The All Consuming: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 4)

by Ellis Daniels, May

  Vuk laughs. “She couldn’t even prevent a Skin woman from harming me.”

  I rev the throttle. The bike snarls and spits.

  “Take me to the pyramid,” Vuk whispers in my ear. “Free your little sister. Go home. This need not be your battle.”

  Something in my brother’s tone, its corruption and treachery, makes me hit the throttle hard and race after Lily.

  She’s a shit alpha. That much is clear.

  But she’s a good person. Maybe the best I’ve ever known.

  She had the opportunity to murder the man she hates most in the world. But she held back. Because her heart told her to. That takes a special kind of courage.

  I need to give her another chance. Maybe she’s right. Maybe she can end the One War without more killing. And if not? Then we’ll end it the way Vuk desires: with blood and chaos and destruction.

  ***

  “Mother of god,” I mutter as I crest the rise and slow the Harley to a stop beside Lily and Trish.

  Vuk’s sharp fingers dig into my shoulders as his muscles tense. “My children,” he whispers in my ear. “My packmates. There’s still time, Anik. Flee to the Pyramid of the Sun. Flee…and live.”

  The ground descends in a gentle slope beneath us, the road running laser-straight across the desert. An army straight from hell is marching through the valley, several hundred strong, animals and men and mixes in between, some running at full sprint or gallop, others driving armored Humvees with heavy-calibre machine guns mounted on their roofs.

  A rolling dust cloud rises in the Stricken army’s wake.

  The formation narrows to a point in front. The advance guard consists of a trio of large, heavily-muscled women with the heads of tigers. The women are dressed in knee-length black leather skirts studded with metal. Each rides a massive elephant with long, wickedly sharp black tusks. The women’s skin is smeared black-red with dried blood. Metal chains strapped to their wrists lead to a harness threaded over the elephant’s heads. The women are seated on leather and steel thrones. A half-dozen poles rise from the backrest of each throne, swaying with the motion of the elephant’s footsteps. Mounted on the poles are heads, and roosting in the decapitated heads is a flock of blood-red crows with white eyes.

  My skin tingles. An odd sensation churns in my gut.

  Fear.

  The heads are Purebloods murdered during the march from the Pyramid of the Sun. I scent them.

  Quick-moving fanged monkeys chatter and screech on the elephant’s backs. Sometimes they leap from one elephant to the next. There’s something parasitic about them; there must be dozens of them, and I imagine the rabid monkeys jumping from the elephant’s backs and onto their enemies, latching onto shoulders, piercing necks with poisoned fangs—

  The lead elephant sways its giant head from side to side. Paws at the pavement, tearing it up. Then it looks to the hill we’re on and looses a trumpet-call that echoes in my ribcage.

  “It can’t see us,” Trish says, sounding uncertain. “We’re too far away. Hidden behind the rise in the road.”

  “The Three Sisters tracked your Pureblood pack across the continent,” Vuk whispers. “They have an unerring nose for red blood. They’re on the hunt. They know they’re drawing near.”

  “Three Sisters?” Lily asks, her voice miles off.

  “My firstborn children,” Vuk says with the pride of any father. “Vora. Vita. Valina. The Ravishes. The genealogy is rather convoluted…but since our mother birthed them, Lily…I believe that makes the Ravishes your half-sisters?”

  “Minions,” I mutter.

  “The oldest and purest of Stricken blood,” Vuk says. “I’m surprised you don’t remember them, Anik. The Sisters came as close as anyone ever has to destroying Tornarsuk the Indestructible.”

  Giant striped tigers snarling and spitting, leaping onto my back, opening my flesh with their paws, clamping their teeth around my neck—

  “I remember,” I say, my voice dull. “They dropped from the trees. Ambushed my animal spirit.”

  Vuk nods. “They’ve waited millennia for a rematch.” His fingers tighten on the back of my neck. “We all have.”

  I swat Vuk’s hands off me.

  My gaze moves past the Three Sisters to the army they command. Howling wolves with glowing yellow eyes. Roaring lions and tigers, some with wings and spiked tails. Lumbering rhinos and sleek, black-scaled reptiles, and mixed among them are humans riding motorbikes and ATV’s bristling with rocket launchers and machine guns.

