The All Encompassing: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 1) (5 page)

“Nothin’,” Lonny says, drawing the ‘o’ sound out nice and long to show he doesn’t mean it. He cracks the rear window an inch or two and I peer in. Lonny’s got three girls bound and gagged in the backseat. All fucking hot. All busting tits and ass. And all bleeding black. A hundred percent Stricken. They’re bruised up pretty bad from where Lonny’s smacked ‘em around, and when they see me staring inside they drop the Skin disguise and become hideous fanged monkeys.

Their true selves.
 

I’ve hunted their kind before. They’re vicious little cunts and I’m a bit impressed Lonny had the stones to wrangle all three by himself.
 

The thought of sinking my cock into Stricken pussy makes me shift a little in my seat. What can I say? Human pussy can’t handle my animal and the female Purebloods are all either spoken for or too busy getting off on hunting. That leaves the Stricken.
 

A man with an appetite like mine takes what he can get.

I give Lonny a nod and lick my lips. The light turns green. There’s some honking from behind but Sorry turns around and flashes a very toothy grin to the impatient Skin bastards and they begin slowly driving around us.
 

“You fucking hungry?” Lonny says, knowing damn well I am.
 

“Whatever,” I say.”

“Uh-huh,” Lonny says, rolling the back window down a bit more so I can see the girl’s half-naked bodies all tied up and twisted and pressed against one another in the back seat. I try and pretend it’s not Stricken flesh back there, just warm human or better yet Pureblood booty all ripe and ready for a hard fucking. My cock shifts and swells in my pants. I’m about to arrange a meet with Lonny’s three little monkeys when he leans out the window and sniffs.

His face goes all weird. “You smell that?” he says, trying not to look worried.

Fucker’s all up in my business.

“Yeah,” I say, nodding at Nash, who lifts his mangled hand out from under his cut. Lonny’s eyes widen and he’s about to ask what the fuck when a car full of Skin morons rolls by and a gangster-wannabe type kid in the passenger seat screams that we’re all punk bitches that need to get off the road, then throws a half-full can of beer at my head.
 

Mia bats the beer to the ground with a snake arm that’s too fast for the Skin idiots to see. I close my eyes and take a quick breath, then throttle the Harley after the Skins. I catch them just across the intersection, cut them off, hit the brakes and look back, bringing the wolf out for a roam.
 

The driver’s eyes go wide as he tears at the wheel, trying to avoid a collision with whatever the fuck he thinks he’s seeing. The car’s tires lose their grip on the pavement and the back end of the car begins fishtailing wildly.

A car crash. That shit always makes me grin.
 

I was born to hunt and feed on black-hearted Stricken, just like the Stricken feed on the weak-ass Skins. That me killing Stricken benefits the Skins means nothing. I’m not sworn to protect Skins or some shit, and in fact there’s much to be said for a good old-fashioned werewolf-in-a-girl’s-dormitory style blood bath.
 

Loosens the muscles.
 

Trouble is Purebloods like me can’t feed too well on humans.
 

It’s like quenching your thirst by drinking saltwater.
 

I lean the bike hard and punch her out of harm’s way and I’m back beside Lonny’s pimp-mobile in time to see the Skin kid’s car careen off the road and smash into a telephone pole with an impressive plastic-on-metal crunch. Glass flies across the road and the dick who threw the beer can at me follows right behind, and then one, two, three more cars pile into the first.

Lonny grins as horns blare and Skins pile out of their cars and start shrieking at one another.
 

“Should’a worn his seatbelt,” I say, looking at the dumbass kid’s mangled body lying unmoving on the pavement.

“Who throws a beer can at a biker?” Mia asks.

“A dead guy.”

The sight of all that shit getting nicely fucked up makes my skin tingle. The night’s going from weird to wild, and a part of me—a big part—likes it that way. Lots of night creatures get high on madness and pain and fear and bloodshed, and I’m one of them.
 

“Ooh,” Sorry says, pretending to wince at the wreckage. “If we’re lucky one of the gas tanks’ll catch fire.”

