Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles) - By Nancy Holder Page 0,83

be the grandmother she had never met.

“Hi,” she whispered.

The couple had gone hunting together. And fishing. There was the same kind of canoe that was in this very garage — maybe the same one, even. She tried to remember what she’d been told about how her grandmother had died. An illness? She couldn’t remember.

There weren’t very many photographs — not enough for an entire lifetime — and soon she was finished. There had to be more, somewhere. But they would have to wait.

She was just about to put them back when she caught sight of a yellowed bit of paper at the very bottom of the box. Setting down the stack of pictures, she picked it up and unfolded it. It was a clipping from a newspaper article. She flipped it over, shining her flashlight on it and the title jumped out at her.

RARE WOLF SIGHTING IN TAHOE?

Her heart skipped a beat. There was some faint writing in the margins that she couldn’t quite make out.

She began to read the article:

Tahoe — A visitor hiking yesterday claims to have encountered an injured wolf. The animal appeared to have been shot but when the man attempted to help, the wolf bit him and ran off. Wolf sightings are extremely rare in the Tahoe basin. Since wolves are migratory it is likely that this creature is not native to the area but traveled down from Oregon.

“We believe this was a coyote sighting,” said Fish and Game spokeswoman Georgia Fullerton. “Because of habitat encroachment, our coyotes are becoming more brazen in their encounters with humans.”

However, the hiker, attorney Sean McBride from Los Angeles, vacationing with his wife, remains adamant that his attacker was a wolf. The injury was not deemed serious, nor was the wolf assumed to be rabid. McBride was treated at an urgent care facility, and then released.

There was a roaring in her ears as Katelyn stared at the article, reading, rereading. Swaying, she reached out a hand and steadied herself against a pile of boxes. Her chest squeezed hard, and she grabbed her side, afraid her ribs were going to crack; she stumbled and leaned against the boxes.

Her father, bitten by a wolf? How come she’d never heard anything about it? In a daze, she located the date of the article, and saw that it was the same year that he was killed. They’d come home from that trip without saying a word about an attack to her. Or maybe she’d forgotten. She’d only been eleven years old. But would she actually forget being told that a wolf had bitten her father?

Maybe they didn’t want to scare me.

Or . . . maybe they didn’t want her to know.

But people did get bitten by wild animals. There were mountain lion warnings all over L.A. She remembered a story about a six-year-old boy who had been killed by a coyote in a park in Long Beach.

Just because it had happened to her, it didn’t mean anything had happened to her father.

Oh, yes, it does.

Quivering, she tried to straighten the pictures and put them back into the box; but she dropped them and they scattered on the floor. In the nearest photo, the face of her grandmother smiled up at her. Surrounded by trees, she was calmly holding a hunting rifle. Groaning, Katelyn dropped into a squat to gather them all up. She couldn’t feel them in her hands. She was numb.

She replaced the box lid and threaded her way out of the maze of boxes, clutching the article in her hand. She made it upstairs to her room, heart thundering, and shut the door. She sank down on her bed, clicked on her reading lamp, and shoved the article underneath the light, where she could make out the words scrawled in the margins in red pen.

See, I told you.

It was her mother’s handwriting.

Katelyn stared at the words, clutching the newspaper article until her knuckles were white. Her mother’s distinctive loops and swirls blazed like neon. Why would her mom have sent the article to her grandfather? What had she told him? That there were wolves in that part of the country, that her husband had been bitten?

Her father.

Attacked by a wolf.

She felt like she was drowning, being sucked down into a whirlpool of pain and fear and darkness that she didn’t have the strength to escape. In her mind, she heard the rumbling of the earthquake, the staccato tapping of the couch against the hardwood floor. The fire, already devouring the downstairs