Alpha Blood Box Set (BBW Werewolf / Shifter Romance)

by Mac Flynn

  “That they locked behind them,” Luke added. He turned his head to the men and winced. “Any luck?” he wondered.

  Alistair shook his head, but didn’t stop perusing the walls. “Nothing yet, sir, but there may be a weakness in the corners we could take advantage of.”

  Baker sat down on the chair and folded his arms. “Don’t waste your energy. We’re stuck in here until they come calling for us.”

  “I don’t give up that easily,” Luke shot back.

  Baker smirked. “Who said anything about giving up? We’ll just bide our time and think of a way out of this place.” He looked to Stacy. “You know this place pretty well.”

  “As well as anyone,” she agreed.

  “If we can get away from the guards, where do we go from there to get out of this place?” he asked her.

  Stacy paced the room and shrugged. “There’s always through a window or the backyard, but we can’t be sure one of Cranston’s guards aren’t waiting for us there.”

  “We may not need to worry about either of those ways,” Alistair spoke up. He knelt in the center of the room and tapped on the floor. The clang echoed around the bare room.

  “We dig our way out?” I wondered.

  Alistair smiled and tapped the floor two feet to the left. The sound was different. “A hidden escape?” Luke guessed. He turned to Stacy. “Would your father have been worried about being locked in here by accident?”

  She furrowed her brow and tapped a well-manicured fingernail against her chin. “Now that you mention it, my father was very adamant the builder follow his blueprints to the letter. I never got to see them, but my father was sometimes known to be secretive. That’s probably one reason why I didn’t see this takeover by Cranston.”

  “What’s the floor made out of?” Luke asked her.

  “He never told me that.”

  “I would say steel, but there is a thinner plate here,” Alistair spoke up. He pulled back his arm and thrust his fist down onto the floor. His hand left a half-inch deep dent in the floor. “This may take a while.”

  “What’s beneath the house?” Luke wondered.

  She shrugged. “The sewer, I suppose. I’ve never been curious.”

  “What’s going on in there?” a voice spoke up from out in the hall. Alistair and I jumped on the dent and pushed our backs against each other before the slide in the door opened. One of the loyal guards glared at us. “What’s all the noise?” he growled.

  “We were testing out ways to escape,” Luke replied. I shot him a look that told him I thought he was nuts.

  The guard just laughed. “You can do that, but you won’t get far.” He slammed the slide shut and we heard his footsteps retreat from the door.

  Four of us breathed a sigh of relief and glared at Luke. “Are you trying to get us moved?” Stacy snapped at him.

  “Is there more than one of these rooms?” he returned.

  “No, but that was still stupid to tell him that,” she argued.

  “Stupid or not, he’s gone and we have to figure out a way to stifle the noise,” Luke replied.

  I glanced around and noticed the chair Baker sat in. “Why don’t we knock the chair legs against the walls?”

  Luke smiled, knelt down in front of me, and planted a light kiss on my lips. “There’s my smart girl. Now let’s get making some noise.”

  15

  The chair was sacrificed in the name of Justice, and Stacy and I were each handed two legs. The men positioned themselves over the thin steel trap door, and we stood on either side of the entrance. At a signal from Luke we started batting away at the walls and doors. I chimed in with a resounding rendition of a cat howling. “Meeeooowwwwr! Meoowwwrrr!”

  Stacy raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you be dog howling?” she teased.

  I shrugged, but didn’t stop my melodious meowing. “Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow-mix, we deliver!”

  Our noise was enough to wake the dead and drowned out the noise from an atomic bomb. The men used their fists and elbows to bash away at the plate, and in a matter of seconds the floor door fell into itself and lodged down a circular shaft. Stacy listened with one ear on the door and the other deaf with our noise. She tensed and stopped pounding. “Trouble!” she hissed.

