Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles #2) (35 page)

Had Mr. Fenner killed Mr. Henderson after he had told him all he knew about the mine? Or because he had failed to find it? She doubted she would ever see Mr. Henderson alive again.

He pulled back his lips from his teeth and hair sprouted on his face and the backs of his hands. “We’ll hunt them down and take what’s ours. I’ll have her pelt.”

His jaw began to elongate. Katelyn’s heartbeat picked up and her joints seized with pain; her instinctive fear of him was ratcheting up her adrenaline and beginning to force the change on her, too. She fought to stay calm, not wanting him to know that she had partially transformed once without the full moon. She knew now that that hadn’t been a one-time event.

One secret at a time.

“I found it a while ago,” she said. “When I first moved here. I didn’t know what it was as I couldn’t smell silver back then. But my grandfather was teaching me how to shoot. So I cleaned it up to see if I could use it. The bullets were covered with tarnish.”

“Did you show it to him?” he asked urgently. “Has he seen it?”

“No,” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to be out in the woods. So I hid it.”

“It was wrong of you to deceive him,” Mr. Fenner said, knitting his brows. “But you saved his life.”

She knew that. And if it was true that the mine was filled with silver bullets, then finding it would give her even more status. Maybe even enough to make sure no one ever tried to harm her again . . . and to bring Cordelia home.

“Sometimes, when it seems like we’re being disobedient,” she said cautiously, “we’re really the most loyal.”

“Does Justin know about this?”

“No. I brought the gun with me in case Babette started fighting us. I didn’t tell him about it, though, and when he kept thinking he smelled silver in the truck, I pretended that I didn’t.”

“Show me exactly where you found it. Now,” he ordered her. He pointed at the driver’s seat, indicating for her to get behind the wheel. Then he jogged around to the passenger side and climbed in.

She looked from him to the pack. They were milling and watching. From his place at Lucy’s side, Jesse bounced on his heels and waved at her while Arial gaped open-mouthed as she watched her father get into the truck. Justin’s face was a neutral mask. Katelyn wanted to reassure him that their secrets were still their own. She had never told him about the gun — he would be stunned when he found out.

He had left the keys in the ignition so she started the engine and the two drove away. She could feel everyone’s eyes on them. Mr. Fenner hadn’t explained or told them what to do and obviously he expected them to wait for further orders.

Lee seemed to take up all the room in the truck. Although he was just a man, he was larger than life. Her hands on the wheel were sweaty, and Katelyn had to concentrate hard on her driving. He held out the gun and she almost screamed.

“This thing is making me itch,” he said. “Take it.”

The gun was heavy in her hand. I could shoot him, she thought. For a second or two, she gave it serious thought. Then even more serious thought. Sweat beaded on her forehead. If he was gone . . .

She couldn’t kill him in cold blood. She just couldn’t do it.

What do you think he’s going to tell you to do with this gun?
she asked herself.
Shoot people.

All she had been thinking of when she gave him the gun was protecting herself. But there were consequences to her actions. Dire ones. And killing Mr. Fenner would only bring on more of them.

Unless I ran. If I went to the Gaudins.

Right. The same pack Cordelia had been forced to join?

She put the gun under the driver’s seat, one of the usual places for keeping guns in Wolf Springs.

Taking a huge breath to force down her aggression, she turned off the road into the meadow where she and Justin had found the silver animal trap. She reasoned that Mr. Fenner might smell silver residue on the earth where it had lain, confirming her story that she’d found the gun there. She pulled to a stop and they got out.

They began to wade through waist-high ferns and undergrowth. “It’s been a long time,” she began, “but it was somewhere around—”

He cupped his hand over her nose and mouth and threw both himself and Katelyn to the ground. She began to panic but he whispered into her ear, “Intruders.”

He drew his hand away and she inhaled. There was something subtle in the air that grew sharper with the next breath. It was a pungent scent like sweat — the smell of other people.

Then she heard a male voice speaking in French. The Gaudins were French-speaking Cajuns. She listened intently, but she couldn’t make out a single word. Giddy hysteria threatened to bubble out of her. If only she’d known she’d grow up in a world where bilingual werewolves were her sworn enemies, she’d have asked her mother to teach her the language properly.

