The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3) (11 page)

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 flinches 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.
 

T
HE
R
USTED
S
PIKE
’
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.
 

I send one of the shadow-hunters around back of the bar. Another I station here, just outside the ring of sickly orange-yellow light coming from the bar windows, and the third I send back across the highway to keep an eye on whatever might roll down an empty desert road in the middle of the night during the end of the world.

The ugly mullet-headed biker’s almost finished his last cigarette.
 

Time to roll.

My paws are silent in the sand as I sprint at my prey. The wind rises, ruffling my fur. My fangs glint in the night as I leap and open my jaws, and before the motherfucker can even whimper I’ve ripped out his throat, and as soon as I sink my teeth into him I know he’s a Skin, his red blood watery and weak. I drag him kicking and twitching fifty yards into the desert. He’s not the prey I’d hoped for, but he’s food. I feed, tearing great chunks of flesh from him, stripping the meat from his bones while my animal rages and howls and yearns for more.

A lot more.
 

The shadow-hunter I sent to roam behind the bar hears something. I cock my head, listening through his ears. It’s a muffled sound.
 

Moaning. Crying.
 

Coming from beneath the shadow-hunter’s paws. Behind the bar there’s a broken-down quonset hut and a bunch of rusted-out cars and two warehouses sheathed in aluminum siding that flaps and screeches in the wind.
 

I dig my fangs into the dead biker, snapping his sternum, digging for his heart, while behind the bar the shadow-hunter approaches one of the warehouses and sniffs the air wafting from underneath the door.
 

It smells strange. Coppery. Like blood.
 

Then that low, pained moaning sound.

Then a burst of swearing and laughter as the bar’s front door slams open and three more douchebag Satan’s Spawn bikers pile out.