“Show her,” Trish says from behind my right shoulder. “Make the nasty little bitch remember who you are.”
“No Lily,” Anik says, his eyes wide. “They’re drawn by your creature…and my spirit…Shiori saved me…the bear is fond of her. I don’t know what he’ll do—”
“Holy fucking hell,” Trish spits. “So much for pack loyalty.”
The rotten wooden rafters holding the sidewalk up overhead creak as something very heavy moves over us. Shiori’s skin is fully plated, her cheeks elongating, the barbed antenna that swiped at me now four feet long, with several more sprouting from the back of her neck, each moving upward toward the skylight, waving in the air, scenting.
The reek of Stricken blood fills my nose.
My chest tightens in fury.
Trish is right.
Apparently I have a lot to learn about pack dynamics, and if I allow Shiori to undermine me now…next it will be Anik. “I’m going to ask you once more, Shiori,” I say, my voice very calm and controlled, “and then I’m going to show you why you need to obey when I command.”
Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know if I’m strong enough. Shiori and Connor are the only one’s among us that still seem close to their animals. Maybe Shiori knows that.
I feel like a fucking impostor, and suddenly I want nothing to do with any of them. My packmates. Connor. Even Trish. Suddenly all I want is to be on the back of Aaron’s bike, arms wrapped around his waist, feeling his muscles tense and leaning hard into the curves—
“Anik…” Pimniq says, her glance lifting to skylight as a shadow blocks the sun streaming into the tunnel.
“Shiori! Let’s move! Now!” I shriek, dropping my claws, summoning my creature’s wrath, grabbing the disrespecting little bitch by the neck and tearing her to the side as the skylight bursts in and glass shatters around us and a long, six-inch thick spike slams into the floor where Shiori was standing only a moment ago.
I saved her life. What a shame.
Shiori digs her barbed hind legs into my back as we thrash and struggle, her face twisted in a horrible half-insect howl.
I throw Shiori into the wall so hard the brick cracks and the roof shudders, and at the same time a Stricken drops into the dimly-lit corridor, shining in a ray of dusted sunlight, a horrible goat-lizard monster with a fan of colored feathers arcing from its shoulders and a long, curled tail that ends in a vicious stabbing spike.
Shiori sees the Stricken and lets go of me. Her back bends and snaps and a long, curving black stinger drops between her legs.
My creature’s furious, both at Shiori’s disobedience and the Stricken so close its scent is making me choke. My skin hisses and burns while I fight to keep her caged—
The goat-lizard sees us, lifts its head and looses a frenzied bellow.
Heavy thudding on the sidewalk above.
“He’s calling his bros!” Trish screams while Anik slams his bare fist into the Stricken’s face. The creature’s goat head whips to the side and smashes into the wall while its spiked lizard tail arcs around and slices through the air an inch from Pimniq’s neck.
“You’re too weak to call her,” Shiori says, turning to stare at me with her fractal insect eyes. She doesn’t sound angry. Or frightened. In fact she doesn’t sound anything…just…empty. “You’re too weak to lead.”
Shiori glances at me, then at Connor and Trish, and I know she’s scheming, calculating the odds of her challenging me right the fuck now and coming out ahead.
I snarl and unleash a little more of my animal.
A red-plated scorpion stinger unfolds over my head.
“Lily no!” Connor screams, leaping between me and Shiori.
“This way!” Wes yells, eyes wide as he tugs at me and Trish. “We gotta move, boss lady! Now!”
The goat-lizard lashes its tail out again, the spike whizzing past my head and slamming into the wall. My creature’s raging in her cage, demanding to be freed, but I know if I do I won’t be able to chain her and my son Lachlan will be lost.
She cares nothing for him.
He’s a Skin.
There’s only her animal will, her desire, her need.
If I loose her she’ll never let me back.
I lean forward and roar, inches from Shiori’s ugly plated face, and roar out a little heat, just enough to make the bitch understand who she’s fucking with.
