The Lord of Near and Nigh: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 2) (12 page)

Hate her
because
I need her.
 

Hate her because she’s living proof of my weakness.
 

She convinced me to flee the Cloud Temple. Called me a prisoner of weak men. Said a magnificent creature like me should know freedom.

I glance at the filthy, unhappy creatures crammed in the bus.
 

Is this freedom? And if so—

I close my eyes to block out the sight of the passengers. My skin itches and my head aches, and there’s an emptiness in my stomach, a cold hollow demanding to be filled. Soon my head will start to throb like someone’s stabbing a blade into my skull and the bitter tastes of bile and ash will rise in my throat and even my skin will ache.

This is the One I Am Slave To speaking to me.
 

Gifting me pain to remind me of my purpose.
 

O Lord of Blood, Lord of Night, Night Wind, Night Stalker, Blood Stalker, O Tezcatlipoca, Lord of Near and Nigh—
 

The One I Am Slave To demands an offering.

I lick my swollen tongue across my dry, cracked lips.

I demand a feed.

Find the Broken
, Tamara instructed, and when I asked how she directed me to this bus. I should never have marked her. I should murder her. Murder her and that fucking wretch Carlos Collazo and flee into darkness. I have the Night Smoke. The animal prowling in me.
 

I don’t need her anymore.
 

The thought of opening Tamara’s chest and feasting on her beating black heart makes my hands tremble. I want to swim in a river of blood.

My hunger is so strong I have to grind my teeth together to prevent myself from roaring and summoning my fangs and murdering everything moving on this filthy fucking bus.
 

The bus grinds through knotted traffic. I’m sitting near the back, on a metal seat. A farmer’s seated next to me. Talking. He tells me he lives outside the city, in a small village. Today is the day he takes his limes and mangos to the vegetable market in the city. The journey takes six hours each way. The man’s skin is carved with deep lines and his teeth are rotting out. He lifts three half-full burlap sacks and shakes his head.

From this gesture I gather it was not a good day at market.

There’s a woman sitting on the bench front of me, clutching a large wooden birdcage on her lap. Her hair is matted grey-black. Sweat leaks down the back of her neck through accumulated grime. The cage is filled with a half dozen tiny green and yellow birds. The birds flutter madly inside the cage, squawking and chirping, crashing against one another, a blur of frenzied motion. The woman runs her hands over the cage and whispers something I can’t hear.

We pass street corners with garbage piled nearly two stories tall. Rivulets of foul water leak from the garbage piles. Decaying bodies are strewn among the garbage. Black carrion birds circle the sky, cawing and feasting. Down another road a teeming mob is burning and looting and smashing its way through the streets.
 

There’s an odd sent in the night air.
 

Madness. Chaos. Death.

I clench my hands on my lap.

The bus stops. More desperate-looking Skins pile on, shoulders bent low with misery, carrying burlap sacks or half-broken wooden crates or twisted walking sticks. One has a goat tethered to a piece of rope. The goat resists coming onto the bus, thrashes against the man holding the rope. The man curses and swats the goat’s head. The Skins waiting to board behind him grow impatient, begin yelling and smacking at the goat’s rear.
 

The man tugs at the rope tied around the goat’s neck. The terrified goat bleats and its eyes bulge white and then the bus lurches forward with the man on the top step and the goat still outside on the street. The man stumbles, catches himself, curses. His arm is hanging out of the bus, the rope tied to his wrist, and the goat’s being pulled along outside, kicking and bleating in the dust.
 

The bus picks up speed. The goat stumbles, falls to the dirt and now it’s being dragged along the ground, bleating and mewling in senseless panic, the rope around its neck digging into its flesh and then the driver screams at the man and he takes a step down and someone shoves him. The man flies off the bus, lands on the goat with his left leg bent at an awkward angle and crumples to the ground, screeching and clutching at the white bit of bone protruding from his thigh.
 

The goat nips and bites at him. The man flings his arms up to shield his face and then they vanish as the bus rumbles on.
 

