The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3) (48 page)

“Lil,” Aaron says. “We gotta go. C’mon. We can bring him—”

Something latches onto my forearm, digging into my freshly healed scars and making me shriek in pain.

“What is it?” Aaron yells.

I look up. My father’s eyes are open.
 

They’re jet black, and as I watch, too horrified to scream, the blackness spreads from his eyes and through the veins on his face—

My father’s gripping my arm.

But not my father. He’s dead. I watched him go.

Something else is inside him—

A burning pole smashes to the the floor a few feet away, showering us with sparks.
 

I scent the First Fallen. Like smoke and ash.
 

Like the time I was taken—

My sister—

The words in my mind.
 

You should have answered my summons—

“Fuck you, you fucking asshole!” I shriek, trying to tear my arm from my dead father’s grasp.

“Lil lets go!” Aaron yells.

“I can’t!” I scream. “He has me, Aaron. Please help he has me!”

Aaron leans down, sees my dead father’s hand gripping my wrist and looses a booming roar.

My father’s other hand reaches up and snatches my throat. He opens his mouth. His jaws are lined with tiny black teeth. The blackness has spread across his face and down his neck, and his grip is like nothing I’ve ever felt, so strong I know a single flick of his wrist could snap my spine.

You will kneel, my sister, or you will burn—

Another pole slams to the floor. Then another. One smashes into Aaron’s back. The fire is unnaturally hot. I call my creature, feel my bones ripple as she howls to the surface—

And then vanishes.

She’s fears me, sister. She knows what I’m capable of. Connor Lerrick is a loyal pet. He offered his weak life. I possessed his body when I murdered your mother. Then again, when I hunted you. Through the streets. I hunted you down like a frightened doe and I fucked you, and now our son—
 

I want to scream. But I can’t make a sound.
 

My father’s deathly grip is squeezing the life from me.
 

Colored light dances in my eyes. I’m fading, about to pass out—

Aaron summons his wolf. Leans down and cuts my father’s throat open. Black blood sprays my face. Aaron manages to tear my father’s hand from my throat, but his grip on my forearm doesn’t weaken.
 

“It’s my brother,” I say, my voice pitched high in terror. “He took my father’s body. He’s in my
mind
, Aaron. The Fallen!”

Aaron roars as the pyramid structure begins collapsing around us.
 

The heat is unbearable.

Flames circle around the pyramid and light the gym roof on fire. Soon the entire building will collapse, crushing us alive.
 

My unborn son.

“Run, Aaron,” I scream. “Let me go! I need to…I need my baby back. Our son! Let me die in this world and return to the Bloodless Land—”

The end is the beginning.
 

I am my own Keeper.

So much rage. So much hurt.
 

Everyone near me suffers. It’s time I hunt alone—

I blink, trying to stay conscious. My father’s corpse is grinning and hissing.
 

Not long now.
 

Aaron looks in my eyes.
 

Shakes his head no, then says, “Not you, Lil. I can’t lose you again.”

A sharp crack echoes overhead.
 

The entire pyramid shudders. Glowing red embers rain onto me, but I welcome the pain. I deserve it for what I’ve done.

Aaron’s face is a twisted mask of confusion, anger, sorrow, hatred.
 

“I never meant to hurt you, Aaron. But we always do, don’t we? We always hurt the ones we love.”

Aaron stumbles to his knees. Tears at the creature holding me down. But the thing is too powerful. Then Aaron takes a few steps away.
 

“Go!” I scream. “Just fucking go. I never asked for your help. I never
wanted
your help. We weren’t meant to be. Just go, Aaron. Let me be.”
 

“I can’t lose you, Lil,” he answers. “Not you. Not now, after everything. I understand my role. I know what I need—”

Another pole snaps.
 

I hear it coming, whistling toward me, and close my eyes.
 

I’m ready. I’m tired of the Warm Land.
 

I might not be able to save my unborn son from the Dog God
 

But I have to try.

