The Baby Shift- Alabama Read online

  The Baby Shift: Alabama

  Shifter Babies Of America 26

  Becca Fanning

  Copyright © 2019 by Becca Fanning

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Epilogue

  Also by Becca Fanning

  Chapter 1

  Dalton O’Malley groaned when the sunlight’s first rays shown through his window, beckoning him to leave rest behind and start his day. Normally, he was a morning person, but he had been out all night and hadn’t gotten back from Mississippi until almost four in the morning. Today the time typically reserved for his morning run would be better spent getting a bit more sleep. He stretched, rolled over and put his pillow over his head to block out the offensively bright morning sun.

  Four restless hours of sleep later, Dalton had to admit to himself that his time would have been better spent jogging. Or at least showering and heading to see how his clinic had fared in his absence. With a sigh, he got out of bed and started brewing a pot of coffee. A short while later, two cups of coffee and a quick shower had him feeling almost human again.

  It would be a relief to be back in his small clinic. A few short years ago, right after finishing medical school, returning to his small hometown would have been the last thing on his mind. He’d been hell-bent on setting the world on fire, and the work he was doing in stem cell research still had hospitals and universities all over the country inviting him to come and lecture. That was definitely a good thing because many of his patients couldn’t afford to pay their bills.

  And he couldn’t refuse them care. In a town the size of Ironville, Alabama, your neighbors were your family. So, he ran his small clinic, and he traveled several times a year to bring in enough income to keep his practice in the black. His most recent trip had been lucrative but troubling. His cousin in Mississippi had somehow stumbled across a werewolf who was poisoning his fellow shifters. Perhaps more disturbing than something existed that could poison his kind was the fact that the wolf in question hadn’t been the one to develop the toxin. He’d gotten it from another source and seemed to be testing it.

  Where had the poison come from, and why? Were there more test sites?

  Dalton tried in vain to push the unsettling thoughts from his mind. His cousin had spread word in all the neighboring shifter communities, so everyone knew to keep an eye out for symptoms of the poisoning. There wasn’t much else they could do without any idea of where the silver-laced arsenic had come from.

  After all the worry during his trip, he would enjoy returning home even more than he usually did. It would be a relief to get back to the friendly, relaxed pace of his small clinic. With a slight smile on his lips, he headed out the door on foot to see how his practice had fared in his absence.

  Chapter 2

  “Oh, thank god you’re back,” Cynthia exclaimed. Cynthia worked at the front desk at the clinic, but she was more like the clinic’s administrator than its secretary. Usually, she was calm, one of the most unflappable humans Dalton had ever known. His brow furrowed in concern.

  “What is it? Did Jordan have some trouble taking over my caseload?” Jordan Murray had just finished med school and was doing her internship at the clinic. Normally, he would have balked at an outsider in their small community, but Jordan’s stepfather was a shifter. It wasn’t that the shifters in Ironville were exactly in hiding. The longtime residents all knew about them and accepted them as who and what they were.

  That didn’t mean the rest of the world agreed. It did no good to advertise what they were when large portions of the human population thought they should be wiped off the face of the earth.

  Besides being related to a shifter, Jordan had approached him with a very good argument: She wanted to go into emergency medicine, and a shifter clinic was the perfect place to practice treating potentially fatal wounds without anyone dying if she made a mistake.

  She had a valid point. A large number of his patients, though not all, were shifters. As such, they tended to seek out medical help only when something was seriously wrong. They never got sick, but their reckless side tended to leave them seriously injured quite often.

  And with his relatively frequent travels, Jordan had turned out to be a godsend. With her here, he hadn’t had to worry about what would happen to his patients who couldn’t afford to go anywhere else when he was away. Her internship was coming to an end soon though. He was glad that she would be moving on toward the next step in her life—a residency at one of the best trauma centers in Florida—but it would be a huge loss for the clinic to see her go.

  Lost in his thoughts, he didn’t realize Cynthia had been replying to his question.

  “Dalton? You still listening?”

  “I’m sorry Cynthia. I’m still a bit worn out from the trip I guess. What was that?”

  “I said Jordan’s been great, but…something strange has been going on. Walter Morrison’s never been sick a day in his life, and now he’s bedridden. Joe and Charlene where here the other day not feeling well too. It’s been really strange, and Jordan has seemed really concerned that she can’t find the cause of it.”

  Yes, he’d imagine Jordan was concerned. She knew that those patients where shifters, knew that they shouldn’t have been able to get sick at all. A leaden ball of dread filled his stomach, even as adrenaline sent a tingle through his extremities.

  “I need a list of everyone who’s come down with the symptoms.”

  “Sure thing, Dalton. They’re all strong and healthy though. I’m sure they can kick this thing.”

