Full Moon Strays Ch. 04

This story is a bit wordy and fairly long, so if you are looking for immediate gratification, you might want to look elsewhere. It contains heterosexual and lesbian sexual activity.

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The following story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between actual persons, living or dead (or just confused) is entirely coincidental. Please do not copy/redistribute the story, in part or in total, without the author's permission.

This story takes place in the entirely fictional city of Springfield, California, so don't go looking for it on a map. And in my little fictional world, there are no unwanted pregnancies or STD's, except as plot driving devices. The author encourages the practice of safe-sex. Finally, as the name implies, this is part of an ongoing series. It would benefit the reader greatly to examine the earlier stories for background information and descriptions.

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Jane was sitting by herself, trying very hard to get some food down before the night's activities. She could barely tie her shoes without having an emotional crisis, but she was supposed to go out into the world on her first "mission" to gather information. She felt good that she was going to have some "muscle" in the form of Chris, who wasn't in on the tracking party due to his lack of stealth. He actually had a really great nose when morphed out, but he was also a little slow on the trail. But Chris was as good in a fight as anyone in the Strays, and Red wasn't going to leave Jane unprotected. Mindy was getting pulled into the hunting party, so it would be Jane, Chris, Robbie and Anya that night.

"Hey Jane," Mindy said, plopping down beside the younger woman.

"Howdy," Jane replied, concentrating on her sandwich.

Mindy just stared at her friend for a moment. "So, still mad at me?"

Jane looked over at her, obviously confused. "Why would I be mad at you?"

"For being a bitch yesterday."

"I told you, you weren't . . . I'm okay. I'm just . . . scared about tonight."

Mindy went to tussle Jane's hair, but those magical braids temporarily moved away. Then Jane relaxed and Mindy was able to play with it a bit. "So," Mindy said slyly, "why don't you tell me about you and Red?"

Jane almost choked on her sandwich, and she was blushing furiously. "I . . . uh . . . uhm . . . what?"

"Please," Mindy started, "I heard all about the kiss, and apparently you've been 'sleeping' in her room. No one's really crashed with Red in a year since . . . ."

"Natasha," Jane said wistfully.

"So she told you about Nat?" asked Anya as the tall beauty sauntered over and sat down with the other two girls. "Good."

"Why 'good'?" Jane asked.

"It means Red likes you enough and trusts you enough to open up to, and she trusts you not to freak," said Talia, joining the group.

Mindy scooted over until she was sitting behind Jane, moving her hair out of the way and rubbing the young woman's shoulders. "I'm assuming that . . . certain things went on in Red's room?"

Jane blushed even more than anyone thought humanly possible. "Yes," she whispered, barely audible even to those closest to her.

Talia and Anya each took one of her hands and both were smiling like Cheshire cats.

"So," said Talia, "how was it?"

As the minutes ticked away, the girls got Jane to open up a bit about her foray into sexual activity. They were courteous enough not to demand the gory details, but got her to talk about her fears and insecurities, while also getting details about how good it had made Jane feel. The young woman had been intimate with another woman and, for the first time in her life, she had felt special and cared for.

When Red finally wandered over, all the girls were chuckling and Jane's blushing face was buried in her hands.

"Oh, don't tell me you've started in on her already?!?" Red said exasperatedly.

The group of girls stood up. "Hey, you started in on her first," Mindy pointed out, raising her eyebrows.

"Oh God," said the very embarrassed Jane. "I . . . I . . ."

"We'll leave you two alone for a moment," Talia said, giving Red a hug.

"I'll get Chris and Robbie and meet you in the staging area," Anya said to Jane.

"I'll talk to you in a few minutes," Mindy added, looking at Red.

When they were momentarily alone, Red walked over and gripped Jane's hands softly, giving her a brief but warm kiss. "I hope they weren't too hard on you," she said.

"No, they were . . . nice."

"Still scared about tonight?"

"Yeah."

"Don't be," Red said, trying to sound soothing. "Go to the shelters and shanty towns. Find out what you can, and don't get into any fights. Let Anya help. She has . . . ways of getting people to talk," Red said with a laugh. "If something comes up, listen to Robbie and Chris."

"But won't you need Anya?"

