes of his hulking best friend, and by the presence of the manticore at his side. The distant burning eyes did their best to avoid Valerie, ashamed by the swell of envy she engendered, but it was hard to miss how she leaned against Jake, or her tail curled around his waist, or the broad grin that he turned her way. If only that smile could be focused on– !
“Mattie, you listening?”
Mattie Ann Collins, lovesick hellhound and point guard of the Shallow Creek Panthers, blinked as the voice drew her back to her own table. “Uh, no, not really,” she confessed bluntly, looking at the girl who had spoken with a chagrined frown. Internally, she kicked herself for transparently moping over Jake while at her lunch table, praying that her teammates hadn’t noticed her pining, or had taken it for merely being lost in thought – despite the tail slowly wagging behind her seat..
The sly grin that passed between the werecat who had spoken and the minotaur beside her quickly disillusioned Mattie of that hope. Unfazed by her teammate’s characteristically-candid reply, Nikki Bombay leaned toward Mattie, hoping to fully arrest the hellhound’s love-addled attention. “I saaaid,” she drawled, her feline green eyes locking onto Mattie, “are you going to the Fall Festival this weekend?”
“Oh.” Mattie blinked, then nodded. “Yeah, Friday night. Mom and Dad are going to have a date night there, so Mom asked me to take Gabbie so she could ride the rides with some of her friends. I won’t have to watch her, though – she’ll be going around with them and their parents.” Internally, Mattie was very grateful for that; her hellpup sister could be a handful on her best days, and she would be physically unstoppable after getting hyped up on faire food. “What about you all?” She turned her gaze to all the other girls at the table, bringing her other teammates into the conversation.
“Not my kind of scene,” replied one girl before noisily sipping from the large water bottle she had perched precariously at the edge of the table in lieu of a tray. Red-haired and chestnut-skinned, the dryad Aisha Redmond had only recently joined the basketball team as a sophomore, and her reserved, taciturn nature had meant she had few friends at school. Still, Mattie and the other girls had welcomed her readily to the team, and soon enough she had started to join them at their lunch table, a part of the group despite the rarity of her conversational contributions.
“Oh, I’ll definitely go. I love faire rides and faire food and all the excitement and noise and there’s going to be a concert and I think it’ll be a good one because I’ve heard of some of the bands before, even the local ones, and plus I’ve really been in the mood for some cotton candy, y’know?” Allie Thomas replied, her words rolling over each other in a verbal tidal wave. The mouse girl was in the midst of pulling the cheese off of the slice of pizza she had nabbed from the plate belonging to the girl next to her, and once it had been successfully stripped away, she raised it above her head and lowered it into her mouth, her grayish-brown hair falling away from her face and exposing her wide, dark eyes.
Ignoring her friend’s moans of epicurean delight as the cheese descended into her gullet, Morgan Saddler picked up the remnants of her slice of pizza and took a large bite before adding her own reply. “Don’t have anything else to do, so probably.” The bay-coated centaur made short work of her pizza, then reached over to the mouse girl’s plate to claim another similarly cheese-and-sauceless crust in a practiced act of lunchtime symbiosis.
The remaining pair of girls shared a glance before nodding. “We don’t have any other plans, so yeah,” Angie Madison rumbled, and beside her Nikki nodded. This was typical for the pair; the minotaur and werecat had grown up together, since their parents were business partners in running the local tractor supply store. Both girls had dark hair, though Angie’s was streaked with white; otherwise, on first appraisal they had little in common. Nikki was lean and graceful with a biting sense of humor, while Angie was stocky and even-tempered. Despite this, the pair had been all but inseparable since kindergarten, together during and outside of school, and even on the basketball court they seemed to almost read each other’s minds.
“Well, maybe we can meet up and hang out,” Mattie suggested, trying to force her mind away from its dogged obsession as she wondered if Jake would also be there – or if he would be going with the manticore. That thought inevitably soured her mood, and she glanced back over to his table, seeing that, for some reason, the manticore had stood up and wandered over to speak to a different group, leaving the aim of Mattie’s ardour sitting alone for the moment. He still wore the smile she remembered him best for, the same one he had worn the day-
“Probably have to count me out,” began Allie, launching into another lexical spray. “My older sister Mel is going but she’ll be with her friends so I’ll have to keep an eye on my younger sisters because of that and they can be a handful like the time two of them snuck behind a snow cone stand and got the tubes of flavor stuff and just chugged them and their teeth were bright colors for a week.”
