The Lord of Near and Nigh: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 2) (33 page)

Fucking hell. So much for the forest’s silent tranquility—
 

“Middle of nowhere,” Trish says, hopping out of the van and eyeing the woods suspiciously. Then she sees me and Nash and says, “At least I don’t have to worry about being attacked by an animal.”

Nash laughs. He sounds like a maniac.
 

The Skin bitch
does
have to worry.

“You ever left the city?” Tate asks Trish while I walk around to check on my brother.
 

“Never saw the point,” Trish answers.

Sorry’s lying in the van in a pool of sticky, drying blood. He’s shivering. Pale. But alive. He’s a tough bastard. I brush my fingers across his forehead. His eyes open, and for a moment he stares at me in blind, uncomprehending panic. He doesn’t know where he is. Doesn’t know me. Then his eyes widen and he recognizes me and remembers.
 

“Should…finish it…” he says, begging.

I hold my hand on his forehead and don’t say anything, just shake my head no.

Sorry looks at me with something like anger, then closes his eyes.

I hate knowing my brother’s gunna carry his betrayal to his grave. Hate thinking that a single fuck-up can define a life. We do the best we can. Make a choice between two equally shitty options and hope we can live with our decision. And you know what? Maybe Sorry was right to betray me.

Maybe me being dead would be better for everyone.
 

I’ve failed my pack. Failed my brother. Failed myself.
 

Why should I live and he die?
 

Even if Lily heals him he’ll still carry the shame, like that old story of Atlas with the world on his shoulders. My brother’s body might be strong enough to survive that burden of what he did.
 

But his spirit? I’m not so sure.
 

Would I want to live after betraying my brother to the Stricken?
 

Fuck no.
 

Lily and Nash are behind me, watching. All eyes on me. I fucking hate that, and I’m near telling them all to fuck off. The woods are right there. I could carry my brother and walk with him into the woods, hold him as he dies. Even speed it along. Would that be the merciful choice? The brave one? Am I chickenshit, wanting to save him from more suffering? Am I still the same selfish motherfucker I was before Sorry’s betrayal? Maybe I haven’t learned a thing, and if that’s the truth then Sorry’s death means nothing.
 

“It’s eight miles uphill,” Tate says.

“I don’t like this blood,” I say, motioning at the van. “It’s damn easy to scent.”

“We get up to the cabin we can send someone down to clean up,” Nash says.
 

“Help me lift him,” I say.

Nash and Tate ease Sorry onto my shoulders. There’s something comforting in feeling my brother’s weight settle onto me. This is my burden. Mine alone.

Tate leads us off the gravel road, through thick alder and huckleberry and devil’s club. Eventually a faint, overgrown trail emerges. The trail switchbacks up a hill so steep I have to be real careful with my steps. We wind through granite cliff bands and hop across fast-running streams. My crew handles the terrain easily, but the Skin bitch Trish is struggling. She slips more than once, nearly sending herself down the mountain.
 

I’m all right with her dying that way.
 

One less bitch I gotta worry about.
 

I’m going to have to kill her anyway, and her killing herself by accident means I won’t have to deal with blowback from Lily. I don’t think Lily understands how wrong it is, a Skin rolling with a Pureblood pack. The Skin’s scent is foul and acrid in my nose. She smells like chemicals. Like acid rain. Like a gyre of filth spinning in the ocean, the garbage building up in the stomachs of sea animals, stuffing them full and starving them at the same time. She smells
unnatural
, and if I don’t take care of her one of my packmates will. It’s law.
 

No one speaks as we gain elevation and the air cools. Not even Nash.
 

We’re tired, I realize. Tired and uncertain.
 

The trail leaves the woods behind as we ascend into the alpine. The wind picks up, cold and quick. The terrain levels off onto a long, rocky ridge. There’s snow now; mostly on the northern slopes and tucked in among the boulders. The Wenatchee’s stretch out around us, their snow-covered spires glowing in afternoon light. Even my animal’s quiet, awed by the mountain’s scale.

We follow the ridge to the base of a cliff that stretches up nearly vertical to a sharp mountain summit.
 

