The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3) (10 page)

There’s no place for us to be together and happy.

But soon. Maybe we’ll be alone together.

Rid of these strangers.
 

Already the woman Lily’s weakness has killed the wolf-man Connor.

She should have let me feed on the Stricken. That was also a mistake. The hunger is a brutal ache in my belly. I could have called the biting swarm. Stripped the black-blooded of their flesh. Feasted on their hearts.
 

Who will die next, Anik is wondering as we stalk through the dimly lit corridor. He’s hoping it’s him. Then me. Anyone but Pimniq. He sought the All Encompassing out. Brought his little sister to this evil city and this failing pack. And now?
 

Weakness. Suffering. Death.

I’m shuffling my feet along the corridor. Anik keeps trying to hurry me along.
 

Such a good boy, my Anik.
 

My neck is still sore from where the fuck Lily gripped me. I will admit to feeling fear when she unleashed her animal’s roaring heat. But I’m beginning to suspect something. Perhaps the All Encompassing is not my alpha.

Perhaps there is another.
 

Anik wants to be loyal. Wants to be true. These are his ideas of himself. But I see it in his eyes when he looks directly at me, which is too rarely now. He’s looking for a way to keep his little sister safe, but his stubbornness and sense of duty prevents him from fleeing and joining me.

I have no sense of duty.
 

She will not keep me.
 

I will not bend to her.

But how to make poor Anik understand that abandoning this failing alpha isn’t betrayal?
 

Self-preservation is never wrong, no matter the cost.
 

Survival is all that matters. Living on while others die.
 

This is the only test of a life. This is natural law. We are being hunted. There is no room during the End of Days for ridiculous things the Skins call loyalty and duty and friendship and love. Friendship and love are only valuable if they assist us in our will to survive.

A true leader understands this.
 

The question for now is: do I abandon this woman Lily to die, or do I challenge her for alpha?

Either way, the thoughts make an excited, high-pitched buzz rise in the back of my throat.

***

 
I will admit that even though I am the Plague, the All Consuming, the Sun Smotherer, the Black Dawn, when the stinking Skin called Wes leads us up a rotting wooden ladder and into the daylight my breath catches in my throat.

We’re outside the city the Skins named Seattle, on a slope looking west over the city and the rolling blue-grey ocean, in a neighborhood that must have once been considered affluent and beautiful.
 

It’s still beautiful to me.

“Jesus mother of…oh my god,” the Skin woman Trish stammers when she emerges from the tunnels, her dark skin slick with sweat. I resist the urge to slip my stinger through her eye and into her brain. So quick. A half a second and she’s gone.
 

Death comes easily to Skins.
 

Their one purpose is to die while the strong live on.
 

Many nearby houses are on fire. Below us, toward the ocean, most of the city is on fire. Dark columns of smoke rise from the tallest buildings, plumes whirling into the sky like desperate messages to cruel gods. Seeing the smoke and flames makes me smile.

We are surrounded by the dead.
 

They lie scattered in this pretty neighborhood like they fell from the sky. In a thousand years, when their bodies are buried in mud and dirt, the strongest species will dig up the bones of these dead and study what they were doing when they died. ‘Look here,’ they will say. ‘This human died while trying to enter his vehicle. This one died on her front lawn, holding her two young children in her arms. This one died by his own hand, with a crude weapon called a shotgun.’

There’s a dead person lying on the ground beside me, a woman of my age with pretty blonde hair, her chest torn open.
 

I brush my toe against the dead woman’s hand.
 

She doesn’t move.

A few leaves are caught in her pretty blonde hair.
 

I remember wishing I could have hair like that, when I was a small child in Tokyo. The big screens hanging over the streets in the shopping district showed us smiling Western girls with glowing blonde hair. I was young and small.
 

The blonde girls on the screens looked like giant angels.
 

But they were not angels.

I lean down beside the blonde and dead woman. There’s dirt caked under fingernails. A caterpillar, grey and pale blue, inches along her forearm.
 

This is what we are: mud and dirt and nothing more.

“We need to keep moving,” Lily says as Anik lifts Pim out of the tunnel and I reach down to hold Pim’s hand. Pim presses into me but does not cover her eyes from seeing the dead.
 

She’s strong, this young Inuit girl.
 

What to do with her, when I no longer need her?
 

Anik emerges from the tunnels, also pale and sweating. He sees the death and the frown he always wears deepens. His sadness makes my heart feel heavy.
 

Sweet Anik.

Trish settles heavily onto a bench at the side of the street, leans forward, cups her head in her hands, rubs her forehead, looks at Lily and says, “Where? We can’t outrun this, Lily. It’s everywhere, right? You said so yourself. The End of Days. Even the moon’s fucking fucked. It’s like this…across the whole world, isn’t? Madness? Chaos? Destruction?”

Trish’s voice breaks. She wipes tears from her eyes.
 

I want to tear out her beating heart.
 

It’s like this, yes, I want to say, because your kind is filthy and weak.
 

Lily puts her hand on Trish’s shoulder and says, “There’s still a way to stop him. Trust me.”

“
Trust
you?” Trish says, her voice rising in anger. “It’s too late, Lil! You can’t stop this! You’re too late. Look! It’s a fucking bloodbath! The city’s on fire…my god…the entire city’s burning…”

Lily looks at Anik, then at me, like she expects us to say something that will help her friend feel better.
 

Anik and I say nothing.
 

We both know Trish is already like the woman at my feet: mud and dirt.
 

Lying won’t change that.

Lily’s face assumes an expression I’ve come to despise: a lost, why-me sad face.
 

The garbage-strewn neighborhood is quiet except for a few blaring car alarms and a dog barking madly in a yard. Even the idiot dog understands what our so-called alpha does not: some animals are born to die early in life.

“We need a car…” Lily says, looking around wildly.

“Can’t drive, boss lady,” Wes says. “Road’s all blocked up. Everyone loaded up their families and expensive things in their cars. Thought they’d drive to the hills. Escape the city. Traffic jams stopped that real quick, then the creatures fell on everyone just sitting in their cars like they was warm-blooded meals-on-wheels.”

“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.