“I promised Dad I’d spend some time with him,” Morgan sighed, “and he’ll want to hang around the tractor pull and all the agricultural contests.”
“Maybe for a while,” Nikki said, and an uncharacteristic blush crept into her cheeks. “But we’ll have to, ah, keep an eye out for when the FFA people running the haunted house go on break…” Beside her, Angie also sported colored cheeks, her eyes oddly aimed in the direction of Jake’s table.
Mattie glanced at the pair as Morgan and Allie began to whistle and nudge each other. “Oooooohhhh,” cried the mouse girl, while Aisha smirked beside her, “someboy’s going to have a busy, busy night!” Meanwhile, Mattie looked around the table, utterly lost as to what was happening.
“Quiet,” hissed Nikki, her whole face turning red. “He’ll hear you!” Her black tail waved twitchingly behind her chair, a clear sign of her agitation.
“What’s he going to hear, hmm?” Morgan teased with a grin, her equine hooves stamping slightly from her mischievous energy. “That you two plan on enjoying a secret faire ride of your own? Up and down and-”
“Hey!” rumbled Angie, her eyes widening.
“What are you guys talking about?” Mattie asked, looking around at her friends as they jeered at Angie and Nikki.
The three tormentors sighed, while Angie and Nikki refused to meet their captain’s inquisitive gaze, their cheeks still glowing crimson. Mattie looked around the table with wide eyes, searching for a hint as to what her teammates were being teased about. “Did I miss something again?” Mattie insisted.
“Like a month ago,” yawned Aisha, stretching her arms like branches.
“And then two weeks afterwards…” Morgan snorted, rolling her eyes.
“Hey – enough’s enough, okay?” Angie said, looking away with a florid blush.
Mattie slumped in her seat. She knew that she wasn’t always the best at picking up things that were going on with her friends, but this felt particularly shameful. Of her teammates, she was the closest to Angie and Nikki, and while she had noticed some tension between them, she had thought it had more to do with the stress of their basketball season than anything personal.
“Hey, it’s okay, Mattie,” Nikki jumped in, reaching out to rest her paw on the hellhound’s hand. “You had a lot going on yourself.” Despite herself, Mattie found herself nodding at that statement – that had been when Jake had first started going out with Valerie, and then the Homecoming Dance where Mattie had managed to get one dance with him. Still, her own turmoils weren’t enough to assuage her guilt. “And things worked out, anyways.” At that, the werecat shot a blushing glance over to Angie, who offered her a reassuring nod.
“Yeah, captain, we didn’t try to broadcast it,” Angie said, placing a comforting hand on Mattie’s shoulder over Nikki as the hellhound slumped in her chair, her ears and tail sagging. “And anyways…” The minotaur shot Mattie a broad grin, “Your obliviousness is one of your cuter qualities, you know?”
Mattie shot a plaintive glance to her friend as her grey cheeks darkened to the hue of charcoal. “C-cute? I’m… oblivious? Wait…” All around the table, the other basketball players laughed at the hellhound’s distress. Frowning, Mattie forced her mind to return to the matter at hand. “So… you are both dating the same guy? And that… works?”
Angie and Nikki shot a glance at each other, eyebrows raising and smiles growing. “You could say that,” Nikki offered slyly, while Angie coughed and looked away. “We’ve not had reasons to complain yet.”
“But isn’t it… illegal?” Mattie asked, her crimson eyes blinking. She fought to keep from glancing to the other table, to let her mind wander onto her own troubles – she had ignored her friends’ trials enough, and they deserved her attention now.
“Well, we aren’t exactly married, y’know?” Angie mumbled. “Got a ways to go before we have to worry about all that…”
“It’ll work out in the end,” proclaimed Nikki, leaning against the bigger minotaur. “We have plans, sort of. His family has a big farm, and it’ll take a lot of work to run it, so…” Her thumb jerked to and fro to indicate herself and her partner in crime.