  “Of course, they can. Cynthia…after you get that list I need you to send everyone home except for Jordan. Tell them they’ll be paid still, but I think we need to clear the clinic out while I get to the bottom of this.”

  Cynthia paled, looking genuinely concerned. “You think it’s contagious? Don’t you need to check them out first to know?”

  He knew damn well it wasn’t contagious. He also knew that if what had happened in Mississippi was happening here, apparently on a much larger scale, he didn’t want his fragile human employees anywhere near this. Jordan would need to take some time off as well, but she needed to brief him on what she knew before he could send her home.

  “I’m not sure, Cynthia. But if this thing is strong enough to affect a strong young man like Walt this badly imagine what it could do to some of our elderly patients. Until we know what this is, I think it is best to assume that it is contagious.”

  Cynthia took a stack of papers off the printer just as it finished printing them out.

  “Here’s the list, and everyone’s charts. I’ll go talk to everyone, let them know what’s going on. I’ll head out as soon as I cancel today’s appointments.”

  Dalton quickly scanned the list, then stormed into the back of the clinic to gather some supplies. There where ten shifter households that had been affected. He had his work cut out for him today.

  Jordan was nowhere to be found, so he set out on his own to talk to the shifters. If his suspicions were right, their sleepy little town was about to be in for one hell of a wild ride. Walt’s house was closest to the clinic, so he headed there first.

 
“Walt?” He rapped sharply on the door for the third time. Just as he was getting ready to come in without an invitation, he heard Walt’s weak reply.”

  “Doc? That you? I’m sure glad you’re home. Come on in.”

  Even among their kind Walt was remarkably fit. He worked as a ranger in a nearby park and spent almost all his time outside. Seeing him in his bed, ashen and exhausted, seemed as wrong as a cheerful tune on the day of a funeral.

  “Hey, Walt. I heard you’re feeling a little under the weather.”

  “The way I feel right now, under the weather sounds downright good,” Walt replied with a wan smile.

  “Can you tell me what’s been going on?”

  “I haven’t been feeling that well the last few weeks, but lately it’s gotten downright intolerable. I’m about to go out of my mind stuck in this bed.”

  “What symptoms are you having?”

  A half-hour later Dalton’s suspicions where confirmed. Walt’s symptoms were that of arsenic poisoning. With a heavy heart, he finished making notes under Walt’s name and headed to the next household on his list.

  Four hours later he was close to shaking with frustration. Everyone’s symptoms were the same, but that was about the only thing—aside from being shifters of course—that the victims had in common. They’d eaten out at different restaurants, bought their groceries different places. He had no idea how they were being exposed. Short of asking them to leave town—a difficult thing in most of their weakened conditions—he had no idea how to make sure they weren’t exposed to any more poison so that their bodies could start to heal.

  With a heavy heart, he walked back to the clinic. A note from Cynthia said that she’d let all the employees except Julie know what was going on and that she’d left Julie a voicemail since she hadn’t been into work yet that day. He frowned in confusion. Julie, their lab technician and his best friend since childhood, was a workaholic. He couldn’t remember her ever taking a sick day, much less staying home without calling first. She’d been known to work from home—that was where her equipment was—but not without calling.

  He almost jumped when Jordan started to speak. He had been so busy worrying about Julie that he hadn’t even heard her come in.

  “Doctor O’Malley. I heard you were back when almost every one of my house calls today had already seen a doctor. Have you been able to find anything I missed? I honestly don’t have any idea what is affecting them like this.”

  “Have you talked to Julie?”

  The young redhead’s eyebrows raised when he countered her question with one of his own, but she answered him.

  “No. I’ve been waiting for her call though. She’s analyzing some samples from the shifter patients’ homes to see if she can find an environmental cause for their symptoms.”

  He felt each of the words like a blow to the gut.

  “What?! How long has she been working on that?”

  “The entire time you’ve been gone almost, so about a month? No results yet though.”

  “How could you expose her to something that has shifters on their freaking deathbeds?”

  She looked worried. “Well, the only people getting sick have been shifters. Do you think whatever this is could be affecting humans too?”

  “Until we know if it is, no one gets exposed. Take the rest of the week off, and we can go from there.”

  Jordan’s stance went rigid. “I’ve been treating these guys the entire time you’ve been gone without being exposed. I’m going to keep treating them. You’ll need my help to free up your time so you can figure out what this is.”

  It made him uneasy, but Jordan was right. Except that he didn’t need to figure out what it was. He needed to figure out who was poisoning his fellow shifters. He quickly filled Jordan in and left her with instructions to start bringing clean food and water with her on house calls. Everyone should start to get better quickly if they quit getting poisoned. Once that was done, he set out to check on Julie. As worried as he was, he just might throttle her if she’d holed herself up in her lab and forgotten to check in. She lived in an apartment right above the lab, so he headed in that direction to make sure she was okay. Even a small amount of a poison this potent could be fatal to Julie. She was human and almost painfully fragile. The thought of losing her … he hastened his steps. Surely she was okay. She had to be.

