The All Encompassing: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 1) (3 page)

It was pressed tight against a cedar hedge, so still I almost didn’t see it.
 

The creature was small, like a child. A little boy. But instead of a human head it had—I swear it—a mule’s head stripped of skin. Bulging white eyes and stretched muscles and blue-white sinew and blunt, yellowed teeth. It was wearing a cape of peacock feathers, glimmering blue-green…although when I picture it in my mind now I don’t think it was a cape.

I think the feathers were sprouting from its back.
 

Like wings.
 

I saw it in my peripheral vision. Standing there. Staring at me with those awful lidless eyes.
 

And when I turned to look at it directly it was gone.
 

It’s always like that. I blink and the horrible visions vanish.
 

Poof.

Now, for the second time that day, I wonder if I’m going crazy.

“Hun?” Trish asks, not trying to hide her concern.

I give her a dismissive wave and run my finger along the edge of my champaign flute. There’s an uncomfortable silence.

Finally Trish clears her throat and says, “Sleeping?”

“Not much.”

“Me either. I’ve just been so wound up, y’know. Thinking about everything.”

Liar
, I think. It takes more than lack of sleep to wind Trish up.
 

But I appreciate the effort.

Trish glances around the bar. We’re in the Fairmont Seattle lounge, a too-fancy joint full of bored looking high-class escorts and the douchebag rich guys who pay for them.
 

“So he said he’s coming?” Trish asks, stirring the ice in her water glass. “Mr. On-Again-Off-Again? That’s the only reason I can imagine we’re sitting in this pretentious hellhole and not getting sweaty with some half-naked men on a booming dance floor.”

I nod. “Connor. His name’s Connor.”

“Mr. Connor Lerrick, yes, I remember his name,” Trish says, a bit too quickly, then she softens her voice. “So which is it now? On or off?”
 

“Off.”

“How long this time?”

Good question. I try and remember. The last few months have stretched into one long blur punctuated by minor fits of what-the-fuck-am-doing-with-my-life uncertainty. That’s the difference between me and Trish: girlfriend was born knowing she wanted to police. Me? I saw a recruitment ad on TV. “Maybe three weeks?”

“So the rich boy’s booty calling you. Got a free fifteen minutes in his schedule, figured he’d get caught up.”

“I’m booty calling
him
.”

Trish shakes her head and downs the last of her champaign. “Doubt it. A booty call by definition has no strings attached. You, girl? You’ve got so many strings you look like my mom’s yarn bag. More baggage than moving day.”

“Your mom knits? Thought she’d be too busy nesting her spawn.”

Trish smiles. She has an impeccable smile, made all the more lovely because it’s rare and genuine. “How late is he?” she says quietly.

I glance at my watch. “Forty-five minutes.”

Trish whistles a sigh through her teeth. “Dick.”

She’s right. Connor
is
a dick. But I’m not exactly pleased to hear her say it. Three years of my life gone, then another eighteen months wasted in this I-love-you-I-hate-you limbo. That’s my entire twenties so far—gone.
 

“I know you’re not in it for the money, so the dude must have a cock like this,” Trish laughs, holding her hands well far apart.

“Nope. Like this,” I say, holding my hands up even wider.

Trish grimaces, pours herself another glass. “How long are you planning on sitting pretty for this guy? Because I’m waiting until that bottle’s done, then I’m going to a club where the men don’t wear more make-up than me.”

***
 

Fifteen minutes later we’re in a cab heading to a new club Trish wants to check out when I get a text from Connor that says to meet him at some place called the Wilds. I protested leaving the hotel lounge to go to the club. Trish insisted. It’s our ritual. She’s great like that. I can complain about how much I hate the clubs she drags me to, how although I’m only twenty-four the clubs make me feel old, everyone young and wide-eyed and…happy. Just fucking beaming at one another in that booze and drug-addled way clubbers have, plain happy to be out dancing after a long week of grinding it out.

I remember when dancing was enough.
 