  The men grabbed the plate, yanked it back up into place, and sat clumsily in front of the broken floor. I rolled my eyes at their hastily thought plan, grabbed Stacy’s wooden legs, and stomped over to Luke. I gave him a good whack on the head, and he rubbed the sore spot and looked up at me in astonishment. “Whose side are you on?” he accused me.

  “Not yours, that’s for sure!” I loudly proclaimed. By this time I heard the square peephole door slide open behind me.

  “What are you doing now?” the guard growled.

  I spun around and wagged a leg at him. “Do you think I like being stuck in here with these guys?” I hissed back. I marched over to the door and pounded a leg against it so hard it splintered. “That’s what I think of your groups and about your werewolf superiority! I’ve been stuck as one of you for over a month and I’m already sick of all these politics and messy alliances! You hear me? Sick of it!” I bashed another leg over the peep hole and the guard shut it.

  The guard swung it back open and glared at me. “If that’s how you feel then scream all you want. I won’t be back.” He slammed the small slot shut and marched away.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and my shoulders slumped. “I’m not getting paid enough for this,” I quipped.

  Luke stood and smiled at me. “You’re a good actress.” He rubbed his head and winced. “You even had me convinced for a second.”

  I tossed aside the remaining legs, crossed my arms, and shrugged. “I had to do something to keep them away. We don’t want them looking through that thing a second after we’re gone and catching us again,” I pointed out.

  Alistair and Baker quietly pulled the plate from the hole and we all glanced down. The rounded walls were fashioned out of plaster and a metal ladder led down into the darkness. I looked around at the men and sheepishly grinned. “For once I don’t think I want it to be ladies first,” I told them.

  “I’ll go first,” Baker offered. Before anyone could suggest drawing straws, which was a good thing because we didn’t have any straws to draw, he slipped down the ladder and out of sight. His clanking feet told us he was still alive, and in a few seconds there was a splash. “Looks like a sewer. Better be prepared for some shit ahead,” he called to us.

  I rolled my eyes. “The one time he tries to be funny it’s a farmer’s joke,” I muttered.

  Alistair was next, followed by Stacy. I grabbed Luke’s shoulders and tried to shove him down ahead of me. “Come on, don’t be a chicken,” I scolded him when he grabbed my arms and stopped my pulling.

  “You first,” he ordered.

  I put on my best pouting face. “How come you always get to be the last man standing?”

  “Because you’re a woman, and a very beautiful one at that, so I don’t want anything to happen to my beautiful mate. Now get down there.” He picked me up and lowered me feet-first into the hole. I clung to the ladder and glared up at him after he let me go.

  “You’re pushy, you know that?” I asked him.

  “I learned from the best, now climb,” he commanded me.

  My mature response was to stick my tongue out at him and scurry down the ladder. I hit water before I hit the bottom rung, and shuddered when something dark and globular touched my leg. We had climbed down into a large sewer culvert with water dripping from the round ceilings and a smell so rancid I wondered if all the city had eaten only breakfast bean burritos over the last few years as a joke on us.

  Alistair politely grabbed my waist and set me into more filthy water. My hero. My werewolf sense of smell was nearly overloaded by all the wonderful scents of an entire city focused on flushing the toilet. The smell rose up like the ghost of past Christmas dinners. I clapped my hand over my nose and shuddered.

&
nbsp; “Breathe through your mouth,” Stacy suggested.

  “I’m seriously thinking about cutting off my nose,” I mumbled through my hand.

  Luke hurried down after me and splashed into the water. “Do you mind? I’m trying not to swim in this stuff,” I hissed at him.

  “We may have to if we come to a deep pool,” he pointed out. He waded forward to where Baker’s dark shadow stood a few yards down the pipe. “Well, it seems we have to guess which way to go,” he mused.

  “Not necessarily,” Baker countered. He knelt down and I shuddered when he dipped his fingers in the water. “The water’s heading that way, and that means the treatment plant is bound to be in that direction. If we can’t find a manhole to climb out of we’ll end up there.”

