The Lord of Near and Nigh: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 2) (9 page)

“Yeah. Pretty name, right? Means purple—”

I can’t help it. I have to set the phone down to laugh, and when I finally recover enough to speak I say, “Eggplant.”

“What?”

“Aubergine means eggplant, Connor. Your hammock yoga instructor’s name is
eggplant
.”

Connor and I laugh together, and for a split second every nerve and instinct and gut feeling I have screams at me to turn the fucking boosted Prelude around, forget about the asshole biker and accept Connor Lerrick’s proposal. But my hand remains locked on the wheel.
 

“She
is
vegan—”

“Fucking stop it. Seriously.”
 

“Hey? You busy later? Want to—”

I run my fingers over the stinging bite mark and say, “I’m sorry but I think I have plans.”

“You think?”
 

He sounds disappointed. Genuinely disappointed.

“I do. Have plans.”

“Okay. Bummer.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to harsh your hammock yoga mellow.”

I wince at myself. That sounded way too snide.
 

There’s a longish pause, then Connor says, “So why didn’t you wait for the car?”

“I just…needed some time alone. To think.”

“Yeah? Alone?”

Shitballs. I don’t like where this is headed. “Alone. Why?”

“Uh…damn. Lil? Shit. I…uh…because I called the number you called me from, and some
dude
answered—”

“Yeah. My phone was in my apartment. I had to borrow one from a guy on the street. He was watching the apartment burn. A real catch. Likes the smell of gasoline and flinging lit matches at house-cats.”

Pause. No laughter.
 

Okay. I tell myself to reign it in.
 

“Seriously, Lil. He didn’t sound that surprised, y’know…when I called.”

“I guess he wouldn’t be. I used his phone. Did he say he knew me?”

Another pause. Then: “No.”

Relief washes over me. One good thing about bikers is they know how to keep their mouths shut. “See? So what are you getting at?”

“I just want to know you’re okay.”

I think back on the last forty-eight hours. Glance around the stolen car. Cover the burning bite mark on my neck with the palm of my hand, and then the tears are right there, running down my cheeks, and it’s all I can do to say, “Have a good class Connor I’m fine I’ll call soon,” before I hang up, fling the phone at the passenger window and start sobbing.

***

I get lost a few times, blow past the turns, have to find my way back, but soon enough I’m parked outside the Pureblood Predator MC safe-house.
 

Bikes are lined up outside, nearly a dozen of them, all gleaming chrome and testosterone-fueled swagger, and I wonder if I’m interrupting some sort of outlaw party or secret meeting. But when I step outside the Prelude and listen all I hear is the wind winding through the woods. The sound makes me hug myself, wishing I had a weapon.
 

I stomp up the front porch, calling Aaron’s name,
really
not wanting to surprise him. Maybe he’s got a pack of biker whores in bed.
 

Good for him. Asshole.
 

I knock on the door, softly at first, then louder and louder until my knuckles are sore.
 

Nothing.
 

I halfway turn to leave, shake my head at myself, then whirl and lay a solid kick right beneath the deadbolt.
 

The door splinters but holds.
 

Fuck. Nothing’s ever easy, is it?

Three more kicks and I’m in, half-expecting the door to be booby-trapped with explosives.
 

But I don’t get blown to pieces, and I guess I have that to be thankful for.

There’s a laptop on the kitchen table and a couple of open tabs. One window opens to Senator Gladys Townshend’s website. Another to a hobby farm outside Olympia. Without thinking I close the laptop and make my way upstairs, still calling Aaron’s name, beginning to feel like a lovesick schoolgirl.
 

Or at least a very horny one.
 

I pass the bathroom where Aaron and I fucked.
 

I won’t say made love. It sure wasn’t that. Which is fine, thank you very much.
 

And anyway I’m not here for that…in fact I’m here
in spite
of that. Just to warn him. About the Pureblood dude with his head torn off and burned and his heart missing. Who knows? Maybe it was a Cartel thing. Gangland’s way of saying, “Yo. Whassup?”
 

