by Amira Rain
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DOUBLE THE ALPHA
A PARANORMAL MENAGE ROMANCE
AMIRA RAIN
Copyright ©2018 by Amira Rain
All rights reserved.
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About This Book
“She knew she could handle one alpha, but could she handle TWO?”
In an apocalyptic future, Ellie Miller realized that the only way to keep her people safe was to do a deal with the nearby wolf pack.
In exchange for protection, she would offer them the only thing she could offer...
Herself.
And that was something that the alpha Eric McCormick would gladly accept.
However, when Ellie arrived at the pack she found there was a twist. Eric had joined forces with another alpha named Ryan.
Now Ellie must be mated to both of them or the deal was off....
WARNING: This is a super sexy paranormal ménage romance. Only read this if you are an adult and if these themes do not offend you!
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
It was a sunny day in September when the wolf shifters sent a messenger to my group’s encampment, an act that ultimately put the lives of fifty-some people in my hands.
The messenger’s name was Tom, and he first asked for a private meeting with the group’s leaders.
A seventy-two-year-old man named Norm looked at me. “I guess that’s us, right?”
After a moment or two, I gave Norm a little nod, realizing for the first time that I was considered co-group leader alongside him. I’d certainly never been officially called a leader, and nobody had ever called me Cap, short for captain, like they sometimes did with Norm. I supposed that I’d just kind of fallen into my leadership role without really realizing it, just by going about the business of doing what needed to be done.
It probably hadn’t hurt either that I was one of the only fully able-bodied adults in the entire group. Most everyone else was either too old or too young to really be of much help with crop planting or defense. Norm himself was pretty much too old to really be of much help with crop planting or defense, although he was still decent with a shotgun, and he was usually able to weed the community garden for at least an hour before his gnarled, arthritic hands simply refused to work anymore. What he lacked in physical capabilities, though, he more than made up for with wisdom gained from decades in the military, and then decades as a farmer.
Norm and I took Tom the wolf shifter’s messenger into my “apartment,” which had formerly been an athletic trainer’s office inside a high school gymnasium. Although it was dark, cramped, and cheerless, with its painted cinderblock walls, I still felt grateful to have a space of my own with a door that shut. Some families in the group lived and slept out on the basketball court, with “apartments” made up of a few pieces of furniture surrounded by “privacy screens,” which were just sheets hung from wooden frames that Norm had constructed.
When we’d first settled the group into the gymnasium just over a year earlier, we’d done a lottery drawing to determine who would get the “prime real estate,” which included two locker rooms, two offices, and a semi-private hallway near the gymnasium’s entrance. I’d fished a slip of paper that read Office #1 from Norm’s hat and had immediately tried to give it to a family who’d drawn a slip reading Basketball court.
However, the family wouldn’t hear of this, with the grandparents saying that they and their three grandkids wouldn’t all fit in one tiny office anyway. Norm wouldn’t hear of me switching with anyone either, saying that fair was fair and everyone should just stick to the “apartment assignments” they’d drawn. I’d reluctantly agreed, although I still felt a little guilty about it.
Now in the present, I sat Norm and Tom down at a tiny circular table in my tiny apartment, asking if either of them would like anything to eat or drink. Fortunately, they both declined my offer, and I considered this fortunate for two different reasons. For one, as far as food and drink went, I only had a single bottle of water and a single can of sliced peaches in my apartment, and I wasn’t sure how I’d divvy those things up, being that I only owned one cup and one small plate. Obviously, I wasn’t quite accustomed to having guests and entertaining. For another thing, I was just kind of eager to get right down to business with the visiting wolf shifter and find out what he wanted. Currently, I couldn’t even imagine.
As soon as I joined Norm and Tom at the table, Norm addressed Tom, seemingly just as eager to find out the purpose of his visit as I was.
“What brings you our way, Tom? I hope it’s not to borrow a cup of sugar, because believe me, we don’t have any.”
Norm gave Tom a wry little smile, which Tom returned before saying no, he hadn’t come to borrow anything.
“Although, maybe you could say I’m here to barter.”
Looking wary, Norm gave me a quick side glance before speaking to Tom again. “We’ve heard that some of you shifter groups are setting up bartering networks, but as far as our little ragtag group of human survivors here…we certainly don’t have much to barter. In fact, we don’t really have anything. As you’ve probably seen, we’ve planted a community garden out on the football field, and we’ll have a crop of pumpkins and squash ready to harvest in a few weeks…but we need to keep it all. The truth is that when it comes to food, we’re barely hanging on, and with winter coming in just a few months….” Frowning, Norm paused to sigh quietly. “Our group simply isn’t doing as well as some of you shifter groups, from what we’ve been able to gather.”
