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Mista has been running for what feels like hours when he catches the scent of strawberries. It’s far away, at first, getting closer, and he bares his teeth in a grin as he follows it like the loyal dog he is.
Weaving through trees and over a riverbank, the wind courses through his fur, his strong legs beat against the earth with inhuman speed, and his keen, wolvish eyesight cut through the dim moonlight of the forest, watching and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Squirrels and rabbits skitter away from him, and birds chirp and leap from their branches— yet Mista pays them no mind, chasing after his prey that has yet to show itself.
A few yards away, Mista catches the flash of pale, leathery wings. He can feel drool seeping between his teeth with excitement, and he lets his tongue hang happily from his mouth as he runs after the creature. The bat dips and twirls through the air with practiced finesse, though a little clumsy with its sensitive vision closer to the trees.
Once close enough, Mista jumps for it. The bat dodges him deftly, beginning their little game of cat and mouse, every flap of its wings permeating the air around them with that sweet smell of strawberries, paired with the quieter musk of blood. Mista salivates .
Their chase carries them in laps around the forest, Mista’s barks and the bat’s squeaks echoing through the wood and scaring away any other nearby predators. Mista is panting and his breath is heaving by the time he catches one of the bat’s feet between his teeth, knocking it to the ground. It squeaks defiantly as Mista presses his wet nose and mouth against its wriggling body, the high-pitched noises quickly shifting into more legible speech as the bat’s body changes and contorts back into his humanoid form.
“Mista, Mista, that hurt,” Fugo is whining, fingers pressing delicately to his perfectly uninjured knee. “I would never pull on your tail like that…”
Mista continues his assault on Fugo’s face, licking up his neck and over his cheek wetly. Fugo grimaces as the wolf’s slobber trickles into his hair, but he makes no effort to kick Mista off of him. Once he stops complaining, his hands make their way behind Mista’s ears, scratching and petting, Mista’s tail wagging all the while.
Fugo’s fingers curl into Mista’s hair as the wolf ears disappear, holding him still as Mista’s transformation shudders through his body. The transition from wolf to human is uglier than Fugo’s, at least in Mista’s opinion, as his bones crack and muscles warp themselves back to a smaller size. He thinks he can hear the distinct creak and clink of his sharp teeth shrinking, pressing them against Fugo’s neck in search of comfort. The vampire, usually in the other position, does his best to guide Mista through the act.
“You’re sturdy, aren’t you?” Mista manages to tease, practically a growl. “I’ve done way worse than knock you to the ground. ‘Sides, you pull on my tail all the time…”
The vampire hums, and Mista pulls back to study him. Fugo’s white hair almost glows in the moonlight, and his red eyes, which Mista had once thought were a bad omen, twinkle with warmth like the stars despite his cute pout.
“Doesn’t mean I like it,” the vampire grumbles. Fugo watches as Mista rolls off him, flexing his jaw and stretching his limbs experimentally, reacquainting himself with his human body. “You okay? Your transformation always looks like it hurts.”
It does hurt. Especially on full moons when Mista doesn’t have any control over it. At least during nights like these, he can decide when and where the wolf comes out, and look back with full clarity of the hunt, of what he ate and who he chased. He shudders to think what could’ve happened if he’d met Fugo during a full moon; a vampire wouldn’t have been a tasty meal, but it would’ve certainly been an exquisite kill.
They’d met about two years ago now, in this very forest. The wood was thicker here than anywhere else in the area, which made it the perfect hunting ground for Mista’s pack, though the village sitting at the Southeast edge often made their lives a little more difficult. It was a fine spot to look for mates, or more exuberant meals when desired, but more often than not the local population just bred trouble, with their suspicious eyes and curious children. That’s how the pack ends up with kids like Mista, who wander too far in after a dare on the night of a full moon and never come back out.
The other trouble from the village is Fugo’s family. They’d probably be out in the streets with their pitchforks protesting the beasts in the forests if it weren’t for the vampire thing; instead, hatred brews like a cold war, whispered among clans between bloodied teeth. Leone is always telling Mista that it used to be impossible for wolves to hunt at night without running into a vampire, and that they were always to kill on sight— but for as long as Mista has been hunting with a pack, the bats had never been a problem. In fact, Fugo was the first vampire Mista ever met.