Maybe nothing weird about it.

I smile in the dim light streaming through the upstairs window.
 

Gangland email. Ding!
 

But there’s also the issue of the cops coming for him. And I want to ask him…about the mark he left on me. And about last night. If I dreamed a dogfaced nightmare.
 

Or if he saw it too.
 

I shudder, lean into the wall, trying not to think about what that might mean.

My shoulder itches and stings like crazy. I dig at it, opening it up, and feel slick blood against my shirt.
 

I sneak into Aaron’s bedroom and sit on his unmade bed. A wave of exhaustion swoops over me and the next thing I know I’m lying face-down, inhaling the man’s smell buried in his bedding: pine forest and fresh mountain air. My cunt throbs at the thought of him. Of having his cock again. I run my fingers down my leg, across my warming cunt.

Maybe it’s a good thing he’s not here.
 

Nope. It’s
definitely
a good thing he’s not here.

I force myself off the bed and am about to leave when I’m struck by that age-old cop instinct to snoop. I open a drawer, paw through some clothing. Nothing much. Then I commit, open Aaron’s closet, search through his jacket pockets. Nothing. I’m moving faster now, and the thought surfaces in the back of my mind that I’ll search the whole damned house if I have to.
 

Who the fuck is this guy, really?
 

Am I sticking my neck out for an outlaw asshole?

Stranger things have happened.

Like those girls who fall in love with convicted felons and get married in prison. Love? Fuck that. Real love shouldn’t put you in mortal danger. Neurosis? Sure. Obsession? Maybe. Mental instability? Damn straight. There’s no real explaining why they do it.
 

Or what I’m doing.
 

There are some shoe boxes piled high on the closet’s top shelf. I stand on my tip-toes to grab the bottom one, snag the edge of it, stumble and bring three or four crashing in a heap around me, spilling their contents across the hardwood floor.
 

Fuck sakes.

The boxes are full of old photos.
 

Family photos, from the look of it.
 

Now we’re getting somewhere. The boxes seem to be arranged chronologically. One looks like it’s from the eighties. There’s Aaron on a vintage Harley, surrounded by his crew. I recognize the bitch Mia and Sorry’s jockish good looks and thin, twitchy Nash. But something’s weird. That was nearly thirty years ago. Aaron can’t be more than thirty now. But he doesn’t look much different—

I fling the box aside and dig out another. There’s Aaron and Nash and Sorry, clutching bulky rifles, huddled in a filthy mud pit, razor wire coiled above them, each man wearing US infantry fatigues. Aaron’s smoking. Nash is cradling a grenade. Sorry’s looking…sorry. I’m no military historian, but I can spot an old gun, and those rifles look to be from around the time of the Second World War.

War Two? What the fuck?

I throw the photos in the box, slam the lid closed, scoot against the wall and bring my knees to my chest.
 

What
is
he?
 

And the stinging, itching burn on my shoulder makes me ask: what am I?

There’s a third box I haven’t opened.
 

I’ve sunk this low. Why stop now?
 

I find a heavy stack of newspaper clippings inside, some so old they’re brittle and faded to yellow. I flip through them. Every single one describes a violent unsolved murder involving a victim with its head torn off and its heart missing.

The newspaper clippings are trophies.
 

They must be.

But some stretch back to the late Eighteenth Century.
 

It doesn’t make sense. Not unless Aaron’s involved in an ancient murderous cult.
 

The last hour of the unrepentant.
 

That’s what Detective Kusch said.
 

The paranoid bastard might be onto something.

I hold up a clipping from March 4, 1913. London Courier. The article describes a massacre in a boarding house. Eleven people were found torn apart, their bodies brutally mutilated. The murders were attributed to a bloodthirsty creature rumored to be stalking the streets of London—

I stop reading. Usually the cop in me would scoff at this kind of shit. Wasn’t it fucking hilarious, what people believed way back when?

