Savage (26 page)

“Oh, my God,” she whispered, crashing down after the rocketing speed with which everything had happened. It was like riding with Trick in his Mustang to school; he never slowed down for the curves. But they’d always made it to school in one piece.

Silver girl
, came a voice. His voice.

She caught her breath and put her hand on the glass as if he were standing on the other side. “Trick,” she whispered. “Can you hear me?”

Silver girl, wolf queen. Come to me.

Come now.

Bring him.

18

KATELYN TOLD JUSTIN
she wanted to show him the mine first, and he was so pleased to be taken into her confidence that he didn’t ask a lot of questions. They drove in his truck, taking great pains to make sure they weren’t followed by going offroad, doubling back, and never moving in a straight line toward the Madre Vena silver mine. It didn’t matter too much if they were being followed. The lair of the Hellhound was where they would convene shortly. But Katelyn wanted time alone with Justin.

And with Trick.

Butterflies flickered in her stomach. Trick hadn’t contacted her since he had spoken to her at the window. Now that she knew it was Trick, she wondered why he sounded so different when he spoke to her that way — poetic and otherworldly. She supposed he lived in another world now, just as she did. She remembered when he had told her that something was wrong with him. Is that how he saw it? Did he regret it? Maybe it was something passed down from father to son, and it hadn’t taken with her father. Maybe he hadn’t been a werewolf, but a Hellhound gone wrong.

I’ll make Grandpa tell me
, she thought.
He owes me at least that much.

“You’re thinking awfully hard over there,” Justin said. “Are you okay?”

“As good as can be expected,” she replied. Truth was, she was nervous about taking Justin with her. She didn’t want to put him in harm’s way and if Trick saw him as a rival . . . but no. Trick had made it pretty clear that there was no triangle here. Trick loved her, but he couldn’t be with her.

The thought made her throat raw and tight with pain. If Trick could let her go, make her go . . . She closed her eyes and chewed her lower lip. All this time, she’d been worried that he’d find out she had become a werewolf. Not only had he known, but he’d kept secrets from her since the day she’d met him. Driving her to school, watching over her — and whispering to her by the dark of the moon.

Furtively, she eyed Justin in the light from the dashboard. He was taking all the changes in his life very well. Too well?

They sped along in the moonlit forest with its twisted, horror-movie trees coated with ice that sparkled in the light from the high beams. She gripped the armrest nervously, and they bumped along in wordless silence. Every time that she got bars, she tracked their progress on her GPS function. But the directions seemed to be imprinted in her mind — a werewolf skill? She supposed it was. It wasn’t just sight and scent that drew werewolves back to their hunting grounds after roaming for miles at night. It was something inside them, a knowing.

“Turn here,” she said. “We’ll have to walk.”

They got out, Justin’s fingertips experimentally brushing against the back of her hand. She didn’t respond; she was acutely aware that soon she would see Trick with Justin at her side.

Maybe Trick wanted to make sure that someone had her back.

Someone besides him.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the waterfall in the distance. The melting ice had made it fuller, and it was easier to detect than when she had first spotted it. “See the waterfall? And the heart-shaped rock?”

Justin cocked his head as they walked closer. The mouth of the Madre Vena came into view, and he froze in his tracks. Then he pushed his cowboy hat off his forehead and swore under his breath.

“All this time it was here? Really?” he said.

“All this time,” she said.

“And you’ve been inside?”

Instead of answering, she took a deep breath and led the way to the entrance, bracing herself to see Mr. Henderson’s eviscerated body again. But all traces of him and his camp were gone. They approached the cave and Katelyn strained for sight of Trick or her grandfather. Her nerves were sparking and it took a conscious force of will to keep going.

“Look,” he said, pointing.

At the mouth of the cave stood a small pile of some kind of equipment. She and Justin quickened their pace and Justin stood back slightly, giving Katelyn first shot at examining what looked like chunks of modeling clay sealed in thick plastic and two palm-sized rectangular lidded boxes.

“Whoa. This is sophisticated blasting equipment,” Justin said. “Looks to be wireless.”

“How do you know that?” she asked him.

My dad and I did some blasting, but we never had stuff this fancy.” At her look of surprise, he added, “Breaking new trails up in the hills. Maybe you don’t know that Jack Bronson asked me to flatten out some land for him so his Inner Wolf groupies could have a convenient place to jog.”

She gaped at him, and he shrugged. “I didn’t do it,” he said. “But I do know a few things about setting off explosive charges. The Hellhound must be one rich monster.”

Trick was rich. Very rich.

He picked up one of the boxes and a piece of paper fluttered to the ground. Katelyn retrieved and opened it. She recognized Trick’s handwriting:

“Oh, my God,” she said. Stunned, she showed him the paper. He looked from it to her and back again, his blue eyes big and round.

“What the hell?” he said. “
Blow up the mine?
”

She tried to figure out what to say. Trick had told her to bring Justin and then left the note out in plain sight. A note that said, yes, exactly that, to blow up the mine, as if they were in some crazy war movie and they couldn’t allow the mine to fall into the hands of the enemy. Which was fairly accurate, except that this was actual real life.

Dubiously she scanned the pages and listened to the echoing silence. It seemed that years passed, and she still didn’t know what to say.

“Kat?” he pressed.

“You’re supposed to wait for my orders,” she retorted defensively as she opened one of the small boxes. “To trust me.”

They locked gazes and for one scary moment she thought he was going to challenge her for leadership. That was so very much the last thing they should be worrying about. Then he leaned in as if he were about to kiss her; she could actually feel the heat from his lips as he hovered, waiting. She saw pain in his eyes and then the skin around them crinkled with a smile as he kissed her cheek instead in a gesture of pack solidarity.

