Chapter 24 Shadow
Chapter Twenty-Four
Shadow
I see Luna look up at the sound of the panel sliding closed. She’s hiked her jeans back up, but the zipper is still down.
Bending nearly double so my head does not hit the hidden tunnel’s ceiling, I move to lie next to her again.
“You deserve your name, Shadow. But please, can I have a heads up next time before you flit away?” The poor honey’s voice is reedy and thin. I can see that it takes effort to move her lips when she speaks.
“Heh, sure thing, darlin’.” The sound of a bottle cap twisting off sounds loud as it echoes off the back of the wood panels “Here, drink this.”
Pushing the bottle neck away from her mouth by turning her head, Luna struggles to sit. I prop up her shoulders with my arm.
As anemic as she is, Luna is only concerned for me. “Is your back healed? Damn, but I’m all floppy now. My hand keeps falling back down when I try to take the bottle.”
“I’m good as new, thanks to you.” I feel like twice the creature I was before.
There is something about Luna that invigorates me in a very special way.
I could get used to being with her forever—a sure sign that she is destined to be my queen.
“I won’t have to feed on you again once you get the brew going… not unless you want me to.”
Luna takes a sip of the dark brown liquid I am holding up to her lips and almost does a spit take. I think she was expecting cola.
“What the fuck! What is this? The liquid tastes like blood soup mixed with salty barbecue, or something. It is the craziest taste ever. I think they call it umami?”
“Swallow it.” My voice becomes an authoritative growl. “Tempest drank it all the time, and she did the research.”
Slowly, Luna manages to drink the entire bottle until it is empty. The savory umami smell spreads over the cubby.
“Please tell me what the ingredients are before I worry myself half to death. No wait, I might be there right now.” Luna hasn’t lost her sense of humor. I love that about her.
“See?” I feel the need to make a point. “You feel better already. You are cracking jokes again.”
I watch Luna gathering her strength in order to blast me. No amount of blood loss would make her docile. Time for me to quit my teasing.
“Chill, babe. It is something called Bovril. It’s beef extract fortified with brewer’s yeast. Tempest ordered bottles of the stuff from an elite import store before she started brewing for us. I always figured it was one of the ingredients until I saw her drinking it herself one day.”
Luna relaxes. “I’ve actually heard of Bovril. Callie—the woman I share my art studio with—dated a British man last year. He was addicted to the stuff. Put it on toast, drank it in hot water. I think he would have married Bovril if it were possible.”
Her gentle touch on my skin feels so good. Fuck, somehow this woman is able to keep me in a permanent state of arousal.
“I’m about to go to sleep, Shadow.” Luna’s sweet whisper makes the blood flow faster in my veins. “But please tell me how you got those tattoos. I thought you were invulnerable, so it confused me at first. But the shotgun blast has changed my opinion somewhat.”
Settling back, I cradle her head on my chest as I explain.
“Human and animal attacks, we can repel, but mechanized ones, not so much. I think it has a lot to do with blunt force and velocity, but these are strange concepts for me to grasp with my primitive brain.”
“Tempest wrote some of your history down for me,” Luna mumbles as the healing sleep begins to engulf her.
“Yep, we would talk about it from time to time. She always wanted to know how my brother, Heikkinen, was able to stab the Blood Queen. His puukko was crafted from iron that fell from the warriors’ feasting hall in the sky.
Very sharp and hard enough to slice through stone.
When I realized the Riders would need tatts to blend in, we used heaven-sent rock shards to prick the ink into the skin. ”
“M-meteor rock…” Luna murmurs.
Like any ordinary mortal, I am proud of my ink adornments. Getting up, I move around in a circle to show them off.
“This one here, it’s a vial of blood. Ironic, yeah, because we prefer fresh fluids.
This one here says sanguis spurcus, Latin.
Tempest translated it for me, because the Latin language came after my tribal life.
It means ‘tainted blood.’ That is how my people have always described those children born within the circle of close relatives. ”
Turning to show my other side, I explain more.
