The Baby Shift- Mississippi Page 3

  Her heart sank into her stomach. “So, this is looking pretty hopeless then.”

  “Not necessarily. There are only so many ways the poison could be delivered. That will narrow it down some.”

  “Oh my God, Chris…the groceries…do you think someone could be getting to his food supply somehow? I need to throw it all out! What if—”

  “I guess that’s possible, but the only people to come in contact with his food are Lyla and Walter. They get his order together for me every week, and they are the last people I’d suspect of poisoning someone.”

  “That’s true. Still…” Chris was right. The couple that owned the small store in town were good people through and through. There was no way they’d done this.

  “You’re right. Better safe than sorry. I’m going to drive into Hattiesburg and pick up some things myself. You go through and throw out the stuff that’s in the kitchen now. I’ll be back in plenty of time for you to get something together for him for supper.”

  When Derrick arrived to do some work on the kitchen cabinets a few minutes after Chris had left, he found Alice in the middle of throwing out every scrap of food in the house.

  “Alice…sweetheart?” His voice was gentle and calming…and it was completely obvious that he thought she’d lost her marbles. “Um…what are you doing?”

  “I have to get rid of anything that might be contaminated. This all has to go!”

  “Alice…why do you think all the food in your kitchen has been contaminated?”

  She took a shaky breath and turned to face him. “Arsenic…the hospital called, and Dad’s been exposed to so much of it that if he’d been, human he would be…”

  She couldn’t even finish the thought out loud, and tears had once more started streaming down her face. For the second time that morning she accepted a comforting embrace. She knew that with his sharpened senses Derrick had to be able to smell Chris’s scent on her, but he didn’t comment on it.

  It seemed the most natural thing in the world to turn her face up toward his when he wiped the tears from her cheeks, to stand on tiptoe to press her lips against his.

  She was expecting the kiss, but she wasn’t expecting the reaction it drew from her. She groaned against Derrick’s lips and wrapped her arms more tightly around him, pressing herself to him and urging him to go further.

  He lifted her and set her on the counter before pressing his lips to hers again. Soon his mouth suckled her nipple through the material of her t-shirt and thin bra, and his fingers were moving into her shorts, delving into her moistened heat. Her hips started to rock against his hand, and an orgasm crashed over her.

  Derrick had just stepped back enough to get room to work at the button on his pants when the baby started crying. He smiled ruefully and pressed a kiss against her temple. As passion wore off, embarrassment set in. How could she have done this? With her father sick in the next room and her child upstairs, just a few hours after she’d let Chris hold her in his arms?

  Alice rushed from the room, a blush staining her cheeks. She bolted up the stairs to get Patrick, shamelessly using his cries as an excuse to escape the lust that had filled her when she was in Derrick’s arms.

  She changed Patrick and played with him for a few minutes. She was just about to head back downstairs when she heard raised voices coming from the front yard. Her first instinct was to wait out the strife, but it became clear eventually that if someone didn’t intervene, this wasn’t an argument that would end any time soon. She quickly settled Patrick in the living room and headed outside to try to diffuse the argument that was escalating quickly from the sound of things.

  “Did you think for a second I would let you bring anything else into this house? She’s HUMAN, Chris! Her and Patrick. You could be killing them!”

  Raw hatred shown in Chris’s eyes as he glared toward the house and noticed her standing on the front steps.

  “Me? I could be killing them? Don’t you dare put this on me. You’re just a guilty man trying to cast the blame on anyone but himself. And to be screwing her while you’re killing her father? That’s just sick. I can smell her scent and lust all over you.”

  “Enough,” Alice said quietly. Both men still heard her and turned to face her. “That’s enough, and you will both leave right now. Until I can figure out who’s doing this to Dad, I don’t want to see either one of you.

  Chapter 8

  Derrick waited in the bushes for hours the following day outside the house. It would have been easier to try to break in on a weekday—fewer neighbors around—but this had to be done now. Before Chris could screw things up any more than he already had.

  Finally, he was satisfied that no one was watching. He crept up to the back of the house and eased open a window. Fast in, fast out…he hoped.

  The house was silent, but he’d expected that. He quickly folded his clothes next to the window and shifted forms. When it came to searching without quite knowing what to look for or where to look, his lupine form was always his first choice.

  He wandered through the first floor without smelling anything out of the ordinary. Upstairs, then. It had to be. He was leaving his scent all over the house so there would be no way that he could do this twice.

  He’d wandered through most of the second story when he finally smelled something promising. The clear, piercing scent of silver, coupled with the same smell of sickness he had noticed emanating from Don in recent months.

  Derrick followed the scent into a bedroom that seemed to have been converted into a workroom, and what he saw stopped him in his tracks. He ran downstairs to his clothes and shifted forms a second time, but the sound of Chris’s truck pulling into the driveway had him quickly climbing back out the window without gathering the evidence he had found upstairs.

  * * *

  “Alice, you have to believe me!”

