The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3) (5 page)

This anger. It’s eating me up.
 

As if my animal spirit has taken his rage and placed it in me—
 

I’m about to turn and help Lily when something bites my shoulder, bringing a sharp, stinging pain, and when I look down I see a large wasp perched on my collarbone.
 

“Shiori?” I gasp.

Leave them.
 

The words are in my mind.

We’re stronger without them. They slow us.

“No…get out of my head, Shiori. I told you…ouch!” I swat the wasp off my shoulder and rub the raised bite marks already rising on my flesh. The wasp lifts into the chill air and buzzes in a quick circle over my head.
 

It’s her they want. Remember what the Guardians did to us? To Pimniq? I know where to find them. I will hunt them. Join me in retribution.
 

“I can’t…”

“Anik?” Pim says, her eyes wide and fearful. “Are you all right?”

I scoot Pim through the door and tell her I’m fine. Another blast of cold air slams into my back and when I look behind me I see Connor’s summoned his animal spirit.

A wolf.

Like his murderous father.

A low, chuffing growl escapes my lips.
 

The wolf’s fur is mostly white with a patch of light brown along his back. His fangs and claws glitter like fine crystal. The wolf whirls to face the far door. Behind him are four ghostly creatures, long and pale, with papery-white skin so thin it’s translucent, their faces eyeless and smooth except for a single wide mouth filled with sharp teeth.
 

I recognize them. They must’ve tracked me from the tundra.
 

They’re my love Sedna’s slaved souls. My people named them the Taboo-Breakers, the Kin Eaters. Now I know them as Stricken, and when they scent me close they unleash a horrible throaty scream that sounds like a drowning animal.

The sound hits me with physical force, like a wave crashing onto shore, and throws me into the wall.
 

Trish lifts to one knee, raises her handgun, fires at the Kin Eaters. Gunfire hammers through the windowless room. A wall of shimmering blue water descends between Trish and the Kin Eaters. Her bullets plough into the water and fall harmlessly to the floor.
 

“Oh fucking christ,” Trish mutters. “These pricks just get less and less fun.”
 

The wolf will slow them,
Shiori says in my mind.
Join me on this hunt.
 

I ignore Shiori, tuck Pim in the shadows behind the exit door and say, “I want you to run now, sister. Run after the man who said he’d help us.”

He’s a junkie. But he said he’d help, and right now I have no choice but to take him at his word.
 

“I won’t,” Pim says, her eyes misting. “I won’t leave you, Anik. Not again.”
 

“You
must
!” I shout, too harsh. Then I force myself to calm; run my fingers through my sister’s long, blue-black bangs. She has our mother’s beautiful hair, and now, when she’s angry and determined, she looks exactly like our mother. “Please, Pim. Promise you’ll run. No matter what? Run and…follow Lily and…”
 

My voice trails off uncertainly.
 

What should I tell her? There’s nowhere safe. Pim already understands this. I won’t lie and tell her there is, so there’s nothing to say…and that more than anything makes my failure hit home.
 

I can’t protect her. My little sister. Fuck. I can’t even protect myself—

Bring Pimniq
, Shiori whispers.
She’s safer far away from our usurping alpha.

Usurping? The question flashes through my mind, but there’s no time to ask what Shiori means. Trish’s gun rings out again, then Connor roars. I know they won’t be able to hold the Kin Eaters—
 

Pim looks at me like she’s waiting for her big bro to provide an answer, a course of action that’ll make this nightmare go away, but when she realizes I don’t have any answers, that I’m just as lost and afraid and overwhelmed as she is, she firms her lips and says, “I will
not
leave you. I’m stronger than you think. I’ve always been strong! I helped you once already, brother. When that hunter shot you? Or have you already forgotten?”

“No,” I whisper, “I’ll never forget.” Pimniq
is
strong. She looks older to me now. Less a child. And I see something else I recognize from our mother: a deep stubborn streak.
 

Pim’s not going anywhere, and suddenly, for the first time since the pale man August Lerrick captured and brought us south, the darkness clouding my heart lifts.

You are a fool, Anik. A beautiful, broken fool.
 

