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

Hot and thirsty, she headed downstairs for some water. She crept past the animal heads mounted on the wall and past the empty spaces where the stolen pictures had hung.

Outside in the darkness, the drums of the Inner Wolf Center were echoing off the mountains. A man named Jack Bronson had bought the old hot springs resort Wolf Springs had been named after, and now business executives paid small fortunes to learn how to let out their inner predators. Seen as a nuisance by a lot of the townsfolk, they mostly kept to themselves at the center. It was a good thing, too. Her one encounter with a couple of those executives in town had been less than pleasant. They’d gotten in touch with their inner jerks a little too much.

As she stepped into the kitchen, she thought she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head swiftly, but there was nothing there.

Just my imagination
, she thought, crossing toward the sink. Then she turned and jumped. Justin was standing outside the window, staring in at her. His thumbs were slung in the belt loops of his jeans, his head cocked beneath the moonlight. A jacket that he didn’t need stretched across his shoulders and she remembered the dream, how he had caught her, trapped her. But now, looking out the window, she remembered riding on his motorcycle, and kissing him in the forest before she knew he had a girlfriend . . . or that he was a werewolf. He had been her first real kiss, and even now, despite everything — despite Trick — she still felt drawn to him.

He gave her a slow nod and she caught her breath, wanting, and not wanting, to go to him. They were two of a kind now, in so many ways.

She went to the back door, opened it, and stepped onto the porch, where he was already waiting. The drums matched the unsteady flutter of her heartbeat. She had to tip her head back to see into his penetrating blue eyes, but she defiantly met his gaze. He looked displeased, and she remembered that in the werewolf world she was the lowest of the low, practically an outcast. He was very high-ranking, definitely her superior, and she should show respect by lowering her gaze. She didn’t back down, but she was afraid not only of him, but also of what she had done with him. Last full moon, the time of her first-ever change, they had hunted together. Taken down a deer — even though she was a committed vegetarian. And she hadn’t remembered any of it.

He glanced upward, as if checking on her grandfather’s window; then he blew air out of his cheeks and jerked his head to the side of the cabin. She had left a pair of sneakers by the door. She stepped into them and followed him, her footfalls crunching on frosty earth.

Shoulder to shoulder, they crossed the driveway. She didn’t see a truck or his motorcycle anywhere, and she wondered how he’d gotten there. And when. Once in the woods, he turned to her.

“I didn’t tell,” she said in a rush. “I didn’t say a word.”

Without replying, he took her arm and pushed up the sleeve of her sweatshirt, examining the place where she had fallen into a silver animal trap that morning. When she’d been injured, Justin had carried her to his truck, intent on getting help, even though he had expected her to be dead by the time he’d reached it. Silver was incredibly poisonous to werewolves: even a small prick from a silver knife could make them horribly sick. More catastrophic damage could definitely kill them.

“How come you’re still alive?” he whispered, though loudly enough for her to hear over the drumbeats.

She knew without looking that there wasn’t even a mark on her skin. Werewolves healed amazingly fast. That was one thing to be grateful for.

“Maybe the trap wasn’t made out of silver,” she said. “Maybe you just thought it was.”

“Oh, it was. Believe me. I smelled it. Felt it.” He dropped her arm and studied her face. “If you were bit by one of us, how can you be immune?
We’re
not immune.”

“My point exactly,” she shot back. “Maybe something
else
bit me.”

“Oh, we’re not back to that,” he scoffed. “Darlin’, the Hellhound is a myth.”

Her temper flared unexpectedly. “Why? Why is it a myth and you’re not?”

Katelyn had never believed in werewolves until coming to Wolf Springs. Who was to say the Hellhound wasn’t real, too? Cordelia had told her that it was the werewolf equivalent of the Bogey Man, a story they told to keep each other in line, especially the youngsters.
Be good or the Hellhound will get you
. But even most of the adults seemed to believe that it could come for them if they broke any of the werewolf laws — like letting humans know their secret. Cordelia had believed the monster was real. And she’d broken the laws . . . She’d even thought she’d seen the Hellhound outside her house, but her father and the rest of the family had just laughed at her.

