Authors: Nicole Taft
Blood for Wolves
Blood for Wolves
By Nicole Taft
Copyright
© 2013 Nicole Taft
All
Rights Reserved
Cover
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No
part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without
permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who
may quote short excerpts in a review.
This
book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“Come on.” I stared at the wolf
from my hiding place. She was so close to being in my sights. “Just a little more.”
The alpha female scanned the area
before encouraging her pups to leave the den. No doubt she smelled me, but I’d
set up the blind long ago to ensure that my scent became commonplace. She shook
her head, the radio collar jostling around her neck. I tried to shift without
making too much noise. I didn’t want Isabeau to hear me. If she did, I’d never
get to see the newest addition to the Blue Royal Pack.
One by one the pups padded out of
the packed earthen den, gazing around in interest. They were so fuzzy and new,
blinking in the early morning sunlight. I bit my lip in excitement. It was all
I could do not to squeal in delight. I scribbled down notes on identifying
marks and emerging personality traits. Isabeau had done so well nursing them—they
all looked healthy with plenty of energy. Not one underweight pup among them. I
started formulating names for them based on their marks and actions. One black
pup stumbled over anything he could get his paws on, the spitting image of Navarre,
the alpha male. A shy little female, a dark chocolate with white paws, hung
back in the den and watched her siblings.
At length, Isabeau corralled them
together and trotted off to introduce them to the rest of the pack. The pups
obediently followed, bounding along behind her. Once they were gone I stood and
stretched, turning my face into a patch of sun and grinning with utter joy. How
many people could say they loved their job?
“I do, I do,” I sang to myself. My
sisters Sasha and Brittany could have their high-end city jobs. All I’d wanted
was a little cabin in the woods and an occupation that allowed me to study
wolves. When I’d finally gotten it I was thrilled. I shouldered my pack just as
my radio crackled.
“Caroline? You there?”
Good thing Isabeau had already left
with her pups. No surprise that Alex would call while I was at work. “Yes, I’m
here, and no, hunting season isn’t open yet.”
“Haha, very funny. I just wanted to
know if you were bringing anything to your mom’s birthday party.”
Only Alex would radio me for
something like this. I made for the little stream that eventually ran into the
hiking path. The hike was an easy five miles, all downhill.
“I am working you know. Is this
some sort of annoying step-brother protocol?”
“C’mon Care.”
“Ham casserole. Now get off the
frequency sheriff.”
I giggled to myself, imagining Alex
getting all pissy about being called sheriff. I never understood why he didn’t
like it. After all, he
was
a Park County sheriff. He preferred being
called a cop or Officer McKenna. My guess was that sheriff made him think of
old-timey men with long mustaches, or maybe bumbling guys from old 1950s
television shows.
“Fine,” Alex said. “But first, what’d
you buy her?”
Oh my gosh. “A pearl bracelet. A baroque
one.”
“The hell does ‘baroque’ mean?”
“Alex, get off the damn frequency. I
have to—”
A flash of gold amidst the trees caught
my eye. Bouncing, heading in the opposite direction, following the stream
upriver. It looked like…hair. Frills of blue appeared and disappeared between
the tree trunks and brush. I brought the radio up to my mouth.
“Alex, is there a bulletin out for
a missing child?” I followed it, only able to catch glimpses through the forest.
It looked like a girl in a dress. Was she running? Skipping? Was she lost? Even
stupid parents that took their kids hiking didn’t bring them in little blue
dresses.
“Negative on that,” Alex finally
responded. “Why?”
I emerged from a patch of bushes. The
stream apparently came from a little pond. I’d never bothered to find out. It
must have been a spring. Beside it stood a little girl, her hair in the most
perfect golden curls I’d ever seen on a human being, tied into two perfect
pigtails. Sure enough, she wore a dainty blue dress, socks decorated with pink
flowers, and laced-up black boots. She stared at the pond, looking as though
she might cry any minute.
“Hey there honey,” I said quietly,
hoping not to scare her. “Are you lost?”
“I thought I would be safe here,”
she said.
I blinked. What did that mean?
“But there are wolves here too,”
she continued.
“Oh honey, it’s all right. The
wolves won’t hurt you,” I said, stepping closer. “They steer clear of people. Are
you lost? Where are your parents?”
She leaned forward.
I reached out to her. “Be careful,
you’ll fall in.”
“Caroline, you there?” Alex
crackled over the radio.
The girl looked up at me, her eyes
full of sorrow. “I know.”
She fell face first into the pond
and before I knew it, sank out of sight.
“Oh my God!”
I jumped in after her, expecting to
grab her dress or touch ground in the pond. Instead, the water rushed up over
my head. I sputtered on pond water, flailing my arms. Where was the bottom? Where
was the girl? How the hell could a pond be so deep?
Suddenly my feet found purchase. I
pushed up and broke the surface, coughing and wiping pond scum off my face. I
spun around, searching, swinging my hands through the water in search of the
girl.
Nothing.