We cross a concrete bridge over a wide canal filled with grey-brown sewer sludge. Homes huddle along the canal. Tin roofed. Covered in sagging tarps. Children laugh and play on the sloping banks of the concrete canal. I watch them throw stones into the brackish sewer water, then the bus speeds down the other side of the bridge and the children and canal slums are gone.

There’s a coldness in me. An emptiness.
 

Something’s wrong.

Like I can’t feel the world.
 

My head’s pounding. I close my eyes, press my fingers to my temples. I can’t think. Can’t focus. The foul taste of ash burns my throat. My eyes water. I’m shivering.
 

Something’s very wrong.
 

O Lord of Blood what’s happening to me? Am I simply hungry? No. This is different. Worse. I feel…ill. Like I’m dying of some wretched Skin disease. I smack my forehead. Tell myself to stay focused. Find Javier the Broken. Find him to please my bloodmate. Soon Tamara and I will murder Collazo and rise together. That was her promise.
 

Find the Broken and make him kneel—

Fires burn in darkened alleys. Mobs dance around the fires, naked, a hundred half-mad Skins lifting their hands to the Blood Moon, chanting and dancing and fucking and murdering one another.
 

The Age of Discord.
 

The Skins are weak. They worship anything.
 

Even dusty old books.

I scoff, swallow the bile building in my throat and peer down the narrow alleys, searching for Javier the Broken. I don’t know how I’ll recognize him.

Only that I will.
 

There are Skins tied spread-eagled on dirt roads while their kind dances over them. The bus slows for traffic and I watch as a Skin man dressed in animal hides, with a rack of antlers strapped to his head, lifts a rusted machete over the neck of a woman pegged to the ground—
 

The farmer leans into me.
 

Presses his bare arm to mine.

Not aggressively. Almost tenderly.
 

Like…he’s pleading.
 

He wants something. They all do. I scent it.

I scowl and shift away from him.
 

He is pollution. Diseased.

The bus drives north, enters a neighborhood of concrete and stucco villas, then stops. Nicely dressed Skins pile out. The driver’s assistant, a child of maybe ten years old, bids them farewell with a laughing cackle. I peer through the grimy, mud and grease-smeared window and watch the nicely dressed people wander toward their homes. They will not live through the night. The Blood Moon is a red stain glowing through low, dark cloud. A group of men with thin arms and gleaming, too-long teeth glare at the bus through their cigarette smoke.
 

The farmer sitting beside me is asking me something, over and over, but I can’t hear through the pounding in my head.
 

The bus passes through a neighborhood of tin-roofed houses, then through sorghum and corn fields. The night is growing late. The road’s empty except for a few flitting shadows scurrying through garbage-strewn ditches.

The bus stops at odd places where a few passengers wait on the side of the road. It’s packed full, but still more bodies press inside. A hundred diseased bodies squeezed tight in the dust and heat. I shudder, take a steadying breath. Up ahead, near the driver, there’s a gang of young men harassing an older woman. Plucking at her hair. Pinching her cheeks. Calling her foul names.
 

The woman ignores them.
 

I scent the anger in these men.
 

Their rage requires a home. A resting place.
 

Tonight their anger will rest in this woman.

The farmer sitting beside me laughs, and the laugh becomes a hissing spit and when I look again he has the monstrous head of an axolotl shorn of flesh, his skeleton visible under tatters of skin and muscle. The reek of rot fills my nose. I startle and flinch away, lift my mirror amulet and try to summon the Night Smoke and when it doesn’t arrive the axolotl smirks and digs in his burlap sack.
 

The axolotl’s eyes are colorless and flat as he lifts a mango in his webbed hands and offers it to me.

I’m too stunned to answer.

Lord of Blood. Night Stalker. Place me on your reed mat—
 

The axolotl is a Stricken.
 

Black blooded prey. Like my bloodmate.

But why didn’t I scent him?
 

