The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3) (15 page)

I creep forward, then carefully worry my teeth at a thorn stuck between my claws.

The Skin continues his raving.
 

He’s a madman.
 

The madman’s cracked and broken voice irritates my ears. Only a Skin would wail like this in his final hours. Only a Skin would waste precious energy blaming the world for his misery rather than fighting to survive.

My lips curl over my fangs. A long, low rumble escapes my throat.

Skins. They’re diseased. Unclean.
 

I’m loathe to hunt them.

But I’m hungry.
 

It’s been far too long since my last feed.

I’m about to leap from the jungle when I notice something odd in how the madman Skin walks.
 

He’s limping. I strain to see, and then I notice his right foot is missing.
 

The stump isn’t bandaged, and the flat, partly healed skin is rubbed raw. There’s also a hint of foul blackness running up his calf.

The wound is infected.
 

I flick my tongue across the roof of my mouth.
 

What a hideous creature this Skin is.
 

He should thank me for killing him.

I stay low until the last possible moment, and as I spring from the jungle and the Skin madman whirls to face me and his eyes widen and his mouth drops open in terror I see his skin is painted in strange flower-like marks, marks that look very similar to the rosettes on my fur, and there’s a yellow and black strip painted across his face, nearly obscured by blood and tears.

My second leap brings me to within killing range of this sick Skin animal, and now my jaws open wide and the madman Skin raises his arms in a hopeless defensive gesture while a low moan escapes his lips, the moan of the dying so much like a moan of pleasure, and then my front paws plough into his chest and we fall to the jungle floor, my jaws slipping across the top of his skull and when I bite down there’s a hollow crunching sound and the Skin’s blue-grey brain is rich with fat—

***

Dust clogging my mouth. Filling my nose. Burning my eyes.

Foul, choking dust that tastes of ash.

Darkness so impenetrable at first I believe I’m blind. Am I dreaming? Am I dead? I am the Lord of Near and Nigh.
 

The earth opens at my command.
 

Fire rains at my command.
 

I see like it’s day in the blackest night.
 

Why can’t I see? Have my eyes been taken?

And this cold. Such unbearable cold. My body shivers uncontrollably. My teeth chatter. I hug my arms around my chest to warm myself, but it’s no use. My hands are like ice.

My heart thrums a panicked beat in my chest.
 

Then a sound. A rattling, shifting sound as I shiver and moan.
 

I’m lying on something hard.
 

My fingers graze a smooth round object. A stone?
 

I trace the object’s contours. Find a hole in the roundness. Then another.
 

A human skull.

I’m lying on a mountain of skulls. I smash my fist down. The skulls shatter and crack and the pain shooting up my wrist makes me almost certain I’m alive.
 

Somewhere, far away, a man screams.
 

The sound is muted, as if it’s traveling through a thick wall.
 

Yes. A stone wall. A terrible memory rushes back: Tamara standing behind me as I leaned into the trapdoor on the top level of the Pyramid of the Sun. My bloodmate’s hands hard against my back as she pushed me into the black pit. Me spinning and falling, and Tamara looking down at me, her eyes brimming with sorrow and determination.
 

And her lover, the offering Carlos Collazo—

I loose a rumbling growl and summon my savage animal. His blood-thirst will be unquenchable. The temptress-whore and that fucking traitor Collazo will shriek and beg—

But the growl stops short in my throat, becomes a long, breathless whimper.
 

I’ve been stripped bare.
 

“O Night Wind I am a wretch,” I whisper, clawing at the skulls. “I am stillborn. I am excrement. Please, O Lord of Near and Nigh. Please accept this waste. Please lift this waste.”

Just fucking kill me. Please?
 

He’s no longer with me.
 

The Spotted Stalker. He’s gone.
 

The Night Lord has taken his beautiful gift back.
 

There’s a cold, hollow pit where the night prowler used to live.

Abandoned in this tomb. Left to die.
 

Deserted by my bloodmate Tamara and my brother Vuk.
 

The One Without Value.
 

Hatred and rage rise from my belly, gag me with churning bile.
 

I reach down my to my right leg, find the seeping stump where my foot was.
 

I try and summon the black smoke. Nothing.
 

Just this pathetic Skin sack of blood and bone.

