The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3) by May Ellis Daniels Read Free Book Online Page A

onto the side of the dirt track. The pit the cat was digging is only a few yards away.  
    I wipe my sweaty palm on my thigh and grip the rock tighter.
    The hole’s maybe four feet wide. The freshly dug dirt is cool and soft and silty under my bare feet. A warm wind picks up, whistles through the riverbed, collects dried leaves and tumbleweed into a brief whirlwind against the side of the ravine.  
    The leaves sound like old bones clicking together. Or a death rattle.  
    I’m close enough to peer into the hole when a loud, high-pitched screech descends down the ravine from the rim above. I turn and look.  
    My blood freezes.
    I’m fucked.
    There, perched on the edge of the ravine, backlit by the crimson moon, her long, knotted hair glowing blood red, is a tall, bone-thin old woman with bright blue eyes. She’s on her knees, waving her fists, shrieking down at me, and the sound is so awful and tortured it makes my mouth go dry.  
    The hag lifts her hands into the night sky like she’s calling something down. Her fingers are twice as long as normal and end in vicious curling claws.
    My wolf’s not with me. I’m alone. With that…thing.
    I understand why he fled. This is her territory.  
    Her power’s strongest here. She sent him running.  
    I risk a glance into the pit.
    The old hag howls, scoops up a handful of sand and stones and showers it down on me. Then she leaps to her feet and sprints along the edge of the ravine, screeching and howling and snarling. Running forward and back. Her movements wild and frantic. Flinging anything she can get her hands on. She’s furious. I’ve interrupted a sacred ceremony. Something…ancient and evil.  
    There’s a half-buried body in the pit.  
    A child’s body.  
    The rock slips from my grasp.  
    Lands in the dirt at my feet, forgotten.  
    The hag is a Skinwalker.  
    Another legend I never believed in.  
    An Indian shaman-witch.  
    Once she was a Pureblood like me. But she committed a horrific crime, and now she’s cursed to hunt and murder the innocent for all eternity.  
    The Skinwalker’s vicious, maddened wailing continues, and the sound brings out an unusual sensation in me: raw, pant-shitting panic, and then I’m fleeing, sprinting down the narrow track as fast as I can, past the child’s grave and toward the pioneer cabin, through the shadowy aspen grove as rocks shower down and the Skinwalker follows along the rim snarling and wailing.  
    I reach the cabin door. My heart skips a beat.  
    It’s secured with a heavy iron chain and padlock.
    There’s no time to worry over what might be inside.  
    Fucking plenty to worry about out here .  
    I slam my shoulder into the door.  
    It cracks but holds.  
    More rocks come down, smashing through the cabin’s rotten wood roof. I risk a glance back. The Skinwalker’s still on top of the ravine, waving her arms and spinning and screaming and shrieking, her blue eyes bright with hatred. She’s kicking up a dust-storm, crashing through scrub juniper and sagebrush, sending small avalanches of dirt and sand down the steep ravine.  
    I’ve violated a sacred rite by witnessing her child’s corpse unearthed.
    She’s after my beating heart.  
    I smash the door again.  
    It gives a little more, and then the screeching stops and silence descends on the ravine.  
    Frantic, I search the rim.  
    The trees.  
    The track.  
    Nothing.  
    She’s vanished.  
    I work on snapping the rusted padlock. Dig my fingernails under the rotten porch wood and pry a board loose, then wedge it behind the chain and try to lever the lock open. The fucking thing holds until the brittle, sun-bleached wood snaps in my hands.  
    I’m breathing hard now, gasping, and I hate this feeling of weakness, of fear, of losing control. Anger thick as bile rises in my throat. Someone’s having a good fucking laugh at old Aaron Arud, that’s for sure.
    A horrible strangling sound makes me whirl. The Skinwalker’s leaning over the pit