House Of Bears 7 - Samantha Snow Page 0,15

and frog and algae.”

Garret rotated toward the kitchen and shoved himself off the counter. “Fucking great!”

Holly shut her eyes and struggled not to disintegrate into confusion. “Okay. Let’s think. So you can’t tell her apart from the landscape. There has to be a way to find her.”

“There is,” Wyatt replied. “We follow the next father she tries to infect…or whatever you call it.”

“That would be too risky. We could wind up losing him, too. We can’t run the risk.” Holly focused on Edwina again. “There can only be so many pools in the area where she could be hanging out. Can we narrow it down to a few?”

“She can move from one body of water to another,” Susanna pointed out. “She isn’t confined to one particular pool.”

“I don’t know about that.” Trevor rotated around and examined the chair. “It seems she has a particular affiliation for one specific pool. She would have to concentrate on a pool big enough to drown a grown man.”

“Can we not talk about Loch being dead?” Garret thundered from the kitchen. “He’s been gone a matter of hours. He could be alive.”

“Do we have maps of these mountains?” Holly asked. “Can we eliminate bodies of water that aren’t big enough? In the meantime, let’s figure out if there’s any way at all to make contact with her.”

“We can’t,” Hattie replied. “I really wish we could help you, but we can’t even see her.”

Elise spoke up for the first time. She sat on the bottom stair, almost out of sight from the rest of the group. “You might not be able to, but I might.” She stood up and confronted them all.

Holly gasped. “Can you, really? That would be great.”

“I said I might be able to,” Elise corrected. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll work on it.”

“At least we have some time before she infects another person,” Holly went on. “That buys us some time.”

“Not necessarily,” Johnny countered. “You might need to work a lot quicker than you realize.”

“What makes you say that?” Holly asked. “What makes you think she’s closer to choosing another victim?”

He lowered his eyes to the floor. Without looking up, he tugged back his shirt sleeve. Holly’s stomach turned when she beheld a red mark seared into the smooth skin of his forearm. A graceful curve of lines dotted with leaves touched two concentric rings spreading over a liquid surface. They seemed to waver in the skin itself.

A terrible silence fell over the room. Everyone stared at him in horrified shock, but he didn’t make eye contact with anyone—not Holly or the witches or his clan brothers or anyone.

Holly’s world flipped upside down. Not Johnny. Anyone but Johnny. As soon as she thought that, the very thought of losing any of them destroyed her composure. She couldn’t stand losing any of them, but she already had lost Loch. He was gone. He might never come back. He could be dead at the bottom of some pool somewhere.

She shot to her feet and stumbled over Edwina staggering toward the doors. “I…I gotta get out of here. I need some air.”

She exploded onto the deck, tripped down the steps, and plunged into the dark trees. The cool night air made the woods more fragrant and enticing than ever. The woods closed around her in a protective shield.

She took a few steps and shifted. Being anything but a bear in these woods made no sense. She took off running somewhere, anywhere, but her consciousness searched the countryside for Loch. Where was he? Where could he have gone?

She lowered her nose to the ground, trying to pick up his scent trail. She smelled a lot of things, including people and shifters and animals coming and going. Her olfactory powers spiked to a dizzying typhoon of information. It revealed the landscape spread before her in a highway of tracks and trails leading everywhere.

Loch’s tracks crisscrossed the area going every direction at once. They confounded Holly’s brain until she couldn’t distinguish anything. Without thinking, she turned aside and headed for The Stones. Only there could she make sense of all this.

Running in bear form erased most of her conscious thought process. She could forget everything but the ground passing beneath her paws. She became one with all these impressions and senses. She didn’t have to think. All those nuggets of information rushed at her too fast to think about them. They washed over her and vanished into the night.

She lost all track of time in this form. She