The All Encompassing: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 1) (27 page)

The snake trembles again, then lays still, and suddenly Mia’s lying beneath me in human form. My arm’s wrapped around her head and my clawed hand is squeezing her neck and it takes me a moment to realize I’ve broken her.

She’s submitted.
 

I release Mia, plop backward on to my ass, lean over and retch. The world’s spinning and the venom’s making me feel like a quivering mass of jelly but I don’t think it’s enough to kill me.
 

“Why’d you stop, tough guy?” Mia says, sitting up, rubbing her bruised neck and smiling. “That was just beginning to feel good.”
 

She’s naked, covered in dirt and muck and blood, her purple-streaked hair a ratty mess, and fuck me if my cock doesn’t swell at the sight of her.

Mia flicks her snake tongue out, sniffing the air, then parts her legs just enough to give me a glimpse of her pink cunt.

A needful growl looses in my throat.
 

“Yeah, I get that,” Mia says quietly. “I get what my alpha needs. And he can take it anytime.”
 

Then she stands, bends over, looks me right in the eye and smacks me across the cheek hard enough to set my ears ringing.

“That’s for interrupting my meal, asshole,” she says, turning to face the rest of the crew.
 

They’re looking at her with undisguised desire. Nash is pacing and muttering and glaring at Mia. Sorry’s jowls are thickening. Lonny’s licking his lips.
 

Fucking animals.
 

I stagger to my feet, drag Mia behind me and stare them down. Nash gnaws at his hand. Lonny’s fool enough to bare his gleaming panther fangs in my direction.

“C’mon then, kitten,” I say, but in truth I wonder if I could best him. Mia’s snake poison’s still burning in me: I’m lightheaded, dizzy, my limbs like lead.
 

Then Sorry, my sandy-haired kid brother, clamps his huge hand down on Lonny’s neck. Lonny snarls and tries to squirm away, but Sorry holds him tight, forces his head down an inch or two so Lonny has to look up to meet me in the eye.
 

There’s a long, heavy silence.
 

Lonny lowers his eyes. Sorry lets him go.

We’re not playing with any human MC loyalty or code bullshit now. We’re animals. There’s only strength and weakness. Life and death.
 

I like it this way. It’s simpler. More pure.
 

I rule this pack because I say I do. Because I’m the fucking strongest.
 

Maybe I forgot that, living among the Skins for so long. Maybe I forgot how much hierarchy matters. Maybe my pack did as well.
 

I wonder who it’ll be. The pack member that tests me first. I wonder which loved one I’ll have to murder to remind the others why I lead.
 

Its easy to lose touch with what you really are when you’re swimming in the madness the Skins have created. Trying to keep your head above water in a world of half-truths, where nothing is ever what it seems. A world where bean-counters and bureaucrats rule. Cowards in expensive suits.
 

The world of men.
 

But I know what I am. A hunter. A killer. An alpha. My Pureblood MC is my family. But the lure of alpha is strong, and I know every one of them, Mia included, wants what I have.
 

The power to say kneel.
 

“Get on your fucking knees,” I snarl to my pack.
 

Every single one of them, Mia included, drops to their knees.
 

“I want to see you,” I say. “I want to see the animals you are.”

My pack begins to change. There’s the hyena in Nash, the snake in Mia, the panther in Lonny, the wolf in Sorry and me. They’re beneath me. But they’re also holding me up. Watching my back. We’re stronger like this. United as a pack ruled by a single leader.
 

Ruled by me.
 

And every one of them knows it.

“Get up,” I command, and they do, and then the blur in my vision solidifies into black, and the pain of my head hitting the ground feels far away.

T
HE
GIRL
’
S
IN
her early teens. She’s lying face-down in a patch of weed-choked sand beside a shipping yard, ten feet from the Pacific ocean. She’s soaked. Could be from the rain, could be from the ocean.
 

“Could’ve been blunt force. Could’ve been drowned. Hell, could’ve been straightforward exposure. It was damn cold last night. Won’t know until the coroner gets a boo at her.” Detective Al Kusch leans over the girl’s body and tilts her head, his blue latex gloves strange against the dullness of her weed-choked hair and lifeless grey skin.
 