“Breeding within the family circle—we’re talkin’ aunts, uncles, niece, nephew, and cousins, too, not just brothers and sisters or daughters and sons—was strictly forbidden in most villages.
Even without all that science, it doesn’t take a genius to know a village will rot from within if new blood isn’t introduced from outside the palisade. ”
Tapping the small round mark on my left bicep, I flex to make it more prominent.
“This is blurred because it is a tattoo from my other life. Do you want me to get the flashlight so you can see it better? It’s our shaman standing on a sleigh holding a drum and a reindeer horn to beat it with.”
Grabbing my jeans and socks off the floor, I sit on the edge of the cot bed as I pull them on.
“Ask me anything about my life, Luna, and I will tell you. But first I need to know… do you still feel uneasy about my possessive instincts towards you?”
Before I left the white house on the hill, I wrote down a marriage promise and put it under Luna’s pillow. She can be in no doubt now about my feelings towards her, so I am just going to say it out loud.
“Because I want you to be my queen.”
When she doesn’t answer, I have to smile to myself, as the soft purring breath tells me that Luna is asleep.
My big speech was all for nothing. After touching her peachy cheek with the back of my hand and then sliding one finger under her nostrils to check the strength of her breathing, I leave the hidden room.
Hoisting up the trapdoor in the middle of the distillery floor, I use the tunnel passage to snake through to the clubhouse. The Riders are in a good mood. Soon we will have bottles and bottles of fluids to suck down anytime we feel like it.
When word gets out to Ifan and Konner, they will definitely make a pass.
And so will Wulf. He will have to. He fucking loves the fluids almost as much as he loves killing folks.
Theron looks up as I enter.
“You good?”
Nodding, I move over to the pool table and start ripping off the stained felt. Can’t have any visitors checking out our bloodstained rec gear.
“You could have laid me on the floor, y’all.
” I am mildly annoyed at their relaxed attitude to the bloody pool table and even more pissed about all the delicious fluids the shotgun blast leaked out of me.
“Betty Farmer has six fucking kids last time I counted. And it never crossed your mind that Mickey Farmer might come looking for his father?”
Artim is lolling in the corner sharpening his reindeer horn handled puukko.
“Dude wouldn’t fucking dare. He’s as shrewd as he can hold together. Mickey knows the score.”
I’m distracted as I think about what went down while I lay behind the panels in the secret room. When the coven is disconnected from each other like that, it makes it harder for us to communicate. I believe it has something to do with being underground.
“What did you do with Jake?”
Jaecar answers when the others can’t be bothered.
“Drowning. It’s not as if we could drink his blood.” A few of the Riders sneer with disgust. The thought of being so intimate with a man makes our hackles rise.
“Threw his weapon next to the body so that it will look as if he tried to blow his brains out first. They’ll find the body near the shore closest to the clubhouse. We need to be able to deny he came here without raising suspicion about the proximity of the gun blast.” Rundas has our story straight.
Sticking my head out of the door, I stare at the moon to see what time it is. I have been using the moon as a clock for thousands of years. I have seen it rise and fall for countless seasons. I always count the seasons and not the seconds, because they last longer.
“Reckon I’ll ride out later to give my condolences to Mickey. No good for us to keep lurking here waiting for them to come to us again.”
Beckoning Rundas, I gesture for him to stand across from me at the pool table. On my signal, we bunch our hands into fists and bring them down hard in the middle of the wrecked table.
A sharp crack tells me the thick wood has splintered.
“One more should do it.”
Rundas is right. Second time, the table fractures.
“Fucking mess. Fucking unnecessary cleanup. We should have seen Jake Farmer coming from a mile away.” As club veep, Rundas feels free to say what’s on his mind.
Stomping on the jagged wood frame, I have to bite back my growl.
“That’s my bad. But let us not lose focus. Only one person fed on Linda when she came to hand the keys over to Luna and spent the night at her family’s house. And only one person followed her back to Winnipeg and fed on her some more until she died.”
“Yep,” Artim agrees. “Linda Farmer sure as shit didn’t leave here exsanguinated to the point of death, so he must have hunted her north.”
