Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles) - By Nancy Holder Page 0,66
path across the road into the forest. The trees were quivering. Katelyn kept going.
And then she wondered what the hell she was doing. This could be the person who had shot at her, coming to finish the job now the coast was clear. Or the monster that had killed that man.
She kept running, unable to stop herself. But the force of her momentum threw her forward as a terrible pain squeezed her knees, ankles, and spine. She could hear her joints popping and a growl tore out of her throat.
She was transforming.
The forest shimmered and gleamed; snow falling in loud bursts from the trees looked like fireworks sparklers. She loped instead of running. Her thoughts began to dissolve. It couldn’t be happening. But it was, and she was caught in a grip of unbelievable agony. Pain stabbed her everywhere, bone deep. Then her foot caught on a root and she arced into the air, her body twisting, and she fell face first into the snow. Her ears rang and her nose and forehead stung. She was so stunned she couldn’t move. She lay there, exposed and vulnerable to whomever had been in the yard. She didn’t know if she was wolf or human. All she knew was that she was hurt.
She had no idea how long she lay there, braced for an attack. Woozily she raised her pounding head. Her cell phone was going off. She grunted and awkwardly fished in her half-torn pocket — with a human hand — and drew it out. Then she made the connection.
“Do they know who did it?” a voice asked.
Katelyn’s eyes popped open. It was Cordelia.
“No. Do you?” Katelyn replied.
“But you’re okay.”
“I guess,” Katelyn said. “Oh, my God, I was so scared I would never talk to you again!”
“I want to come home,” Cordelia whispered. “Have you figured out anything about the mine?”
“Still working on it,” Katelyn said. She pushed herself to a sitting position and pulled her legs underneath her. Then, clinging to a tree, she got to her feet.
She heard sniffling. Cordelia was crying. “I’m here alone. Dom is pressuring me. He says if I don’t declare my loyalty soon, I’ll have to leave. But if you found it, and we told my daddy . . .”
“I’ll keep trying,” Katelyn promised.
Picking up speed as she headed across the road, she tried the front door. Locked. Her key was in her purse, in the house.
“How did you know someone had been killed?”
“Dom told me,” Cordelia replied.
“How did he know?” Katelyn asked, suspicion flooding her as she ran around to the back door and looked at the snow to see if there were any prints leading back inside. There weren’t. Cursing herself for being an idiot, she let herself in and quietly closed the door. Standing still, she listened. Nothing. She began to creep through the kitchen.
“Cordelia,” she said into the phone. “Listen, something happened.” All she heard was static. “Cordelia?”
The connection had been severed, or lost. Maybe it was just as well that she’d had a minute to reconsider her impulse to confide that she’d begun to transform. Katelyn dialed back but the call was blocked. Dom must have spies. And if they could come back for Katelyn, then the Fenner territory was not secure from invaders.
Do I care?
Her grandfather called; then he and Trick came back. They were grim faced and her grandfather said he didn’t want to talk about it. Instead, he began to inspect the items Sergeant Lewis had retrieved from the Wolf Springs bog.
“There’s about half of the good silver and one of the pictures,” Mordecai said as he picked up a framed mountain landscape. It was warped and covered with mud — and it wasn’t the painting with the waterfall and the heart-shaped boulder.
“And you say he found this in a bog?” Trick asked.
Mordecai nodded. “Why anyone would throw sterling silver in a bog’s beyond me,” he said angrily.
Katelyn picked up a serving knife and glanced at Trick. He looked back at her with a neutral expression.
“Careful with that, sweetie,” her grandfather warned her. “It’s sharper than the dickens.”
And it’s silver, fatal to all werewolves, she thought as she looked down at the knife. Except me. And, thinking of the silver bullets in the garage, she “accidentally” pricked herself in the thumb with the tip of the blade. It felt so weird to do it, as if she were lying.