The axolotl shrugs and takes a bite of mango. Juice sprays onto me. I wipe my cheek with my sleeve while the gang of men at the front of the bus knock the older woman from her seat. She screams, then the bus hits a pothole and the passengers packed inside are thrown around and I can’t see the woman or the raging men anymore.

I try and sit very still and silent.
 

Perhaps if I don’t move no one will notice me.
 

Because I’m beginning to suspect—

The skinless axolotl slurps at the mango.
 

Quickly. Greedily.

The woman sitting in front of me opens the birdcage, snatches one of the tiny birds and stuffs it in her mouth. The bird squawks once as its frail bones crunch between the woman’s jaws and then there’s only the sound of her fangs grinding together. The sound echoes painfully in my ears.
 

Stricken.
 

The bus is packed with Stricken.

Sweat drips down my brow, along my neck, pools in the hollow between my collarbones. I remind myself who and what I am, then lift my hand to summon my claws.
 

I tire of this too-crowded bus. The emptiness in my belly.
 

Let the blood offerings begin.

I wait to feel the Lord of Near and Nigh raging through me.
 

Nothing happens.
 

He’s gone.

A choked wail escapes my lips.
 

A few passenger turn and stare.
 

Oh Lord of Blood forgive this waste. Take me in your arms…

The axolotl Stricken sitting next to me grins, rubs his damp, webbed hand against my bare shoulder. Like he’s considering how I’ll taste—

 
I fling him aside, try once more to summon my fangs—
 

Nothing happens.
 

The Night Stalker has abandoned me.
 

I’m only me. Rodas of nowhere and nothing.

Rodas the Weak. Rodas the Wretch.
 

I can’t breathe. The air in the bus is too hot, thick with the reek of black blood. The bus is moving quickly now, its engine whining in protest, a cloud of dust billowing beneath its tires as we careen north. The pavement has ended; we’re speeding along a dirt road, thudding over potholes, parched and barren fields whipping by.

I’m being taken somewhere.

I clutch my deer’s foot and mirror amulet and continue praying to the Night Lord. It must be this cursed bus. Something about being crammed tight in this machine has spooked my animal, and then a blind, terrified desire to escape grips me and I scream, grit my teeth and punch my fist through the filthy window. My fist crumples and my knucklebones snap and only then do I realize how truly weak I am.

Tamara.
 

The fucking treacherous cunt.

She sent me to this trap.

Conspired with the offering Carlos Collazo.

Lied, then laid with me. Again and again.
 

The window shatters. A rush of cool night air whips across my sweat-soaked skin. My hand’s trapped in a hole of sharp, broken glass. I drag it inside and the glass cuts deep into my thumb and then I’m bleeding, warm red blood spilling across my chest and down my arm.

The axolotl Stricken sniffs, leans down, flicks its long, purple-grey tongue across my arm. Every single Stricken pauses, scents the air, then turns to stare me down. A nightmare vision of misshapen animal faces: leering donkeys, skinless wolves, carrion birds, hissing snakes, rabid monkeys—
 

I leap from my seat, slam my fist into the axolotl’s slippery face, then jump over the woman with the birdcage, desperate to reach the door. The bus is still racing along the deserted road but I don’t care, I need to escape this wretched death trap, and the Stricken have me now and I’m screaming while their clawed and taloned hands grip my ankles and arms and shoulders. The Stricken pull me away from the door while they laugh and spit and snarl and hiss. My red blood sends them into a feeding frenzy; they begin snapping and biting at one another, consuming each other alive.

Fangs sink into my side and I dig my fingers into the eyes of a horrible monkey-creature and the thing shrieks and then a wolf-Stricken has my hand in its mouth, his fangs grinding into my bones. They’re tearing me apart, pulling my flesh away in bleeding mouthfuls, and why have you abandoned me, O Lord of Near and Nigh?
 

What have I done?

The axolotl seated beside me, the creature I mistook for a pathetic Skin farmer, is the only Stricken not mad with kill-lust. He sits calmly eyeing the mango in his hand while the Stricken turn on one another—
 

Then the axolotl stands and pulls me back into the seat beside him.

Calmly. Without fuss.