It had been pretty embarrassing. Mista liked hunting with his wolven brothers, but it wasn’t unusual for him to separate from the pack on a whim, which he’d done countless times. On this particular evening, he’d been running full-throttle, chasing the scent of a nearby deer, when he’d tripped . That was odd for him, since he’d been the swiftest runner in the pack since he was just a puppy, and that particular error set off a whole chain of them, tumbling over the log and down a steep hill until he landed snout-first in a bush blooming with gardenias. He was completely disoriented by the tumble and the strong scent of flowers, he couldn’t even smell the deer anymore, much less Leone and Narancia. Mista had wandered the area he’d fallen into for a while, whining low and sad and feeling sorry for himself, until he’d finally decided to call it quits, arching his back and ripping his head back to the moon, ready to howl and call for his family—
Somebody yelled before he could: “Don’t!”
And then Fugo had fallen out of the tree, landing squarely on his ass in the same gardenias Mista had ended up in.
It took Mista a minute to register the boy as a vampire. He’d never even smelled one before, even at a distance in the village, and they were both so coated in gardenia it was hard to pick up any other scent. But one good look at him clued Mista in, his freakishly pale skin and red eyes and sharp canines, and the fact that he didn’t seem scared of the giant wolf across the clearing at all— he’d even called out to Mista, knowing full well what he is.
Mista would find out later that Fugo had stopped him from calling his pack over because Fugo’s family weren’t too far away, either. A bloody battle would’ve surely broken out. Mista remembers being surprised that the little vampire didn’t seem to want that, either.
Fugo had pointed the wolf in the right direction, and Mista reunited with his family just before sunrise, still hungry. He’d wondered if the vampire went hungry that night, too.
Turns out he had— Mista found him in the same clearing the next night. He could properly smell the strawberries on the vampire then, but Mista had found him by following the scent of blood. Fugo’s teeth were buried in the flesh of a deer, the very same one Mista’d been tracking the night previous, and wordlessly, Fugo had beckoned him in to share the meal.
They kept coming back, night after night, two predators seeking prey. Sometimes Mista would reach the clearing and Fugo would already have a squirrel or a fox in his teeth, and sometimes Mista would wait with a fresh deer, his tail wagging behind him. And sometimes… they would hunt together. That’s where the chase really began, Mista always thought.
Fugo didn’t see Mista’s human form for those first few months. But Mista saw plenty of Fugo in every shape and form; polite and poised, hunched over and bloody, small and flighty and chiropteran; Mista liked them all, liked how different he was from the werewolves he spends every day with. Despite how few words they really spoke to each other in those early days, Mista sensed a kinship between them. There was something more, something unspeakable in the meat they ate together. Maybe it was the neutral ground they stood on, between the village and the thick of the forest. Perhaps it was more apt to say equal ground, in the unspoken vow to keep their food non-human. It was hard not to view the vampire as an equal when he’d never known anything different, never known anything other than dance and chase and eat. It’s a joy, doing those things with each other rather than to each other.
Sure, sometimes Mista considers tearing Fugo limb from limb. But then he thinks he’d quite like to gnaw on his bones and drown in his blood while he’s at it, too.
Those sorts of thoughts only really come to him in the light of a full moon, when Fugo is out of reach. He’d probably been warned of feral wolves on full moons by his vampire brethren, and knew the danger of crossing paths with them— another reason why vampires don’t seem so bad, in Mista’s opinion.
And now that he gets to be face-to-face with Fugo, not just snout-to-wing, Mista has found that there are even plenty of things to like about vampires.
Brutal, efficient hunters. Fast, and pretty, and wise.
Maybe that’s just Fugo, Mista thinks.
“Hey, are you listening to me?” Fugo tugs on a curl, ignoring Mista’s grunt of pain. “I’m not dragging you back to that cave you call a house, if you’re so severely injured.”
“ Oh look at me, I’m a fancy vampire and I have chairs,” Mista retorts, a half-decent parody of Fugo’s voice. “You’ve never even been there. I bet you’d love cuddling up on the furs by the fire, if you’d let yourself have any fun for once…”
Fugo squirms as the werewolf inches back towards him, muscles finally loosening up as Mista wraps his arms around the vampire’s waist. He acts like he’s been caught in a nasty trap, leaning his head away with a grimace and exposing his neck for the slaughter. Mista’s base urges prevail and he licks a long stripe up the pale stretch of skin, before he leaves a trail of kisses on his way back down.
