The All Encompassing: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

a badass he is?”
    And that was it. The murdered prostitute got about an hour of investigative time.
    The biker meathead at the door is glaring at me. I admit I’m not dressed for the hood: I’m wearing moderately pricey platforms and a knee-length cream skirt and a white sweater under the usual Northwest Coast Gore-Tex rain jacket. My fancy outfit.  
    Anger rushes through me as I think about Connor standing me up at the Fairmont, then having me meet him at this shithole.  
    Fuck him. Now I wish I’d stuck to jeans. Serves me right for dressing up for a dude.
    I look down the street. There’s a working girl pacing back and forth, knobby knees, unsteady, checking out the cars rolling by. She meets my eye, and suddenly I’m cold. Icy cold and shivering because in that moment the working girl’s face…changes.  
    Into something from a nightmare.
    Her jaw elongates, then narrows into a fine, wickedly curving point that reaches nearly to her tits. It’s a stinger. Her eyes widen, then bulge and swell outward, swallowing the entire top half of her head. Her eyes are multi-planed and refractive. Like an insect’s. Her skin stretches back tight, then changes to pale yellow under the wan street light overhead. She doesn’t really have a mouth, but if she did I know she’d be smiling, and then there’s a hissing buzzing sound in my ears and the creature says to me, “What the fuck you looking at, bitch?”

     
     

C HAPTER T HREE
A NIK  

    I SLIP MY toes into the cold granite crack and twist, then look down past my feet into eight hundred feet of empty air. I’m halfway up Mt. Asgard, a magnificent granite spire looming over the glacier below like a stone sentinel.  
    The newcomers named this mountain after a Norse god. But we Inuit have our own gods, and our own names. Some have forgotten.  
    But I haven’t.  
    This mountain is Sivanitirutinguak. It guards the Auyuittuq Valley, in the Land that Never Melts.
    Maybe that was true once. But the land is changing. The melts come earlier every year. The bears roam further south, into the gravel roads and pit mines and tar sands of the newcomers, and when they linger outside the newcomer’s camps for too long they’re shot.  
    I press my forehead into the cool granite and close my eyes. My mother named me Anik. My father gave me Ujurak. A name is a door through which believers access the spirit realm. My surname means ‘stone’.  
    My father named me well.  
    It’s a crystal clear morning. Seqinek the sun casts her cool yellow light against a blazing blue sky, and descending beneath a rocky ridge across the valley, Tatqim the moon is a ghostly silver blur. Icy wind whips around me, ruffles my hair and threadbare t-shirt, threatening to pull me from the wall. My numb hands are jammed in the same crack my feet are. The rock is damp and slippery. This aspect of the wall is north facing. I’ll remain in shadow for the entire day, gazing out at Seqinek shining on the glacier beneath me, wishing I could feel her warmth.  
    I’m cold, but not as cold as a man should be in these conditions. When I was four I wandered into the tundra, searching for arctic hare to hunt. It was autumn. The first winter storm blew in, obscuring the way back to the hunting camp in snow up to my waist. I spent four days huddled in the snow while the storm raged over me, my knees tucked tight to my chest. When the storm cleared I walked for two days back to the hunting camp. My family was certain I returned as a ghost.  
    They were wrong. I’m not a ghost.  
    I’m worse.  
    I peer up at the rim of the mountain high overhead. Still a thousand feet to go. I’m not even a third of the way.  
    I bring my left foot out of the crack and re-set it, then press down, adding my weight gradually. It holds. I reach over my head with my left hand, place it in the crack, cup my fingers against the sides and pull. My hand holds for a second, then begins grinding out. If it slips from the crack