I lift my head and scent, but I might as well be breathing through a rag.
This human thing. It’s complete shit.
I decide to follow a narrow ravine that winds east. There’s a rough dirt road, more like a dirt track barely wide enough for an ATV, that parallels the ravine up on the ridge. This is cattle ranching country. Somewhere out here there’s a house. Maybe a few Skins to murder and rob.
Fuck it. These are end days. The First Fallen is Becoming.
A guy’s gotta do—
I round a sharp bend in the ravine and freeze. Twenty yards ahead the dirt track switchbacks down to the ravine bottom and winds along the shore of the riverbed. There, in the middle of the track, is a bobcat as large as a Rottweiler, pawing and scratching at the ground. It’s movements are hurried. Even frenzied. Like it’s possessed.
There’s no wind.
The cat doesn’t notice or scent me, or if it does it doesn’t care. Its fur is balding and spotty, like a dog with mange. It’s biting and gnawing at the dirt, scratching away, and the awful sound carries down the ravine.
Scritch-scratch.
Scritch-scratch.
The hair on my neck stands on end. I realize I’m standing out in the open like a dumbass, fully lit by the red moon. I eye the shadowed ravine bank. It’s only five yards away. But I’m still animal enough to know if I move the cat will hear me for sure.
I gotta laugh. Not long ago I’d have charged this little kitty and had him for lunch. Now I’m frozen in fear, not able to move or stay still. I try and drop my fangs and claws, hoping the fear will bring my wolf.
No dice. Fucker’s still playing hard to get.
The bobcat continues scratching at the ground. It’s really fucking interested in something. Dirt flies up from the hole. The cat has a stumpy little tail and pointed ears. If I was an idiot I might say its cute.
But its not. Its a predator.
Sick in the head, from the look of things. Driven insane by something.
And very, very dangerous.
Behind the cat the dirt track tunnels through a spindly aspen stand, and there, tucked tight against the side of the ravine, is an old, half-rotten miner or rancher’s cabin.
Might be clothes in that cabin.
Maybe even food and water.
Fuck sakes.
Slowly, carefully, I bend down and pick up two grapefruit-sized rocks. One’s for throwing, hopefully frightening the fuck out of the crazy cat and sending him scurrying off.
The other one’s for bashing its brains in if it charges.
I feel a bit better with a weapon in my hand.
It’s not a Glock, but it’ll do.
I take a long breath, still creeped out by the way the thing keeps pawing at the dirt.
There’s something unnatural about its movements.
Something desperate.
Then I take two long steps forward, putting me within striking distance, cock my arm back, and hurl the fucking rock.
Before the rock’s even left my hand the bobcat whirls at me, snarling and hissing, and when the moonlight hits its black fangs and glowing pale blue eyes you can bet your ass I wish I had that Glock—
CHAPTER TWO
LILY
“HOPE YOU DON’T feel as bad as you look, girl.”
I open my eyes to blackness.
Panic grips my throat. I’m blind.
I don’t know if the Dog God stole my eyesight or if my animal did it in her rage after I caged her. The details are blurry. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Either way…it sucks shitballs.
I sense Trish sitting beside me, muster a thin smile and the strength to say, “I feel worse than I look,” then listen to the sound of water dripping in the near distance. The air is cool and smells of bleach or industrial cleaning fluid. I have no idea where I am, and I’m too exhausted to care. Truth is I’m kind of shocked to discover I’m still alive. “Feels like…I got hit by a fucking asteroid,” I say, aiming for humor but instead sounding straight-up tired and afraid.
Aaron of the Mountain River.
My last memory of my bloodmate is the reek of his burning flesh.
I murdered him.
He deserved it.
“Water?” I croak.
Trish presses a bottle to my parched lips. I slurp greedily until Trish pulls the bottle away, tisking, telling me to take it slow.
“You want to talk about it?”
I shake my head no.
Trish presses her palm to my forehead. “You’re still burning up. I keep waiting for this fever to break.”
