Pretty Poison

Pretty Poison

By Kari Gregg

Copyright 2013 Kari Gregg

Cover by Lou Harper

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Whil
e reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Dedication

With heartfelt thanks and gratitude to stellar compadres who helped make my shifters shine: Susan Sorrentino, Jennifer, Laura, Pender, LC, and SC.

Deadly poison...or exquisite cure?

Noah fell from an eighth story balcony as a toddler, cracking open his skull and shattering his body. The accident would’ve killed a human, but even shifter blood can’t heal some damage. After the pack recommended a mercy killing, Noah’s family ran. But there’s no outrunning the mating pact formed before Noah’s birth.

Wade, the new alpha, chooses an adult Noah to fulfill that pact. Wade believes the previous alpha was a fool to reject Noah as a weak and inferior wolf, but Noah’s family was wrong to hide him and starve his wolf, too. Human doctors with human medicines are poison to shifter physiology. Now that Noah is fully grown, halting his shift to retain the pins, plates, and bars holding him together hurts rather than helps him, and for Wade, more than Noah's recovery is at stake.

Noah’s family sacrificed everything to keep him alive. Noah will do whatever it takes to save them—including mate with the alpha who is determined to correct past mistakes and defeat old prejudices contaminating the shifter community.

Too bad some still believe Noah is the true poison...and should be culled from the pack for good.

Content Warnings: dubious consent, shifter knotting/tying, and Nerf gun assassination attempts. Ereaders (and you) may spontaneously combust—Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Chapter One

Noah heard the crunch of tires on gravel outside only because that morning’s migraine had silenced his mp3 player, which he’d shoved into a dresser drawer. He’d maxed out his meds for the day. The worst of his blinding headache was gone so music wouldn’t have been painful, but after his sick agony earlier, the quiet soothed him. Hunched over his laptop, he usually hummed along while he updated websites for his clients, the beat of arena rock coaxing his fingers to fly over the keyboard. Even softer melodies would’ve been uncomfortable with his stomach still tender from vomiting and his sore muscles tight from clenching, though. Silence was better.

He frowned at the muffled thump of car doors closing in the driveway.

Weird. The farm entertained few visitors.

Ignoring the distant rumble of voices and the screech of the opening front porch door, Noah focused on his computer screen. He knew the drill. His dad met distributors at a diner a few miles away to sell their crops, but inspectors sometimes assessed their operation to ensure they fulfilled organic farming requirements. Sunset was late for an inspection. Maybe neighbors needed a favor or help? The reasons didn’t really matter to Noah. When outsiders came, he stayed hidden. Humans weren’t as eager to hurt him after Dr. Phares accepted him as a patient, but he’d learned not to take chances.

He tuned out the noises and worked.

The tap on his bedroom door didn’t alarm him, either. When he hobbled to the door, his eldest brother stood in the hallway. Tall, beefy with muscle, and dark like most shifters, Mikael often let Noah know when humans arrived at the farm as well as when it was safe for Noah to leave his room.

“Come with me,” his brother said, face ashen.

That
pricked Noah’s unease. He trusted his family. His dad and his brothers had proven a million times they could be relied upon to protect him. Noah was alive because of his family’s diligence and sacrifice. If Mikael said he had to go, then he would go.

Noah shut down his laptop. After the screen went black, he fetched his forearm crutches. Dread stirring, Noah pushed his glasses up his nose with a bunched shoulder and followed his brother’s silent hulking back.

He stumbled when they reached the living room. Noah’s mother had died shortly after Noah’s first shift at puberty, but the house was the same as she’d left it: full of overstuffed furniture, draping afghans, family pictures, and vases that Noah’s father still supplied with wildflowers. The cluttered living room wasn’t big. And Noah had never seen so many shifters inside it.

He’d never seen so many shifters. Ever. Not this close.

Terror sprinted through him, fiery hot, because he recognized some of these men. City shifters. The pack from town. The same shifters who had wanted to kill him when he was a toddler. A mercy killing, they’d called it. After he’d fallen eight stories from a high-rise balcony, when he’d awakened from weeks in a coma to paralyzed legs and excruciating migraines, these shifters would’ve ended him. His parents had fled to the country instead and made enemies of their former pack by seeking human medical treatments to help Noah.

Was this it then? Had the city shifters finally decided to exact judgment?

Trembling more than a little, Noah clamped his mouth shut while Mikael guided him to join his father and his other brothers who perched stiff and pale on the couch on one side of the cramped room. They faced a small army of betas from the town pack, who stood behind an easy chair occupied by a sprawling man who must be their new alpha. Dressed in casual khakis and a form-fitting black T-shirt, he blended in with the other shifters, but no one would mistake the intense energy that vibrated the air around him. Nor his eyes. Dark as midnight. They glittered with command. And fury.

Noah shuddered.

Rather than dropping to the couch with his family, he stood beside them, leaning against his crutches as his wrecked knees jellied. He wouldn’t risk the censure of the shifter horde by drawing attention to his brace and crutches by sitting. His father, alarmingly, hung his head low and focused his stare on the living room carpet. Wouldn’t look at Noah, whose fear rocketed when his brothers wouldn’t meet his gaze, either.

Although he must certainly smell the stench of Noah’s mounting terror, the alpha smiled. Wade. Wasn’t that the new alpha’s name? He studied Noah for moments that felt like lifetimes, his stare lingering on Noah’s forearm crutches. Noah slumped his shoulders, trying to look as insignificant as possible. The accident had stunted his growth, and he’d topped out at five foot six inches. He couldn’t pull off invisibility, but at least being small wasn’t difficult, even if being shorter than everyone else in the room was another strike against him.

“This is the boy?”

