The All Encompassing: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 1) (42 page)

“Whose home is this?” I ask, remembering the concrete walls of my cell beneath the temple.

“One of Carlos’ villas.”

“Is he here?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Why?”

I decide not to answer. Let her wonder.
 

After a while I ask, “Who is the first offering?”

“Depends,” Tamara says without turning to look at me. “Do you want to start small and work your way up, or do you want to begin with a bang?”

“With a bang?”

“With the most impressive kill.”

“Yes. The most impressive.”

“Yay. Me too. Now get some rest, Night Lord,” Tamara says, stroking my cheek. “This week we assassinate the Mexican President.”

“The President?”

“Yes.”

“He is important?”

Tamara sighs. “Yes.”
 

“The One I Am Slave To will be pleased.”

“I thought so.”
 

I lie staring at the ceiling, anticipating the future kill and wondering why Tamara insists on calling me the name of the one I worship. Suddenly an urge strikes me, so strong it will not be denied. I put my hand on Tamara’s shoulder and say, “I need to taste you.”

Tamara lifts her head from the pillow. “Again?”

“Not that. Or maybe that, too. But after. Right now I need…to feed from you. It’s been—”

“Four days.”

“I’m very hungry. My injuries. The healing. I’ll never sleep. I’ll be forced to—”

“Roam the streets of Mexico City preying on my kind. Yes. We can’t have that. Not now, with so much at stake.”
 

Tamara turns on her back, pulls the silk sheet down to expose her soft white neck and says, “Go ahead, killer. I release myself to you. Drink from your loving bloodmate.”

W
E
LIE
TOGETHER
for a long while, just holding one another, and I realize my mind isn’t racing with hunger or hatred or plotting my MC’s next move. My animal isn’t pacing in his cage, driving me crazy with his need to roam free.
 

I feel…calm.
 

More than calm. It’s such a strange sensation I’m not even sure what it’s called.
 

But just…quiet.
 

Like when I’m gliding alone in the woods in the blueish half-light before dark and my animal’s fed and there’s only the cedar trees and moss and the first few stars waking overhead. The air crisp and fresh and heavy with scent. Times like that I feel…wholly alive, I guess, and if Sparkles can make me feel this way…but I stop the thought short, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life it’s not to get too attached.
 

To anyone or anything.
 

The world’s a cruel motherfucker, and the moment you open your heart to something—bam!—it gets snatched away, and you’re left with an emptiness bigger than you thought you had room for.

I’m propped up against the tub. Sparkles is resting her head against my chest. She’s breathing real slow and mellow. I start thinking about her tight cunt wrapped around my cock. How perfect she felt. And squeezing her slender neck in my hands, feeling her blood throbbing through her carotid artery. My claws dropping, scratching into her skin as I came. She was riding a knife-edge and didn’t even know it.
 

Sex often carries my wolf beyond all control.
 

There’ve been accidents.
 

But this time my wolf was quiet. I didn’t lose control, at least not more than I wanted to. And now I’m thinking maybe…maybe…because there’s a part of me that’s been lonely for so long it’s all I can remember.
 

What would it feel like to have a true bloodmate? Someone who’s got my back? Someone who understands?

A lone wolf.
 

Yeah. I’ve been called that, even by my packmates. “You need to let us in, Aaron,” Mia likes to say. And I guess she’s right. Because you know what? There’s nothing cool about being a lone wolf. Wolves are pack animals. You see a wolf roaming alone, you can bet your ass he fucked up. Got banned from his pack. From what makes him whole.
 

I run my fingers across the bite mark at the base of Lily’s neck. The skin is raw and warm and slightly swollen, and there’s a tiny trickle of carmine blood trailing down. I marked her without realizing what I was doing. Just leaned the fuck down and did it because it felt right. Acted on instinct. I’m not going to worry and fret over it. We won’t be bloodmates until she marks me in return, which she can’t do because she’s only a Skin.
 

So that’s that.