That was an understatement, not that Norm and I had been able to gather much info about the shifter groups in the area. Still, we knew enough about them to know that none of them seemed to be starving. On the contrary, the three times that Norm had run into different shifter groups while out on supply runs, he’d reported that their people seemed very fit and well-fed. He’d also reported that their clothes were in decent shape and clean, too.
One of the shifter groups was even said to have a fleet of a dozen or so trucks that they used for supply
runs, having enough gasoline to drive as far as a hundred miles away. This was in contrast to the single vehicle owned by Tom’s and my group. It was an older SUV with almost two hundred thousand miles on it, and because of frequent breakdowns, Tom didn’t like to drive it further than four or five miles away.
Currently, this vehicle was parked about a quarter-mile from the gymnasium, where Tom had run out of gas returning from his last supply run. The two fourteen-year-olds who’d accompanied him, twins named Blake and Devin, had been unsuccessful in pushing the truck the rest of the way due to there being a hill. Not that this really mattered. By this point, Tom, Blake, and Devin had picked clean every grocery store, gas station, and pharmacy within feasible driving distance, anyway.
In response to what Norm had said, Tom just studied him for a long moment before asking a question. “How many people do you folks have here?”
Tom said fifty-four, but I shook my head.
“Fifty-three now. We lost an older gentleman last week. He and I and two young men from our group set out on foot to gather apples from a group of trees not far from here, and we were attacked by a group of Creepers on our way back. The two young men and I were able to fight them off and get back here to the gym, but the Creepers got Clarence along the way.”
Everyone seemed to have a different name for the bloodthirsty, otherworldly creatures that had invaded earth over a year earlier, but the term Creepers seemed to be universally understood. The shifter groups even called them Creepers, Norm had told me.
Their arrival had ushered in what most people called The Chaos. First, the night sky had glowed red with mysterious fireballs, from which things seemed to be falling. Later, most people guessed that the falling objects were Creepers, dropping to earth by the millions. These Creepers, which were about the size of human men, although covered in dark green scales, soon proved to have a taste for human flesh, killing millions of Americans within the first few days of The Chaos. News reports indicated that all countries on earth had been affected.
All branches of the military were called out to try to deal with the Creepers, although they were mostly unsuccessful, despite the fact that they used bombs and chemical weapons in the hardest-hit areas. People barricaded themselves in their homes. After witnessing the Creepers kill their friends, family members, and neighbors, some people killed themselves.
Soon came the Virus, which was a flu-like condition that seemed to affect only women and girls. Millions more died. Barricaded in my apartment, alone, with only a mild fever, I survived.
A few weeks into the Chaos, it became clear that the chemical weapons used by the military had had an unintended effect. They had turned many human men into half-animal, half-human hybrids that people began referring to as shifters. Most of these shifters, at least in my area, were wolf shifters.
These wolf shifters soon proved to be much more adept than the military at killing Creepers. While global civilization disintegrated, with power grids failing and bodies being piled up in the streets, the wolf shifters in my home state of Michigan formed militias, killing Creepers and driving them away with their sharp teeth, which easily pierced the Creepers’ hard green scales.
It was the wolf shifters who had allowed me to finally flee my apartment after several weeks, temporarily clearing the hallways of Creepers so that we survivors could flee the building in search of someplace that hadn’t yet been overrun. It was at this point that I’d met Norm, who’d lived in an apartment two floors above me.
Back in the present, Tom said that he was sorry to hear that I’d lost a member of my group while out on the apple run, adding that it was fortunate that I, and the two young men with me, had survived. I agreed, and Tom then asked me how old the two young men were.
Slightly embarrassed, I responded by saying that they were maybe closer to “older boys” than “young men.”
“They’re twins, named Blake and Devin…and they just turned fourteen about two weeks ago.”
Across the little table, Tom frowned at me. “And they’re the ‘muscle’ you take out on food-gathering runs?”
Further embarrassed, yet feeling a little bristly at the same time, I said yes. “They’re both brave and strong, and they’re the only males in our group older than twelve and younger than seventy. Since we all fled here to the gymnasium just over a year ago, they’ve both stepped up into adult roles, and they’ve both acted very heroically. In fact, I don’t think our group would have survived as long as we have without Blake and Devin.”
Looking incredulous, Tom snorted. “Frankly, I can’t believe that any of you have survived as long as you have, let alone an entire cohesive group.”