“Please tell me it’s not up there,” Trish says, hugging herself against the cold and eyeing the sheer cliff.

Tate gestures to a small depression in the ridge where an ancient glacier deposited a cluster of house-sized boulders. I understand geologic time. I’ve seen the continents torn apart and sent adrift across oceans. And I feel the bedrock beneath me, still shifting, still moving.
 

Only Skins believe the world is unchanging.
 

Us Purebloods? We know nothing lasts forever.

Tate’s cabin isn’t so much a cabin as a cave. A den. There’s a four-foot high wooden door tucked beneath one of the boulders. It’s well camouflaged; even I don’t notice it until it’s right in front of me.

Tate unlocks the door and we pile inside, stooping. A packed dirt floor slopes sharply downhill for twenty feet, then opens up into a room large enough to hold ten people comfortably.
 

Trish stumbles and paws against the side of the tunnel. It must suck: not being able to see in the dark. Half the day lived blind. No wonder Skins are so fucked up.
 

“Uh, could we get a light in here?” Trish says, clearly not as impressed by Tate’s hang-out as I am.
 

Tate lights an oil lantern, sets it on a shelf sculpted from stone. There’s a couple old couches and a rug on the dirt floor and piles of supplies and weapon crates and not much else.
 

It’s perfect.

“Welcome to
mi casa
,” Tate says, drawing a groan from Trish.

“A
hole
,” Trish says, looking at Lily. “We’re gunna be here how long? Cuz I’m already over it.”

“There are four rooms like this one,” Tate says, pointing at the corridors leading out of the main den. “Each is fully stocked. There’s a radio but no internet and no TV.”

“Shocker,” Trish says.
 

“There are fireplaces, but I’d advise against fires. It’s not that cold anymore, wood has to get packed uphill, and the smoke can be seen and scented.”

“No fires,” I say, settling my brother onto a ratty couch.

“How long you been working on this place?” Nash asks.

“Oh…three hundred years. Give or take.”

“Industrious motherfucker, aren’t you?” Nash says.

Tate smiles and opens a wooden crate packed tight with canned food. “We have enough provisions to last a year, if we hunt as well. Me alone up here? I could last ten.”

“Why?” Lily asks.
 

It’s the first she’s spoken since we arrived.
 

“Why?” Tate grins. “I dunno. It began as a hobby. A place that was mine alone. Then for a while it was an obsession. I spent year after year up here. Came to like it. Thought one day I might say thank you and fuck off to the Skin world. Leave it all behind.”

“Go wild,” Mia says, settling beside Sorry and using the sleeve of her leather jacket to wipe the sweat from his brow.

“Yeah.”

“And then…in the last century…a place like this started to make sense. The Skins are hurrying toward extinction, and they’ll go out with a bang. I wanted to make sure I didn’t go out with them.”

“Then why didn’t you?” Trish asks. “Just stay up here?”

Tate smiles and says nothing.

But I know why. It’s because he got hungry. Couldn’t get the thought of a Stricken feed from his mind. Maybe he hunted game. But animal blood is only a step above water in terms of nourishment. Tate grew weak. Like a Skin. Because of the collar he couldn’t go full animal, and Tate didn’t want his animal withering inside him because he was so malnourished. He likes that part of himself, and to sustain it…he needed a particular kind of meat.

“Lily,” I say. “It’s time. You ready?”

Lily swallows hard, straightens her shoulders. She’s trying to be brave. But she’s terrified. Summoning what lives inside her is dangerous.
 

I scent it. We all can.

“Lets do this,” Lily says, firming her lips.

“Rest a while, girl,” Trish says. “I don’t know what the dirtbag wants you to do, but I know you look like hell. Rest a few minutes.”

“Sorry doesn’t have a few minutes,” Mia hisses.

“She’s right, Trish,” Lily says.

“Not here,” I say. I don’t tell them it’s because I want my brother to die under the open sky, but I lift Sorry into my arms and step outside into the day’s fading light. The wind’s howling, and the mountains are lit pink and orange from the setting sun.
 

I lay Sorry on a flat boulder and turn to Lily.
 