Something heavy and built solid as a tank lifts me by the shoulders and throws me and my father’s living corpse through the air and out from beneath the collapsing pyramid.
 

I’m suddenly weightless.
 

Like a child lifted laughing into the sky. I land hard on my shoulder, and for a moment there’s only darkness, deep and familiar, and in a way it feels like home.
 

Let me rest, I think, enveloped in the comforting darkness.
 

Let me never wake up.

I open my eyes lying face down, wincing against a brutal pain in my forehead. My father’s corpse is still. Lifeless.
 

I take a shaking breath.
 

Burning, choking smoke instantly fills my lungs.
 

Suffocating. Blinding.

Have I arrived in the Bloodless Land?
 

No. I hear a child’s laughter. A massive fire spitting and roaring. Carrion birds screeching. And something worse. A tortured, animalistic screaming. Like a man being stretched on a rack. Or burned alive—

I put my hands under my shoulders and push myself from the hardwood floor.

I can’t see more than a few feet through the acrid black smoke.

“Aaron!” I scream. “Aaron!”

A roaring orange pillar of flame shoots into the air, hits the roof of the gymnasium, spreads outward, then slowly rolls down the walls. I throw my arms in front of my face to shield myself from the heat.
 

The fire burns with malevolent ferocity.
 

I feel it now. My brother’s bloodlust.
 

His insatiable
hunger
.
 

You will kneel, sister—

The smoke parts, and for a moment I
see
.
 

Buried under the mountain of fire is a beautiful lone wolf, lying motionless on his side, eyes closed, pinned under a mountain of wood while the flames eat into him.

***

I’m about to leap into the flames after my bloodmate when a child’s voice cries from outside the gymnasium.
 

“Mother? Mother are you there?”

“Lachlan?”

I fucked you—

No. My brother was lying. My son? Child of an atrocity?

Girders from the gymnasium roof fall into the flames. The entire building’s collapsing. The reek of singed hair and burned flesh reaches my nose, making my stomach churn.
 

I look inside the raging fire.
 

I can’t see him. Aaron of the Mountain River.
 

He’s gone. Burned. Consumed.

My bloodmate sacrificed his life for mine.
 

“Mother?”

I stumble toward the gymnasium doors and into the light, too raw and panicked and confused for tears.
 

The black vultures are waiting.
 

When they see me emerge they screech and caw and lift into the air, their beating wings blocking the sun, creating an icy wind that chills my skin and knocks me backward toward the fire. The flames in the gymnasium surge, fueled by the howling wind. Vultures circle over the burning building, flitting through the rolling smoke like malign spirits.
 

“Mother? It’s you! Father said you’d be here. He promised. I’ve missed you!”

I take a weak-kneed step toward the child.
 

“Lachlan?” I say, very quietly. “Lachlan is that you? Are you here?”

“It’s me, mother.”

There. Standing in the center of the painted pyramid-disk symbol.

The boy I saw in the window.
 

The child that transformed into a hideous horned monster.

My son. My beautiful boy.

“Lachlan?”

My eldest son smiles. Looks straight at me. His eyes are inky pits of blackness that catch the light and shine like onyx.
 

“Oh god no,” I whisper.

“I missed you, mother. Even though…I’ve never known you.”

“It’s not your fault, Lachlan,” I say. “It was never your fault. I didn’t mean—”

“But you
did
,” Lachlan interrupts. “Words mean nothing. It’s what we
do
that matters.”

“I was an infant.” Lachlan opens his black-feathered vulture’s wings. They spread thirty feet behind him, rippling in the wind created by his flock. Curling ram’s horns grow from his head, and his hands turn into hooked talons.

He’s summoning his animal.
 

