Southern Alpha Book One (Southern Alpha Serial 1) Read online

  Southern Alpha

  Part One

  Carina Wilder

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Coming October 17th!

  Also by Carina Wilder

  Introduction

  This is the first instalment of the Southern Alpha serial. Each of the four parts will be released approximately once a week, starting with this one on October 8. These are NOT complete books, and they’re meant to be read as episodes, approximately 15,000 words each (this one is 17,000 words).

  If you hate cliffhangers, you may want to wait until all four parts are out!

  You can pre-order the second instalment here: Southern Alpha Part 2

  This serial is a spin-off of the Alpha’s Hunger Series of full-length novels. You don’t have to read them, but it’s recommended in order to meet the characters:

  Wolf’s Hunger

  Wolf’s Secret

  Wolf’s Choice

  Enjoy!

  xo

  Carina

  Chapter 1

  Sierra

  The cemetery’s menacing wrought iron double-gate stood open in front of me, welcoming and imposing at once. Something about the way it creaked back and forth ever so slightly on its hinges told me it would probably slam shut the moment I walked through. Either that, or leap out and impale me on one of its sharp black spikes.

  Either way, it was definitely planning to end my life.

  I stared down at the bright red flyer that I clutched in my hand. It was almost too dark to see anything, but under the diffuse light of an overhead street lamp I could just make out the words:

  Annual Bash for New Orleans’ Seediest Denizens

  Location: The Undercroft

  St. Anthony the Abbot Graveyard

  Tonight, 12 midnight

  Open once a year to invited guests.

  Wow.

  I’d actually persuaded myself to head to an enclosed section of the Big Easy filled with dead bodies.

  In the middle of the night.

  Alone.

  Really great idea, Sierra, I told myself. So fucking sensible. Mom would be proud.

  Actually, my overly-protective mother would have throttled me if she’d known what I was up to tonight. But then, she’d never much cared for my sense of adventure. She’d hated when I’d taken a job as a journalist seven years ago. Hated that I’d visited war zones, interviewed convicts, put myself in harm’s way over and over again. Pretty much every life choice I’d ever made had horrified her.

  Now that I’d moved to America’s shadiest town to write a book about its more colorful characters and their strange nocturnal habits, Mom had pretty much given up hope that I’d ever stop being a risk-taker. The good news, I supposed, was that if I was murdered tonight, I’d never have to listen to another one of her lengthy lectures about my lack of common sense.

  Sweet, merciful death was good for something, at least.

  Shutting out thoughts of my mother’s shrill voice in my head I looked around, trying to make out the shapes of above-ground tombs silhouetted in the darkness ahead. I was only just beginning to realize that I had no idea what the “Undercroft” mentioned on the invitation was, let alone how to find it. I’d assumed that someone would be waiting at the cemetery’s entrance, ready to guide guests to the right location. But I’d been standing in the same location for at least five minutes and I hadn’t seen a single person.

  Everything was quiet.

  Too quiet.

  Wasn’t that what they always said in the movies before someone got horribly maimed or murdered?

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I was here for research purposes, not to freak myself out.

  According to the pocket guidebook in my purse, this cemetery was named after the desert-dwelling patron saint of wild beasts and gravediggers. I couldn’t help but wonder why the bash couldn’t have been held in a graveyard named for the patron saint of puppies and butterflies.

  Still, I braced myself, determined to go in. Which, by the way, was the one thing the guide book had told me never to do. A warning in the Dangers of New Orleans section specifically said:

  DO NOT ENTER GRAVEYARDS ALONE

  OR YOU WILL DIE AT THE HANDS OF A

  BLOOD-THIRSTY PSYCHOPATH! :) :) :)

  Well, okay, maybe those weren’t the exact words, and maybe there were no happy face emoticons. But the warning definitely went something like that.

  I took another deep breath and gave myself a silent pep talk. After all, it was the potential of scary moments like this that had brought me to the Big Easy in the first place. I’d wanted to expose myself to the city’s hidden corners and dark crevices, to NOLA’s creepy side. Whether it was the occult, voodoo, witchcraft, or some other bizarre bayou magic no one had yet discovered. As far as I was concerned, the weirder the better.

  As long as no one slit my throat...or worse.

  The thing was, this little inadvisable adventure was beginning to feel less like dipping a toe into unknown waters and more like throwing myself head-first into the shark-infested part of the ocean.

  “Screw psycho killers. Here goes nothing,” I muttered under my breath as I finally stepped forward, my heart edging its way towards my throat, eyes veering left and right.

  As I advanced into the cemetery’s depths, I tried to occupy my mind by reading the names carved into the stone tombs that surrounded me, as if the company of the dead would somehow keep my heart calm and steady. Cemeteries were supposed to be built on rolling green hills dotted with little headstones, crisscrossed by gently sloping walking paths.

  Oh, and sunlight. Always sunlight.

