The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3)

by Daniels, May Ellis

  And perhaps a little angry.

  I thrash against him, but he holds me fast, and the way he’s holding me against my will makes warmth flood through my midsection.

  Poor Anik.

  He should have held me hard like this when there was love between us.

  We could have been lovers. Bloodmates.

  “Dead?” Earl asks, his eyes never leaving the forest.

  “Yeah,” the fourth man says.

  “How?”

  “Not sure.”

  “The fucking wasp! It’s the wasps,” Steven says, panic mounting in his voice. “There’s one here it’s here the freaks they’ve found us—”

  “Quiet!” his father barks, then he points his gun at me and Anik and commands his son to stuff the gags in our mouth. Steven follows orders. He approaches me cautiously. I open my mouth wide for him. He cringes, then quickly fill my mouth with the cotton gag, careful not to touch his skin to mine.

  This boy. He senses something. He might be the smartest of them all—

  “You two!” Earl says. “Out front. Quick now! Keep moving. That’s it!”

  We abandon the dead body and push through the dark forest for a few more minutes. The forest becomes more dense, the branches low and tight, obscuring our vision and slowing us down.

  Anik leans down, points to something.

  Earl shuffles over. “What is it?”

  Anik mumbles something through the gag.

  “Fuck,” Earl says, sweat streaming down his face. He reaches down and tugs the gag from Anik’s mouth. “Not a sound. Or I swear I’ll put a bullet in your head.

  Anik turns to study the ground again.

  I wonder if he can scent the Stricken.

  I lift my nose to the air and sniff.

  Yes. They’re out there. Scenting us down.

  We’re being hunted.

  Anik gestures at the ground and whispers. “We’re on some kind of animal trail. See? Branches bent back? Grass worn down? And there? Scat. Lots of it.”

  “Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck,” Steven says, blinking against the sweat pouring into his eyes.

  Earl casts his son a scathing glance and tells us to keep moving.

  An animal screeches in the distance. Steven whirls at the sound. There’s a click and a flash of blinding light and the booming roar of machine gun fire as the boy unleashes a full clip into the night forest.

  His face, lit by the firing weapon, is a mask of stark terror.

  “You little idiot!” Earl hisses when the bullets stop and Steven’s rifle begins to click. “You fucking fool. Do you know what you’ve done? Do you? You’ve—”

  “Earl!” Anik says from a few yards ahead.

  Earl ignores Anik, points his finger at his son and says, “Give me the rifle.”

  “No, father, I—”

  “Give me the rifle!” Earl screams.

  Steven’s shoulders slump. He looks at the ground, then at the soldiers behind him, then slowly hands his father the weapon.

  Earl snatches the rifle from his son’s grasp and slings it over his shoulder. “That gunfire will be heard for miles. You’re to blame if anything happens,” he says. “If anyone else dies. It’s on your idiot head.”

  I take a few slow steps toward Anik, push through a tangle of undergrowth and emerge into a clearing ringed with massive boulders. The clearing’s maybe thirty yards wide. The moon’s cloud-filtered light shines down, bathing the clearing in crimson.

  “Would you look at that,” Earl breathes as he steps into the clearing beside me.

  The entire clearing is filled with the beautiful pole-pyramid structures. There must be fifty of them. Some are nearly three stories high, tied together with scavenged rope and cable and electrical cord. Some lean against one another, forming a web of interconnected structures.

  Steven moans, drops to his knees, empties his stomach in the dirt.

  Dead Skins are everywhere. Suspended in twos and threes from the pyramids. Arranged in orderly rows in the moss below. Piled in heaps as tall as a man. All headless, their chests torn open and their hearts removed.

  I’ve never seen anything so marvelous.

  “So many dead,” Earl says, his voice shaking for the first time since we’ve met.

  I take a slow step into the clearing.

  “How many? A hundred?” Steven asks.

  “More,” Anik says, his face grim. He points at the structures, then says, “Look at their heads. All facing the same direction. North.”