I whirl and lock eyes with Shiori.
 

She’s pressed in a dark corner, nearly invisible.
 

She shrugs, lifts her thin arm and points behind me.
 

The Kin Eaters glide further into the room, bringing cold air that reeks of rotten fish and low tide and the suffering of the drowned. Connor leaps at the first creature, his wolf jaws snapping, and when he hits the Kin Eater it explodes in a burst of foul seawater that spreads across the room an inch deep.

The water runs toward me. Laps at my toes.
 

The water is calling me. My lover Sedna is calling me.

It’s my fault the Kin Eaters are here. It’s me they want.

“Take me,” I whisper, suddenly longing for the safety and peace and…emptiness I enjoyed as Sedna’s captive. “Take me.”
 

Icy cold water runs over my shoe and down the other side.
 

I can’t lift my foot. The water’s trapping me.
 

Pulling me down.
 

Lily’s on her feet, facing the three remaining Kin Eaters, with Trish standing protectively in front of her. But it’s not the All Encompassing they want.
 

The Kin Eaters dissolve into the floor and suddenly the entire room is flooded in water six inches deep. It washes ice-cold over my ankles and then I can’t move, and the rushing, roiling sound of ocean waves and the lives they’ve claimed slams into me, and from within that haunted drowned sound I hear her calling my name, Sedna, my love, and a part of me is thankful she found me, wants to feel her warmth—

“Anik!” Pim screams, but her voice is far away.

“Go!” I scream. “Please Pim! Just…fucking go! I don’t want…I can’t…”
 

I want my sister safe. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. Or so I believed.
 

Then I met Sedna. And I realized it’s her love I want more than anything.
 

More than life itself—
 

The water’s pouring up my calves. Soon it will run up my chest, over my neck, down my throat, and I’ll be reunited with Sedna in the watery grave of Adlivun. I’ll cut myself open for her, feed her my flesh as loving offering—

“My god Anik what’s happening?”
 

Lily’s voice. So quiet I can barely hear it.
 

The water’s moving up my skin. It’s reached my hips. It circles around my crotch, caresses my balls, makes my cock throb and swell and I see her now, Sedna my love, in her true home at the bottom of the Arctic ocean. Her house is a whalebone frame stretched tight with the clothing and skins of my drowned people. I’m looking down at her from above, I’m sinking to her, she’s crouching over something, her back turned to me—

“She still has him,” Shiori says. “He hasn’t forgiven himself.”

Shiori’s standing beside me.
 

The water parts around her, concentrates around me—

My eyes can still move and I can turn my head a little but the rest of me is frozen. I try and plead for my packmates to help, please help me but only a watery moan escapes my lips—

“What?” Lily screams. “Who?”

“Sedna,” Shiori answers. “She captured him. Seduced him. He feels he deserves to be punished for…what he did. We broke free together but…he must still…want to be with her…”

Shiori’s right. I need Sedna.
 

My animal spirit murdered my parents.
I
murdered my parents.
 

I’m a Taboo-Breaker. A Kin Eater.
 

A living curse.
 

I deserve this suffering.
 

Sedna’s there below me, I see her through a shimmering haze of icy blue-black water, her hair waving in the ocean currents, long and thick and matted, every broken taboo a knot or piece of filth in her black hair, and she’s consuming something, I can’t see what, but I hear the watery sound of my own screaming. The water runs over my hard cock, caressing me, urging my seed forward. Thin rivulets of the Kin Eater’s watery bodies run over my ribs, across my heart, chilling my blood and when I look down I see my skin is bloated and pale blue, like a corpse rotting on the ocean bottom—

Something smacks into me. Lily.
 

She’s shouting, trying to knock the water away. But it’s like trying to stop a surging tide propelled by a blood red moon. Some things are simply meant to be. Like Sedna and me.
 

I am meant to be hers.
 

“We have to help him! Shiori! Help him!” Lily cries.

