The All Consuming: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 4) (31 page)

A keening death call.

Furious now, maddened by the closeness of the kill, I grind my fangs into Vuk’s spine so hard I feel the soft marrow beneath. A bit more and his spinal cord wil be severed—

I feel something flap against my back, then a shattering pain.

Something’s tugging at me, pulling me from Vuk.
 

The white raven caws. I snarl and glance up.

Black vultures.
 

They slam into me, tearing me from my kill. I rage and thrash and bite. Kill hundreds with shimmering blasts of heat from my throat. But still the vultures come, innumerable, an endless Carrion Cloud.
 

Then I’m in the air, my prey far below. The vultures carry me into the sky, flinging me every direction, piling into me, a living mass that stinks of rotting meat.
 

But they stop biting and clawing. They’re simply holding me.

Forcing me to watch.

“Lachlan!” I scream. “Lachlan!”

The boy is down there. In human form. Half hidden behind the stone slab where Rodas beheaded the Stricken woman. My son looks up at me, his expression blank and unreadable.

“You fucking release me!” I yell, knowing it won’t do any good. My son has chosen. He’s lost to me.

I feel my animal slipping away as my wounds leak blood and heaviness builds in my limbs and behind my eyes.

Far below, Vuk rises.
 

Aaron’s beneath him. Sprawled flat on the ground. Unmoving.

I see everything. Rodas and Shiori battling one another at the base of the pyramid. The Stricken and Skin armies clashing. Anik’s corpse. Trish crouching behind the lip of the pyramid, a tiny mouse among hungry cats.
 

Vuk turns to me and smiles.

Lifts his lethal paw.
 

Slams it down, opening a fist-sized hole in my bloodmate’s chest.

“No!” I shriek, eons of suffering burning through me.

Vuk’s about to strike again when the white raven slams into Lachlan’s face. Instantly, the Carrion Cloud loses focus. The raven flutters against Lachlan, claws at his eyes, gouges his pale cheeks.
 

The vulture’s release me.
 

In a heartbeat I’m diving at my brother.
 

My heart’s beating an insane, irregular rhythm in my chest.

Vuk’s killing blow falls.

I smash into my brother’s backside, bowling him forward over Aaron.
 

I land hard, crushing my right shoulder.
 

For a second I’m frozen with pain, and in that time Vuk is on me. He wraps his hooked forearms around my throat and lifts me into the air.
 

“You thankless little
bitch
,” he hisses. “I offered you a place among We Who Rule. A place at
my
side—“

I swing my scorpion tail around and stab him in the gut. Pump him full of poison. But he shrugs it off. The motherfucker.
 

His forearms tighten on my throat. I see myself reflected in his black eyes. My face contorted in pain. My arms flapping madly around my head as my animal retreats.

“You deserve
nothing
,” Vuk spits. “You’re a fucking feed. A womb for my offspring, and a meal for me.”

Pools of blackness coalesce behind my eyes, run into one another, grow larger. Something’s prying against my chest. There’s no pain. It’s Vuk’s claws, digging for my heart—

Something springs onto Vuk’s back.
 

A scent of warm pines.
 

Aaron latches his jaws onto the tender spot between Vuk’s mantis head and his wolf body.

Vuk drops me to the ground. Spots explode in my eyes and for a minute I’m confused, disoriented, I’ve forgotten where I am and what’s happening.

Vuk’s furious screech brings me back. He’s spinning on the pyramid platform, smashing into sculpted stone obelisks, careening through the burning pyramid poles, trying to shake the silver-black wolf.

But the wolf’s fangs have sunk deep.

Black blood arcs from Vuk’s neck. He’s stabbing backward, sinking his sharp forelegs into Aaron’s back, shoulders, neck. But still the wolf holds on. I feel my bloodmate’s power, his final reserves of strength.

I make to attack my brother.
 

We can murder him. My bloodmate and me.
 

Overcome the One Without Value.

Banish the Stricken armies. Mend the broken world.
 

I scent our victory.

I take a step forward.

Lachlan, his face scratched and bleeding, walks between me and my kill.