But my pack…they’ll scent my mark on her. And they’ll know shit’s going down with their alpha, and that instability might be enough to draw a challenge—

Damn. That feeling of calm. So fleeting. It almost never gives you time to appreciate it before it’s gone.
 

Sparkles is looking off into the steam cloud swirling around the bathroom. I run my fingers over her shoulder, up her neck to her cheek. Then a curious urge strikes me, and she doesn’t see me when I bring my bloodied fingers to my lips and taste her. I thought I tasted something odd in her blood when I marked her, but it must’ve just been the sex and release from all the pent-up bullshit that’s been building in me.
 

The Skins say you can tell a lot about a woman by what she carries in her purse. But you can tell more by how her blood tastes.
 

Tracing my bloody finger across my tongue, I can tell this Sparkles girl has a poor diet. Refined carbs and sugar and additives of every kind. Typical junk food, made cheap to eat fast. She’s taking some drug, something refined, probably abusing prescription meds…and she had a more serious drug problem in the past. Doesn’t sleep much. Stressed to all hell. She’s fertile, but not in cycle right now. And she’s already born a child.
 

Then I freeze.

Like her unique scent, there’s something madly attractive in the Skin girl’s blood-taste. She tastes old…ancient, even…but somehow recent at the same time. Like something reborn, if you go in for that kind of Skin religion bullshit.

I lean back and close my eyes. Just a fucked up few days is all. Making me imagine weird shit.
 

Something shifts in the blackness behind my eyes. Gathers into a shape. Then several shapes, and suddenly I’m…
seeing
something. I feel myself slide out of my body, and then there’s a vast, rolling plain stretching out to the horizon. Black-bellied storm clouds spit orange and red lightning into the plain’s tinder-dry grass. I’m in my animal, uncollared and free, running, leaping, snarling, and I’m surrounded by my kind…thousands of them…an army…and we’re charging over the burning plain, over a knoll, and when we crest I look down and see them, the enemy, another animal army, spread out below, and their black-blooded scent rises to my nose and makes me howl in fury and bloodlust because these enemies were once my packmates and this is the One War—

My head jerks to the side and my eyes snap open. I blink, trying to remember where I am—

The Skin girl. Her blood.
 

My wolf paces in his cage and suddenly I want to hurt her. Not just hurt. Kill. I want to open her throat and drown in her powerful red blood. My animal howls for a feed, which is fucking strange, because she’s a Skin, and no Pureblood has ever fed off Skin’s—

I give my head a shake and hug Sparkles close. She shifts in my arms, traces her fingernails across the tats on my chest. She like ‘em. The tats of mythological creatures. They make her think of faraway lands in a faraway time. Make her feel nostalgic for a past that never even existed. She’s on the run, I know. Wondering how the life she imagined for herself and the life she has could be so different.

The One War? A fucking myth like all the rest.
 

My kind has our own stories. Our own dreams.
 

I growl quietly, lean down and rest my face in Lily’s damp hair. I’m into her fucking hair. In fact come to think of it I’m into
all
of her. She’s built like a
woman
, with actual hips and skin that’s soft and inviting and welcoming in all the right place. Plump breasts and a nice round ass perfect for laying into. A natural beauty, not some fucking TV ad-man’s idea of how a woman should look—like she hasn’t eaten in a month, her sharp little bones visible under pale skin, her eyes sunk deep in a spiky head.
 

Fuck that.
 

See…that’s what the Skin’s are doing to themselves. Trying to outrun natural law. Trying to forget the unforgettable fact that they die like everything else in the world. You see it in their homes, their food, even how they warp and mutilate themselves, trying to look like something from a computer program.
 

Something that doesn’t die.
 

Glossy. Fake. Unreal.
 

Sparkles feels strong in my arms. Capable of fending for herself. Capable of raising a pack of stubborn, unruly wolf whelps. My cock stirs at the thought of laying more seed into her, watching her belly swell with my bloodline, and I gotta say that’s a new one, the thought of raising a brood.
 

I close my eyes and smile.
 

