“I can’t!” I scream. “He has me, Aaron. Please help he has me!”
Aaron leans down, sees my dead father’s hand gripping my wrist and looses a booming roar.
My father’s other hand reaches up and snatches my throat. He opens his mouth. His jaws are lined with tiny black teeth. The blackness has spread across his face and down his neck, and his grip is like nothing I’ve ever felt, so strong I know a single flick of his wrist could snap my spine.
You will kneel, my sister, or you will burn—
Another pole slams to the floor. Then another. One smashes into Aaron’s back. The fire is unnaturally hot. I call my creature, feel my bones ripple as she howls to the surface—
And then vanishes.
She’s fears me, sister. She knows what I’m capable of. Connor Lerrick is a loyal pet. He offered his weak life. I possessed his body when I murdered your mother. Then again, when I hunted you. Through the streets. I hunted you down like a frightened doe and I fucked you, and now our son—
I want to scream. But I can’t make a sound.
My father’s deathly grip is squeezing the life from me.
Colored light dances in my eyes. I’m fading, about to pass out—
Aaron summons his wolf. Leans down and cuts my father’s throat open. Black blood sprays my face. Aaron manages to tear my father’s hand from my throat, but his grip on my forearm doesn’t weaken.
“It’s my brother,” I say, my voice pitched high in terror. “He took my father’s body. He’s in my mind, Aaron. The Fallen!”
Aaron roars as the pyramid structure begins collapsing around us.
The heat is unbearable.
Flames circle around the pyramid and light the gym roof on fire. Soon the entire building will collapse, crushing us alive.
My unborn son.
“Run, Aaron,” I scream. “Let me go! I need to…I need my baby back. Our son! Let me die in this world and return to the Bloodless Land—”
The end is the beginning.
I am my own Keeper.
So much rage. So much hurt.
Everyone near me suffers. It’s time I hunt alone—
I blink, trying to stay conscious. My father’s corpse is grinning and hissing.
Not long now.
Aaron looks in my eyes.
Shakes his head no, then says, “Not you, Lil. I can’t lose you again.”
A sharp crack echoes overhead.
The entire pyramid shudders. Glowing red embers rain onto me, but I welcome the pain. I deserve it for what I’ve done.
Aaron’s face is a twisted mask of confusion, anger, sorrow, hatred.
“I never meant to hurt you, Aaron. But we always do, don’t we? We always hurt the ones we love.”
Aaron stumbles to his knees. Tears at the creature holding me down. But the thing is too powerful. Then Aaron takes a few steps away.
“Go!” I scream. “Just fucking go. I never asked for your help. I never wanted your help. We weren’t meant to be. Just go, Aaron. Let me be.”
“I can’t lose you, Lil,” he answers. “Not you. Not now, after everything. I understand my role. I know what I need—”
Another pole snaps.
I hear it coming, whistling toward me, and close my eyes.
I’m ready. I’m tired of the Warm Land.
I might not be able to save my unborn son from the Dog God
But I have to try.
Something heavy and built solid as a tank lifts me by the shoulders and throws me and my father’s living corpse through the air and out from beneath the collapsing pyramid.
I’m suddenly weightless.
Like a child lifted laughing into the sky. I land hard on my shoulder, and for a moment there’s only darkness, deep and familiar, and in a way it feels like home.
Let me rest, I think, enveloped in the comforting darkness.
Let me never wake up.
I open my eyes lying face down, wincing against a brutal pain in my forehead. My father’s corpse is still. Lifeless.
I take a shaking breath.
Burning, choking smoke instantly fills my lungs.
Suffocating. Blinding.
Have I arrived in the Bloodless Land?
No. I hear a child’s laughter. A massive fire spitting and roaring. Carrion birds screeching. And something worse. A tortured, animalistic screaming. Like a man being stretched on a rack. Or burned alive—
I put my hands under my shoulders and push myself from the hardwood floor.
I can’t see more than a few feet through the acrid black smoke.
“Aaron!” I scream. “Aaron!”
A roaring orange pillar of flame shoots into the air, hits the roof of the gymnasium, spreads outward, then slowly rolls down the walls. I throw my arms in front of my face to shield myself from the heat.
The fire burns with malevolent ferocity.
I feel it now. My brother’s bloodlust.
His insatiable hunger.
You will kneel, sister—
The smoke parts, and for a moment I see.
Buried under the mountain of fire is a beautiful lone wolf, lying motionless on his side, eyes closed, pinned under a mountain of wood while the flames eat into him.
***
I’m about to leap into the flames after my bloodmate when a child’s voice cries from outside the gymnasium.
“Mother? Mother are you there?”
“Lachlan?”
I fucked you—
No. My brother was lying. My son? Child of an atrocity?