I draw a quick breath when I see the girl’s face.

Kusch’s partner, Detective Sandra Bernard, casts me a glance that says she knows I’m new at this but can I try not to make it so obvious?
 

Bernard’s like that: hard as hell. But it’s Kusch that grates on me. I dunno. Something in how he handles the bodies we find. Especially the girls. Like they’re nothing.
 

The girl’s eyes have been burned out.
 

Not dug out. Burned. The flesh around her eye sockets is seared black.
 

“Huh,” Kusch says, dropping the girl’s head into the sand.

“It’s like the other one,” I say. “The one we found beside the dumpster?”

“Maybe,” Bernard says, moving aside for one of the forensics crew to snap a few photos. “Too early to tell.”

Kusch looks at his partner with a flash of impatience. “Two is coincidence. Three…well, three is a pattern.”

“
Might
be a pattern,” Bernard corrects. “And we don’t have three.”
 

Kusch shrugs in a way that lets us know he thinks its only a matter of time.
 

“We have an ID?” I ask.

No one answers. I was an hour late arriving on scene. I look like a girl who’s been shot at, fucked, and had a bird of prey nearly eat her alive in twenty four hours. In other words I look not bad for a rookie homicide detective.
 

Bernard leans down beside the girl and motions me over. Detective Sandra Bernard is a smallish, lean-boned woman with close-cropped hair and a thing for Seahawks bomber jackets. Now Bernard points to the girl’s clothes, unripped and intact, shrugs and says, “No signs of sexual assault,” then lifts the girl’s arm.
 

The girl’s wearing about a dozen bracelets. Some handmaid from beads and leather, some cheap knock-off silver, some plastic pink and baby-blue like the raver kids wear.
 

“What do you think of these?” Bernard asks me.

I study the bracelets. “Could be she frequents one of those do-it-yourself bead shops. Could be they were gifts.”
 

Bernard stands, surveys the scene. “Tell me about it,” she says to me. “Tell me about the last five minutes of her life.”

I study the ground around the body. “She wasn’t running from land toward the water. There’s no footprints in the mud behind us. And why run to the water if someone’s chasing you? It’s a dead end.”

“Unless there’s help there. A boat, maybe,” Bernard says.

“No,” I say, walking around the body toward the ocean. “Look. She crawled out of the water. The killer chased her down.” I take a few steps. “He caught her here,” I say, pointing to the first sign of struggle in the sand. “She fought him off, kept crawling. He chased her. Beat her down where she is now.”

Bernard nods. “What about the eyes?”

“We need the coroner to tell us if she was alive when it happened.”

“What do you think?”

I pause, study the body. “I think she was. Alive.”

Bernard nods. “What’d he use?”

“Must’ve been something like a blowtorch,” I say, looking across a gravel pit to a working shipyard. “It’s risky, though. Those yards run all night. Would’ve been able to see the blowtorch from a long way off.”

“Wouldn’t take long,” Kusch says. “A minute, two at the most.”

“Then back into the boat and he’s gone,” Bernard says. “He’s enraged. Not thinking clearly. Doesn’t care about the men in the shipyard seeing him. Just wants her to suffer before she dies.”

“Maybe,” I say, studying the scuffed up sand. “But where are her eyes? He didn’t just burn them out. He
took
them, then burned her. She’s not tied up now, and there’s no signs of contusions on her wrists. Imagine her fighting, screaming. He’d have to hold her down with one hand and hold the knife with the other. Then the blowtorch.”

“Maybe she didn’t fight,” Kusch says. “Maybe there was a gun to her head.”

“Yeah, but even with a gun to her head she’d be screaming. It’s isolated here, but it’s not deserted.”
 

“So?” Bernard says, pressing me, seeing how my mind works to sift through what little evidence is available.
 

“I think he’d already mutilated her. On a boat. She escaped somehow, leapt into the water. She was already blind. He didn’t know she was gone right away. And when he did, he went out looking for her. Maybe in a smaller craft.”