I’m so frail and weak and wounded I can barely keep my eyes open.
 

“Please?” I mumble, scratching my face, trying to drop my claws. But nothing happens. I have only these weak, pathetic human hands.

I have nothing. I’m alone.
 

Please kill me.

I’m a Skin.

Prey
.
 

“Fucker’s right about one thing,” a raspy, mocking voice says from the darkness. “He’s excrement. Living, breathing shit.”

I silence my breath. Listen.
 

I can’t see them, but I know they’re close.

Whoever they are.

“He goes animal we’re all dead,” a second whiny-sounding voice whispers.

“Little bitch can’t turn animal,” a girl says in a quick, impatient tone. “Or he would’ve by now.”

“Yeah?” the whiny voice says. “You know that for a fact?”

“Moco the pussy,” the first voice taunts. “I knew we shouldn’t bring him hunting rats, Luz. Run back to the Hole and hide, Moco-puss.”

“Fuck you, Rata,” Moco says.

“Quiet. Both of you,” the girl named Luz says.

“Lets eat him,” the whiny one named Moco says, as if to prove he’s not afraid.

A disgusted spitting sound, then Rata says, “I don’t eat shit—”
 

“Fucking
morons
,” Luz hisses. Her voice is acidic and dripping contempt. “Next moron to talk loses his tongue.”
 

I leap to my feet, using every ounce of strength and will I have to summon the Night Stalker, smash my head against the chamber’s low stone roof, shriek in pain and fear and collapse into the skulls, clutching my bleeding head.
 

My tormentors cackle with laughter.
 

“Who are you?” I say once I catch my breath enough to speak.

“Luz! That painted guy talked first! He loses his tongue!”

“Shut the fuck up, Rata.”

Cruel, sneering laughter.
 

The stone chamber makes the sound echo in my ears.

“Kill me,” I beg, kneeling in the blackness. “Please…kill me.”

More laughter.
 

Then Rata says in his cold, cruel voice: “Lost the animal, hey princess? Yeah? Well fuck you. Time to bow and scrape with the rest of us scum. Welcome to
La Mugre
. The fucking filth. Welcome to
our
world.”

He sounds young. Maybe a teenager.

“Where am I?” I ask, not expecting an answer.

“In the pyramid, you idiot,” Luz hisses. “In the
tombs
. You don’t remember? Your animal queen tossing you down that trapdoor? Quite a move. You must’ve really pissed her off.”

The boys laugh.

“Loser,” the one named Moco says. “Your bitch is on all fours right now. Taking Collazo straight in the ass.”

“Ooh,” Luz says. “Take me big Collazo! Ooh! Take me!”

The boys join Luz in mocking my bloodmate.

I cover my ears with my hands to block out their taunts.
 

I must be imagining them.
 

My mind’s broken.

There’s a long silence. After a while I remove my hands from my ears.
 

I can’t stand these tormentors. But the silence is worse—
 

“Lets hurt him for a little while, Rata. See if we can make him go animal, then kill him before he does,” Luz says.

“That’s my girl.”

“No…please—”
 

Something hits me hard in the nose, shattering it.
 

I shriek, then clamp both hands over my face as something strikes me in the back of the head.

“I could throw rocks at you all day, you animal bastard,” Rata says. “Lets see that ugly fucking thing hiding in you. Come on! We know what you are. A demon animal. I wanna see you change before I cut off your fucking head.”

“I…I…can’t…”

Something stabs into my thigh, then my hip, then my ribs.
 

I swat at the pain and am rewarded with another stab in the shoulder.
 

I can’t see. I can’t scent.
 

I can only lie here, a trapped, tortured animal, praying for death.

“Do it!” the kid named Rata screams. “Show your demon!”

“I can’t!” I shriek. “He’s not with me! My…my fucking animal. The Spotted Stalker! He’s gone.”

Silence.
 

Then hurried footsteps crunching over bone.
 

“Luz stay back—”
 

Gloved fingers brush the hair from my clammy forehead. I turn toward the touch, squinting, trying to see through the dark, praying they don’t hurt me anymore—
 

“You’re feverish,” Luz says.

“He gunna spread some dying animal disease?” Moco asks. “Like a plague?”

“Please kill me,” I beg.
 

