Hot Blooded (Wolf Springs Chronicles #2) (10 page)

The school buildings had once been a Spanish church, and to her left, a large stained-glass window of a saint with a blue-eyed pet wolf seemed to gaze down at her. The man wore a robe; there was a halo around his bald head. But there were no blue-eyed wolves in the Ozarks. Had the artist who had created the window known that? Was the creature really a werewolf?

If the saint knew, he wasn’t saying.

She was spooked; she felt watched. Cordelia had told her the school was supposed to be haunted. Back then, Katelyn had privately made fun of the gullible locals. There were enough tall tales about Wolf Springs to fill a dozen books: a weeping banshee searching for the children she had murdered; a thief who made nooses out of Spanish moss to hang his unsuspecting victims as they walked through the forest. A man who had changed into a bear.

She’d thought they were all so stupid, proof that she had been exiled to “Banjo Land.” But the laugh had been on her.

She felt the back of her neck prickle, swore that the blue eyes of the stained-glass wolf tracked her, and she ran-walked the rest of the way to the classroom.

The door from the hall was unlocked and light spilled into the room from the windows, saving her one more time from using the flashlight. She could see the black rectangle behind Mr. Henderson’s desk that was the door to his office.

Hurriedly she crossed the room, remembering the first time she’d walked into it. Trick had just nicknamed her “Kat,” and she’d told Mr. Henderson that was her name. Now everyone called her Kat except Trick, who had whispered her real name, Katelyn, over and over on Halloween night, when she had broken down in grief and fear and he had been there.

The door to the office wasn’t locked. But as she pulled it open, there was something stretched across the transom, like a thick spider’s web — yellow police caution tape.
NO TRESPASSING
, it read, and she shied backward. They had wrapped the ruins of her home in yards of that tape, after they found, when they found . . .

“Mom,” she whispered.

Lifting one leg up high, she snaked her way through.

Mr. Henderson’s desk, usually cluttered with textbooks and papers, was bare. A chair that had contained more books sat empty.

It hadn’t dawned on her that the police might take away his stuff. Grimacing, she looked around the room, then squinted at a low-lying bookcase, which still had a few books piled haphazardly, as though someone had looked through and then discarded them.

Katelyn reached back through the tape and quietly pulled the door shut. Then she hurried to the bookcase, dropping to her knees so she could more easily read the titles. He had the teacher’s edition of her textbook; and lots of titles about the Civil War; and then at least half a dozen on Arkansas history.

Then book after book after book about treasure hunting, shipwrecks, ancient civilizations, and lost mines. A fleeting smile crossed her mouth. It seemed that Mr. Henderson was Wolf Springs’ answer to Indiana Jones.

Unsure of how much time she had, she satisfied herself that In the Shadow of the Wolf was not on the shelves, then stood and moved to his filing cabinet. It creaked as she opened it, and the first thing she saw was a large file labeled
HISTORICAL DETECTIVE
. That had been the name of the assignment that had led to Katelyn and Cordelia researching the Madre Vena mine. She pulled open the file and started thumbing through the papers, which were from her class, filed in alphabetical order.
FENNER
,
CORDELIA
/
M
c
BRIDE
,
KAT
, came up quickly, and she pulled it out. They’d gotten an A. He had circled the letter and written “
GOOD WORK
!” beside it. A few sentences were marked, and in a couple of places in the margins he had written, “
CONCLUSIONS
DRAWN
HOW
?
BACK
UP
ASSERTION
!”

On the last page, he had written, “
SWITLISKI?
” and “
YOU
TWO ARE
DEF
.
ONTO
SOMETHING
.” She was about to put the paper back when something slipped to the floor. She squatted and found a paperclip.

And then she saw something wedged between the file cabinet and the book case. She used the paperclip to fish it out.

A business card for Fenner Construction, Lee Fenner, Owner. She stared at it as the wheels turned in her mind. Had Mr. Henderson been trying to find the mine for Mr. Fenner? Is that why Lee had pushed Cordelia to choose it as their project?