But I know eventually I’ll settle into the scene and the booze and pills will kick and a song will strike the right emotional chord and next thing I know I’ll be grinning, inexplicably happy as well, and there’s always a young hottie or two and a secluded corner and let me tell you something: I regret nothing. I’ve seen too many corpses, both living and dead, to have regrets about how I choose to live my life.
 

It’s been raining for days, but now I look out the cab window to see there’s a momentary break in the clouds. The streets are wet and gleaming, and there’s a hopeful anticipation in the air, like maybe this time the rain will actually stop long enough to reveal the morning sun. It’s early March, the air chill and damp. Everyone’s longing for spring. The sidewalks are busy even though it’s nearly one in the morning, kidless couples arm in arm, shiny club kids come in from the ‘burbs and flying high on anything they can get their hands on, stoop-backed drunks wandering in lazy circles with a palm up, underdressed working girls hugging themselves and strutting to tinted windows with a smile that says please don’t be a bad one.
 

I crack the cab window and the night air rushes in, curling against my neck, winding my bangs across my forehead. I ask the cabbie if he knows where a bar called the Wilds is. He flashes me a grim look in the rear-view, then nods.
 

I hold my phone up to silence Trish’s question.
 

She crosses her arms and settles into her seat with a pout.
 

It’s Wednesday night. The good people of Seattle are fast asleep. Safe in their beds. Dreaming about being free, or maybe dreaming about nothing since the dream of freedom is long gone. People are tired these days. Let them sleep.
 

It’s better that way.
 

I’m tired too. Only difference is I can’t sleep.
 

I feel like I’m standing at the cusp of something I can’t quite name. Like there’s a cliff in front of me and I’m about to leap over, except for fuck’s sake I can’t remember if I’m wearing my parachute.

I close my eyes and it hits me: a feeling of dread and blind anticipation as the cab rolls to stop in front of the bar Connor suggested.
 

“What?” Trish says, looking around the grimy neighborhood. “Where the hell you taking me, Lil?”

“There,” I say, pointing to a run-down bar with a sagging black and red awning guarded by a leather-jacket wearing meathead. There’s a long row of windows facing the street protected by a thick metal cage, but a few are smashed in and partially covered with sodden cardboard. The windows that aren’t shattered are filthy and steamed up so all you can see is an ugly orange-yellow glow from inside and a few edgeless shapes moving around.
 

“The Wilds?” Trish says, reading the faded sign. “Come on, girl. That joint’s a dive. A fucking biker bar. Full of fat middle-aged assholes and skinny meth-head wannabes.”

“You girl’s sure?” the cabbie says, eyeing the bar.
 

I’m already opening the door.

I step onto a sidewalk so splattered with trash and old gum and cigarette butts I can barely see the cement. We’re a few streets over from the shipping yards. The air smells of low tide and chicken rendering plants that run twenty-four seven. We were called to a body on this block a few weeks ago. Girl, as per usual. Got on her pimp’s bad side was the official decision. The charmer beat her to death with a tire iron, then left her body behind a dumpster. Classic. You find a body beside a dumpster there’s a ninety-nine percent chance it’s gunna be a woman. Like the killers drive the body around wondering what to do, then spot the dumpster and are all like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s perfect’.
 

Dead men rarely get moved after they’re killed, unless its a pro hit and someone’s trying to cover shit up. But the women?
 

Dumpsters. Garbage. Waste.
 

Used, abused and thrown out.

Except this one? I dunno. Had her eyes burned out of her head. Like with a blow torch or something. When I brought it up with Detective Sandra Bernard, the lead homicide supervising my training, she said, “Yeah. Fucking pimp’s warning the competition. You can bet he did that before killing her. Maybe even had his girls witness it. You know? So they spread the word about what a badass he is?”

And that was it. The murdered prostitute got about an hour of investigative time.

The biker meathead at the door is glaring at me. I admit I’m not dressed for the hood: I’m wearing moderately pricey platforms and a knee-length cream skirt and a white sweater under the usual Northwest Coast Gore-Tex rain jacket. My fancy outfit.
 

