Mia bats the beer to the ground with a snake arm that’s too fast for the Skin idiots to see. I close my eyes and take a quick breath, then throttle the Harley after the Skins. I catch them just across the intersection, cut them off, hit the brakes and look back, bringing the wolf out for a roam.
The driver’s eyes go wide as he tears at the wheel, trying to avoid a collision with whatever the fuck he thinks he’s seeing. The car’s tires lose their grip on the pavement and the back end of the car begins fishtailing wildly.
A car crash. That shit always makes me grin.
I was born to hunt and feed on black-hearted Stricken, just like the Stricken feed on the weak-ass Skins. That me killing Stricken benefits the Skins means nothing. I’m not sworn to protect Skins or some shit, and in fact there’s much to be said for a good old-fashioned werewolf-in-a-girl’s-dormitory style blood bath.
Loosens the muscles.
Trouble is Purebloods like me can’t feed too well on humans.
It’s like quenching your thirst by drinking saltwater.
I lean the bike hard and punch her out of harm’s way and I’m back beside Lonny’s pimp-mobile in time to see the Skin kid’s car careen off the road and smash into a telephone pole with an impressive plastic-on-metal crunch. Glass flies across the road and the dick who threw the beer can at me follows right behind, and then one, two, three more cars pile into the first.
Lonny grins as horns blare and Skins pile out of their cars and start shrieking at one another.
“Should’a worn his seatbelt,” I say, looking at the dumbass kid’s mangled body lying unmoving on the pavement.
“Who throws a beer can at a biker?” Mia asks.
“A dead guy.”
The sight of all that shit getting nicely fucked up makes my skin tingle. The night’s going from weird to wild, and a part of me—a big part—likes it that way. Lots of night creatures get high on madness and pain and fear and bloodshed, and I’m one of them.
“Ooh,” Sorry says, pretending to wince at the wreckage. “If we’re lucky one of the gas tanks’ll catch fire.”
Lonny whoops and lays me five out the window. “So?” he says, “you in or am I ganging all three of them sweeties?”
Mia throttles her ride impatiently. I feel like telling her to stop nagging, that I know the pigs will be on their way. Talk about needing a lay, that bitch…but whatever.
I’ve been down that road with her.
Never again.
“Fuck it, I’m in,” I tell Lonny. “Let me get Nash to the club. Then I’ll meet you at church.”
Lonny nods toward the stoplight. It’s a challenge.
We wait for green, then Lonny floors it. The Caddy is a beautiful roaring beast, rear posi-traction laying a dual rubber track as it shoots into the intersection. I give the car a bit of a head start just to be fair, then throttle my Harley deep into the red. She screams and bucks like a good bitch should and in seconds I’m ripping past Lonny’s caddy and the three black-blooded whores tied up in the back seat, splitting lanes through Seattle’s scant late-night traffic, a wolf bent low to a sweet blood scent.
CHAPTER FIVE
LILY
THE WASP-THING is still staring, long enough for me to wonder what’s taking Trish so long in the cab and hope she stays in there. My hands are clenched into fists, my fingernails digging into my palms. My right hand slides down to the small of my back, instinctively, to where my G22 should be.
Fucking shitballs.
Of course I don’t have it, and even if I did I couldn’t fire. How to end a career before it begins: gun down a civilian in the street, then try explaining you did it because she transformed into a wasp right before your eyes.
I keep waiting for the…whatever it is…vision, nightmare, hallucination, to vanish. I even blink and look away, hoping when I look back it’ll just be some working girl glaring at me, her sixth sense sniffing out the cop wearing platforms on the wrong side of town.
Big mistake, losing eye contact.
When I look up the wasp-thing is right in front of me, her face inches from mine. She smells too-sweet in a sickening way, like meat gone to rot. Her stinger brushes against my chest, right at my sternum. Her eyes are mirrored coal-black planes.
Inhuman. Merciless.
What about everyone else, I think. Can they see this thing?
