by Coyote Starr
Alpha Hunter
An M/M Alpha/Omega Mpreg Novella
Coyote Starr
Copyright © 2017 by Coyote Starr
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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About Alpha Hunter
An M/M Mpreg Novella
Kill the monsters. Don’t fall in love with them. And definitely don’t have their babies.
Ethan spent his whole life training to hunt down and eliminate the deviant, all-male wolf-shifter packs—the ones made up of the Alphas whose ability to magically impregnate other males threatens the very fabric of shifter society.
Then an encounter with one man changes everything—especially when Ethan finds himself pregnant. If Ethan is himself a fertile Omega, then Jamal isn't really a fiend, and everything Ethan believes might be wrong.
And the more time Ethan spends with Jamal, the more he's beginning to think that maybe this baby is meant to be.
Assuming they can live long enough for Ethan to give birth—and to bring about peace among the shifter packs.
Love the Alphas. Protect the Omegas. Save the babies.
Book 1 of the hot new Alpha Hunter Series!
Dedication
This novella is dedicated to Harper B. Cole, with love and thanks!
Chapter 1
The monster he hunted was so close that Ethan could hear the thing breathing. He couldn't pinpoint the sound’s origin, though. The tombstones in this old cemetery redirected the noises and made the harsh rasping seem to come from every direction, even to his wolf-shifter hearing.
It might have been better if he could have shifted to his wolf form, but that made it easier for the deviants to track him.
No. Better to hunt them in his human shape, using human weapons.
Even if he couldn’t hear as well.
He could hear Adrian's voice in his mind, the old Hunter scolding him in his rough voice. Then do not use your ears.
Ethan’s sight wasn't of any use here, either. It was too dark—the gravestones and monuments, with their cracked and crumbling angel statues, were merely dark patches against a barely lighter sky.
Resting one fist lightly on the ground, he knelt behind the medium-sized mausoleum he had ducked behind when he first caught the breathing. He closed his eyes and let his senses fall away, one by one, focusing on each briefly to make sure he didn't need it.
Sight. Gone. Only the blackness of his inner eyelids.
Touch. He readjusted his grip on his broadsword, felt the grit of the dirt beneath the knuckles of his other hand, the pressure of the ground against one knee. Then he let his awareness of those things drift out of his consciousness.
Hearing. The other wolf's breathing sounded less harsh. It was catching its breath. Ethan had to hurry, or he wouldn't be able to catch it.
No. This can't be rushed.
Taking a deep breath of his own, he moved aside any idea of rushing, and simply allowed the sounds to slip away from his thoughts.
Taste. There was something there, a hint of an odd, wild flavor on the back of his throat. The taste of a rogue Alpha.
That sense he allowed himself to linger on, even as he moved to the last one.
Smell. With the shift in his focus to the scents in the air, that suggestion of something wild on his tongue became the full-blown aroma of the feral, the untamed.
The virile.
The monstrous.
And I know right where you are.
Opening his eyes, he allowed all his senses to flood back in, and this time, they all pointed in the same direction.
In one flowing motion, he stood and swung his broadsword in a smooth, silent circle, working out any kinks that might have developed during his sensory exercise.
As if he had become a shadow, Ethan slipped toward the nightmare slinking through the graveyard, coming on it from behind before it realized he was there.
This one was particularly ugly, caught halfway between animal and human form, standing upright on bent hind-legs, its wolf's muzzle highlighted in the moonlight as it turned its nose up into the air.
It caught his scent at the last instant, spinning around to face him as his broadsword whistled through the air, its centuries-old blade slicing cleanly through the flesh and crunching into the vertebrae. With a practiced move, Ethan jumped backward and tugged the broadsword out of the werewolf's neck to remove himself from the reach of its claws. It wasn't unusual for the creatures to swipe at him reflexively before their bodies realized they were dead.
Ethan had the scars to prove it.
But as long as he avoided a wolf's jaws, he was usually okay taking one of them out.
This one's body seemed to recognize that it was done for, though. Even as its mouth continued to snarl, its legs crumpled beneath it. Ethan watched dispassionately as it fell to the ground, attempting to determine whether or not he should step closer to deliver a final blow, or simply stand back as its last breath bubbled out.
When it dug its front claws into the dirt and attempted to drag its way toward him, he slipped to one side, dancing around behind it long enough to slam his broadsword down one more time. The head still wasn't entirely severed—it took much more precision and power to behead a monster in one stroke than most popular fiction suggested—but the creature fell still.
Once it stopped moving, he took the time to finish the decapitation. It never hurt to be certain, after all. Then he pulled a phone out of his back pocket. Nothing fancy—he didn't want to risk his good electronics on a hunt—but enough to let Adrian’s clean-up team know where the body was. Adrian himself had been in Virginia scouting a new group, last Ethan had heard. But the old Hunter had promised Ethan he’d hit the road to South Carolina as soon as possible.
