The All Encompassing: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 1) (33 page)

I hate this feeling of not knowing. Of being caught off guard. We got lucky with Lonny and the panther. It was still weak from the transformation. But next time?
 

Luck’s a fickle bitch on which to place one’s life.
 

I reload my Glock, stalling, trying to think of a convincing next move. I’ve been playing at this predator alpha game, thinking I have it all figured out. But maybe I don’t. Maybe shit’s just been easy for the last while. Maybe that Stricken bitch was right. I’ve become complacent. Sloppy. Weak.

Maybe this is war, and I’m beginning to realize I’m no war president.
 

I grind my teeth together, furious at myself, thinking of Lonny.

Crazy motherfucker.
 

I’ll miss him.
 

“There could be hundreds of these lairs,” Mia says. “Thousands. Around the globe. And who knows what kind of little freaks they’re breeding.”

I nod, then a line of graffiti sprawled on the far wall catches my attention. All Encompassing, it says.
 

That’s it. Two words
 

All Encompassing.
 

More whacked-out cult mumbo-jumbo. But the words sound familiar. Like a song heard long ago you can only remember the chorus to.
 

All Encompassing.

Then it hits me. Something I saw downstairs when we first came into the building but only recognized now.

“Holy fucking hell,” I whisper, racing down the stairs to the weird-ass alter. There, tacked on the wall behind the broken idols and candles, is her picture.

Sparkles. Lily the Cop.

The photo’s old and faded, the bottom half torn off, but I can tell Lily’s younger than she is now. Maybe mid teens. She’s standing on a street in a shit neighborhood in Seattle. Not looking at the camera. Her face is in profile. She isn’t smiling. She’s wearing torn and faded bluejeans and a tight black blouse and there’s an army surplus backpack on the pavement at her feet. Her hair’s much shorter than it is now, and her ear’s pierced with several safety pins. She’s holding her hands clasped together at her waist, and her fingernails are rimed with dirt.
 

Lily was living out of that army surplus backpack.
 

Sparkles, Little Miss Perfect, was a fucking street kid.
 

“Holy fucking hell,” I say again, my breath tight and my blood racing. I feel suddenly…dizzy, like I’m standing at the edge of a very deep pit and about to lose my balance.
 

I take Lily’s photo off the wall and hand it to Sorry when he stalks up behind me.
 

“Shit,” he says, looking between me and Mia.

“What?” Mia asks.

“It’s the Skin girl from the Wilds,” I say. “The night we got shot up. She was there. The cult whacko’s weren’t aiming for me. Never were. They wanted her dead.”

“What’s she to them? Another body to breed in?”

“Maybe,” I say, remembering Lily’s odd, overpowering scent. How I was drawn to it. Like a bee to honey.

“But that’s not what you think, is it, Aaron?” Mia says. “You think she’s a Stricken. Or something else altogether. Something…different.”
 

I tuck the picture into my back pocket and look at the altar. Several more photos are tacked up on the wall. All girls, all about the same age. “I think they’re looking for someone. Someone they need. I think this altar is a kind of list. Somehow Lily’s on that list. And if the cult pricks want her, we can’t let them have her.”

I turn and face my crew. “Here’s what’s gunna happen. Nash and Mia: you hang out across the street. Keep an eye on the lair. Anything enters you call me. Do not engage until we’re all here. Sorry rides with me.”

“Nope, lover-boy,” Mia says. “I’m the only one who hasn’t met the infamous Skin bitch that whipped a Pureblood Prez in a single night. I’m coming with you.”

I sigh. Sorry flashes me a broad I-told-you-so grin. He warned me about hooking up with Mia a long time ago.
 

Said jilted bitches have long memories.
 

Especially hungry, horny jilted snake bitches.
 

I
FOUGHT
THEM
as best I could.
 

It wasn’t enough.

I kicked and squirmed while my abductors loaded me into some kind of box, so small my head was pressed down between my knees. The fetal position. They carried me down the stairs from my apartment and threw the box I was stuffed inside into the back of what can only be a van. I heard traffic noises and the sound of the van’s engine and thumping rear suspension as we drove through the city. I tried to keep track of the left and right turns, listened for any recognizable sounds, hoping I might discover where we were going.
 

Then the van screeched to a stop and I heard something unmistakeable.
 

A ship’s horn, long and mournful.

Now the van door slides open. I scream, hoping someone on the dock will hear me. But the duct tape strapped across my mouth and the heavy vinyl bag I’m entombed in block out any sound. I’ve decided I know what kind of bag I’m in. It’s a body-bag, the kind cops and the military use to transport corpses.
 

The bag’s zipper opens a fraction and a rush of salty ocean air flows inside the bag. I breathe deep through my nose, trying to stay calm. Trying to focus on not losing my shit completely. Panic’s building in me, a raw, animal instinct.
 

I can’t afford to panic.
 

If I do I’ll hyperventilate and maybe suffocate to death.
 

I’m carried down a dock. Boots thud loud against wooden planks. Water laps against pilings. A seagull caws. These sounds—the only things anchoring me to the world outside this horrible bag—they’re like a lifeline linking me to sanity and hope.
 

They’re all I have.

Then I’m in a boat. The men lift the body-bag out of the box and carry me down a narrow flight of stairs, narrow because I brush against handrails on both sides as my abductors carry me down.
 

A dull clanking sound. A whirring noise. The reek of gasoline.
 

They’re taking me into the dark belly of this ship.
 

