She stood rooted; then she looked up at the trees and told herself to climb them, as she had to save herself before. Then she burst into action, bounding through the snow and bending her cold, sore knees, leaping up and grabbing a branch. Her recently broken arm throbbed with pain, but she grabbed another branch. And another. Climbing. Putting her hand around another branch.
Finally hearing something: the branch cracking. Her shout as she began to tumble toward the ground. She was a werewolf. She’d be okay. Her arms flailed until her gymnastics training kicked in and she pulled her hands against her chest and executed a twist in the air, sticking the landing as she slid into the snow like she was entering the water after a high dive.
A shadow pooled around her. It spread and blossomed, the cold swirling toward her knees. Her breath hitched in her chest and she looked around for the source as it expanded, spreading over her head like a net, blocking out the sky.
She looked up, up, then fell backward and crabwalked as fast as she could. Her hands pushed into the snow and she got her legs underneath herself. Her palm flattened on a sharp rock and she grabbed it. She yanked another stone out of the snow and held it against her chest. She got another one, and a fourth, and soon she was cradling six or seven of them as she used one hand to get to her feet. She staggered backward as the shadow kept coming. There was nothing but the dense, oily blackness crawling over her.
“Go away!” she shouted, and she threw a stone. There was nothing to hit. She threw another and another, then all of them as she got to her feet and began to run.
She heard something loping behind her, huge paws crunching the crusted surface of the snow, wind ruffling through its hair. The back of her neck grew hot and wet and she ran faster as a shriek of pure fright ripped out of her body.
Then something grabbed her and she screamed and screamed and screamed. Arms were around her tightly, as she struggled.
“Katelyn!” Trick said, grabbing her hand and breaking into a run. He dragged her behind himself and his cowboy hat flew off. He had a rifle looped around his shoulder but he didn’t stop to use it. “What’s after you?”
“Trick, Trick,” she said wrapping her hand around his to keep herself linked to him, “it’s . . . run, oh, God, please, run as fast as you can!”
They barreled along together until Katelyn thought her lungs had burned up. Then he moved in front of her and turned to face the way they had come. His shoulders were heaving. He stood with his legs wide apart and raised his rifle.
“No, that won’t work, it’s . . .” She looked past him to the trees as snow sprinkled down on them. “Bullets won’t hurt it.”
He glanced at her over his shoulder but he didn’t lower the rifle. She could hardly stand still.
“Where’s your Mustang?” she begged him. “We have to get out of here.”
“Brought a truck,” he said. “Bullets won’t hurt it?” he repeated.
Hysterical laughter bubbled to the surface but she kept herself together. “The truck. Get to the truck,” she said.
“Okay, okay. It’s just . . .”
He didn’t re-sling his rifle, but carried it against his side as she took his hand again and he turned sharply to the left. His truck lights were on, revealing a ribbon of road, and he practically threw her inside, then ran around to the other side of the truck. He handed her the rifle and started the truck, peeling out.
“Katelyn,” he said, but she was staring out the window as they put distance between them and the forest. She closed her eyes and thought of Jesse and Lucy. She pulled out her cell phone. No service.
“Trick, do you have bars?” she began, and then he was yanking off the road and pulling to the side. The lights on the dash revealed his green eyes and sharp, mocha-colored features; then his hands cradled her face and he covered her with quick kisses, a river of them, his lips touching, moving; he gasped and put his mouth over hers and eased his tongue inside.
She set down the rifle and filled her hands with his soft hair, grazing his earlobes and the back of his neck, unable to believe he was there, and that he’d saved her, and that she was alive.
“What the hell, darlin’,” he said, and she kissed him some more. Her nerve endings sizzled and she couldn’t kiss him enough, couldn’t get close enough; she wanted him as much as she had been afraid. Trick seemed to know; he lifted her as close to his body as he could and molded her against his chest. She wanted to growl and grab his head and kiss him so hard it was almost a bite.
Don’t bite him. Don’t
, she reminded herself.
