Savage (5 page)

“That’s not for you to decide,” she insisted. But his answering look told her that he would never accept that. “Some of them are good.” Like Doug, who had tried to look out for Katelyn, and had died a hideous death for his trouble. Or Justin’s big brother Jesse, who had Down’s syndrome, a sunny, sweet guy.

Except that Jesse keeps talking about breaking necks
, she reminded herself.

“They’re not good
enough
,” he replied. He cocked his head, appraising her. “But I think that perhaps you’re worth saving. Come with me now and prove it.”

“I have to go home,” she said. But Wolf Springs wasn’t home. Los Angeles was. “I have to make sure that my family’s all right.”

“Your pack,” he said dismissively.

“My grandfather. And someone else.”

Trick.

A funny look crossed his face. She scowled at him.

“Stop trying to be all mysterious. What is up with you, anyway? You dress like a Renaissance Fair refugee and you’re wearing Old Spice. I’m betting you don’t have a day job unless it’s being in a motorcycle gang.”

He jerked in shock. Emboldened, she was about to lob more insults at him when his expression turned steely and he swerved to the side of the road and stopped.

“This isn’t a game,” he said. “I killed a werewolf back there. It’s not my first. And it won’t be my last.”

She realized she was cowering against the door and forced herself to sit up straight. But when she tried to glare back at him, she broke into a cold sweat. Her stomach clenched and her face prickled. And she had to avert her gaze.

“So we understand each other a little better,” he said with grim satisfaction.

“I don’t understand at all.”

“If you join forces with us, you’ll understand everything,” he said. She sucked in her breath as he held up his forefinger. “But only if.”

Then he focused his attention back on the road, leaving her to sit in queasy silence. She thought of a thousand things to say and instead, pulled her phone back out. Instead of listening to the voice message from Los Angeles, she put her phone on mute and pulled up a video of Trick. He had been filming a play,
Dark of the Moon
, and in it he played a witch boy who falls in love with a human girl. Trick had translated it into Russian, which he spoke fluently, and in the video, he wore nothing but a pair of black footless tights and had feathers woven into his dark, curly hair. A spotlight was shining on his face, highlighting the sharp angles of his cheekbones, the warm brown color of his skin. His hair was pulled back from his forehead, accentuating his sea-green eyes, and he swayed like a snake.

Trick Sokolov, who had bewitched her. The only thing she wanted more than Trick was not to be a werewolf anymore. So far, both were things she couldn’t have.

She drank in his movements, his face. She remembered what it felt like to kiss him. To be held by him. The video was so sexy, and so Trick, that her heart skipped beats and she played it again, focusing on him, on how she felt about him. It was hopeless: he knew nothing about her werewolf world, and if he ever learned of it, he would be put to death.

Even now, he was in trouble. Mike Wright, who had bullied and terrorized Trick for years, had been found dead. Katelyn had been unable to confess that she’d beaten him badly after he rammed her car. But she had left him alive. Of that she had been certain. Trick’s only connection to the murder was his known animosity toward Mike — and the fact that he’d been in trouble with the law before. People had it in for Trick, because he was wealthy, and different, and of mixed heritage. Some of the girls who’d warned Katelyn about him were the same girls who wanted him to be theirs. People who detested him had crashed his amazing Halloween party on his family’s vast, sprawling property.

His parting image was a slow, wicked smile. It physically hurt to think of him smiling that way for someone else. But he would have to, one day.

“What are you doing?” Magus asked sharply. “Are you texting someone?”

“None of your business,” she retorted.

His hand shot out as if to grab the phone, and she yanked it out of his reach.

“Hey, not cool,” she said.

“Everything is my business,” he retorted. “For you, that’s a lucky thing.”

“Why?”

He looked her full on, and his eyes glowed against the crimson firelight beyond. “Because I can save you, Katelyn, even if you can’t save them.”

4

KATELYN FIGURED SHE
had the rest of the drive back to Wolf Springs to learn all she could about the Hounds of God. She wasn’t sure yet what she would do with the information — go straight to the pack? Call Cordelia first? — but the more she heard, the more convinced she became that the Hounds of God were just as crazy as the executives who attended Jack Bronson’s Inner Wolf Center, with their drumming and their howling at all hours of the night. The Inner Wolf guys stirred up the animals in the forest, and made the locals resentful, hostile. Bronson urged them to let out their wild wolf side, and people were wondering aloud if one of them had gone too far, and committed the murders that were baffling the two officers of the Wolf Springs police department.

“So in your rituals, you drink this potion, and that’s when you change,” she said, recapitulating what he’d been telling her. With each revelation she had become more doubtful that the Hounds of God really were werewolves. It sounded to her as if they were a bunch of tattooed freaks who got high and then shared some elaborate mass hallucination. When he talked about the werewolf packs they had already “cleansed,” she imagined them riding into town like an outlaw biker gang and physically blowing werewolves away with guns. But she remembered the names: Manarro, Lycanan, Verdulak.

“You’re not initiated into our order, so I can’t go into detail,” he replied. “But yes, we derive our power from aligning ourselves with God and His avenging angels. The Fenners and the Gaudins are descended from monstrous creatures — the Fenners from the Fenris Wolf, son of Loki, and the Gaudins from the Beast of Gévaudan, who terrorized France in the eighteenth century.” He narrowed his eyes. “The Fenners claim descent from a god, and they say that the Gaudins are upstarts, possibly a mutated offshoot from their godly origins. But there is only one God! And the Gaudins are proud to claim a ravening monster as their forebear.”

“Is that why they hate each other? Cordelia said they’ve been feuding for centuries.”

“They’ve been feuding because they’re sinful barbarians,” he replied, as if the fact were obvious. “Only we who claim God as our Creator are free from sin.”

