Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles) - By Nancy Holder Page 0,21

she thought. No, don’t do this.

“Are you okay?” someone murmured as a hand rested on her shoulder.

It was Beau, who had warned her to get out of Wolf Springs because of the killings. Of course, that had been before she had become a werewolf. Now she needed to tell him that she didn’t want to investigate the killings around Wolf Springs; that she didn’t want to investigate the current deaths, or the ones Beau said his own grandmother had told him had happened half a century before. A massacre, she’d called it. A killing field.

“I’m fine,” she murmured, studying the varnished surface of her desk.

“I gotta tell you something,” he persisted. “My grandma had a stroke. She was yelling something fierce the other night, said she saw a demon in her window.”

Katelyn was stunned. A werewolf?

“She just screamed ‘Demon! Sweet Jesus protect me!’ and then she collapsed.” Beau looked wan. “She’s not doing too well.”

She saw the unspoken plea on his face. He wanted her to help him find out what it was that his grandmother had seen. She’d been so intrigued about everything his grandmother had said about Wolf Springs before — that the town was “a banked fire,” according to her, and that every forty or fifty years or so something happened, something terrible, something epically bad. That the animals went crazy, and then people died.

That it was starting again.

She’d asked her grandfather about it. But now, she didn’t dare involve Beau. If the answers pointed to the existence of werewolves, she’d be signing Beau’s death warrant. She resolutely opened the book on her desk and stared at the words, but the letters swam before her eyes.

“Kat?” he prodded.

“Beau, I — I just don’t want to talk about . . . things,” she whispered.

Mr. Hastings and the police sergeant walked out of the classroom, leaving a buzz of whispers and texts in their wake. Gretchen was holding court, shredding Cordelia’s reputation as she made insinuating remarks about cozy “meetings” with Mr. Henderson to discuss her “history project.” Everything in poisonous air quotes, of course. Katelyn had been at those meetings and they had discussed their history paper and their bibliography and his interest in the silver mine. There was no more chemistry between Cordelia and their teacher than between Cordelia and Coach Ambrose. But the seed of a juicy rumor had been planted, and it was taking root. In a tiny town like Wolf Springs, it would be a tangled thorn patch before lunchtime.

I should speak up for her. I should say something, Katelyn thought. Or not.

“That’s not true. They didn’t. None of that is true,” she blurted suddenly, and heads turned to stare at her. She looked hard at Gretchen. “You know it’s not.”

Gretchen just raised a brow and smiled knowingly. Then she turned her back on Katelyn and slid a sly glance at the girl sitting beside her. The other girl smiled back. There was more than one kind of wolf in Wolf Springs, and Gretchen was busily raising her status in the pack through the power of gossip. Katelyn had no idea if it was a battle she should take on, but she couldn’t stand by and let Gretchen do that to her friend. And she was still Cordelia’s friend, even if Cordelia was blaming her for what had happened.

“It wasn’t like that,” she said again.

Beau patted her arm. “It’s okay, Kat. No one believes it.”

And she felt even guiltier for not offering to help him find out what had frightened his grandmother, and what threatened their town.

What did they believe around here? she wondered. What did they know?

~

That afternoon, Katelyn told Justin about what people were saying about Cordelia. They were standing in the Fenner kitchen filling up two water bottles, and she blurted out the horrible gossip about Mr. Henderson. He blinked and guffawed, but when he saw how upset she was, he leaned forward as if to brush her cheek with a kiss. It was the way pack members acknowledged and comforted each other. But he pulled back before his lips made contact with her skin.

“You can kiss her,” his older brother said, coming up behind them. “She’s not a stranger.”

Jesse Fenner had Down’s syndrome and Cordelia had told Katelyn that one of the reasons for Justin moving the two of them into the Fenner house had been because he needed help taking care of his older brother — help that was often provided, Katelyn knew, by Justin’s girlfriend Lucy, when she