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

by Daniels, May Ellis

  “We need to get to the Monroe Correctional Complex,” Lily says, her voice straining for authority.

  “That’s what? About forty miles off?” Wes says. “Only way is on foot. It’ll take two days, maybe more. I say we bunker down in one of these houses. Wait for night. Less chance of being spotted. You’re strong, I seen you, we can bunker down and—”

  “There’s no time,” Lily shouts, wringing her hands together. “I don’t even know…he might not be…”

  “Why the psychiatric hospital, Lil?” Trish says quietly.

  Lily glares at her friend. “Because I need to speak to someone. Someone who might know…what’s happening. My father.”

  This makes me raise my eyebrows a little. Her father? And from the look on Trish and Anik’s faces I know they’re thinking the same thing.

  “Why would you need—”

  Trish’s question is interrupted by a shrill cry from high overhead.

  The fools.

  Only a few minutes standing in open daylight and the Stricken are nearly on us. I look to the sky. There, drifting through low grey cloud and smoke a few miles off rising from behind a wooded hill, a flock of seven black vultures circles. At first they look like normal birds. But then I realize they’re much larger, as large as men, with wingspans twenty or thirty feet across.

  “I don’t think they’ve seen us yet,” I say, moving slowly away from the street and toward a large and ugly light brown house ringed with fences and tall hedging.

  “How do you know?” Trish says, her lips twisted suspiciously.

  “Because if they had they’d already be diving for the kill,” Anik whispers, gathering Pimniq in his arms and hurrying after me.

  I slink along the thick cedar hedge, not bothering to check if Lily and the two Skins are following. Anik catches up to me, and there in the cool shadows I pause.

  Anik smells of fear.

  I reach out and hold his forearm. “You miss him, don’t you?” I ask.

  Anik’s jaw tightens. “Yes.”

  “Remember that feeling,” I say. “Remember your weakness. I know how you hated your animal spirit. But this is worse, isn’t it? Not having him is worse? Living like a Skin?”

  “Yes.”

  Vultures scream and circle overhead. Drawing near.

  Perhaps they’ve scented us.

  “The Skin man is right,” I say. “We must find shelter until night falls.”

  “But Lily—”

  “Lily is our alpha,” I say, hoping he doesn’t notice the hatred on my face and catch my lie. “We must protect her at all costs. She’s exhausted. Overcome with grief. She needs rest.”

  “You might be right,” Anik says, eyeing little Pimniq.

  I nod and push into the cedar hedge. It’s larger than I thought, at least a five feet thick. Cedar boughs tickle and scrape against my skin, and their sharp, pungent odor stings my nose. Inside the boughs is a large hollow spot, close to the trunks of the old hedges, where the branches have died and gone brown.

  Peering out at the street from within this shelter I see Trish pulling Lily toward the house. Wes shuffles along behind, his tall, gangly frame bent low, his shoulders hunched. He’s a hideous looking man, even more so in daylight: his long, pointed chin and sharp nose and high, narrowing forehead and greasy-slick hair. His eyes make the biting things inside me buzz and crawl. Wes’s eyes are wide and wild, rolling around in his head like when a horse has a broken leg.

  “You don’t trust him,” Pimniq says from right beside me. The girl is quiet. I didn’t even hear her enter the hedge.

  “No,” I say, “I don’t. Why should I?”

  Anik barrels into the hedge, swatting branches from his face as the others make their way across the lawn. He pushes to the other side and studies the house, then says, “I don’t see anyone. But who knows? Anything could be hiding in there.”

  “Monsters,” I say, not bothering to hide my mockery.

  “Yeah. Monsters,” Anik says.

  Lily and the others are almost to the hedge when a roaring screech sounds from down the road, then another and another. I know that sound. It’s the noise car tires make when sliding across the road. Perhaps there are more Stricken on our scent. I poke my head out of the hedge and look up. The vultures have changed course. They’re flying a straight pattern now.

  Directly toward us.

  I open my mouth. A wasp flies out, drifts through the cedar hedge.

  I am not concerned.

  An army of Stricken could arrive. I would simply become the swarm. Vanish into the sky.

