The All Consuming: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 4) by May Ellis Daniels Page B

 
    She’s wrong.
    My body dissolves into black smoke, reforms as a whirring razor-edged blade eight feet long. The blade spins across the room like a helicopter, slices the goat-Stricken in half so clean it takes a moment for his torso to part from his hips.
    The rat-faced Stricken, slick with their kin’s blood, release Luz’s arms.  
    Luz rolls to the side, ducking under my still-spinning Night Smoke blade while the two rat heads arc through the air—
    Shiori frees her animal.  
    A hideous clicking wasp with a foot-long black stinger.  
    I banish my Night Smoke and summon the Spotted Stalker while Luz grabs her spear and thrusts it through the face of a fanged monkey trying to crawl into the villa, then leaps to the side as a black snake uncoils and strikes. Its jaws snap closed inches from her neck.
    My rosette tattoos ripple and bulge and my bones break and reform and I crouch on all fours while my fangs drop and the world becomes scent and sound and raw uncaged animal instinct—  
    Then my sister is on me, her mandibles crushing into my shoulder while she tries to spin around to stab her poisoned stinger into my side. Blinding pain and the scent of my blood makes my eyes explode in red and orange fury. I rake my claws against my sister’s abdomen, find the soft flesh between her armored plates and work on plunging my hand into her insides—
    Luz shrieks there’s a tunnel and I want to tell her to flee, to save herself, but Shiori slams her forelegs into my side, piercing a lung. My breath gurgles and wheezes out of me. Shiori looses a keening wail that drills into my wildmind and for a moment I’m too stunned to move, my animal suddenly confused and uncertain. Shiori’s stinger grazes my thigh. The burning pain from her poison jolts me out of my trance and I run backward, carrying my sister with me.
    We slam into the villa’s stone wall. The wall shudders, then cracks and explodes outward. We land in a cobblestone courtyard, a blur of tooth and fang and stinger, rolling along the ground, snarling and hissing and screeching, covered in red blood and I feel my animal begin to tire, my sister’s too strong, too close to her animal, a Risen freed, and then Luz is running beside us, her spear raised—
    Shiori catches sight of Luz and tries to throw herself to the side, but I slip my claws into her belly, clamp my jaws on one of her forelegs and hold her firm. The metal-tipped spear point reflects in Shiori’s fractal eye, then there’s a crunching popping sound and wetness soaks my midsection and I scent my sister’s pain, her shock and surprise as Luz buries the spear through Shiori’s eye and deep into her head.
    Shiori goes rigid, then lashes out at Luz with her razor foreleg. Luz leaps back. Shiori’s leg opens a long horizontal wound directly across Luz’s thighs. Luz screams and I reach up and grip the metal-tipped spear and grind it into my sister’s head while she shrieks and wails.  
    I loose a mad blood-roar and flip Shiori onto her back.  
    She’s twitching and keening, desperate to throw me off.  
    My animal scents death. A feed.
    I hold the spear buried in Shiori’s eye while I clamp my leopard jaws around her neck. Sink my fangs into her throat. The wasp flails and red blood fills my mouth and I need this kill, this offering—
    “Wait!” Luz cries.  
    I growl and snarl and tense my jaws.  
    Shiori freezes. Her forelegs slip from my flank. Her body shifts.
    There’s a tiny, frail woman pinned under me. Her white summer dress wet with red blood. Her head pinned to the ground by the spear clenched tight in my clawed hand. My Night Hunter fang’s sunk deep in her throat. One twist of my head and my sister’s throat will open—  
    “Don’t murder her, Rodas. You’ve won. She’s submitted . You’re better than her. Reborn.”
    “Weakness,” Shiori says, her voice so frail I scarcely hear through the bloodlust pounding in my head. “Kill me, my proud brother. Offer me. I