“Stand aside, Lachlan,” I say, my voice harsh and raspy.

Lachlan shakes his head. “No, mother. You’ve interfered enough. A blood challenge was issued. Let the wilds decide.”

My animal rages. It takes everything I have not to attack my firstborn son. But instead I snarl, “What if your father loses?”

“Then he is not who he claimed to be.”

I glance behind my son. Aaron still has Vuk in his jaws. I scent Vuk’s weakness. It would be nothing to murder him now. My animal’s shrieking at me to shove Lachlan aside and rip the Fallen’s heart from his chest.
 

But my son. My son?
 

I won’t harm him. I
can’t
.
 

The boy’s suffered far too much already.
 

Lachlan lifts his hands and holds them outstretched. A challenge, or a gesture of welcoming? I can’t tell. I don’t know him at all. The thought makes my chest tighten. I draw a slow breath and turn away, choking on frustration and guilt and an overwhelming sense of loss, leaving my bloodmate to finish murdering my brother.

There’s a wasp I need to kill.

***

Shiori has Rodas surrounded in a cloud of swarming black-yellow wasps. They’re pouring into the Stalker’s nose, ears and mouth, strangling him. I give Lachlan one last glance, then summon my animal and nod at Trish. She jumps from her hiding spot below the pyramid and hops onto my back.
 

I leap into the sky.
 

The feeling of flight is intoxicating.
 

The freedom reminds me of being on a bike, nailing the throttle and saying fuck you to the world. My animal’s senses are razor-sharp, honed by blood. A red haze gathers at the edges of my vision. Aaron might have fucked up, but he was right about one thing.

Survival is all that matters.

Trish lets out a thrilled scream as we swoop through the sky.
 

“Crazy times, girlfriend,” she shouts. “Now where is that bug-eyed bitch?”
 

Man, do I love her.
 

Shiori’s buzzing through the clouds, her wildmind focused on commanding her swarm to kill Rodas. I fly wide around her, struggling against the icy wind, trying to stay out of sight. When I’m directly over my prey I tuck my wings in and dive, remembering how the creepy bitch betrayed me in the woods, how she hurt little Pimniq—

I slam into Shiori at full speed, wrapping my tail around Trish’s waist to keep her from being flung off. Dig my claws deep into the soft tissue between Shiori’s armored plates. My sister’s red blood leaks out and spills into the air. She looses a choked screech. The swarm enveloping Rodas bursts into a million fragmented insects, buzzing around the pyramid madly, lacking their queen’s command.
 

Shiori and I are locked in a plummeting death spiral.
 

Trish’s screams sound very far away.

I lance my poisoned scorpion tail into the bitch’s side, then again, feeling her weaken with every blow. Shiori wrenches free from my claws and flips upside down so she’s facing me, her deadly stinger curling up under my belly. I jerk to the side, avoider her stinger, then snap at her neck.

Miss.
 

Shiori gets a chunk of my chest between her pinchers—

It’s my turn to scream. The wasp’s pinchers saw into me, opening my flesh. I snarl and spit and slam my tail into her again. She looses a high-pitched squeal as the ground races to meet us. Her powerful mandibles are forcing me down, holding me while her stinger arcs up. I scratch at her chest, desperate to gut her before her stinger sinks home. There’s a gruesome tearing sound as one of her plates tears free from her body. I roar in kill-lust, sensing her exposed heart beating only a few inches from my fangs.
 

We’re only a hundred feet above the ground, whirling in a quick circle, both of us flapping our wings madly, desperate to gain advantage—

Fifty feet now.
 

The wasp’s stinger tickles my belly.
 

Her mandibles sink deep into my throat, loosing a shower of blood.
 

My animal roars, opens her mouth, unleashes a withering blast of heat.

Shiori rolls leftward so her shoulder and not her head takes most of the heat. Her scales redden and burn and the stink of seared flesh sours my nose and my life slows to this single instant, a mad dance of blood and death, of survival and extinction and something deep inside, some well of hidden strength bursts free and I rear backward, freeing myself from Shiori’s mandibles while my scorpion tail slams into the soft spot where I tore off her armor—

Thirty feet.