  The roaring-screeching sound grows louder. Anik cocks his head and says, “Diesels. A whole lot of them from the sound of it. Moving fast.”

  “Diesels?” I ask.

  “Trucks.”

  The roaring trucks are close now.

  “Quick,” Anik shouts to Lily. “Get in here quick!”

  The street descends at a slight slope toward the city, and in moments the trucks will scream over the rise and spot Lily and the rest. Anik reaches from the hedge and pulls Lily inside while Trish and Wes drop to the grass and crawl in and my biting insects are flying close to the surface, a few more swarming from my mouth and nose and ears and I want nothing more than to loose them but not yet, not yet, and then the trucks appear over the rise as Lily and Trish settle beside us.

  We peer out from the hedge.

  Breathless and still. Like prey.

  My packmates hope that whatever’s driving those trucks can’t scent us.

  But me? I hope they can. Perhaps I will even shout or cough. Do something to alert the Stricken. Force Lily to summon her animal—

  The trucks are huge glittering black and red and blue things with large ugly tires and shining metal pipes rising from their roofs. There are at least a dozen of them, and following behind is a pack of smaller cars, maybe twenty in all, and behind them are even more motorbikes, their engines growling and spitting through the quiet dead neighborhood.

  The trucks are filled with men dressed in what looks like black armor. Every one of them holds a weapon. Assault rifles and handguns, mostly, but also machetes and axes. They are all big, cruel-looking men.

  Soldiers at the end of days. Survivors.

  My swarm buzzes for a feed.

  “I seen these ones boss lady they the worst this convoy of fucking nutters and psycho’s I seen ‘em—”

  Trish wraps her hands over Wes’s mouth, silencing him.

  The trucks slow to a stop slightly ahead of us. The cars slow as well, and the motorbikes hop over the curbs and onto the green lawns and fan out, forming a protective ring around the convoy. Stricken corpses are chained to the roofs of the cars, some in half-human half-animal form. Their heads have been cut off and their hearts torn out. Black blood runs from the corpses, spills down the sides of the cars, drips onto the ground.

  In between the trucks up front and the cars and motorbikes behind there’s a larger truck with a flat bed, and chained on top are three living creatures, all Stricken from the look of the black blood pouring from their wounds. Four Skins stand on the flatbed truck beside the chained Stricken, and when the truck stops and one of the men approaches a hissing monkey creature I scent its fear.

  The Skin man kneels over the monkey Stricken. The creature cowers and spits and trembles. The Skin man laughs. It’s an odd sight, the hunter chained and cowering while the prey lords over him. An unnatural sight. The Skin men on the back of the flatbed are naked except for a flimsy piece of cloth tied to their waists. They all have long, knotted hair pulled back in a loose ponytail.

  They look a bit like the Guardians of the Gate, these men on the flatbed truck, and my insects begin buzzing and singing and begging me to free them—

  “Who are they?” Pim whispers.

  “Quiet now,” Trish whispers. “Quiet and we might live.”

  The Skin leaning over the monkey creature reaches out and gently strokes the creature’s head. The monkey shivers and flin
ches away so hard the chains holding him rattle and pull tight. The Skin begins speaking to the monkey creature, saying something I can’t hear. The monkey leans as far away from the man as his chains will allow, but I can tell he’s listening.

  One of the truck doors flies open.

  The Stricken on the flatbed wail and moan.

  Two men pile out of the truck, dressed in that black fabric-like armor and holding heavy, wicked-looking guns, and then a woman, tall and wiry and covered in tattoos, with purple-streaked jet-black hair and mirrored sunglasses exits the truck, then two more men right behind her. The four men shuffle along beside the woman as she approaches the flatbed truck, and by the way they’re scanning around I can tell they’re guarding her.

  “What’s the fucking freak say, Zoar?” the woman says, staring up at the chained monkey creature. “He scent anything?” Her voice is loud and clear and unafraid.

  The voice of a leader.

  An alpha, even.

  “Same thing. Says he scents you, Admah.”