  “Father please! We have to turn around. Run! Please? Admah will listen! Once she sees this she’ll know—”

  I glide deeper into the clearing. My skin buzzes and hums with an uncontainable energy. My creatures ripple right beneath me, and for a moment I wonder if Earl and the rest can see the creatures that live inside, and then I realize I no longer care, because the structure is speaking to me.

  The ugly little man Mia called the professor was only partly right.

  The structures aren’t simply road signs marking the way.

  They’re an ancient language.

  His language.

  I step over a decapitated corpse, and how it’s arranged to the corpse beside it forms a shape, and another and another, and as I enter the pyramids the shapes coalesce into a three-dimensional vision written in blood and sacrifice.

  And triumph.

  “Shiori?” Anik says, his voice uncertain.

  Poor, silly Anik.

  He can’t read death’s ageless language. He’s as blind and helpless as these decapitated Skins. Wandering lost and afraid through the forest.

  Unable to understand the truth written right in front of him.

  But I can read this truth.

  This is my truth. My place.

  I step into the middle of the towering pyramid constructions. Corpses sway in a strengthening breeze, wooden poles creaking under their weight. I lift my head and peer through the pyramids and into the sky, and for a moment the grey clouds part to reveal glittering stars, and then the energy building in me concentrates in my groin and heart and throat, a power beyond any I’ve ever imagined, and in the swaying structures and shapes arranged to form symbols I read the history of the future.

  My future.

  The future is a vast, empty desert.

  Wind-scoured rocks and stinging red sand.

  A cruel sun that never sets. Water more precious than gold.

  I’m looking out over this vast, empty plain from somewhere high above the sun-baked ground. At first I believe I’m flying, but there are massive stone blocks under my feet and I realize I’m standing naked atop a stone pyramid so large it lifts me nearly to the sun. A narrow set of steep stairs is carved into the pyramid. The steps are slick with red blood, and as my eyes trace down to the base of the pyramid I see the lifeless bodies of those who have offered themselves to me, and a long line of more faithful snaking far into the distant desert.

  The faithful have dug a moat around the pyramid.

  Red blood runs down the pyramid steps and drains into the moat.

  The faithful have travelled long to pay their respects in blood. Crawling through burning sand on all fours. Their hearts thrumming, their blood pounding in that odd mix of terror and ecstasy called religious fervor.

  Only We Who Rule are permitted to walk upright in one another’s presence.

  Only We Who Rule are permitted speak in one another’s presence.

  This is natural law.

  The bodies of the faithful are piled high against the pyramid, a mountain of decaying flesh, and when I see them I breathe deep. The cloying scent of rot fills my nose, making me smile.

  This is my home. A pyramid ringed by a moat of blood.

  My temple.

  One of the faithful wades through the moat, then carefully crawls over the decaying bodies piled at the base of my pyramid and up the blood-slick stairs. The man’s face is blank and calm and peaceful. His eyes are softly focused and serene. He’s naked, his body pai
nted in red ochre and black coal patterns.

  He has prepared himself for this sacred death.

  The man arrives at the pyramid’s uppermost level. Sinks to his knees. Reaches his fingers out, slow, reverent, and caresses the edge of the top step, his fingers tracking though the blood. He keeps his eyes downcast, but I notice him peeking out over the desert plain, marveling at the last view he’ll ever see in this world.

  Suddenly, from close behind me, a child cries.

  My heart fills with joy.

  My firstborn.

  This sacrifice is a celebration.

  I turn and see my infant child lying on a stone altar, swaddled in black robes. I walk to him, lift him into my arms, my antennae clicking, my multifaceted, fractal eyes shining in the harsh sunlight.

  My child.

  “Why is my son crying?”

  A man’s voice. Hard. Ruthless. Imperial.

  I lift my head and stare at the speaker. The man is tall and lean, with a powerful jaw and burning black eyes and dark, straight hair that hangs just below his ears. His face is painted in yellow and black stripes. He’s naked, his muscular body covered in small yellow and black tattoos that look like flowers or stars.

  The Lord of Near and Nigh.

  My brother. My bloodmate.