  Chapter 3

  Julie groaned as shivers wracked her small frame. She knew she should pick herself up off the floor, at least make it to her bed, but every time she’d tried, her weakened limbs hadn’t been able to support her weight. Yesterday she’d been too miserable to be concerned. Today she was just as miserable, but she was starting to become truly scared. What if she didn’t get better? If she could just make her way to her cell phone … blackness overtook her consciousness, and she slept once more.

  Sometime later—hours or days, she was no longer sure—consciousness bled into her mind once more. She almost shied away from it. When she slept, she didn’t hurt ….

  But there it was again. A voice, calling her name. Dalton? She had to be hallucinating. He wasn’t due back for several days yet. She tried to answer him. Hallucination or not, she would always want him there if she was in trouble. He was steady, sure. If she could answer him, he would come and fix this. Please let him be real ….

  Her voice offered barely a whisper, rusty from disuse and weak from her illness. Her best friend was a shifter. Maybe, just maybe she’d been loud enough for his sensitive hearing. She knew though when he continued to call her name and knock, that she hadn’t been loud enough. Oh, he might come back again, once he hadn’t seen her or heard from her at work … unless he was too late. Could she really die here?

  A loud crack sounded through the lab downstairs. The sound of the door being broken down? And footsteps pounded their way up the stairs. Thank goodness. He had heard her. Secure in the knowledge that Dalton was here and everything would be okay, she allowed herself to succumb to unconsciousness once more.

  She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she opened her eyes again. The last time she’d been awake, it had been night, and light now filtered through the windows. She opened her mouth to ask what day it was but wasn’t able to utter more than a moan.

  Dalton was at her side in an instant. He smoothed the hair back from her face and brought a straw to her lips. She tentatively took a sip—nausea had been her constant companion lately—and when it stayed down, she swallowed a few more small mouthfuls.

  “What day is it?”

  “It’s Tuesday.” He took her hand as she said it. His touch was comforting, but they hadn’t held hands like this since they were children. Not since ….

  “It can’t be Tuesday. I went to work on Wednesday, and then I got sick. So… Thursday maybe?”

  Dalton went still beside her. “It’s Tuesday. You mean to tell me that you’ve been missing for days, and not one damn soul from our office thought to check on you?” There was an edge of anger to his voice. She chose her next words carefully.

  “You know you’re the one I call when I’m working from home. They probably just thought I—”

  “You call Jordan when I’m not here though, right?”

  “Her or Cynthia.”

  “Not anymore. You need to call one person, and if you don’t show up, someone damn well needs to come check on you when I’m not home to look after you.”

  He said it like she was a child in need of a sitter, and she bristled. She wasn’t going to start an argument now though. Dalton was as stubborn as they came, and they’d had this fight plenty of times before. He wanted to protect her from everything, including himself. If he had his way, she’d be living the rest of her days in a bunker strong enough to withstand a nuclear warhead, swaddled in layers of bubble wrap. She rolled her eyes to let him know that she didn’t agree with the statement, even though he already knew it all too well. For the moment, a change of subject was probably for the best.

  “How are the shi
fters doing? The ones that were sick?”

  She knew she’d succeeded in distracting him from his ire when the tension left his body, and he ran a hand over his short red hair, the way he always did when he was trying to puzzle something out.

  “Are they feeling better?”

  “That kind of depends on how they were a few days ago, but … not good, Julie. I’m not sure Walt is going to make it, and the others aren’t much better.”

  “I was afraid of that. If I could just figure out what they’d caught … but every culture I’ve taken is clean. If they had anything, viral or bacterial, I should have been able to find it by now. I even started taking samples of all the food in their homes, the water … I mailed some off to Mobile for a more comprehensive tox screen than what I can do here, but I’m not exactly high on their priority list. There’s no telling how long it will take for it to come back.”

  “I know what it was. Julie … they were poisoned. I just don’t know the source.”

  “What? What the hell could poison a werewolf?” And if it could poison a were, what was it going to do to her much more fragile body?

  “Silver laced arsenic, very potent. I saw a case of it in Mississippi. I was hoping it was an isolated incident, but I knew that it probably wasn’t. I just can’t imagine why they’ve chosen our community to target.”

  Chapter 4

  Even as he said the words, a sickening realization dawned on him. They’d finished testing a single subject … it was time for a larger trial. They weren’t targets. They were damned lab rats, and this was the perfect community for a trial run. Small, not newsworthy … a doctor who would be striving to cover up the fact that his patients were shifters, and that there was something out there that could kill a shifter. God only knew what some of the human extremist groups would do once that information became widespread.