Savage (6 page)

Please
, she prayed.
Please
.

“That’s something that hasn’t been revealed to me,” he said carefully. “But I’ve never heard of it being done.”

Crestfallen, Katelyn chewed the inside of her cheek as she resumed staring at the endless lines of trees. Maybe she could hold out a little hope there. He might be lying. Maybe their leader, Daniel, knew how to do it. Cordelia had been definite that you had to be bitten to become a werewolf. So were the Hounds of God actually werewolves, or something else? This other world was much more complicated than Cordelia had led her to believe.

“Of all people,
you
should welcome the gift,” he said.

She jerked. “Why is that? Why have you guys picked me out?” Did they know about her immunity to silver?

“Daniel will explain,” he said. “I’m just his messenger.”

“But you must know more than you’re telling me.” She tried a different tack. “Did you ever hear about the string of murders around here forty or fifty years ago?”

He nodded. “My great-aunt has spoken of it often. She grew up around here. That’s why I’ve been to the Fenner house before.” He added the last sentence as if he were giving in to her request to explain his past to her.

Katelyn’s pulse sped up. “She did? How? Is she a Fenner? Are you?”

He grimaced; she’d clearly insulted him. “That doesn’t even make sense,” he said. “She didn’t receive the blessing until she was older . . . like you.”

“But who is she?” she persisted, and when she watched his face glaze over, she realized that it didn’t really matter at the moment. “Did she ever say who she guessed could have been behind the killings?”

“She didn’t have to guess. It was a werewolf, and she survived an attack by the beast. That’s how she first learned of our world.”

“She was
bitten
?” Katelyn gasped.

“Just deeply scratched.”

She blanched at the memory of her grandfather’s scarred back. Two close calls. Why hadn’t she gotten off that easily?

Because you got out of the truck
, she reminded herself.
You left the party alone because you were mad at Trick, and you blew it
. A wave of bitterness soured her stomach, but she pressed on.

“Did she ever figure out who scratched her?”

He took his eyes off the road again to look at her. His eyes gave her chills as he stared her down like the wolf —
correction
,
werewolf
— that had leaped on the hood of Trick’s car on her first day of school at Wolf Springs High. She should have taken that as a warning, been more careful.

He said, “It was the Fenner alpha, of course.”

Katelyn felt like she was freefalling, and she dug her fingers into the spongy material of the armrest.

“Lee?” she whispered.

“No,” Magus said abruptly, turning back to the road. “Tommy Ray Fenner. Lee Fenner’s father.”

She blinked, processing that information. No one had ever talked about Lee Fenner’s father. But Cordelia had a distinct lack of older relatives.

“She saw him?”

“No, it took us years to piece it all together. By then he was dead and Lee was alpha. The matter was closed as far as we were concerned. We didn’t stop to think that sickness of the mind might run in the blood.”

She felt off-balance, as if the vehicle were spinning around her.
Sickness of the mind
. A pack forced to endure the rule of more than one demented Fenner?

“Did that . . . does your great-aunt have problems? With her mind?” She was trying to be tactful, but she supposed it was a little late to try for niceties.

“No,” he retorted. “We would never have permitted her to become a Hound of God if that were the case.”

“Do you think Lee’s father was the one who killed all those people fifty years ago?” She hesitated. “Do you know about that?”

“Of course. Without a doubt.”

She wasn’t sure which question he was answering.

“That’s likely why Lee challenged and killed Tommy Ray. We believe Lee’s brother Tyler opposed the challenge.”

“Tyler. I’ve never heard that name before,” she said.

He slid her a glance. “Tyler Fenner. The father of Justin and Jesse Fenner. Who died mysteriously.”

She shuddered. Lee had killed his own father. Justin had as much as accused Lee of killing
his
father, Tyler. What kind of man could do that? What kind of world required that?

I think my grandfather killed my father
, she thought.
And I think my mom knew something. So what kind of people does that make us? What kind of a family are we?

“The recent maulings,” she said. “Did Lee do that?”

“So I would assume. However, we have a bigger situation to worry about,” he replied.

She stared at him, but quickly had to look away when his eyes locked with hers. Locked onto her. “‘For the Lord will send out His warriors, and they will cut down the unrighteous. They will smite the disobedient, and the sinners will sink into the earth,’” he said. “Thiess.”

I have to tell Cordelia all this
, she thought.
These guys really could be dangerous
.

“We’re nearly there,” Magus said. “And someone’s coming toward us.” When she jerked, he looked at her warily. “Don’t you hear the motor?”

“You startled me. I was just about to tell you that when you started talking,” she said defensively. The truth was, she hadn’t heard it. Her heightened senses came and went, but there was no need to tell him that. She almost shook her head in exasperation. She was a terrible liar.

Then they rounded a curve and she saw a car bouncing toward them. Fenners, most likely.

“Shit,” Katelyn said, ducking down out of sight.

Magus squinted through the windshield. “There’s a young woman and a man,” he reported.

Lucy and Jesse, it had to be. Katelyn realized he didn’t know who they were. So the Hounds of God didn’t know
everything
about Wolf Springs — or at least, Magus didn’t.

Katelyn listened in anxiety to the sound of the approaching motor. Then it was passing by them and slowly fading into the distance.

“Gone,” he reported. “You can sit up.”

Katelyn did; fifteen minutes later they pulled up outside the Fenner home. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around, and she practically jumped out of Magus’s truck.

“You know how risky it is for you here,” he said shrewdly. “You should come with me. We can protect you.”