But I already know the answer. They can’t. If they could they’d be hoofing it out of here right quick, which is what I want to do…except I can’t move. Not just my feet. I can’t move a single muscle.
Can’t even scream. My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. I’m frozen. Paralyzed.
“I said hey bitch, what you staring at?” the wasp-thing repeats in my mind. I’d like to say I’m staring at a wasp-bitch who mates in excrement, but I can’t move my tongue.
“You stare and stare,” she says, “but you’re fucking blind. You don’t see a thing, do you pretty? That’s gunna change. That’s gunna change real quick for you, and soon you’ll be seein’ more than you ever wanted. More than—”
The wasp-thing cocks her head to the side like she hears something unusual.
I listen, trying to figure out why she interrupted herself. I can’t hear anything out of the ordinary: cars droning past leaving wakes of mist above the wet roads, someone screaming in the distance, a police siren way too far off (never around when you need them, huh?) and a growl of Harleys in the distance.
It’s hard to tell, but I think the wasp-thing’s eyes widen. Just a little.
And I think she’s afraid.
She dips her stinger to my sternum once more. There’s a flash of cold so intense it burns. Then she walks a few steps backwards, whirls and sprints down an alley faster than any human has ever moved.
I clasp my hands to my sternum. There’s a tiny burn-mark in my sweater, and I don’t have to peer down my shirt to know it goes all the way through to skin.
“Cabbie tried to say he forgot to put the meter on. Liar. Tried to get forty bucks to go—hey Lil! You all right?”
I nod at Trish, still watching the alley the creature fled into and thinking of the drunks and homeless hidden in the shadows there, passed out, waking up to that thing straddling them, silencing their screams with a hand as she drives her stinger into their chests, drawing red-blue blood from their dying bodies.
“Yo Lil!” Trish snaps her fingers in front of my face. “Whats the matter girl? Had a change of heart? Good. Place is a dump. Here—I’ll hail another cab.”
The Harley’s are getting louder.
The doorman at the Wilds opens the door and peers out.
That’s why the bitch fled, I think without knowing why. She heard them. The riders.
Then they’re racing past, three broad-shouldered men and a woman, a blur of gleaming chrome and roaring unmufflered pipes and black leather cuts, splitting the yellow and even dipping into oncoming traffic, going at least 100 mp/h on a city street and making the cop in me itch for a maxed-out unmarked cruiser to chase them down with.
Then he turns. The leader. The damn—what do the outlaw MC’s call the boss?
The Prez.
Needless to say, Mr. Prez isn’t wearing a helmet.
He turns his head as he whips by and let me just say, not for second do I believe in love at first sight. The entire idea makes me gag. The giggling school-girl romance of it all. Love isn’t a thing that appears out of nowhere and lives forever. Its a series of small actions that build up over time, layer into feelings, until one day you wake up and realize the bedrock of your life is founded on those feelings. They’ve become your earth: what holds you up, nourishes and sustains.
But it sure doesn’t happen instantly, or even overnight.
Call me a cynic. I prefer the term pragmatist. Or maybe ‘bitch with a broken heart’ is more accurate. Either way, I’m too old to believe in fairy tales.
I tried that once and what did it get me? Penciled into some rich guy’s schedule.
But I see this guy, this…biker, for the love of all hell…and maybe for an instant I do believe. In everything. In all the fairy tales. In all the fantasies about a lonely heart snapped up and saved. And maybe that’s what love is, too: hope. Hope that love can exist independent and inviolable from the shit we live in, somehow both in the world and above it, like a soul living inside us yet linked to heaven.
Me and the biker Prez lock gazes. The roar of the Harleys crash down like waves.
The rain starts again, misty, almost teasing.
He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. Even hunched over his Harley he’s tall and perfectly built: not puffed up like a juice-monkey but muscled wiry and tight, naturally powerful. He’s wearing soaked blue jeans that cling tight to his thighs, a black t-shirt and a black leather cut. That’s it. No jacket even though its damn cold outside and it must be freezing whipping around on that bike.