“It’s gone?” Luz says. “Your…animal side? Never heard of that before.”

“He’s lying,” Moco says, his voice quivering with suspicion. “You shouldn’t be so close—”
 

“You don’t know a fucking thing, Skin,” I say, finding a scrap of courage amid the terror. “You’re a wretched little bitch—”

Luz slips a gloved hand over my mouth and slams her fist into my Adam’s apple. Bile rises in my throat and then I’m choking on my own acidic vomit.

Luz holds my mouth closed tight while a squirm. She’s strong. Or I’m very weak—
 

“You want to drown in your own puke?” Luz says, her voice perfectly flat.

I shake my head no.

“You gunna call me and my friends ugly names?”

I shake my head again.

“You gunna stop being an asshole?”

I nod yes.

“I fucking doubt that very much,” Rata says.
 

Moco chuckles.
 

Luz sighs and releases my mouth.
 

I roll onto my side and retch bitter fluid, then take a gasping breath.

“Skin? You hear that, Luz? Asshole called us Skins,” Rata says.

“So?”

“So? I’m a
man
,” Rata says in the vain, ridiculously proud way of a teenager.

“You’re a moron,” Luz says. Then she sets her hand on my shoulder and her voice softens. “We saw you up there, you know. On the pyramid? Saw what you did. The idiots were lining up to have you rip out their hearts. Offering their lives to the Aztec god reborn. Calling you all kinds of fancy names. Some even think you’re the Antichrist. Ha! The fucking morons. People will believe anything when the moon rises red. So…what happened up there? Why’d your girl fuck you over? Why can’t you go animal?”

“I…don’t know.”

“He’s lying,” Rata says. “Let me kill him. Please! I want another head. Axel has eight. I can even it up.”

“Doesn’t count if he’s not at least part animal,” Moco says.

“Maybe I am the Antichrist,” I say.

The three burst into laughter.
 

“Lets tie him up and keep him around a bit,” Rata says. “He’s a fucking riot.”

“What happened to your leg, Princess?” Luz says, stabbing her index finger into my stump.

I wince at the pain and say, “My name is Rodas.”

“Not anymore,” Luz says. “I’m calling you Princess. Now. What happened?”

“You wanna answer her, Princess,” Rata says. “Trust me.”

Luz grips my swollen and infected leg stump in her hand and squeezes so hard I nearly pass out.

“It…they…the Keeper…he cut it off! He cut it off so I wouldn’t win!”

“Win what?”

“The fights! In the cage—”

Luz whistles through her teeth.
 

“See?” Moco says, his voice cracking. “I told you he was dangerous. Now can we
please
kill him and get the fuck out of here?”

“Moco-puss!”

Luz flings a skull at her crew. It shatters against a stone wall.

“Missed!” Rata cries.
 

“So,” Luz says. “You were a cage fighter? Here?”

“What…”

“In Mexico City?”

“In the Cloud Temple…in the sky…”

“No fucking shit,” Rata says. “The Penthouse? That’s where all the big shots went—”

“See?” Luz says. “This is why you find out who someone is before killing them.”

“We can barter him,” Moco says, his voice raised in excitement. “He might be worth something.”
 

“Whatever,” Rata says. “Kill first. Ask questions later. The sack of shit is lying. He’s no cage fighter. Look at him. All skin and bone. Can barely lift his arms.”

“I don’t think so…” Luz says quietly. “He was built strong once. Who knows how long he’s been trapped down here? Wasting away.” Luz runs her fingers up my leg, over my abdomen, across my chest. “They called you the Blood Giver, didn’t they, Princess?”

I nod, flinching from her touch. I wish I could see these three tormentors. They’re just disembodied voices in the darkness, and a part of me still believes I’m imagining them.

“Are you…really here?” I ask.

“Oh, we’re here,” Luz says, pinching my cheek painfully. “In spite of you fucking animals raping and butchering and feeding on us. We’re still here.
La Mugre
. We were here when that pale cunt Cortez rolled into town. Here when forty thousand fools were thrown from this pyramid.
La Mugre
is the dirt under your fingernails. The dust in your lungs. The sand in your eyes. We’ll
always
be here. Even after you demon animals burn the city to the ground. We will live on. Like fucking cockroaches. We’re unkillable. Understand?”