I'm going to TRANSFORM him, and unleash the savage instincts that lie hidden within…
Dr Alfred Brandon, I Was a Teenage Werewolf
When you want remoteness and distance from the rest of the world, which state would you pick?
Sam chose Minnesota.
Lakes, forests, nothing but nothingness; yes, Minnesota was a wonderful place to clear your mind, since there was about as much distracting you as there was nutritious value in cheeseburgers.
Unless someone slipped a piece of lettuce in-between. For Sam and his meditation time, the equivalent of unexpected vitamins in fast food was a young girl trapping his attention like a bear trap.
Or wolf trap.
Zoe turned up the heating in her already stuffy office and warmed her slender fingers on the gazillionth cup of tea that day. What her fun and amusement qualities lacked in strength, her bladder had in abundance.
The phone rang and forced her to abandon her web search for the perfect wedding dress. "Diver Farming, Zoe Heart speaking."
Zoe noted down the orders, making a mental note to herself as she did to maybe get a manicure for her wedding, for the first time in her life.
Her eyes travelled over the dead pot plants to the clock ticking on the wall. Half an hour to go before she would meet Marc for dinner.
Despite Zoe not being one of those girls who enhance their looks by seductive clothing causing them nephritis and pounds of make-up suffocating their faces, she was pretty.
Hazelnut hair, gently curled like strung-out corkscrews and glossy like the silk it felt like. Eyes of a blue so intense they made the summer sky bow its head in shame. Seductive curves proportionally spread out over a 5'6 height and a face contoured by soft edges.
Pretty enough that men considered her purity promise a shame; would she put some more effort into her appearance, she would even be pretty enough even to make men willing to marry her just to lay her.
Zoe wasn't stupid, though; she knew true intentions when she saw them. Marc really loved her, she was sure he was… that's why he was the one who she'd give everything to. Zoe believed that by preserving her 'virtue', she'd avoid slipping onto the wrong lane like so many of her college comrades had.
Given, Bemidji wasn't known for its metropolitan aura, but that didn't mean existences couldn't crash to the ground here as well as elsewhere. Teenage pregnancies, drugs, alcohol, homelessness, all that, Zoe knew she would avoid by following her faith. It would keep her safe.
Sam's head pounded as if he'd gone through a bender marathon last night.
Aspirin turned out to be useless, so did Tylenol and every other pain killer from the medicine collection he carried around with him. It wasn't that the headaches were connected with images; he would understand the pain if those memory snaps of hell were hosting a slide show before his inner eye. However, that wasn't it.
A cold shower couldn't cool the heat of his skin; the heat he knew he radiated, but couldn't feel himself.
'What the hell?' Sam growled and wondered if maybe, his whacked up job had left behind traces on his sanity, after all.
It wasn't until the next day he would find out that it wasn't his mind hunting had left traces on, but rather his physiology.
With all due respect, Geology was about the most boring and pointless subject ever invented. Who wants to study dirt and rocks? Exactly.
Unsurprising it was therefore that Zoe granted herself the luxury of dozing off.
Strong hands on her pale skin, manhandling her hips… a bruising touch, but so arousing. She wanted more, she wanted to taste him on her lips, feel him. Rustling of sheets, faint light casting shadows. A consuming, burning hot flame inside of her as she wanted nothing more but to have him inside of her.
Zoe returned to this plane of reality with a yelp, which earned her a few queer looks from her fellow students. Those still awake, anyways.
Her cheeks blushed a nice shade of tomato from shame; those had been indecent, unchaste images, she didn't even want to know where the passion in them came from… surely not her subconscience?
Couldn't be; because whoever the mysterious, tall dark handsome stranger was, it hadn't been Marc. Not that that necessarily made it any better…
Zoe forced herself to listen to the lecture; would it have been any other class than Geology, it might have worked. Now, however, there was absolutely nothing to keep her from tasting the remaining passion her dream had left behind: Zoe was scared to discover it was lust.