The rain has slicked his skin. He’s got serious biker ink lacing up his ripped arms. A narrow chin verging on stern, and a set of high cheekbones that make me think of aristocracy. Thick, full lips. Dark hair whipping in the wind. And his eyes? Damn. His eyes are a gorgeous arctic blue so bright they nearly glow high-lumen neon, and I can tell he’s no meathead, not your run-of-the-mill biker idiot, and for the second time in about five minutes I’m frozen on the spot, mouth hanging open, heart beating a mad staccato rhythm in my chest and warmth building between my legs that I haven’t felt in…ever.
Then he’s gone. Zoom.
Not a wink, not a nod, not a single obvious indication to show he knows I exist. But I turn around to make sure there’s no biker whore standing behind me that he was eyeing. Because the Prez threw me a look…yeah.
There was something in how he looked at me. A promise.
I’d swear on my mother’s grave.
“Obnoxious pricks,” Trish mutters, stepping into the street and giving them the finger. “Idiots whose sole aspiration in life is to ride around on a loud bike. Perpetual adolescence.”
“Yeah,” I say, still breathless. “Not to mention riding waaay too fast.”
Trish gives me an odd look, and I realize my hands are resting on my legs, on my upper thighs actually, and I’m kind of slowly kneading the skin under my skirt, almost rubbing it. Trish looks about to say something snide when there’s a sharp squeal of tires and a sputtering roar.
Three blocks down the bikers have flipped a u-turn and are racing back up the street.
“Quick,” Trish says, waving at the dive bar. “Inside. Before the dumb-asses get the wrong idea about us.” She tosses me a glare that says what kind of shit have I gotten her into before striding past the bouncer and into the Wilds.
And right about then I’m thinking the same thing, and as I shuffle into the bar I’m surprised to realize I’m damn excited to find out.
CHAPTER SIX
SHIORI
BECAUSE PRIEST GABRIEL lied when he said he wouldn’t hurt Charlene, right now I am suffering drowning.
I chose to suffer drowning after I heard Charlene screaming when the Three Priests took her eyes.
Priest Gabriel taught us about lies and their opposite, truth. Truth is what is said in Solace when we are with our holy family the Guardians. Lies are what is said when we are not in Solace and not with our holy family. And because I have never been exposed to lies or the Absent since being Accepted, I am Blessed.
Being Blessed means I am eligible to become a sacred Vessel, like Charlene and the other Hopefuls, and have my eyes removed so I may See, and bear the Three Priests many children to assist in their struggle to Guard the Gate.
After Charlene bore her first child I was to be next. I had dreamed of that day my entire Accepted life. Fought pernicious envy as I watched the Priests lead other young Hopefuls into the Ark to be transformed. Swallowed my tainted thoughts when the Vessels emerged from the Ark many months later, blinking in the sunlight and cradling their swaddled infant children.
It’s difficult to understand how the Three Priests can lie, especially Gabriel, who is Truth on Earth.
But they did.
I heard Charlene’s screams when they took her deep in the Ark and performed the ceremony to scourge wickedness from her soul and transform her into a sacred Vessel. I recognized the screams meant she was being hurt because she screamed the same way, a long time ago, when she became entangled in the ship’s trawl winch and crushed her hand.
Earlier this morning Charlene’s screams were like that, only worse. She screamed and screamed as they burned out her eyes to help her See.
It is night. I’m immersed in the cold night water, drowning in rolling black waves that crash over my head and bury me in blackness.
They’re out here in the night ocean with me.
The Guardians. Searching for me.
Like many things the waves from the late winter storm are good and bad. Good because they make it difficult for Gabriel and the Guardians to find me. Bad because they make it difficult to swim.
I’ve been in the water long enough for my fingertips to turn wrinkly. It’s an odd thing to notice, maybe, but when swimming we are taught to return to the Ark when our fingers are wrinkly. Any longer and the Beast of the Sea will rise to claim us.
I think about that beast now. He’s in the water beneath me. I feel him.