  “I have to warn Aaron,” Lily says.

  “There’s still time, Anik,” Vuk whispers. “Think of Pimniq. The Purebloods will execute me. The One We Answer To lacks his bloodmate’s compassionate heart—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I snarl.

  “Shiori will sense my death. Her rage will be boundless—”

  Lily revs her bike. Looks to me. “Anik?” she says, seeing the uncertainty in my eyes.

  “I don’t know, Lil,” I say. “There’s so many. What if we lose? What if Vuk dies? I can’t abandon my sister to Shiori’s wrath—”

  “Let the Purebloods fend for themselves,” Vuk says in his deadly quiet voice. “They’re a lost species.”

  Lily’s eyes burn red. She ignores her brother, turns to me and says, “We’re warning Aaron. And Mia. Remember her? And all the rest. You’re riding with me, Anik. Your place is at my side. Like it was a millennia ago when we warred. We’ll get your sister back unharmed. I swear it.”

  Something in my packmate’s tone quiets my uncertainty.

  It’s a command.

  My place is at The All Encompassing’s side.

  I look once more at the advancing army. The Three Sisters.

  My hackles rise. My hands grow heavy and clawed.

  Lily flashes me a quick grin when she sees my animal spirit readying for the kill, then tears off down the road toward the Pureblood MC.

  “Yes, what of them, dear brother? What of that black-blooded army?” Vuk says, mocking. “Every second you delay Pimniq suffers.”

  “I was commanded.”

  “Our alpha sister. It’s a shame Pimniq’s such a low priority in her mind. And heart.”

  Silence descends on the two of us.

  I choke back my anger at Lily’s command.

  In the distance I hear the red crows cawing and the elephants trumpeting and all the animal spirits of the hell my people named Adlivun calling my name.

  “Your unnatural brood dies screaming,” I growl, whipping the bike back the way we came. “They die under fang and claw.”

  Vuk looses a throaty laugh as my Harley roars to life.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AARON

  MY PACK’S FUCKING tearing along the highway toward Phoenix, howling and whooping and raging, hot for the kill. Lily’s scent, the smell that first attracted my wolf to his bloodmate, alpine wildflowers at dawn, hangs heavy in the air. She rode this way. Not long ago. I’ve already decided to hunt her down. Fuck Phoenix. The dust-pit will still be there after I get my bloodmate back. The crew will roll with me.

  And if not? Fuck ‘em.

  Lily’s scent sharpens. Something’s wrong. She’s afraid.

  A gust of wind carries another scent. My wolf howls with hunger.

  There’s a pack of black-blooded Stricken up ahead.

  Close.

  I crank the throttle back. Rushing wind plasters my hair to my forehead. My leather cut flaps in the wind. I got Nash and Blue and Tate at my side.

  This is how an alpha predator should die.

  Fast and full-on.

  His packmates warring beside him.

  Blood-lust making his heart pound, strong and free—

  We fly over a rise. Two bikes are riding toward us at full speed, and behind them, about twenty miles off, I see something that takes me back a millennia, to a time when grasslands stretched clear across the continent, to a time of war.

  A furious howl bursts from my lips. My focus narrows on th
e advancing Stricken army. I take a quick glance back at my crew. We’re outnumbered at least three to one. I howl again, the sound rising even louder than the spitting Harleys. My crew answers my call, all but a few of them, who see the Stricken, peel off and flee into the desert.

  Pussies.

  They’ll die knowing they’re cowards.

  But the rest? They got my back.

  I flex my arms and shoulders and hunch low onto the bike.

  Red spots flash in my vision, my rage and kill-lust so brutal and violent it makes my entire body shake. I can’t fucking wait to meet that Stricken army head-on. This is what I was born to do.

  Die murdering black-blooded motherfuckers.

  Die with meat in my mouth and blood on my lips.

  A hunter. A killer.

  Thoughts of Lily slip from my mind as my animal takes over. Shit’s too fucked up anyway. Too complicated. The dead cat Soren was right. Next I’ll be trading my Harley for a minivan. Fuck that. Guess I’m not built right for love. There’s a wildness in me. Life tries to pin you down. Tie you up. Smother you in senseless bullshit. And every time I’ve dropped fucking claw and cut myself free.

