The Lord of Near and Nigh: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 2) (5 page)

Shiori saved me from losing my spirit to Sedna, Mistress of Adlivun. I will never forget. Shiori was powerful against Sedna, but ever since we escaped she’s been waning. Growing weaker by the day. Maybe it’s Sedna’s poison. Maybe she needs a feed, or the drug the men on the ship fed her.
 

But she can’t summon the insects any more.
 

And she can’t communicate through her mind.
 

I fear soon her warmth will fade, and the cold will finally blacken her skin.

As I carry Shiori I think on many things. What she told me about the All Encompassing. How we must find her before we search for Pimniq. How the ones who stole Pimniq have grown too powerful to face alone. It’s Shiori who guides us through the endless forest. She says she feels the presence of the All Encompassing. Like a divining rod tuned to a secret source of water far beneath the earth.
 

I feel nothing except fear.
 

I wonder what that means.
 

And I feel their eyes on me as I walk. Peering through the forest. Waiting. They’re in no hurry. It’s no use looking for them, so I keep my head low, concentrate on lifting one leg out of the snow and putting it forward, then another, and another until I’ve gone ten steps. Then I stop, breath three long breaths, and continue. This is my long march.
 

They want to be sure we cannot summon our animals. That’s why they’re waiting.

I remember the feeling well. Of knowing a kill is yours and choosing to savor it. Driving your prey mad with fear.

Then moving in.
 

***

Shiori startles awake, clutches my shoulders, perhaps afraid I’m her captor, then relaxes when she realizes it’s only me.
 

“Do you want down?” I ask.

She’s silent for a long while, then says, “No.”

It’s nearly dark. The sun’s last rays settle into blackened spruce. Night has never bothered me. But it does now. The constellations are wrong. As if the stars are also lost. The moon rises red. The Blood Moon. I’m living my people’s ancient stories. The thought terrifies me.
 

“When did you first know?” I ask Shiori. “About what lives in you?”

Shiori shifts on my shoulders. I don’t mind carrying her. She weighs nothing at all. In fact we travel faster this way.
 

“I was young,” she begins. “A child of…three or four. It was on Odaiba. Do you know Odaiba?’

“No.”

“It’s an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. A happy place to go for not working.”

“A park.”

“A…park? Yes. I was in this park with my family. It was spring. My parents were behind me on the grass, picnicking. I was playing in the sand with some children I’d met on the beach. I was sitting cross-legged, looking at the sea, picking the sand up with my fingers and sprinkling it on my leg. On my upper leg.”

“Your thigh.”

“Yes. The sand tickled. There were two children with me. I can’t remember their names. They were siblings. A boy and a girl. I remember the sand tickling my leg. Then the tickling became…a crawling feeling. It spread from my thigh up my middle. To my belly. A tickling crawling feeling under my skin. Then the two children stopped playing and stared at me. I remember not liking how they stared at me. I looked down. My skin was…moving. Very fast. Like how a stretched drum moves when it’s hit.”

“Vibrating.”

“The vibrating under my skin moved up my chest, over my breasts. The girl staring at me began to cry. The vibrating tickled. It was warm. It didn’t hurt. It made me want to laugh. Especially when it arrived at my throat. I covered my mouth, because it is not polite to laugh with the mouth open. And I giggled. The tingling tickling feeling stopped when I giggled. But I felt…something in my hand. Many things. And heard a quiet buzzing sound. When I took my hand from my mouth and turned it over to see what was inside, a small swarm of wasps flew into the air.”

“I bet the girl cried more after that,” I say, stopping my march to draw three pained breaths.
 

The truth is Shiori isn’t the only one growing weaker.
 

I can’t feel him much anymore.
 

There’s nothing inside except a sharp, ceaseless hunger and…fear.
 

“She did. She screamed. The wasps buzzed around her and her brother’s head. They were angry with her, I think. The children swatted at the wasps, then ran and told my parents.”

“What did they do?”

“Oh, you know. Children. My father was a very…traditional man. Very hard.”

“Strict.”