Then he gently took both her hands in one of his and pulled them off himself, then cupped them under his chin. He kissed her forehead and whispered, “Hush now.”
“Trick, oh, Trick,” she said, alternating between sobbing and laughing. “I thought I was dead and — and why did you stop talking to me and why are you here?”
“I
am
here,” he said. He cradled her head and kissed away more tears. She hadn’t even realized she was crying. “You called me, and I’m here.”
He kissed her temple and the side of her face; she closed her eyes and he kissed her lids. She dug her fingers into his sheepherder’s jacket, smelling the soap and leather scent that was Trick. There was something else, a piney fragrance that registered somewhere in her brain, if not her memory.
“Talk to me,” he said. He looked hard at her, eyes nearly glowing in the light from the dash, lashes so heavily fringed they almost didn’t look real. “Tell me,” he insisted. “I can help you.”
“Trick,” she began, and hope lit up inside her. Yes, he could help. Of course he could. He was Trick.
“I think . . . I thought there was something in the forest, like with all the killings.” She remembered how close they had been to the road when he had run with her out of the woods. “I was going for gas and I ran into this . . . feud, like a mountain feud. The hill people . . .” She trailed off, seeing the disbelief in his eyes.
“Some of that is actually true,” she said quietly. “Oh, God.
God
, Trick, I want to tell you, bu . . .” She took a breath. “But I can’t, because if something happened to you . . .”
He placed the flat of his fingertips against her mouth. Something tingled at the base of her spine and caught fire in her chest. They looked at each other in silence. His chest rose and fell. He was struggling with something, just as she was.
“If something happened to me,” he echoed, and she nodded.
He said, “This has gone on long enough. You’ve suffered way too much, carrying this secret. I
know
, Katelyn. I know.”
Her face went completely numb. Everything fell away. Her chest constricted; she was floating. Trick squeezed her hands.
“What — what do you know?” she asked him. She didn’t even sound like herself. She felt like she wasn’t even there.
He blew out a breath and gave his head a little nod. “I know that something happened to
you
, darlin’.” He squeezed tighter. “I know . . . that you’re a werewolf.”
She couldn’t breathe. Her lips parted. But before she could speak, Trick spoke again.
“I know all that.
“And I know that it’s my fault.”
14
“WHAT ARE YOU
saying?” Katelyn whispered. He looked as if he had been holding his breath ever since she had come to Wolf Springs, preparing, defending. As if he had been dreading this moment. His eyes were shiny, as if tears were welling, and that frightened her more than anything else could have.
“That night. I should have been with you. I shouldn’t have let you drive home by yourself. I knew better. I . . . I was too caught up in my own head to think straight. If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have left the party and it wouldn’t have attacked you.”
He knew. She didn’t have to carry her secret by herself any longer. And she could share it with Trick. She was almost giddy with relief, light-headed.
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
“It is. I was meant to protect you.”
“But how could you have protected me? How could you even have known?”
He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. A groan of misery escaped him. “Because, Katelyn, it’s my job.”
“It’s not your job to protect me. I know Grandpa laid that on you but . . .” She stopped speaking as he cleared his throat and looked at her from beneath his long eyelashes.
“Actually, it’s my job to protect everyone.”
She frowned. “I don’t understand.”
Don’t you?
the voice whispered inside her head. The voice that had been whispering to her since she had come to Wolf Springs. The voice that had threatened, promised oh, so much.
Trick’s voice.
Her hand flew to the door handle, but he was faster, grabbing her hand, holding it tight. Fear squeezed her chest. The voice that had haunted her dreams. It had been Trick all along.
“How? How can you be in my head?” she whispered.
“Oh, Katelyn, how do you think?” he answered.
She panicked.
She threw herself hard against the door, breaking his hold on her hand. She tumbled outside and ran. But something hit her around the knees, sending her crashing face first into the snow. She flipped over, blinking the powder out of her eyes, and looked up to see Trick above her. He pinned her with his hands on her shoulders. He might know she was a werewolf, but he could never guess how strong she was.
