New plan.
Punch as deep into that fracture as possible, then tear the fuckers apart from the inside. Sounds like fluffy kittens.
Last I see of Nash is him going all animal, barking insanely, leaping from his bike at a hundred miles an hour and tucking into a roll that obliterates a pack of bitch-ass Stricken wolves like a fanged bowling ball slamming into a set of pins.
Three seconds to impact.
No time to glance back and see how my MC is getting on.
The remaining two elephants bunch tight together and charge at me, several tons of blood-mad muscle—
I lay the bike on its side at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. There’s a scream of grinding metal and a blinding shower of sparks and then I’m on my back on top of the bike while it spins and slides down the highway, the sky whirling overhead and I summon my wolf nearly all the way and slide under one of the elephants and punch my hand into its abdomen, loosing its insides. The thing flings upward as my claws rake through its tough hide, and then I’m behind the elephants, spinning on the bike, smashing right into the center of the Stricken army, howling and laughing, covered in all kinds of blood—
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LILY
THE FUCKING CRAZY wolf bastard.
If I didn’t love him so much I’d run. That’s the sane thing to do. Abandon Aaron and the MC and head south to the Pyramid of the Sun. More Stricken armies will arrive unless I can stop whoever’s sending them.
I also need to not get myself killed.
“Make the call, hun,” Trish says in a way that says she already knows the answer.
The last of Aaron’s Pureblood army roars past with a reek of burning rubber and oil and something more, a scent my animal recognizes: blood-lust, the ancient urge to protect the pack at all costs.
The will to survive.
I watch the riders recede down the highway toward the Stricken army, envying their courage and clear-cut purpose. A hunter hunts. But what do I do? Lead? Follow? Hunt? Try and save my family? The whole world? I don’t know anymore. It all feels like it’s crushing down, smothering me with uncertainty and sadness. My blood pounds in my ears as the riders vanish beyond a hill and then the silence hits, presses the breath from my lungs. I grip the Harley’s handlebars so tight the metal squeals and threatens to buckle. My animal paces her cage, worried, scenting my weakness and near-hysteria—
You are your own keeper.
My animal has the answer.
All I have to do is listen.
Vuk looks like some sort of parasitic growth latched onto Anik’s back. He must read the hard expression in my eyes, because he says, “Take me south, my dear sister. This is not our war. This is our rise!”
I ignore him and say to Anik, “You want your sister to live?”
Anik’s forehead furrows in worry or anger or maybe both, but he says yes.
“You want to live?” I ask him.
Anik shrugs.
“Bullshit, Anik,” I say, remembering how I dug my claws into my forearms to loose the pain inside. How awful but…right it felt in that moment of despair. Then I think about my unborn son. The potential for goodness there. Innocence. A chance to start over. The cynic in me says he’ll get beat down like the rest of us. But it doesn’t have to be that way. He can choose how to live his life. But not if the black-blooded triumph. No. Then the choice will be made for him. Thinking about how close I came to ending my own life…and thinking about my son…suddenly I feel stronger. More certain.
“I know you feel like shit,” I say to Anik. “Like there’s no hope. But that animal in you? I scent his anger. He’s not finished with this life. Not by a long shot. He’s still got some fight in him. He still understands what’s right and wrong. So. I’ll ask one more time. Do you want to live?”
“Yes,” Anik says, glaring at Vuk.
“Then tell me about natural law.”
Vuk’s eyes gleam. “The strong over the weak,” he screams feverishly.
I shake my head. “There’s more than that. What else is it, Anik? Tell me.”
A shadow passes over Anik’s face. He doesn’t like me leading him like this. Tough shit. I’ve seen that fucking three-eyed bear. I need Tornarsuk roaming at my side—
“You have to fight,” Anik growls.
“For what?”
“For what you want.”
