Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles) - By Nancy Holder Page 0,1
mother’s features, frozen forever and yet so lifelike. If her mom had really been there, what would she say to any of it?
What would I say to her?
Mom, I’ve become a werewolf wouldn’t have been at the top of her list.
Then again, if her mother were still alive, Katelyn would still be with her out in California, pursuing her dreams of becoming a performer, a Cirque star, instead of being trapped in a remote cabin in the Ozarks with a grandfather she barely knew. She’d never have been attacked by a werewolf, being transformed into one herself. She would never have seen Cordelia Fenner, her new best friend, driven from her home by her father Lee Fenner, the leader of the werewolf pack — its alpha — for failing to tell him that she was worried Katelyn might have been bitten.
As she stood up and touched the bust of her mother, warm skin against cold stone, she also conceded that if she had still been in California, she never would have met Trick. Wonderful, crazy, frustrating, secretive Trick—Vladimir Sokolov, to give him his full name — who cared enough about her to shape this tribute, and had talked her grandfather into buying her a computer and a microcell for her birthday so she could use her cell phone in his cabin situated miles and miles outside the town of Wolf Springs.
When Justin — Cordelia’s cousin — had dropped her home, the place had been full of chaos. There had been a break-in while she had been with the wolf pack, and the thieves had stolen her grandmother’s silver and some paintings off the wall in the stairwell. Sergeant Lewis, one of Wolf Springs’ two police officers, had been taking her grandfather’s statement.
Trick had been there, too, planning to give her the bust, and after Sergeant Lewis left, her grandfather had surprised Katelyn with the computer. What she wouldn’t have given to have had it when she first arrived in Wolf Springs weeks before.
As she stretched out her tense body, she remembered her nightmare. Before the werewolves had invaded it had been a happy dream, with her performing in Cirque du Soleil just as she had always hoped. I’m not that girl, she thought. But she was. She still was. She whirled in a circle, slowly, feeling the joy in movement that had been the constant in her life. Back home, dance and gymnastics had both filled nearly all her waking hours — and kept the nightmares at bay. Sean McBride, her father, had been shot down over four years ago in cold blood. Her mother was dead, killed in the fire that had destroyed their home, and she, Katelyn, had been forced to come to Wolf Springs to live with her grandfather, Mordecai McBride, whom she barely knew.
And then . . . the bite. A monstrous gray wolf with blue eyes, a rogue werewolf no one seemed to know.
All those things had happened to change her. But what they had not changed was what it felt like to be graceful and strong. Stretching, bending in ways that had taken years of practice and sacrifice, she held on tightly to the feeling. She was reclaiming something — what it was that made her Katelyn McBride. The core of her identity.
Now, as she moved in the room in the cabin, she felt life surging through her muscles. She slid slowly and effortlessly to the floor in the splits and arched her back until the crown of her head nearly touched the floor — something she had never been able to do before.
My human body is different, she thought, amazed. Because of the change.
She caught her lower lip. She saw herself auditioning for Cirque, imagined people gasping at the incredible things she could do. Her mind began to race with the fantasy. Werewolves only had to change on the full moon. She could still live a normal life. She could get out of Wolf Springs. Be what she was destined to be.
If it was the last thing she did, she would leave Wolf Springs. She would make her dream come true. She couldn’t let what had happened to her, any of it, stop her.
“I swear it, Mom,” she said, gazing at the bust of her mother. “I’ll live enough for both of us.”
Hot and thirsty, she headed downstairs for some water. She crept past the animal heads mounted on the wall and past the empty spaces where the stolen pictures had hung.