The Baby Shift: Florida
Shifter Babies Of America 38
Becca Fanning
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Also by Becca Fanning
Chapter 1
Jordan smiled as she parked her car in an empty lot near the nature preserve and breathed in the scent of the ocean air. The fresh air seemed to wash away her travel weariness. That was definitely a good thing, considering the challenging hike she would need to take to get to her new temporary home.
The small community of weres was located deep in a nature preserve outside Orlando, Florida. She would be staying with a friend of her stepfather’s while she completed her residency at one of the top trauma centers in the city. The training she would receive there would help her to finally be an asset to the wolf shifter community where she’d grown up. For so long, she’d felt like dead weight, supported and protected by the wolves she’d come to love as though they were her own blood.
She slung a backpack over her shoulder—she would have to worry about the rest of her things later—and slipped through the gap in the fence that her stepfather’s childhood friend Bill had told her about. Jordan adjusted her backpack more securely and started the long trek up to his home. The werewolves were settled deep in the heart of the nature preserve. Strictly speaking, they didn’t have a right to be there, but the rangers who worked for the park were weres, and if anyone else had noticed their presence, they must not have minded enough to report it.
The trail to Bill’s cabin offered an everchanging array of cypress, maple, and sweetgum trees intermingled with evergreens. It was a peaceful, solitary walk that seemed to bring strength to her very soul. Jordan had no doubt that the trip might get old quickly once she was dragging herself home from work after long shifts at the hospital, but at this moment, it seemed perfect. All the stress of the past months seemed to fade away.
The healing was definitely needed. At the end of her internship, she’d been faced with a situation she’d have deemed impossible if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. Someone had formulated a poison potent enough to kill even shifters by lacing arsenic with silver. Thankfully the shifter who’d been poisoning others had been stopped, but it had still been a long road to recovery for many of her victims. At times, Jordan still felt the weight of her responsibility to them, but a fresh start would take care of that. And she’d been handed one, at her first choice of hospitals, no less.
Little by little, the trees gave way to a clearing with sandy soil and modest cabins, framed by skeletal pine trees. Jordan looked around the small community—more the size of a camp—that would be her home for the next few years. The cabins were small, simple, but in good repair. She scanned them, uncertain which belonged to Bill, until he came through the front door of one out toward the edge of the clearing.
Jordan smiled as he headed toward her with a hand extended in greeting.
“Uncle Bill!”
A smile broke over his craggy face. “Jordan, look at you. How long has it been?”
“I’m not even sure. Too long.”
Jordan tried to remember the last time she’d seen him. Her high school graduation, maybe? It had been quite some time ago, for sure. But her father’s old friend had aged well. Of course, that was to be expected with the healing power that werewolves possessed. They were, by no means, immortal, but excellent tissue regeneration and even better immune systems often left them looking years younger than a man of the same age would have.
“You found the place okay?”
“I did, and I enjoyed the walk up. It is beautiful out here.”
“That it is, child.”
“Does it bother him that I’m here? If the community here isn’t open to non-shifters…” She let her voice trail off. She would...what, exactly? Get an apartment in the city? On a resident’s pay? The amount she would make before she was fully licensed looked decent on paper, but a large portion of her pay would be going toward student loans.
“Oh, don’t let Ezra bother you. He looks at everyone that way. He’s...not had an easy time of it. He blames us for his being a shifter and for his wife’s death. She couldn’t make the transition when they were turned.”
Shock coursed through Jordan’s body. “You turned them against their will?”
Bill frowned in response to the accusation. “Of course not, Jordan. His wife, though...she had terminal cancer. Becoming a shifter was a last-ditch effort to save her, but by the time they made their decision, she just wasn’t strong enough. He blames all of us for her death.”
Jordan felt a lump of emotion welling up in her for this man who had risked and lost everything to try to save the woman he loved. She would have to remember to try to forgive him if his actions were less than courteous.
Her heart stayed heavy as Bill welcomed her to his home and showed her the room she would be settled in. Empathy for Ezra left echoes of imagined pain aching through her as they made the hike back down to her car to gather the rest of her belongings.
Chapter 2
Jordan splashed water on her face and stared at her reflection in the mirror, willing herself not to cry. Emergency medicine might be her life’s calling, but somehow, it had never occurred to her that while she was going through training so many of her patients would die.
In the two weeks, she’d been working, more than half of the seriously injured patients who’d come in hadn’t made it through surgery. The years of residency she would be completing here before moving home, where almost all her patients would be shifters, seemed to stretch endlessly before her. She took a deep, wavering breath and pasted a smile on her face before leaving the bathroom. One step, one false smile, one patient at a time. She would make it through this year and then finally, after more than a decade of training, she would go home.
“Jordan?”