“Not now,” she said.
Not ever
, she vowed.

“We’ll be in touch,” he said.

She didn’t respond. The best news she could have on that score was never hearing from the Hounds of God again. As he idled, she made it to her Subaru and heaved a half-moan of relief when it started right up. She waited for Magus to go up the driveway and back onto the road, and then she followed, torn between putting distance between himself and her, and avoiding any returning Fenners. Magus might already know where she lived, but she had no intention of leading him there if she could help it.

A few minutes later he turned west off the country road. As he disappeared down the dirt path, half a dozen enormous black wolves with hair tipped in red trotted across in a line, turned, and stared at her. The wolf in the middle of the line snarled at her and snapped its jaws. Though her windows were closed, she could hear the sharp clack of teeth. It was a warning. She knew enough to tell that. They would have let her through with Magus, but not following him.

“We’ll do it your way for now,” she said.

She hit the gas and continued on her way, eager to put as much distance between herself and the sinister new pack as possible. Finally she slowed down, convinced that she’d clocked enough miles to be safe.

Exhaustion was setting in, and as she struggled to keep herself awake, she blasted some music at full volume and that made her think of Trick, whose whole life seemed to be accompanied by a soundtrack. Thinking of Trick was good. It kept her busy, occupied. She hoped he’d been cleared of suspicion in Mike Wright’s murder and freed, and that he would be at her grandfather’s cabin when she got there.

She glanced down at herself and realized that she had forgotten that her clothes were ruined, covered with soot and muck from the poisoned bayou. Pulling over to the side of the road, she got her duffel bag from the backseat and quickly changed into fresh clothes. She found a large bottle of water and cleaned off her face, neck, and arms, then poured it over her head. Snow was falling, but she relentlessly washed herself, then ran a comb through her hair and grimaced as it caught on knots. She hoped she looked like someone returning from a sleepover, and not a war.

Katelyn reached for her phone, remembering that she’d gotten a call from L.A. from Detective Cranston, the man who had investigated her father’s murder when she’d been twelve, and was looking into the fire that had destroyed her home and led to her mom’s death less than six months ago.

She put the phone up to her ear. He identified himself, then added, “I just wanted to let you know that the fire investigators finished their report on your house. Given what happened to your dad, the department wanted to make sure there was no arson or anything else involved. It turns out it was just an accident. Earthquake broke a gas pipe, there was a spark . . . you get the idea. I’m sorry.” He paused, then added, “There was one interesting thing they did find, though, that I thought you should know about in light of our recent conversation. They did find what appeared to be a bullet made out of silver. We’re looking into that. Call me if you want to talk.”

With a trembling hand, Katelyn deleted the message. She sat for a few minutes staring at falling snowflakes without seeing them, as she tried to make sense of what she’d just been told.

Why had there been a silver bullet in their house?

She thought about how dramatically her mom had changed after her father had been killed. Giselle Chevalier had become a broken woman, afraid of everything, a poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder. Katelyn had had to grow up fast, raise herself, baby her mother.

Her mother, who had sent Mordecai McBride the newspaper article about Katelyn’s dad being bitten by a wolf.

See, I told you so.

That was what her mother had written in the margin of the news clipping.

“Keep it together,” she whispered to herself. “You’ll figure all of this out.”

She just wished she believed that.

By the time she pulled up outside the cabin, her heart was thumping.
Just breathe
, she told herself.

Trick’s car wasn’t there and she was disappointed. She closed her eyes tightly, got out, and slammed the door. She mounted the cabin steps slowly, her hand shaking so badly she had to try twice to unlock the front door. She pushed it open and stepped tentatively inside, closed the door and leaned against it for a moment, struggling to catch her breath. She couldn’t let her grandpa know anything about what had really happened in the last twenty-four hours.

Mordecai McBride appeared from the kitchen, wiping a butcher knife with a dishtowel. She stared at the glinting silver of the blade and began to sweat.

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked gruffly, eyes narrowing as they took her in from head to toe.

“Oh, hi, Ed,” she said. That had been her nickname for him when she’d first arrived in Wolf Springs. He’d told her that when she was little, she hadn’t understood what a grandfather was. He’d told her it was like having an extra daddy, and she had taken the initials — E.D. — and called him that. In the months since then, they had moved on to “Grandpa,” but in her uncertainty, she’d reverted to the more distancing name. “I, uh, was at Paulette’s. Like I said.” Her voice sounded like a tiny squeak to her own ears. She thought of the wound at her temple. Surely it had healed by now. She could feel the sweat rolling down the middle of her back. It was beginning to bead up on her forehead and she clenched her fist, hoping that he didn’t notice.

“Paulette live in a pigpen?”

She glanced down. There was muck under her fingernails and she could still smell bog water in her hair. She’d done a terrible job of cleaning herself up.

“No, she, uh — it’s just that—”

Katelyn panicked as she realized she was stammering. She was an idiot. No one had been at the Fenner house. She could have used a faucet outside or probably even found her way inside to a shower.

“It’s just that—”

“Just what?” he cut in, sounding angry.

He took another step closer and she smelled the poisonous, silvery tang. With a sudden sinking in the pit of her stomach she realized that he wasn’t holding a kitchen knife but a hunting knife.

And it was made of silver. Hunting knives were usually made of stainless steel.

He knew. He knew, and now he was going to kill her.

Just like he had probably killed her father.

He took another step closer.

There was nowhere to run.

His eyes darkened and the towel fell on the ground, leaving the bare knife in his right hand, glinting wickedly in the light.