The Lord of Near and Nigh: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 2) (38 page)

Pimniq taps her fingers on the truck’s dash and says, “How far are we from her?”
 

Anik shrugs. “I think the one Shiori speaks of is in the northern US. The cop who sent Shiori to prison in the boreal said she was in Seattle. So lets say I’m right, and the one we seek was nearby. We’re in southern Manitoba. If everything goes good, which means we secure gas for the truck and get across the border easily, we could be there in two days.”

“She’s growing impatient,” I say.
 

“So am I,” Pimniq says.

The closer we get the more I feel her. She’s with someone she trusts, but I feel her fear and worry, over one in particular. I can’t read his name yet, but I know it’s a ‘he’ and I know he’s very important to her.
 

“Okay, fuck,” Anik says, staring at the dials on the truck. “No more denying it. We need fuel.” Anik drives a while longer, then pulls the truck into busy parking lot. The Absent are loading their cars with boxes and cartons and crates and a multitude of items I can’t name. Their motions are hurried. No. Frenzied. They look like scurrying mice after a hawk’s shadow passes overhead.
 

“What is this place?” I ask.
 

“Grocery store in a strip mall. Highways look pretty much the same from here to Mexico.”

“We need money for gas,” Pimniq says.

“The only thing we have to sell are the dogs.”

“Nobody’s going to buy those filthy dogs, Anik,” Pimniq says quietly.

Anik drives the truck into the far corner where there are no Absent, turns it off, and rests his forehead against the wheel.
 

“You’re trying very hard to be something you’re not,” Pimniq says.
 

I listen very carefully.
 

Sometimes this Pimniq…she commands with her words. Like a pack leader.
 

I don’t care what she says to me.
 

But Anik? Anik cares very much.
 

Anik sighs, hops out of the truck, unties the sled dogs in the back and screams at them to leave. A few of the stronger ones run, but most stay huddled around the truck, looking lost and miserable in this land without trees or snow.
 

When he returns Anik is angry. I scent it on him.

“There,” he says to Pimniq. “Happy?”

“No. We still need gas.”

They argue. They are both strong willed and have different ideas about what to do. Pimniq wants to call our animals. Anik doesn’t. I grow tired of listening, and soon my gaze drifts outside. I watch a middle-aged Absent woman load a car full of food. There are two children in the back, screaming and hitting one another. The middle-aged Absent woman looks unhappy. She piles box after box of food into the car, and when the back is full she fills the front seat.
 

I wonder if she is heading north.
 

I wonder if she will consume her children to survive when the wind and snow settle in.

Thinking of consuming the woman’s children makes me realize how hungry I am. I don’t particularly like feeding on Absent, and there’s a strange sweetness in my nose telling me there might be something more nourishing nearby.
 

I slip from the truck, scenting.
 

Whatever he is, he has very sweet flesh. This prey.
 

Anik hops out after me, and Pimniq after him. He’s yelling something at me, telling me to get in the truck, telling me we don’t have time, pleading with me to be safe.
 

I’m sorry I feel resentment toward Anik.
 

It’s very difficult to resist striking him.
 

I walk across the busy parking lot very slowly, careful not to lose the scent.
 

Anik runs up behind and grips my wrist. Too hard. I tear it away. He orders me back in the truck. A few Absent turn and stare at us.
 

I smile and keep walking.
 

Then Anik’s eyes widen. He licks his lips, slowly.
 

Yes. Finally. He’s scented it as well. Our natural prey.
 

Anik’s Tornarsuk might be more powerful than me. But apparently I have a sharper scent for this prey.

“Do you know what it is?” Pimniq asks, scenting the air as well.

“No,” Anik answers.
 

I walk underneath a narrow roof in front of a long line of stores. The Absent buzz past me, looking fretful and afraid. They’re nothing. Like flies scattering in a swamp when a wolf tromps through.
 

I stop, turn to face a door. They’re in there. Whatever they are.
 

“More than one,” I say.

“The Royal Canadian?” Pimniq says, sounding surprised. “A bank?”

