Like the rest of us.
Then I think about the Skin girl, the one with the scent like nothing I’ve ever known, the one I took two bullets to save, and for the life of me I have no answer as to why I did that except a feeling like a wild animal gets when on the hunt, a single driving need that narrows the world, blocks everything else out.
Lily. That’s her name. I need to see her again.
If she’s still alive.
And right then I know the half-eaten Skin spreading his bloody mess across the church aisle wasn’t aiming to murder me.
He was aiming for the girl.
I grip one of the Stricken bitches by her blood-soaked hair.
She hisses at me, tries to squirm away, but I drag her from her meal and rake my claws across her throat, slicing her wide open and spraying her black blood across the altar.
Father Andres sweeps down the stairs, drawn by the scent of black blood.
I wave him to the other Stricken. She makes to run, and suddenly the good Father’s a greying half-man half-wolf, and let me tell you this: the old bastard can still move. The last Stricken skank gets a few steps down the aisle before the Father pounces on her back and drags her down.
My animals howls. Sorry joins the good Father in the kill.
I drop my claws and plunge them through the Stricken chick’s chest.
I need this fucking feed.
And what I need, I get.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LILY
“YOU CAN’T GO in there,” Trish says.
“I need to. I need to hold him. Just for a second.”
“Yeah? Tough shit. There’s a woman in there he calls mother. It’s her job to hold him now. You think of that?”
“Yes,” I say, suddenly irritated. “I think about it every waking moment.”
Trouble is, Trish is right. She usually is. It’s her most annoying quality.
We’re in a cab outside a bungalow in Cherry Hill. The home isn’t a dump, but it’s average in every way: grey stucco streaked with rain and a light green mould around the eaves. A sagging porch. A lawn of flattened brown grass. A cedar fence with lattice on top, the cheap pre-made panels you buy at a big box store. I’ve driven by the house in every season, and in spring the cherry tree out front blooms into a fan of rustling pink flowers. There’s a swing hanging from a thick branch, but I’ve never seen him on it. “I just wonder if he’s happy is all.”
Trish taps the front seat headrest. The cabbie shoots her a look in the rear-view that says hey, its your dime lady.
“We shouldn’t even be here,” Trish says.
“Just hold him,” I whisper, knowing it isn’t going to happen. “Just once.”
I gave Lachlan up nine years ago. I was fifteen. Some mistakes you can’t outrun. Like stones around your neck, the faster you run the heaver they feel. You carry them with you, and if you’re lucky on some days their weight lightens and you draw a full breath and there’s a glimpse of hope that its going to be all right, that the life you lived in your past won’t haunt you to the grave.
But I haven’t felt that yet. The lightness and hope.
“I brought him into the world,” I say, my voice cracking, “and then I just…let him go.”
“You did what you felt needed to be done. What you felt was right. Shit, Lil, you were a teenager. A child.”
I close my eyes. The rain beats a quick rhythm on the cab’s metal roof.
Trish mumbles something and the cab lurches forward. As we pull from the curb I look at the house once more, and is that a figure standing in the upstairs window?
A little boy, looking down at us?
Why are you awake so late, son? I ask silently, and then the cab pulls around a corner and the house is gone.
“You’re coming to my place,” Trish says in a tone that means she expects to be listened to. But I don’t want sleep at her house. It’s not that I’m not grateful for her friendship—I am. Sometimes its just better to face things alone.
Sometimes you feel you don’t deserve true friendship.
I want to ask Trish about what happened at the Wilds, but I don’t dare in front of the cabbie. He picked us up four blocks from the bar and was already plenty suspicious. All I remember is a handsome biker who was lousy at pool and my head hitting the floor. No. There’s more…the popping sound of gunfire and the feel of the biker’s body slamming me down. I remember how he felt, hard as stone as he crashed into me, forcing the breath from my lungs and saving my life.
The smell of evening woods on him.
