Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles #2) (24 page)

“Can we skip tomorrow and meet Wednesday?”

He shook his head. “I’m taking Lucy Christmas shopping Wednesday, and I don’t think she’d cotton to waiting in the car while I teach you how to howl,” he said. “Me, I like to order things online. But you know how the female of the species is — always on the prowl for something shiny.”

“You’re so sexist,” she said.

He raised a brow. “Is that the way they talk in Santa Monica? Here in the hills, them’s fightin’ words.”

Katelyn sighed. In some ways, she and Kimi had been right about calling Wolf Springs “Banjo Land.” Around here, women still tended to cater to the male ego, and so far, in the pack, the alpha-
male
held sway. But with three daughters and no sons, Lee Fenner had been planning to hand over leadership of the pack to a female.

Had been
. Until Cordelia was banished. Now she figured it was anyone’s guess who was going to get control of the pack.

“Hey,” Justin said, jostling her. “I’m just teasing you. Sorta.”

“Is it a problem that Lee doesn’t have any sons?” she asked. “Are there people in the pack who are unhappy about possibly having a female alpha?”

“Yes,” he said, losing his lightness. “But the female of the alpha pair holds a lot of power. She can boss around the other males.”

“Just not
her
male,” she said, and he nodded. “Would you be okay if the alpha was a female, maybe even Lucy?”

“It won’t be Lucy, but I’ll play along with your question. My alpha is my alpha,” he replied. “Once the alpha’s declared, my loyalty instinct kicks in.”

Loyalty instinct. She had never heard of such a thing.

He must have seen her confusion. “As far as I can understand it, humans have to work at being loyal, and staying loyal to each other. But we have a natural impulse to figure out the chain of authority and respect it. It makes life a lot easier.”

“But you’re bucking the system,” she argued.

He winced as if she’d hit him. “Here’s the thing, Kat. ‘Alpha’ means the highest-ranked, based on being the most dominant. And ‘dominant’ means exerting the most control. Our alpha is our king, and he’s on the throne only as long as he guides and protects the pack. In the old days, there was a lot more fighting to become alpha. A lot of challenging. But that was before civilization encroached on us.”

“Or vice versa,” she said. “You encroached on civilization.”

“Even out here, there are a lot fewer wild places,” he said. “We used to run for miles and miles and miles. We’re too bunched up now. It puts added pressure on everyone.”

“So why don’t you spread out?” she asked. She took a chance. “Some of us could move to L.A.”

To her surprise, he reached over and tousled her hair in a friendly, big-brother sort of way. It was a side of him she hadn’t seen, at least where she was concerned. He was like that with Jesse.

“L.A.,” he said. “We’d be like the Beverly Hillwolves, gawkin’ at them big-city folks.”

“You’d do great,” she insisted. A fleeting microfantasy raced through her mind in which she and Justin headed a pack that moved to L.A. Or maybe even Montreal. She could get a job in the Cirque du Soleil and just not work on full moon nights.

But that meant a life with Justin, not Trick. And though Justin affected her in a physical way — wolf to wolf — Trick was the one she wanted to sit on the couch and watch movies with. Or maybe that was just as farfetched as imagining Justin without Lucy beside him.

“Kat,” Justin said seriously, interrupting her reverie. “Don’t get ideas. I don’t see a move to L.A. in anyone’s future.”

“It’s not up to you,” she snapped. Then she jerked. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, backtracking. Because if he challenged Lee and assumed leadership of the pack, it would be up to him. He could give her back her life. Could she talk him into it?

“Listen, the packs are what they are and we don’t split off, make new ones. Us, the Gaudin pack, the Hounds of God, and the others, we’re all vying for territory while trying to survive in this world. So, tomorrow after school,” he pressed.

“If you say so,” she replied.

“I say so.” He bent forward and offered his cheek. As she rose on tiptoe to kiss it, he swiveled his head, as if he was going to try to kiss her on her mouth. Then he stopped himself and, sighing, accepted her gesture of pack kinship.

Tuesday, Beau was looking pretty tired during history. After class she stopped him.

“Everything okay with your grandmother?”

“She was a little worse, but she’s doing better now.”

“Did you find a gun in your grandmother’s room?” she asked, trying to force a smile. Mostly she wanted to figure out if he’d had any time to think about what his grandmother had said and get suspicious of her, Katelyn.

“No.” He flashed a disbelieving smile. “Granny wasn’t loaded. I did find something else interesting, though.”

“What’s that?”

“The missing book.”

She stared at him, mind racing.

He grinned. “Yup, like some crazy old hoarder, my grandma was the one who had
In the Shadow of the Wolf
out from the school library. Heaven only knows how she got it or when. For all I know she checked it out when she was still in high school.”

He was trying to be funny, she registered that, but she couldn’t connect on that level because all she could think about was the book and what it might say about the Hellhound. “What did you do with it?”

He reached into his backpack. When he handed it to her, she swore her fingers tingled on the old leather cover.

“You can take it home and start reading,” he said. “I didn’t know where to start, but you did that paper.”

“Thanks,” she said quickly, tucking it against her chest.

“Let me know what you find.”

“Of course.”

Never.

All through training with Justin she was miles away, thinking about the book in her backpack and praying that no one went snooping and discovered it. They were working on her sense of hearing and she just couldn’t get it to go into overdrive, too busy focusing on what she might find in its pages. Justin seemed distracted, too, and sent her home early. When she finally made it into her room, she slipped the book out of her backpack. It was dusty and worn, the white letters stamped into the blue cover practically illegible.

She flipped it open, eager to read the secrets it kept. But the print was tiny and there didn’t seem to be any kind of table of contents. No index, either. She was going to have to read from the beginning.