  I turned to Stacy, who looked as ill as me. “How far away is that?” I asked her.

  “About fifty blocks,” she replied.

  I looked back to the men. “Um, I veto going that far.”

  Luke turned around and glanced up at our escape hatch. “I’m sure we’ll find a manhole sooner rather than later, but what I’m worried about is them finding us. We have to get moving.” He sloshed downstream and the rest of our damp group followed. It was slow going because even with our wolf vision there was little light to see more than a few yards ahead of us. I groped along the wall until I touched something I could only describe as this-will-haunt-me-in-my-dreams disgusting and decided Luke’s shoulder looked a lot more tempting, and clean. I shuffled through our little crowd and clutched onto him.

  “Wonderful vacation spot, darling. We should take our travel agent out and shoot him,” I quipped.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more, but I hope we can cut our vacation short in a few minutes,” he replied. He glanced up and frowned. “If we don’t find our way out of here soon we’ll be driven mad by these smells.”

  “I’m already mad, but about more than just the smells.” I shuddered when something brushed against my legs. “Any way you want to reenact a scene from all those mushy romance novels and carry me?”

  He turned, looked me over, and smiled. “But you look lovely in brown.”

  I scowled at him. “I look better under the sun.”

  “I may be able to oblige you,” Alistair spoke up. He sloshed over to the wall and gestured to an alcove in the wall. A ladder led up to a few small holes of moonlight. Freedom and fresh air lay beyond that dirty, heavy manhole cover. Alistair turned to me with a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “Perhaps the men should go first.”

  “Oh hell no. Ladies first this time,” I argued.

  “I should go first,” Stacy suggested. “I know the city much better than you and can tell where we are.”

  I had a really great counterargument set up, something along the lines of if-there-isn’t-any-oncoming-traffic-I-don’t-care, when there was a loud noise behind us. It sounded like the splashing of a half dozen guards sicked on us by Cranston to drag us back to that horrible white room. That, or the sewer alligators had found us. “All right, but if you don’t move fast I’m climbing over you,” I told her.

  We hurried up the ladder with the men close behind. Stacy removed the manhole, stuck her head out, and then climbed into the fresh air. The manhole opened up onto a side street a dozen blocks from Stacy’s dad’s house. As I was making my escape from the sewer of stink I heard a commotion below me and glanced down. Luke was grappling with a few dark shadows and Alistair dropped off the ladder to help. The pair and the guards dunked and punched each other, and it looked bad for my mate until Baker joined the brawl. He landed on two of them, and Luke and Alistair took care of two themselves. Then they hurried up and joined us in the clean world.

  “We need to hurry. They’ll be able to trace our scent by following the stench,” Luke told us.

  “Hurry to where?” Baker challenged him. He opened his arms and gestured to our surroundings. We stood in a narrow alley between two tall fences that stretched for most of the block. Trash cans stood beside the few gates and the din of the city sounded far off. “The city’s big, but Cranston has Stevens under his control and that means he’s got a tight fist on everything.”

  “Not entirely,” Stacy spoke up. “I rent an apartment my father doesn’t know about, and what my father doesn’t know about then Cranston doesn’t know about.”

  “An apartment for what?” Luke asked her.

  Stacy smiled and shrugged. “Oh, just exchanging some favors from my network, and a girl has to have a place where she can be alone.”

  “Lead us to it, then, before our stench leads them to us,” Baker demanded.

  “And we’d better avoid a taxi. They might have the wrong armband,” I added, much as I regretted to remind everyone. My feet ached to be free of my wet, soggy shoes.

  16

  Stacy led us out of the alley and down every side street in the city. We zigged and zagged, jumped over fences, through yards, between tall office buildings, and past buildings that advertised women on the sidewalks. Luke stayed close to me and eyed every stranger with suspicious jealous. I was flattered, but a little disappointed to find such depressing quarters in this werewolf city. I had hoped this new society I lived in was better than the old.

  “The more things change the more they stay the same,” I muttered.