Then another smell, one I know from my homicide work. Blood. Acrid and warm in my nose. I look down at my sweater. It’s soaked and grimy but not covered in the biker’s blood. I was wearing my undershirt when it happened, and Trish stripped me in an alley behind the bar and tossed the shirt in a dumpster.
“Take me home,” I say.
Trish fires me a glare but keeps her mouth shut. That’s big of her.
A part of me thinks she’s worried I’m going to phone someone at the station, tell them we were there. It might not be a career ender, two rookie’s getting busted hanging out at a biker bar for no good reason, but it sure won’t earn us a gold star.
“What time is it?” I ask the cabbie.
“Four in the morning.”
Shitballs. Three hours until work. There’s no way I’m sleeping tonight.
“I need some coffee,” I say, thinking of the Adderol in my purse. “Lets stop at a gas station.”
Trish sighs and settles deeper into her seat, chewing on a fingernail.
The cabbie pulls into a gas station. The florescent lights feel too bright and glaring. I squint into the store. It’s deserted except for the kid behind the counter.
“You want anything?” I say to Trish.
She shakes her head no and I hop out of the cab, squinting in the bright light. I toss the store door open. A blast of cool air hits my face and the reek of refined sugar and junky hotdogs drifts into my nose, making me gag. The light inside is even brighter. Nearly unbearable. I wonder about the light bothering me so much, then attribute it to lack of sleep. The cashier, a gangly kid full of pimples and piercings, doesn’t even look up as I enter. I do want some coffee, so I head to the back and pour myself a big cup of black. Shitty gas station coffee is the best. I grab a breakfast bar and make like I’m heading to the washroom, then walk right on by it.
The store’s rear exit door opens without an alarm. Easy-peasy.
I slip into the night, figuring I have about three minutes before Trish bursts inside looking for me.
Sorry Trish. You’re a friend, but you’re not what I need tonight, and I don’t have the energy for more questions.
I run through the alley, sprint across a street, down another alley, then turn left so I’m two blocks away, facing the gas station down the street and eyeing the cabbie in the parking lot. Trish is still in the back seat. I keep my eye on her until another cab rolls by, and when I flag him he stops real quick. There’s some advantage to being a reasonably dressed woman alone in the night.
I hop in the backseat and the cabbie asks where to?
“Hunt’s Point,” I say.
The cabbie looks in his rearview and raises an eyebrow. “I’m sorry, lady, but that’s a long fare. You got cash? Keep it off the meter save you a bit.”
I dig into my purse, pull out a hundred dollar bill and show it to him. “Shouldn’t be more than sixty, right?”
“Right.”
The cabbie throws it in drive and heads toward the gas station where I abandoned Trish. I slink into my seat as we roll past, and when we’re safely out of sight I settle in the corner behind the passenger seat.
Hunts Point. Highest per capita income in the state. The cabbie raised his eyebrow for more than one reason. Bet it’s not too often he picks up solo women at four in the morning who ask to be driven to Hunt.
I pull out my phone and text Trish, tell her I’m all right and that I’m sorry and
we’ll get caught up later this week. Then I turn the phone off. I give the cabbie an address I know by heart, then put my coffee in the cup holder before I lay my head back. I’m asleep almost instantly, and in my dream there’s a child swinging under a cherry tree while pink blossoms shower around him.
***
“Lady. Hey. We’re here.”
I startle awake, looking around wildly. In my dream I was running through a black wood, being chased by something I couldn’t see or name.
A presence. And it was gaining on me.
I tell the cabbie to wait while I slam back the coffee and breakfast bar, then pop two Adderol. That’s a girl. All freshened up for another day. The cabbie’s watching me in the rear-view with something between concern and disgust. I know what he’s thinking. I don’t look like a working girl, not even the expensive kind.
And I’m not. Not really.