“Oh…” Mattie said, staring at them in silent awe, her mouth slightly agape.
“But the real question is,” Morgan leaned back into the conversation, grinning. “Have you made it, you know… official?” The centaur’s question caused brilliant blushes to erupt on the cheeks of the two at the center of attention.
“I don’t think…” Nikki began, but noticed that all of the other girls aside from Angie – even Mattie! – were staring at her expectantly. She coughed on her words, and, cheeks aflame, looked away from all the piercing gazes. “Not, y’know, official official, but…” Beside her, Angie diligently studied the ceiling. “…got pretty close…”
Three of the girls around the table immediately took that as permission to begin clapping and cheering for the mortified duo, while Mattie looked them over with new eyes. So, under her nose, her two best friends had found a mate. She wished she didn’t feel envy for them – not that they had found someone, because she had known the pair were both interested in David from years ago (not that she could have foreseen it going this far or in this direction), but that they were able to be with the one they had chosen. The bell rang, shocking Mattie out of her thoughts. Despite her valiant fight to escape his gravity, her blazing eyes drifted back over to where Jake was standing from his table, tray in hand – and girlfriend at his side. Mattie sighed once more, reaching forward to listlessly take up her own tray as the lunchroom began to stir and scrape into motion, the other girls on the team needling Nikki and Angie for more details.
Trailing behind the others, Mattie forced herself to wear a smile as she followed the procession towards the washroom, dumping her trash and sliding her plates and silverware down the proper chutes, her ears folding and nose crinkling at the cacophonic, malodorous room. Still, as she waited in line to place her tray atop the stack, the object of her ardour walked past, and she shifted over just a half-step, enough to brush against him in passing, and for an instant his smell filled her nose-
“Mattie?” The voice was prim, official – and worryingly familiar. The hellhound swallowed as she dropped off her tray, and trotted towards the source of the call, hoping the woman hadn’t seen what had just happened, had been just as unaware as Jake himself.
The woman standing near the entrance to the washroom wasn’t known for letting much slip past her. She was the school’s secretary, a role that carried less of the prestige of other administration officials but as many responsibilities, and she ruled all in her domain with an iron fist – including the vice principal, her husband. She was a consummate professional, and dressed the part in a starched suit with a skirt that revealed much of her long, grey-skinned legs. Her top was also unbuttoned a bit more than was likely wise, revealing enough dun cleavage to be the reason certain boys fought for the chance to be sent to the office just so they could await their fates in the room outside with her. Still, for all her undeniable sultry appeal, it was the sharp edge in her blazing eyes that truly kept the school in line… including her daughter.
Mattie smiled at Kyra Collins as she came to a stop in front of her. “Yeah, mom?”
Kyra eyed her daughter for a long moment before letting a slight smile curve her lips. “Have you seen your father? We’ve had another incident in the boy’s locker room again – yes, the Boxer Bandit, even after she got ISS last month – and we need him to track her down before she stows her loot to sell later.”
Mattie shook her head. “No, he’s not been at lunch today; I don’t think he has duty on Thursdays.”
Kyra nodded, but her eyes narrowed as she examined her daughter. Those burning orbs darted to the side to watch one of the last students trail out of the washroom, before locking back in on Mattie. “You know…” Her head tilted slightly to the side. “Jake Carroll has a girlfriend now.”
Mattie fought to keep her reaction neutral. She failed. “Y-yeah, Valerie… I, ah, had heard-”
“Mattie,” Kyra said, her voice taking on a hint of maternal warmth reinforced with parental sternness, “he’s off-limits. You know the rules. Stealing mates is unnatural.”
“But, I don’t think they’ve… committed.” Mattie glanced up to see her mother’s raised eyebrow; Kyra was drastically unconvinced. “Plus, there are girls who… share…” She mumbled, now not meeting her mother’s eyes, instead looking down at her feet, her claw tracing the edge of one of the lunchroom’s worn tiles.