“Full of bankers,” Anik says. Then to me: “How many?”

“Three or four.”
 

He sniff the air and says, “Yeah. I scent more than one. But I can’t tell…what they are inside. Can you?”

“No.”

“This is a mistake,” Anik says, glancing at the busy strip mall. The Absent wander around, dim-eyed. Oblivious. Idiotic.
 

Why does he worry over them so much?
 

“No,” Pimniq answers. “This is exactly right. Can’t you feel it? In your blood? This is…instinct. This has happened for millennia. We hunt our prey. We hunt
them
. They offer their bodies so we may live. I tasted their black blood, Anik, when they arrived to kidnap me.”

“It’s a
bank
, Pimniq,” Anik says, nearly shouting. A few of the Absent glance in his direction. “The cops’ll be here in…what? Fucking ninety seconds?”

“So?” Pimniq says with a white gleam in her eye.
 

I open and the door and step inside the bank. Prey-scent fills my nose. The bank is busy. Long lines of Absent peering into machines with buttons and screens. There’s restrained arguing from a frosted-glass office. The lights are too bright. I smell northern forest in the cold sweat dripping from my forehead.
 

Where are you?
 

The air in the bank smells of greed and cleaning agents and chemicals.
 

Where are you?
 

There’s a wide staircase leading upstairs.
 

Yes. Up there. Close.
 

 
I’m on the second step when something grips my arm. I whirl, thinking it’s Anik preaching restraint again, but it’s only an Absent man wearing a uniform like the cops wear and he says, “Excuse me miss but you need to have a meeting booked to go upstairs,” which sounds all right, but when he smiles I see three sets of sharp black teeth receding back into his mouth and I know he’s one of of them, an unnatural, black-blooded one.

Stricken
.

The name comes to me from a deep well of forgotten knowledge.
 

I hunted his kind once, long ago, and then the Stricken’s eyes widen because he scents me.
 

He tries to scream to warn his friends upstairs.
 

Fuck.
 

I decide I like this word. Anik and Pimniq say it sometimes.
 

Fuck this fuck-guy.

I open my mouth and they arrive, fuck yes they do, a swarming buzzing cloud of angry yellow-bellied wasps, so many they darken the room. The Stricken’s face dissolves as the wasps stream past him, stripping him bare of flesh, and before he can fall to the ground I thrust my hand into his chest.

Except my hand is no longer a hand…it’s a long black hook that pierces the Stricken’s chest like a knife. I feel his foul heart beating, sink my hook into it and bring it into the air and the Absent scream and thrash as my swarm eats them alive, I taste every one of them, but compared to the black blood spraying my face and the scent of the Stricken’s beating heart the dying Absent are nothing.
 

I have no hunger for them.
 

Anik and Pimniq sprint up the stairs as I bring the black heart to my lips.
 

This only happens once, I know.
 

The first feed.
 

Perhaps it’s similar to first tasting the Essence. A feeling of happiness that never quite returns, but you yearn for it, you want it more than anything, just once, you beg, please let me feel that happiness just one more time and so you seek the Essence again and again, hoping to experience that perfect feeling.

But it’s gone. It happens only once.

The black heart tastes like that perfect happiness.
 

Only more…it tastes like life triumphing over death.
 

Explosions echo in the crowded bank. I know this sound. The Priests taught us to fire weapons. Absent scream and pile against the glass exit doors while the biting wasps consume them alive. Anik must have locked the doors to prevent their escape. Perhaps he’s not so weak after all. The Absent tear and scratch at one another in their panic.
 

More gunshots, and a bullet maybe grazes my shoulder.
 

I can’t really tell.

An Absent man knocks into me, wraps his hand around my throat, puts a gun to my head and says something that sounds like, “Got you, you fucking witch.”

“I don’t know what a witch is,” I say, then I shatter into a million pieces, each piece in flight. My body has become a tight buzzing cloud of wasps and my mind is in each one. The Absent man shrieks and pulls the trigger. The bullet passes through the buzzing swarm I have become. My attacker screams as I, the swarm, settles onto him, and in seconds falls dead to the ground.
 