Connor Lerrick’s father, August Lerrick, is one of the wealthiest men in the state, which is saying something in a state that includes Bill Gates as one of its residents. Connor and I met in our late teens. His mother Evelyn bankrolls a citywide charity that provides safe havens for street kids. Places they can hang out and stay warm or watch some TV and just stop looking over their shoulder for a minute or two.
I was playing ping-pong with a kid whose name I forget when Mrs. Evelyn Lerrick and her entourage strolled into the Happy Valley Youth Center one afternoon. Connor was with her, a rich boy forced to tag along while his mom played Mother Teresa to the world’s downtrodden. He looked bored as all hell. Connor saw us playing ping-pong, walked over, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Do you mind if I have this dance?”
I know. Beyond cheesy. But it didn’t take much to woo me in those days, and I laughed and we played three rounds of ping pong, then snuck out back and fucked in his mother’s limo while she did her good samaritan thing.
The driver didn’t even look up from his newspaper.
That pretty much sums up the nature of our relationship going on…oh what feels like forever now.
I didn’t expect to see Connor after that afternoon in the limo. I was horny, not stupid. I enjoyed some fancy bottled water (I blame my current Vitamin Water addiction on that limo’s wet bar) and some rather impressive sex and that was the end of it.
But he came back to the shelter a week later, describing me to the councilor and saying he forgot my phone number and leaving his. That made me laugh when I phoned him that night from the shelter.
I didn’t have a phone.
“You want me to wait for ya, lady?” the cabbie asks.
I tell him no but to wait until the gate opens and I’m inside. I stare through the rain smeared window at Connor’s house. I’ve been in a few times, though never at five in the morning and never unannounced. It’s built into a hill overlooking Lake Washington, and from above you can’t see the extent of it. Lets just say it’s large enough to require an elevator, made of cantilevered polished concrete and panes of glass two stories tall and imported hardwood. And this is Connor’s house, not his parent’s—they gifted it to him when he turned nineteen.
Nice, huh?
But I hate it. My voice echoes inside. It feels cold and cavernous. Unwelcoming. The entire place reeks of old money, and I always end up feeling like a trespasser. Connor usually meets me at my apartment in the University District. Stops by during my lunch hour or after work.
Yeah, that’s how we roll.
I pay the cabbie, gather up my few things and head out into the rain, flipping my jacket hood over my head. I must look like a drowned rat. Or something uglier and wetter than a drowned rat. I approach the gate and press the buzzer.
No answer.
I press again, then again, then finally a sleepy male voice answers.
“Hey Connor it’s me Lily will you let me in I need to see you…”
It comes out in a breathless rush. Damn. I meant to sound more…together than that. Nothing like the reek of desperation to get a guy going. I’ve been holding shit inside pretty good until now, but the events of the evening are straining against my self control, threatening to burst through. Who the hell knows if Connor has someone in there with him? In fact now that I think about it a text might’ve been nice. You know, give him a chance to boot the high-class whores out. But I didn’t want to hear my phone buzzing with angry messages from Trish.
“Lily?” Connor says, clearly not quite awake.
I tap on the camera mounted into the gate panel. “Lily Thompson. The one and only. Your on-again-off-again.”
“Holy shit, Lil,” Connor says, and he must be looking into the surveillance monitor because his voice hits a note of fear and worry. “Are you okay? Wait a minute I’ll—”
The gate slides open without a sound.
I’m in.
I wave the cabbie goodbye and tromp down a slick stamped concrete driveway. The rain’s coming down hard enough to create little rivers that carry leaves and sticks from the road above. Before I drop behind the house I see Lake Washington out in the distance, a flat black plane that looks like the end of the earth.
Then Connor’s racing through the rain toward me, dressed in boxer shorts with little sailboats on them and nothing else. Rainwater runs down his naked skin and suddenly I feel like shit, stopping in unannounced and waking him.
Sometimes you don’t have to love the person you want to be with.
Sometimes its easier that way.