“He came down to the beach. By then the wasps had gone. He told me it’s impolite to frighten your friends. I don’t think he liked me very much.”

“Why?”

“Only…he never looked at me. Not properly. He always looked
through
me. Like I was a stain on a window he was trying to see through.”

“Ants. Wasps. Can you summon any insect?” I ask.

Shiori pauses. Scratches her wind-burned nose. “I think so. What arrives is what I need. I don’t think about it.”
 

I nod, then stumble down a steep ravine, slide through the snow and pause on the bank of a frozen stream. The wind has scoured most of the snow from the ice, making it easier to walk on. “Shiori? If I walk this stream for a while is that all right? Are we still going the right way?”

“For a while, yes.”

I head down the stream. I don’t really like being in low terrain and not being able to see above the ravine, but it’s much easier walking, and I’m so tired sometimes I catch myself closing my eyes as I walk. I wake, startled, just as my balance goes and I’m about to fall to the ground. Soon I won’t wake, and I’ll crash to the ice and have to struggle to my feet, and a little later I won’t even be able to do that. Freezing to death is slow, but at the last there is no pain.
 

“Shiori?”

“Yes?”

“Can you see? If we’re going to die?”

“No. I can’t see anything. I only feel her.”

***

Sometimes I’m angry. And because I don’t know what I should be angry at my anger floods outward, consuming everything. My anger is boundless; it knows no reason. I become angry at the snow. The forest. The fucking sky. My exhausted body. I’m angry at Shiori and even Pimniq. I’m angry at my animal spirit for abandoning me when I need him most.
 

But the sharpest anger I reserve for myself.
 

***

“Anik?”

“Yes?”

“Do you scent that?”

I sniff the air. “Yes. It’s woodsmoke. A fire.”

“The Absent?”

“I thought…we talked about that. About the Absent not really existing? About that being part of the lies the priests told you?”

“Maybe,” Shiori says, sounding unconvinced. “But I think there are Absent. Maybe not like Priest Gabriel said. But they exist.”

She’s right. The world is full of absent.
 

“We cannot fight them,” I say.

“Maybe they don’t want to fight. Maybe they want to help.”

“It’s better to assume everyone wants to fight. That way you’re ready.”

“See? This truly is the Land of the Absent.”

I shift her weight across my shoulders and roll my head from side to side, stretching my neck. The smoke drifts down the ravine toward us. Someone’s camped on the bank. Hunters, most likely. They’ll have food. Clothing. Maybe even weapons.
 

We need all three.
 

“Anik? What is your purpose?”

Purpose
. I smile. Shiori’s still learning English. Sometimes the way she speaks sounds…more honest than she realizes.
 

“What am I going to do?”

“Yes.”

I could climb up the ravine and go wide around them. That’s an option. I consider it for half a second before saying, “We’re going to wait until their fire dies. And then we’re going to steal from them.”

I walk to the edge of the frozen stream and lower Shiori to her feet. She wavers, then sinks into the snow.
 

“I’ll have to leave you here,” I say. “When I steal from them.”

Shiori looks at me, her quick black eyes ringed in blueish circles, her cheeks sunken, her lips colorless. “Sometimes I wish…”

“What?”

“That I’d stayed on the Arc.”

“I know.”

“My life was so clear. I had…purpose. Is that word right?”

“Yes.”

“I knew right from wrong.”

“What they did to you…it was horrible.”

“That’s what you say. But to me, looking back now, sometimes it seems like a fair trade. I had a life of purpose without fear. Now I have a senseless life of fear.”

“They abducted you. Brainwashed you. Addicted you to drugs so you couldn’t resist them in body or mind. They planned to rape you and murder you once you bore their children.”

“Yes.”

Shiori looks at me as if she expects me to present a more convincing argument. I shake my head, suddenly angry at her. They still have her mind. That’s what this is. She hasn’t broken free from them.

“Let me ask you,” she says, running her fingers through the snow. “You have a choice. You can live a life where everything makes sense, where you are not afraid, where your life has purpose, and at the end something horrible
will
happen.”