The lead clean-up guy would be glad to hear Ethan had finished this hunt in a cemetery. They were Adrian's favorite places for him to complete a kill, as they made body disposal much easier.
Planting the point of his broadsword into the ground and sliding his hand down the hilt, he squatted to get a closer look at the abomination's body, trying to determine if he could see any difference between it and his own packmates.
Alpha.
Yeah, right.
These creatures were not Alphas. Not in the way Ethan had been raised to believe.
They weren't leaders. Didn't have a pack.
Just the horrific ability to impregnate other men, the ones they called "Omegas." Sometimes, one of them went rogue and attacked a normal lupine shapeshifter, some poor gay pack member whose one-night-stand turned into a nightmare.
How must that feel? he wondered. To wake up from a night of passion, only to discover the most basic tenets of biology overturned...
To create life, another voice whispered deep inside him.
Not for long, though. Those poor males had their unnatural pregnancies terminated. Every once in a while, a pregnant male went crazy and trie
d to leave his birth-pack to join his attacker.
Those wolves had to be put down.
The thought of it made him sick. Shaking his head, he went back to examining the corpse.
Its mouth still held a sneer. The wolf had been in his late twenties or so, with a normal face and a half-beard that would not have suggested his deviant nature. The cloudy, sightless eyes had been blue, and at best, his physique could have been called rangy.
No. He was definitely not like any Alpha werewolf Ethan had ever seen. Just another clear indication that those mutants were abominations.
Sighing, Ethan pushed himself back up to standing.
Where the hell are Adrian’s guys?
All Ethan wanted was a drink, and then bed.
Maybe someone else's bed, for a change. He rolled his shoulders. He could definitely do with the tension-relief a night of sheer, uncomplicated physicality could offer him—the kind of release he could get from sex, rather than killing.
Unless his clean-up crew bothered to show up pretty soon, though, the clubs would close before he had a chance to find someone to go home with.
There was a college campus not far away, he remembered.
Should be plenty of bars with lots of athletic, eager young men to choose from.
Even if talking to them did make Ethan feel unspeakably old, despite being only twenty-one himself.
Maybe he’d shift, go for a run first.
No. Definitely sex first.
At the sight of Adrian and his team making their way through the cemetery, Ethan raised a hand in greeting. As soon as he handed off this duty, he could start the real fun.
Time to get my game face on.
* * *
Jamal Akua leaned his elbows back against the bar and surveyed the crowded room. He hadn't wanted to come out tonight—college bars weren't really his scene, after all—but the rest of the pack had insisted, and as the only Enforcer who had traveled to the Summit with them, he felt it was his job to keep an eye on them.
"It is not your duty, son," Kamau, the pack leader, had told him. "Not tonight. We are here in peace. The other shifters will not attack." As he had left with the others, he had patted him gently on the arm. "If the summit does not go well tomorrow, we will be spending all our time looking for a new pack to trade Omegas with. That will be enough stress. Please, at least attempt to have a good time tonight."
So far, so good, really. Although alcohol didn't do much to burn through a shapeshifter's metabolism, five stiff drinks in a row had relaxed him enough that he didn't feel the need to glance over his shoulder every few seconds.
Relax.
The other pack Alphas were enjoying themselves, along with a couple of pack Omegas. And more than one or two of the humans in the bar had attached themselves to pack members, too. Jamal hoped the Alphas had remembered to bring condoms. The chances of interbreeding with humans were lower than they were with other shifters, but every so often it happened. A shifter baby born to an unsuspecting human parent was inevitably a problem. And if the unsuspecting human was male?
As an Enforcer, I would have to take care of that problem.
One way or another.
The pack leader wanted all wolf shifters—Alphas, Omegas, and even Betas—brought up within the pack. The Council wanted all shifters to remain hidden from general human knowledge. Everyone wanted the Omegas and babies protected. That meant it was a good idea to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Jamal never wanted to have to kill a child's parent, if he could avoid it. He had been taught to revere fatherhood—even to removing a child from its father was more than he liked to consider.
A reminder to the Alpha males about protection won't go amiss, he decided.
He pushed away from the bar and stood up straight, moving lithely through the crowd toward Kopano. Leaning in toward the other man, he whispered a few words into his ear. Kopano's grin flashed wide and white, and he patted the pocket of his jeans with a wink. Jamal nodded, scanning the room for his next target.
A flare of golden-white hair caught his eye by the door, and he found himself staring at the blond man taking his ID back from the bouncer on the stool and gliding into the room.
