Luz grabs her spear. Turns to face the windows. “There’s a tunnel just outside—”
The wasp caresses me with her stinger.
My brother.
The words buzz through my mind.
My lost brother. Our alpha has called. Vuk is Becoming—
Deep inside my spirit, locked in his hidden cage, my animal shrieks in terror and hatred.
I scent them. Their polluted black blood. My ancient enemies.
They’re gathered outside. Waiting my sister’s command.
Memories from my wildmind, long lost to time, wash over me. A tiny woman with pale skin and eyes as black as her hair. An altar in the shape of a pyramid. I remember kneeling to an animal far more powerful than me. My alpha. My brother. My mother’s shrieks as my brother violated her. I remember the killing. Eons of suffering. I remember hating and fearing my alpha brother. How he kept me obedient by securing a chain around my neck and attaching it to his wrist when we rode against those who resisted—
“I won’t go,” I whisper. “I will not kneel. Not again. Never again.”
Several things happen at once. The wasp sinks her poisoned stinger into my arm, startling me from my trance. The windows implode inward. A vast, buzzing cloud of wasps pours into the villa, followed quickly by the black blooded, twisted creatures. Stricken. My brother’s corrupted spawn. Luz screams. Thrusts her spear through the throat of a grinning, horned Stricken with the body of a man and the head of a bullfrog.
All this happens while I remain frozen in the middle of the room.
Helpless.
Luz shrieks something, but the buzzing wasps drown out her voice. The villa door opens and my sister Shiori glides in, wearing a white summer dress that shimmers in the low light and makes her look even more pale.
The Stricken pile into Luz, knocking her to the floor. Her spear clatters against marble tile. My sister pauses at the threshold while her buzzing swarm circles in the air over my head.
“The Lord of Near and Nigh?” my sister sneers. “I brought you a gift, my weak, wayward brother.”
Shiori tosses a loosely wrapped bundle at my feet.
A deer’s foot with a gleaming gold cap rolls across the floor.
I see my obsidian amulet half-hidden in the bundle.
The Smoking Mirror.
“Raise the Night Wind, Rodas,” my sister says in her quiet, almost shy voice. “Summon the stalker. Challenge me.”
I’m trembling. My heart racing.
I can’t move. I’m too weak. Too afraid.
I scent my sister’s power. She is the High Priestess.
My brother’s second in command in the Age of Discord.
She has usurped my place at his side.
The Stricken rip Luz’s loincloth off. She’s screaming, kicking and scratching at them. Bleeding from where their wicked claws have carved into her. Two chattering rat-faced animals grab her wrists and secure her arms over her head while a third, a blunt-faced goat, works at parting her legs—
“Do you remember my name, my brother?”
“Shiori,” I stammer.
“I have many names. As you once did.” My sister spits. “Your blood is watery. Like a Skin’s. But still. You are a Risen. You belong with your packmates.”
The goat-Stricken grips Luz’s leg and fumbles with his belt while the rats holding her arms cheer him on—
Shiori’s lips twitch into a smile. “Does it bother you?”
“She’s innocent of our war.”
Shiori shrugs. “The strong are free to take what they desire from the weak. It’s their right.”
“No. I don’t think so. Not anymore. No right-minded animal commits such atrocity. No right-minded animal maims and murders without need. Or takes pleasure in another’s pain.”
My sister’s wasps descend from the ceiling.
They’re circling only a few inches over my head.
“The world has weakened you, my once-proud brother.”
“If what you have is strength, then I accept weakness.”
I accept.
The words pound through me.
Luz screams as the gasping, spitting goat-Stricken strokes himself hard and leans down—
“Call the stalker, Rodas,” Shiori hisses. “I want to greet him. Feed on him. Summon your strength. Challenge me! I feel your hatred. Scent your bloodlust—”
My world burns yellow and black.
Night Smoke.
O Night Lord have you mistaken me for another? I who am a commoner, a laborer. In excrement and filth my life is lived…I am unreliable. I am an imbecile. I am stillborn. Why do you darken the sky for one such as me? For what reason do you offer such a wondrous gift?