“That’s right!” Vuk screams, his voice hoarse and insane-sounding. “See, Lily? You have to fight for what you want. That’s what I did. The only difference is…I want everything. What they said I shouldn’t have…I wanted it! The inviolable laws? I broke them! The taboos? I trampled them! You understand. You love the outlaw biker. The rebel, living outside society’s ridiculous laws. You despise their chains as much as me. Your animal is a wild, beautiful creature, Lily. You yearn for the freedom that only arrives when we step beyond all limitation—”
“What do you have to fight for, Anik?” I say, my voice rising above my brother’s feverish rant. “What else?”
“For those you love,” Anik says.
“Love no one!” Vuk hisses in Anik’s ear. “Love yourself. Love your needs! Your wants. Love what you can do for yourself. The rest is weakness—”
“You ready to fight with me, Anik? To protect those you love?” I say, interrupting Vuk by pulling the bike around close beside him and smacking him across the cheek to shut him the fuck up.
Vuk recoils, clutches a shaking hand to his reddened cheek. “You fucking slut,” he whispers. “You’re nothing. A waste. You always were. An upstart bitch too stupid to kneel for her betters—”
Anik growls a warning.
I settle the bear with a calm wave of my hand.
For a moment I’m taken aback by the depthless fury and hatred in my brother’s eyes. He’ll never change. Never repent. Some people are just born with a lack inside them. An emptiness. In some ways he’s only partly alive. He’s missing what makes us feel—
“I’m more than you,” Vuk seethes, as if he’s peering into my thoughts. “I’m beyond you, as the Purebloods are beyond the Skins. Evolution’s next level. A higher form of life—”
“Yeah,” Trish scoffs. “You’re beyond sane.”
Vuk fires my best friend a glare so nasty it makes me want to smack him again. He wasn’t lying when he said there’s no good in him, and suddenly a profound sadness washes over me, cooling my skin. It’s not anger anymore. It’s more like I pity him. Feel sorry for him. He’s forgotten how it feels to love. Family. Friends, lovers, packmates. The one thing that makes this hard life worth the struggle. All he knows are his own fucked-up urges and needs and desires, and the fear creeping through him, the fear that maybe he’s wrong, maybe he is the one who’s missing something—
My brother’s truly dead to me.
I see that now.
I don’t believe in staying loyal to someone indefinitely while they drag you down, even a family member. Loyalty’s like friendship. It’s earned.
“Hey Trish?” I say, my eyes never leaving my brother.
“Yeah hun?”
“You got handcuffs?”
“Uh, I think Nash has them,” Trish says sheepishly.
I fire her an eye-roll over my shoulder, then say, “You stay here and guard my brother. Tie him to a fucking cactus for all I care. Keep your Glock pressed to his temple. He moves, shoot him.”
“Again?”
“Again. And this time? Kill him.”
“What if the Stricken overrun you?”
I shrug. “Kill my brother. Save a bullet for yourself.”
“You fucking whore,” Vuk whispers. “I fucked you. I fucked you in that alley. And you liked it. I’ll do it again. Like I did our mother—”
Anik slams his elbow into Vuk’s gut, flinging him from the bike.
Vuk lands hard on his ass, coughing black blood.
Trish slides off the bike. Looks me in the eye. She seems about to say something. A final word. Then her eyes mist up and sh
e clamps her mouth closed. A hard line forms across her brow.
I know she’ll murder my brother if she has to.
I see it in her eyes.
She unholsters her Glock and for second she’s the woman I used to know, the girl who always stayed one step ahead of me in the academy, a talented cop and a crack markswoman and an all-around good fucking person, someone I admired and looked up to and was proud to call my friend. She had her whole life in front of her. And now here we are: sunburned in the middle of the desert while a hot wind blows sand in our eyes and the Blood Moon glares down and a nightmare army charges at us.
“Trish,” I say, my voice cracking. “I’m sorry. About all of this.”
Trish’s eyes light up. “Let her loose, Lil. Let her right the fuck out. I only wish…” My friend’s voice trials off. She checks the cartridge of her Glock. “If it was me, I’d make the motherfuckers pay.”
