Savage (10 page)

Finally, quite a ways in, Eric started dishing about what he’d found in his own investigation of Jack Bronson. A couple of disappointed customers. No big surprise there. But there was another surprise: Jack Bronson had mysteriously appeared out of thin air a decade before the man’s article. Before that, there had been no record of him.

That was because “Jack Bronson” had changed his name so that people wouldn’t know he’d been charged with three assaults. Apparently there was also a string of hunting violations. Katelyn read the section eagerly, hoping there was evidence that would point to him as the current killer.

And then she read a sentence that stopped her cold.

Jack Bronson’s birth name is John McBride.

7

KATELYN STARED IN
shock at the name for several seconds before her heart started back up. Jack Bronson’s last name was McBride? Her last name? The family name etched in the stained glass window on the landing of this very cabin? Her brain shot off in a hundred directions at once, seizing puzzle pieces and trying to fit them together. Her father, shot with a silver bullet. Her mother, knowing. A piece of stolen silver just outside the Inner Wolf Center.

Did Trick know about Jack Bronson? Was that why they’d broken into the Inner Wolf Center instead of coming through the front door?

The name Eric Custer was highlighted in blue letters, signifying a link, but when she clicked on it, she got a 404 Error — no such page. She typed in his name and more links popped up — dozens of them — and she tried some of them. They were all broken. Wearying of the dead ends, she searched for John McBride. As with Eric Custer, there were dozens of John McBrides. Jack Bronson definitely wasn’t the John McBride who was married to the country singer Martina McBride. She looked for something, anything, that linked the Inner Wolf Jack Bronson to John McBride, and to her grandfather. She found nothing. Maybe Eric Custer had been wrong.

She decided to ask her grandfather about it when he got back, but then she hesitated. If he hadn’t told her that he was related to Jack Bronson, he obviously didn’t want her to know.

She tapped her fingers on the table and reread the article. Why didn’t more people know about this? Or if they did, why didn’t they care?

Doggedly she returned to the search, trying keywords — “Inner Wolf,” “author,” “criminal record” — but nothing else came up. Just the Custer article.

By then it was almost two in the morning.

Frustrated, she dialed and redialed Trick, pacing, swearing at the phone, jumping at every noise. It was hard to believe that back in Los Angeles, she and her then-best friend Kimi had helped Kimi’s mother work on the Handgun Control Initiative. They’d been stereotypical peace-loving, tofu-eating California girls who washed cars at fundraisers for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Katelyn hadn’t even liked to watch violent movies.

But tonight, she had seriously considered killing someone.

I really wanted to. What have I become?

She trembled as she walked to the window and looked out. She felt different, as if her human skin was no longer real and her wolf body was what she belonged in. As she scanned the snowy forest, a little part of her was hoping for prey. Were more assassins coming? If she understood pack behavior, what Arial had done was cowardly and underhanded: you were supposed to issue your own challenges, fight your own fights — even if you were the daughter of an alpha.

The former alpha. The crazy, dead alpha. She felt a rush of empathy for him as she remembered the one time she had seen what he might have been. Two Gaudins trespassing on Fenner territory had attacked the two of them in the forest and he had put his own safety on the line, nearly dying rather than letting the enemy werewolves know that they had a gun that shot silver bullets. She couldn’t deny that she’d been impressed by his self-sacrificing bravery.

But that was the same alpha who had banished Cordelia and threatened to kill Katelyn and her grandfather every single day since she’d been forced to join the Fenner pack.

“Where are you, Grandpa?” she said aloud. “Trick, damn it, call me.” She thought about getting in her Subaru and searching for them; she fantasized for the one-thousandth time about just leaving. If something happened to her grandfather, they would have to let her move in with Kimi and her family. She didn’t have any other relatives, not that she knew of, anyway.

Her lips parted. Her entire life, she had assumed that her mother had had a falling out with her family, possibly over marrying an American. No one on the Chevalier side had gotten in touch when either of Katelyn’s parents had died. But maybe Giselle Chevalier had been the one to cut off contact. But why?

I need to know what happened to my father.

She moved to another window. Starlight frosted the falling snow; there seemed to be as many snowflakes as there were possible reasons for her father’s murder. Like the snowflakes, she couldn’t count them all; and she finally turned away and sat back down at the computer.

She jumped at the little trill on her phone as a text came in. It was Justin.

YOU SAFE?

WHERE ARE YOU?
she texted back, which wasn’t an answer.

He texted back:
OUTSIDE YOUR CABIN
.

She ran into the kitchen and peered through the curtains; his silhouette was dark against the falling snow. She threw open the cabin door and he was on the threshold, stomping his boots on the boot rack, shaking snow off his shoulders. Droplets clung to the ends of his dark hair. His blue eyes were stormy, and he looked gaunt and tired. Thick stubble accentuated the hollows of his cheeks. The wolf in her responded to his presence, and she looked away so that he wouldn’t see the rising hunger in her expression.

“You shouldn’t be here. My grandfather will be back any minute,” she said, taking only a couple of steps away as he came inside and shut the door.

“Kat,” he said, and he bent down and offered his cheek to her in a werewolf greeting. She still wasn’t used to it, but she brushed her lips across the stubble on his face. Then she offered her cheek, and he molded his hand gently against the side of her face while he pressed his mouth to her cheekbone, then slid his lips toward her ear. She caught her breath and gave her head a little shake.

He kept hold of her and whispered, “Let’s go upstairs.”

