The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3) (26 page)

Rodas smiles, hesitates, then lifts his arms in a gesture of conciliation.
 

When he speaks his voice is softer, less demanding.
 

“As you wish, my All Consuming,” Rodas says with a shrug.

My firstborn’s cries ring loud in my ears.
 

I carry my infant son to the dead offering’s prone body. Set him down. My son’s face shifts, going black, then smokey grey, then animal-like, then finally his eyes fracture and a long curving jaw opens and he wriggles from the black swaddling and onto the offering’s chest.
 

Rodas steps beside me.
 

Takes my hand in his.

Our newborn son burrows his face into the offering’s chest, biting and gnawing through the human’s ribcage. He struggles against his kill’s hard sternum, crying and straining, his body changing rapidly from cat-like to insectile to shifting back smoke.
 

“He hasn’t mastered who he is,” Rodas says, watching his son with a mix of pride…and something else. Fear? Suspicion?

Yes. Suspicion. Apprehension.
 

One day our son will climb these steps and murder us to claim his place as alpha of our empire.

That is natural law. The strong survive. This son will grow stronger than either Rodas or I, and one day he will ascend to claim what’s rightfully his.

There’s a sharp cracking sound as our son pierces the sacrifice’s sternum and finds the heart hidden within.

“Give him time,” I say as my son feeds.

“What shall we name him?”

I’m about to answer when the sky darkens. A flock of black-winged carrion birds, so large it blots out the sun, swoops from the sky. The birds dive toward us. A million screeching blood-fed birds, hooked beaks dripping blood, eyes gleaming, led by a giant vulture with ram’s horn’s sprouting from its head.
 

I stand perched atop the blood-slick stairs as the carrion birds dive toward me and my family, and when I lift my hands the birds break left and right, whirling around the pyramid, circling around us, a spinning gyre of death darkening the sky, casting whirling shadows, and in the screeching of the carrion flock a child’s voice emerges, a high-pitched voice speaking through the beating wings and shrieking beaks of a million flesh-eating birds, and the voice says to me: “Join the One We are Slave To. Join the Night Stalker. The Lord of Near and Nigh.”

The pyramid vision vanishes.
 

My brother and bloodmate Rodas is gone.
 

My beautiful infant son. Gone.

There’s only me alone, standing in the forest clearing under swaying poles and swinging corpses, surrounded by enemies I’ve mistaken for friends.
 

Surrounded by weakness, cowardice and deceit.
 

I blink, trying to hold on to the image of my precious son feeding.
 

“Lead your Risen packmates to the Pyramid of the Sun,” a child’s voice says through the beating wings of the carrion flock as it fades from my mind. “Lead them to me.”
 

Then the voice is gone.

A shudder of devotion and faith burns through my blood, and suddenly I understand where I must be.
 

What I must do.
 

I too have
purpose
.

I
LOWER
MY
Glock and peer around the shipping container. The high-powered fluorescent lights that usually light up Tacoma’s shipyards have been shot out. The yard smells of steel and engine oil and the musky reek of low tide.
 

And something else. Stricken.
 

“You scent that?” I ask.

“Hell yeah,” Blue rumbles. His animal’s half unleashed: Blue’s usually boyish face is broad with plates of bone, his jaws distended and his fangs shining in the darkness. There’s no one I’d rather have at my back during a raid, except maybe my brother Sorry, and that’s not gunna happen ever again.

I clench my hands on the Glock and survey the shipyard.
 

Cold metal bites into my skin.
 

I’m a bundle of barely-contained violent energy. I take a deep breath and try to reign my animal in. I fucking
hate
waiting.
 

I gesture for the MC to split into two. Blue heads off with one group to cover our flank while Nash and Tate stay at my side. I count to ten, listening, scenting, scoping shit out. Then something catches my eye. Motion in the operator’s box of a container crane high overhead.
 

Something’s up there. Watching.
 

A guard.

Good thing I was patient.
 

This old dog’s learning new tricks.
 