  Only two thing smatter now: the Stricken must die, and my bloodmate must live and raise my son. I hope she tells him about me. At least the good parts. Maybe she’ll tell my son his father was fucked up but brave. Maybe she’ll tell him I tried. Maybe she’ll smile, just a little, when she speaks of me.

  I hope so.

  But something tells me…the way shit stands with me and Lil right now…she won’t say a word about me. My son will hear rumors and whispered bullshit. He’ll live wondering where his anger comes from.

  Struggle with it like I have.

  Shut down, guard his heart, become lonely.

  Maybe he’ll lash out. Turn bitter. Lose the love of fucking sunsets, the joy being open to wildborn beauty can bring.

  The thought makes another howl burst from my throat, and this one’s long and plaintive, the kind of howl a man makes when he realizes he fucked up and it’s too late to change shit.

  A deathbed howl.

  Lily and I lock gazes as I zoom toward her.

  She’s scared. No, she’s terrified. I see it in her eyes.

  But she tries to put on a brave face. Flashes me a smile.

  Her smile falters when she realizes I’m not slowing down.

  Her expression turns to shock, confusion, then anger.

  I got no time for lengthy goodbyes. Last time we were together we fucked in the dirt. Words will never come close to how perfect that felt. Words only obscure. Corrupt. I want my last memory of my bloodmate to be that moment, when we were locked so close together we were almost one being, beyond the bullshit the world buried us in.

  Lily hits the brake. Black smoke rises from her tires.

  I nail the throttle back.

  Elemental. Free.

  I blaze past Lily at a hundred sixty.

  My pack’s right on my heels.

  Lily screams something, then flips me the bird as I roll by.

  Okay, maybe it’s not the lovey-dovey last image I wanted of her. But somehow it’s fitting. We’ve been flipping one another the finger since we first met. Fighting with ourselves, each trying to discover what we really want.

  Fuck it. It was fun while it lasted.

  I only hope she has the sense to get the fuck out of here. Take Anik to Shiori and beat the creepy bitch down. Maybe they kill the Fallen, maybe they don’t. Doesn’t mean shit anymore. There’s only this hunt—

  I rip past Anik. He’s got someone riding bitch.

  A dude. Pale as all fuck. Black eyes shining in a face carved so thin I see his bones beneath his taut skin.

  Fucker’s smiling like he knows me.

  Black blood’s leaking from his bandaged chest—

  A tremor of loathing races down my spine.

  His scent. Smoke and ash. Fury and madness.

  “Aargh!” I scream, caught between needing to stop to see if my wolf’s instinct is correct and needing to lead my Pureblood MC into the charge.

  Up ahead, three Stricken elephants rear onto their hind legs and loose a tremendous trumpeting call that scatters the clouds from the sky and reveals the Blood Moon hanging over the valley like a scythe.

  A war cry. The One War begins.

  Decision made. If that was Vuk, Lily has him.

  I got a blood-hungry pack to lead.

  ***

  Survival always has a moment of commitment. That point where there’s no turning back. You close your mind to the possibility of failure or retreat. Some of the Skin warriors have discovered this moment and built philosophies around it. They call it courage. The battle-mind.

  It’s really discipline.

  A predator makes a decision and sees it through. He acts. Always.

  That takes discipline.

  My Pureblood MC are a pack of wild motherfuckers. But when we’re on the hunt, every single one of them is a disciplined killing machine. The hierarchy itself is an instinct toward discipline. Natural law.

  Without it we’d be lost.

  So when we’re a couple hundred yards away and the Stricken start peppering us with bullets and rocket-grenades my pack knows exactly what it has to do. I don’t need to bark an order. We hunt in a place beyond thought, relying on lethal instincts sharpened by millennia in the wilds.

  My pack breaks into three.

  I stay on the highway, splitting the yellow, leading the central charge because that’s what a bad motherfucker alpha does. The two other groups veer hard to opposite sides, Nash leading the right group while Blue and Mia take the left, each aiming to outflank the Stricken army.