  Rodas.

  “He’s hungry,” I say, my voice clicking and singing through my insect throat.

  “Then feed him,” Rodas says, walking to the living sacrifice perched at the edge of our platform. Rodas lifts his hand over the sacrifice’s head. His hand dissolves into swirling black smoke, and a second later a shining black blade appears.

  The sacrifice trembles and moans like one does when joined with a lover for the first time.

  Rodas brings the swirling smoke-blade onto the sacrifices neck.

  Gently.

  Not so much a blow but a caress.

  The sacrifice’s head tumbles onto the blood-stained stones at Rodas’ feet.

  Rodas lifts the offering’s head and flings it from the pyramid. It arcs into the sky, then smashes into the stairs and tumbles into the pile of decaying bodies far below.

  “Bring my son to me,” Rodas commands.

  I hesitate. Only for an instant.

  No one commands me. Not now. Not ever again.

  Rodas’ face ripples. Black fangs descend from his upper jaw.

  My antennae click and snap, their razor-sharp barbs slicing though the air inches above my bloodmate’s head.

  Rodas smiles, hesitates, then lifts his arms in a gesture of conciliation.

  When he speaks his voice is softer, less demanding.

  “As you wish, my All Consuming,” Rodas says with a shrug.

  My firstborn’s cries ring loud in my ears.

  I carry my infant son to the dead offering’s prone body. Set him down. My son’s face shifts, going black, then smokey grey, then animal-like, then finally his eyes fracture and a long curving jaw opens and he wriggles from the black swaddling and onto the offering’s chest.

  Rodas steps beside me.

  Takes my hand in his.

  Our newborn son burrows his face into the offering’s chest, biting and gnawing through the human’s ribcage. He struggles against his kill’s hard sternum, crying and straining, his body changing rapidly from cat-like to insectile to shifting back smoke.

  “He hasn’t mastered who he is,” Rodas says, watching his son with a mix of pride…and something else. Fear? Suspicion?

  Yes. Suspicion. Apprehension.

  One day our son will climb these steps and murder us to claim his place as alpha of our empire.

  That is natural law. The strong survive. This son will grow stronger than either Rodas or I, and one day he will ascend to claim what’s rightfully his.

  There’s a sharp cracking sound as our son pierces the sacrifice’s sternum and finds the heart hidden within.

  “Give him time,” I say as my son feeds.

  “What shall we name him?”

  I’m about to answer when the sky darkens. A flock of black-winged carrion birds, so large it blots out the sun, swoops from the sky. The birds dive toward us. A million screeching blood-fed birds, hooked beaks dripping blood, eyes gleaming, led by a giant vulture with ram’s horn’s sprouting from its head.

  I stand perched atop the blood-slick stairs as the carrion birds dive toward me and my family, and when I lift my hands the birds break left and right, whirling around the pyramid, circling around us, a spinning gyre of death darkening the sky, casting whirling shadows, and in the screeching of the carrion flock a child’s voice emerges, a high-pitched voice speaking through the beating wings and shrieking beaks of a million flesh-eating birds, and the voice says to me: “Join the One We are Slave To. Join the Night Stalker. The Lord of Near and Nigh.”

  The pyramid vision vanishes.

  My brother and bloodmate Rodas is gone.

  My beautiful infant son. Gone.

  There’s only me alone, standing in the forest clearing under swaying poles and swinging corpses, surrounded by enemies I’ve mistaken for friends.

  Surrounded by weakness, cowardice and deceit.

  I blink, trying to hold on to the image of my precious son feeding.

  “Lead your Risen packmates to the Pyramid of the Sun,” a child’s voice says through the beating wings of the carrion flock as it fades from my mind. “Lead them to me.”

  Then the voice is gone.

  A shudder of devotion and faith burns through my blood, and suddenly I understand where I must be.

  What I must do.

  I too have purpose.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  AARON

  I LOWER MY Glock and peer around the shipping container. The high-powered fluorescent lights that usually light up Tacoma’s shipyards have been shot out. The yard smells of steel and engine oil and the musky reek of low tide.

