The All Encompassing: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 1) (29 page)

I’m trapped.
 

I’m scratching at my thigh, my belly, digging my nails in, and have my nails grown longer? No longer chewed pink to the quick? Are they slightly black? It’s difficult to know in the glaring light, but they dig into me, dig, dig, and my fingers are coated in blood and then I see it, beneath my skin.
 

A wriggling black insect head.
 

It squirms up through the hole I’ve dug in my flesh, its blood-slick antennae quivering. It’s tiny, smaller than my baby fingernail, and it pauses at the edge of my flesh and the foul air of this cursed land, as if smelling for danger.
 

I scream, smash my fist into the evil thing.

There are more insects crawling beneath my skin. A swarming black cloud of them. They are the darkness. The hunger.
 

“On your knees! Get on your fucking knees!”

It’s them. The Absent. They’re all around me. Dozens of them. Their glaring lights burning my eyes. Their disgusting reek filling my nose, making me…want to feed.
 

I want them to kill me.
 

End this burning hunger. Please kill me.
 

Because something awful has happened.

I’m no longer afraid of them.

The Guardians were wrong. The Absent are not all-powerful. They’re weak. I felt it in how easily I snapped that man’s neck on the road. Saw it in the wound that refused to heal quickly on the woman’s head.
 

I don’t run from the Absent.

They run from me.

More shouts, on your knees on your knees, and I do as the Absent command, I crumple to the ground and curl up into a tight ball. My hands are jerked behind my back. Some kind of lock is secured around my wrists. The itching beneath my skin is making me mad, my head thrashing from side to side, my voice unlike my voice, clicking and raspy in my ears as I scream.
 

“Kill me,” I scream, “kill me please kill me.”

But what I hear coming from my mouth is this: “Aiee-clik! Aiee-clik-clik! Aiee!”

A
FTER
S
ORRY
SHAKES
me into consciousness we steal an SUV a few blocks down from the canal, then roll out to a safe-house in a neighborhood outside Renton. It’s a semi-rural area full of large, heavily wooded properties, barbed wire fences and half-starved guard dogs.

I’m sore as all fuck. I have a pounding headache that makes it tough to concentrate and the taste of bile is stuck in my mouth, like I’m a moment away from throwing up.
 

Mia says its the poison. Says it’ll take a day or two to work out of my system. Told me I got lucky when she only grazed me.

“Blind and paralyzed damn near instantly if you get a direct sting”, she said with more than a little pride in her voice.

I told her the bitch has bite.

We arrive at the safe house, load out of the SUV and I order Sorry to stash it in the barn.
 

“Should I bring out the bikes?” he asks.
 

I hesitate, wondering if the heat the bikes bring is worth it. But the thought of heading to battle in a soccer mom’s ride makes me shudder. I tell him yeah and head inside the house, glad to be alone for a second.

I stalk into the kitchen, turn on the faucet and splash cold water over my face, feeling like I could shower for a day and sleep for a week. Plus—and this is more worrisome—I’m getting hungry. No, I’m
famished
, and from the look in my crew’s eyes I know they are as well.
 

We need a Stricken or three to Reap, and soon.
 

The good, non-Minion kind: the ones that don’t burn with their blood.
 

The Sin Crew and the Collazo Cartel will bleed for betraying my MC. But first there’s the whacko cult cocksuckers that shot up my bar. A quick internet search turns up the headquarters of the Seattle branch of the Guardians of the Gate. They’re one of these bullshit prophet-based armageddon doomer cults. Led by a man named, surprise, Holy Restored Priest Gabriel the Third.

“Dude named himself after an archangel,” Mia says, leaning over me and the computer. “Go big or go home.”

Lonny and Nash are lining rails on the kitchen table, then chasing the blow down with cheap vodka.
 

Nash stretches his arms out, flexes his shoulders, then rolls his head slowly from side to side with a popping sound. “I need a kill, Prez,” he tells me. I need a real fucking kill. None of this Skin-chasing bullshit.”

