Savage by Nancy Holder Page A

looking shocked. Then she quickly nodded as Katelyn narrowed her eyes in displeasure. “Understood.”
    “Things are in chaos, but it’ll be all right soon.” She looked at the woman, realizing that she wasn’t as embarrassed that both of them were undressed as she had been in the past. “Did you bring some clothes?”
    “Yes, I did,” Wanda Mae said proudly. She pointed to the forest. “Hid ’em good.”
    “Then get dressed and go,” Katelyn said.
    “Yes’m, alpha,” Wanda Mae said, bowing her head. “Thank you. I’ll do everything you say.” Then she scrambled to her feet and disappeared into the darkness.
    Katelyn stood for a moment, breathing deeply the cold night air. Things had just changed irrevocably and she didn’t know what it meant for her future, but she was grateful that at that moment the overriding fear she had been feeling for weeks seemed to have evaporated.
    “There’s a new alpha in town,” she whispered to the darkness, partly to hear herself say it aloud and partly as a show in case there were more werewolves lurking nearby.
    The Fenner pack knew she was immune to silver. She wondered if Wanda Mae had bought her lie about not being able to be killed by bullets of any kind.
    Somewhere in the distance a wolf howled and she knew that it was Wanda Mae.
    She picked up her gun and the remains of her tattered clothes, then hurried into the house as life, her other life, flooded back in.
    What if her grandfather or Trick had come back and seen everything? She sighed as she closed and locked the cabin door. For one minute an overwhelming, ecstatic freedom had lifted her and now she plunged back into her prison.
    This is why the others take such joy in being wolves.
    She buried her shredded clothes at the bottom of the trashcan and then hurried upstairs to shower and dress. She took her new silver bullets and gun and put the bullets in some socks, then slid the gun and the socks beneath her mattress.
    Then, completely wired, she went downstairs to wait for the hunters to return. She fixed herself some pasta, continuing the myth that she was still a vegetarian when she was dying for meat. After cleaning up, she found herself pacing the living room. She should have asked how long this was going to take, how long until they came back.
    But of course they wouldn’t have known.
    Finally she wandered over to the bookshelf and the Jack Bronson book, which she had reshelved there, caught her eye. She pulled it out and took it back to the couch with her.
    Another Inner Wolf executive had been killed. She thought of her run-in with Jack Bronson. The man had been powerful, charismatic, and intimidating. She wouldn’t put murder or much else past him. It was possible that it wasn’t a werewolf who had been killing people in the woods, but rather some of his attendees who’d gotten a little too in touch with their inner wolves? And why was it she had found a piece of her grandfather’s stolen silver outside the Inner Wolf Center?
    Maybe Jack Bronson or one of his disciples had broken into their house to steal the painting that revealed the entrance to the lost silver mine, then covered it up by stealing other valuables, too. The legend of the mine was no secret, and why else come to some place like this to build a fancy retreat center? There were loads of places he could have built that were still in the woods, yet closer to civilization.
    She cracked open the book and began reading from the beginning. The introduction provided a mini-biography of Jack. Apparently he had grown up in the mountains in Arkansas. That could help explain the appeal of the area for him.
    She kept reading, hoping that at any moment she’d hear Ed and Trick returning. She pictured Jesse lying dead in the snow, and then Justin, and resolutely kept reading the book, trying to drive away images of their mangled corpses.
    The more she read about getting in touch with her inner wolf and Jack’s theories about the primal savage