The Lord of Near and Nigh: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 2) (4 page)

“Enough, Kuschy,” Bernard says. “Save the libertarian rant for your doomsday prepper buddies.”
 

“I’m ready,” Kusch says quietly. “When the shit hits the fan. I’m ready.”

“Sure you are,” Bernard answers, undoing her seatbelt and peering up at the condo tower. “Swanky place for a gangbanger. He high up the food chain?”

“Dunno,” Kusch says. “But it sure doesn’t matter now, does it?”

***

We’re in a penthouse on the forty-ninth floor. The walls are solid glass. There’s a three-hundred and sixty degree view: west over a purple-black ocean rough with whitecaps, east to the looming blue-green Cascades. It feels like we’re suspended in a cloud, a feeling exaggerated by the condo’s pristine white walls and gleaming marble floors.
 

“Fancy fancy fancy,” Bernard mutters to the building manager, an officious middle-aged man in grey slacks, suspenders and coke-bottle glasses. Her voice echoes in the near empty space. “Being scum pays better than it used to.”
 

“One of the finest views in the city,” the building manager sniffs.

Kusch laughs. He seems in a good mood. Then I realize why: he loves catching bodies. Lives for it. I glance at his hands. No toothy mouths. Just old, flabby, greying skin.

We round a corner from the entry hall. My breath sucks in my lungs. The manager throws me a contemptuous glance.

“You
really
gotta stop doing that every time you see a body, Thompson,” Bernard whispers.

There’s a single white wall in the middle of the vast room, stretching at least twenty feet overhead. Intended to show off a priceless work of art, no doubt. The entire wall is coated in dried blood. Lying on his stomach at base of the wall is a decapitated corpse.

“Blue jeans and shit-kicker boots?” Bernard says, edging closer to the body. “Is that a biker cut?”

It is. I recognize the patch. The Pureblood Predators MC.

“The Purebloods,” Kusch says, as if reading my mind. “Ain’t that something?”

Bernard snaps on a pair of latex gloves. I follow suit and earn a condescending smile.

“Guess I don’t have to ask if this dickhead biker was the condo’s owner?” Bernard asks the building manager.

The manager’s gone a nasty shade of green. “I don’t…I think…” Then he sprints to the sink and empties his stomach.

Kusch winces.

“What? You squeamish all of a sudden?” Bernard asks him.

“About certain things, yes. Puke is one of them.”

“Huh. Didn’t realize you were so sensitive. Maybe you and Officer Thompson should join forces and start a ladies crochet circle. Oh wait, no. There’s needles involved. Too scary.”

“Fuck off, Sandra.”

“Can I wait outside?” the manager asks, wiping his mouth.

“Maybe,” Bernard says. “Was this guy the owner?”

“If he owns the offshore incorporated company #78-GF73, then yes.”

“Figures,” Kusch says. “It’ll be incorporated in Albania or somewhere else completely untraceable.”

Bernard sends the manager to wait in his office until we come to collect the building’s video footage, then turns to me and says, “Okay, rookie. What we got?”

“No sign of forced entry,” I begin, pacing around the corpse, careful not to step in the puddle of blood it’s swimming in. “No sign of a struggle.” I glance around the near-empty condo. “No sign of anything, really. Body looks like it fell from the sky.”

Kusch glances at the untouched skylight overhead. “No it doesn’t.”

“It’s a figure of speech, asshole,” Bernard says. “Give her a chance.”

Kusch shrugs, walks over to the window and peers out at the Seattle skyline stretched below.

“What else?” Bernard asks.

“Male. Heavy build. Looks strong. Decapitated.” I study the gaping wound where the guy’s head was. There’s a thin metal chain stuck in the dried blood around the guy’s neck. My heart skips. The chain is just like the one Aaron was wearing. Except it’s not a chain. It’s a solid piece of metal. I look at the guy’s build and tattoos. It’s not Aaron, that much I know. And I’m pretty certain it’s not Nash. It might be the other guy, though. The younger one. Sorry?
 

There’s something odd about the wound.
 

“It looks…torn,” I say, half to myself.
 

“Pardon me?”

“His head. I don’t think it was cut off. It looks…torn off. Twisted.”