A loud buzzing fills the room as the first drops of water reach my lips. The water tastes salty and too-sweet and its touch is so cold my breath freezes in my throat and I open my mouth to drink deep of her, swallow her down, my love Sedna, but instead of her comforting touch something flutters down my throat, or rather many things, buzzing, angry, and through the watery haze obscuring my vision I see a cloud of yellow wasps swarming around my head, pouring into my open mouth.

Shiori.

No. I’m hers!
 

Let me be Sedna’s. Please.
 

The wasp swarm fills my mouth, nostrils, ears, sealing me closed from the sweet ocean water.

Warding me away from death, Princess of Adlivun.
 

But I’m still floating down into the murky ocean depths to greet my love. Sedna lifts her head from what she’s eating, turns to me, and beneath her I see a stretched-skin kayak and a male corpse draped across it, one arm already gnawed to bone, the other partially consumed. Sedna’s cradling the arm in a pair of small, delicate flippers, and when I look at the man’s face I see it’s me—

Welcome home, my love
, Sedna says, lifting my arm and taking a bite from my wrist, pulling and tearing my flesh from my bones.
 

The wasps mass around my face, a solid ring of buzzing insects, then work their way down my jaw, pushing the Kin Eater’s watery shape away from my mouth, forcing the water down to my shoulders, and as the water builds up against this living dam the wasps start drowning; they fall from my shoulders to land in a ring at my feet, and now Sedna shrieks at me from her watery palace, telling me I deserve this, that I’m hers and hers alone, that I must suffer for violating the taboo, for killing my kin, murdering my parents, and I know she’s right.
 

She’s
right
.
 

I am a monster.
 

The wasps and the water push against one another while Lily and Trish and Connor, now in human form, watch helplessly, eyes wide in awe and horror and I see Pim peaking from behind the door, frozen, afraid and I can’t leave her, she’s forgiven me for what I did…but why can’t I forgive myself? The swarming wasps have driven the water down to my belly. They march from my throat and I draw a long gasping breath as the water recedes down my legs, the dying wasps pushing Sedna’s Kin Eaters down, saving me—

“She won’t be able to hold the water for long,” Lily says. “Help me get him through the door when the water releases his feet.”

“I’m sorry,” I mumble, meeting Pim’s eyes. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”
 

Pim stands, approaches me, reaches out and holds my hand, and when she does I feel the water weaken and recede even more, it’s at my shins now, and the watery crash of waves against stone and the screams of the drowning rise to meet Sedna’s furious shrieks, the sound piercing my skull, and I squeeze my little sister’s hand tight while Shiori’s wasps work against the Kin Eaters and then the wasps reach the floor, form a small protective circle around me, the water damming up around them.

“Now!” Lily screams.
 

Connor slams into my back while Pim tugs me forward, over the pooling water and through the open door, and I crash in a heap beside my brave sister, shivering and retching, then turn in time to see the wasps fly across the door’s threshold, holding the water back as it rises, growing deeper, a foot now, two feet, building up against the door and the dam of wasps, remorseless, cruel, unstoppable, while Sedna laughs and screeches in my ear, telling me how delicious my flesh is, how she longs to consume me for eternity, how I deserve this suffering for what I’ve done, and then the wasps form a wall a foot thick across the entire door, holding the water back, bulging and straining against the mounting pressure, their buzzing growing louder, more frantic—

Lily walks close to the door and the buzzing wall of wasps and reaches her hand up. A single wasp lands in the center of her palm. She passes the wasp to Pimniq, then says, “All right, Shiori. Just a few seconds more.”

Lily’s skin begins to steam and smoke. Her clothes smolder, then burst into flame and fall to the floor. I shield my eyes against the terrible heat and lean over Pim while Trish and Connor leap behind one of the steel tables.

Lily’s skin glows white-red, so hot it shimmers. The linoleum floor blackens and melts beneath her while the pink-painted walls bubble and burn.
 

I scuttle backward, dragging Pim with me, the heat making the soles of my boots melt and then the wasps fall to the floor and the pent-up dam of ocean water bursts into the room with a tremendous crash.
 

Inside the wall of water I see the Kin Eaters, their thin, drowned forms and black, ravenous mouths, and then the water slams into Lily with a thundering hiss.