“Yes? Or what?”

“Or you can live a life where nothing makes sense, where you are always afraid, where your life has no purpose, and at the end something horrible
may
still happen.”

“Which do I choose?”

“Yes.”

“Neither.”

“Those are the choices.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I settle in the snow beside Shiori. This is something I try to avoid, both of us sitting in the snow. It’s dangerous. It would be far too easy to remain here, seated on the bank of this frozen stream, and never get up.
 

“Because there can be a life where some things make sense. Where sometimes we’re afraid and sometimes we’re at peace. Where sometimes we have purpose. And most of all where we choose for ourselves.”

“Can there?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so. Not here, in the Land of the Absent.”

I lean close and kiss her, once, softly, on the lips. I can’t tell if she’s cold or warm, which means we’re both very cold.
 

“There,” I say once our lips part. “Did that make sense?”

Shiori stares at the snow for a long time, then says, “Yes.”

Overhead, hidden in cloud, a raven caws.
 

T
URNS
OUT
A
NNIE
’
S
one of those fierce little kittens that’s been coddled too long and itching to scratch at something. I emerge from the upstairs bedroom, cock raw and aching, hungrier than I’ve been in a long while.

The recent additions to the MC are skulking outside on the porch. That’s good on Sorry and Nash, not letting them inside. Coming in from the cold is a privilege they have to earn.

Sorry and Nash are at the kitchen table. Sorry’s got his laptop out. Dude’s always loved computers. Used to tease the hell out of him about it. But recently it’s proved useful.
 

“You want a taste of the new girl?” I ask Nash, jerking a thumb toward the bedroom.
 

“Fuck yes,” Nash says, leaping from his seat and racing up the stairs.

“Be quick about it,” I shout. “We ride in twenty.”

“Fucker needs three. Max,” Sorry says, staring at his laptop.

“What about you, brother? Hankering for some feline SoCal tang?”

Sorry pushes his glasses up his nose and shakes his head no. He can see a rabbit from three miles off. Fucker doesn’t need glasses. It’s part of his deep web computer-geek kick. Always wears ‘em when he’s tracking Stricken filth. The internet’s nothing more than a big shopping mall and a soapbox for repressed dickheads to vent, but it’s made tracking Stricken a hell of a lot easier. Used to be we had to hit the streets and sniff around for a meal. Now Sorry plugs into the internet’s anonymous dark underbelly and he’s away. ‘Prowling,’ he calls it.

Always makes me grin.
 

I don’t give a fuck what he calls it but I know this: since we’ve been hunting online we haven’t gone more than a few weeks without a feed. We used to go years.
 

“Tell me you have something,” I say, settling beside him. “I could eat a horse.”

“Oh, I got something all right. I got a
hive
of sick fucks,” Sorry says, sliding the computer toward me.
 

I sigh and shield my eyes from the glaring artificial light.
 

I fucking hate screens.

There’s a few pictures. Dead bodies in a nasty looking cage. A bloodstained bed. Typical fucked-up Skin shit. I tell you, the further the Skins get from the purity of their animal nature the more twisted they become. Nothing in the natural world kills like they do: simply for the sick, fucked-up fun of it.
 

“What is it?”
 

“A snuff porn studio. Right here in the Emerald City.”

“Could be Skins.”

“Could be.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

Sorry taps a few keys. A picture of a woman pops up, so fat she has to cruise around in a fucking mobility scooter. She’s parked the scooter in front of a Christian Mission in some blasted-out inner city, flashing a nasty dick-wilting grin. I grimace and say, “Who’s the looker?”

“Her online tag is the Countess.”

“That’s a fucking laugh. Should call herself Moby Dick.”

“That picture was taken a decade ago in LA. After I found the snuff ring and the Countess alias I’ve been hunting her through the Deep Web for months. Waiting for a slip-up to trace back to her real world identity. You want the boring details?”

“Hell no,” I say, lighting a smoke and trying not hear Annie’s cat-like wails drifting down from upstairs.