“That’d be a heck of a trick,” Bernard says, leaning beside the corpse with me. “Dude must weigh two-fifty.”

I nod, inspecting the wall, then run my finger through an oily black stain partially hidden by the pool of blood, lift it to my nose and sniff. The smell is sickly sweet. I gag, throw my arm over my nose and hold my finger up at Bernard. “Soot. Smells like burned flesh.”

Bernard sniffs at the air. “Now you mention it, it does smell nasty in here. I thought it was douchebag cologne.”

“They burned the head,” Kusch says loudly from right behind me. “In the middle of a fucking luxury penthouse.”
 

I jump a little. Kusch chuckles.
 

Bernard gives him a back-off glare and asks, “Why’d they do that?”

“Fuck knows. Slow down the ID?”

“Takes a long, hot fire to burn a human head to soot,” Bernard says.

Kusch shrugs. “Maybe they got bored. Swept up the rest.”

“Anything else, Miss Rookie?” Bernard asks me.

“Miss Rookie. Heh,” Kusch says. “I like that.”

I resist the urge to throw the obnoxious prick off the balcony and say, “Blood splatter on the wall indicates the beheading happened right here.”

“So what is this? Drug deal gone bad?”

“Maybe,” I say. “This killing…it has the drama of the Collazo Cartel.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Bernard waves her hand at the body and says, “Help me roll him.”

I slide two hands under the corpse, then we lift and turn the body. There’s a horrible sucking sound and then I’m staring into a hole in the guy’s chest where his heart used to be.

“Someone
really
wanted this guy dead,” Bernard says.

“Dead twice,” I whisper.
 

“Another one of these,” Kusch says through a long, bored-sounding exhale.

“Huh,” Bernard says. “Quite a few recently, am I wrong? Like nearly half dozen this year alone?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Fuck,” Bernard says, staring at the corpse.

“Where’s the heart?” I ask.

Bernard gives me an odd look. “We never find them. Brass refuses to say this is a serial. Says we can’t use the word ‘trophies’ to describe the missing hearts. But there’s a fucking freezer full of human hearts in a maniac’s trailer somewhere. I guarantee it.”

“This is our first vic connected to an MC,” Kusch says. “The rest were random.”

“Not quite random,” Bernard corrects. “All backgrounds, socio-economic statuses, skin colors, ages. Yeah. But they all had one thing in common.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“The victims were all sick fucks. Rape, multiple homicide, kiddie stuff. You name it. All the victims with their heads missing and their hearts torn out were into the nastiest of nasty.”

I think about the guys on the
Guardian
. My abductors. The ones Aaron murdered when he rescued me. Red and black blood splattered across the walls. I remember the look in Aaron’s eyes. Righteous. Wrathful. I can see him hunting the sickos. Turning his anger against them. Justifying his own violence. One-Eight-Seven.
 

“A vigilante?” I ask, not really meaning to.
 

“Maybe,” Bernard says.

“What are you thinking, rookie?” Kusch asks.

“Nothing.”
 

“End of days,” Kusch says with a grim smile. “The last hour of the unrepentant.”
 

“Fucking stop, already,” Bernard snaps, standing to face Kusch. “Seriously. It’s getting old, Kuschy.”

“Hey. I got a right to my opinion. You got a right to yours. That’s what used to make this country great.”

“Except your opinion is
shit
. And it might be interfering with your police work.”

“Nope,” Kusch says. “Makes me sharper.”

Bernard laughs. “I doubt that very much.”

“Uh, guys,” I say. “There’s something…inside the chest cavity.”

Bernard and Kusch both look at me like I’m crazy.

Which maybe I am.
 

“Well? Pull it out,” Bernard says, tapping the marble floor impatiently.
 

I reach slowly inside the cavity and retrieve blood-soaked piece of paper. No, it’s a photograph. I look, not really wanting to see.
 

It’s a police mugshot of Aaron ‘One-Eight-Seven’ Arud. The man who saved my life. The man I fucked, twice, last night. The man who abandoned me in an alley behind my burning apartment.
After
I saved his life—

I clamp my teeth together, stifling a scream.
 

“Well,” Kusch says. “Man of the hour.”