I raise my head toward the ceiling and roar, scattering my sister’s wasps.
Shiori looses a high-pitched wail of triumph while her jaw distends and her face elongates and her limbs shift into vicious hooked forelegs—
Shiori believes my animal will kneel to my brother’s power.
She’s wrong.
My body dissolves into black smoke, reforms as a whirring razor-edged blade eight feet long. The blade spins across the room like a helicopter, slices the goat-Stricken in half so clean it takes a moment for his torso to part from his hips.
The rat-faced Stricken, slick with their kin’s blood, release Luz’s arms.
Luz rolls to the side, ducking under my still-spinning Night Smoke blade while the two rat heads arc through the air—
Shiori frees her animal.
A hideous clicking wasp with a foot-long black stinger.
I banish my Night Smoke and summon the Spotted Stalker while Luz grabs her spear and thrusts it through the face of a fanged monkey trying to crawl into the villa, then leaps to the side as a black snake uncoils and strikes. Its jaws snap closed inches from her neck.
My rosette tattoos ripple and bulge and my bones break and reform and I crouch on all fours while my fangs drop and the world becomes scent and sound and raw uncaged animal instinct—
Then my sister is on me, her mandibles crushing into my shoulder while she tries to spin around to stab her poisoned stinger into my side. Blinding pain and the scent of my blood makes my eyes explode in red and orange fury. I rake my claws against my sister’s abdomen, find the soft flesh between her armored plates and work on plunging my hand into her insides—
Luz shrieks there’s a tunnel and I want to tell her to flee, to save herself, but Shiori slams her forelegs into my side, piercing a lung. My breath gurgles and wheezes out of me. Shiori looses a keening wail that drills into my wildmind and for a moment I’m too stunned to move, my animal suddenly confused and uncertain. Shiori’s stinger grazes my thigh. The burning pain from her poison jolts me out of my trance and I run backward, carrying my sister with me.
We slam into the villa’s stone wall. The wall shudders, then cracks and explodes outward. We land in a cobblestone courtyard, a blur of tooth and fang and stinger, rolling along the ground, snarling and hissing and screeching, covered in red blood and I feel my animal begin to tire, my sister’s too strong, too close to her animal, a Risen freed, and then Luz is running beside us, her spear raised—
Shiori catches sight of Luz and tries to throw herself to the side, but I slip my claws into her belly, clamp my jaws on one of her forelegs and hold her firm. The metal-tipped spear point reflects in Shiori’s fractal eye, then there’s a crunching popping sound and wetness soaks my midsection and I scent my sister’s pain, her shock and surprise as Luz buries the spear through Shiori’s eye and deep into her head.
Shiori goes rigid, then lashes out at Luz with her razor foreleg. Luz leaps back. Shiori’s leg opens a long horizontal wound directly across Luz’s thighs. Luz screams and I reach up and grip the metal-tipped spear and grind it into my sister’s head while she shrieks and wails.
I loose a mad blood-roar and flip Shiori onto her back.
She’s twitching and keening, desperate to throw me off.
My animal
scents death. A feed.
I hold the spear buried in Shiori’s eye while I clamp my leopard jaws around her neck. Sink my fangs into her throat. The wasp flails and red blood fills my mouth and I need this kill, this offering—
“Wait!” Luz cries.
I growl and snarl and tense my jaws.
Shiori freezes. Her forelegs slip from my flank. Her body shifts.
There’s a tiny, frail woman pinned under me. Her white summer dress wet with red blood. Her head pinned to the ground by the spear clenched tight in my clawed hand. My Night Hunter fang’s sunk deep in her throat. One twist of my head and my sister’s throat will open—
“Don’t murder her, Rodas. You’ve won. She’s submitted. You’re better than her. Reborn.”
“Weakness,” Shiori says, her voice so frail I scarcely hear through the bloodlust pounding in my head. “Kill me, my proud brother. Offer me. I accept…this death.”
Her blood warm in my mouth.
My sister’s blood.
The Night Stalker roars at me, demanding I murder her.