Lonny whoops and lays me five out the window. “So?” he says, “you in or am I ganging all three of them sweeties?”

Mia throttles her ride impatiently. I feel like telling her to stop nagging, that I know the pigs will be on their way. Talk about needing a lay, that bitch…but whatever.
 

I’ve been down that road with her.
 

Never again.

“Fuck it, I’m in,” I tell Lonny. “Let me get Nash to the club. Then I’ll meet you at church.”

Lonny nods toward the stoplight. It’s a challenge.
 

We wait for green, then Lonny floors it. The Caddy is a beautiful roaring beast, rear posi-traction laying a dual rubber track as it shoots into the intersection. I give the car a bit of a head start just to be fair, then throttle my Harley deep into the red. She screams and bucks like a good bitch should and in seconds I’m ripping past Lonny’s caddy and the three black-blooded whores tied up in the back seat, splitting lanes through Seattle’s scant late-night traffic, a wolf bent low to a sweet blood scent.
 

T
HE
WASP
-
THING
is still staring, long enough for me to wonder what’s taking Trish so long in the cab and hope she stays in there. My hands are clenched into fists, my fingernails digging into my palms. My right hand slides down to the small of my back, instinctively, to where my G22 should be.
 

Fucking shitballs.
 

Of course I don’t have it, and even if I did I couldn’t fire. How to end a career before it begins: gun down a civilian in the street, then try explaining you did it because she transformed into a
wasp
right before your eyes.

I keep waiting for the…whatever it is…vision, nightmare, hallucination, to vanish. I even blink and look away, hoping when I look back it’ll just be some working girl glaring at me, her sixth sense sniffing out the cop wearing platforms on the wrong side of town.
 

Big mistake, losing eye contact.
 

When I look up the wasp-thing is right in front of me, her face inches from mine. She smells too-sweet in a sickening way, like meat gone to rot. Her stinger brushes against my chest, right at my sternum. Her eyes are mirrored coal-black planes.
 

Inhuman. Merciless.
 

What about everyone else
, I think.
Can they see this thing
?
 

But I already know the answer. They can’t. If they could they’d be hoofing it out of here right quick, which is what I want to do…except I can’t move. Not just my feet. I can’t move a single muscle.
 

Can’t even scream. My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. I’m frozen. Paralyzed.

“I said hey bitch, what you staring at?” the wasp-thing repeats in my mind. I’d like to say I’m staring at a wasp-bitch who mates in excrement, but I can’t move my tongue.
 

“You stare and stare,” she says, “but you’re fucking blind. You don’t see a thing, do you pretty? That’s gunna change. That’s gunna change real quick for you, and soon you’ll be seein’ more than you ever wanted. More than—”

The wasp-thing cocks her head to the side like she hears something unusual.
 

I listen, trying to figure out why she interrupted herself. I can’t hear anything out of the ordinary: cars droning past leaving wakes of mist above the wet roads, someone screaming in the distance, a police siren way too far off (never around when you need them, huh?) and a growl of Harleys in the distance.
 

It’s hard to tell, but I think the wasp-thing’s eyes widen. Just a little.
 

And I think she’s afraid.

She dips her stinger to my sternum once more. There’s a flash of cold so intense it burns. Then she walks a few steps backwards, whirls and sprints down an alley faster than any human has ever moved.

I clasp my hands to my sternum. There’s a tiny burn-mark in my sweater, and I don’t have to peer down my shirt to know it goes all the way through to skin.

“Cabbie tried to say he forgot to put the meter on. Liar. Tried to get forty bucks to go—hey Lil! You all right?”

I nod at Trish, still watching the alley the creature fled into and thinking of the drunks and homeless hidden in the shadows there, passed out, waking up to that thing straddling them, silencing their screams with a hand as she drives her stinger into their chests, drawing red-blue blood from their dying bodies.
 

“Yo Lil!” Trish snaps her fingers in front of my face. “Whats the matter girl? Had a change of heart? Good. Place is a dump. Here—I’ll hail another cab.”