Shiori withers from the white heat escaping my lips. He hair singes. She staggers a few steps back, lifts her hands in surrender, like she’s finally realized who’s boss and turns to face the fucking Stricken.
It’s not over between me and her.
Not by a long shot.
And something’s telling me I better heal and get whole real quick, because the first challenge to my alpha status is already here—
Connor smashes into the goat creature, only half-wolf, his powerful jaws snapping at the thing’s scaled neck. Black blood sprays across the corridor and for a moment I want this fight, this kill, want to feed on the Stricken’s sweet blood, but three more hideous animals leer down at us from the hole overhead, their jaws leaking spittle…and I know they have the same idea.
Eat or be eaten.
Anik and Pim are trapped in the narrow corridor behind Connor and the goat creature. Shiori’s flicking her barbed legs up at the Stricken piling around the hole.
“Anik!” I scream as Connor and the goat creature tumble to the floor in a blur of teeth and claw.
Anik leaps on the goat-lizard’s back, grabs its tail in both hands and somehow manages to wrap it around the thing’s neck, strangling it.
“Run!” Connor yells, slamming his clawed hand through the creature’s chest while Anik hops off the thing’s back and toward us.
But Pim’s standing frozen, pressed into the wall, her face pale and slick with sweat, mumbling something I can’t hear.
“Run Pim!” I scream again, and this time she startles and leaps over Connor and the dying goat-lizard as another Stricken, a hissing fanged monkey, drops into the corridor. The monkey lifts Connor by the throat and slams him into the wall, then stabs his clawed hand deep into Connor’s chest.
Connor’s eyes widen in shock.
The monkey creature hisses and spits in triumph.
A third Stricken drops into the corridor and leaps at Connor.
I choke back my fury. My creature’s raging in her cage, mad with blood-scent. She loathes me, despises my weakness and hesitation, hates that I’m stunned motionless, horrified, watching Connor sacrifice himself as Anik, Pim and Shiori race past me.
I can’t do this.
My creature’s right. Shiori’s right.
I’m not strong enough.
I’ve failed my pack.
Trish wraps her arms around my shoulders and pulls me a few steps down the corridor.
My world slows.
Connor slices into the monkey’s neck, nearly cutting its head off with a single swipe and I fight against Trish, almost lash out and open her wide and then three more Stricken drop from the street above and Connor looks at me and yells for me to go, that he has this covered—
The man who can’t decide if he loves hammock yoga or bonsai. The charming, arrogant, silly, carefree billionaire who can’t figure out what to do with his life. The guy who dropped a knee and fucking proposed to a former street kid named Lily.
The guy I almost loved.
A beautiful, flawed and fucked-up man.
Connor’s on his back now. Soft belly exposed to the brutal and bloody death spitting and snarling and barking over him—
But the Stricken aren’t murdering Connor Lerrick.
I’m murdering him. I failed him.
Anik and Wes join Trish in pulling me down the hall while the Stricken pounce on Connor. His wolf howls and wails in terror and fear and then he turns to me, looks me straight in the eye and shrieks, “Go Lily run please…go! I’m sorry please run!”
My heart shatters.
He’s apologizi
ng to me.
The Stricken bite and claw and cut into him, overtaken by their feeding frenzy.
Connor howls and thrashes against the monsters. He’s close to his wolf now, a beautiful animal with crystal-white fur with a patch of brown on his back and for an instant I wonder what it could have been like, Connor and me—
Claws and fangs dig deep into the wolf, opening his chest and silencing his howls.
I could call her. She could help. But the price she’d extract…we’d all perish.
“You gotta listen to him, Lil,” Trish screams in my ear. “You gotta listen, girl, and you gotta run.”
Bones snapping and sinewy muscle being shredded—
More Stricken drop down from the street.
They turn to us, eyes blazing with hunger and hatred.
Their roars echo down the corridor.
“Lily?” a tiny voice says.
Pimniq.
Waiting for me to lead. Waiting for me to make the call.