Girders from the gymnasium roof fall into the flames. The entire building’s collapsing. The reek of singed hair and burned flesh reaches my nose, making my stomach churn.
I look inside the raging fire.
I can’t see him. Aaron of the Mountain River.
He’s gone. Burned. Consumed.
My bloodmate sacrificed his life for mine.
“Mother?”
I stumble toward the gymnasium doors and into the light, too raw and panicked and confused for tears.
The black vultures are waiting.
When they see me emerge they screech and caw and lift into the air, their beating wings blocking the sun, creating an icy wind that chills my skin and knocks me backward toward the fire. The flames in the gymnasium surge, fueled by the howling wind. Vultures circle over the burning building, flitting through the rolling smoke like malign spirits.
“Mother? It’s you! Father said you’d be here. He promised. I’ve missed you!”
I take a weak-kneed step toward the child.
“Lachlan?” I say, very quietly. “Lachlan is that you? Are you here?”
“It’s me, mother.”
There. Standing in the center of the painted pyramid-disk symbol.
The boy I saw in the window.
The child that transformed into a hideous horned monster.
My son. My beautiful boy.
“Lachlan?”
My eldest son smiles. Looks straight at me. His eyes are inky pits of blackness that catch the light and shine like onyx.
“Oh god no,” I whisper.
“I missed you, mother. Even though…I’ve never known you.”
“It’s not your fault, Lachlan,” I say. “It was never your fault. I didn’t mean—”
“But you did,” Lachlan interrupts. “Words mean nothing. It’s what we do that matters.”
“I was an infant.” Lachlan opens his black-feathered vulture’s wings. They spread thirty feet behind him, rippling in the wind created by his flock. Curling ram’s horns grow from his head, and his hands turn into hooked talons.
He’s summoning his animal.
“I know, I know you were,” I say tears burning down my cheeks. “I know and I’m sorry. I meant to tell you that. I always meant to tell you. I watched you grow. My beautiful baby boy! I parked outside your house and watched you play in the cherry blossoms. Please? I wanted to…but I didn’t have the courage. And I thought…I thought
reminding you would only hurt you more. I’m sorry. Sometimes the world doesn’t give us a right answer. Sometimes anything we do causes hurt. I wish it wasn’t that way. But it is. It is! Please? You have a right to be angry. But be angry at me. You have to understand! Try and understand. I was only a child as well. I was frightened and alone and he…your father…”
“Do not speak against my father!” Lachlan shrieks.
Lachlan’s furious scream pierces my skull like a blade.
There’s rage in my son’s heart. Cruelty. Wickedness.
The son has become the father.
No. I won’t believe that.
I won’t abandon Lachlan to his father’s evil.
“I love you, Lachlan,” I say, and for the first time in forever the words feel right. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to say. You’re my son. You came from my womb. And no, it wasn’t…how I wanted it to be. The world hurts us. It hurts us day after day. But part of living whole is letting that hurt go. See? You can either hold it in and let it eat you up, or you can let it go. You didn’t have a say when I gave you up. But you have a say now. You have a choice. Do you think…you can do that, Lachlan? Can you choose to let that hurt I gave you go?”
Lachlan hesitates, and for a moment the cruel, hate-filled glint in his black eyes dims, and I see him as he truly is: a little boy being led by the hand into darkness and hatred by the same man who harmed me.
Vuk. The One Without Value.
The creature who murdered my mother in this age and another.
The creature who violated me.
My eldest son’s father.
My brother.
Something hidden, a long-buried pain, looses, scours my spirit raw, and then the hatred hits: a loathing and rage so overwhelming I know if my creature were with me I’d be unable to stop her murdering my son.
But she’s not with me. I’m alone.
Forgiveness.
The word echoes in my mind as I stare at my Risen son.
You are your own keeper.
Would I forgive my brother if he asked? Can I forgive him…even if he doesn’t ask? Can I let my hatred go? And if not, how can I expect my son to forgive me?
“Can you choose to forgive, Lachlan? Can you forgive me…like I want to forgive your father?”
My son flinches. It’s a small, nearly imperceptible motion.
But I see it.
My heart lifts with hope.
“We can choose to forgive, mother,” Lachlan says. “But I want to know. If you could do it over again. Would you still give me up?”
That question. How many sleepless nights have I spent asking myself the same question? I look into my son’s eyes. He deserves the truth. It’s going to hurt him. But he’s strong. I know he’s strong. And I know he can choose to heal, if I manage to free him from his father—
“I would,” I say. “It was the right decision.”
Lachlan’s face falls. “Even knowing…how much it hurt me?”
“Yes. Even knowing that. I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t…see you. The reminder of what your father did. You would have felt it every single day. The resentment. The anger. I’m sorry, Lachlan. But I would do it again.”