The Harley’s are getting louder.
 

The doorman at the Wilds opens the door and peers out.

That’s why the bitch fled
, I think without knowing why.
She heard them. The riders.
 

Then they’re racing past, three broad-shouldered men and a woman, a blur of gleaming chrome and roaring unmufflered pipes and black leather cuts, splitting the yellow and even dipping into oncoming traffic, going at least 100 mp/h on a city street and making the cop in me itch for a maxed-out unmarked cruiser to chase them down with.
 

Then he turns. The leader. The damn—what do the outlaw MC’s call the boss?
 

The Prez.
 

Needless to say, Mr. Prez isn’t wearing a helmet.

He turns his head as he whips by and let me just say, not for second do I believe in love at first sight. The entire idea makes me gag. The giggling school-girl romance of it all. Love isn’t a thing that appears out of nowhere and lives forever. Its a series of small actions that build up over time, layer into feelings, until one day you wake up and realize the bedrock of your life is founded on those feelings. They’ve become your earth: what holds you up, nourishes and sustains.
 

But it sure doesn’t happen instantly, or even overnight.
 

Call me a cynic. I prefer the term pragmatist. Or maybe ‘bitch with a broken heart’ is more accurate. Either way, I’m too old to believe in fairy tales.
 

I tried that once and what did it get me? Penciled into some rich guy’s schedule.
 

But I see this guy, this…
biker
, for the love of all hell…and maybe for an instant I do believe. In everything. In all the fairy tales. In all the fantasies about a lonely heart snapped up and saved. And maybe that’s what love is, too: hope. Hope that love can exist independent and inviolable from the shit we live in, somehow both in the world and above it, like a soul living inside us yet linked to heaven.

Me and the biker Prez lock gazes. The roar of the Harleys crash down like waves.
 

The rain starts again, misty, almost teasing.
 

He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. Even hunched over his Harley he’s tall and perfectly built: not puffed up like a juice-monkey but muscled wiry and tight, naturally powerful. He’s wearing soaked blue jeans that cling tight to his thighs, a black t-shirt and a black leather cut. That’s it. No jacket even though its damn cold outside and it must be freezing whipping around on that bike.
 

The rain has slicked his skin. He’s got serious biker ink lacing up his ripped arms. A narrow chin verging on stern, and a set of high cheekbones that make me think of aristocracy. Thick, full lips. Dark hair whipping in the wind. And his eyes? Damn. His eyes are a gorgeous arctic blue so bright they nearly glow high-lumen neon, and I can tell he’s no meathead, not your run-of-the-mill biker idiot, and for the second time in about five minutes I’m frozen on the spot, mouth hanging open, heart beating a mad staccato rhythm in my chest and warmth building between my legs that I haven’t felt in…ever.

Then he’s gone. Zoom.
 

Not a wink, not a nod, not a single obvious indication to show he knows I exist. But I turn around to make sure there’s no biker whore standing behind me that he was eyeing. Because the Prez threw me a look…yeah.
 

There was something in how he looked at me. A promise.
 

I’d swear on my mother’s grave.

“Obnoxious pricks,” Trish mutters, stepping into the street and giving them the finger. “Idiots whose sole aspiration in life is to ride around on a loud bike. Perpetual adolescence.”

“Yeah,” I say, still breathless. “Not to mention riding waaay too fast.”

Trish gives me an odd look, and I realize my hands are resting on my legs, on my upper thighs actually, and I’m kind of slowly kneading the skin under my skirt, almost rubbing it. Trish looks about to say something snide when there’s a sharp squeal of tires and a sputtering roar.
 

Three blocks down the bikers have flipped a u-turn and are racing back up the street.

“Quick,” Trish says, waving at the dive bar. “Inside. Before the dumb-asses get the wrong idea about us.” She tosses me a glare that says what kind of shit have I gotten her into before striding past the bouncer and into the Wilds.

And right about then I’m thinking the same thing, and as I shuffle into the bar I’m surprised to realize I’m damn excited to find out.