Trish leans forward on my neck, hurls a fistful of orange powder straight in Shiori’s hideous face. Shiori’s eyes melt into her head and the skin on her face sloughs off, revealing her thin skeleton. Professor Melchuk’s burning powder eats still deeper, dissolving flash and bone.

Shiori’s body tenses beneath me.
 

Her screams become a choked gurgle.

The ground’s coming up fast. I have to break free of Shiori or Trish is dead, but the wasp-bitch still has her hooked legs wrapped around me—
 

Ten feet.

Trish jumps off me, into shifting black smoke.

Rodas.
 

I’m above Shiori as we hit the ground, which is what I intended. Let the wasp absorb most of the impact. Only right before we crash into the Avenue of the Dead Shiori bursts into a swarm of wasps and suddenly I’m falling alone, passing through the biting cloud, feeling them sink their tiny stingers into my ears and nose and eyes—

I hit the ground so hard the earth shudders.
 

Everything goes black.

***

I’m prowling through a night forest, my nose low to the dew-moistened ground, on the scent of something I can’t name. An approaching storm bends the hemlock and cedar trees forward and back.
 

I stop and scent the air.

He’s close.
 

My son.
 

Lachlan?

No.

My second son. I leap through a dense stand of slide alder and devil’s club, convinced my son is in danger. My limbs ache. There’s a strange exhaustion in my muscles and a tightness in my joints. Like I’ve been hunting for days without food or rest.
 

Then it hits me, a preternatural knowledge common to some dreams.

I’m older than I am in this age.

Much older.

I burst through the thicket and into a moonlit clearing.
 

The moonlight is silvery-white. Soft. Beautiful.
 

A magnificent creature is waiting for me in the middle of the clearing. A silver-black wolf with piercing blue eyes. For an instant I think it’s my bloodmate. Then the grief hits.

My bloodmate died long ago.

Shimmering metallic eagle’s wings rise from the beautiful wolf’s back. He flicks his tail, a nest of hissing blue-eyed snakes.

My son. Child of love.

Lord of Dawn.
 

The Unforgiving. The Wolf Knight.

The names arrive from a deep well of hidden knowledge.
 

We failed. The One War lives on.

The thought makes my hackles rise.
 

My son lifts his head as I approach. His animal vanishes, and standing in the clearing is a tall, tight-muscled warrior dressed in animal hides. He’s wearing a single piece of armor, a battered breastplate that shines in the moonlight. There’s a grim coat of arms etched in the worn steel.

A skeletal wolf head.
 

A floating crown.
 

A pair of crossed reaper’s blades.

His father’s coat of arms.

My son has a morning star slung over his shoulder, its viciously spiked head attached to a long wooden handle stained black with Stricken blood. A gorgeous mess of jet-black hair spills around his ears. He looks so much like his father my heart skips.

My son studies me for a long moment, concern and sadness etched in his proud features.
 

Then he whispers three words:

Wake now, mother.
 

***

I scream myself awake, looking through a ragged hole in the pit entrance ten feet above me. The sky’s a flickering red-orange terror.
 

My animal’s gone.
 

Frantic, I check my wounds: the cuts around my neck are almost healed, and there’s no sign of a puncture wound from Shiori’s stinger. But my bones are shattered. I feel the tingling heat that means I’m healing, but my skin is deathly cold. There’s a bitter chemical taste in my mouth, like bleach and bile, the byproduct of my body healing too fast from catastrophic trauma.
 

How long have I been out?

Aaron
.

The thought makes a surge of panic rise in my throat. I scramble up the pit, sending a shower of loose rocks down. My fingers slide and slip through the muck. Then a shadow falls over me.

Terror grips my heart.

I look up, expecting to see Vuk or Shiori. Instead there’s a man with yellow eyes and patterned skin. He leans down, extends his hand.
 

“Hurry,” he says, casting a quick glance over his shoulder.
 

Something’s coming. So large its footsteps make the earth quiver, sending stones and sand falling into the pit.

“Hurry, Lily,” the man says.