“I can only ask you to try,” I say, the words thick in my throat. “Please. For my brother.”

Lily nods, kneels beside Sorry, holds his hand.
 

Sorry opens his eyes and peers up at her.
 

“No…please…” he says, his voice as soft as leaves settling into a mountain stream.

“I don’t know how,” Lily says, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Call her,” I say. “Command her. She’ll listen.”

“You think so?” Lily says, casting me a bitter glare. “You don’t know her as well as I do.”

My pack gathers around, waiting.
 

The wind strums an icy tune through the boulders.
 

Lily removes the bandage from Sorry’s shattered chest, lays her hands over the wound and closes her eyes. Blood seeps between her fingers.

For a long while nothing happens. There’s only the cold wind and the shining mountains and the granite spire towering above us. The wind is blowing ferociously now, so strong I have to lean into it to stay standing.

The light fades. The first stars emerge above us, and there low on the horizon is that red moon. The Blood Moon. Something about it sends a shiver down my spine. The wind screams around us, lifting sand from the ridge and driving it into our faces. A powerful gust knocks Trish to the ground.

Nash throws his body over her. Protecting her.

Nash and the Skin girl? Fuck.

That might be a problem, but I can’t worry about it now, because the wind has built into a shrieking maelstrom so strong it forces me to my knees. I dig my claws into granite bedrock as the wind threatens to blow me off the ridge, and when I look up I see Sorry and Lily are untouched by this unnatural, malevolent wind.
 

Not a hair on Lily’s head moves.
 

She and Sorry are so still they look carved from stone.
 

The air around me thickens. I’m vaguely aware of Nash dragging Trish into the boulders, seeking shelter. The clouds ringing the mountains are being pulled toward us, sucked into this mad, swirling storm.
 

“Stop!” Mia screams. “Send her back!”

But too late. Clouds spin and whirl overhead, caught in twisting wind, and then they begin to coalesce into shifting black shadows, an army of creatures whirling through darkness, hoofed creatures with the bodies of lions and wolves and bears and black leathery wings and insect faces marching mad across the sky above Lily and my dying brother, and the scream of the wind is their scream, their wrath, and for the first time in my life I know how it feels to be in the presence of something far more powerful than myself, something that makes me feel tiny and weak and afraid.

Like prey.
 

Another group of sky-creatures scream through the clouds and then I recognize them, they’re my pack, my kind, my history, the story of the ancient Purebloods written in wind. I see the first two packs, alpha and beta, roaming at the dawn of earth’s history. The packs live through times of peace and war. Of bounty and starvation. Together they form a balance of natural law. Strong over weak. No remorse. No doubt. No guilt.
 

Only instinctual action, pure and unquestioned.

That life like a lost dream.
 

Living clean and clear.
 

Raw. Elemental.
 

No Skin corruption or pollution or sickness. No lies or treachery or pride or vanity. No concrete condominiums and pumpkin-spiced lattes and strip-malls and traffic. No school shootings. No reeking tar sands spilling toxic black sludge or mountains of garbage scoured by rag-wearing children. No internet. No fucking
selfies
.
 

Only the woods. The seasons. The pack. The hunt.

Only morning air crisp in my nose as I lean upwind, scenting a trembling doe.
 

My brother at my side.
 

I’m close to remembering what I am. I was a leader in those ancient times. I was certain of myself and my place. My pack kneeled to me. Named me the—
 

The wind slows. I glance at Lily and Sorry. Sorry hasn’t changed, his eyes are still closed, but one of the cloud-shadows has descended and is hovering over Lily, right above her neck. At first the shadow is shapeless. But then it begins to take form, a silver she-wolf nearly as large as a truck, with blue-green eagle’s wings and a blood-red scorpion’s tail. The creature hovers over Lily, snarling and spitting, her blood-red eyes gleaming, and as I watch the bitch wraps her giant paw around Lily’s neck and digs her claws into my bloodmate’s throat.

Lily collapses onto my brother, twitching and flailing, her eyes rolled back in her head as the shadow-creature presses down, holding my bloodmate pinned, making her submit.

The silver she-wolf looks at me and grins.