There’s nearly a half mile of open concrete to cross before we reach the warehouses where I’m betting the Sin Crew is holed up. Plenty of time for a skilled sniper or two to take out half my guys as we race across the exposed terrain.

I lean into the shadows beside the shipping container and tell Tate to go take out the guard in the crane.
 

“Flick your Zippo three times when it’s clear,” I say to the reptile bastard. “Then stay up there and cover us when we move.”

Tate nods, slips as close to his full reptile form as his iron collar will permit, a black Komodo dragon twice as long as a man is tall, then slinks off into the night, nearly invisible in the blackness.

“He’s fucking prehistoric, that one,” Nash breathes.
 

I flash my VP a wide grin and settle against the cold shipping container, wishing we’d found more heavy artillery at the Satan’s Spawn roadhouse saloon. I could use a decent assault rifle in my hands instead of this fucking pistol.

My animal’s howling. Pacing. Begging to be set free.
 

Nash had better be right about these docks being the Sin’s stronghold.

I count to sixty, then a hundred twenty, then three hundred. A chill traces down my spine, making my hackles rise.
 

What’s taking Tate so fucking long?
 

A warm wind picks up, blowing off the rising Pacific. That’s good. We’re upwind from whatever’s in the warehouses beside the moored ships.

Patience. The stalker’s greatest asset.
 

But I’m a wolf. Born to move.
 

The waiting’s fucking killing me.
 

I’m about to say fuck it and spring from behind the container and rush the fucking warehouses and so what if we lose a few MC when Nash taps me on the shoulder. A set of headlights appears in the entrance to the shipyards behind us, than another, then another.
 

“It’s a fucking convoy,” Nash says under his breath.
 

I nod, watching as the vehicles kill their lights and roll into the center of the open lot. Four blacked out luxury sedans slow, then stop, all lined up in a row facing the entry gates.
 

No one gets out.
 

“They’re waiting for someone,” I say to Nash.
 

“Or they know something’s up.”

We stashed our bikes in an abandoned garage a few miles back. I left four guys guarding them. Maybe one of them turned? Maybe they got scented out?
 

Fuck it.
 

Maybe I’ll shit rainbows. No sense fretting about what you can’t change. No way in hell I’m leaving Tate behind and slinking out of here with my tail between my legs. The End Days Chapter needs an initiation kill.
 

And we’re gunna get one.

A light flicks three times from the crane’s operator’s booth.
 

Good. Tate’s in position.
 

No one steps out of the blacked out sedans.
 

Who the fuck is in there? And who are they waiting for?
 

One of the crew lined up behind me and Nash looses a low growl.

The MC’s growing restless. Can’t blame ‘em. For most of them this is their first ride with their new Prez. My leadership—and my life—depends on this ambush not going to total shit.
 

I smile into the darkness.
 

My track record pretty much sucks when it comes to dealing with the Chinese Sin Crew.

Move now or wait for whatever the crew inside the sedans is waiting for? My animal’s screaming at me to charge. But I’ve learned to ignore him when I need to. It was charging into that fat beetle bitch’s house that got me and Sorry locked in her cage.
 

No. This time we wait.

One of sedan windows rolls down. Someone flicks a cigarette butt outside. The glowing red cherry smacks into the concrete, then slowly darkens.
 

I hear the gangbangers approach before I see their headlights: thumping bass echoes as they pass through the entry gate. It’s a troop of white SUV’s sporting gleaming gold rims.

“The fucking Lockdown Crew?” Nash says, anger sharpening his voice.

“Could be some other bangers,” I say.
 

But I don’t believe it.

The SUV’s kill their lights and roll up facing the sedans.
 

The thumping bass quiets.
 

A door swings open.
 

My breath catches in my throat. A tall, heavy-built black dude wearing a gleaming white suit steps out of the white SUV.
 

It’s Mr. Frederick Jones. AKA Friday.
 

AKA another lying, treasonous motherfucker just added himself to my kill list.