Then she’s gone, dragging my brother into the shade of a saguaro. Vuk’s pissing sweat. Shaking. His eyes sunken in his head. Black blood’s still seeping through the bandage. But he looks at me, and he smiles.
Love is weakness, the prick said.
My animal surges beneath my skin.
My brother’s dead wrong.
Love is the only strength there is.
***
I don’t have to ask Anik if the bear is with him. By the time we get within striking distance of the black-blooded Anik’s bulked up so large the Harley looks like a toy beneath him, and when the first few Stricken hear our engines and race at us Anik leaps off the bike, rolls through the dirt and emerges the magnificent three-eyed bear, Tornarsuk the Indestructible, and when the lower-level Stricken see him they drop their weapons and run.
I stay on my bike, my skin burning into the custom alligator leather seat, fighting to keep the All Encompassing from bursting out until I command her to. A wave of shimmering heat radiates from my body. The Harley’s heating up red-hot, a fucking demon bike, and the bullets and rockets the Stricken fire our way explode as they hit my heat shield and then I’m laughing, my mind fucking shattered by the insanity of it all…and more, the sweet-as-fuck next-level power surging through my veins.
My creature’s shrieking for a feed.
The Stricken and Purebloods have broken into several warring clusters.
The sky darkens with smoke and the air rumbles with booming explosions as the Stricken unload their artillery. I see a giant Kodiac bear lift a squirming green snake over its head and tear it in two, then use half of the snake’s corpse to whip a skinless goat-monster to death. A pack of hunchbacked, rat-faced Stricken fall onto a Pureblood cougar and consume her alive. The single elephant still standing charges in a blind panic, ploughing through Stricken and Pureblood alike. A huge dust cloud rises from the battle, obscuring who’s winning.
Then I see Aaron of the Mountain River.
My heart leaps.
He’s standing in the center of the fighting. He’s in half-wolf form, his body human but his head a beautiful wolf with silver-black fur and piercing blue eyes. His fur is matted with black blood. He’s charging through the Stricken, spinning and roaring, his fangs and claws glinting in the harsh light. The Stricken fall like grain beneath a scythe. Seeing my man at war…it’s the most terrifying, awe-inspiring and beautiful thing I’ve ever witnessed, and I realize I’m seeing my bloodmate truly for the first time.
This blood is who he is. This violence and death.
He was born for it.
The thought makes my breath catch in my lungs.
My son’s father.
A warrior. A killer. A leader.
Aaron rips the head off a grinning monkey, tosses the head to the ground and howls. His Pureblood pack answers, and then a sensation builds in my belly and bones and bursts from my lips and the next thing I know I’m howling as well, answering my alpha’s command, and as I leap from the Harley and unfold my wings and take to the sky Aaron pauses.
Look up. Meets my eyes.
Breaks into a boyish but impossibly-hot grin.
He’s like a kid in a candy store down there.
Or maybe a wolf in the hen house.
Then the dust closes around him and the last thing I see is a pair of massive, heavily muscled orange and black-striped tigers closing in on my bloodmate—
***
The Three Sisters. The Ravishes. The Minions who nearly defeated Tornarsuk. I growl, tuck my wings tight and dive at the spot where I last saw my bloodmate.
I punch through the dust and turn hard left, my lowest wing scraping the ground. Open my jaws and loose a rolling blast of heat into a group of Stricken. They explode in flame, shrieking as their flesh melts to bone. My animal screams in triumph. I snatch a lumbering Stricken warthog in my talons, stab him three times in the face with my poisoned scorpion tail.
He’s dead before he hits the ground.
I’m flying only a few feet over the ground, a silver blur of predatory death. I burst through a pocket of dust and catch Nash the mad hyena barking like a crazy bastard as he chomps through the neck of a hissing lizard. Nash looks at me as I fly past and looses a frenzied laugh, then spins in a jacked-up circle and leaps onto his next victim.
Something smashes into my heat shield with a thundering boom that sends me veering dangerously low to the ground. I flap my wings, struggling to right myself, and when I look up I see Aaron emerge from the dust, his face twisted in pain.