  And something else. Stricken.

  “You scent that?” I ask.

  “Hell yeah,” Blue rumbles. His animal’s half unleashed: Blue’s usually boyish face is broad with plates of bone, his jaws distended and his fangs shining in the darkness. There’s no one I’d rather have at my back during a raid, except maybe my brother Sorry, and that’s not gunna happen ever again.

  I clench my hands on the Glock and survey the shipyard.

  Cold metal bites into my skin.

  I’m a bundle of barely-contained violent energy. I take a deep breath and try to reign my animal in. I fucking hate waiting.

  I gesture for the MC to split into two. Blue heads off with one group to cover our flank while Nash and Tate stay at my side. I count to ten, listening, scenting, scoping shit out. Then something catches my eye. Motion in the operator’s box of a container crane high overhead.

  Something’s up there. Watching.

  A guard.

  Good thing I was patient.

  This old dog’s learning new tricks.

  There’s nearly a half mile of open concrete to cross before we reach the warehouses where I’m betting the Sin Crew is holed up. Plenty of time for a skilled sniper or two to take out half my guys as we race across the exposed terrain.

  I lean into the shadows beside the shipping container and tell Tate to go take out the guard in the crane.

  “Flick your Zippo three times when it’s clear,” I say to the reptile bastard. “Then stay up there and cover us when we move.”

  Tate nods, slips as close to his full reptile form as his iron collar will permit, a black Komodo dragon twice as long as a man is tall, then slinks off into the night, nearly invisible in the blackness.

  “He’s fucking prehistoric, that one,” Nash breathes.

  I flash my VP a wide grin and settle against the cold shipping container, wishing we’d found more heavy artillery at the Satan’s Spawn roadhouse saloon. I could use a decent assault rifle in my hands instead of this fucking pistol.

  My animal’s howling. Pacing. Begging to be set free.

  Nash had bett
er be right about these docks being the Sin’s stronghold.

  I count to sixty, then a hundred twenty, then three hundred. A chill traces down my spine, making my hackles rise.

  What’s taking Tate so fucking long?

  A warm wind picks up, blowing off the rising Pacific. That’s good. We’re upwind from whatever’s in the warehouses beside the moored ships.

  Patience. The stalker’s greatest asset.

  But I’m a wolf. Born to move.

  The waiting’s fucking killing me.

  I’m about to say fuck it and spring from behind the container and rush the fucking warehouses and so what if we lose a few MC when Nash taps me on the shoulder. A set of headlights appears in the entrance to the shipyards behind us, than another, then another.

  “It’s a fucking convoy,” Nash says under his breath.

  I nod, watching as the vehicles kill their lights and roll into the center of the open lot. Four blacked out luxury sedans slow, then stop, all lined up in a row facing the entry gates.

  No one gets out.

  “They’re waiting for someone,” I say to Nash.

  “Or they know something’s up.”

  We stashed our bikes in an abandoned garage a few miles back. I left four guys guarding them. Maybe one of them turned? Maybe they got scented out?

  Fuck it.

  Maybe I’ll shit rainbows. No sense fretting about what you can’t change. No way in hell I’m leaving Tate behind and slinking out of here with my tail between my legs. The End Days Chapter needs an initiation kill.

  And we’re gunna get one.

  A light flicks three times from the crane’s operator’s booth.

  Good. Tate’s in position.

  No one steps out of the blacked out sedans.

  Who the fuck is in there? And who are they waiting for?

  One of the crew lined up behind me and Nash looses a low growl.

  The MC’s growing restless. Can’t blame ‘em. For most of them this is their first ride with their new Prez. My leadership—and my life—depends on this ambush not going to total shit.

  I smile into the darkness.

  My track record pretty much sucks when it comes to dealing with the Chinese Sin Crew.

  Move now or wait for whatever the crew inside the sedans is waiting for? My animal’s screaming at me to charge. But I’ve learned to ignore him when I need to. It was charging into that fat beetle bitch’s house that got me and Sorry locked in her cage.