"We're moving out into the suburbs now, and she doesn't move fast enough to keep up. She can do more good with you tonight." Red moved her arms around Jane, taking the girl's hands with them and pinning them behind Jane's back while Red kissed her again. "And be safe."

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A few hours later . . .

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"Christ, these guys are everywhere!" Robbie said after Jane and Anya reported what they had learned from their most recent set of "interviews." They had spent a long time sifting between incoherent, insane and/or drunken ramblings, but had gotten more and more information about the hellspawn and the drug that they were selling.

The veteran members of the team were convinced the drug, sold in powder form and inhaled, was magical in nature, highly addictive and hallucinogenic and slowly drove its users insane. The hellspawn were targeting low-income users, the homeless . . . anyone who wouldn't be missed, and they were selling it cheap. That led Robbie to believe that money wasn't the object. And the hellspawn had been all over town apparently, preying on the weak and the desperate.

"Why would they want to drive people that no one . . . that most people don't care about," Anya started, wrapping an arm around Jane's shoulders, "completely insane? And it's not like they're trying to drive them out of a particular area to get property values up or down."

"I HATE it when something magical is afoot," Robbie grumbled. "It gets messy." He turned to Jane. "So, what do you think?"

"I don't know," Jane said, trying to put some steel in her voice. "It has something to do with this 'dark thing' that Ben was talking about, but that could be anything. Couldn't it?"

Suddenly, Chris lifted his nose to the air and inhaled.

"What is it?" Robbie asked, joining in looking for a scent.

"Hellspawn," Chris said, his disgust evident even through his Texas drawl.

Jane's skin went cold. "Where?"

"Upwind apparently," Anya said. "How far?" she asked Chris.

"Couple hundred yards maybe?" the redneck said. He looked at Robbie and waited for a confirmation that he quickly got.

"Don't you two even THINK about taking them on," Anya warned.

"We need to find out what they're up to," Robbie pointed out, obviously cruising for some payback.

"Then I'll go," Anya said, darting into an alley with her friends in hot pursuit, shirking her clothes and then turning invisible.

"Miss Anya," started Chris, looking genuinely alarmed. "Ya can't go runnin' off on yer own!"

"I'm just going to see what they're up to." The rest of the group heard the girl's footsteps for a moment, then Anya was gone.

Robbie turned to Jane. "Jane, I need you to be another set of eyes."

Jane was almost paralyzed with fear. "Me? How?"

"They're fast," Robbie said, placing hands on both of Jane's shoulders and looking her in the eyes, "but they can't climb any better than a human," he said, looking up at the brickstone buildings surround them.

Jane was still terrified, but she didn't want to leave Anya out on her own. She had to be a grownup now. She looked at the building next to her and willed her magical hair into action. All eight braids latched onto fire escapes or pushed against the walls behind her, and she scurried up the walls and over the ledge of the roof.

Chris and Robbie just stared. The girl could move incredibly fast and fairly quietly as well. Chris looked at his friend.

"She's like that Doc Oc character from Spiderman 2."

Robbie raised his eyebrows. "Bet Doc Oc never needed that much shampoo."

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Up on the rooftops . . .

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Jane was peeking over the edge of an apartment complex at two familiar-looking forms, dressed in black suits, white shirts, gloves and sunglasses with shaven heads. Jane could steel feel the cracking of her ribs when she had been hit by one of these things, and she grew almost nauseous as she remembered ripping one apart down in the Den, then beating another into a fine paste. One of them handed a small back to a young black man they were talking to, who handed them some money and then walked away. Jane wanted to go after the young man, telling him what an idiot he was for throwing his life away. 'Who are you to judge?' she asked of herself. 'You spent just as much time hiding from the pain of living . . . you just didn't use narcotics.'

The two hellspawn grumbled between themselves for a minute, and then headed down a side-street before climbing into a luxury car with dark windows. Jane wished she knew where Anya was, or that Chris or Robbie were around. Once the doors of the car were closed, she spoke in a low voice.

"Anya? Are you down there?"

A voice echoed up from near a trash bin. "Here. Crap, I didn't see you girl! You're pretty sneaky. Hey, think you can carry me?"

"I . . . I think so," Jane replied. She stretched on braid down twenty feet and soon felt something tugging on it. She felt her way around (what she hoped was) Anya's waist and hauled her up quite effortlessly.

"That is a cool power," came Anya's voice, sounding quite appreciative. "Let's follow them."