I bring my wasps together and then I’m me, Shiori Hayashi.

Hello.
 

I’ve never become the wasp swarm. They’ve always been outside of me. I wonder if it’s the power of feeding on the black heart that’s permitting me to do this marvelous thing. I also wonder what my father would say if he could see me now.
 

He’d say I’m being impolite.
 

That soon I won’t have any friends to play with.

 
I wish he were still alive so I could feed the fuck on him.

A woman, tall, blonde, with much floppier breasts than me leaps down the stairs in a way that tells me she’s a black-hearted Stricken. She sees me standing among the dying Absent and screams. The sound of her scream shatters the glass in the room and drives deep into my skull, forcing me to put my hands over my ears and the next second she’s on me, the
fuck
, driving her shoulder hard into my chest and knocking me backward. I slam into the wall so hard the concrete shatters and for an instant the world goes black.

When I wake the Stricken woman has summoned her animal, a snarling spitting goat-creature with fangs like a lion. Her claws dig into my neck. My red blood splatters across her face and this surprises me, truly, because I will admit to believing with the new power brought by feeding nothing could harm me. The goat-woman presses her head forward and opens her jaws and I realize she intends to chew open my chest and expose my heart—
 

The thought makes me will my wasp swarm straight at her. She screams as they tear into her backside but manages to sink her fangs into my neck.
 

She’s drinking my blood.

Feeding on
me
.

I scream and writhe under her and then the wasps consume around her head to her face and her jaws weaken and then she’s sliding to the floor.

I hold a hand to my wounded neck, feeling my skin ripple and close over the wound. But the Stricken woman is also healing. She snarls and rolls to the side as I stand. Then a tremendous boom and heat and flame as the front doors explode inward. The Stricken woman slips into the cloud of choking yellow smoke, invisible, and the few Absent still alive who breathe the smoke clutch their throats and fall to their knees, dying.
 

I’m beginning to think perhaps Anik was right.
 

Perhaps this feeding was not a good idea.

“She’s here!” a Stricken woman screams. “She’s fucking right here!”

She’s screaming to the men outside.
 

Her Stricken packmates. Warning them.

“Anik?” I say, my voice very weak. “Anik are you here?”

The goat-woman laughs from within the rolling yellow smoke. “You stupid bitch Pureblood. Where have you been, that you haven’t heard? Have you seen the news? Looked at the sky? Seen the fucking
moon
? The First Fallen is Becoming. A new predator is born.
We
are born.”

I blink, not understanding. Yellow smoke enters my lungs.
 

My swarm feels…distant. I can’t command them.

The goat-woman pounces so fast I have no time to act before her claws sink into my chest, tearing at my ribs. She’s trying to dig my heart from me. I scream to unleash the plague but nothing comes, and the goat-woman snarls and spits and bites at me as she pushes me to the floor.

I’m losing. This life. So new to me now. And I’m going to die—
 

Something snaps in my chest, then something else, and there’s a terrible bone-deep pain and at first I think the goat-woman has shattered my ribcage. But then I see fear in her eyes, and when I lift my arms I have shiny plated legs ending in vicious curved hooks and the shattering breaking sensation spreads over my face and down my legs and the goat-woman throws herself off me and turns to flee, because I am not what she thought I was, not her prey, and as she whirls to run I stab both my black hooks into the soft place just below her ribs, tearing her nearly in half, and then I lift to my feet, towering over her and the shrieking Absent, and bring the dying goat-woman into my clicking mandibles.

The Stricken’s sweet black blood makes me lift my mouth to the ceiling and shriek in triumph, and this feeling is far beyond the joy of the Essence, far beyond anything I’d known in the weak, fear-ridden life now behind me, a shattered life of pain and uncertainty, because I have something in me beyond the swarm, I have this powerful creature, and as Stricken dressed all in black stream into the smoky room with their guns flashing red-orange I understand this is the true me, the
real
me, and that frail, sickly and miserable person once known as Shiori was only a temporary shell I inhabited until the All Encompassing arrived to set me free.