“Here’s the thing, girl,” he said gently. “We’re not robots. We’re wolves, sure, but we’re also people. We don’t just mutely obey every order. You know that. You saw that with my uncle. Hell, you were in on Lee’s war council. It’s okay to talk things over, get some perspective from other members of your pack.” He reached out a hand and looped her blonde hair around her ear, and her earlobe tingled. “But it looks to me like you’re playing your cards awfully close to the chest.”

She wasn’t quite sure what that meant, although she had a pretty good idea: she was keeping secrets. Well, wasn’t everybody? She looked back down at Trick’s note. What if she said no? Refused to “set it up”?

“Do you know how to do this?” she asked him, and to her surprise, he nodded.

“I can figure it out.” Justin squatted on his haunches as he retrieved a paper booklet on top of more chunks of clay. As he flipped the pages, she looked over his shoulder, and saw that it consisted of photocopied sections about how to place the explosives and how to set the detonator.

If the mine blew, all the silver bullets and weapons would be buried in the explosion. Maybe Trick and her grandfather wanted them gone because they were too great a temptation, too dangerous. They would lead to more fighting. Maybe Trick and her grandfather had transported them out of there already.

She looked at the note again, wondering if her grandfather had told Trick to write the note. So far Mordecai McBride had steered clear of dealing with her as a werewolf. Her feelings toward him were a jumbled mess and now she had to add stark fear to the mix: he really was the werewolf version of the Bogeyman, and he really did kill bad werewolves.

My father must have broken one of the laws
. That seemed so insane. He’d been an assistant district attorney, prosecuting criminals with a single-mindedness she had always admired. As she’d grown older, she’d known there’d been threats against his life from felons he’d convicted and members of their gangs or crime families. Katelyn had asked him once if he was afraid of being killed.

“No, baby,” he’d told her. “I’ve got you to live for.”

She balled her fists in barely suppressed rage as she watched Justin examining the equipment. Her grandfather had taken her father from her. She didn’t care what he’d done since.

“Kat?” Justin said, as he pulled away the packaging from the clay. It was described as “an advanced material like C4.” She didn’t know what C4 was. There were small objects that looked like spark plugs. They were the charge caps, which they would set into the clay for the detonator to trigger. Then the clay would explode. “Is everything okay?”

Stirring herself, she nodded. She had to be okay. She was in charge of the pack. She had to protect them.

“I’m really glad we sent the pack to Trick’s place,” she said slowly. “Because this is bad.”

“Bad-
ass
,” Justin said grimly. “If Dom tries to ambush us, he’s going to get a big surprise.”

“Or Arial,” she said. “Regan told me she’s got some assassins out gunning for me. She wants to kill me first chance she gets.”

“Bitch. I wouldn’t be sad if she got buried under a ton of rock. Regan, either.” He scrutinized the darkness. “I can’t smell the silver. You’re sure it’s still there?”

“No,” she confessed. “Let’s start placing the charges.” She was getting nervous. Soon they’d have to meet the others at the cabin and show them the way here. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

They both gathered up the supplies and entered the cave. To her relief, her enhanced vision snapped on as if she had pulled a switch. It took her a moment to get her bearings, and then she and Justin were standing before the huge cave painting of the Hellhound. Justin stood quietly for a long time, as if it was finally sinking in that there really was such a creature, and that it lived there.

“I owe Cordelia one huge apology,” he said. “I made fun of her for believing in the Hellhound all the time we were growing up.”

“Who do you think made this painting?” she asked him.

“There were Native Americans here first, then the Spanish missionaries,” he said. “Maybe one of them. Is this what it looks like?”

“Sort of. It’s black and it’s got fur but it looks put together wrong. It has fangs and its eyes glow like they’re on fire. They actually smoke.”

“Shit.”

“Do you remember when something hit your truck on the way out of the bayou?” she asked him.

He looked expectantly from the painting to her. “I saw the whole thing,” she said. “I was there. I was trying to run away, so I lied to you about the truck driver.”

“Well, hell.” He smiled sadly. “I guess we gave you no cause to stick around.” He took a step toward her. “But you have cause now, darlin’.”

The heat from his body enticed her. Her bravado was beginning to waver. She’d had a hell of a day and it was far from over. She wanted to be comforted. But she stood her ground.

“The thing that hit your truck was the Hellhound,” she said. “It came after me, and then it attacked your truck.” His mouth dropped open and she nodded firmly so that he couldn’t deny it. “I saw it happen,” she repeated.

“The Gaudins were the ones—” he began, but she shook her head. He glanced back at the painting. “Then what the hell are we doing in here?”

“We’re going to convince it not to kill us,” she reminded him. “At least that’s the plan.”

But then she had another thought, one that made her stumble as they both turned from the painting. What if, after he set the charges, Trick and her grandfather killed Justin? What if she was setting the charges that would kill everyone?

Trick?
she sent out.
Grandpa? Is this a trap within a trap?

He stopped walking and looked down at the objects in his arms. She saw his mind working. He was silent for a couple of seconds, and then he nodded as if coming to a decision.

“I’m thinking,” he whispered, “that we should set off these charges when we damn well please.” At her startled look, he murmured, “This is its lair, right? If it’s
here
 . . .”

“No,” she blurted, but he frowned intently at her.

“It’s killing us,” he argued. When she began to speak, he shook his head. “It killed that messenger. Probably killed those other people, too. If we can kill it, we should.”

“We don’t know how,” she said, and he nodded at the detonators in her hands. “If we try and fail, then what will it do in return?”