"Shouldn't we tell Chris and . . ."

"No time. We're not going to approach them. I just want to see where they're going and then we'll come back."

Jane was nervous about the idea, but it made a certain amount of sense. Her hair extended again and she scurried from rooftop to rooftop, keeping the black car in sight.

"I think you're power is pretty cool too," Jane said as they moved. "Mine is . . . weird."

"Not so much," Anya said. "A Talent is an extension of the user. Let me guess, your hair was important to you, wasn't it? Even before coming here?"

Jane thought about it for a moment as she climbed over another building ledge. "Yeah. It . . . my mom used to play dress up with me when I was a kid . . . back when things were good. She used to brush it and tell me I was a princess. When things got bad, especially when I ran away, I would brush it and . . . sorry, this sounds so stupid."

"No, go on. Please."

"I . . . I would brush it and it would make me feel like a princess again."

"That's not stupid at all," Anya whispered.

Jane scrunched up her eyebrows. "If your Talent is an extension of your personality, why are you invisible? You're so beautiful and you seem to love being around people." Jane heard a sigh.

"Thank you . . . for the beautiful comment, and I do like being around people . . . now. But there was a time I didn't."

"Why? If you don't mind me asking?"

Anya was lost in her own head for a moment. 'You can't ask her to be honest and not be honest yourself,' she thought. Then out loud, "Actually, I used to be a model."

"THAT I believe," Jane said. Anya was a true beauty.

"I started when I was fifteen. I went to Italy, Spain, France, New York, Los Angeles . . . I was on every runway from here to Neverland, and it was a non-stop party. Literally non-stop. At first, everything was great. My agency and the clothing designers gave me everything I ever wanted. Money, cars, boys and girls to 'play' with, clothes, jewels . . . and in exchange, I made whatever it was designed look good and sell well. Life was a continuous party." Anya paused and collected her thoughts. "And that might sound great to some people, but it took a lot of energy. I had a serious cocaine habit by the time I was eighteen . . . my agents and 'friends' wouldn't let me near heroine because I couldn't afford to get needle-marks on my arms. Between the coke and the alcohol and trying to keep my image up, I would go for days without sleep. There were entire weeks of my life I couldn't remember. And not only did no one stop me, they kept egging me on. I was the life of the party, and it was killing me."

"I'm so sorry," Jane said.

"Don't apologize for me," Anya said crisply. Then her voice softened. "I embraced that life with open arms, so I need to accept a lot of the blame. But then I woke up one day in a bed with two guys whose names I couldn't remember after a night I had forgotten in hotel I couldn't identify and didn't know how I got to. I knew I had to stop. I tried to get my agency to give me some time off . . . to let me go into rehab. But they kept putting it off . . . booking me for new locations and new gigs. I felt like I was dying from the inside out, and they kept pushing me. I couldn't get away. One day, I ran away. Kind of like you I guess. I just wanted to disappear."

"And you did?" Jane asked.

"Not right away. I hitchhiked up her from L.A. and wandered the streets. My resolve broke down pretty quickly, and I started looking for a fix. I was in the process of offering up a blowjob to one dealer when . . . well, when I was saved."

"The Strays?"

Anya smiled, mostly for her own benefit. "Yeah. Actually, it was Red and Robbie. They had just gotten done cleaning out a nest of some kind of larvae demon when they happened upon me making the deal. I was on my knees and that creep was unzipping his pants . . . shit Jane. I shouldn't be bringing this up with you."

"It's my turn to say, 'It's okay.' Victor was a pig, but only because I let him be."

Anya wondered what Jane would say if she knew what Red had done to the girl's ex-landlord. Anya suspected he still had a number of broken bones and nightmares on a regular basis due to that red-haired woman. "Well, Red and Robbie came out of nowhere, morphed out, roughed the guy up and tossed him in a dumpster. Then Red looked down on me, and . . . she said, 'You can live on your knees, or you can stand up . . . right now . . . and come with us.' And despite everything I had told myself about wanting to start over, standing up at that moment was the hardest thing I ever did."

"But you DID stand." Jane was sympathetic and more than a bit teary-eyed. She was trying to learn to stand on her own as well.

"I was freaked, but yeah. I finally got up, the Strays took me in and the rest is history. Shit! Stop!"

