Red

Red

Kait Nolan

Red

Written and published by Kait Nolan

Copyright 2011 Kait Nolan

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved, including the right to
reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Cover Art by Robin Ludwig of Robin Ludwig
Designs

AUTHOR’S NOTE:
The following is a work
of fiction. All people, places, and events are purely products of
the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, places,
or events is entirely coincidental.

License Notes:
This ebook is licensed
for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or
given away to other people. If you would like to share this book
with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each
person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not
purchase it, or obtain it from a library, or it was not purchased
for your use only, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank
you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For Allen,

My everyday hero, who makes me laugh.

All my love,

K

Acknowledgements

As is always the case, this book would not be
possible without the extensive brainstorming, pep talks, chocolate,
and critiques of Susan “The Pink Hammer” Bischoff. Best crit
partner EVER.

Additionally, thanks to my agent, The
Magnificent Laurie McLean, for seeing
Red’s
potential and
mine and fighting to give us wings.

Also thanks to my fabulous beta readers
Claire Legrand and Andrew Mocete. Your reading updates were
treasured.

Chapter 1

Elodie

I
was thirteen when I
found out why my mother left me.

It seems important to start my story there.
The moment when everything changed and my life became a nightmare.
The moment when my mother’s madness began to infect my father.
Infect me.

The letter that came on my birthday that
year was such a shock to my poor dad. So many times, I’ve wished
I’d thrown it away. That I’d never let him see it. But at thirteen,
I couldn’t wrap my brain around the enormity of what my mother was
imparting. I thought it was a joke at first. A cruel one.

Dad didn’t. Instead of believing that she
was mad, he took her words as the cold, hard truth. That I am a
monster, just waiting for the proper catalyst to be unleashed. That
I am cursed as she was.

Today I know it’s true.

I stared at the final line, the period a
blotch of blue ink that bled into the page until I lifted my pen.
It was worse, somehow, putting my fears into words. Words made a
thing real, and I’d spent so long in denial. My ancestors all wrote
of the curse in the weeks and months before they died, so it seemed
fitting that I begin documentation of my own story to slip beside
my mother’s letter, behind the final pages of the thick,
leather-bound journal that held my gruesome family history.

With a careful, slanting hand, I
continued.

I am seventeen today.
Older than my predecessors by a full year. Nothing happened the way
she said it would. As far as the history goes, all of them had
given birth by now. All of them were dead by now. Some hunted and
slaughtered. Some, like my mother, dead by their own hand. Maybe
it’s because I haven’t transitioned yet, but I cannot see suicide
as a viable alternative. The book hints of madness that accompanies
the curse, but my mother seemed right enough in her mind when she
penned the letter explaining things to me, arranging for its
safe-keeping and delayed delivery, and seeing that the trail to my
father was obliterated before she walked away from us, away from
life, when I was only three days old.

I cannot help but feel she took the coward’s
way out, even if she thought she was protecting us. But was it
cowardice? Each year since I got the letter, I’ve come out here, to
contemplate whether I could do it. Each year I’ve brought a
different weapon, testing, if you will, my willingness to end my
own life, should it come to that. Acclimating myself to the idea.
Pills the first year, though I learned from this book that our kind
has a stronger constitution and requires something more definitive
than an overdose. A rope the next. I wound up making a swing from
it. Last year was my father’s pistol. The barrel tasted bitter and
oily when I put it in my mouth. I managed to load the cylinder, but
didn’t get so far as cocking the hammer.

You see, I don’t want to die.

I want a life, a future. I want to be
normal. And I thought I was until yesterday morning.

Then I smelled it. The succulent odor of
bacon frying. So innocuous, really. I thought Dad had decided to
cook breakfast, like he used to on Saturday mornings before the
letter. We made it through the worst year, the worst of the
waiting, and nothing happened. Nothing changed. I had hope.

But there wasn’t any bacon frying. There
wasn’t even anybody in the kitchen. Just a note from Dad that he’d
been called in to work, and he’d be back in a couple of days.

I don’t know what possessed me to follow the
smell. I was hungry, I guess. I tracked the scent to the Redmond’s
open kitchen window. They are our closest neighbors. A full
three-quarters of a mile away.

Humans do not have such fine-tuned senses of
smell.

But wolves do.

What will be next? My hearing? My reflexes?
The fevers that precede the first shift? How long do I have before
I change? Before I lose my humanity like those who came before
me.

Will I have the courage to do what must be
done?

I glanced down at the bone-handled knife
sitting beside me on the stone but didn’t touch it. Of all the
weapons I’d tested, this was the first one that truly scared me.
Pills were relatively painless. A rope, well if you did it right,
that was pretty instant. Same with eating a bullet. But a knife… A
knife was something else altogether. A knife meant you had to be
sure, had to inflict pain, had to wait and watch as your life bled
out, heartbeat by heartbeat.

A knife had been my mother’s choice,
according to the coroner’s report.

Setting the notebook aside, I rose and paced
a restless circle around the clearing. I had privacy here, out in
the depths of the park with the slopes of the Appalachians rising
around me like giant hands curved to hold the mist of morning. I
wasn’t worried about being interrupted. None of the tourists would
stray so far from the trails that snaked their way through the
trees. And as far as I was aware, no one else knew about this
place.