  “How’s that?” Luke whispered to me.

  I gestured to the decrepit buildings. “I saw these in my old home.”

  Luke sighed. “I’m sorry to say that changing a man into a wolf doesn’t help his civilization.”

  It was in one of those crummy neighborhoods that Stacy finally turned off the sidewalk and guided us up the stoop of a dilapidated apartment building. Half the windows were broken, the bricks were chipped, and the old door looked about ready to disintegrate on its rusted hinges.

  Luke tilted his head back and looked over the fine bit of crumbling architecture. “I would never have imagined you staying here,” he mused.

  Stacy smirked. “Neither would my father, and that’s why I chose it.” She pulled a key from a false brick in the wall to her left and opened the door. We followed her inside, and the lobby was as shabby as the outside. The rugs were smelly and rotten, the walls were full of mildew, and the steps that led up to the other floors looked about ready to fall under the strain of decades of termites. A desk stood to our left with an old gentleman seated on a stool behind it. His full attention was on the paper spread out in front of him.

  Stacy walked up to him, and the man twitched his nose and glanced up. “You’ve gotten yerself into a bad mess, haven’t ya?” he mused.

  Stacy laughed. “Guess that from the smell?” she wondered.

  “No, the look of the party ya have there. They look like something the cat’s dragged in, if ya werewolves will excuse the expression.”

  Luke smiled and shook his head. “We do look and smell pretty bad,” he agreed.

  “That’s an understatement, but were ya wanting something?” he asked Stacy.

  “A warning. Some men might be coming after us. Some of the peace patrols,” she told him. “If you see them, will you ring my apartment?”

  The old man leaned over the desk and squinted. “Something happen to yer father?” he wondered. Stacy’s face fell and she nodded her head. “Anything I can do?”

  “You can alert us to the patrols, and if you get a message for me send it right up,” she added.

  “How’d you guess it was about her father?” Baker spoke up. His eyes were narrowed and he looked unkindly at the desk clerk.

  The old man chuckled. “Nobody else but her father handles the patrols. If they’re after her then that means something’s happened to him.”

  “We’re not sure what’s wrong, but even if my father is with them don’t let them up,” Stacy told him.

  The old man frowned, but nodded. “Ah’ll do what I can,” he promised. He dug beneath the desk and pulled out a thick silver key. “And enjoy yer stay.”

  Stacy took the key from hi
m and smiled. “Thanks, Rick. I owe you one.”

  “When yer out of this mess Ah’ll take a nice dinner,” he requested.

  Stacy laughed. “Done. Come on, group. I’m dying to get out of these clothes.”

  Stacy guided us up the rickety stairs to the fifth floor. That was the top, and I prayed I wouldn’t fall through the rotten floor to the lobby below. At each landed we got a glimpse of the halls, and those were filled with holes in the walls and battered doors. At the top of the stairs the landing was shut off from the rest of the floor by four walls, and we were presented with a steel door and a heavy lock. Stacy pulled out the key given to her by Rick and opened the lock. She swung the door open and revealed a new, and clean world.

  The whole floor was one giant apartment complete with skylight above for maximum sun and wood floors that stretched across the whole place. There were a few windows on both sides with strips of plastic etched with designs to fake broken panes. The walls were a shimmering white, and there was a large living room with an up-to-date kitchen. Halls on both sides led to bedrooms, each with their own bathrooms. Stacy strolled in with us close behind and our mouths trailing. “Try not to get too much grime on the furniture. The maid only comes once a week. She’s too afraid of the neighborhood to come any more often.”

  Luke looked around the place and smiled. “Now this is the Stacy I expected,” he teased.

  “A home away from home,” Stacy agreed. She gestured to the living room and the many chairs. “But have a seat. I’ll see what’s in the fridge.” Stacy shed her coat, ran her hand through her mussed hair, and walked over to the kitchen.

  “I could eat a whole cow,” Baker mumbled as he made himself at home in a chair.