  This place, however, was the photo negative of that. No headstones here. No manicured lawns. No quaint churches. And definitely no pretty, rolling hills. This shadowy landscape was beyond creepy with its staggered rows of small monuments, crumbling crypts, and endless dark alleys. I imagined that even in the daytime the footpaths must be nearly invisible under bleak clumps of dark moss and dense patches of thorny bushes.

  I felt like I was walking into a half-built city for corpses.

  The perfect place to get killed and never heard from again.

  Stop it, I told myself. No one has any interest in killing you. At all.

  Hmm…

  Except for whoever the hell is walking up ahead.

  In the distance I spotted a stirring of movement under a tall lamp post that stood at the cemetery’s center. The dim light at the top of the post seemed to be fighting with the oppressive dark of the grounds, and the dark was winning. Two figures—a man and a woman, both dressed in black from head to toe—were heading towards the open door of a mausoleum. Through the thin fog that was forming along the ground, they seemed to move like soot-coated ghosts.

  I looked down at my clothes, wondering if I’d made a mistake by dressing in a flowing summer maxi dress of light blue and yellow, instead of wearing something more appropriate for a ghoulish evening. Then again, it wasn’t like I had much of a choice. I didn’t own any garments that screamed I’m an ass-kicker.

  Note to self: Buy a seriously badass leather outfit.

  And maybe a really big freaking knife.

  I trudged forward, staring at the small stone building. It was a clunky looking structure, not more than about seven or eight feet tall, built of speckled marble blocks patched with dark streaks of concrete from where it must have been damaged by weather and time.

  Groo
ved columns stood guard on either side of the open black doorway. The whole thing was topped off by a stone turret and a steeply-angled roof jutting up into the night sky. It looked like a creepy shed some deranged kid had assembled out of an old set of monochromatic Legos.

  One thing was for sure, though. It had to be the place I was looking for. I’d watched the other guests walk up the three shallow steps leading to its entrance. But now that I was seeing it up close, I was confused. The place was tiny, barely large enough to hold six people, let alone fifty. I couldn’t imagine how a party could possibly be carrying on inside.

  They might as well have tried to throw a rave inside a phone booth.

  But even as I approached, the faint pulse of music wafted out into the night air from somewhere within the mausoleum’s stone walls. I was beginning to wonder if the structure was an optical illusion intended to confuse and keep away unwanted guests.

  When I walked up to the entrance, a very large, very wide, and very bald-headed man emerged from the shadows and stepped into the doorway, blocking my way. His thick body and off-putting scowl made him look like a cement-mixer with the face of a constipated bulldog.

  “Oh, hi,” I said, trying and failing to peek around him to see inside the building. “I’m here to…”

  “Where’s your invitation?” he barked, clomping down the steps and holding out his hand.

  I handed him the red sheet, which he studied for a second before looking back at me. He stared into my eyes, squinting as if he was trying to focus on some detail of my face that he couldn’t quite locate. “Where’d you get this?” he asked, fluttering the page violently, his tone laced with skepticism.

  “I found it,” I said. It was the truth, after all. The flyer had been sitting on a table in the café where I’d sipped my americano that morning. “I assumed that some person in charge left it to be found by someone like me.”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s sure as hell not for you,” he said, crumpling it up and tossing it into the darkness somewhere behind me. “V.I.P.s only.”

  “Hey!” I replied, wondering how stupid I had to be to protest a bouncer’s decision to bar my entry. What was I going to do, pick a fight with an enormous man who outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds?

  “Do you have a problem with that?” he asked, his tone more snarl than English.

  “I have a problem with you littering in a graveyard. Not to mention the fact that you’re being a huge, inhospitable dick.”

  Huh. Apparently I didn’t need a black leather outfit to kick ass after all.

  “You haven’t even begun to see inhospitable, lady,” the guy growled, taking a step towards me that forced me to leap backwards, sending me colliding with something tall, firm and…hot.

  I reached my hands back to steady myself, only to find them grappling with the denim belt loops of a low-riding pair of men’s jeans. When I slipped my fingers upwards I realized that I was suddenly groping bare skin that apparently belonged to some incredibly fit behemoth of a man.

  “Fuck me!” I gasped, pulling my fingers free of the stranger’s waist.

  “Really?” a deep voice said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong—I’ll definitely think about it. But I thought people usually waited until the third date.”

  I spun around to find myself staring at a broad chest packed tightly into a white t-shirt that fit so well that I could see the outline of a set of pecs bigger and broader than any I’d ever set eyes on. His shoulders were as wide across as most doors, his muscles shapely and daunting.

  The man was a wall of power.

  Not to mention that his body was sexy as all hell.

  I couldn’t stop gawking at him, much as I tried.

  “So, what seems to be the problem here?” the chest’s owner asked.

  I pulled my eyes up to his face only to find a set of fiercely bright eyes staring down at me. They sparkled incandescent blue in the darkness, as though there was a light source somewhere behind them making his irises glow.