“So you’re feeling fine, then.” Fugo’s hand scratches through Mista’s hair until it lands on the scruff at the base of his neck, holding him there as teeth tease the tough layers of vampire skin. “Are you hungry?”
“I’m always hungry,” says Mista.
“I know,” Fugo rolls his eyes, the hand not in Mista’s hair snaking down to linger over the wolf’s empty stomach. “Bruno’s been telling me that I look thin, lately.”
In Mista’s embrace, the vampire doesn’t feel any smaller than usual. But when he shifts to look up at him, the moonlight catches the hollow of his cheeks and sickly hooding of his eyes.
“Do you miss human blood?” Mista asks.
Fugo shrugs limply. “I guess, in a way… I’ve never stopped craving it, but I don’t want it, either. Humans are gross.”
“How about my blood? Tastier than human, you think?”
The vampire mulls it over for a moment. Then, he dips his head to hide his face in Mista’s neck, taking a deep breath; only, vampires don’t need to breathe, with no circulatory system requiring the constant pump of oxygen into blood. Fugo is smelling him, Mista realizes, and relishes a little in the fact.
“No worse than, at the very least,” Fugo grumbles. It sounds like he’s convincing himself. “You smell like a wet dog rolled around in pine sap.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad to me.”
Despite his claim about Mista’s smell, Fugo doesn’t pull away. Mista starts to suspect that the vampire really is considering taking a bite.
“Hey now,” says Mista, “While I’d happily let you drink to your heart’s content, my pack wouldn’t be very happy if I came home with your marks on my neck.”
“Giogio would smell it on me, anyway.” Fugo sounds disappointed. “I already smell suspicious enough when I get back scented with every flower and bush in the vicinity.”
“They must think you’re pretty weird, chasing squirrels through flower fields for every meal.”
Fugo’s expression twists unpleasantly. “Weird is one way to put it. They think I’m sick. ”
Mista wants to take it all back— he doesn’t like the thought of Fugo around these other vampires. Who so quickly turn not only against werewolves, but also against other vampires, against Fugo. Who are they to police who he hangs out with, what he eats?
“You should come back with me,” Mista proposes, not for the first time. “There’s a waterfall nearby, with a pond perfect for swimming. And the cave is really cozy, when you get used to it—”
“My family would track us down before we could even get under those furs. And then you’d all be dead.”
“Come on, my family can fight better than those leeches—”
“And that’s mine you’re talking about!” Fugo spits, rolling out of Mista’s grip to sit up and glare into the distance. “Sure, Bruno and Giorno are picky about the blood we drink, but it’s no better than your pack spreading lycanthropy to any curious soul that wanders too close.”
Mista frowns. “That’s not true at all. They haven’t turned anybody since I…”
Well, since they picked up Mista, and stopped spending so much time in the village. How much longer would it be until the pack decided to strengthen their numbers again?
Mista shakes his head, and the thought, away. “Okay, both of our families aren’t perfect. Doesn’t change the fact that I enjoy hunting and eating game with you. I’d like to keep it that way. As long as you do, too.”
The vampire worries his bottom lip between his teeth. “Of course I want that, Mista.”
“Let’s stop stressing, then.” Mista sits up, pressing valiantly back into Fugo’s space with an arm around his shoulder. “You asked if I was hungry. What about you, hm? I swear I smelled a moose on my run over, how about we treat ourselves?”
Leaning into him, Fugo hums lowly. “That does sound good.” He studies Mista’s face, though, looking the wolf up and down with a pensive expression. “Maybe you should rest a while first.”
“Now who looks sick?” Mista rolls his eyes, despite the grin creeping across his mouth. “But if it means spending more time with you, then I can’t complain.”
Fugo answers the rhetorical question with a kiss. His body is cold and stiff in all the ways that Mista loves, letting his own warm hands skirt over any piece of skin he can access. Their kisses always feel like the climax of a good hunt, clinking teeth and the caress of tender flesh.
In fact, it’s like Mista’s hunger has vanished. The moose falls far from his mind, away with their families and this stupid war. All that is left behind is the moon casting its light over two bodies, indistinguishable from any other creatures of the night.