The two girls had gotten so caught up in talking that they had reached the edge of the city, or at least the end of the area where Jane could move freely without fear of being detected. They were on the east side of town, and could see the Inland Bridge off through the trees.

"Just like Ben said," Jane murmured.

"Let's go back to Chris and Robbie," Anya said. "They'll be worried."

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A few minutes later . . .

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"Where the hell have you been?" Robbie said, waving his arms around wildly.

"We was a might worried 'bout you," Chris added. When Anya materialized completely nude, the big man blushed and spun around while she got dressed.

"We followed . . . followed them for a bit," Jane said. "We just wanted to see where they were going."

Anya was trying to process what she had seen. She wasn't stupid, but problem-solving wasn't her strong suit. "So nicely dressed demons in a really sweet ride come into town, seemingly at random, hand out a bunch of this super-drug for nothing and then head out somewhere in the boonies." She looked over her shoulder and noticed that Chris was still facing away. "C'mon Chris, you don't need to be a prude," she chuckled. "How many times have you seen me naked?"

"Several ma'am," Chris replied, not changing his position at all.

Anya smiled. She didn't think that there were any real gentlemen left in the world. "Well, I'm done. Let's get back to the Den."

As they headed out towards the nearest entry point for the tunnels leading back home, Anya leaned against Chris and teased him outrageously, taking great comfort in making the big man blush. Robbie spent some time talking to Jane about her Talent and ways she might be able to use it. Jane felt something unusual . . . foreign . . . deep inside her. Pride. She had done something right tonight, and that made her smile.

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Several hours later . . .

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Jane was practicing manipulating her Talent, swinging around the Den and perfecting fine manipulation skills with her hair when the hunting party returned. They were dirty, some of them seemed to have been cut and were bleeding, and all of them seemed pissed as hell. And the most pissed off of them was quite obviously Red. Jane found it harder than she imagined not to run over and hold the beautiful warrior in her arms, but good sense told her this wasn't the time. So she approached with caution.

But while Jane was a whisper, Tarloh arrived with a bellow. "What the hell happened?" he asked.

Red was almost growling. "Apparently, we got too close. We followed Jane's lead and were roaming the woods East of town. We saw power lines leading off, but no one knew of any business out in that area. We decided to investigate, and apparently we tripped an alarm. We wound up in a fight, but they didn't seem nearly as organized. They were reacting, not attacking, and that means we were close. Damn it Tarloh, we were close!" Red had a wild-eyed look about her. "If it hadn't been for the wounded . . . I'll go back out on my own and . . ."

"No," Tarloh said firmly.

"For crying out loud Tarloh, you know . . ."

"What I 'know' is that you're angry and taking this really personally. You chewed out your own brother for going vigilante, so don't make the same mistake he did." Red looked like she was going to say something, but Tarloh cut her off. "No, and that's final. Go out again tomorrow when everyone is rested and you've calmed down."

Red stormed off, clenching her fists, and the crowd of people parted to let her pass. No one in his or her right mind fucked with Red when she was in that kind of mood.

Jane wanted to go after her, but she felt someone grabbing her arm.

"Don't," Talia said. "Give her a couple of minutes to calm down."

"But . . . shouldn't I . . ."

Talia grinned. "I know you want to help. But Red has one hell of a temper. She'll want you in her bed tonight, but don't go with her unless she's under control. It's always a bad idea to go to bed with someone's who's THAT pissed. Now why don't you go tell Tarloh about what you found out tonight?"

Jane walked over to the big man and found that Robbie, Chris and Anya were waiting for her. They discussed the evening's findings, including the effects of the drugs, the targeted clientele and their form of transportation.

"This is highly disconcerting," Tarloh said at last.

"Tell me about it," Jane whispered. "It's like there's something out there feeding on madness and . . ."

"Stop," Tarloh said. "What made you say that?"

Jane almost felt like she'd done something wrong. She looked back and forth between her three friends and each of them nodded his or her encouragement. "Well . . . we keep wondering why this 'dark thing' wants to drive people nuts as if . . . as if there's something else that comes after. We didn't see these crazy people turned into something or picked up or used to rob banks or anything like that. They just go crazy, and at some point they die," she added. "What if driving them crazy IS the point? Maybe whatever this thing is just wants them insane."