She brought her knee up into his stomach and tried to heave him off her. He grunted but didn’t budge. His hands tightened around her shoulders and she registered that he was stronger than she would have expected.
Too strong for an ordinary guy.
“Katelyn, listen to me, listen,” he said. His expression was serious, his green eyes intently boring into her very soul. “We’ve
both
kept secrets from each other way too long.”
“I think my grandfather is the Hellhound,” she burst out. She blinked in surprise. She hadn’t expected, hadn’t planned to tell him.
He nodded slowly. “He is.”
And there it was, the final confirmation. She thought of her nightmare and waited for the freefall into this terrible truth. For Trick to have to catch her.
She’d once heard someone say that the truth could set you free. She lay still.
“Does he know what happened to me?” she asked.
“I’ve never told him.”
“But how do you know all this? How can you talk to me? So you know about everything? The war?”
“War,” he echoed.
Trick would help her, be with her. They’d figure out a way out of this whole mess.
He let go of her and kissed her, his lips warm and soft against hers. Every sense clicked into
need
as she kissed him back.
“Run away with me, Trick, far away where they’ll never find us.”
He went completely still. He eased himself up to a sitting position and looked down at her, pain twisting his features. “I can’t do that, darlin’. I can’t leave Wolf Springs.”
“My grandfather would like that. I’d be out of here. Safe. Since he doesn’t know, he won’t care. He doesn’t know that I know that he—” She stopped herself. Trick didn’t need to know about her father. Fresh secrets, beginning to mount up?
She began to sit up, too, and he took her hand to help her. “You can tell your parents you’re going away to college, early acceptance, something, anything—”
He shook his head. “It has nothing to do with them. The minute I was released after being suspected of Mike Wright’s murder, they flew back to Europe. I can’t leave because I have commitments, a job that I’m sworn to do.”
“I don’t understand,” Katelyn said.
He laughed, the sound hard and bitter. “How could you? Because I haven’t told you yet, haven’t explained.” He sighed. “Everything else being equal, we still couldn’t leave without your pappy’s permission. And that’ll never happen.”
She blinked at him, bewildered.
“He’s the Hellhound,” she said. “We don’t need his permission. We need to get away from him before he finds out what I am.”
Before he tries to kill me like he killed . . . my father.
Trick pressed his fingertips against his forehead. “Oh, Katelyn, this is all so screwed up.”
“That’s why we have to get away from here, go someplace no one knows us where we can be alone, start over.” She thought of how wealthy he was. He could make it happen. Her imagination shot into overdrive. She made herself ignore the pained expression that clouded his features, but her pulse was jumping.
“I can’t.” He sounded . . . haunted.
“Why not? Of course you can,” she said, allowing the tide of her urgency, her euphoric hopes, to wash over him. “Trick, I want it to be you. I love you.”
He stared at her with the strangest expression. He looked both young and very old, joyful, defeated. “And I love you. More than anything in this world. More than
anything
,” he said again.
“Then come with me. Come
now
, Trick.”
He took her hands in his and they felt icy. He squeezed tightly and she got panicky, because she knew he was going to tell her more things she didn’t want to hear.
“Katelyn, werewolves aren’t meant to be without a pack. It can drive them a little . . . crazy.”
She thought of her father, a werewolf alone in Los Angeles. Madness? There had to have been a good reason for his actions. And his death. She shook her head.
“But I won’t be alone. I’ll have you.”
Except . . . her father had had his wife. And his daughter.
“You can’t turn me into a werewolf,” he said.
“Is that what you thought?” she responded, gasping. “Trick, I would
never
bite you,
never
do that to you.”
He nodded as if to assure her that he believed her. “I didn’t say you wouldn’t turn me. I said you
couldn’t
. As in, it would be impossible. And a single werewolf, even one surrounded by family and friends, is still very much alone.”
He was wrong about that. She would have to show him, convince him, but what he’d said about it being impossible to turn him into a werewolf gave her pause.