Anger rushes through me as I think about Connor standing me up at the Fairmont, then having me meet him at this shithole.
 

Fuck him. Now I wish I’d stuck to jeans. Serves me right for dressing up for a dude.

I look down the street. There’s a working girl pacing back and forth, knobby knees, unsteady, checking out the cars rolling by. She meets my eye, and suddenly I’m cold. Icy cold and shivering because in that moment the working girl’s face…changes.
 

Into something from a nightmare.

Her jaw elongates, then narrows into a fine, wickedly curving point that reaches nearly to her tits. It’s a stinger. Her eyes widen, then bulge and swell outward, swallowing the entire top half of her head. Her eyes are multi-planed and refractive. Like an insect’s. Her skin stretches back tight, then changes to pale yellow under the wan street light overhead. She doesn’t really have a mouth, but if she did I know she’d be smiling, and then there’s a hissing buzzing sound in my ears and the creature says to me, “What the fuck you looking at, bitch?”

I
SLIP
MY
toes into the cold granite crack and twist, then look down past my feet into eight hundred feet of empty air. I’m halfway up Mt. Asgard, a magnificent granite spire looming over the glacier below like a stone sentinel.
 

The newcomers named this mountain after a Norse god. But we Inuit have our own gods, and our own names. Some have forgotten.
 

But I haven’t.
 

This mountain is Sivanitirutinguak. It guards the Auyuittuq Valley, in the Land that Never Melts.

Maybe that was true once. But the land is changing. The melts come earlier every year. The bears roam further south, into the gravel roads and pit mines and tar sands of the newcomers, and when they linger outside the newcomer’s camps for too long they’re shot.
 

I press my forehead into the cool granite and close my eyes. My mother named me Anik. My father gave me Ujurak. A name is a door through which believers access the spirit realm. My surname means ‘stone’.
 

My father named me well.
 

It’s a crystal clear morning. Seqinek the sun casts her cool yellow light against a blazing blue sky, and descending beneath a rocky ridge across the valley, Tatqim the moon is a ghostly silver blur. Icy wind whips around me, ruffles my hair and threadbare t-shirt, threatening to pull me from the wall. My numb hands are jammed in the same crack my feet are. The rock is damp and slippery. This aspect of the wall is north facing. I’ll remain in shadow for the entire day, gazing out at Seqinek shining on the glacier beneath me, wishing I could feel her warmth.
 

I’m cold, but not as cold as a man should be in these conditions. When I was four I wandered into the tundra, searching for arctic hare to hunt. It was autumn. The first winter storm blew in, obscuring the way back to the hunting camp in snow up to my waist. I spent four days huddled in the snow while the storm raged over me, my knees tucked tight to my chest. When the storm cleared I walked for two days back to the hunting camp. My family was certain I returned as a ghost.
 

They were wrong. I’m not a ghost.
 

I’m worse.
 

I peer up at the rim of the mountain high overhead. Still a thousand feet to go. I’m not even a third of the way.
 

I bring my left foot out of the crack and re-set it, then press down, adding my weight gradually. It holds. I reach over my head with my left hand, place it in the crack, cup my fingers against the sides and pull. My hand holds for a second, then begins grinding out. If it slips from the crack I’ll plummet to the glacier.

I don’t have a rope. I don’t have a climbing partner. The nearest road is more than five hundred miles away, the nearest hospital five times that.

There’s only me, alone with the sun and moon and wind and rock.
 

My hand slips another half-inch. Desperate now, my heart leaping in my chest, I try and worm my hand deeper in the crack. I tell myself I am Ujurak. Made of stone. But regardless of my name the mountain doesn’t have to accept me.
 

Maybe this time it won’t.
 

My hand slides toward the edge. I thrust my hips toward the rock, unweight my slipping hand and for a moment I’m suspended by nothing more than my ten bare toes. Just as I begin falling backwards I jam my arm elbow-deep in the rock.
 

It holds.
 

“Anik! You want to die today?” I ask myself out loud.
 

No. I don’t.