Is that why he was missing? Had he found it?

Katelyn thought of the Hellhound. Had it been guarding the mine?

Or had someone else done something to her history teacher? Did the police have any leads? Obviously, they had missed the business card.

Then someone called out, “Hello?”

6

She must have made too much noise.

Katelyn tucked the business card in her pocket and ducked down behind Mr. Henderson’s desk. Then she looked up with horror at the open filing cabinet, sure to attract attention if someone came in through the office door.

She could make up an excuse, she thought, trying to stay calm as she braced herself for discovery. She could say that she had lost something valuable. Something belonging to my best friend. With all the rumors going around about Cordelia and their history teacher, no one would blame Katelyn for trying to learn the truth.

She heard the classroom door open. Every muscle in her body tensed. Then there was silence. Her hearing snapped into overdrive and she heard a voice murmur, “Hello? Huh. Weird.”

Then the door closed.

Mike Wright. A wave of fury shot through her, and she was stunned by how fierce it was. It was like somehow he embodied everything that was wrong about her life, this place. She was sure all the kids at her old school that had seen therapists on a regular basis would know a name for it.

Breathe
.

She shut her eyes and clamped her jaw. Her chest heaved. Very slowly, her emotions ebbed. She waited a few seconds to make sure she was in control of herself, then reached up and eased the file drawer shut. Then she snaked back through the caution tape, and tiptoed through her history classroom.

As carefully as a tightrope walker, she opened the door and peered into the hall. Seeing Mike and one of his redneck homies messing around with Trick’s locker, she almost took off along the hall after them. She looked down and away, overcome again with the desire to hurt Mike.

Permanently.

Mike and the other boy started snickering, then went trotting on down the hall. Katelyn hurried over to Trick’s locker. From what she could tell, they had used lipstick to write the F-bomb and the worst homophobic insult for “gay” Katelyn had ever heard. What a moron! In Santa Monica, Mike and his minion would have been expelled for what he’d just done. But here?

Katelyn looked around for something to clean off Trick’s locker. She finally grabbed some paper towels from the girls’ bathroom and set to work, smearing the lipstick until it was illegible. If she had her way, Trick would never see what Mike had done. Mike was a bully and a moron and the stereotype of every prejudice she had held about the south. He was mean and stupid. And he seemed to be getting away with more than his share of nasty pranks.

I could just kill him
, she thought.

She finished, tossed the paper towels, then snuck back outside. She was halfway across the parking lot, which now had five cars in it, including one painted like the Confederate flag, when her phone rang. Startled, she glanced down at the number. She didn’t recognize it, but she answered anyway.

“Are you alone, cher?” said the voice on the phone, deep and masculine, touched with a lilt of Louisiana Cajun.

Katelyn was so startled she almost dropped the phone. It was Dominic Gaudin.

“Yes. Hello. Do you know what’s happened?” she said urgently, hunching over the phone as if to muffle their conversation. It dawned on her that someone might be watching — someone not connected with her high school. A pack member, reporting her every move to Lee Fenner. She pushed that to the back of her mind.
So what?
she thought resentfully, gazing around.

“
Oui
. She has called me,” he said. “I’m coming for her.”

Katelyn caught her breath. “Where is she?”

“She’s alone, and frightened,” he said. “She has no one.”

“Me,” Katelyn said firmly. She searched the lot. And then she felt a fillip of anger. She could see Mike Wright through the windshield of the Confederate flag car. He was smoking a cigarette and, from the way he was nodding his head, listening to head banger music. He hadn’t noticed her. “She has me.”

“She’s not sure of that. She knows that her father has threatened to kill anyone who helps her.”

Katelyn gave her head a shake. “I’ll help her.” She started to walk in Mike’s direction and realized that was a bad idea. So she slipped into the shadows of the trees, making her way toward her parked car.

“Or maybe you’ll tell them where she is, if I tell you. To get in good with your new family,” Dom said.

She was speechless. “They are not my family.”

“They are who you run with.”