Mr. Fenner pressed his finger across her lips and she nodded: stay quiet.

“Where’s the gun?” he whispered.

“Truck,” she whispered back.

The French-speaking man said something else. Katelyn assumed he was on his phone. Then she remembered that she hadn’t been able to get cell reception, just as a second voice replied to the first.

Mr. Fenner raised himself on his elbows and looked back at the truck. It sat in plain sight. The voices drifted closer and she could see the frustration on his face.

Closer.

She darted her gaze in their direction. With barely perceptible gestures, Mr. Fenner tapped her arm and pointed to his own face.
Keep your eyes on me
, he was telling her.
Watch me
.

She understood a little better now what it meant to follow an alpha. He was in charge of her survival. And in the werewolf world, he was supposed to be.

He pointed at her, and then at the truck. Mimed pulling a trigger. She sucked in a breath and nodded. Oh, God, they were doing this. He held up a single finger, then a second.
One, two, three
.

“Go,” he whispered, then as she bolted upright and ran, he transformed nearly instantaneously. A fierce growl exploded from powerful lungs as he raced through the grass in the direction of the voices.

Birds shot from the treetops as she ran. She heard shouting, then more howls as she dashed to the truck and yanked open the door. She felt for the gun, found it, and froze. She crouched behind the door and watched through the window, her instinct for self-preservation taking over.

In the short brown grass of the meadow, Mr. Fenner’s white wolf form lunged at a black wolf and a tawny-hued one the color of Dom Gaudin’s human hair. The black wolf charged Mr. Fenner and knocked him backwards, then sprang at him as the tawny one circled behind. Mr. Fenner raised his head and opened his massive jaws. As the black wolf fell on him, he clamped his jaws around the black wolf’s shoulder. Its howl cut through the forest like the cry of a human in pain.

Then, before the tawny wolf could get to the white wolf, Katelyn’s alpha wheeled around and hurtled himself at it. The tawny wolf feinted left, then attacked Mr. Fenner’s right flank. There was a rolling ball of brown and white. Blood began to spurt. Whose, she couldn’t tell.

The gun in her hand, Katelyn ran toward the meadow. Blood was gushing from a large rip in the white wolf’s side. The black wolf pushed him over just as the tawny one positioned himself over Mr. Fenner’s thick neck. Then the black wolf fell down on top of Mr. Fenner, pinning him. Mr. Fenner flailed and fought, but Katelyn could see that the fight was going out of him. The tawny one threw back his head and howled; he was about to go in for the kill when Katelyn stopped and raised the gun.

“No,” she whispered, not wanting to do this as she aimed at the tawny one’s head, knowing she had a good chance of making the shot. Her vision telescoped. She could see the hairs on the tawny wolf’s face, the intelligence in his eyes. He was going to kill Mr. Fenner.

And what then? Would she be able to draw breath enough to reason with him then before they killed her, too?

Katelyn took a breath and held it in, as she’d been taught to do. Took aim.

Her finger found the trigger. She began to pull. She could almost hear the bullet chamber.

Then at the last minute, she raised the gun into the air. It went off, startling all three wolves. At once, the black one leaped off Mr. Fenner. The tawny one got in a parting nip, then disappeared into the trees with the black one as the report of the weapon echoed against the hills.

The white wolf became a man in rags, writhing in pain.

Katelyn ran to Mr. Fenner and stood over him, aiming her gun in the direction his attackers had fled. All she saw was shadow.

“No,” he said in a breathy voice. “Don’t waste the bullets.”

“Can you get to the truck?” she asked him, glancing down. She saw blood on his hand, and in the grass.

“Keep the silver away from me,” he said, pushing himself up on his elbow. “Give me a minute. I’ll start to heal.”

She kept watching the trees. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shot wide.”

“Best thing you could have done.” He kept his voice soft. “You could only get one. If the other one figured out what we had, he could report back to the Gaudins.”

“But you might have died.”

His smile was strained, but it was there. “It’s not about me, darlin’,” he said. “It’s about the pack.”