“Bastard took us for a ride, Prez,” Nash growls. “The Cartel didn’t kill him in that ambush. They wanted it to look that way so—”

“Friday could come back around to us and they’d have someone close to the MC. A rat.”

“Fuck yeah.”

“Or maybe he just didn’t die. Maybe he escaped.”

“Then why’s he here now? Either way he has to be working for them.”

I think about the power vacuum left behind in the Westcoast’s criminal underground after my MC got wiped out. And then the Stricken rising. The world collapsing. I know exactly what Friday would say in his defense. He’d smile and say a brother has to do what a brother has to do.
 

And he’d be right.
 

“Take him alive,” I say, wishing I had a way to tell Blue the same thing. “I want a chat with my old friend Friday.”

Friday lights a cigar, leans against the SUV like he doesn’t have a care in the world. But I know Friday well enough to know there’s a pack of bangers in the trucks with their Uzis raised at the blacked-out sedans.
 

“Come on, you chickenshit motherfuckers,” I whisper to the guys in the sedans. “Come on out and show me who you are.” The burning tightness in my lungs is back. Fuck sakes. I’d hoped being reunited with my MC would make the shortness of breath go away—

“No one’s moving,” Nash says. He’s fucking trembling with kill-lust. “They’re all waiting for someone else. Fuck sakes, Prez. Now’s not the time. Whoever’s in the sedans will be packing as much heat as Friday. We need to arm up heavier. The ambush is blown.”

“Quiet, VP,” I growl. “Let’s see how this plays.”

A few in my MC glance at one another uncomfortably.
 

They said they were ready to die.
 

How many were talking shit? Guess we’re gunna find out.
 

I hear an odd whumping sound in the distance. At first I think it’s the wind rattling a piece of metal somewhere in the shipyard. But it’s too rhythmic, and soon the sound grows loud enough to recognize.

It’s a chopper.
 

No. It’s a fucking
fleet
of choppers.
 

Coming in low off the ocean.
 

One of the sedan doors pops open.
 

Friday tosses his cigar on the ground. His crew steps out of the SUV’s. They’re all holding mean-looking TAR-21 automatic assault rifles.
 

Nash whistles.

“Yeah,” I whisper. “Damned expensive guns. Let’s get our hands on a few, huh?”

The world might have gone to hell, but it looks like the gun business is still booming.
 

An Asian man wearing crisply ironed black slacks and a grey sweater steps out of the lead sedan. Dude looks like a fucking accountant. But I’d recognize his smarmy, humorless smile anywhere.
 

It’s Tao Ah Hong.
 

Leader of the Ah Hong Syndicate.
 

“That little bitch,” Nash growls, tensing.

I lay my hand on my VP’s arm and point at the sky. “Let’s see who they’re waiting for.”

The choppers crest over the ships moored at the docks. They’re flying dark and nearly invisible in the low light. When they’re directly over the shipyard they turn on their spotlights.
 

The shipyard lights up brighter than noon.

“Down!” I hiss, throwing myself onto the concrete while a spotlight sweeps over us.
 

The light passes over us once more, and when it’s gone I lift my head to see nearly a dozen military Longbow Apache helicopter’s hovering over Friday and Tao. Both men are looking up, cupping their eyes against the blinding light. The choppers hover over them for a few moments, then turn in that slow, lazy way choppers do, speed to the other end of the yard, pause directly above the ships, then turn once more to face the Sin and Lockdown crew gathered in the middle of the yard.

Friday and Tao share a glance.

They look worried. Tense.
 

“What the fuck is going on?” Nash whispers.

Don’t know. But I’m beginning to wonder if he was right. Maybe we should’ve cleared out while we had the chance.

The choppers hover above the ships for a moment, then one of them breaks formation and makes a slow approach toward the ground. Before it’s even settled on the concrete a Hispanic man hops out. He’s built low and stocky, dressed in full army gear right down to the military-issue black leather boots. His face is pitted and craggy and oddly shiny.