Christ. I feel like a fucking babysitter sometimes. I ignore him and memorize the address of the so-called prophet’s hangout. It’s down by the water in the industrial district.
 

Nash doesn’t like being ignored, so he says, “Hey Mia? Aaron tell you about the Skin bitch he took two in the back for at the bar? Yeah. Never knew your boy was such a romantic.”

Mia leans real close, flicks her forked tongue against my ear and hisses.

I push to my feet, pull a metal box stuffed with guns out from the closet, grab a Glock and a hunting knife, tuck them into my belt and storm out of the safe house.
 

I’ve got ten lifetimes worth of pissed off surging through me. And if that mouthy prick Nash keeps needling he’s going to know it.
 

Won’t matter how far back we go.
 

It’s late morning. The sun’s a low patch of light grey against a darker grey-black background of cloud. Sonny comes out of the house, yelling we should stash our MC cuts here. I take mine off and toss it to him, then hop on my Harley and throttle her hard. She pops and spits, idling rough. It’s been a while since I’ve ridden her. My other ride’s probably in some pig station, soon to be sold to a fucking dentist.

I smile, thinking of Lily and that smarmy mouth of hers, then light a smoke with trembling hands.
 

Lily’s been in the back of my mind all day, a worm digging into my flesh. I can’t get the scent of her off me. It’s like I’m a man in a desert dying of thirst. She comes along, gives me a drip of water, laughs, then vanishes into the sand, and I’m left more thirsty than ever. I’ve never thought about a Skin woman longer than it took to come in her or kill her. But this time…I slam the bike’s throttle down, loosing the back tire, and redline the bike into a wild series of spins, spraying gravel across the house and kicking up a whirling dust cloud.
 

The boys coming out of the house hooting and shrieking, thinking I’m getting psyched for a good old-fashioned slaughter.
 

Well, that’s a part of it.
 

But mostly there’s so much raw energy ripping through me I don’t know what to do with it all. My wolf is crouching down, silent, waiting. He doesn’t like the scent of that Skin bitch Lily. Doesn’t trust her. He’s on the hunt as well, and he smells prey ahead.
 

Weak, desperate, frightened prey.
 

The only problem is the thing he wants to kill…is me.
 

***

“Must not be getting too many donations,” Sorry says, eyeing the shithole three-story brick building that houses the illustrious Guardians of the Gate.

Nash kicks open the front door and we’re in, gathered shoulder to shoulder in a narrow corridor that leads to a set of rickety wooden stairs. Right away I know there’s rotting flesh somewhere close. The building’s even worse inside than out. Half the floorboards are rotted, leaving gaping holes to trip into. Most of the walls have been stripped to the studs, and the ones that haven’t are layered in graffiti. Not the usual gangbanger shit but New Age meets schizo end of days fantasy-land: pentagrams and lidless eyes and every bullshit symbol and rune a nut-job who thinks he’s the Lord incarnate can dream up.
 

I have to smile.
 

Fucking Skins. The only animal conscious of death. It’s a curse to them. They spend their lives obsessing about it, inventing entire mythologies when it couldn’t be simpler: you stop breathing and you’re fucking dead.
 

End of story. I’ve never understood the worry.

I sight a few seconds into the future to scope this hellhole out. No probs. So we split up. Me and Mia and Lonny creep through the lower floor while Nash and Sorry head upstairs. I step over a few filthy mattresses and some scattered clothing, women’s mostly. There’s a little altar in the corner that looks like someone got their Catholic and alien invasion imagery mixed up: half-burned votive candles, some incense and rosary beads, a drawing of a humanoid thing with a huge bulging head and big round eyes and a drooping fang or sucker thing hanging off its face. There’s also pictures of women, Skin girls by the look of it, tacked up on the wall behind the altar.
 

I stomp on the alter, suddenly furious for no reason except it feels good.
 

Sorry hollers there’s something upstairs we should see, so we turn around and step carefully up the stairs, trying not to fall through the rotten planks. I slip into a room that takes up the entire back half of the building. Sorry and Lonny are there, staring at some trash bags strewn around on the floor.
 