  Every muscle in my body tightens. Every nerve hums. Kill-lust and adrenaline sharpen my already razor-sharp senses, the feeling unmatched by any drug.

  I duck as an RPG whistles beside my head and explodes behind me. Howl into the wind. Stand up on my bike’s foot pedals. Take my hands off the handlebars. Lift my arms to the sky and roar, then reach down, unholster two sawed-off shotguns from the bike and blast buckshot into the stupid black-blooded animals.

  The elephants meet my call. One of them lifts a massive boulder in its trunk and hurls it at us. It crashes into the road, creating a car-sized crater, spitting rocks and chunks of pavement a hundred feet high. I veer the bike around the crater and keep charging. The fetish-gear-wearing tiger-faced bitches riding the elephants shriek a few commands and a flock of red crows lifts into the sky and flies right at me and my pack—

  Bullets ping into my Harley, nearly bursting the front tire.

  That would suck.

  But I get lucky.

  Not all my pack does, judging from the screams behind me.

  Ten seconds to impact.

  I’m coming in hard and fuck the reserve ‘chute.

  The crows slam into me, and for a second all I can see is fluttering red wings and glowing white eyes. They dig their claws into my shoulders, flap against my head, pecking, trying to gouge out my eyes. I blast off a few more shotgun rounds, then the guns click empty and I use one of them like a baseball bat to swat the birds from the sky. The bike dips dangerously as the crows knock me off balance. A black object whistles by my head, then again and suddenly I can’t see a thing through the fucking crows—

  Something slams into my shoulder.

  I lurch backward, nearly falling off the bike. The crows pile onto me, sensing weakness, a hundred of them pecking the flesh from my skin and this is not how I die, pecked to death before I even reach the main event—

  I swat the crows off and right myself just in time to see another boulder sailing through the air. Lean the bike hard left, so low my knee scrapes the ground, shredding skin down to bone. My animal thrashes and rages, scenting the black blooded, demanding this war be his alone.

  The boulder crashes beside me, showering dust and stone. The crow flock scatters. Something’s still paining my arm. I look down, expecting a bullet hole.
<
br />   What I see makes bile rise in my throat.

  There’s a worm-like creature attached to my arm. It’s about a foot long and three inches thick, black and shiny, and its head is buried deep in my flesh. I snatch at it, trying to tear it off. It squirms and wriggles and slips from my clawed fingers and slides an inch deeper into my flesh.

  I feel it drinking my blood.

  Biting through muscle and sinew.

  Worse, it’s getting larger.

  My arm goes numb. Sinks to my side. I can’t lift it.

  The fucking leech is poisoning me.

  I grip the Harley’s handlebar with my one good hand. There’s no time to get rid of the leech. The nasty tiger-faced bitch riding the first elephant meets my eyes, licks her lips, raises a crossbow in my direction. The bolt she fits into the crossbow is long and black.

  Another leech.

  I summon my shadow wolves as the leech flies.

  A black shape leaps in front of me and catches the leech in its teeth.

  I send two wolves ahead into the Stricken and command one to hang back with me. The wolves nip and bite at the first elephant’s heels. The creature rears up, trying to stomp my wolves dead, but its massive feet pass through their shadowy forms. The elephant goes mad with panic, looses a terrified bellow, swings its massive head from side to side. Its razor tusks slice into the Stricken marching beside it, and then the elephant collapses as one of my wolves severs its hamstring.

  The tiger-bitch tumbles from her saddle, gets caught in the chains securing the elephant’s head. There’s a tremendous shriek as the tiger-bitch’s arms tear from her body, and then my shadow wolves are on her, ripping her throat out, and through them I taste her Minion blood, stronger than any I’ve known, more nourishing.

  The power of the kill floods my veins.

  The leech squirms and wriggles and slithers from me, repelled by my healing strength, and as it worms free there’s a sucking sound and then I see its horrible toothed mouth. I snatch it up, bite it in two and hurl it to the pavement while more bullets slam into my bike and my wolf roars at the scent of blood and death—

  Nash and about forty of my boys plough into the Stricken on the right side. The entire black-blooded army shrieks. I see a good chunk of the enemy break toward the new threat, splitting a line down the right edge of their formation.