Shiori would have killed me without remorse. It’s law.
Strong over weak.
“I’ve failed the Fallen,” Shiori whispers. “Kill me, Rodas. Be kind…and kill me. I can’t return without you. He will hurt me far worse than you can imagine.”
She’s afraid. Of my brother Vuk. The One Without Value.
My true enemy.
I release my sister’s throat.
Tug the spear from her eye.
My chest heaves. Blood streams from my sides, my chest, my back where Shiori’s forelegs punctured me. But already I’m healing.
Shiori is as well.
“The tunnel, Rodas,” Luz says, watching Shiori heal with a look of horror on her face. “Quick! Before more arrive—”
“Hunt with me, my sister,” I snarl. “There are two more of our Risen pack. Together we can defeat him—”
Shiori shakes her head sadly. “You are like Anik and Lily. You belong with them. You have…goodness in you. But I am the All Consuming. I have nothing but hunger. My place is at the Fallen’s side.”
I banish my animal. Look my wounded sister in the eye. “Then tell our brother we’re coming,” I say. “Tell him he’s being hunted.”
CHAPTER TEN
AARON
MY HEAD’S POUNDING. My eyes are sealed shut with nastiness. My sinuses ache. My stomach’s feels like there’s a vice clamped around it, and the only reason I’m awake is because I’m bursting for a piss.
I’m ripping hungover.
Feels awesome. Just like old times.
Fuck of a lot better than being burned alive and waking up caged by a douchebag dog-headed motherfucker.
That was fun though. Gutting the bastard.
The look of shock when I plucked his heart from his chest.
My stomach rumbles.
I work my eyes open, groan and immediately slam them shut.
Fucking sunlight. Fuck you to fucking hell. Times ten.
I work up enough spit to cough a mouthful of sandy dirt. I need a Caesar. Breakfast of champions. Blue used to mix ‘em nice and hot.
But that would involve getting up off my ass.
Not quite there yet.
Few more minutes chillaxing.
The One War can wait.
About last night? Booze, bitches and blow. Don’t remember much. Didn’t hang out with Lil. Saw her once. She was sitting on the Harley my MC gifted me. Looking out of sorts. Panties bunched. Wearing the resting bitch face I usually see on Mia. Maybe should’a talked to her. Nah. She’s all twisted up about her bro. Can’t be easy, having a psychopath for a brother.
Fuck it. Murdering him will help.
Today we roll on Phoenix. Not worried about a thing. Gut some Stricken. Set up shop. It’s the fucking heart-to-heart I gotta have with Lil that makes my headache spread from my temples around to my brow and down the base of my neck.
How best to break the news?
All pansy-assed? Appeal to her emotions? The child she’s carrying?
Fuck that. Lil will just laugh. Brush me off.
I’m pregnant, you asshole, she’ll say. I’m not an invalid.
Trish’ll nod and say hell yeah, girl.
Get all woman’s lib on me.
So I say: you’re staying here. Don’t fucking argue.
Shut the fuck up and stay put.
The direct approach.
Let her hate the big bad biker Aaron Arud.
Fine. It’ll pass. That’s what lover’s do. Hate on one another for a while. Sort it out. Move on. Until maybe one day the hate sticks.
I don’t think Lil and me are there yet. Not quite.
Her snatch’ll be hot and wet when I ride home after murdering her fucking brother. Bet your ass it will. We’ll have some solid make-up sex.
“She heard you, handsome.”
What the fuck?
Mia. I loose another groan, not from the headache this time. From the hassle.
“Here.”
I look up. Squint against the light. Shade my eyes with my hand. Mia’s crouched beside me. Real close. Damn, bitch is stealthy. She’s wearing skin-tight black leather pants and an even tighter t-shit that makes her tits pop. Chrome buckles glint on her knee-high fuck-me boots. There’s a Glock and hunting knife dangling from her belt. My cock surges at the scent of my former mate.
Oh, and she’s handing me a Caesar.
With ice. Little beads of condensation run down the mason jar.
I don’t even bother asking how the fuck she got ice out here.
Prolly squeezed it from her frigid snatch.