Which made it the perfect spot to challenge
myself.

I circled back around, eyes on the knife.
Even sheathed, it made my breathing hitch. It’s not like it was the
very knife Mom used. That one was still in an evidence locker
somewhere. I’d filched this one from Dad’s workroom, so it wasn’t
cloaked in bad juju or anything. But I couldn’t look at it and not
imagine blood. Oceans of it, spilling out of a warm body, skin
growing paler and paler as the life pulsed across the stone in some
horrible sacrifice.

Dad always said I had an active
imagination.

I approached the knife,
willing myself to pick it up.
C’mon
Elodie, you can do this. You can face the knife
.

Closing my hand around the hilt, I could
feel the pattern carved into the bone handle where it pressed
against my sweaty palm. A howling wolf. The irony. I was sure Dad
would never have bought it if he’d known what I was.

My heart hammered against my ribs, galloping
with a fear I hadn’t felt in all my other trials. I wanted to run.
To drop the knife and flee back to the sham of a normal life I’d
struggled to build over the last four years. Instead, I unsnapped
the leather strap that kept the knife in its sheath and slipped the
blade free.

It gleamed, polished and sharpened,
well-kept as everything my dad tended, though he probably hadn’t
used it in months. Nathaniel Rose took care of things—whether he
wanted to or not. Mouth dry, I set the sheath aside and crossed to
a green sapling. Tugging on a branch about the size of my pinky, I
drew the knife across it. Two swipes. That’s all it took to sever
the branch.

The Cheerios I’d had for breakfast
threatened to make a reappearance.

I moved back to the stone and sat, propping
my right arm in my lap, wrist side up. The faint tracery of veins
stood out like blue lace against my fair skin. I lifted the knife,
but my hand shook so badly I had to stop and rest it against the
rock. No way in hell was I going to accidentally slit my wrist
while I was facing down this personal demon.

This is a test,
I thought.
This is only
a test.
I imagined an annoying, high
pitched
BEEEEEEEEP!
My snicker sounded muffled in the trailing wisps of fog. The
sun would be burning it off soon, once it topped the eastern ridge.
Best get this done with.

The near laughter steadied
me. I lifted the knife again and brought it slowly and carefully to
my arm. Gooseflesh broke out at the kiss of the blade, its tip the
barest of whispers against my skin. I focused on that point of
contact, shutting my eyes, and reminding myself to
breathe.

I can do this.

~*~

Sawyer

“
I’m not going.”

I didn’t yell it, but my dad immediately
changed into the I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-you-anymore
expression that had become the norm in the last eight months.

“
Sawyer, you’ve got to
finish school. You were so close to graduating when you got
expelled. If you’d just go to summer school, you’d finish up,
graduate, and be ready to start college in the fall like we’d
planned.”

Oh of course, The Plan. Dad had been big on
trying to get me back on The Plan since our lives fell apart. It
was his way of coping, I guess. Ever the scientist, he wanted to
restore order out of chaos. Like that could possibly repair the
massive hole that was blown in our lives.

I thought about the GED shoved under my
mattress upstairs. It would be easy enough to settle this, but then
it would look like I was on board with the program. He’d start
trying to push me back into Normal Life, as if there was any such
thing for people like us. Besides, it was something else to fight
about, and these days, I needed to fight like I needed to
breathe.

“
I’m. Not. Going,” I
repeated, letting the edge of a growl seep into my voice and
shifting forward into his personal space. My eyes held his in a
dominance challenge that should have spurred him to action to knock
me down a peg. I wanted the physicality of fists as a release from
the pressure constantly building inside me.

But he answered in words.

“
Your mother would be so
disappointed in you.”

My breath rushed out in a whoosh, as if he’d
sucker-punched my gut. Because it was true. Then I leaned in, so
close I could feel his shuddering breath on my face, and delivered
the only retaliation I had against the accusation. “And whose fault
is it she’s not here to say so herself?”

The question slid home like a knife between
his ribs, and even though I believed it, I still felt like a dick
for sinking so low. His eyes shifted to gold, his lip curled in a
snarl, and I knew I’d gotten what I wanted.

At last.
I balled my fists, body
tensing to move, to finally let off some pressure. But the punch
never came.

“
She wouldn’t want this,”
he said, and his voice was guttural, already halfway to animal. He
stepped back.

Fresh fury boiled up. I whirled toward the
back door, needing to get out, to move, to run.

“
Where are you going?” Dad
demanded.

“
For a run.”

He opened his mouth, to issue a warning
probably, and I lifted my shoes in a sarcastic wave. “On two
feet.”

“
Be—”

I slammed the door, cutting off the caution
and sprinted for the tree line. Once in the shadow of the trees, I
paused only long enough to put on my shoes before resuming my
futile escape. You can’t run from what you carry inside.

My rage grew with every thudding step, the
fog shredded by my passage. I was desperate to shed my human skin
and hunt, but I didn’t dare. Not here. Timber wolves hadn’t been
native to the area for at least a couple of centuries, and after
what had happened to my mother in Montana, where we didn’t stand
out in the least . . .