She was amazed. She imagined him as he must have been before he started losing his mind, and she understood a little better why Justin and Cordelia were both so distressed by his condition. They weren’t supposed to protect the alpha; if he could no longer protect them, he had to be replaced. But that didn’t mean that he had to die, did it?

“Do you want me to help you get up?” she asked him.

“No. Keep covering us.”

Us
. They were in this together. She nodded and kept the gun aimed at the trees, sweeping slowly left and right in case the two werewolves tried to circle back around. When her grandfather had been teaching her to shoot, her arms would quickly tire. Holding a gun was harder work than they made it look like on TV.

Behind her, the grass rustled. Mr. Fenner was on his feet with his tattered clothes wrapped around his waist.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They got in the truck and drove back toward the Fenner house. As soon as he could get phone coverage, Mr. Fenner made a call not to Justin, but to Regan. He told her to put Arial on speakerphone — and to make sure they were alone. He told them about the attack . . . but he didn’t mention the gun.

“Set up a guard around the house. And I want some scouts in the woods. No mercy, you hear? We catch any of those bastards, we make ’em sorry they were ever born.” He hung up. “Not a word about the gun or the mine,” he said to Katelyn. “I’m positive this is the general vicinity.
She
probably told the Gaudins where it is. Now we just got to figure out exactly where.” He thought for a moment.

“Mr. Fenner,” Katelyn began, “she loves you. When I first met her, all she could talk about was you.”
Because she was terrified of you
, Katelyn thought silently, but Cordelia’s feelings about her father were very complicated. As miserable as he had made her, she still wanted to come home to him.

He shook his head. “Love’s not a factor when it comes to pack security. She knew someone had bitten you but she didn’t come to me.”

“She couldn’t believe it was a werewolf,” Katelyn said. “She thought it might just be a dog. Because I’m not from here, she thought I might not know the difference between a wolf and a husky. We were going to see what happened when I changed. Or
if
I changed.”

He huffed. “That was not a decision she should have made. She should have said
nothing
to you. Come to me.”

“But I made her tell me. I threatened her. I said that if she didn’t, I’d ask my grandfather about it. That’s the only reason she told me anything.”

“She still should have come to me,” he insisted.

“I was halfway out the door and on my way home to talk to him,” Katelyn said. “What was she going to do, kill me?”

He didn’t answer, and she nearly choked on sudden fear. “Did — did those other girls know? And that man who died? Is that what happened to them?”

“No,” he said. “We don’t attack people.”

“But you said you’d kill
me
,” she blurted. “And . . . Quentin—”

“We live by different rules. Our rules. But we don’t punish humans for not following them. That’s like blaming a bear for hibernating. So, she really did think a dog might have bitten you?” Katelyn heard a tremor in his voice and she was angry all over again for the whole big mess.

“A dog,” she agreed. “Or . . . she thought it might have been the Hellhound.” She heard herself lower her voice, and waited for him to make fun of her, the way all the Fenners had scoffed at Cordelia’s pathological terror of the supposedly mythical monster.

Silent for a moment, he shrugged, and he looked old and tired. “That night she thought she saw it? I almost thought so, too. Like to scare me to death, the way she started shrieking. We put guards out everywhere. Nothing.”

That doesn’t mean she didn’t see it,
Katelyn thought.

“But I’ve come to a different conclusion.” She felt him looking at her and took her eyes off the road to meet his flinty gaze. “I think a Gaudin bit you. She planned it with them. Picked you out the day you got here, ran you to ground. A Gaudin bites you, you go to her, she turns you into their spy.”

“No,” Katelyn said, startled. But why couldn’t it have been a Gaudin who’d bitten her? “Wouldn’t you be able to tell? Wouldn’t I smell like a Gaudin?”

He blinked the same way Justin did when her ignorance caught him by surprise. “No. We have individual scents; we don’t have pack scents,” he said. “But we do have instincts. Loyalty to the pack, for one.” He set his jaw. “At least,
most
of us feel loyalty.”

“I don’t feel any loyalty to the Gaudins,” she said. But neither did she feel any loyalty to Mr. Fenner. Not a minute before, she’d considered shooting him. “I could have killed you in the meadow. I didn’t.”