In the Arms of the Beast (Kings of Hell MC 5)

A third hand, black as tar, burst out of Shadow’s side, extending until the whole third arm was out. Beast forced down the nausea at the sight of the additional limb bulging from an otherwise healthy side, but Gray smiled and entwined his fingers with the shadow hand.

“I can test it with this one. But I can already sense that there are places in the tree where the veins are thicker,” Shadow said.

Vars frowned. “Really? Damn shame we didn’t wait for you that first time.”

Beast swallowed the passive-aggressive remark and approached the black trunk, which loomed in front of him, spreading its many arms and creating shadow with leaves like paper sheets covered in coal dust.

“Where? We might as well deal with it now. It’s not like we’re getting any more safeguards.” Beast rubbed his forehead when the chicken clucked from its cage as if commenting on what was happening around it.

Shadow approached and pointed at an irregularity in the bark without touching it. Upon his approach, the ground under Beast’s feet vibrated, as if the tree wanted to consume a chunk of its fellow shadow creature.

Shadow nodded and walked up to Gray, sliding into his embrace and placing both hands on Gray’s shoulders.

Beast was annoyed by the hugging, because the two lovebirds could have at least kept it to their time off, but then Shadow went limp in Gray’s arms, and his dark form drizzled into the grass. A few seconds later, the tall, faceless figure emerged from the ground right in front of Beast and took the container from his hand.

The smooth, expressionless face always gave Beast the creeps, even when he tried to reimagine it as a perv in a gimp suit. There were no eyes to watch him, no nose to smell him, yet he felt scrutinized until Vars offered Shadow an axe and the creature walked off.

Gray adjusted the limp body in his arms, struggling with its weight yet unwilling to ask for help. “Be careful.”

Beast watched the black figure kneel by the trunk, press the sharp end of the axe to the bark instead of swinging it, and then cut in.

Beast’s head throbbed with worry, but by the time he could again breathe, he saw there was no blood sap spraying all over Shadow, and where he’d cut a vein, Nick must have lodged the axe into a major artery.

Next to him, Gray kneeled to rest Shadow’s earthly shell in the grass, and Beast could see tension leave his body. “Good. Be vigilant until you come back to us.”

Vars hummed, looking at the dark tree top as if he were expecting the branches to pound them into a pulp. “Is the container deteriorating? Can you see smoke or sense a strange smell?”

Shadow shook his smooth black hair, and his buzzing, inhuman voice answered tonelessly. “Just of the tree.”

“Hey you! What are you doing here?” came from behind them so unexpectedly Beast didn’t know how to react.

Shadow melted his dark form against the shape of the tree, dropping the axe, and Beast turned his head so stiffly if felt as if there were rusty hinges in his neck.

A man in a trench coat approached them in fast strides. A large camera hung from his neck, and he held binoculars in one hand. Red-faced, at least sixty years old, and wearing camo pants, the chimera of Sherlock Holmes and a high school teacher remained a mystery to Beast even when he stood just a couple feet away from them.

“What?” Beast asked, frowning. Most people would have felt uneasy about meeting a single man his size in a hidden location, even more so when he was tattooed all over and had friends to back him up. But the stranger seemed unbothered by the biker vest or all the muscle on show.

“It’s not private property,” Vars said, but Beast was way more concerned with the old man seeing Shadow out of his body than anything else. He didn’t want to kill the guy over something so idiotic.

The stranger adjusted his thick glasses and pointed at the tree. “I ask you again. What is your reason for being here? Are you sacrificing that chicken to the devil?” He pointed at the damn cage. “Our local association for Biological Science has been watching this tree for weeks now. It’s a rare specimen, not a place for indecent acts!”

In the corner of his eye, Beast could see Shadow moving against the tree at the pace of a fly caught in a spider’s web. One would have to have known he was there to have spotted him.

Vars spread his arms. “Nothing indecent’s going on. We’re just admiring the tree.”

The man raised his camera and took a snap of them, causing Beast’s blood pressure go into overdrive and boil his brain. “Why is he laying like that then, huh?” He pointed to Shadow’s human vessel. “And I saw the axe too. Are you intending to hurt this miracle of nature? People like you have no care for the future of our planet!”