Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles #2)

ALSO BY NANCY HOLDER & DEBBIE VIGUIÉ

THE WICKED SERIES

Witch & Curse

Legacy & Spellbound

Resurrection

THE CRUSADE SERIES

Crusade

Damned

Vanquished

This edition published 2012

ISBN-13: 978-0-9887346-0-9

Text Copyright © 2012 Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié

Front cover artwork ©2012 Chris Nurse c/o Debut Art

68 80 71 82 79 85 80 32 69 88 67 76 85 83 73 86 69

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

REYNOLDS & JONES

This book is for Charlotte Fullerton McDuffie, who has run with the wolves.

—Nancy

To my two grandfathers, Harold Trent and Ted Reynolds. I miss you both every day and see your quiet strength in the character of Mordecai.

—Debbie

What do you run from?

“Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.”

-
K
ING
L
EAR, 1.1.36

The Werewolves of Wolf Springs

Our Laws

We are the descendants of Fenris, Wolf-God. He gave us this creed to keep our pack strong and free. Follow it, or die for the good of the pack.

Loyalty is the highest virtue.

Stay in your place until you have another.

Obey the Four Commandments:

Never hunt humans.

Never hunt alone.

Never tell anyone about the existence of werewolves; it is a secret that must be kept.

Always obey your alpha, and be submissive to higher-ranking wolves, male and female, within your pack.

And if you misbehave, beware . . . the Hellhound will hunt you down!

1

I outran them.

Katelyn McBride soared into the spotlight on the Mexican cloud swing. The swing was a thick rope of braided fibers connected by either end to the sky-high rigging of the circus tent. To the audience far, far below, the swing looked wispy as mist, but it was as strong as Katelyn herself. Nearly unbreakable. She was seventeen, and she was at the top of her game: a beautifully trained gymnast, limber, made of solid muscle. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a bun and her light blue eyes were edged with kohl.

I outfought them.

Music pulsed like a heartbeat as she sat on her swing and pumped her legs, rocking in and out of the spotlight —

— the moonlight —

— and she gazed down at the werewolves of Wolf Springs. They prowled in their magnificent wolf forms on the floor of the arena, which also seemed to be the forest, in a swelling river of tension. Their glowing eyes narrowed with intense purpose.

You thought you could hurt me, but you can’t even touch me,
she sneered as she executed a backward roll on the swing, then shifted her weight onto her hip bones as she came back around. This was the Cirque du Soleil, the world of greasepaint and gymnasts and death-defying feats of daring. Here she was in charge. Wolf Springs was nothing but a fraud, a lie designed to frighten little children. All you had to do was stop believing in ghosts and monsters and Hellhounds, and Wolf Springs lost its hold on you.

I’m free.

But another voice seemed to whisper,
Never free from me.

Applause and cheers rose, buoying her up. In the audience were her mother and father, Giselle Chevalier the ballerina and Sean McBride the assistant district attorney, their arms around each other, loving her. Proud, happy. Alive. She swung back and forth, waving. They waved back.

Then a voice whispered urgently,
Run.

A sharp, icy fear washed over her; everything shifted. The cloud swing picked up momentum on its own, propelling her back and forth like a pendulum. The frantic to-and-fro rhythm was out of control, like her heartbeat, and she collapsed from her balanced pose, grabbing the two sides just in time to stop her fall.

Run.

As she looked down into the audience, huge tongues of fire shot up between the seats. They rose so high they nearly singed Katelyn’s eyelashes as she pulled herself upward, holding on for dear life. Spectators were screaming, igniting like kindling. Her cloud swing was gone. She was holding onto twin ropes of Spanish moss. Through the sudden haze of smoke, all she could see were the howling werewolves of Wolf Springs, racing around the trees, trying to find a way out.

“Jump, my darling!” Katelyn’s mother screamed. Then her mother tumbled into the center of the wolf pack and the closest werewolves leaped on her. In seconds, she was buried underneath them.

“Mom!” Katelyn shouted.

Some of the werewolves fixed their glowing blue eyes on Katelyn, snapping their blood-drenched jaws. Their eager howls were like the shrieks of demons.

Then a figure streaked with blood and ash rose from the center of the pack. Fists balled over his head, Justin Fenner roared with fury. He stood broad-shouldered in a shredded white T-shirt and ripped black jeans that molded his body. Howling like a werewolf prince, he slashed at all comers.

Wheeling out of his reach, the werewolves scattered into the smoke and began to catch fire. They screamed and tried to retreat from the inferno, racing back toward Justin. But as he lunged at them, they cowered and cringed, preferring to burn rather than to take him on.

Panting, he looked straight up at Katelyn with his deep blue eyes. He held out his arms to catch her.

Capture her.

“Kat. You are my secret weapon,” he whispered, yet she could hear his voice above all the chaos. “Jump. I’ll keep you close.”

“No!” she shouted, flailing in the rigging. “Don’t touch me!”

Then she was falling.

     Falling.

         Falling.

Frantic, she clawed at the smoke-choked air. She landed hard in Justin’s embrace, against his chest. She struggled to get out of his arms but he enclosed her, enfolded her. “I’ll keep you forever,” he said, gouging his nails into her arms. The pain was an icy shock.

And Katelyn McBride woke up in her bed.

~

Moonlight poured down from her skylight and illuminated the bust of her mother that Trick had made for her as a birthday present, presenting it to her earlier that day after Justin had dropped her home. Katelyn stared at her 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.”