To her bedroom, he was saying. She quivered. The wolf in her wanted to obey him.

Wanted him, plain and simple.

“Lucy,” she said. It was the magic word that always stopped him when he started coming onto her like this.

Trick
. That was
her
magic word.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “There are going to be some changes in the pack.”

A thrill shot through her. Was the fighting within the pack already over? Had someone been declared alpha?

“Are you — did you win?” she asked.

He gave his head a shake and came close again. “I mean about Lucy. And me.”

“Justin, she’s your fiancée,” she said deliberately.

He looped strands of her blonde hair around her ear and studied her face. “You were amazing today. Ferocious. Brave. And you put your life on the line for Doug. Gotta admit, I had my doubts about you. But you’re a hell of a werewolf, darlin’. You’re going to make . . . someone . . . a fine mate.”

His pupils dilated and she saw pure desire there. Justin was one of the most important, if not
the
most important, of the werewolves in the Fenner pack. In terms of pack politics, being Justin Fenner’s mate would be like winning the lottery.

“When I’m twenty-seven, maybe, but not at seventeen.” Her voice cracked. She was excited and nervous, and she was flooding with guilt. Trick was out there somewhere in the snow, chasing after a killer. What the heck was she
doing
?

He reached out his hand, and she protectively crossed her arms over her chest.

“Lucy called me out,” she reminded him. “She would have killed me. And you just stood there and
watched
.”

“Ssh, honey,” he murmured, stroking her cheek, like someone trying to gentle a wild animal.

She pulled away and got a glass out of the cabinet, turned on the tap, and filled it. Just as she began to put the rim to her lips, Justin clasped her wrist and forced her to set it down.

“You know that I’ve broken rule after rule for you,” he said. “You don’t know how hard it was to do nothing while she beat the crap out of you. The only consolation I had was knowing that no matter how bad it hurt, you’d heal.

“And I also knew that if I moved to help you, Lee would have taken my throat. What help would I have been to you then?”

“That’s easy to say
now
.” She made a point of lifting the glass. His hand moved, and for an instant she thought he was about to bat the glass out of her hand. She was scared. She was playing with fire. His uncle had nearly ripped the hair from her scalp when she hadn’t been submissive enough.

“Remember who you’re talking to,” he said between clenched teeth. His eyes blazed. She could hear his heartbeat thundering. Feel the tension rising between the two of them.

I never forget
. She remained mute. Unsteadily, she took a defiant sip of water.

Justin watched; then he swore under his breath, stomped to the kitchen door, threw it open, and left.

Holding the glass with two hands to keep from spilling it, she moved to the kitchen window, but the snow was coming down too hard to make out Justin as he left. She turned on the tap again and splashed water on her face.

A wolf howled and she jerked because it sounded like Justin, who shouldn’t be able to transform at will.

She made sure the back door was locked and walked back into the living room. She sprawled on the sofa, watching the flames dance in the fireplace. When she had first moved in, she couldn’t come near the fire. Her house had burned to the ground — and her mother had been inside it.

“Mom,” she murmured, “what really happened to Daddy?”

She lifted the phone to try Trick again, but it slipped from her grasp as her eyes closed. She drifted.

Running.

Leaping.

Attacking.

Blood on your paws, silver girl.

Blood in your mouth.

Mine.

Click, click, click.

Soft pelt sliding across her cheek. Hot breath on the crown of her head.

Click, click, click.

The back door, shutting.

Again.

Katelyn jerked awake the next morning to find herself still on the couch. She looked out the front window, fingers crossed that she would see her grandfather’s truck parked outside. It wasn’t there. She dashed upstairs and knocked on his door. It was locked, and there was no answer.

She ran back downstairs and tried Trick’s phone. Nothing. She burst outside, standing on the porch as the sun began to peek through the trees, and caught her breath.

The snow in front of the cabin had been tamped down by dozens of paw prints. Someone — possibly more than several someones — had come visiting last night.

She shut the door. Realizing that part of the reason she was shaking was from sheer hunger, she made herself a salami and cheese sandwich, not caring that digging into the meat might bring questions later.

She showered, brushed her teeth, and changed into clean clothes. Then she got her gun and her backpack, cocked the trigger, and hurried to her car. Leaping in, she peeled out, heading for school. Once she was on her way, she pulled over and called the police station. But there was no coverage. She connected her phone to the charger in the car and drove like a demon.

Trick wasn’t at school. There were signs up in memory of Mike Wright, as there had been for Becky and Haley, two girls who had previously been killed in the woods. But no one had really liked Mike.

She saw Beau in the hall and ran up to him. His father had been among the hunters in the cabin’s front room, and when Beau saw her, he paled and shook his head.

“My dad hasn’t checked in,” he said by way of greeting.

“Where could they be? Shouldn’t someone be notified?” she asked, her voice shrill and anxious. “Like the FBI or something?”

His worried expression softened. “Kat, these are the hills. Things like that don’t happen here.”

“But other things do happen. Are happening,” she argued. She thought about calling Detective Cranston. Doing
something
. But just as quickly, she realized that she couldn’t. The first law for werewolves everywhere was to protect the secret of the existence of werewolves. Breaking that law brought instant death. But surely some people in Wolf Springs
knew
.

Everyone at school was distracted and anxious. Katelyn spent most of the day trying to reach Trick, and as soon as the last bell rang, she drove straight to his family’s place — a former dairy; she supposed you called it an estate — and found no one home. His parents traveled almost constantly, and they usually left Trick to manage things.