I glance at Connor once more. He meets my eyes. Tries to smile through the pain. Then he lashes out, kicks one of the tunnel’s support columns. The wood buckles and cracks, then gives way. The ceiling collapses, crushing Connor and the Stricken in a mountain of rock and concrete and blocking the tunnel.
“Connor!” I cry while Trish and Anik grip my elbows to keep me from running to the rubble and pawing through it. Dust fills my lungs and nose, stings my eyes and I can’t hold this grief, there’s nowhere for me to put it, first my son Lachlan, then Aaron and now Connor, and suddenly I despise myself, truly and completely, because all of this is my fault, if it wasn’t for me—
“No, Lil,” Anik says. “It’s his fault. Vuk’s. Our brother’s. Not yours.”
Vuk. My brother. A new hatred is being born in me—
“There’s an army of the motherfuckers,” Trish yells. “That rock won’t hold them long.” Then she takes my head in her hands and says, “He’s done, Lil. Connor’s gone.”
“This way, boss lady,” Wes says, slipping through a drainage hole in the corridor. “This way and don’t look back.”
CHAPTER SIX
SHIORI
THE RISEN ALPHA is weak.
Perhaps her creature is strong. But the woman Lily? No.
There is a deadly weakness in her.
A weakness this pack cannot afford.
We have arrived at the end of days.
I now understand Priest Gabriel and the Guardians did not lie to us Accepted about everything. They mixed truth and lie. But they did not lie about the end of days. The scent of blood, both black and red, hangs heavy in the Absent Land. The reek of madness and destruction. There will be a war to end species.
Stricken. Pureblood. Risen. Skin.
One or many will be extinguished.
This Lily woman isn’t strong enough to lead this pack in war.
Even Anik sees it. I can tell by the way he looks at her. His beautiful brown eyes lowered because he knows she’ll fail us. My poor Anik! I think about the days we spent together in the freezing wind and snow-draped forest. How he carried me across his strong shoulders. How it felt when he kissed me when we were dying, only once but perfect and…happy in that brief kiss on the icy riverbank. I know he desires to kiss me again, but his young sister is here, and we’re surrounded by treacherous strangers.
There’s no place for us to be together and happy.
But soon. Maybe we’ll be alone together.
Rid of these strangers.
Already the woman Lily’s weakness has killed the wolf-man Connor.
She should have let me feed on the Stricken. That was also a mistake. The hunger is a brutal ache in my belly. I could have called the biting swarm. Stripped the black-blooded of their flesh. Feasted on their hearts.
Who will die next, Anik is wondering as we stalk through the dimly lit corridor. He’s hoping it’s him. Then me. Anyone but Pimniq. He sought the All Encompassing out. Brought his little sister to this evil city and this failing pack. And now?
Weakness. Suffering. Death.
I’m shuffling my feet along the corridor. Anik keeps trying to hurry me along.
Such a good boy, my Anik.
My neck is still sore from where the fuck Lily gripped me. I will admit to feeling fear when she unleashed her animal’s roaring heat. But I’m beginning to suspect something. Perhaps the All Encompassing is not my alpha.
Perhaps there is another.
Anik wants to be loyal. Wants to be true. These are his ideas of himself. But I see it in his eyes when he looks directly at me, which is too rarely now. He’s looking for a way to keep his little sister safe, but his stubbornness and sense of duty prevents him from fleeing and joining me.
I have no sense of duty.
She will not keep me.
I will not bend to her.
But how to make poor Anik understand that abandoning this failing alpha isn’t betrayal?
Self-preservation is never wrong, no matter the cost.
Survival is all that matters. Living on while others die.
This is the only test of a life. This is natural law. We are being hunted. There is no room during the End of Days for ridiculous things the Skins call loyalty and duty and friendship and love. Friendship and love are only valuable if they assist us in our will to survive.
A true leader understands this.
The question for now is: do I abandon this woman Lily to die, or do I challenge her for alpha?
Either way, the thoughts make an excited, high-pitched buzz rise in the back of my throat.