So much can change in a day or two.

Sparkles moans quietly, strokes her hand along my cock and sighs.

Still. That odd taste in her blood. Strange yet familiar. Almost…fuck it. My head’s all fried. Making something of nothing. But it’d be real easy to snap her fucking neck, rip out her heart—

“Hey,” Sparkles says. “You there?”

Her voice brings me back to the moment. “Yeah. I’m here.”

“Your heartbeat,” she says quietly. “It’s so loud in your chest. Boom boom boom. And fast. Thought you’d be relaxed. You all right?”

“I’m all good.”

She’s quiet for a moment, then says, “I have to go back. I can’t stay here.”

“That a problem?”

She lifts her head and looks in my eyes. She’s off guard, vulnerable, but also a tad irritated. “It might be. That a problem for you?”

I guess I could say yes. I guess I could say I want her to stay. But instead I keep quiet, and her face falls a little and she leans back against my chest. “That’s good,” she says, her voice rough. “I’m glad we’re clear about what this is.”
 

She’s rubbing my cock again. Damn. I’m stiffening for her.
 

I love how her hands feel on me.

“There something you want to ask me?” she says.

I shake my head no.

“About my past? About my life now? Do I have a boyfriend?”

“You have a child?”

She tenses beneath me, then says, “How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“I have a son.”

“How old?”

“Nine. His birthday’s in a few weeks.”

“He wasn’t at your apartment. Didn’t look like the home of a little boy. He live with you?”

“No,” she whispers. “I gave him up. For adoption.”
 

“You regret that.”

“It was the right decision.”

“Doesn’t mean you don’t regret it. A decision can be right and still feel like shit. They usually do.”

“Yeah, I regret it. I think about him all the time. Little things. What does he like to eat? What’s his favorite toy? How does he act when he’s sleepy?”

“You see the father?”

She draws the kind of quick breath a person draws when they’re in old, familiar pain and trying to struggle through it, just holding on waiting for it to pass.

“I don’t know him. I never…knew him.”

I listen to the hot water still running in the shower behind us, then say, “But you carried that boy. Gave birth to him.”

“I just thought…y’know? That it wasn’t the baby’s fault. What his father did.”

“That takes a lot of courage,” I tell her, and I mean it. “A lot of strength.”

She scoffs. “Courage would’ve been keeping him. Raising him.”

The guilt’s feeding on her, a black worm digging into her spirit. “We do the best we can.”

After a while she says, “What about you, Mr. Outlaw? You have any secrets?”

“Nah. I’m an open book.”

“Sure. A biker with no secrets. That must be nice,” she says, clearly not believing a word of it. “That must be really fucking nice.”

I think about what it would mean if it were true. No secrets. No wolf. No Stricken. The life of a Skin. A regular biker outlaw.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Sparkles says, sitting up and pulling me onto her. “You’re going to give me that magnificent cock one more time. You’re going to take me on that ride you promised. Then you’re going to take me back to the city.”

“That what you want?”

Sparkles smiles as my weight settles onto her. “Yeah. That’s what I want.”
 

T
HE
SECOND
TIME
we fuck is a slow burn, longer but no less intense, and when we come together I clamp my legs around Aaron’s waist and pull him tight, wanting every last drop of him. I’ve never experienced this desire before. It’s more than lust. More than love. It’s a force, unstoppable, devastating. Yet also serene. Soothing. Like the quiet moments after a storm, when the air hums with energy and you give thanks to whatever power you believe in that you’ve made it through. That’s how being with Aaron makes me feel.
 

Like I’ve made it through to some unknown future.

When he slips from me I give him a smile, hop in the shower and finish washing. When I step out of the shower I’m alone. I slide into a pair of jeans and a navy-blue men’s t-shirt I find waiting on a shelf by the sink. The jeans fit tighter than I’d normally wear them, but I figure since I’m a biker bitch now that makes sense. I wonder if I should streak my hair. Get a piercing or two. Cultivate a fuck-you attitude.