Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles) - By Nancy Holder Page 0,53
said. “Caffeine is always my first drug of choice.”
~
The gym equipment was ordered. Among the amazing haul: uneven bars, parallel bars, a vault, a balance beam, a trapeze, and a cloud swing. Trick put it on a black credit card, which meant either that there was no limit or the sky was the limit: a few kids at Samohi had been given black credit cards — and, usually, chauffeurs, if so.
Katelyn’s reprieve from the Fenners ended two afternoons later when Justin told her to drive over to the house to resume her training. She went immediately after school, telling Trick only that she was busy. Which he did not like.
When she got out of the car, Mr. Fenner came over from the house and stared at her car so long she was afraid he had forgotten she was coming over. He growled deep in his throat and pulled back his lips.
“How many bodies does this make, six? It has to end,” he told her.
Katelyn stared at him in shock. There were only two dead people that she knew of. Possibly three if Mr. Henderson was truly gone.
“Excuse me?” she asked.
Lee Fenner looked at her. “I may be only eighteen, but I’m not stupid. I can see what’s happening. Someone has to put an end to it.”
Katelyn’s heart began to pound as she realized he was having one of his episodes, reliving something from when he was about her age. Her mind instantly flashed to everything Beau and her had heard about the rash of killings forty or fifty years earlier. Was six a rash?
“Do you know who’s doing it?” she asked, hoping that her voice didn’t shake.
He stared at her for a long minute, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. Then he turned without another word and went back into the house, slamming the door so hard the windows rattled.
Justin ambled toward her from the yard, looking from the front porch to Katelyn and back again. “You okay?”
“Yeah, he um, startled me. He was baring his teeth.”
“Don’t let it throw you when he makes wolf gestures in human form,” Justin said. He lowered his voice. “It’s a symptom of his . . . condition. Our pups are taught from the cradle to cut out that kind of nonsense.”
“Oh,” she said quietly, thinking of how she had started growling when she and Trick had snuck into the Inner Wolf Center.
“It’s never happened to you, has it?” he asked, studying her.
“No,” she replied, trying to sound earnest, crossing her fingers that he couldn’t hear her heartbeat speed up. But of course he could. Of course he would know. The only question was, would he let it go?
“Hmm,” he said. He walked into the trees and she followed. The darkness and gloom descended. “Soon we’re going to work on focusing your hearing, your vision and your sense of smell.”
“Soon, but not today?”
“No, today, we’re going to see just how strong you are,” he said with a smirk.
“Shouldn’t I be focusing more on social stuff? You know, what to do and not do around the others so they don’t want to kill me for breaking some rule I don’t even know?”
“We need to work on that, too,” he acknowledged. “But you have to test yourself, find the limits of your new abilities so that you understand them. Because understanding what you’re capable of and learning how to control it will help the rest of the world not figure out who you are and want to kill you.”
“So, basically it’s all about not getting killed.”
“Pretty much,” he said, pausing under a tree. The lowest branch was about twelve feet off the ground and Justin looked up at it. “Jump up there and grab that branch.”
She gazed at it. “I’m springy, but not that springy.”
“How do you know unless you try? After all, that’s only about two feet higher than the rim on a basketball hoop. It should be easy for you now.”
She crouched and jumped as high as she could, but came up about a foot short. She landed back on the ground and glanced at him.
“Again. And this time actually try.”
“I did try,” she said, feeling irritated. She crouched back down and stared up at her target. She felt all the muscles in her body coiling and then releasing as she sprung upward. Her hands wrapped around the branch and she gave a triumphant shout and looked down at Justin.