***
I will admit that even though I am the Plague, the All Consuming, the Sun Smotherer, the Black Dawn, when the stinking Skin called Wes leads us up a rotting wooden ladder and into the daylight my breath catches in my throat.
We’re outside the city the Skins named Seattle, on a slope looking west over the city and the rolling blue-grey ocean, in a neighborhood that must have once been considered affluent and beautiful.
It’s still beautiful to me.
“Jesus mother of…oh my god,” the Skin woman Trish stammers when she emerges from the tunnels, her dark skin slick with sweat. I resist the urge to slip my stinger through her eye and into her brain. So quick. A half a second and she’s gone.
Death comes easily to Skins.
Their one purpose is to die while the strong live on.
Many nearby houses are on fire. Below us, toward the ocean, most of the city is on fire. Dark columns of smoke rise from the tallest buildings, plumes whirling into the sky like desperate messages to cruel gods. Seeing the smoke and flames makes me smile.
We are surrounded by the dead.
They lie scattered in this pretty neighborhood like they fell from the sky. In a thousand years, when their bodies are buried in mud and dirt, the strongest species will dig up the bones of these dead and study what they were doing when they died. ‘Look here,’ they will say. ‘This human died while trying to enter his vehicle. This one died on her front lawn, holding her two young children in her arms. This one died by his own hand, with a crude weapon called a shotgun.’
There’s a dead person lying on the ground beside me, a woman of my age with pretty blonde hair, her chest torn open.
I brush my toe against the dead woman’s hand.
She doesn’t move.
A few leaves are caught in her pretty blonde hair.
I remember wishing I could have hair like that, when I was a small child in Tokyo. The big screens hanging over the streets in the shopping district showed us smiling Western girls with glowing blonde hair. I was young and small.
The blonde girls on the screens looked like giant angels.
But they were not angels.
I lean down beside the blonde and dead woman. There’s dirt caked under fingernails. A caterpillar, grey and pale blue, inches along her forearm.
This is what we are: mud and dirt and nothing more.
“We need to keep moving,” Lily says as A
nik lifts Pim out of the tunnel and I reach down to hold Pim’s hand. Pim presses into me but does not cover her eyes from seeing the dead.
She’s strong, this young Inuit girl.
What to do with her, when I no longer need her?
Anik emerges from the tunnels, also pale and sweating. He sees the death and the frown he always wears deepens. His sadness makes my heart feel heavy.
Sweet Anik.
Trish settles heavily onto a bench at the side of the street, leans forward, cups her head in her hands, rubs her forehead, looks at Lily and says, “Where? We can’t outrun this, Lily. It’s everywhere, right? You said so yourself. The End of Days. Even the moon’s fucking fucked. It’s like this…across the whole world, isn’t? Madness? Chaos? Destruction?”
Trish’s voice breaks. She wipes tears from her eyes.
I want to tear out her beating heart.
It’s like this, yes, I want to say, because your kind is filthy and weak.
Lily puts her hand on Trish’s shoulder and says, “There’s still a way to stop him. Trust me.”
“Trust you?” Trish says, her voice rising in anger. “It’s too late, Lil! You can’t stop this! You’re too late. Look! It’s a fucking bloodbath! The city’s on fire…my god…the entire city’s burning…”
Lily looks at Anik, then at me, like she expects us to say something that will help her friend feel better.
Anik and I say nothing.
We both know Trish is already like the woman at my feet: mud and dirt.
Lying won’t change that.
Lily’s face assumes an expression I’ve come to despise: a lost, why-me sad face.
The garbage-strewn neighborhood is quiet except for a few blaring car alarms and a dog barking madly in a yard. Even the idiot dog understands what our so-called alpha does not: some animals are born to die early in life.
“We need a car…” Lily says, looking around wildly.
“Can’t drive, boss lady,” Wes says. “Road’s all blocked up. Everyone loaded up their families and expensive things in their cars. Thought they’d drive to the hills. Escape the city. Traffic jams stopped that real quick, then the creatures fell on everyone just sitting in their cars like they was warm-blooded meals-on-wheels.”
The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3) Page 7