Going from “a little bristly” to “outright offended,” I snorted in return. “Well, we may not be wolf shifters, but it’s pretty amazing what strong humans can do when they all band together.”
Tom conceded that it was, then just studied my face quietly for a long moment before speaking again. “Please tell me the story of how your group all came together, Ellie, if you don’t mind.”
A bit proud of how my group had all come together, yet at the same time not really wanting to think about those dark early days of the Chaos, I hesitated before responding. “All of us lived in the same apartment building here in the town of Brackson. It was a building about three miles east of here. It was owned by a private charity that assisted grandparents raising grandchildren by offering them reduced rental rates; so, all of the tenants were older folks with children living with them…I guess except me, anyway.
Before the Chaos, I was a struggling artist, so I worked at the front desk at the apartment building to pay the bills. I collected rent, took phone calls, scheduled maintenance work, and things like that…and, as part of my salary, I got to live in one of the apartments in the building rent-free. So, that’s where I was when all of the Chaos started. We were all in our apartments. We watched from the windows while Creepers fell from the sky and took over the streets.”
Tom looked at me expectantly, as if waiting for me to continue. When I didn’t after a moment or two, he spoke. “Then what happened?”
Once again, I hesitated in responding. “Well, we all survived barricaded in the building for a few weeks. Norm didn’t live in the building but was a part-time maintenance worker when everything happened, and he and I reinforced the doors and ground-level windows with two-by-fours and steel beams that we found in the basement. It maybe wasn’t the best security job, but it was enough to keep the Creepers out, at least at first.
But then, after a few days, the phone calls from local government telling us all to just stay put stopped coming. Then, the phone lines went out altogether, and all the TV and radio broadcasts stopped. Then, a few weeks later, just as everyone was running out of food anyway, the Creepers broke through our barricades. One of you wolf shifter groups soon cleared them out of the building, thank God, and that’s when Norm and I decided that it was probably time that we take everyone to a safer place.”
Tom asked if that was when we’d come to the gymnasium, and I said yes.
“Norm went out scouting and found that while most of the high school was just a pile of rubble from the government dropping bombs on the Creepers, the gymnasium was still intact…so, he came back to the apartment building and began ferrying us all here in his maintenance truck. Then, once everyone was inside, we started building fortifications like at the building, but this time, even stronger. For defense, we set up armed guard posts, too, to keep the Creepers away, using a cache of shotguns that Norm had at his house.”
Tom gave me a dubious sort of look. “And who’s been manning the guard posts?”
“Well, Norm, here, and several grandfathers from our group, although many of them have glaucoma or cataracts, so they’re sometimes not able to see the Creepers very well. But we also have Blake and Devin working guard patrol, too, along with a woman named Maryanne. She may be a seventy-nine-year-old great-grandmother, but she grew up on a farm, and she sure knows ho
w to use a shotgun. She’s even teaching her eleven-year-old great-granddaughter, Sadie, how to fight off the Creepers too. Sadie’s actually becoming one of our best patrol guards.”
Tom gave me a look that I couldn’t quite read. “Jesus.”
A little offended again, although I wasn’t even quite sure why, I snorted. “‘Jesus,’ what?”
Tom once again gave his head a little shake. “I just really don’t understand how your group has survived this long.”
Thoroughly irritated by his dubiousness, I folded my arms across my chest. “Like I said, we might be a group made up of older folks and children, but we’re strong. We’ve all pulled together to defend our lives and our community. We’ve had to, because none of you wolf shifter groups that we know of in the area have given us any help. You folks just look out for your own, right?”
Tom scoffed. “We do tend to stick to ourselves; I’ll give you that. We don’t just look out for our own, though. In fact, Ellie, you probably have no clue just how much your group has been ‘looked out for.’”
“Well, please enlighten me.”
“Well, for one thing, even though the wolf shifter community I belong to is about twelve miles away from here, we’ve always been aware of your group, and we’ve always run a daily patrol near this area, just to make sure that you folks weren’t getting overrun by Creepers. Had we not been doing this; you folks would have been dealing with more than just the half-dozen or so Creepers that you probably have to shoot on a daily basis. You probably would have long since been overrun.”
A little surprised, I said nothing, and Tom continued.
“Also, it was us Silverbacks who just about dropped that diesel generator in you folks’ laps early last December, when you all were nearly freezing to death in this gym. That’s what my shifter group calls itself, by the way…we call ourselves the Silverbacks, since we have a lot of wolves who appear more on the silvery side of gray.”