“I know, I know you were,” I say tears burning down my cheeks. “I know and I’m sorry. I meant to tell you that. I always meant to tell you. I watched you grow. My beautiful baby boy! I parked outside your house and watched you play in the cherry blossoms. Please? I wanted to…but I didn’t have the courage. And I thought…I thought reminding you would only hurt you more. I’m sorry. Sometimes the world doesn’t give us a right answer. Sometimes anything we do causes hurt. I wish it wasn’t that way. But it is. It is! Please? You have a right to be angry. But be angry at
me
. You have to understand! Try and understand. I was only a child as well. I was frightened and alone and he…your father…”

“Do
not
speak against my father!” Lachlan shrieks.
 

Lachlan’s furious scream pierces my skull like a blade.

There’s rage in my son’s heart. Cruelty. Wickedness.
 

The son has become the father.

No. I won’t believe that.
 

I won’t abandon Lachlan to his father’s evil.
 

“I love you, Lachlan,” I say, and for the first time in forever the words feel right. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to say. You’re my
son
. You came from my womb. And no, it wasn’t…how I wanted it to be. The world hurts us. It hurts us day after day. But part of living whole is letting that hurt go. See? You can either hold it in and let it eat you up, or you can let it go. You didn’t have a say when I gave you up. But you have a say now. You have a
choice
. Do you think…you can do that, Lachlan? Can you choose to let that hurt I gave you go?”

Lachlan hesitates, and for a moment the cruel, hate-filled glint in his black eyes dims, and I see him as he truly is: a little boy being led by the hand into darkness and hatred by the same man who harmed me.

Vuk. The One Without Value.

The creature who murdered my mother in this age and another.
 

The creature who violated me.

My eldest son’s father.

My brother.
 

Something hidden, a long-buried pain, looses, scours my spirit raw, and then the hatred hits: a loathing and rage so overwhelming I know if my creature were with me I’d be unable to stop her murdering my son.

But she’s not with me. I’m alone.

Forgiveness
.

The word echoes in my mind as I stare at my Risen son.

You are your own keeper.
 

Would I forgive my brother if he asked? Can I forgive him…even if he
doesn’t
ask? Can I let my hatred go? And if not, how can I expect my son to forgive me?
 

“Can you choose to forgive, Lachlan? Can you forgive me…like I want to forgive your father?”

My son flinches. It’s a small, nearly imperceptible motion.
 

But I see it.

My heart lifts with hope.
 

“We can choose to forgive, mother,” Lachlan says. “But I want to know. If you could do it over again. Would you still give me up?”

That question. How many sleepless nights have I spent asking myself the same question? I look into my son’s eyes. He deserves the truth. It’s going to hurt him. But he’s strong. I know he’s strong. And I know he can choose to heal, if I manage to free him from his father—

“I would,” I say. “It was the right decision.”

Lachlan’s face falls. “Even knowing…how much it hurt me?”

“Yes. Even knowing that. I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t…see you. The reminder of what your father did. You would have felt it every single day. The resentment. The anger. I’m sorry, Lachlan. But I would do it again.”

Lachlan’s eyes fill with tears.

“I’m sorry about hurting grandpa,” he says. “But you? No. I’ll never forgive you. You
deserve
to suffer. As I suffer.”

Before I can say a word the carrion vultures descend, a vicious screeching cloud, their wings beating onto me, talons raking me, claws piercing me. I sprint madly through the vultures, battered left and right, falling down, struggling and crawling forward, pushing to my feet, trying to reach my son, my beautiful baby boy, desperate to hold him, to right the wrongs, to make everything all right.

But nothing is all right.
 

Lachlan’s carrion birds smash into me, holding me back, knocking me to the ground, smothering over me, silencing me, and when they lift in a single cloud I manage to look up—

My son is gone.
 

The First Fallen has him.

Rodas. Shiori. And now my son Lachlan.

A newborn Risen.

Vuk has the three packmates he needs to Become.

I’ve failed.
 

It was never me or my creature my brother wanted.
 

It was my child.
 

My firstborn son.

His
heir
.

***

I’ve got Aaron’s Harley redlined.
 

We’re riding along a curving mountain highway, through a still-smoldering burned-out forest, away from the psych hospital and toward…fuck if I know.