  As I studied his face the breath froze in my chest, trapped like a prisoner begging for release. His jaw was chiseled, his features exquisitely handsome in a dangerous, rough-around-the-edges kind of way. The bronze shade of his skin told me he spent a good deal of time outside, and only enhanced the lightness of those unbelievable eyes of his. His hair, light brown with blond streaks, fell in waves around his face, slightly unkempt but wholly tempting.

  I want so badly to touch you, I thought, my mouth dropping open. Let me run my fingers through your mane, wild man. Let me do unspeakable things to whatever you’ve got packed in those jeans of yours.

  Wait.

  Why was I thinking about putting my hands on the giant scary man?

  I slammed my lips shut and swallowed.

  “She’s not one of us, Trick,” the bouncer protested while I stood there, struck mute by my attraction to the larger-than-life stranger. “You know as well as I do that she doesn’t belong in the Undercroft.”

  The sexy giant smiled, eyeing me up and down as if assessing me for worthiness. He looked oddly pleased with the results of his scrutiny. “No,” he said, “she isn’t one of us, is she?”

  “One of you?” I asked when I could muster the words. “I’m sorry, was I supposed to buy some enormous muscles before I came here tonight?”

  I began to regret the question when the man who was apparently called Trick stepped toward me, his expression altering to something a little off-putting.

  Okay, maybe my mouthing off had angered him. Still, I stood my ground, trying desperately to keep my body from shaking.

  As he drew closer, a wholly erotic, intoxicating scent flitted its way through the air around me. All of a sudden I didn’t just want to touch him. Now all I could think about was getting him naked, ripping off my dress and asking him to push me up against a wall, part my thighs and have his way with me for hours on end.

  Devilish beast-man, turning me on like it was a game.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Sierra,” I replied, my throat almost too dry to get the syllables out.

  “Sierra,” he repeated like he was sampling the letters on his tongue. “Nice name, blondie.”

  I raked my fingers through my hair, suddenly self-conscious about my long golden waves. Everything felt inadequate; my body, my clothing, my face. There was no way this walking god could possibly find me interesting, yet all I wanted in the entire world was to feel half as sexy as he looked.

  “Let her in, Karl,” Trick said, turning to the bouncer. “She belongs here as much as anyone does.”

  “But…” the other man began to protest.

  Trick shot him a glare that seemed to say I’ll fucking kill you if you dare say but to me again, asshole. He towered over Karl, who now looked like a freaked-out mouse in comparison.

  “Are you seriously going to tell me you have a problem with what I just said?” Trick snarled in a voice that made me quake in my sandals.

  Karl lowered his head and shook it. He bulldog face and bald head were shiny with sweat now, his hands shaking. Clearly, he was terrified of the big guy, and I couldn’t exactly blame him for it.

  “Good,” said Trick, holding out a hand to me, presumably to guide me inside. “Come on, Sierra. You’re my guest, at least until we get downstairs. After that, you’re on your own.”

  When I slipped my hand into his, I froze. What should have been an innocent gesture shot a sharp pulse of sensual pleasure straight through my body, hitting me in every erogenous zone at once.

  For a second I wondered if he could make me come just by touching my fingers.

  One thing was certain. Trick was turning out to be a highly appropriate name for a man who played with me like I was a nothing more than a deck of cards in his hands.

  If New Orleans really was a city of magic, this man was the magician at its very epicenter.

  Chapter 2

  Trick

  I shouldn’t have offered her my hand. I goddamn kn
ew I shouldn’t have, but I did it anyway.

  Idiot.

  Sierra’s touch ignited something immediate and aggressive inside me. A sensual explosion, shooting bolts of searing flame through my veins.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to feel anything for anyone.

  This wasn’t the plan.

  The plan was to come to this gathering, have a few words with my allies, find out what was going on in the city, then get the hell out of the Undercroft. But now I’d gone and screwed everything up.

  I yanked my hand away from Sierra’s in an act of pure self-preservation that probably looked to her more like a hostile reflex. Ducking down through the Undercroft’s narrow stone doorway, I didn’t pause as I headed straight to the steep stairwell that descended down into the darkness. I needed to go first. I needed an excuse not to position myself next to this painfully tantalizing woman and risk more contact from those perfect fingers of hers.

  Damn it.

  I wanted to punch myself in the face. Why the fuck had I offered her my hand in the first place? I’d known full well that I was attracted to her. I’d known the moment I’d set eyes on her curvy body and picked up that sweet scent that I wanted her.

  The last thing I needed was to get a hard-on for some human. My life was already way too damned complicated. With the Alpha Trials coming up, there was too much at stake for me to be destroying myself with thoughts of getting some blond bombshell naked.

  So why the living hell did I touch her and strengthen the attraction?

  Because I’m a horny idiot whose days are numbered. That’s why.

  My eyes scanned the set of narrow marble steps plunging down into the darkness of the secret catacombs, my mind struggling to focus on the task at hand. It had been a year since I’d been in this place, and I’d nearly forgotten the warm, eerie glow of the torches that lined the walls. The rough stone of the low arched ceiling. The echo of the ethereal music pulsing up from the open chamber below us.