Read Online Savage by Nancy Holder - Free Book Online Page A

probably alive now only because news of Cordelia’s marriage to Dom Gaudin had interrupted their fight.
    She texted Cordelia the same message. As with Justin, there was no answer. Katelyn pictured the raging forest fire and the Hellhound and worried. She would have thought both of them would be on tenterhooks waiting for word from her, and made plans to communicate back.
    Sliding her phone into her pocket, she put on her shoes and socks, grabbed a flashlight and crept outside toward the garage. Her objective was to find another gun that shot silver bullets so she’d have one to show her grandfather next time. If she was lucky, he wouldn’t look too closely at it.
    She didn’t bother with a jacket despite the light snowfall that piled drifts around the door to the garage. Werewolves weren’t as sensitive to the cold as humans.
    Looking left and right, she confirmed that she was alone and darted into the garage. She flicked on the flashlight and played the beam over the towers of dusty packing cartons as she headed for the section where she had found the ammo box filled with silver bullets and the incriminating newspaper clipping that had revealed the story of her father’s wolf bite. And her mother’s handwritten note: I told you so .
    Detective Cranston had found a silver bullet in the wreckage of their house.
    Her grandfather had come to Los Angeles for her father’s funeral, so maybe he had brought some silver bullets with him.
    But he hadn’t come to her mother’s funeral. Why was that?
    She put all that aside for the moment, trying to concentrate on what she was doing. The cardboard boxes in question appeared as dusty and untouched as the night Katelyn had stumbled upon them. She had done everything she could to avoid tipping off her grandfather that she’d found them. Setting down her flashlight so that the light bounced off the ceiling, she explored several boxes new to her. She found more baby things of her father’s and a photo album filled with old black-and-white pictures of her grandparents. There were no more boxes of silver bullets; she had begun to despair of ever finding another gun when she smelled a hint of silver. Eagerly she moved aside a light blue crocheted baby blanket and looked down at a gun very like the one she’d lost. Cracking it open to see if it was loaded, she smelled more silver and figured it for residue from the silver-laden bullets.
    She slipped it in the pocket of her jeans and carefully put everything back the way it had been. Then she boldly went to the ammo box and gathered up several handfuls of bullets. She’d been afraid to disturb anything last time. But now she loaded the gun slowly, deliberately, defiantly emphasizing the fact that the silver didn’t bother her at all. Justin had had trouble holding the gun even though the firearm itself wasn’t made of silver — the bullets inside were enough to bother him.
    She took another handful of bullets and stuffed them into her jeans. She’d taken enough for her grandfather to notice, which was foolhardy. But necessary.
    The stakes were higher now. The threat was closer.
    And for all she knew, she was arming herself against him.
    Her phone rang, the ringtone the dog bark she’d assigned to Justin as a sort of in-joke. She took the call.
    “Hey,” he said. “Who died?”
    “Inner Wolf guy.” She heard how shaky she sounded, how needy, and cleared her throat. Werewolves despised weakness. “Where are you? What’s going on?”
    “We’re still on the road. We think the Gaudins are trailing us and we’re resting up in case they launch an attack. They rammed my truck and Al got killed.”
    “No,” she began. She’d seen what happened. It had been the Hellhound, not the Gaudins. But how could she tell him that without revealing that she’d run from him?
    “Don’t shed tears for that one, darlin’. He was no fan of yours,” he said. “Where are you ? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
    She had prepared