The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3)
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Authors: May Ellis Daniels
ABLE
OF
C
ONTENTS
About Author May Ellis Daniels
The One We Answer To
Pureblood Predator MC
Book 3
May Ellis Daniels
C
OPYRIGHT
© 2015 May Ellis Daniels
All rights reserved.
The One We Answer To
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events portrayed in this story are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, shared, down-loaded, compiled, stored, or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the author.
HAPTER
O
NE
A
ARON
T
HE
MOUNTAIN
ANIMALS
are starving.
I am starving.
The Blood Moon rises crimson against a rocky ridge deep in the Cascades. The night far too warm for early spring. I lift my nose to the breeze and scent the air.
There’s a forest fire raging in the next valley.
More fires arrive every evening, with black-bellied storms that roll in from the west, barreling across the Pacific like cavalry in the churn and scream of war, slamming into the mountains and cutting the night with vicious red lightning. Flames follow in the storm’s wake, consuming cedar and fir in this land that was once known as a rainforest.
The time of rain has ended.
This is the Age of Discord.
I know this truth like I know I will die this evening unless I succeed in a kill.
Starvation lives deep in my marrow.
I growl and paw at the dry forest loam, releasing a sharp whiff of decay.
With any luck the fire in the next valley will drive game into the exposed terrain along the ridge. The deer will be frenzied, panicked, oblivious to the lone wolf waiting to pounce.
Ambush.
Once, when I commanded a Pureblood pack, I would have scoffed at such a tactic. I preferred to announce my presence to my prey. Preferred the thrill of the chase. Enjoyed running my prey down, watching exhaustion overtake them as they staggered and stumbled.
Enjoyed toying with them.
I was tireless then. We all were.
Ambush is a strategy for the weak and desperate.
For those unwilling confront their kill straight-on. For cowards.
Is that what I have become?
A coward?
Everything I once loathed?
Or is this survival, the will to continue hunting when every fibre of my being screams at me to stop, lie down, rest…and never stand up? Is survival simply stubbornness, the blunt refusal to admit I’d rather be dead than alive?
I pace back and forth within a stand of stunted balsam and huckleberry, the hunger a living demon in my belly. The pacing is foolish. I should lie down. Rest. Conserve energy. Even now I’m not certain I have the strength to give chase. The seeping, unhealed burn on my chest refuses to heal, its pain both lesson and reminder: trust no one.
They will turn on you. Betray you. Everyone you once trusted.
Every single one of them.
Lily
.
That strange word. Repeating in my wolfmind whenever the pain of my burn becomes too sharp to ignore. One of the few Skin words I’m left with. For some reason the burn reminds me of that word, but I’ve lost all sense of its meaning.
Lily
.
I look to my right, expecting to see my younger brother, the magnificent black wolf, crouching in the shadows. Only his grey-green eyes visible. But there’s no one.
I’m alone.
They will all turn on you.
Wind rolls over the ridge, sending a plume of black-grey smoke swirling toward me. I lower my head and snarl as red embers whip into the trees I’m hiding in. Soon the fire will crest the ridge and the wind will carry the embers into the valley below, lighting treetop after treetop, crowning a mile ahead of the main blaze, impossible to outrun.
Sometimes I think the fire is hunting me.
Tirelessly.
Laughing as I stagger and stumble. Toying with
me
.
The fires burn with unnatural heat. I’ve seen the flames transform solid rock to molten red lava. I’ve seen fire shoot straight into the night sky, a single column a thousand feet high, then race to the ground in a different direction, as if targeting something, and when it touches down a violent explosion shakes the earth.
Now I take a quick breath through my nose. Air so hot it singes my lungs.
Soon it’ll be too hot to breathe, and I’ll be forced to retreat hungry down the hill.
I paw and scrape at the soreness around my neck.
My fur is thin, the skin beneath worn raw from my claws.
There was another fire like this one: too hot.
Unnatural.
That fire almost killed me. I remember it burning into my chest, melting something I hated from around my neck, then I was falling, landing in cold rolling water that slammed me against a rocky shore.
Collar
.
I lean down, drag my head and neck through the dirt, maddening myself with memory and physical pain.
She freed me.
Lily
.
I lift my head to the raging red-orange sky and howl.
The sound echoes across the valley, long and mournful.
The smokey-black air changes.
Gathers
.
It heard me.
I should never have howled. I’ve seen Pureblood screams draw the ascendant alpha near.