Noah shivered at the alpha’s voice.

Stress lines bracketing his mouth, Noah’s father confirmed that Noah was indeed the boy with a murmured, “Yes.”

“The pact you formed with the old alpha demands the selection of this generation’s alpha mate among your children. Since the child specified, your eldest, married a human,” Wade said, mouth twisting to a terse grin, “I can now pick from your sons, and your family is required to give him up.” When Noah peered through a layer of lashes, the alpha nodded. “You may consider the pact satisfied.” He angled his head at Noah. “Him.”

Noah’s stomach plummeted to the floor. His jaw dropped.

He blinked at the dark-haired alpha.

What had just happened?

“No!” Dad’s stare snapped up. “Take one of my other sons if you insist on fulfilling the pact. Each of them is ready and willing to go with you.” Flanking his father on the couch, Noah’s three brothers bobbed their heads in uniform agreement. “But not Noah.”

“You’ve broken our laws and defied this pack long enough. You can pay for those crimes. Or you can honor the mating pact.” The alpha’s lips thinned to a grim line. “I choose the boy.”

A pair of betas strode across the short width of the room. They grabbed Noah by his biceps. “Dad,” Noah said while he ineffectively jerked his elbows and forearm crutches to try to break free. “You said leaving the pack negated the old mating pact,” Noah pleaded with his father. With the city shifters. With anyone who would listen. “You said they didn’t care about us anymore.”

The alpha shifted his frown to Noah. “Your father was wrong.”

Mikael bolted to his feet, a snarl on his lips, but Dad halted the rebellion with his white-knuckled grip on Mikael’s arm. “Stop, you fool. Or they’ll kill us all.”

Eyes wide, grief-stricken torment writ across his face, Mikael sank to the couch.

Noah’s last hopes died.

The taut, avid attention of the gathered betas and the angry glitter in their alpha’s glare proved they hadn’t driven to the farm to enforce an obsolete mating pact. Arranged matings were barbaric. Though shifters drafted the agreements to convey special honor and status, few were executed. No one pushed to fulfill a mating pact unless both parties were willing, even at the top of the shifter hierarchy where the practice most often continued to foster alliances between packs. But as much as Noah loved his family, they weren’t another pack. No political benefit would be fostered or gained here. His dad had been important among the city shifters once, the most trusted of the old alpha’s betas, but after the accident, his family became rogue wolves, outsiders. And criminals. They hardly merited the high regard and attention of the new alpha.

Wade wanted revenge. That was the only explanation.

City shifters had left his family alone as long as they’d stayed out of sight, but the new alpha’s largess had made them sloppy. Stupid. Lydia marrying Noah’s physical therapist had crossed a line, no matter how they’d convinced themselves the pack wouldn’t notice or care. Noah would now pay the price. With the eldest child mated, Wade could choose among the remaining siblings according to the letter of the law regardless of how little mating pacts were enforced, even in the city. Wade was right about that. Dragging Noah away was a vicious taunt, the alpha daring his family to object, and perhaps provoking his father and brothers into a fight they couldn’t win. Not against this many betas.

Noah was doomed.

Maybe his family, who had sacrificed so much for him, didn’t need to be.

“I’ll go.” Sandwiched between the two betas, Noah let his body go slack. His fear coiled like vipers in his belly, but he stopped struggling. The shifters lifted him until his feet dangled uselessly above the floor. “I’ll do whatever you want, if you grant my family amnesty. If you don’t hurt them.”

The alpha beamed in predatory triumph. “Agreed.”

Noah hung limply between the pair of betas as they dragged him toward Wade, whose smile roiled Noah’s stomach.

“In the car,” Wade ordered the betas.

While the collected shifters parted to create a path for the two manhandling Noah to the door, Noah’s father at last made a shaky attempt to help him. “He needs his medicines, his extra brace and forearm crutches, his computers—”

When Noah looked over his shoulder, the alpha cut Noah’s father off with a sharp wave. “You’ve done enough harm to him. The boy is no longer your concern.”

Oh God.

They muscled Noah, heart thundering, to the nearest of a fleet of black Chevy Tahoe’s. He swore he wouldn’t gamble his family’s safety, but he flinched then. He stiffened in the beta’s grasp when they opened the SUV door. He couldn’t go into that vehicle. He’d be helpless. Captured. They could hurt him. Maybe kill him.

He jerked away—and earned a light cuff to his temple in rebuke.

His brothers wrestled. Often. All shifters did. The mock battles that frequently resulted in bloodied noses and bruises were their way of jockeying for position even in a group as small as their family or that’s what his mother had said when Noah was younger. His brothers had never touched him, though. Shifters could take the rough and tumble, but not Noah. He’d been physically vulnerable, easily injured.

The blow, however gentle, rocked him to the core.

He’d known pain—endless surgeries, torturous physical therapy, and a shattered body that refused to function properly. But he’d never suffered as much as a casual swat on his butt when he’d misbehaved as a child and none of the typical punishments meted out by his father to maintain discipline among the adult wolves since.

“Don’t look at me like that. And stop cringing.
We
won’t abuse you.” The beta frowned. “You’re a shifter. He’s ordered you to be treated as one. That’s all.”

That didn’t reassure him considering bitter experience had taught him shifters were the most brutal of nature’s creatures. More scared than he’d ever been in his life, Noah stopped resisting, though, and they shoved him into the back seat of the Tahoe. They took away his forearm crutches, cramming the lightweight supports at their feet on the floor. When Noah instinctively reached for them, the shifters tied his hands with rope. The engine roared to life, and the Tahoe shot forward, zooming from the farm while the betas bound his feet, too. Once he was restrained, they ignored him. Terror balled inside Noah as he waited for what would happen next.