The scent of death is so thick it makes my mouth water and and my hackles rise. I pull out the Glock I grabbed at the safe house just for the fuck of it.
 

Sorry carefully toes one of the garbage bags and steps back, wrinkling his nose. My little bro always did have a weak stomach.
 

I edge further into the room, and when I get closer I see they’re not garbage bags at all. They’re the heavy-duty bags used to carry biomedical waste, like from bodies infected with ebola and shit. I lean down, unzip one a few inches and look inside.

My wolf growls and snaps his jaws. He hates this twisted shit. Grotty apartments and body bags and whacked-out altars created by douchebag doomsday cults. The building reeks of diseased minds and twisted souls and all the nasty, corrupted shit the Skins and Stricken seem to thrive on. The Skins say mother nature’s brutal and savage. And that might be true. But at least she’s not…evil. There’s law in the wild. Order. But here? Among all this so-called civilization? There’s only—

“Sick fucks,” I mutter.
 

“Aaron?” Mia asks.

I zip up the bag.
 

There’s a woman’s body inside, bloated and green-blue. She’s been rotting for a while. Her eyes have been eaten or…burned out. I look around the room. There must be a dozen bags, and now that I’m noticing they’re not really strewn but
arranged
. Each one is connected to the other by a clear plastic tube, about a half inch wide, running along the floor.

“You scent that?” Sorry says.

“I sure as fuck do,” Nash answers.

Stricken. Shoulda known a psycho like our cult pal Mr. Holy Anointed What’s-His-Ass would be a twisted Stricken lackey.
 

“It’s a fucking lair,” Nash says, sounding excited.

“The bastard brings the girls in with stories about the end of the world,” Mia says, leaning over a partially opened sack. “Makes them feel safe for a while. Gives them a few easy answers. And he’s not lying. It is the end of
their
world.”

Mia zips up the bag. Her face has turned glittery green-blue with a thousand tiny scales.
 

“Alright, but where the fuck is he?” Sorry says. “And if it’s a lair…what are the Stricken doing with these girls?”
 

I’m thinking the same thing.
 

I’d like a little Stricken heart served blood-rare. And I’d like some answers. Like what the hell these twisted assholes were doing unloading automatic machine guns in my bar—

One of the bags begins moving.
 

Or more exactly: twitching.
 

I order Sorry to cover the door and head on over, dropping my fangs and claws on the way, then zip open the bag.
 

At first I don’t see much beside another dead Skin girl. But then the dead woman’s stomach shifts, just a little. I wait, barely breathing, trying to stay focused on what’s around me, the overpowering reek of decay and madness, the moldy smell of the rotting wood, the dust of old bricks and the sounds of Seattle at dusk outside.
 

Everything’s cool
, I tell myself.
Everything’s fucking ducky.

Then something small and sharp punches through the dead woman’s swollen belly.
 

I watch, more curious than disgusted, as a pale, long-limbed crab-human creature with hooked front pinchers wriggles out of the woman’s belly. It’s slick with some kind of grey mucus. The thing’s eyes are welded closed, but it lifts it’s oval-shaped head in my direction, sniffs, then opens a mouth that stretches right across it’s ugly little face, revealing row upon row of razor teeth.
 

I reach in and poke the little bastard with the mean end of the Glock.

The creature recoils slightly at the touch of cold metal, then screeches and swipes at the gun, knocking my hand away.
 

It’s surprisingly strong. Its eyes are beginning to open, and I see a pale green glow underneath.

“What the fuck is that?” Mia says.

“A natural born Stricken,” I say, trying to keep my voice even.
 

“But they…that’s not possible. The predator lines haven’t reproduced—”

“In eons,” I say. “Looks like things have changed.”

“Someone’s breeding them,” Mia says. “These girls…someone’s using them to breed Stricken.”

“Tell you what,” I say. “We need to find this Priest Holy Reverend Asshole. And we need to kill him.”

“Does its blood burn?” Nash asks.

I think I already know the answer, but I slip out my knife and slam it straight through the creature’s chest, pinning it to the floor. It shrieks and writhes, then dies.