Justin shook his head and grinned. And angry as she was, Katelyn couldn’t stop herself remembering what it had felt like to kiss those lips. And even though she cared deeply for Trick, she couldn’t help the feelings that stirred inside her when Justin Fenner stood too close. Somehow it seemed different, even more intense, now that she was a werewolf, too.

“Getting riled up, aren’t you?” he asked, smiling at her. “Biting back?”

The drumming stopped abruptly. She and Justin stood in the relative silence, though the wind made the pine branches scrape, and an owl hooted. There was a rush of wings. She was certain he could hear her heartbeat as it roared in her ears.

Justin leaned back against a trunk and crossed his arms over his chest. The moonlight slashed his face, giving it a sinister cast. “Damn it, this is such a mess,” he said quietly.

“Hey, I didn’t ask to be attacked, okay?” she flung at him defensively. “I didn’t want this to happen to me!”

“Well, see, as I figure it, that’s the only upside.” He broke off a branch, then cracked it into two, running the ends along his palm. “That it did happen to you.”

“Not seeing that,” she snapped, moving farther away from him, although her mind flashed back to the big amazing life she was planning to escape to. “Not at all.”

He dropped the pieces of wood onto the ground. “Being stronger and faster than any human ever dreamed? You will. You’d better. There’s no going back, Kat.”

“No one else is immune to silver, or so you’ve said,” she reminded him. “So maybe it’s different for me there, too. Maybe I can . . . go back.”

“Keep your voice down.” His own voice dropped an octave.

She looked quickly around. “Who else is here?” she demanded.

“The alpha’s nervous about you,” Justin said, ignoring her question. “Our kind are born werewolves. We hardly ever bring in humans changed with a bite. Uncle Lee said the last time someone was bit in without permission was in ‘the homeland.’ That’s Scandinavia. The fjords. In the seventeenth century.”

Four hundred years ago? That lent weight to Cordelia’s refusal to believe that a Fenner werewolf had bitten Katelyn.

“Was he there when that happened?” she asked.

A fleeting smile appeared on his face, but just as quickly disappeared. “Oh, man. You don’t know
anything
.”

“Then enlighten me,” she retorted.

He raised a brow. “Don’t you have the sense to know you shouldn’t speak to me like that? With such disrespect? You know how high-ranking I am. Do you do it because you’re scared?”

She said nothing, just tried to look as if she wasn’t afraid. She didn’t want to appear fragile or needy in front of him. Werewolves despised weakness.

“You need to learn so much.” Even in the darkness, she could feel him studying her, assessing her. “So much.”

She remained silent, and he did, too.

“We’re not immortal, Katelyn. Of course Lee — our alpha — wasn’t around four hundred years ago,” he said finally. “We heal up quick, as you’ve already noticed, but we do have a normal human lifespan. We make the most of the time we have, though. In ways you can’t begin to imagine.” He pushed away from the tree trunk and ambled toward her. “Kat.”

Her name on his tongue was like a caress. Silky, sexy. She could feel herself reacting, and she glided out of reach.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” Justin said, and she thought there was just the slightest emphasis on the first word in the sentence.

She scanned their surroundings: the woods, the road, the front of the cabin. Was that someone creeping through the shadows beneath the overhang of the second story? A person, or a wolf?

“Who else is out here?” she asked again.

“You need to get used to being watched,” he said, still evading her questions. “You need to remember that Lee’s got to look out for the safety of the entire pack.”

“Then he needs to remember that someone did this to me. Without my permission, or his.”

“Listen to me,” Justin said, leaning forward. “You know about his dementia, that he’s losing touch with reality. He knows it, too, and he’s running scared. He can’t be seen as losing control. He’ll be challenged. He was going to pick Cordelia to succeed him but that’s out the window now.”

Katelyn couldn’t believe Cordelia would have become the new alpha. Cordelia was just seventeen. Cordelia’s two older sisters had bullied Cordelia mercilessly, and she spent half her time apologizing for things that weren’t even her fault. How could Lee Fenner have ever thought she would be able to lead the pack?