Lachlan’s eyes fill with tears.
“I’m sorry about hurting grandpa,” he says. “But you? No. I’ll never forgive you. You deserve to suffer. As I suffer.”
Before I can say a word the carrion vultures descend, a vicious screeching cloud, their wings beating onto me, talons raking me, claws piercing me. I sprint madly through the vultures, battered left and right, falling down, struggling and crawling forward, pushing to my feet, trying to reach my son, my beautiful baby boy, desperate to hold him, to right the wrongs, to make everything all right.
But nothing is all right.
Lachlan’s carrion birds smash into me, holding me back, knocking me to the ground, smothering over me, silencing me, and when they lift in a single cloud I manage to look up—
My son is gone.
The First Fallen has him.
Rodas. Shiori. And now my son Lachlan.
A newborn Risen.
Vuk has the three packmates he needs to Become.
I’ve failed.
It was never me or my creature my brother wanted.
It was my child.
My firstborn son.
His heir.
***
I’ve got Aaron’s Harley redlined.
We’re riding along a curving mountain highway, through a still-smoldering burned-out forest, away from the psych hospital and toward…fuck if I know.
The Pyramid of the Sun.
Nash is on my right, with Trish clinging on back. Blue’s on the left.
Aaron’s corpse is wrapped in a tarp and strapped to the back of Blue’s bike. I keep trying not to look.
Rain stings my bare face. I’m not wearing a helmet. Some things are beyond control. I learned that from my outlaw bloodmate. Sometimes you just gotta let go.
I lean hard into a curve, feel the back wheel kick out.
Right there. Relax into it.
Tense up and you’re dead.
Let it go.
I might have to let my eldest son go. Lachlan.
Child of an Atrocity in this age. A second generation of Risen.
I haven’t given up on him yet. Not by a long shot. But I saw the look in his eyes when he said he’d never forgive me. I don’t think he will.
Part of me doesn’t blame him. It’s a lot to ask a nine year old. Especially one who’s heart’s been corrupted by his asshole father.
The One Without Value.
I hit a corner too fast, jerk the handlebars hard right, overcorrect, and for an instant I think I’m dead. But the bike figures out what she needs, rubber sticks to wet pavement, and a heartbeat later I’m riding out of the corner, gritting my teeth, knowing I should feel happy for being alive.
But there’s only anger and sadness.
Two emotional poles, facing one another, feeding off each other’s energy, driving everything else away.
Seems like that’s all I know. Anger and sadness.
All my life has room for.
Anger at the lying bastard Connor Lerrick and my psychotic brother Vuk and the traitorous bitch Shiori and the rest of the foul, black-blooded Stricken.
Sadness for my sons and bloodmate.
Lachlan might be lost to me. But my unborn son? Child of love?
There might be time.
I know Aaron’s roaming the Bloodless Land. His wolf bent low, scenting, tracking his son. No way I’m letting him face the Dog God alone.
I wave Nash and Trish over beside me.
“Promise you’ll do something?” I yell at Trish over the growling Harley engines and rushing wind.
“Tell me first, then I’ll promise,” Trish answers. “I don’t sign blank checks.”
“When you find Anik, give him a message from me?”
Trish nods. Nash looks at me suspiciously.
“Tell him…he has to forgive himself. Tell him that comes first. Tell him everyone fucks up. It’s what we do after we fuck up that matters, that makes us who we are.”
Trish gives me a long, searching stare. Damn. My best friend looks great on a bike, wind whipping her hair, the adrenal thrill and sense of freedom brightening her eyes, and the way she’s holding Nash—
“Will you do that for me?” I yell. “Will you promise?”
“Of course, Lil. I promise. But why—”
I flash my friend a quick smile, throttle the Harley all the way down, cut hard right across the highway, over the gravel shoulder and off the edge of a high granite cliff. Take my hands off the handlebars as I plummet into the boulders. Close my eyes.
Let it go. Let it be.
Shame about the bike.
END BOOK 3
THE ALL CONSUMING
PUREBLOOD PREDATOR MC BOOK 4
FINAL IN SERIES
AVAILABLE SOON!
THIS BOOK IS dedic
ated to my family. Forever.
ABOUT AUTHOR MAY ELLIS DANIELS
Hi! I’d like to say a heartfelt thank you to my family and fans for making this writing life possible. I write contemporary and paranormal romance with smoking hot bad dudes, strong females and lots of fast-paced thriller-style action and erotic heat.
When not writing I’m into hiking in the Pacific Northwest with my beautiful family, drinking craft brews, and riding fast bikes (but not after drinking tasty craft brews).
Stay sane-ish!
- May Ellis Daniels
The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3) Page 36