Bernard inspects the photo, then looks at me and says, “See what I mean? He’s a looker, all right. Even stuffed in a dead guy’s chest the man can wet a woman. You recognize him now, rookie?”

Recognize him? What’s she mean? I quickly shake my head no.

Detective Bernard seals the photo in a plastic evidence bag and says, “Good eye catching that, Officer Thompson. Now go collect the surveillance video. Take it back to the station and watch it from start to finish. That should fill up your afternoon. And grab a shower while you’re at it. You smell worse than Kusch.”

“What are you guys doing?”

“Us?” Bernard smiles. “We’re going to see a man about a horse.”

W
INTER
AGES
US
.
 

In the summer it’s easy to forget time. Easy to forget there’s a ticking clock in us all, winding down. But in winter’s cold we remember. Winter reminds us of frail flesh and blood and bones, forces us into our bodies with its icy sting.
 

I’ve aged much since they stole my sister Pimniq.
 

I’ve learned what it means to mourn. Learned what it means to love wrong. How the heart betrays. I’ve learned how it feels to be preyed upon. Hunted.

They’re hunting us now.
 

Weeks fleeing across the boreal forest and still they hunt. It’s early spring in the south, but here in the north it’s barely late winter. Three more months before the sun is anything but a pale yellow-blue disk hanging low in the sky, bereft of warmth. This is the season we curse the sun for mocking us with its light.
 

Shiori Hayashi, my packmate, stumbles through the snow at my side, her arms wrapped around her chest, hugging herself. She’s wearing only a stained and torn white gown that makes her pale skin appear to glow white. Her straight black hair, now matted and tangled, sways as she struggles through the snow.
 

She should be dead. We both should be.
 

Dead of exposure long ago.
 

But there’s a heat inside us that burns brighter than any sun.

Shiori stops, puts a hand on my shoulder, leans forward and retches.
 

Bile and blood stain the snow beneath her.
 

Our hunters scent her illness.
 

“I’m sorry,” Shiori says, looking at me with an odd mixture of fear and embarrassment and pain.

“It’s getting worse.”

Shiori nods, scratching at the mark tattooed on her wrist. Three tiny red disks, arranged in a pyramid. The mark means something, like a word I once knew but have long forgotten. I asked Shiori about it. She said she couldn’t remember.
 

She was lying.
 

Shiori's had the sickness ever since we fled Sedna’s lair. She believes it was the choking dust that poured from Sedna’s corpse when I tore into her.

These things, the suffering and loss, they all come back to me.
 

My animal is restless. He’s not used to being hunted.
 

We continue walking. Our feet punch through an inch of ice, then sink knee-deep in the snow. I glance behind, studying our tracks. They’re so obvious even a newcomer from the south could track them.
 

Some days we walk through snow that falls so softly it makes all sound feel obscene. Other days we walk through wind-driven ice shards that burn our skin. Some days are like today, calm and quiet, low grey cloud smothering the sky, and these days are the coldest. We walk for hours in silence through twisted black spruce trees whose branches grow only on the side sheltered from the wind. Sometimes the land rolls gently beneath us, a series of indistinguishable hills and valleys, like swells in an ocean. But mostly the land is flat. A barren, windswept plain interrupted by an occasional frozen river. There are no landmarks. No mountains to guide us. Only the trees rimed in ice that emerge from blowing snow like shadowy spirits come to claim us.

When the silence becomes unbearable we talk.
 

I tell Shiori what life was like in Pangnirtung. How I used to hunt seal and trap fish with my father. I tell Shiori about Pimniq, her reputation for being a raven spirit, a trickster, because she used to hide things and leave clues for people to find, or make odd voices and cast them around a room, startling people when they were alone.
 

Shiori smiles at my stories.
 

I think Pimniq would like her.
 

A harsh, ragged cough tears through Shiori, forcing her to her knees, and when I step around her there’s more blood in the snow.
 

“Come on,” I say when she quiets. “Up.”

Shiori shakes her head no.

I sigh, hold her under her shoulders and lift her to her feet. The girl is strong-willed. “You’re too weak to walk. Allow me to carry you. Only for a while.”

Shiori frowns but doesn’t protest when I lift her onto my shoulders and begin trudging through the snow. Soon her breathing settles into sleep. Its the only time she sleeps.