I leapt off the Ark and into the Land of the Absent hoping drowning would send me to Hell quickly. Painlessly. I dove for the ocean bottom, pleased to be off the Ark and alone with my imminent death. Swam and thrashed as deep as I could, then opened my mouth and blew out the small amount of air left in my lungs and took a big breath of water.
I was wrong.
Drowning is not a painless death.
The water burned my lungs so bad I screamed. Or I believed I screamed, because deep in the ocean at night there is no sight or sound, there is only feeling, and my feeling was of a pain like I’ve never known.
I understood in that terrible moment I didn’t want to suffer drowning, and I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to go to Hell.
By then it was too late. By leaping from the Ark I had already entered Hell, the Land of the Absent. The faithless.
Let go, I told myself. Do not cling to this life.
But I couldn’t let go. That is how wicked I have become. I wanted to live, even though wicked and faithless and absent.
I forced the water from my lungs. My chest was a fire burning in me and I swam blindly, hoping to reach the surface but not knowing which way was up.
Drowning is not only painful. It’s slow.
Another breath of water that I breathed into my lungs without meaning to. The burning worse than before and I resolved to die and meet the endless fire and fornication and despair that waits for the Absent in Hell. But that last breath took me to the surface, and from there I swam away from the Ark, hidden in waves and darkness.
There is a single way to God. You must Guard the Gate.
To do otherwise is to be Absent, which means your soul is lost.
That is Truth.
My soul is lost now.
A wave rolls over my exhausted body, and at the wave’s peak I see a small aluminum motorboat racing across the water. It’s them. A searchlight on the front of the boat swoops back and forth over the waves, but by the way it keeps going from left to right I know they haven’t found me. Not yet.
Their path is straight to mine. In a minute they will see me and return me to the Ark and then I don’t know what happens. No one has ever chosen to leap from the Ark and join the Absent that I know of.
I wait a few moments, trying to make my breath slow, then dive under the water and into endless blackness.
I stay under until the fire returns in my chest. I would pray for this to be over but there is nothing to pray to. The Priests have lied. The Word is broken. I am not a Hopeful anymore, I am like a fish in a net: flopping, senseless, unknowing.
My only solace is that if the Priests can lie perhaps they are wr
ong about the Gate. About the Land of the Absent where I am now.
When my mind breaks from the pain of not breathing I float to the surface, too tired to swim. My face enters the chill air. The waves are still here, but the boat is gone.
My name is Shiori Hayashi. I have been a Hopeful for twelve of my eighteen years. Today is the first day since my day of Acceptance that I have lived in Absence, without Life or Solace.
Today is my first day of living alone.
***
I float on my back, rolling through the violent waves, waiting for the Guardians to find me. The stormy sky is broiling black grey. I recognize that sky. In the past few months I’ve had strange visions. Standing on the deck of the Ark, looking across the ocean at the sun setting against the water, and suddenly the sky would turn black like the one above me now. The sun would lose its glow and turn first grey, then black, until the deep blue ocean and black sky and glowing black sun merged and became one flat plane.
Believing I was unwell, I spoke to Priest Gabriel about what I saw. He looked at me through his thick red beard, his beautiful green eyes blazing. I enjoyed looking into Gabriel’s eyes, just as I enjoyed the thought of becoming his Vessel.
“We are at war, Shiori,” Priest Gabriel told me. “The visions you see are a gift from God. They speak of hardship, and loss, and terrible suffering. They speak of a tortured path through a dark wood. Of not knowing where to turn. They speak of the many trials ahead.”
Priest Gabriel’s words made me feel fear, and I told him this.
“Who is the Light in the Wood?” Gabriel asked, reaching to caress my cheek.
“You are the Light,” I answered, as I always did.
Gabriel sighed. “Yes. And here you enjoy Solace and Light. Be grateful, and when the visions arrive give thanks. Not everyone is as close to the Truth as you.”
Usually I would have kneeled and excused myself, but that day the vision was particularly troublesome, and so I said, “Am I? Close to the Truth?”
The All Encompassing: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 1) Page 4