“No way. They are who I run from.” She laughed bitterly.

“Ah,” he said. “Then you’ll come with her, when I come for her?”

Her stomach did a somersault and she caught herself giving another quick shake of her head before she remembered he couldn’t see her. Part of her raced ahead to how wonderful it would be to be free of insane Lee Fenner and his whole dysfunctional family. And as far away from Justin as possible. She would miss her grandfather and Trick a lot.

“What would your pack think of me?” she asked him. The mistake?

“It doesn’t matter what they think of you, cher. What matters is how they treat you. I am the alpha, and if I accept you, they will, too. We’re more disciplined than the Fenners. And I’m not losing my mind.”

All plusses. And she and Cordelia could be friends again. She had no one now.

“I’m afraid of what would happen to my grandfather.” She decided to leave Trick out of the discussion. She didn’t need to go around advertising to werewolves which humans in Wolf Springs they could use as leverage to get her to do what they wanted. “They might retaliate.”

“Did he think of you, forcing you to come here?” Dom asked her. “He knew a girl had been killed in the woods. There has been a second one since your arrival. Your teacher is missing. Does he send you home?”

“How do you know . . .?” she began, then trailed off. Had someone told Cordelia about Mr. Henderson? Did Dom Gaudin have a spy in Wolf Springs?

“He’s still my grandfather,” she said.

“And Cordelia is your best friend. She’s the only real friend you have. And you’re the only friend she has. She risked everything to keep you safe. She could have died. Her pack has been her whole life, and she’s going to be lonely in my pack, until she makes some friends.”

“Tell me where she is,” Katelyn asked.

“You say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when you speak to me, cher,” he said, not unkindly. “I’m an alpha. You need to show me respect.”

“Please tell me where she is.” She tried not to sound impatient. All this ritualistic manners stuff was annoying when there were bigger issues at stake. “Please.”

“I will send someone to take you to her,” he said. “Tonight. Be ready.”

Alarm bells went off. “Where? What time?”

“Your cabin. Midnight.”

“No, wait. I think they’re watching me.”

“We’ll make sure they aren’t,” he said.

He disconnected.

Lunch.

And Trick was studying her. Since it was a cold November day, everyone was crowded inside the lunchroom. She would be welcome to sit at his table — his arty, slightly nerdy crowd really liked her — but she kept to her spot in the stairwell of the unused staircase at the back of the room. She was going through the motions of eating the peanut butter sandwich her grandfather had made for her the night before. He had added an apple. It was the exact lunch he made for her every day, and she found it very touching. All she was missing was a juice box and she’d have the lunch she used to pack for herself in elementary school. But the truth was, she had no appetite. Her phone call with Dom was swirling in her mind. Could she really leave? Just go? And then what? What kind of life would she have? She’d be a runaway. A statistic in the growing population of Wolf Springs citizens who had met bad ends.

And if she went missing, her grandfather would go crazy. Could she do that to him?

The questions were drowning her, so she made a pretense of texting so she could keep to herself and try to figure out her next step.

Even with staggered lunch periods, students were packed in tightly and the place was steamy, making the wolf mural that filled one wall look like it was sweating. Beau was also looking at her from across the room, and she kept up the show of texting so she would have a good excuse for avoiding him, too.

Then Kimi actually texted her.

Yo!

Hi,
Katelyn texted back.
How’s it? Jane?

Left me 4 a boy!
came the reply.

Abandoning texting, Katelyn called her. “What?” she said once the connection was made. “Some friend she turned out to be.”

“You know how some girls are,” Kimi said. “Girlfriends are what you have until you hook up with a guy. And, hi.”

“Ridiculous!” It felt like old times. She wondered if that was why Kimi had started texting her again. But it didn’t really matter, did it? They were talking.

“It’s no guy you know,” Kimi said. “Doesn’t go to our school. He’s a total stoner, though, so boring.”

Katelyn was nearly giddy with the normalcy of their conversation. She almost burst into tears, which made no sense, but she held onto the phone with both hands and tapped her toes happily on the stair.