The entire first page was one paragraph.

Welcome, Gentle Reader, to the myriad stories of the founding of Wolf Springs. This bucolic town, nestled in the beauteous mountains of the Ozark Region, was first settled by Spanish missionaries, in hopes of converting the local savages to the joys of the Gospel, as set down by our Lord, Jesus Christ. Ah, what a task lay before the good padres, faced with the stubbornness of the primitive innocent—

“C’mon, c’mon,” Katelyn muttered, skimming the rest of the long-winded introduction. She turned the page.

— for is it not true that salvation can only be found in a society based on Christian values?

With a groan, she flipped back to the first page and picked up where she had left off.

And as many have often surmised, the soul of the childlike native must also be brought to the Lord—

The book progressed from describing the attempts of the missionaries to convert the natives to a detailed description of the building of each structure in the town. The dry goods store. The barber shop.

The blacksmith also ran a foundry, kept busy by hunters who requested peculiar casings for their ammunition. Horses for hire were stabled there as well.

She remembered that when she’d been in the sick room at school, Mr. Hastings had called Sergeant Lewis about Mr. Henderson’s absence. And he had described Mr. Henderson’s house as “by the old stables.”

She made a second mental note, and kept on reading.

And then . . . a secret.

The Lost Mine of Wolf Springs. A Discussion.

The author laid it all out — the Madre Vena, the claims by Xavier Cazador to have found it in the nineteenth century. The outlaw, Jubal DeAndrew, who had threatened to kill him if he didn’t reveal where it was.

It is said that a painting of the mine’s entrance was created by Xavier Cazador for Jubal DeAndrew. In the foreground stood a heart-shaped boulder, and in the background one could view a silvery waterfall. But the true artistry of the painting lay in this: a false signature could be scraped away, and beneath it one could learn the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates for the mine.

Her mouth dropped open. She had been right about the sketch, and the painting of her grandfather’s that had been stolen showed the mine’s entrance. Was it possible that the stolen one had been the original and had the coordinates on it?

It is said that although Cazador created this painting for DeAndrew, it was never given to its intended recipient. Cazador died, and DeAndrew went missing. One surmises that foul play might be blamed, perhaps by a rival interested in the painting.

Her head swam with the possibility. People were born, lived, and died in Wolf Springs. Their attics had to be bulging with things that might hold the key to unlocking so many of the town’s dark secrets. Her grandfather might have had a fake — a replica — or it could have been the actual painting. He said his father had picked one of the paintings up at an estate sale. Was that the one? And was it the original?

The question was: had someone else figured out that he had it? Had they stolen the silver and the other painting only to cover up the theft of this vital clue?

She tingled all over and eagerly turned the page.

The mine is said to be guarded by a monstrous beast, a Hellhound, who keeps thieves at bay and protects the treasure as if it is his own. A notable detail about the legend surrounding the Hellhound is that the creature shows up in historical accounts of the area years before there is any mention of the mine. Whether this is an oversight is unclear. It is possible that when people learned of the mine they connected the creature to it as a means to scare others away.

To her disappointment there was nothing else she didn’t already know about the Hellhound, at least not in that section. Her eyes blurred, as she realized that she had to be more tired than she thought. She kept trying to read the tiny words, but her head bobbed. With a reluctant sigh, she closed the book. It would have to wait until the morning.

Click. Click. Click.

The clicking mixed with the sound of drums. Both getting closer. Both in time with the beat of her heart.

“I found this for you, a perfect fit,” Babette said, holding up some coveralls.

“But I won’t be digging in the dirt,” she protested.

“Don’t think you won’t before it’s over.”

Click.

She turned around, but no one was there. Just the walls of the cave. They were closing in on her and she smelled . . . something.

Aluminum.

No! Silver. Far more precious. Lovely but deadly.

“Just like you,” Justin whispered in her ear.

His breath was hot; it tickled.

But then he was gone and the cave was shrinking around her. The walls were closing in and she knew that they were going to bury her.

And in the darkness something growled.

Laughed.

Cried.

“Katelyn,” it whispered.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Katelyn opened her eyes with a gasp. She was in bed and something was scratching at the skylight above her head. Nails on the glass going click, click, click.

She looked up.

There: a shadow darker than any shadow, and eyes that burned like the fires of hell.

She screamed.

14

As she screamed, the eyes disappeared. She leaped for the door at the same time her grandfather barreled in, wild-eyed, a gun in his hand.

“Katie, what is it?”

“I saw it,” she whispered.

“What? What’d you see?”

And as her senses came back to her, she realized she couldn’t tell him. She was sure that what had been on her skylight had been more than just a werewolf: she was certain it had been the Hellhound. But either way she couldn’t risk her grandfather going to investigate.

“What?”

She wiped her forehead and managed an embarrassed, if extremely forced, smile. “Sorry. I — I guess I was having a nightmare.” She crossed her arms. “I feel like such an idiot.”

He visibly relaxed. “You need anything? Drink of water?”

“No, I think I’ll be fine,” she managed to say.

She strained her ears, listening for the sounds of something walking around on the roof, but heard nothing. Was it possible she
had
just imagined something staring down at her?

“Okay. Let me know if you need anything.”

“I will,” she barely managed to choke out around the sudden lump in her throat.

As soon as he closed the door, she wrapped her arms around herself and leaned against it. She thought of Beau’s grandmother stroking out because she had seen “a demon” at her window. Why would she and Katelyn both be getting visits? As far as she knew, Beau’s family had no connection to the werewolves.

Maybe it was because she knew there was something wrong and she told people.

Katelyn hugged herself even tighter. It was one more reason not to endanger those she loved. But she couldn’t just roll over and stay ignorant instead of asking questions that someone needed to answer.