“Not sure it will.”
“No. Me either.”
“He deserved it,” I say, not really to Trish but just needing to hear the words spoken out loud.
“Yeah,” Trish says quietly.
“You don’t think so?”
“I think…a lot happened. I think—”
“Say what you need to say, Trish. You think I fucked up.” I close my eyes. No sense having them open if I can’t see. A bead of sweat drips down my forehead and over my cheek. I lift my hand and wipe it away as if it were a tear. The sheets beneath me are soaked. “Maybe I did. Fuck up.”
“We’re alone, Lil,” Trish says. “There’s no one. So if there’s anything—”
I bite my lip, afraid of the torrent of emotion threatening to break free. I don’t want to talk. About anything. I want to tell Trish to piss off. I want to sleep. Rest. But there’s so much…bullshit broiling inside. Working through my blood like poison. And maybe this sickness I feel? You know how what’s in our hearts and minds can manifest in the body? In actual physical illness? Maybe that’s what’s happening to me with the blindness and fever, and so I say: “I remember…you know? That first night? In the Wilds? How when he rode by…my world just stopped. Like someone hit pause. I remember thinking…ha! What a juvenile idiot. Cruising on that bike like he’s all that. Then he sharked me at pool. Asshole! And then…the shoot-up and everything else. It’s all been…boom! Boom! So fast. And I realized…when I found out what he did…to my mother? That I don’t even really know him. Right? I mean he’s a total fucking stranger. An outlaw biker Prez asshole. I guess I got carried away. By the rush. I just lost my center, you know?”
“Yeah. I get that, Lil. I see that.”
“But it says something.”
“About what?”
“About me.”
There’s a long silence. I’m roasting. My skin feels on fire. “Where are we? A fucking sauna? Is there a…fan or AC?” I say, my tone not friendly at all.
“No,” Trish says with a pause like she’s going to say more. Then she says: “What is it, Lil? What’s it say about you?”
“Fuck if I know.”
That makes me smile bitterly. Now I even sound like him sometimes. “It says I never had a center to begin with. Says I don’t even know myself.” I loose a quick, unhappy laugh. “Twenty-four years old and I don’t even know myself. Because if I did know who I am…I would never have put myself…or you…or my—”
Sons. I almost say sons. I would never have put my sons in this situation. My eldest boy, Lachlan. Abducted and missing. And another child, my unborn—
I shake my head, banishing the thought.
Some things are too painful to remember.
But there’s a part of me that wonders if I dreamed it all. The Doberman-faced Dog God. The Bloodless Land. Even my animal. Was it all a feverish fucking dream? Oh god, let that be it. Let me be waking up from that nightmare right now. Maybe I got shot…hurt on the job. Stabbed by a junkie. Yeah. I’ve been in hospital for weeks. Jacked on painkillers. All the deep, dark, hidden subconscious shit floating around in my unmoored dream-mind like mental sludge—
“You’re feasting on it,” Trish says. “It’s not helping.”
She presses a damp cloth to my forehead.
“Trish?” I ask, my voice breathless with fear.
“Yeah?”
“Have I been dream
ing?”
“About?”
“Everything? All of it?”
Trish sighs. “Tell me what you think you’ve been dreaming.”
“It’s gunna sound…fucking crazy.”
“There’s no one, Lil,” Trish repeats. “No one at all. And even if there was…I wouldn’t hand you over to the head doctors.”
Like they did with my father? I almost say.
But for some reason I don’t. Something in how Trish keeps saying there’s no one. Like she means not only in this room, but…anywhere.
“Did I dream about animals? Monsters hidden beneath our skins? Did I dream about…Al Kusch? A man…a wolf…I’m not sure? And an animal inside me? A creature that wants me killed? That wants everything killed? Please tell me I was dreaming. About having to fight something evil…and the moon rising red?” I reach out and grip Trish’s hand, squeeze it hard. “Please tell me! Tell me I was dreaming.”