One of the Minion tiger-sisters is latched onto his back.
He’s stabbing backward, trying to stab his attacker in the face. But the tiger keeps ducking away, and all the while she’s tearing at his back, exposing his vulnerable spine—
My creature goes berserk.
Flies straight at the tiger-bitch. Looses a screeching death-call. I’m about to snatch the Minion from my bloodmate’s back when something powerful and heavily muscled leaps from the dust cloud and slams into my side. Searing pain shoots down my wing as the second she-tiger clamps her jaws into my flesh.
I lose control, slam into the dirt hard enough to make my vision lose focus and crash into several Stricken who’ve bunkered down behind an overturned Humvee. The she-tiger roars as we come to a stop, swats me in the side with her paw, opens four long gouges along my ribs.
The tiger pounces on me, pinning me down with her weight.
The stupid bitch.
I lean up and roar right in her face, loosing a pent-up fury of fiery hatred. I wait for her head to blacken and melt—
Nothing happens.
The tiger snarls, snaps down, clamps her jaws over my neck.
Her teeth slide into my throat. Almost gently.
The Minions are immune to my fire.
The world around me is a chaos of death and dust and bullets. The sounds of war fill my mind: pained shrieks, furious howls and roars, mad laughter and taunting screams. Booming explosions shake the ground. Smoke billows, so thick it obscures the tiger crouching over me—
I rake my claws into the bitch’s belly. Her black blood spills onto me, sizzles into my skin, burns. And in that moment I feel something I never believed I would: my animal fears this creature.
The tiger Minion works her fangs deeper into my neck.
I feel her chest rumble as she growls.
My limbs grow heavy.
Then she shakes her head from side to side, dragging me along the ground, trying to snap my neck like a dog with a rabbit in its teeth. Something cracks in my neck, sends another blinding flash of pain and suddenly the world slows, I feel every weakening thrum of my heartbeat as it counts down to its last—
Desperate, I fling my stinger into the tiger’s back. She spits and roars but manages to keep her jaws clamped over my throat. Her grip is vice-like. Unbreakable. I stab her again, flooding her with poison. This time she mewls. A quiet sound. Like a kitten.
Kill or be killed.
My enemy’s weight pressing down.
My warm blood coating her mouth.
&nbs
p; My stinger buried in her back.
There’s intimacy in death. A kind of terrible beauty.
My chest and belly feel like they’re on fire. The Minion’s blood is eating into me, dissolving my flesh—
I worm my stinger deep into her side. Feel her lung pop.
Flood her with the last of my poison.
Then her back arches in an involuntary reaction so powerful it forces the bitch’s jaws open. Her eyes widen and her tongue spills from her mouth and then she’s on the ground beside me, motionless.
Bullets whip by overhead. My blood’s leaking down my neck, forming a red pool in the dirt. I choke back the bile threatening to burst from my gut.
An explosion close by my head sends stinging shrapnel into my face.
I whimper. Cover my face with a paw.
A shadow falls over my prone body.
It must be the second tiger.
I’m dead.
Too weak to fight without a few moments to heal—
Something icy cold grazes my shoulder.
I open my eyes.
Three shadow-wolves have surrounded me. They leap into the fray, sending Stricken scattering, then fall back into a defensive position. Shielding me. Permitting me time to heal. My skin tingles as the wound at my neck closes.
Aaron.
There are perks to being the apex alpha’s bloodmate.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SHIORI
MY RAGE KNOWS no limit.
I am weak. Undeserving. I challenged my brother Rodas to a blood match to secure my position in the Risen pack.
And I was beaten.
Maimed by a…filthy Skin woman’s weapon. I’m alive only because of Rodas’ weakness. His mercy. The thought rankles me, drives my wasps swarming through the ruined city, murdering whatever moves. I taste the watery blood of a thousand Skins as my wasps plague the streets. I hear their dying screams. Feel their last breaths.
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