Wow. They’re total religious fanatics
, Katelyn thought. She gave him a careful nod, not wanting to appear as if she were insulting him. She didn’t want him to clam up.

“I think the Fenners would agree that the Gaudins are barbarians,” she said. “They dumped silver in the water. That’s not playing fair.”

He looked at her in disbelief. “There’s no such thing as playing fair in a war.”

“They had traditions,” she said. “Fighting only on the full moon . . .” She stopped. Tonight was not a full moon night. The Fenners had deliberately chosen it to launch a surprise attack.

Gazing at a light snowfall through the windshield, she wondered which of the Fenner werewolves had survived the battle and would be returning home. Who would be in charge? Justin had a good shot at it, especially given how much anguish Regan and Arial were going to be in over their father’s death.

She hoped it
was
Justin. Even with her silver immunity she wasn’t sure that either of Cordelia’s sisters would be thinking rationally enough to know that they should work with her instead of against her.

Pack politics. They were confusing, exhausting. She ran her fingertips over the faceplate of her phone. There had been a time back in the bayou when she had planned to run, and she would never have seen Trick or her grandfather again. Now it looked like she could, at least, for a while.

She would get home and hope that everything would go okay. Her grandfather had no reason to think that she wasn’t at a sleepover at Paulette’s, as she had told him the day before. She’d still be able to make it back to his cabin by noon. Except that she had left her Subaru at the Fenners’, and he would know something was up if she came home without it.

Magus shifted in his seat as though he had sensed her sudden unease. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“My car. It’s at the Fenners’.”

He cursed under his breath. “I can get you there before they get back.”

“There’ll be people there already.” Jesse, who was Justin’s brother, and Lucy, who often looked after Jesse for the Fenners. “People who didn’t go to the bayou.”

“Werewolves, not people,” he corrected her, pursing his lips. He puffed air into his cheeks, such a normal-looking gesture of frustration that she almost burst out into nervous laughter. He accelerated and the trees blurred past. They had long ago put the forest fire behind them, and it was still dark out. What kinds of red flags would be raised if Lucy, who had only backed down from a challenge to the death because of the battle at the bayou, saw Katelyn with this weird monk werewolf?

“You should leave the truck there and come with me now,” Magus said.

“I need to sort out a few things,” she replied. Everyone wanted her to leave with them, first Cordelia and Dom, and now Magus.

If only Trick would ask me to run away with him. We’d run and never look back.

Katelyn woke with a start and it took her a moment to remember where she was. Magus’s truck. She didn’t know when she’d fallen asleep or how long she’d been out, but she’d been dreaming about Trick. In her dream, they’d been playing in the waves at the Santa Monica pier. Such a simple thing, and yet far beyond the realm of possibility.

The sun was up and she could feel warmth on her arm where it was pressed against the window. Her anxiety rocketed sky-high. There was no hiding under cover of darkness anymore.

She looked around to spot a landmark, something familiar. But the trees looked like the trees anywhere else. A premonition reared its head that Magus had decided to take her away after all.

“We have to be getting close,” she said, clearing her throat.

“Yes,” he said shortly.

“And you know the way?” she queried, failing to keep the suspicion out of her voice.

He cocked a brow at her. “I went to the Fenner compound once when I was very young,” he said.

That took her aback.

“Why? Do they know you?”

“They wouldn’t remember me,” he said. “It was just a visit.”

“A visit?”

He frowned at her. “It’s got nothing to do with what’s going on.”

“I sincerely doubt that. They told me about your pack. They didn’t like you.”

“Why would they? We have the moral high ground. And the power to destroy them.”

“Well, if you think they’re so bad, why haven’t you?”

“We wait to learn of God’s will in all things,” he replied with the confidence of someone who is convinced he is right.

“And God told you that He wants you to kill them now?”

He was quiet for a moment, and he didn’t look at her. She waited.

“Once you’ve joined us, Daniel can explain this to you more clearly,” he said. “Now, as to your question, I was here once, with my great-aunt. On a visit.”

“Once. And all these trees aren’t confusing you.”

“You really are new at this, aren’t you?” His smile was unbearably patronizing. “You’ll soon learn that those of us with the gift have an excellent sense of direction, much like our wild brethren.”

“Gift. ‘Curse’ is more like it,” she said flatly.

“Not at all. It’s an honor to fight for God, to destroy the demons that would overrun this earth. ‘Blessed are they that go down into the earth for my sake.’”

“Is that in the Bible?”

“In our holy scripture, from the Inquisition trial of Thiess,” he replied.

Justin thought of it — being a werewolf — as a gift as well. Katelyn hadn’t gotten there yet. She doubted she ever would.

Then she studied Magus’s profile, his green eyes. The werewolf who had attacked her had had blue eyes. She’d been compiling a list of werewolves with blue eyes ever since. Justin was on it, and a few other people as well. Not as many as she would have expected.

“If you think it such a gift, why don’t you bestow it on everyone?” she asked. Maybe that was exactly what someone in his pack — or group, or whatever they called it — had done to her. Who said her attacker had to have been a Fenner or a Gaudin?

Magus shook his head sharply. “The gift must be protected. The responsibilities that come with it can be overwhelming. The mantle is not to be taken up lightly.”

“Wow,” she said, aloud this time.

“And beyond that, we don’t bring strangers in,” he went on. “I told you that we’re not changed through a bite. We become werewolves through a magic ritual, and one must participate willingly, or it won’t work.”

“So can you undo it with a magic ritual?” she asked hopefully. “If someone isn’t doing too well with the gift, can you take it back?”

She held her breath as he fell silent, and tried to read his hesitation. She caught herself hopefully crossing her fingers, like she did when she was little.