Trish’s voice is grim. She’s fighting back tears. “That’s all real, Lil. All of it. You’re not dreaming.”
I nod and turn away.
It was worth a shot.
But I’m a little relieved it’s not a nightmare. Because if it was…that would mean I dreamed my bloodmate as well. I want him to be real. Need him to be real. Because…I don’t think I’m finished with him.
Not yet.
My gut’s telling me he’s still alive.
I shiver, sweating but suddenly ice cold, then tug a blanket up under my chin and say: “I remember riding with Aaron through the mountains. It’s a ridiculous memory. Total sappy bullshit. But it was real. For a moment it was real. That’s what kills me, Trish. Even though he’s a douchebag, and even though I’m a fucking emotional infant…what we had was real. That’s what makes it so hard. If he was just a fuck, a one-nighter, I’d have already forgotten him. I wouldn’t feel this—”
“Guilt.”
“Yeah. Guilt. And regret. And…fucking loss, right? And the question. The fucking question! Over and over in my head. What if things had been different? What if…none of that other horrible shit happened? What if it was just me and him? Would we have had…you know…a future together?”
“You’re a cop. What’s your gut say?”
“That I’m about to vomit.”
Trish laughs. “Bucket?”
I shake my head no and think on Trish’s question. After a while I say: “My gut says yes. In spite of me not even knowing him. In spite of everything. My gut says yeah, we might’ve had a future.”
Trish whistles through her teeth. “I’m sorry, Lil. That must make it harder. To forget.”
Forget.
I know I’m going to have to forget. Or at least try damn hard to. Because otherwise this’ll eat me up from the inside. But the trouble is: “I don’t want to forget,” I say, my voice cool and hard. “I want to remember everything. Forever. No matter how much it hurts.”
“Torturing yourself, girl.”
“No. Learning from my mistakes. Trying to find out who I really am. What’s the point of having your heart broke if you don’t learn from it?”
My hand slips across my belly.
“What makes you think that, Lil?” Trish asks.
Damn. I’d forgotten how observant she is.
“What always does?” I answer.
“Could be the stress.”
“Stress,” I say, managing a sarcastic shrug. “What stress?”
Trish laughs, and the sound makes me yearn for a time—less than two weeks ago, unless I’ve been unconscious for days—when my biggest worry was not pissing off Detective Sandra Bernard and passing my homicide exams.
Fuck.
Life changes in a hurry when you fall in love with a wolfman and discover you have an ancient apex predator living inside you.
Someone knocks on a door. Loud. Insistent.
“What?” Trish yells. Then to me: “It all right if they come in?”
I can’t quite remember who ‘they’ is, but I nod and Trish yells for whoever it is to come inside.
A heavy door opens and closes. A few people shuffle into the room.
No one says a word.
I push thoughts of Aaron ‘One-Eight-Seven’ Arud to the back of my mind.
Lesson fucking learned, thank you very much.
I got other shit to focus on.
“Star?” I ask, remembering her beautiful red-gold hair and the eagle she truly was. And her father, August Lerrick, feeding on his daughter’s beating black heart.
“Gone,” Trish says.
Sadness sweeps over me. I didn’t know Star well. Didn’t even really like her. But this senseless death: “When will it stop?” I whisper out loud, without meaning to.
“When the First Fallen is vanquished,” a male voice answers. Haughty. Arrogant. But now hollow and exhausted and subdued by grief.
Connor Lerrick. Star’s brother.
My on-again off-again.
“I’m sorry, Connor,” I say, remembering a terrible image of Star’s black heart cupped in her father’s crystal claws. “She wasn’t…the Bloodless Land? I couldn’t save her.”
“Can you feel her, Lil?” Connor asks from somewhere in the darkness. “Your…creature?”
I turn my attention inward.
She’s there. Restless. Hungry.
But all I tell him is yes, I feel her.
Connor sighs with an odd mix of relief and fear.