But it doesn’t seem so funny now.

I lift the newspaper clipping and continue reading. Authorities were searching creature with the body of a man and the face of an animal. A werewolf. A priest had been called to exorcise the malign spirit from a man named—

The end of the article’s been torn off.
 

The name is missing.
 

Shuddering, I drop the clipping back into the box.
 

I’m alone and unarmed in this man’s room.
 

A murderer’s room.

Terror strikes me, so bone-deep it makes me moan.
 

Run.
 

That’s what I have to do now.
 

I have to run.

But run from what? A few faded newspaper clippings? Some old stories?
C’mon, Lil,
I tell myself.
Get your shit together. You’re just spooked is all. Totally fucking normal to be spooked. But it wouldn’t be normal to run screaming like a crazy person—
 

I miss the life I had just a couple days ago. I miss Connor Lerrick and his juvenile hobbies. I miss Trish’s loving bitchiness. I miss only having to worry about my career. I even miss my shitty apartment.
 

But most of all I miss my gun.

There’s something else tucked in the bottom of the shoebox.
 

A sketchbook.
 

I lift it out. It’s bound in worn black leather, and when I flip it open the pages feel…strange. As in not paper. They’re too thick and soft.
 

Vellum. Calfskin paper.
 

Popular…oh, around a thousand years ago.
 

The sketchbook’s crammed full of drawings done in black ink. Many are of creatures like I saw on Aaron’s tattoos. Wild looking beasts with half-human half-animal forms. There are snowy forests and sun-baked deserts. Mountains and plains and jungles. There’s a huge round disk hovering in the sky over a broiling ocean. I would say it’s the moon, except it’s colored blood red, and as I stare at the picture and a chill traces down my spine I’m certain the moon
is
colored in blood. Real blood. And on every page there are more creatures, like a collection of images from every ancient myth from every culture through history, and they’re all—

At war.
 

The creatures are battling one another. Black and red blood pools beneath the dying. I stare at a picture of a pack of…dogs or wolves or coyotes feeding on a half-lion half-snake animal. The pack is tearing out the creature’s heart—

I flip to another page. Empty except for a symbol.
 

Three red disks.
 

Two on the bottom and one on top, so the disks form the shape of a pyramid—

Another page. Trees charred black. A starless sky. That same blood-red moon. A pack of creatures emerging in the distance, their faces shorn of skin. And now I notice the disk-pyramid everywhere. Hidden in the clouds. In pools of blood—
 

Another page, and now there’s writing and that symbol all across the images. The writing’s even stranger than the pictures. I recognize three words, and then I realize the same three words have been repeated again and again in a hundred different languages. Some of the words are scrawled and barely legible. Some are printed in ornate font like you see in old Bibles. Some seem more recent.

And always the same three words.

TRY AND REMEMBER
 

Over and over.
 

Paired with that disk-pyramid.
 

Try and remember.

An unstable mind skipping like a scratched record, inventing it’s own sick fucking story.
 

I slam the notebook closed.

The house is dead quiet.
 

The crickets in the fields outside have stopped chirping. The air is cold. Goosebumps rise on my skin, sending a shiver through me. I feel like a little mouse who’s blundered into the cave of something very dangerous. I scoot across the floor, moving very slowly, trying not to make a sound.
 

Mouse-like.
 

Because I’m no longer alone in this house.

I don’t know how I know it.
 

I just
do
.
 

And for once in my life I’m smart enough not to argue.
 

Carefully, barely remembering to breathe, I crawl to the bed. It’s the only spot within easy reach that an outlaw biker could stash a weapon of any size. And tell you what: my instinct’s telling me I want a big weapon.
 

A fucking cannon.

I lay on my side and peer under the bed.
 

There it is. Wrapped in an old army-green wool blanket.
 

What kind of gun does a fucking maniac biker keep under his bed?