I’m dropped on the ground so hard it knocks the wind out of me. The zipper is undone all the way. I already hate that sound, wonder if I survive this it will I need trauma counseling every time I hear a zipper? Will I wear only button-fly jeans? The thought almost makes me smile, which is difficult to do considering the duct tape strapped across my mouth.
 

That I’m smiling in a situation like this makes me wonder if I’ve lost it already, my mind broken in terror.

We like to tell ourselves if we stay calm we’ll be all right. That our wits and courage will get us out. That we’re strong. We’re survivors. We’re taught never to lose hope. But I wonder if those girls with their eyes burned out lost hope? And did it make a difference, in the end, whether they had hope or not?
 

No, I don’t think it did.

A rush of cool air chills my naked, sweaty skin. I’m lifted out of the body bag. Laid on a cold metal floor floor. The humming whirring machine sounds are louder and the smells of gasoline and grease are so overpowering they make me want to vomit.
 

I must be in the ship’s engine room, or close to it.
 

A boot digs hard into my ribs.
 

“She’s good?” a man’s voice says. No accent. Maybe educated. That’s all I can guess.
 

“Good,” says another voice, deep, also no accent, rougher-sounding.
 

I chronicle these details, burning them into my mind. In my head I’m already at the police station, giving a description of events to a detective.

In my head I’ve already lived through this.
 

I’m already free.

Maybe this is how we survive. Not by clinging to some fragile hope or misguided belief in our own strength, but simply by ignoring the plain, awful truth of our suffering.
 

Fantasizing it away.
 

There’s a metallic rattle close by my ear. Something cold presses against my wrist, then a sharp click followed by another click.
 

Handcuffs.
 

Strong, gloved hands grip under my arms, drag me across the floor and lean me upright. Then another sharp click.

I’m being chained to a metal pipe. The pipe is moist with condensation.
 

“She’s the one?” the rougher voice asks.

There’s a pause, then the sound of footsteps approaching me. I feel him there, my abductor, hovering over me, inspecting me. If he removes the duct tape over my mouth and eyes I don’t know what I’ll do.
 

Scream at him? Tell him to go fuck himself?
 

Or beg and plead for my life?
 

We think we know ourselves. What we’ll do when something horrible happens. We want to be heroes. But we’re not.
 

We’re strangers in our own lives.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” the sneering, educated-sounding one says.
 

He sounds like he believes it.
 

Like he hasn’t already hurt me.
 

“We’d never hurt
you
.”
 

There’s something odd about the way he says ‘you.’ Like I’m special to him somehow. It makes me shuffle as far away from the sound of his voice as I can, straining against the handcuffs and pressing into the metal pipe.
 

Is this where he tells me what he wants?
 

Why I’m here?
 

How I fit into his fucking sick vision?
 

Because they all have visions, don’t they? The
real
sick ones do. Visions and theories they dream up to justify what they do. Hitler didn’t look in the mirror and think, ‘I’m a horrible man. What I’m doing is wrong.’ No. Hitler looked in the mirror and thought, ‘I’m a great man. What I’m doing is
right
.’

Then he brushed his teeth.
 

That’s the joy of being a sociopathic fuck. Every sick thing you do is right. Imagine living like that. Without questions or doubts. A life without guilt. Believing no matter what you do, no matter how twisted, is the
right
thing to do.
 

Imagine that power. That freedom.

The boot-steps retreat up the stairs.
 

I mumble and moan through the duct-tape gag, ashamed at trying to communicate with these assholes but suddenly terrified of being left alone in the black belly of this ship.

A heavy door slams closed. A bolt is drawn across the door.

The ship’s engine hums and whirrs, mechanical and uncaring.

What do they want with me?
 

Oh god, what do they want with me?
 

S
HE
’
S
STEALING
FROM
me.
 

Every time she summons me. Every time she lays with me.
 

The veiled woman is stealing my life one fuck at a time.

Even though I understand this truth, the thought of fucking her makes warmth throb through me. I can’t resist her. It’s a compulsion. Like a mentally ill man forced to walk three times in a circle after he closes a door.

He doesn’t have a choice.
 

If he doesn’t do it the world will crumble around him.
 

She’s not only stealing my life. She’s taking…my spirit as well. I feel the animal in me less and less, and isn’t this what I wanted? Haven’t I begged to be rid of him?

She asks me that after, when I lay beside her cold, naked body, shivering, feeling an emptiness that’s so powerful it pulls my mind into blackness, consumes me like a black hole consumes stars.

“You should thank me,” she says. “For ridding you of that monster.”
 

I thought I wanted the animal gone.

Be careful what you wish for, they say. You just might get it.

I’m in a cell without windows, deep beneath the ground. There’s a small door, just large enough for me to worm through, sealed with iron bars that will bend for no creature. The walls are solid bedrock. There’s no light, which suits me fine.
 

The lounge? That’s the veiled woman’s.
 

And I’m not even certain it’s real.

Someone slides my meals under the bars. They never speak to me, and I rarely eat. Eating requires a certain amount of desire to live. I have no idea how long I’ve been Sedna’s prisoner.
 

But the desire to live died long ago.
 

The first time she lay with me I woke with an iron collar around my neck, edged sharp on the inside. When I wrap my fingers around it to try and break it I bleed. I know what the collar’s for. And what iron does to creatures like me. If I call the animal through the threshold the collar will slice into my swelling neck, half cutting off my head while I’m still only partially changed, killing me.

Sometimes, like now, the thought makes me smile.

Only he won’t come. I’ve tried.

Besides my insatiable desire to mate with the veiled woman the worst thing is the weight I feel in this cell. All that stone above me, pressing down on my chest. The air stale and damp. Sometimes my throat constricts and I can’t take a full breath.