Then I remember the others. My Risen packmates. My brother and sister. “Anik? Shiori?”
“We’re here,” Anik’s soft voice answers.
“I’m glad,” I say. And it’s the truth.
“I’m here too!”
A young girl’s voice.
“Pimniq?” I say, a smile spreading across my face. I try to sit up, but a sharp pain in my belly makes me wince and settle back down. Whatever I’m lying on is cold and hard. “Would you mind holding my hand, Pimniq?”
A child’s hand slips into mine, and in my mind’s eye I see ocean tides swelling over stone seawalls, swamping cities and leaving piles of dead fish and kelp and seaweed in their wake. I see desperate, wide-eyed people crowding the interstates, fleeing the swelling oceans, only to be caught by whirling firestorms sweeping down from the mountains with unnatural speed and intensity.
I let Pimniq’s hand go and say, “Where are we?”
“In the basement of Seattle General Hospital,” Trish says quietly.
“The basement? Why?”
“We took you here when…after you brought us back…and—”
“Did you burn him?” I interrupt, my voice hardening. “Did you make sure?”
“He fell into the ocean, Lil,” Trish says. “Disappeared.”
My throat tightens. “Not Aaron. August. Your fucking father, Connor? Did you burn him?”
“Yes,” Connor says. “My father is dead.”
I nod, then reach out, grip Trish’s hand and say, “Tell me.”
“You were bleeding, Lil. From—”
“My womb.”
“Yes,” Trish whispers.
I remember. And fuck sakes I wish I didn’t.
The Dog God. Opiyelguabiran. My creature’s betrothed.
In exchange for bringing my packmates back from the Bloodless Land he stole my unborn child. Aaron’s unborn child.
Grief and regret and self-loathing rip through me. Tears slip down my cheeks as I fight the urge to shriek, and when I’ve held it all in, when I’m sure I’m not going to explode in a violent, hysterical rage I say, “I have a child born before this madness. A nine year old boy. His name is Lachlan. He was abducted by the Guardians of the Gate—by your father, Connor—on the same night I was. I intend to find him.”
There’s a long silence, then Connor says, “Lily, we need to find your fourth packmate. Your brother. I know what city he’s in. Star and I were—”
“You know an awful lot, for a guy who didn’t even know his father was a fucking butcher,” Trish snarls.
“Then what?” I say, half expecting him to have an answer.
“I don’t know,” Connor says, the defeat clear in his voice. “I don’t know what happens then. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe the Stricken have already grown too strong. But we have to do something. Can you walk? We can’t stay here much longer. Soon either the Stricken or hordes of panicked Skins are going to burst through these doors. We need to leave. Now.”
“Leave?” I ask. “You mean…travel to Mexico City?”
“Yes,” Connor says.
“I’m not leaving Seattle without my one living son,” I say in a tone to close the matter.
“Lil, we—”
“Enough!” I shriek, finally losing my cool. “You want to find Rodas? Then fucking find him. Bring him to me. If he’s so important. I don’t even trust you, Connor. You were wrong about your father being the First Fallen. Wrong! We almost…he…oh my god! You have no idea. And where are we now? In a fucking basement while the world dies. Do you know where Vuk is? Do you know who he is? Huh? Answer me! Do you know who the First Fallen is? Do you know anything of any use at all?”
“Only that we need Rodas to defeat the Fallen.”
“Then fuck you. I’m finished listening to you. My pack will find my son. Then at least I can go to my grave…” the tears begin again, and this time there’s no stopping them, they slam into me with hurricane force, and then I’m sobbing, chest shuddering and voice cracking, because my sons are gone, one abducted and one stolen from my womb, and I murdered my bloodmate and now there’s no one to turn to, no one who knows—
Which is when I remember my father again.
Wil Thompson the lunatic.
His mad, paranoid ravings and delusions after my mother was murdered. Monsters hiding beneath human skins. Preying on the living.
The crazy asshole was right all along.
The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3) Page 2