He was far from the only white man in the place. Unlike other places Jamal had been in the Deep South, this bar's clientele was racially mixed—a side-effect, he assumed, of the nearby college, as well as perhaps a less volatile racial divide than he had been led to expect. But he was certainly the palest person, by far. Hair so light that only its gleaming gold highlights made it clear that he wasn't albino and milk-white skin both almost glowed, even in the bar's dim lighting. He carried a black leather jacket too warm for the weather, and his serious expression seemed to evaluate everyone in the room.
Jamal stood frozen to the spot, unable to look away.
The man's assessing stare slid past him, paused, and then tracked back until their gazes met. The stranger's eyes matched the rest of him—a blue so pale that they appeared almost colorless, except for a dark ring around the outside of the iris.
Like a wolf's eyes.
The thought shook Jamal out of his frozen state.
Could he be a wolf?
He needed to get closer, see if he could scent the male. At the thought of getting near enough to smell him, Jamal's breath caught in his chest, his cock stirring.
Getting next to the stranger had nothing to do with desire, he told himself.
If the blond was a wolf, Jamal he needed to let Kamau know.
And if he isn't a wolf?
Then Jamal needed to know that for himself.
Surreptitiously, he slipped his hand into his own pants pocket, glad to be able to double-check that he, too, had brought protection. He almost hadn't, sure as he had been that he would spend the evening watching over his packmates, rather than participating in the evening's sexual hunt.
You're still not certain that won't be your fate, Akua.
He was, nonetheless, glad to be prepared.
Chapter 2
After his initial survey of the bar, Ethan had paused, re-examining the composition of the crowd.
More wolf-shifters than humans.
More men than women.
More gay men than straight, it looked like.
That could definitely work in my favor.
Mixed-race group—but a disproportionate number of the men seemed somehow related, or at least linked. At first glance, he couldn't have articulated why, exactly, he had come to that conclusion. That they were all young, fit, black males who made similar fashion choices—mostly jeans and plain T-shirts—wasn't enough for that assumption. A bar in a college town was enough explanation for those similarities.
Closer scrutiny suggested that he was right, though. That particular set of men primarily spoke to one another, or to people they were hitting on.
Or to the one particularly muscular man who was making his way across the room, touching base with every one of the guys Ethan had pegged as being connected to one another. He watched him lean in to whisper to another man—instructions, from the way the other man nodded understanding.
Alpha male.
The thought flitted through his mind as his gaze flicked back to his face and they made eye contact.
At the impact of the man's stare, Ethan's breath hitched in his chest.
Damn, he's hot.
The muscular man slid around the edges of the bar, stopping to speak to several other men along the way, but always moving toward Ethan, his liquid-brown eyes flickering toward him every thirty seconds or so.
Yeah, he was every bit as interested in Ethan as Ethan was in him.
Smiling to himself, Ethan sidled up to the bar and ordered a drink. Something cold and strong was definitely in order. Even a cold shower after the hunt hadn't entirely cured his sense of being permanently bathed in a slight sheen of sweat. Charleston, South Carolina was not the sort of place he would want to have to live—or hunt—permanently.
Lucky for him
, settling down wasn’t an option—in Charleston or anywhere else.
We go where the monsters are.
I prefer it that way.
That's what he told himself, anyway.
He took a long sip of the drink the bartender handed him, letting the icy fizz of the tonic rest on the back of his tongue long enough for the bite of the gin to kick in, and then closed his eyes and sighed in appreciation.
"What are you having? Would I like it so much?"
Ethan opened his eyes and smiled, unsurprised to see the owner of the voice was the man who had been stalking him around the room. His voice was low and deep, his accent almost musical.
Tilting his head back, he regarded the dark man in front of him, who stood about two inches too close for someone Ethan didn't know. Close enough to be flirtatious, not so near as to make a lone wolf anxious. His dark brown eyes absorbed the light, reflecting nothing but liquid color back at Ethan. A dimple flashed in only one cheek when he grinned. "Well? Do you plan to tell me?"
Tilting his head to one side, Ethan glanced up at him from under his lashes. The man didn't tower over him. Oddly, he had expected him to—something about the guy made him seem bigger than he actually was, up close. "Gin and tonic," he said. "Nothing special."
"Not special? I do not believe it. All that you touch must become special." A half step closer allowed him to lean one elbow on the bar. Muscles in his arm bunched and flowed along his arm and up under the sleeve of his gray T-shirt. Ethan had to stop himself from reaching out to slide one finger along the smooth skin of his bicep.
At the mere thought of touching him, heat pooled low in his belly and his cock twitched in response.
Oh, yes. This one would do nicely.
Waving one finger in a lazy circle to encompass all the man's associates in the room, he asked, "You guys on some sort of team?"
That single dimple flashed again. "Something like that."
"I like your accent. Where are you from?"
"Most of us are originally from Botswana, in Africa, though many of us live here in the United States now."