Jordan turned toward Alex Preston when he called her name, trying to ignore that her heart had skipped a beat at the sound of his voice. Alex was wickedly handsome. Somehow, his soft brown eyes and chiseled features had not hardened with the daily death and grief his job surrounded him. His dark features spoke of Latin heritage, and she momentarily wondered if he was...Your boss. She reminded herself. Your supervisor, who you can’t afford a messy breakup with.
Not only was he her boss, but he was also a shifter. He was someone who could help her get ready to treat the shifters back home better than anyone else could. She needed him as her mentor, not her lover.
“Dr. Preston,” she responded with a smile, hoping that her emotions hadn’t played across her face.
“There’s someone here to see you. He’s waiting in my office.”
Had there been a note of tension in his voice? She searched his face. It seemed unreadable, but she detected a note of tension in his eyes.
When she reached Alex’s office, she realized he had every reason to seem tense. With only a glance at the newcomer, she could already see that he was an unstoppable force. He seemed the polar opposite of Alex. Alex was lean, lithe strength and intellect; this man was a muscle-bound powerhouse. Whereas Alex’s features were untoughened and refined; this man’s face was rugged and wild.
“You’re a shifter,” she stated. There wasn’t anything—apart from shifting into an animal, of course—that would set a shifter apart from others at a glance. And yet…one look at the fury in this man’s eyes and she knew.
His lips
twitched with humor. Somehow the lighter expression didn’t make him look any less threatening.
“Yes. I’m also an enforcer.”
Jordan stared at him, unsure how to respond. The enforcers were legendary. Before shifters had come out to the world, they had been used to assassinate weres who got out of control and risked exposing their existence to the human population. Now the existence of shifters was common knowledge, but their job remained mostly unchanged. Before they had silenced those who threatened exposure; now, they targeted those who made shifters look too threatening to the outside world.
They still lived a life of blood and violence, endlessly killing their own kind. No wonder he seemed ferocious. A life lived only for death would have to leave, one half-crazed and half-jaded. She said nothing but continued to stare at him with something akin to fear was writhing in her belly...until he broke the silence.
“Matt Williamson,” he said with a sardonic grin that told her that he knew just where her thoughts had taken her.
She felt a twist of pity as she realized that most everyone probably reacted to him this way. She tried to push her emotions back as she briefly shook his hand.
“Jordan Murray, but I’m guessing you already knew that.”
“I did. Jordan, do you mind if I ask you a few questions? I’m looking into a few...incidents that have happened here recently, and I think your input might be valuable.”
Was that a note of accusation in his voice? She shrugged it off as she answered. He was only a threat to rogue shifters, she reminded herself.
“Of course. I’ll help any way I can. But I’ve only been in the area for a few weeks, so ...” she let her voice trail off.
“Yes, two weeks. Are you aware that in the last two weeks seven shifters in the area have fallen ill?”
Alarm and dread mingled sickeningly in her stomach. “I...no, I wasn’t aware of that. What were their symptoms?”
“Nausea, weakness...death. Almost like they’re being poisoned, but that shouldn’t be possible.”
Jordan knew exactly what this had to be, poisoning by arsenic laced with silver. Just like she’d seen in Alabama before coming here. Had the killer followed her here? Why? It was possible, though. The wolf responsible for the poisonings in Alabama had never been caught. As she looked at the hardness that had entered Matt’s eyes, she knew she had another, potentially more lethal, problem. The killer had only been targeting weres. This enforcer, though? He was targeting her.
“I...it isn’t possible. You know that.” Stupid, she berated herself. Stupid to lie to him about something so easily disproven. It had been a gut instinct that overrode her common sense and urged her to deny any involvement rather than risk the judgement that would be meted out by the lethal force of nature that stood before her with the promise of blood in his eyes.
“So, you’re denying that shifters were treated at the clinic you worked in for exactly those symptoms?”
He advanced toward her, one step at a time. Jordan fought the tears that threatened to spill from her eyes and straightened her spine. To run from him would be useless. If she were going to die, she could at least do so with some shred of dignity.
“Enforcer.” Alex’s voice was quiet, with a lethal edge. “Whatever you think Jordan might or might not have done, she works here with me and is living in Bill Nielson’s cabin. We can both vouch for her. Unless the enforcers have started taking out innocent human women, you need to leave my hospital.”
For a moment, Jordan thought the two of them might shift and fight, right there. Somehow the enforcer brought back under control the beast that raged in his eyes. Jordan breathed a sigh of relief as he left, and the air seemed to reenter the room, allowing her to finally draw a breath not stifled by terror.
“I wouldn’t relax so quickly, Jordan. I intervened because I don’t believe in shooting first and asking questions later, but I need to know what the hell is going on. Do you know something about the shifters who are falling ill?”