“I think you’re right,” Bernard says quietly, reaching in her bomber jacket for her phone. “I think we better start checking ports and wharves along with anyone in the area.”

Something’s niggling at me. “What about her wrists?” I say. “If he did take her eyes out somewhere else, on a boat or not…she would’ve fought him. And if she was bound, her wrists would be torn wide open.”

“Drugged?” Kusch says.
 

“We’ll know after we get the lab results,” Bernard says. Then she turns to me. “But you’re right. It’s odd. She’s beaten. Brutally. Violently. That makes sense for a rage-filled killer. But the wounds on her eyes…there’s a precision there. Even in the burns. Whoever did this to her was careful not to damage her face. That takes a tremendous amount of focus and detachment. It takes…a strong sense of purpose. She meant something to him.”

“Two perps,” I say. “One took her eyes, and another one, maybe connected maybe not, beat her to death here.”

Bernard nods. “Could be.”

A ship’s horn sounds across the water. The area around us is cordoned off. Uni’s are waving a few snoopy citizens away.

Detective Bernard’s phone rings. She answers it and I wander down to the shore, nearly dipping my toes in the lapping water, thinking of Star, the golden eagle, swooping above Lake Washington.
 

Above all this insanity.
 

Bernard comes and stands beside me. “It’s a pretty day,” she says. “That’s the weird thing about this job. You think every time you find a body it’s going to be in some creepy hellhole. Like in the movies. But death doesn’t care. He’ll drop a body in Pike’s Market at noon on a Tuesday if it suits him.”

There’re several cargo ships moored in the bay. “Those ships,” I say. “International, right? Not in our jurisdiction?”

Bernard shakes her head. “Federal.”

“Pimps collect girls from downtown, load them up and send them to the ships. Y’know, to service the sailors while they’re in port?”

“A guy gets lonely after a month at sea,” Bernard says. Then she looks right at me. “How’d you know about that? The shipping prostitution rings?”

I startle a little bit. Enough to draw attention. “I…read about it. Years ago.”

“Huh,” Bernard says. “Tell you what. You want your detective badge? Best stop bullshitting me.”

I clasp my hands in front of my waist and stare across the ocean. “I spent four years living on the street.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I know. But that’s strange, isn’t it? Because I also know you have friends in very high places, Officer Thompson. All right. We all need friends. Men like August Lerrick will get your foot in the door. But he won’t keep you inside. That’s up to me. And I don’t give a fuck how many rich businessmen you know. You show up late to a body again, you’re gone.” She brushes a hand across my head, above the bruise, then asks very quietly, “How’d you get that?”

“Great sex,” I say, pulling away.

“Yeah. I can see how this is. You and me…we’re either gunna love or hate. Am I right? And I don’t have to say which way I’m leaning. Go home, Thompson. Get cleaned up. Then get to the station, pick a uni or two and hit the docks with that girl’s photo. And for the love of all shit please crop her eyes out before you start waving her picture all over town.”

Bernard turns and yells, “Hey Kuschy! Your lucky day. Gangland shooting in an equipment yard near Renton. Roberts sounded real worked up. Multiple MC, local gangbangers, Sin. Probably retribution for that hit at the Wild’s. A fucking potpourri of dead douchebags.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Detective Kusch says. “Not worth my time. Or the good citizens of Seattle’s hard earned tax dollars.”

“Gangland?” I ask, without quite meaning to.

“Yeah,” Bernard says, turning her sharp, cool eyes on me again. “That mean something?”

“No…it’s just…nothing. You’re right. I need some rest.”

Detective Bernard nods again, and suddenly I’m convinced I left evidence that will link me to the shooting at the Wilds last night. A piece of ID fell from my purse. Or a street camera caught me and Trish going in or out. I think about Aaron, the Predators MC Prez. Spending a few minutes playing pool in a biker bar doesn’t make you a criminal. But withholding information about a mass shooting does, and then I begin to wonder whose side I’m on.

I shake my head and glance at the dead girl. My day hasn’t exactly been roses, but it’s been a long way better than hers.