Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles) - By Nancy Holder Page 0,65

her. He looked down and swore. “No service. Did you bring your cell? Katelyn?”

Part of her couldn’t stop scanning the area, searching for his foot. The other part of her was praying she wouldn’t see it. When her mother had died, there had only been ashes. And memories.

I’m looking for a foot.

She took off the jacket Trick had lent her and put it over the man’s face. Trick turned on his heel and headed up toward the car. Wincing, Katelyn moved away awkwardly from the dead man, crossing her arms over her chest. Her breath came in labored little gasps. After a couple of minutes, when she realized Trick hadn’t returned, she backed away from the man, feeling irrationally guilty for leaving his side, then pushed through the trees. She hadn’t wanted to shout for Trick. Didn’t want to disturb the — the body.

Trick was standing on top of the hill beside his sled, her phone to his ear. Then he saw her, picked up the sled when it would have been easier to let it slide down, and came over.

“Yours doesn’t work, either. Let’s go to the cabin.” He looked past her and she turned quickly, half expecting to see the man stumbling out of the trees. Trick chewed the inside of his cheek as if debating something.

“Do you want the jacket?” she asked him, feeling ill.

“Oh, girl,” he said mournfully, reaching out and holding her against his chest. “I just don’t like leaving him there.”

“I know what you mean.” She closed her eyes tightly, losing herself in his warmth.

“What if it comes back?” he said.

“What comes back?”

“The animal that killed him.”

She let out a sob. Please, let it be just an animal.

They rushed back together to the Mustang, and drove back in taut silence, Katelyn checking both their phones for service. Even though Trick drove with a seeming disregard for safety, it took forever to get to the cabin. To Katelyn’s shock, Sergeant Lewis’s squad car was already parked behind her grandfather’s battered blue truck.

“Did we get through?” she asked.

“Oh, God,” Trick whispered, stricken. The wheels had barely stopped rolling before he and Katelyn were running up the steps and bursting into the cabin.

Her grandfather and Sergeant Lewis were at the kitchen table, bent over some objects covered with what appeared to be wet sawdust, spread out on a layer of plastic trash bags. Beyond the wet, muddy odor, she detected the unmistakable smell of silver. She froze.

“Sergeant Lewis found some of our things that were taken in the break-in,” her grandfather said, looking up at her. “Dumped in the Wolf Springs bog.” Then he looked at her again. “Katie?”

“We found a man,” she blurted. Trick came up beside her and put his arm around her waist. “Dead.”

Sergeant Lewis was instantly all business. “Where? Can you show me?”

“The sledding hill,” Trick answered, then launched into a detailed explanation of how Katelyn had found him, and that there was nothing they could do to help him.

“Katelyn put a jacket over his eyes,” Trick said faintly.

“I think you’re going into shock, son,” Katelyn’s grandfather said. “Katie, get him some water.”

But Trick was rushing after Sergeant Lewis, who was already halfway to the door with a big radiophone to his ear. Her grandfather grabbed his rifle from the wall rack. “Stay in the house,” he told Katelyn. “Don’t go outside.”

She was about to insist that she should go back, too, when she realized she needed to make some calls of her own. As soon as she heard the three of them drive away she called Justin, but his voice mail answered.

Urgent!!! she texted him.

She tried Cordelia next, then Dom. No one responded. Trembling, she went into the kitchen and splashed water on her face, then looked through the window at the snow-covered yard.

“Did one of you do it?” she demanded.

Her phone dinged, signaling the arrival of a message. It was Beau.

“Not now,” she said aloud, as if he could hear her.

Then as she poured herself a glass of water, movement in the yard blurred in her peripheral vision. Before she even knew she was going to do it, she slammed down the glass, threw open the kitchen door, and raced outside. Something was running down the side yard. Snow came showering down in its wake and Katelyn ran straight through the cascading curtain of white, charging from beneath the frosted branches to the road, where her Subaru and Trick’s Mustang were parked. Footprints — they looked human — had cut a