“I had figured this conversation was coming when your friends starting dating David,” Kyra sighed, leaving Mattie even more frustrated that she had learned so late. “Look, puppy… those two girls have been together since childhood, and made a deal between themselves.” Her hand reached out to touch her daughter’s face, and she offered a warm smile when Mattie grudgingly met her gaze. “But you and the Hall girl aren’t even friends, and she has no reason to agree to something like that. And those who do manage to make something like that work… it takes a lot of effort and understanding, and I don’t know if you are there just yet. Maybe you will find a different guy who-”
At Shallow Creek High, Mattie Anne Collins had an undeserved reputation. She was a hellhound, and people had ironclad opinions of what that meant: sex appeal, chaos, and a bad attitude. And so, people who barely knew her thought that was who Mattie would be: a man-eater. Mattie knew she was attractive, but she had also felt like a disappointment to her mom at times – too meek, too dutiful, too obedient. She was a good daughter, a good student, but a bad hellhound. It was something that bothered her – had made her, at times, think that she should have born a kobold instead, a ‘good girl.’
But it was a hellhound that glared at her mother now, fire erupting from the sides of her eyes like solar flares, and she didn’t realize that her teeth were bared, that the temperature in the room had just climbed three degrees instantly. “No,” she said, and that was the end of it.
Kyra blinked, and then sighed, her face falling. “Mattie, please-”
“I said no.”
Kyra paused, waiting a moment for her daughter to come back to herself. When she didn’t, the elder hellhound sighed. “Fine. Look, I need to go find your father. Just…” She took a deep breath, closing her eyes before looking at her daughter once more. “I just want you to be happy, my pup.”
Mattie nodded once. “Me too.” The curt reply brought a smile onto her mother’s face, and the school’s secretary touched her daughter on the shoulder in an affectionate pat as she started to walk away, fighting to hide the hint of pride that tugged at her lips.
“Have a good day, dear. Remember that you have to check in on Gabbie tomorrow night, okay? We’ll be busy for at least three hours. And…” Standing side by side with Mattie, she met her daughter’s gaze again. “Good luck.” And she walked by, her claws tapping the floor like high heels, leaving Mattie standing alone in the lunchroom.
Closing her eyes, Mattie took a deep breath, calming herself – or trying to. She knew, deep down, that her mom was right – that it would be almost impossible to make something work. She had nothing to offer Valerie, no way to appeal to the manticore. And there was no way a girl would let go of a guy like Jake when she had him. And so, the smartest thing would be to… give up…
The air shimmered and crackled with heat around her, and the room’s light was tinted slightly orange by the flames leaping from her eyes.
Mattie Anne Collins was a terrible hellhound. But if she had one thing in common with her ancestors, the famed huntresses who had chased their prey across land and sea without tiring, it was that she didn’t know how to surrender. Once she had set her teeth, once her heart was dug in, she would never let go. So, even if he didn’t know it yet… Jake Carroll would be hers.
Mattie turned, and walked out of the lunchroom, head held high.
Author’s Note: Welcome back, all of you. I finally managed to finish this section, started over two years ago, and hope to have good luck hammering out the remaining few parts of this tale. This work will obviously be longer than its predecessor, which was a contest entry, though it will be shorter than “…Sleepover,” which was… unexpectedly long. I expect 4 parts, which I hope to have done in fairly short order. Remember, though, humility: the Muses are goddesses, and bossing them around ends… badly. And thus, I only hope to work as frantically as I have thus far.
As for the story itself, I won’t say much, except that it won’t be wrapped up quite so nicely as the one before it. This is the second story in a trilogy, and so… there will be a happy ending, but not ‘the’ happy ending. That comes later. And look forward to me playing with bringing monster girl merch and imagery into a setting that may be familiar to many of you – that was my initial concept for this story, and I hope to do it justice. Fingers crossed!
Finally, my last duty in one of these: thank you, for reading. Thanks especially to those of you who comment, because you bring me joy. Thanks to those who offer stars or kudos, because that brings me pride. But thanks to you all, and I hope to continue to be worthy of the time you spend perusing my scribblings.
In time, I will return with more. But not now. Now… I sleep…
~Wynn Pendragon
(0 votes, average: 0.00 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this post.
Loading...
0 thoughts on “The Wildcat’s Rival, Chapter 1”