Breaking off one of the pool table legs, Theron snaps it in half again to vent his frustration and anger. “It is time we hunted the beast down! Who is going to respect our authority if we don’t draw the line?”
“I drew the line long ago, brother. But if we hadn’t held back long enough to listen to Tempest’s idea, we would have never had the recipe for alternate fluids.” I force my tone to sound optimistic.
The temperature in the clubhouse has almost reached boiling point.
We were all born to be men of action, warriors of war. It sets us on edge not to act on our fury. Artim begins to pace around the confined space, running his hand over the bar counter and knocking off random glasses and bottles that get in his way in a wanton act of destruction.
My only reaction to this is envy that he thought of doing it before me.
The fragile vessels roll and smash on the ground. We don’t care—it’s not as if the glass shards can hurt us.
“Once we have that sweet juice to drink, we have a shot at getting the inn back up and running again. We can get Landslide back on its feet. Invite more settlers to live here. Get them to breed.” Theron attempts to encourage the crew.
Artim explodes. “But not even that will work if Wulf Ifan’s son is still on the prowl! We know enough about the outside world by now to understand that Luna is right.”
I finish the sentence for him because I was the one who told the club. “If a tourist dies on Landslide, and if some fucking lowdown lawyer gets to hear about it, the crew’s at risk of being sued.”
That shuts us up for a beat. The Sons have always hated having to wrap our Arctic brains around such a modern concept.
“Let ‘em try,” Jaecar snarls. “I will slay every bloodsucking lawyer and the client as they come.”
“Heh, nice choice of words.” I try lightening everyone’s mood with a joke, but I’m not Luna so I have misjudged the black despair we are all feeling. “However, I don’t want to go to war with the modern world just yet. Our strength lies in anonymity.”
As president of the crew, my word is law. It has always been so, and not only because we needed a leader to unite us against the world. I was chosen to head the Midnight Riders as a way of honoring Heikkinen’s sacrifice. As his closest blood relative, I carry his legacy.
Without my brother, none of us would have escaped the Blood Queen’s deadly embrace.
Jaecar lifts his hand to show he wants to speak. Sighing, I stomp into the adjoining room and hold the door open for the others to pass through. “If we’re going to treat this like a meeting, we might as well go to church.”
The room contains a long wooden table with one chair at the head and three chairs on either side. Banging a reindeer horn hammer on the table, Jaecar calls the meeting to order. None of us write that well, and we don’t understand laptop keyboards, either, so we don’t take notes.
“When the woman awakes, her job is to start brewing. Are we all in agreement on that?” Jaecar makes a rune notch in the table to mark the topic of conversation.
They all look at me. For the first time in my life, I feel uncomfortable.
She’s not “the woman,” you ignorant fuckers. She is my queen, my bloody heart, my bonded soulmate!
Damn, but the jealous sensation of needing to possess Luna is nearly overwhelming me. I must not let my love for her jeopardize the rest of the crew. That might just be a one-way ticket to having my presidential power challenged.
I never knew it was so unbalanced to fall in love like this.
Part jealousy, part ecstasy, completely confusing, but it gives me a warm glow in my gut.
The sensation reminds me of how it used to feel when I was a small child, waking up on a feast day, with no chores to do and the scent of roasting meat in the air.
Somehow, I manage to unball my reflexed fists and close my mouth over my fangs, but it is an effort.
Every Rider raises his hand in the air. They look at me and wait.
“Fine.” The word bursts out from behind my teeth like a hiss. Ffffine. “But after we go offer our condolences to Mickey for the death of his sister, we rake this island with a fine-toothed comb for the half-breed. Wulf is close. I can feel it. And that worries me.”
With one slanting eyebrow lifted, Rundas asks, “Wouldn’t it be better for us to guard the woman?”
“Luna walks in sunshine, brother. We cannot. She will only be safe once Wulf is gone.”
The chair legs shriek as we push them back to stand.
“The dead must ride fast tonight. We have a lot of ground to cover. And go burn that fucking pool table right now.”