"Zo? You okay?"
"Hm? Oh, yeah," Zoe shook her head at her friend Jane, "Fine, why?"
"You just seem a little… out of it."
"Just had a weird daydream, that's all," Zoe smiled. "We still on for dinner tonight?"
"'Course. You want a dream reading?" Jane waggled her eyebrows.
"Thank you, but I'll pass. I don't even remember it, it was just strange, that's all." Zoe had a fair idea of how that reading would go: Jane would accuse her of having suppressed desires, and that her subconscious was expressing its need for sex through dreams, and that Zoe should finally get laid and let out her inner animal.
'Just a dream, Zo, just a dream,' She calmed herself. For a simple dream, though, it had left her suspiciously wet and hot between her legs.
With two more days left before full moon, Sam was nowhere near feeling like himself. He didn't know what it was, he just was acutely aware of his humanity being pushed into the background and his needs taking over center stage.
His senses were oddly sharpened, but his sense was reduced in so far as that he didn't wonder about that; not until late that night, when he ambled down the pedestrian precinct – roaming was more like it, actually – and suddenly caught a scent so intense that he knew something supernatural must be going on with him. The way his eyes immediately zoned in on the source of that alluring scent wasn't human.
Her hair was a dark shade of caramel, carelessly flicked over her shoulder as she pranced down the street. Blue eyes, with specks of green, glowing vibrantly. Pale skin, white like the full moon Sam felt would be the day after tomorrow without ever having glanced at the lunar calendar. Flawless skin that screamed to be marked, branded; a lush body demanding to be taken, offering itself like an open buffet.
Her appearance mattered very little, to be honest; in the end it was her aura that sealed her fate. Sam just knew he needed to possess her.
Zoe snuggled closer to her pillow and pulled the covers up to chin. Normally, she would say her nightly prayer now and fall right asleep.
Then again: Normally, she didn't doze off during class and dream of handsome strangers doing unchaste things to her.
So instead of holding monologues to God, Zoe's mind fell prey to the siege of inappropriate images that in turn conjured unknown feelings.
Rough hands slipping off her night gown. They ran up her naked waist, grabbed her breasts. Her body was buried underneath his, and damn, did he have a fine physique…
Zoe's eyes flew open in shock and she quickly took her hand away from the naughty place it had been about to go. Face burning with shame and guilt, she kicked the sheets off and dived under the shower. The heat remained no matter how freezing the water was.
Opening his eyes slowly, as if suspicious of the light outside, Sam found he remembered little to nothing of what he'd done last night. Just one name stuck: Zoe Heart.
Rumbling through his memory like one would rummage through a messy trunk, Sam tried to figure out where he'd gotten that name from that pounded so intensely against his skull.
A scent. Intense; like caramel, but sweeter. Better, sexier.
Sam just wished the cold water he splashed onto his face could calm this inner heat of his. If he wouldn't feel so strong and alive, he'd think he was coming down with a fever.
A look in the mirror told him the blunt truth. His pupils had narrowed to the point of near invisibility, and when he ran his tongue over his teeth, he discovered them to be sharper than they were before.
Just thinking of that girl turned him into an animal.
As his humanity receded, memory came back.
She had a swaying edge in her walk, seductive but barely visible. He saw it, though; the way her rounded hips teased him with their discreet dance. A breeze tangled with her hair, carrying her alluring scent over to him and striking right into his lust centre.
His newly re-gathered soul squelched his urge to ravish the girl right on the spot, regardless of what that would make him. However, his soul wasn't strong enough to let her go completely; so he followed her home. He didn't even need to step closer to her doorstep to read the name underneath the doorbell.
Zoe Heart.
"I must be nuts," Sam groaned as he got into his rental car, dressed all formal like fake FBI agents usually are and headed for the local college. It was a shot in the dark, but better than no shot at all. "Let's hope mystery girl isn't only pretty but also has brains."