  “Of course. Believe the man I’ve known for a few months over my lifelong friend? Chris isn’t hurting my father, Derrick. He’s trying to help me figure out who is. Why would he do that if he’s guilty?”

  The woman was as stubborn as her old man, which was really saying something.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Alice. Maybe to keep the suspicion off himself?”

  “Or maybe you’re just jealous of him and trying to get him out of the picture,” there was icy determination in her eyes, and Derrick couldn’t help but think that she’d never looked more beautiful.

  She’d never paid him any mind when they were younger. He’d been too steady, too mundane to catch her eye in their youth. But he’d grown into the promise of steel and strength, and she’d matured. And now?

  “Trust me, sweetheart,” he replied, his eyes on the lips that had been pressed against his earlier that day, “I don’t need lies to help me get rid of the competition. Hell, there is no competition. You and I both know that.”

  She glared at him but didn’t deny it.

  “Chris has been my friend for years, Derrick. He wouldn’t, couldn’t have done this. I think you need to leave.”

  Derrick turned to go, already trying to formulate a plan to keep an eye on Don, Patrick, and Alice. There was no way he would leave them unprotected. Not when he knew what kind of a monster Chris was. He would just run home for a few essentials, and then he would guard them every free moment that he had.

  Chapter 9

  Alice clanged dishes angrily in the sink, replaying her conversation with Derrick again and again. How dare he come over here spinning wild stories and accusing the only friend from her youth who had stood by her of something this terrible?

  It couldn’t be Chris. There was just no way. Sure, he could be angry and territorial at times—his behavior outside the hospital was proof of that—but why would he do something that would hurt her as deeply as this?

  And how could he be getting the arsenic to her father without affecting her or Patrick? Granted, Patrick had shifter blood that would protect him even as young as he was now, but there was no way that she was immu
ne.

  But…if it wasn’t someone poisoning the environment around them, or all the food in the house…

  It had to be someone who either knew her father very well or had direct access to him. He’d only had two visitors the entire time she’d been back. Everyone else was afraid to come near her father for fear that his condition might be contagious. But if someone were poisoning him…that person wouldn’t have been scared. So, who was it, then? Her oldest friend or the man who could make her heart beat faster with a mere glance?

  She had to know. If she couldn’t find out who this was and stop them, her father might die. It would be hard to search Derrick’s house. She knew where it was, of course. That was next to inevitable in a town this size. But Chris’s house…she knew it like the back of her hand. He lived in his parent’s house, she’d learned since returning to town. They had moved into a smaller cabin in the hopes that he would marry and settle down and raise his children there the way they’d raised him.

  It would be so easy to look through the house. So easy, and such a betrayal if she were wrong. And yet…her father’s life was more important than Chris’s feelings. There was only one choice to be made here, and it needed to be made before she lost her nerve. Or, more importantly, before she lost her dad.

  Once he woke up, if he felt up to watching Patrick, she would go. It wasn’t ideal, but the only people who would come into this house to watch her son were the people who might be killing…no.

  No one would die. She would find a way to end this today. She set about making sure that the living room was completely toddler proof so that her father wouldn’t need to do anything more than pick up the phone if there was trouble. Chris’s house was nearby, and it should only take her about half an hour to search it. She spent longer than that in the shower some days, so Patrick should be fine without her.

  Luck was with her when she got to Chris’s. He wasn’t home, and the back door was unlocked. She ghosted through the first floor, finding nothing out of the ordinary. The second floor, however…

  She stared at the vials of powder that filled the box. It was dark grey, almost black, with silver chunks mixed in. Real silver? If so, it could explain why her father hadn’t been able to easily fight the poison on his own. Of course, there could just as easily be another explanation.

  There was only one way to find out. She needed to take a vial—surely he wouldn’t miss one out of so many—and get it analyzed. How she would go about that, she wasn’t sure. But there had to be a way. She took a vial and, on impulse, took out her phone and snapped a picture of the mailing label on the box. If this turned out to be poison it might be good to know where it came from.

  She sent the picture to Derrick with the words You might be right. At this point, she was fairly sure he was innocent, and Alice needed all the help she could get.

  Just as she hit send, the door opened behind her. “You shouldn’t have come here, Alice.”

  His voice sounded genuinely pained. She hit the call button, then turned the sound all the way down on the call. With luck, Chris wouldn’t notice that she was calling Derrick for help. She slid the phone into her pocket as she turned around.

  “I shouldn’t have come here? You shouldn’t have poisoned my dad, Chris.”

  “I did it for you, Alice.” His voice was pleading, his eyes earnest. Her heart dropped into her stomach. He was obviously unhinged. How had she not noticed? “I knew as long as he was here, as long as he lived, that you would never come home. I did this for us.”

  She swallowed hard, unsure of how to proceed. “Well…you could stop now, right? I’m here, and you could stop. Let him heal.”

  “It isn’t that simple, Alice. This is bigger now. They would never let me—” Chris clamped his lips shut.

  “They?” She queried softly.