  “Does he now,” the woman laughs. “That’s too bad. Suppose the lying freak should have a taste.”

  The monkey Stricken slams its fists into its head, maddened with fear.

  This woman named Admah. I do not like her. And suddenly…I do not want to war with her. I want to remain hidden. At least until I understand her power.

  Lily shifts forward in the hedge, dangerously close to being seen, turns her ear toward the convoy as if straining to hear, then says, “Mia?” much too loud.

  The tattooed woman named Admah freezes.

  Turns toward the hedge, very slow.

  The fuck Lily is going to get us killed.

  I am learning more words. Bitch.

  Silence, you stupid fuck bitch.

  I want to kill you, you stupid bitch.

  The leader-woman Admah lifts her gloved hand to her mirrored sunglasses and lowers them an inch down her nose. Her eyes are violet with bright green pupils. She stares at the hedge for a long while.

  Right at us.

  She senses us. I feel it.

  She’s one of us.

  Then Admah slips the sunglasses back over her eyes and faces the monkey creature chained on the truck. “That all he’s telling you? Won’t scent for us?”

  The man on the flatbed shakes his head no.

  “Well, fuck him then,” Admah says, pulling herself onto the flatbed in one fast, fluid motion. She snatches a small leather satchel from inside her jacket, reaches two fingers inside, then lifts her hand above the monkey’s head. The animal-thing writhes and thrashes against his chains, and the sight of his fear makes me hum with pleasure.

  “I see you,” the monkey-thing shrieks, spitting and baring its fangs. “I scent you, you fucking lying Pureblood sack of—”

  Carefully, with much composure and grace, Admah opens her gloved palm, sprinkles a tiny flutter of bright orange crystals on the monkey’s head.

  The monkey screams as the orange powder burns into his skin, melting it from his bones. Smoke rises from the Stricken’s burned flesh and by the way his eyes roll back in his head and he begins twitching I know the pain from whatever poison Admah showered on him must be near unbearable.

  Admah tucks the satchel into her jacket and places the heel of her heavy black leather boot on the monkey’s throat as he twitches and moans. White froth spills from the dying Stricken’s mouth onto the flatbed truck.

  “What about you all?” Admah shrieks at the convoy. “Any here among the New World Order want to take the freak monkey up on his claim? Any of you motherfuckers question my red blood?”

  The men look at each other.

  No one says a word.

  “Good,” Admah says, drawing a serrated hunting knife from a sheath on her hip. “Because this is how we discipline liars in the New World.” Admah leans over the monkey, drives the blade into his chest and cuts out his beating black heart. The monkey remains alive for a few moments after his heart leaves him, then his screams suddenly quiet.

  The man named Zoar puts on a pair of shiny metallic gloves, cups the monkey’s black heart in his hands and carries it to a huge gleaming brass bowl set in the front of the flatbed. Zoar drops the monkey’s heart in the brass bowl while Admah saws off the monkey’s head with the hunting knife. When the head is in the brass bowl alongside the heart Zoar lifts a red can, pours some clear fluid into the brass bowl, then strikes a match and drops it inside.

  A rolling fireball erupts several feet into the sky, spewing thick black smoke.

  The men leap and cheer and raise their weapons into the sky.

  Admah wipes her blade clean on the Stricken’s corpse and stares right at us for a long moment.

  I feel her eyes on me.

  Watching. Waiting.

  “All hail the New World,” the men gathered around the flatbed truck shout, their eyes following the smoke into the sky and their voices booming. “Hail our survival. Hail our triumph. Hail our return!”

  Zoar unchains the dead monkey Stricken and rolls his body over the side of the truck. Several men gather around, lift the monkey’s blood-stained body, carry it to a car and begin strapping it on the roof.

  Admah turns to the other two Stricken chained on the flatbed. There’s a bird-creature and another who looks like a cross between a weasel and a crab. Admah lifts the leather satchel and says, “So tell me, freaks. Do you scent any of your kind?”

  “What is that?” Anik whispers right beside me. “What does she have that burns them?”

  I say nothing.

  My only concern is: can it do the same to us?