“I thought it was odd, too,” Justin said.

She knit her brows. “I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t need to. I read it. You’ll get better at reading body language, same as us.”

Us
. She would have to be doubly, triply careful around him then. Just like with Trick. Justin could read her; Trick somehow just knew her.

“What happened to you happened on his watch,” he continued. “Something so counter to our moral code it’s never happened here in Wolf Springs, ever. You’re proof that he’s not in complete command of his pack. A source of shame. It might be easiest for him just to get rid of you.”

Threatened, she reared back, and he lunged forward and caught her by the shoulder. His head lowered toward hers and she knew he was going to kiss her.

“I’m standing between that decision and your life,” he said huskily. “You need me, Kat.”

And you need me
, she thought, fighting not to let him kiss her, ever.
I’m the only one immune to silver, and you’re the only one who knows it
. He was planning something, and he needed her to pull it off.

His lips were brushing hers when she turned her head.

“Lucy,” she said. “Your girlfriend, remember?”

He grunted. “I’m sorry, Kat,” he muttered, and he let her go.

Katelyn took a sharp breath. Just being around Justin was like being hypnotized. It had to be something chemical, because they were both werewolves. It couldn’t be that she was that weak.

“Hormones,” he muttered.

“What?”

He huffed. “Look, I know you have to be going crazy right now. All the chemicals in your body have been shaken up, changed. The wolf side of you is fighting the human side and it’s like being a little kid again. Everything will feel more extreme for you and when you’re not with someone to remind you how to act, you’re going to have to remember that your life is riding on your behavior. It’s going to take a while to learn to handle it. Right now, the wolf in you is responding to the wolf in me but you don’t even have the impulse control of a two-year-old human.”

“Feeling like a two-year-old is not my current problem,” she snapped. Her problem was that she wanted to kiss him like there was no tomorrow.

“When your body learns to adapt to everything that’s happening to it, you’ll feel fully in control again.” He paused. “Until then . . . be damn careful around me or any other young wolf in the pack.”

“Like being alone out here with you is being damn careful,” she groused.

“Yeah, well, if we are truly alone.”

He was trying to joke, she could tell, but it just fed into her paranoia, her feeling of being watched.

“
So
not funny.”

He sighed. “Look. It’s not a question of whether you’re a human or an animal. You’re both. And you’re going to have to learn to live with that twenty-four/seven. There will be times when the animal part of you’ll want to act on something and it will be wrong. Same with the other way. So deal with the human issues with human responses and the animal issues with animal responses.”

“And what if the issue is both human
and
animal?”

His grin was evil. “Like making out?”

She nodded, completely humiliated to be discussing it with him like this. But she thought about Halloween when she’d gone from kissing Trick to kissing Justin while barely missing a beat, then hating herself for it.

“Then tread very, very carefully. You bite a human, draw even just a little blood accidentally, and they’ll change.”

Thinking of Trick, she swallowed hard. “
Maybe
they’ll change. We don’t know. Because I'm different.”

“You willing to take that chance?”

He reached out to push a strand of hair back from her face and even though she wanted to step closer to him she forced herself to take a step back.

“What’d you do with the animal trap I got caught in?” she asked, wanting desperately to change the topic.

“Hid it,” he said uneasily, as if he didn’t want to discuss it. “You tell no one, hear?”

“Someone already knows,” she insisted. “Knows enough to put out a trap.”

“That thing was old. It didn’t even spring. It would have taken your arm off when you fell into it if it had been working.”

“But it doesn’t matter
when
it was put out,” she said, sensing she should shut up but not being able to. “It matters
that
it was put out.”

“Kat, I’m not an idiot.” When she opened her mouth to speak again, he said, “You should go back before your grandfather misses you.” Then he added, “Lee wants you to come over tomorrow.”

Cold chills washed down her back. She never wanted to see Lee Fenner — or any of them — again. She knew that was too much to wish for, but she had hoped for some kind of reprieve before it all started—learning to fit in, groveling like a kicked dog before that madman —