  Chris’s eyes met hers again, and the softness bled out of them. They turned steely and hard. “I have to finish it now, Alice. You shouldn’t have come.”

  He crossed the room so quickly that Alice had no time to react. His arm snaked around her neck in a bruising hold, while his free hand reached for one of the vials and pried the top off. Tears filled Alice’s eyes as she tried to pry his arm away from her neck. There was no use. He was just too strong.

  She closed her eyes as he pressed the vial against her lips, trying to force the poison down her. All her energy, all her focus turned to keeping her lips closed tightly. The vial mashed her lips into her teeth until she felt cuts opening. She felt a sting as the poison seeped into the open wounds.

  Chris seemed to realize his tactic wasn’t working. The pressure from the vial eased even as his grip around her throat tightened. After an initial moment of panic, a sense of detachment fell over her. The world faded to grey, then black. Finally, her thoughts stopped too, and she could finally rest.

  Chapter 10

  All Alice could think, as she forced her eyes to open, was that she couldn’t possibly have died if her head was still hurting this much. Nausea and chills wracked her body, and her throat felt thick, swollen and painful when she tried to swallow. A bitter taste filled her mouth, and distantly she wondered if Chris had poured the poison down her throat after all. How much had she ingested? Could her body fight it off? Pain wracked her abdomen, and she couldn’t feel her fingers well when she moved them to cradle her stomach.

  A sound pulled her from her morose self-examination. Two wolves were fighting each other, rending with tooth and claw. Had Derrick come and saved her after all then? Their coloring was similar, the same reddish, tawny color that many of the weres—and natural wolves for that matter—in the region were. She’d seen Chris shift before, but that had been years ago.

  She watched on in horror, wishing desperately for Derrick to win, but unsure which wolf he was. Every scratch, every bite, sent hope and fear pulsing through her in equal measure until, at last, the room fell silent except for the labored breathing of the wolf still standing. Slowly, every minute movement was obviously causing him pain, the wolf began to shift.

  She clung to consciousness, willing herself to see Derrick’s dark features instead of Chris’s light hair and blue eyes. Finally, the change was complete, and with a rush of relief, she let go of wakefulness and succumbed to the abyss.

  The next days passed in an indecipherable blur. Vaguely she could remember voices. Derrick, a voice that she thought belonged to his cousin, the doctor, and even her father’s. Was he feeling better, then? Would she get better, or was her fragile human form too weak to fight off the poison pulsing through her veins?

  Finally, she reached a point where she could truly understand the voices speaking to her, though she could not quite open her eyes for more than a second and she certainly couldn’t hold up her side of the conversation. Derrick explained to her that she hadn’t ingested much of the arsenic, but it had been a potent mixture. She had a good chance of survival after making through the first 72 hours, according to Dalton. (The other voice had been his, and he had stayed in town to see her and her father through their recoveries.)

  In the weeks that followed she started to improve much more rapidly. Patrick was brought in to see her every morning, and in the afternoons Derrick—or sometimes her father, who was back to his former strength—would bring her out to sit on the screened-in front porch. The breeze had grown lighter and cooler, bringing with it a teasing hint of fall. The sun was softer, gentle on her skin. Then, finally, she was able to move around all on her own. She still wasn’t back to her former strength, but it was getting close.

  Derrick had hardly left her side, and she remembered him holding her small hand between his calloused ones before she had been able to open her eyes. But since she’d woken, he treated her with kidskin gloves, as though he thought a strong breath of wind would break her. He kept a respectful distance always, and Alice was starting to wonder if the powerful attraction she’d felt between them had been all in her head.

  Surely it couldn’t have been, though. One afternoon he
’d come in after she’d fallen asleep on the couch, and she had opened her eyes to see him standing there, with Patrick in his arms, staring at her with such an intense longing that it had taken her breath away. No, she decided. There was no way it had all been in her head. Maybe, she thought, he just needed a little bit of a hint from her.

  Chapter 11

  “Derrick?”

  Derrick had been heading out the door to go and buy some supplies to finish some repairs in the laundry room. Soon, he thought sadly, the repairs on the house would be complete. He would still see Alice, of course, but only in passing. He wouldn’t get to speak with her every day, to see for himself that she was okay.

  It had to be this way though. He had no regrets about killing Chris. Chris had almost killed the woman he loved, and her father, a man who had become a friend. And there was more to the situation than met the eye. The more he and Dalton investigated it, the more it looked like Chris had been testing the poison he’d been using on Don. Yes, this was a part of something bigger. He couldn’t be sorry for uncovering a threat to their entire species.

  His only regret was that the woman he loved had watched him kill her best friend. She probably wouldn’t ever want anything to do with him, but at least she was alive. At least she was safe.

  He swallowed thickly, forcing down his emotions before he answered.

  “You need help with something before I leave, Alice?” Her father had gone into town with Patrick. He was supposedly getting groceries, but Derrick was fairly sure that he was just looking for another excuse to show off his grandson. If he didn’t help her before he left, she would be on her own until they got back. He should have thought to ask.