  The weasel-crab has had his pinchers sheared off, and now his eight spiked legs drum against the flatbed truck so hard the truck sways from side to side. One of its eyes is missing, but it turns to the hedge we’re hiding in, lifts two long, pointed legs and screams, “There! I scent my kind there!”

  A hundred angry faces turn toward us.

  “Yes,” the woman named Admah says, smiling as she lifts her head and stares at the hedge. “You’re a good pet. A useful pet. Make sure you remain so.” Then Admah screams, “First Battalion rides with me on the hunt. The rest of you remain with the convoy. Let’s go kill us some fucking freaks, boys!”

  Three of the shining black trucks and a dozen cars and motorcycles hop the curb and drive across the lawn straight at us.

  My skin tingles in anticipation of death.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AARON

  THE RUSTED SPIKE’S the kind of run-down desert roadhouse saloon where you’re bound to find Stricken or two to feed on, but even better for me right now are the gleaming Harley’s lined up outside and the promise of the open road.

  The saloon’s windows are grimed over, but there are ten bikes outside and the place seems packed. Question is: do I slink out of the desert and steal a bike and be on my way, or do I step inside, grab a beer, murder and feed on a few Stricken douchebags?

  My animal paces and growls, making his preference clear.

  He needs a feed.

  I run my fingers across the amulet the Skinwalker gifted me.

  My chest is healed. My iron collar gone. I’ve never felt stronger.

  Never more in control of my animal.

  Metallica drifts out the bar’s twin doors as a fat-assed biker steps outside, tosses a smoke in his mouth, flicks a Zippo to flame, then settles on his heels and stares at the starry sky. The reek of Stricken blood carries across the road, making my stomach growl. Dude’s sporting a thick fu-manchu and a long, greasy mullet. I see just enough of his leather cut to know he’s not a Pureblood Predator. Out here, east of the Cascades, he’s probably running with Satan’s Spawn, an outfit of sketchy white-trash fuck-ups and meth-heads who provide muscle and run drugs for the Mexicans, mostly the Collazo Cartel.

  The thought of how Carlos “The Jackal” Collazo fucked me during the ambush back at my equipment yard makes a low growl rumble through my throat. Seems like a lifetime ago. But still. Payback
’s a bitch, and Collazo is owed a whole lot of payback.

  Gutting the Satan’s Spawn would be a good start.

  I wandered in the fucking desert.

  Realized I wasn’t the messiah.

  Just another angry son-of-a-bitch with a gun and a grudge.

  How’s it go? I once was lost. Now I am found.

  But what brought me back?

  Revenge. Anger. Blood.

  Read the fucking Old Testament.

  God’s an angry, vengeful motherfucker.

  I figure my former MC’s gone to shit like the rest of the world. We build these pretty things: clubs, institutions, relationships, careers, and convince ourselves they have staying power. But they don’t. You think the cops are gunna protect you when the moon rises ride? When the streets swarm with looters and animal-men?

  Nah. Trust me.

  The cops will be too busy gettin’ theirs.

  Every animal for himself.

  I’m tucked behind a juniper on the opposite side of the road from the shithole bar. The fat-assed biker takes a long, casual drag of his smoke, like he’s fucking taunting me to come kill him. Hackles rise around the back of my neck, and before I know it I’m in motion, sliding through shadows along the highway, moving with the grace of a trueborn killer, prowling, hunting, my animal eager to taste blood.

  I run a mile up the road and when I slip across the highway under the red moon’s glow I’m in full wolf, my shadow racing along the ground beside me.

  I hit the sand on the other side of the road and my shadow splits into three, and now there’s four of us on the prowl, the shadow-hunters linked by a synaptic pathway running somewhere deep in my mind, and now there are sounds and sights and scents arriving from all four of us as we approach the bar.

  The shadow-wolves might be gifts from the Skinwalker. Or maybe the turquoise amulet she gave me summoned them. Or maybe what the old hag said about my true lineage is true.

  The One We Answer To.

  Fuck it. None of that matters.

  All that matters is that I feel…powerful.

  Like my old self again, but stronger. More certain. More…unyielding.