Seen the Fallen’s power—
I lower my head and slink deeper into the balsam and cedar. There’s a meadow behind. If I flee I’ll be in open terrain. Exposed. But here I’m pinned down—
The smoke begins to swirl, slowly at first, then increasing in speed until it becomes a tornado whirling along the ridge, sucking stones and small trees into its center. I hear myself whimper and moan. The whirling wind concentrates into a single point and for a moment I feel the wind…
pulling
at me.
Calling me.
Leaves and branches fly through the flaming sky and vanish into the swirling wind. Then, with a quickness that makes me growl, the wind suddenly calms. Glowing embers fall like rain. Sitting on its haunches on the ridge fifty yards away is a giant red wolf with the head of a preying mantis, its three compound, crystalline eyes gleaming black as it stares into the grove I’m cowering in.
The mantis-wolf glares into the trees for a long while. I lick my dry, cracked lips and try not to whimper. It scents…wrong. Unnatural. It’s like the fires that burn without wood: it should never be.
Yet it is.
Worse, I know what it is. Or…I once did.
Now I only know its strength.
The mantis-wolf is an apex predator. The current peak of evolution. And me?
I’m prey.
The mantis-wolf stands, unfurls a pair of ruddy red eagle’s wings and leaps into the sky, trailing an arc of burning embers as it swoops toward me.
I lower my belly to the ground. A snarl escapes my lips.
I scent this creature’s foul black blood.
The creature arcs low to the ground, banks sharply, rides a thermal high into the storm-ravaged sky, turning in a wide, slow circle, then furls its wings close to its sides and dives straight at me.
Blind panic races through me, and for a moment I’m stunned motionless.
This is how it feels. To be hunted.
I dig my claws into the dirt and prepare to leap at the winged mantis-wolf. It barrels down, its eyes black and heartless, insectile mouth parted in a shrill, high-pitched shriek that makes my ears feel like they’re going to rupture. I ignore the pain and concentrate on sinking my fangs into its flesh at least once before it tears me apart.
To drink black blood again, even as I die, would be more than I deserve.
At the last second the creature lifts its head and flaps its wings and swoops upward, diving so close its vicious, curving claws rake against the trees overhead. Hot wind following in the creature’s wake presses me to the ground, and for a moment I glance up and meet the creature’s gaze, and in my mind I hear:
You hunted beside me. You will do so again. Now, feed. Live! I may yet have need of you, Aaron of the Mountain River.
Embers fall and singe into my flesh as the creature whirls and vanishes into the valley below, and there, staggering over the burning ridge, is a frightened doe, near dead with exhaustion. The sight of game makes my empty stomach scream, and I know that the mantis-wolf has granted me life for another day, and that soon he’ll arrive to collect his debt.
***
The kill gives me strength to outrun the blaze.
It feels good to move, even better to have blood on my lips.
My paws sink into sandy soil. The rhythm of my stride lulls me into a waking trance. I press east through the night, avoiding heavily-wooded mountain slopes and keeping to valley floors where ancient rivers now run dry make for fast travel. Soon the sun rises, casting its sickly yellow glow through clouds of smoke. I pass other animals fleeing east: black bears and foxes and the odd cougar.
The predators give each other a wide berth. For now.
The fire recedes behind me, but other dangers are not so easily outrun. Images, blurred and half-formed, race through my mind. A shining, screaming animal I once rode on the hunt. The strange sensation of standing upright on two legs. Of being able to hold objects in my paws. A world without trees, full of disease and noise and deception.
A world where nothing is what it seems.
I pause at a stagnant pond, sniff the water. It’s murky and stained with soot, but there’s nothing else. I’m about to bend my head to drink when a female bear shuffles from the woods a few yards off. She’s injured, her fur burned to blistered skin across her shoulders.
She won’t live long.
I’m shocked I didn’t scent her; the fire must have deadened my nose. I raise my haunches and snarl. The bear pauses, eyes the water, then retreats into the woods.
I’ve known other bears.
One a Kodiak. His memory is distant.
Another even larger, a massive white-furred killer with three eyes. I shake my head against the image and press on, driven by nothing more than an instinct to escape a fear I can’t name.
Soon cedar and fir give way to thin pine. The soil changes from soft and rich to hard, dusty and sun-baked. The scent of sage fills my nostrils. I scramble to the top of a knoll and peer into the distance: a broad expanse of dry rolling hills and brittle grasslands.
The sun beats down on my back. Pains my eyes. Makes my burned chest sting.
This is no land for a wolf.
