Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles) - By Nancy Holder Page 0,110
protect the alpha; if he could no longer protect them, he had to be replaced. But that didn’t mean that he had to die, did it?
“Do you want me to help you get up?” she asked him.
“No. Keep covering us.”
Us. They were in this together. She nodded and kept the gun aimed at the trees, sweeping slowly left and right in case the two werewolves tried to circle back around. When her grandfather had been teaching her to shoot, her arms would quickly tire. Holding a gun was harder work than they made it look like on TV.
Behind her, the grass rustled. Mr. Fenner was on his feet with his tattered clothes wrapped around his waist.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They got in the truck and drove back toward the Fenner house. As soon as he could get phone coverage, Mr. Fenner made a call not to Justin, but to Regan. He told her to put Arial on speakerphone — and to make sure they were alone. He told them about the attack . . . but he didn’t mention the gun.
“Set up a guard around the house. And I want some scouts in the woods. No mercy, you hear? We catch any of those bastards, we make ’em sorry they were ever born.” He hung up. “Not a word about the gun or the mine,” he said to Katelyn. “I’m positive this is the general vicinity. She probably told the Gaudins where it is. Now we just got to figure out exactly where.” He thought for a moment.
“Mr. Fenner,” Katelyn began, “she loves you. When I first met her, all she could talk about was you.” Because she was terrified of you, Katelyn thought silently, but Cordelia’s feelings about her father were very complicated. As miserable as he had made her, she still wanted to come home to him.
He shook his head. “Love’s not a factor when it comes to pack security. She knew someone had bitten you but she didn’t come to me.”
“She couldn’t believe it was a werewolf,” Katelyn said. “She thought it might just be a dog. Because I’m not from here, she thought I might not know the difference between a wolf and a husky. We were going to see what happened when I changed. Or if I changed.”
He huffed. “That was not a decision she should have made. She should have said nothing to you. Come to me.”
“But I made her tell me. I threatened her. I said that if she didn’t, I’d ask my grandfather about it. That’s the only reason she told me anything.”
“She still should have come to me,” he insisted.
“I was halfway out the door and on my way home to talk to him,” Katelyn said. “What was she going to do, kill me?”
He didn’t answer, and she nearly choked on sudden fear. “Did — did those other girls know? And that man who died? Is that what happened to them?”
“No,” he said. “We don’t attack people.”
“But you said you’d kill me,” she blurted. “And . . . Quentin—”
“We live by different rules. Our rules. But we don’t punish humans for not following them. That’s like blaming a bear for hibernating. So, she really did think a dog might have bitten you?” Katelyn heard a tremor in his voice and she was angry all over again for the whole big mess.
“A dog,” she agreed. “Or . . . she thought it might have been the Hellhound.” She heard herself lower her voice, and waited for him to make fun of her, the way all the Fenners had scoffed at Cordelia’s pathological terror of the supposedly mythical monster.
Silent for a moment, he shrugged, and he looked old and tired. “That night she thought she saw it? I almost thought so, too. Like to scare me to death, the way she started shrieking. We put guards out everywhere. Nothing.”
That doesn’t mean she didn’t see it, Katelyn thought.
“But I’ve come to a different conclusion.” She felt him looking at her and took her eyes off the road to meet his flinty gaze. “I think a Gaudin bit you. She planned it with them. Picked you out the day you got here, ran you to ground. A Gaudin bites you, you go to her, she turns you into their spy.”
“No,” Katelyn said, startled. But why couldn’t it have been a Gaudin who’d bitten her? “Wouldn’t you be able to tell? Wouldn’t I smell like a Gaudin?”
He blinked the same way Justin did when her ignorance caught