“Not falling ill. Being poisoned,” she replied tiredly. She spent the next few minutes filling him in on the shifter who had been killing people in the community where she’d done her internship. Silence followed the end of her tale for a few moments but felt like an eternity.
“And then it started here. Almost as soon as you arrived.”
“Yes, apparently it did,” she agreed brokenly.
“You don’t need to be alone. There needs to be a shifter with you at all times. I’m calling Bill now and asking him to start walking you up to his cabin. I’ll follow your car to the trail every day.”
“Because you want to protect me, or because you think I’m guilty?”
He paused before continuing, “Both, Jordan.” His bitter smile haunted her as she finished the rest of her shift and made the drive back to the nature preserve.
Chapter 3
Alex sat in the car for several long minutes after Bill had come to collect Jordan and accompany her back to his home. Alex hadn’t let the other shifter know about the threat Jordan posed. Bill’s best friend was lying on his deathbed even now. All logic screamed that Jordan was guilty, and yet he couldn’t reconcile the caring, competent young doctor he’d seen with the killer who was picking off his packmates at an alarming rate, with a weapon they had no idea how to fight.
Well, not no idea. If Jordan could be believed, then they just needed to make sure the shifters weren’t exposed to anything that was contaminated with the arsenic-laced silver. Then they could wait to see if their symptoms improved, or if it had been too late for their bodies to repair the damage. Or was she lying about the method by which they were dying?
Alex wasn’t sure, but he had every intention of finding out. Bill could watch Jordan during the day, but during the night, while the older shifter was asleep, Alex planned to watch the house and make damn sure she couldn’t leave. He knew the fix was temporary at best—after all, he had to sleep sometime—he couldn’t think of a single other option that wouldn’t lead to the possibility of someone taking Jordan out before her guilt could be proven or disproven.
He stilled as he saw movement in the cabin, saw a light come on through one of the windows. Jordan’s tall, lithe form was silhouetted in the doorway, and Alex waited, watched. Would she leave through the window, then?
But she didn’t leave. Instead, she stripped off her shirt before she leaned over, Alex assumed, to start the shower. He should have looked away, but he stood transfixed as she removed her bra. Her breasts were lovely, small but round and firm with rosy nipples that begged to be licked and kissed.
With this small glimpse of her, he stood mesmerized, helpless to move as she stripped away the rest of her clothing. An erection pressed against the front of his pants, rapidly becoming painfully hard.
He moved to readjust his pants to accommodate his length, and his hand lingered against his rigid shaft, moved up and down gently. He told himself he needed to stop, willed himself to, but he couldn’t look away from the sight of her before him, couldn’t stop the pleasure that rippled through his body as he stroked his shaft.
Finally, he found his willpower and cursed as he turned and strode away into the night. God help him, how would he look her in the face tomorrow after what he’d done, what he’d almost done?
Chapter 4
Jordan listened to the rhythmic sound of her footsteps striking the ground over and over as she ran through the forest. She’d been skipping her morning runs lately, afraid that the time she spent by herself would cast suspicion on her. Today, though, she needed the escape. Work had her tense, and today she was off. She couldn’t stand the thought of spending the entire morning inside, worrying about the effect Matt’s arrival could have on her residency.
Alex had seemed the best mentor a resident could ask for her first few weeks on the job. Here lately though, Jordan had found herself drawn to him. She’d never understood those students back in college who had slept with their professors. Whether it was for a grade or just
because they were ruled by their emotions, Jordan had looked on their decisions as a weakness. Why risk everything by starting a relationship with someone who could shape your success or failure?
If they’d felt a tenth of the desire she had for Alex, she could now understand their decisions. The way he looked at her sometimes, like she was the only woman on earth...
Down, girl. She couldn’t forget the other times he looked at her with suspicion and disgust. She thought he might actually believe her capable of murder. If that were true, then she really was venturing on thin ice. He had the power to single-handedly derail her career, even after years of training and thousands of dollars spent to get her here. What would he do if he became completely convinced that she was the killer?
Matt, on the other hand, seemed to have forgotten her completely. Either that or he was just biding his time. Jordan was optimistic, sometimes to a fault. She chose to believe that he had directed his suspicions elsewhere. Now, if only Alex would do the same...
The path to the village came into view, and Jordan slowed to a walk. She laced her hands on top of her head and slowly made her way back toward Bill’s cabin, waiting for her breathing to steady.
“Jordan?”
She started at the sound of someone saying her name and turned to see Ezra standing at the edge of his yard. The dirt on his clothes and the patch of freshly turned earth next to him told her that he’d been working on planting a winter garden. In some places starting a garden in the fall would be foolish, but the milder Florida temperatures allowed things to grow this time of year.
“Yes. And you’re Ezra. Hello.”
The Baby Shift- Florida Page 1