I make it into Connor's arms before I start crying, and I’m pretty damn proud of that.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SHIORI
I SIT ON the sharp boulder for a long while, my knees clasped to my chest, staring at the ocean as the hunger to know the Divine Essence sinks deep into my bones. Rain pelts my skin so hard it hurts. Sometimes a wave crashes over me. I feel its desire to pull me back to sea, and I beg it to, please take me please take me away from this Absent Land, but I only slide across the sharp rock, cutting my buttocks and legs, and then the wave releases me.
I think I see a light once, very faint and distant, and wonder if it’s the Guardians still searching for me. I worry over my family of Hopefuls. Will they be punished for my weakness? Will they suffer Priest Gabriel’s lash? Or worse, will they be denied the Essence for so long their skin begins to crawl with the sensation of insects and no nourishment stays in their bellies?
A forest lies behind me. How large it is I don’t know. This is the Land of the Absent. That’s all we were told.
A place of sin and suffering and despair.
It’s the hunger for the Essence that eventually drives me to stand. My legs are wobbly and weak. I stumble off the sharp stones as the waves crash and roar. My toes sink into the sand as I cross a narrow beach. I hate the feeling of this land against my skin. I miss the sound of the great engines rumbling deep within the Arc and the warmth of my narrow, windowless room.
I miss giving thanks for nourishment with my family.
The wind arrives fast now, its roar matching the waves, bending trees back, whipping branches across my face hard enough to draw blood as I stumble into the wood.
This place is a Hell. Of that I’m certain.
I stagger from tree to tree, leaning heavily into each, gasping for breath, panicked of what lies in the wood. My hair tangles in the dense undergrowth, tears from my head as I stumble onward. Occasionally I bend at the waist while my belly expels yellow fluid into the moss at my feet.
When I have a burst of strength or an especially overwhelming fit of fear I run, often only for a few steps before I fall to the ground. My white dress is torn and filthy, and I’m happy Priest Gabriel isn’t here to witness me in such disarray.
Then I see something that makes me freeze. The forest glows up ahead. Like a vision. Has He found me already? Is He coming to collect this newly born Absent?
Then the glowing light fades.
I listen to the sound of the rain filtering through the forest. I stand very still for a long while, wa
iting and watching and listening. There it is. A hiss like a thousand snakes, then the forest glows again.
An eerie yellow light.
It lasts for a few seconds and disappears.
I want to run back to the ocean and fling myself against the waves. Want to stand on the shore and cry for the Guardians to take me back. But I know they won’t. I know they’ll make me scream like Charlene when they took her eyes.
So I walk through the forest toward the light. It comes randomly, and always with that horrible hissing sound. The light grows brighter and the hissing louder as I approach. Suddenly I’m very close to something that looks like a river made of a hard material I don’t know the name of. There’s a twin yellow line painted down the middle of the hard river, like the lines painted on the deck of the Arc. I stare at this strange thing.
It looks…familiar somehow.
Like something I understood from before my Acceptance on the Ark. I shudder, hoping I continue not remembering that sinful life.
I won’t step on this strange thing.
It’s sure to carry me to Azazel.
Then swooping from the forest to my left comes a blazing yellow light so bright it blinds me. I fling my arm over my eyes as the hiss of snakes assaults my ears. Oh Holy Guardians give me Strength and Will to remain at the Gate, I pray, and the white light fades and the hissing recedes.
A cloud of mist passes over me.
It reeks like the engine room in the Arc.
I open my eyes and see two glaring red eyes staring back at me from far down the hard river. The eyes are set in something that looks like a shining metal coffin.
I flee a few steps into the woods as another white and red-eyed beast speeds toward me. This time tree branches shadow my eyes and I’m able to keep them open despite the glare. I see another metal coffin speed past, and inside there’s a person that looks like me, facing forward and sitting very still.
I gasp and cover my mouth, afraid something will hear me scream.
The coffins carry the Absent.
The All Encompassing: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 1) Page 13