Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles) - By Nancy Holder Page 0,16

worn to school. She didn’t smell Justin at all. Didn’t see footprints, or broken-off tree limbs, or anything else to signal his route. The forest was just the forest, and she was wandering from one identical tree to the next.

She came to a stand of trees growing so closely together that Justin couldn’t have possibly passed through them. She walked along it, huffing, growing more nervous, and turned around to go back the way she had come. But she faced a V in the path that she didn’t remember. She took the left branch, but it looked unfamiliar, so she went back to the beginning and took the right fork. She didn’t recognize that, either.

Birds took flight overhead, startling her, and she raised herself on tiptoes to see if she could locate where they’d been roosting before they bolted. Maybe that was where Justin was. But she was too short to see over the bobbing pine branches in her way.

“Oh, forget it,” she muttered. She reached for her cell phone. The GPS would help her get her bearings so she could at least find the right way back to the house. But when her hand dipped into her jacket pocket, she realized that the phone was gone.

Ice water seemed to pour through her veins. Worse than being lost, she had lost the phone, her lifeline to civilization; the device that Cordelia had texted her on earlier that day and might contact again soon. She wasn’t sure if she had been sweating before, but she became hyper-aware of it now.

Something moved in the corner of her eye, and she ticked her glance in that direction. She saw only the trees. But it had to be Justin, she told herself. Messing with her.

“Marco,” she called out, a little mockingly, because she knew it would be uncool to sound afraid. But the truth was, she was getting more jittery.

“Marco Polo,” she called.

Something cold and sinister seemed to settle across her shoulders and she whirled around in a half circle; finding nothing, she glanced anxiously around, then upward, squinting. Pinpricks of gray afternoon light were barely visible above the treetops, and she heard the plaintive cry of a dove, things stirring in the underbrush.

There could be many things in the forest. A werewolf pack of things. Maybe they were hunting her. Maybe Lee Fenner had decided after all that she was too dangerous to be allowed to live. Maybe there was a bounty on her head.

And I knew how dangerous he is, and I got on Justin’s motorcycle and came here like an idiot anyway, she thought. But she hadn’t really had an option, had she?

The weighty sensation pressed down and she shivered as if someone had just walked over her grave.

“Justin?” she croaked out.

A distant sound somewhere between a growl and a moan echoed against tree against tree against tree. Katelyn froze. It didn’t sound like a wolf. It didn’t sound like anything she had ever heard before in her life.

The woods around her went deathly quiet. No chirping birds; nothing stirring in the brush. Then she looked down to see a little rabbit standing completely still. About five feet from that one there was another, and it, too, didn’t so much as twitch its fluffy white cotton tail. They were so still that they both looked stuffed. Then she looked more closely and saw that the chest of the closer bunny was fluttering, as if it was panting. The other one, too. They were panicking.

The hair on the back of her neck rose. Not even the wind made a sound — it was as if it didn’t dare move, either. The forest was holding its breath.

Another moan vibrated through the forest.

Closer.

The rabbits scattered in terror. Cawing birds shot across the forest canopy. And something began to crash through the heavy growth. Something huge.

In her direction.

She took off like a shot, running blindly. She came to an incline and skidded, tumbling end over end as her slippery boots lost their purchase. She scrabbled to her feet, charging forward. Dodging nooses of Spanish moss and spindly outstretched twigs, she ran an obstacle course as the sound of breaking branches gained on her.

A squirrel skittered up the tree nearest to her. More birds burst from a tangle of vines and roots. The wind began to blow as if it had just woken up.

She kept going. And going. The crack and snap behind drove her faster. There was another growl, and she poured on speed. She