“Thanks,” I say, pushing myself upright and trying not to wince too bad.
“Here,” Mia says. “You need this too.”
She’s holding a facecloth.
“I’ll get cleaned up later,” I scowl, irritated by all the babying.
“Fine. Bleed all over yourself. Fuck if I care.”
I look at my jeans. A drop of blood plops on my thigh.
I snatch the facecloth and press it to my bleeding nose.
That would be Nashy’s blow coming back to bite me.
“I love seeing you after a bender,” Mia says, her voice low and husky. “Totally fucking hot.”
“I stink,” I say, sipping the Caesar. It’s perfect. Spicy and ice-cold.
“You smell exquisite. Rough and raw.”
“You missed me.”
It’s not a question.
A shadow flickers across Mia’s face. “You know I did. I tried not to, if it makes you feel better.”
“Look,” I say, trying to find the right words and coming up way short. “It was shit what I did to you at the rich prick’s house. I went wild. No fucking collar? C’mon. Didn’t even recognize you—”
Mia flicks a handful of dirt in my face. “Don’t fucking lie. You chickenshit. You recognized me. You ran. You could’ve waited—”
“I was out of my fucking mind.”
“We could’ve roamed together. Like the bad old days.”
I take another sip of the Caesar. “Time’s change.”
“Yeah, they do,” Mia says in a way I don’t like at all. “Sometimes they change real quick. Like in a single night.”
“You got something to say?”
“I’m saying it.”
My head feels like a Harley with a blown gasket. I ask Mia for a smoke. She lights one, hands it to me, and after a long drag I say, “Who heard what?”
“Nothing,” Mia says with a shrug. But her eyes are cut gems, and I know she’s not telling me something—
“I got something else for you,” she says.
“A smoke and a Caesar and I’m already wondering what you want.”
“Don’t be a dick. You could be grateful. Show a little class.”
My laugh quickly becomes a cough. “No one ever accused me of having class.”
Mia tosses something in the dirt. The turquoise amulet t
he skinwalker gave me. I pick it up, wipe the dust from the green-blue stone and drop it around my neck.
“You’re welcome.”
“Thanks, Mia. Seriously.”
Mia takes a long breath. Here it comes. The real reason for this little meet-and-greet.
“I saw you beat your bloodmate down, Aaron. The All Encompassing. A Risen. I scented your power. And all these new Purebloods joining us. More each day. From around the globe. Saying they scent the ancient bloodline. Saying they heard the primal alpha howling for them. The One We Answer To.”
I flash Mia a toothy grin. “Guilty as charged.”
Mia gasps.
I scent the need coming off her, her arousal, and my wolf’s fucking howling for her, demanding I let him loose to claim this willing mate—
Mia reaches out and takes my chin between her long, narrow fingers and her thumb, like I’m an errant schoolboy, then says, “You could demand me. Your bloodmate will kneel to your command. She can’t say a fucking word. An alpha like you…well, fuck it. I don’t need to make your head swell any more than it already is.” Mia trails her hand down my naked chest, my abs, across my aching crotch. Then she smiles. “You are swelling, aren’t you, handsome? I missed your cock in my mou—”
I swat the snake bitch’s hand off me, making sure I drop enough claw to cut her a bit. Mia’s not good at getting subtle hints.
“Do you scent the bear on me?”
So there it is. A knife in the back.
Anger tightens my throat. “The what?”
“The bear. The big one? Tornarsuk? You only saw Anik once. Right before the Guardians slit his throat. Nice enough guy. A little quiet. A little thick-minded. Lacking…well, not spunk. He’s got plenty of that. Built like you’d think for a bear his size, with balls to match. Even bigger than you—”
“I know what you’re doing, Mia. It won’t work.”
All right. That was good. Mellow. In control. Bitch won’t get under my skin. But it’s a struggle to keep my voice even—
“You’re a shit liar, Aaron.”
“Fine. You fucked Anik whoever-the-fuck. He’s got a big cock. Good for you. You trying to make me jealous?”
The All Consuming: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 4) Page 9