Sam checked his badge to recall the name he'd be using this time – Agent Richards it was today – and then headed for the office.
"Can I help you?" The secretary's head shot up. According to her hairstyle, she just jumped out of the movie 'Grease', and the faded floral pattern of her blouse only supported that theory.
"I hope so," Sam flipped his badge with a well-practised motion. "I'm with the FBI, looking for Zoe Heart."
"Oh, my, she didn't do anything, did she? Sweetest girl I've ever met, she wouldn't harm a fly!"
"No, she hasn't done anything."
'Other than getting me all hard just thinking about her,' Sam's primal instinct added, a voice he quickly suffocated. "But a relative of hers, err, disappeared, and we, um, think she might be able to help."
Sam prayed she wasn't an only child with dead parents and no other family.
"Oh, my, how horrible!"
'Not more horrible than your voice, lady,' Sam put on a smile and demanded, with his best puppy dog look; "If you could just give me Zoe's student file, that would be great."
Twenty 'I hope her relative isn't hurt's and 'Poor Zoe's later, Sam finally managed to ditch the hysterical secretary and get down to work on his imaginary case. It certainly wasn't imaginary to him.
"So, you and Zoe have Geology class together?" Sam wondered who the hell wanted to study rocks, but saved that question for another time. If he was lucky, he would get the answer out of Zoe as she lay in bed next to him after a passionate night of sex.
Sam rather wouldn't know where that thought had come from.
"Uh-huh," Lola ran her tongue over her lips. That FBI agent could investigate her in depth any day, anytime, even here in the Chemistry lab. "So, agent, what do you want with our little wallflower Zoe?"
"She didn't strike me as a wallflower."
"Oh, so you met her?"
Sam cursed himself for letting that slip. "No, just from her file and picture, she doesn't strike me as one, you know?"
Lola nodded slowly. "Right. Well, she is. So, if it's fun and amusement you're after, she's the wrong address. I'm sure that whatever problem you've got, I can help you just as well." She straightened her back and pushed her – admittedly impressive – bust out.
Sam had no doubt she could help on that account, but that utterly wasn't what he was after. Not with Lola, anyways. "Right, um, I'm sure you could." Where was Dean to take the promiscuous witnesses – or sources of information in this case, seeing as there was nothing to have been witnessed – from him when he needed it? "Anyways, back to Zoe. What's she like?"
"Look, I love the girl, everyone does. She's sweet, caring and helpful. Practically one of the saints she's preaching to."
Sam was pretty sure Lola meant 'praying' not 'preaching', but oh well. Apparently the IQ needed to get into college had been scaled down from the time he was at Stanford.
"But she's so prude it's not even funny anymore. She's gonna marry that bore Marc next month, just so she can finally get laid. I told her I don't know how many times she should screw, literally, her promise ring to hell, but she doesn't listen. Virginity is a virtue and all that crap." Lola cocked an eyebrow at Sam, "I'm a looser girl than that, you know, agent."
"I bet you are," Sam jotted some random notes onto his notepad just to look busy and not let that tigress across from him jump on him any more than she already was. "Are there any places Zoe likes to go regularly?"
"Try church. She should be there in the mornings, the afternoons, and oh, the evenings." Lola rolled her eyes, "Other than that; she works in a coffee shop when she's not working at Diver Farming."
"Which coffee shop?"
"The Starbucks down in Bemidji. It's not hard to find, we only got that one."
"No surprise there."
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing," Sam shook his head. Lovely town Bemidji was. "So, er, thank you, Ms Kilmer, I think I got everything I need."
"Please, call me Lola."
Sam got up and darted for the exit before she could punch her number into his cell.
Thank you so much for all your sweet feedback, and the alerts and favorites, I'm absolutely thrilled about how awesome you guys are! =D I promise there'll be some werewolf action soon. ;)
xoxo