I stood in the pond at a loss,
gazing through the forest around me. She was nowhere to be found. And for some
reason now the pond was no longer as deep as when I’d first jumped in. Weird. I
crawled out of the water and stood on the bank, assessing my situation. Pack,
wet. Me, wet. Radio, gone. Little girl, vanished.
I gazed around. Funny—nothing
looked quite like when I went in. At least as far as forests went. The trees
were more open here, less underbrush. Dead leaves carpeted the ground but the
treetops above were still relatively green and not in full blown autumn color
change. Disquieted, I looked back at the pond. The stream led the
other
way now; north, not south. I frowned and then shook my head. No. I was just
confusing myself. Everything was the same; I’d just gotten all turned around
after nearly drowning in a frigging pond.
“Ugh.” I found a flat rock to sit
on and undressed, wringing out my socks and garments before going through my
daypack. At least my notes would still be intact. Thank goodness for waterproof
notebooks and pens.
I sat there for a while, running my
hands through my brown hair and flipping it around to try and get as much water
out as possible. It would dry well enough as I walked, but it was still going
to be a bit annoying. At least my socks weren’t too wet; waterproof boots had
done their job, not only repelling the water but the collar keeping it from
going down inside the shoe. Hooray for high quality.
At length I slipped back into my
damp clothes. I held my daypack at my side; it was still much too wet to put on
my back. I stared at the stream. I’d head down it, meet up with the path, hike
the few miles out and go home to a nice hot shower and explain to Alex later
that I must have been seeing things, because there certainly was no girl here. I
stared in the direction the stream led off to. That was the way I needed to go,
and yet, I really didn’t want to go that way. A nagging sensation pricked at
the back of my neck. Something bad was down that way. Something very bad.
I shook it off, grunting. Stupid. Stupid.
Everything is fine.
And that’s when I spotted the
little girl out of the corner of my eye, running away through the trees. I
bolted after her.
“Hey!” She’d tried to commit
suicide in a pond and I’d tried to save her and now she was running around like
everything was hunky dory? Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her get
away again. I sprinted after her. She was so far ahead I was afraid I might
lose her. But the underbrush was almost nonexistent in this part of the forest
and her blue dress was too bright to miss.
“Come back here,” I shouted, more
angry than concerned. What was she playing at?
“He’s after me. They’re after me,”
she cried.
Oh man, what was her problem? Maybe
she had some mental illness and her rich parents took her for a walk through
the woods and she’d gotten away. She’d mentioned wolves earlier—maybe she’d
manifested some wild idea in her mind and was now running amok.
Goody for me.
She headed toward a cottage that emerged
from the trees. Thatched roof, whitewashed stone walls. A wooden door and round
windows. Like something from a fairy tale. She swung open the door and
disappeared inside. I followed after, shutting the door behind me so she
couldn’t get out. Whatever her problem was, I needed to calm her down and keep
her from getting out again. I didn’t want her dying of exposure in the woods. I
wished my radio wasn’t waterlogged at the bottom of the pond.
I heard crying in the next room. I
took slow steps to try not to scare her and peeked around the doorway. She sat
on an old, mouse-eaten bed, a few mushrooms growing out of the bedpost in the
corner. She had her knees tucked up with her arms over them, her face buried in
her arms as she cried.
“Hey there honey,” I said as softly
as I could. She didn’t respond. “Are you okay?”
“The wolves are after me. They want
to get me. He already tried to eat me.”
Whoa. They? A little extreme. At
most a wolf might bark or growl at an unwanted guest, but there were too few
wolf attacks on humans to take her seriously. A person had better odds of
getting struck by lightning than being attacked by a wolf. Unless, of course,
he was rabid, but when was the last case of a rabid wolf? Not in the last three
years at least.
“It’s okay,” I cooed. “Wolfies
aren’t mean honey, maybe you just startled him. Where are your parents?”
“They are so mean!” she shouted,
looking up and slamming her little fists into the bed at her sides. “They’re
always trying to eat me and I never did anything to them. Wolves are always
mean.”
Forget the wolves, she needed to go
home. “All right. Well, where do you live? Did your parents take you out for a
hike?”
“They wanted to take me to the
kingdom, but I didn’t want to go. I want to stay with all my friends, but they
said it was too dangerous for all the wolves.” She sniffled. “I ran away instead.
I tried to run really far, but there are wolves everywhere.”
I bit my lower lip. This was
extreme. I knew how to handle wolves not people.
“Do you know how to get home?”
She shook her head, more tears
building up in her startlingly blue eyes.
“Okay, well why don’t you come with
me to the ranger’s station, hmm? We can call your mommy and daddy from there
and they can come and get you. How’s that sound?”
“What’s a ranger’s station?”
Feeling more confident now, I
walked up to her and knelt on the wood floorboards, which were thick with dust.
“A ranger’s station is where all
the rangers work. Rangers make sure the forest is safe from people, and that
people are safe from the forest.”
She gave me a hard look. “There is
no such place.”
Okay, different tactic. But before
I got the chance to implement it, there was a faint bang at the cottage door. The
girl’s eyes went wide.