Red

by Kait Nolan

  ~*~

  Elodie

  Taking the road was not an option. Mortimer is a small town. My pulling an apparent hitchhiker routine on a stretch of pretty heavily travelled road was going to get me noticed, which was against The Rules. Plus, the last thing I needed was my dad finding out that I wasn’t working where he thought I was working. Instead I struck out cross country, heading for the research station as the crow flew. It shaved off a mile and a half, but I was still forty-five minutes late.

  The research station was housed in a trailer, one of those dealies you usually see at big construction sites. You know, where the foreman or architect or whoever hang out. This one was long and low, with corrugated tan walls and no sign to indicate I was in the right place. But this was the location Dr. McGrath had given me in his email, so after checking to make sure that my unscheduled hike hadn’t totally blown my deodorant, I trudged across the gravel parking area, past a handful of mud-spattered vehicles.

  Because they were shaking with nerves, I shoved my hands back in my pockets and started fiddling with the scrap of t-shirt. I wove the fabric through my fingers. Please let me not have screwed this up. I was just going to provide a calm, reasonable explanation for my tardiness, and hopefully Dr. McGrath wouldn’t be so pissed he kicked me off the project on the first day.

  At the door I hesitated. Should I knock? Just go in? In the end I opted for decisive and confident, even though I felt anything but. It was better than slinking in like a delinquent to the principal’s office.

  I stepped inside. Several people were clustered around a long table further down the room. All faces turned in my direction with expressions ranging from curiosity to irritation. Too much attention. Too much focus. In a moment of instinctual panic, my fingers tightened on the scrap of t-shirt in my pocket. It steadied me somehow, reminding me that I wasn’t a coward.

  Zeroing in on the older guy in glasses, I straightened my shoulders and said, in a voice that sounded a lot calmer than I felt, “Dr. McGrath, I’m Elodie Rose. I’m terribly sorry I’m late, but I had some transportation issues.”

  One of them stood up from the table and walked over. “Well, we’re glad you made it, Elodie. I’m Grant McGrath. Come on in and join us.”

  I blinked, a little taken aback. Dr. McGrath wasn’t the skinny guy in glasses who actually looked the part of a scientist. He was an enormous man, towering at least a full foot above me. His face was ruddy and windburned, with crinkles around his green eyes. Indiana Jones, eat your heart out, I thought, taking the hand he offered. His dwarfed mine.

  “So did your car break down?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a car, actually. I had—” I paused, searching for words that did not reek of the angsty, teenage idiocy that had resulted in the destruction of my bike. “—a mechanical problem with my bike. So I had to hike in.”

  “Not too far, I hope,” he said.

  “Only five and a half miles, sir.”

  Now it was Dr. McGrath’s turn to blink.

  “Holy crap. You really just hiked nearly six miles to work?” This came from a pudgy, red-headed girl that I judged to be a grad student.

  “The terrain is pretty moderate on this side of the park,” I replied, shrugging.

  “We’ll see that you get a ride home this afternoon,” said Dr. McGrath. “Come meet the team.” He escorted me toward the table. Gesturing to the red-head, he said, “This is Abby Renfroe, one of my grad students. That’s David Bryson, my post-doc.” With his long, sun-streaked hair and hazy blue eyes, David looked like he belonged on a surf board instead of in a lab. “And this is Patrick Everett, my right hand man and co-investigator.” The glasses guy nodded in my direction.

  I nodded back to each of them in turn, relaxing a bit now that I knew I wasn’t fired.

  “We were just looking over a map of the park to start dividing things up into quadrants,” said Dr. McGrath. “Part of what we’ll be doing is tracking game patterns to establish prey density for the area. That was part of the problem when they did this the last time.”

  Taking a seat I slipped into a role I was comfortable with: attentive student. Some of what he told us I already knew from my research on the first attempt at reintroduction; some was new. I soaked it up like a sponge. School was something I was good at. When you have no friends and few activities to take up your time, there’s nothing to distract you from your education. And when you’ve got a curse hanging over your head, you’re pretty motivated to distract yourself by any means possible.

  As I relaxed further, my brain began to register the scents around me. The stale, recirculated air. The rich scent of coffee. A sort of faint odor of mold. The various personal scents of the people around me. And somewhere layered over it all, a scent of something wild, with a trace of cedar. My nostrils flared, trying to capture and parse out the scent. The thing with the super nose was that I hadn’t had it long enough to catalog stuff. I was scenting all kinds of things I’d never noticed before, and not all of them were familiar.

  This scent tickled my brain, a teasing, fleeting recognition, then gone again. I lifted my head slightly, trying for a better whiff.

  And then I knew.

  ~*~

  Sawyer

  You are turning into a stalker, I thought as I knelt to check the scent trail again. I’d been trying to convince myself otherwise for the last three miles.

  After my questionable rescue of the girl in the woods yesterday, I’d trailed her home. It’s not like I was turning into some sparkly, blood-sucker wannabe, who hung out staring into her room while she slept or something. Give me some credit. I just wanted to make sure she made it home okay and kept her word. As far as I knew, she had, and that should have been the end of it.

  But she’d stayed with me. Or rather, what it felt like to be with her stayed with me. When I’d touched her, I felt calm for the first time in months. The bloodlust I’d been carrying around, that rage I’d been living with, finally took a break. And that really messed me up because that was not something that should happen from contact with a human girl. It freaked me out, and that’s why I bolted from the clearing.

  I spent half the night talking myself out of going back over to her house—on the grounds of that whole not being a stalker thing. Yet when I caught her scent on my run this morning, I couldn’t help but follow. It lingered in my nose as I stared at the research station.

  Not only was I a stalker, I was also going crazy. Because there was no way that this girl was hanging out in there with my father. Maybe my conscience was using the one positive thing I’d fixated on to fool me into doing the right thing by coming to help with Dad’s research. I hadn’t made up my mind on that front. It might seem too much like I was starting to get on board with The Plan after my rejection of summer school. Curiosity propelled me forward anyway. One way or the other, I had to know if my mind was playing tricks on me.

  It was easy to slip in unnoticed, moving with my silent hunter’s gait, up the steps, through the door.

  And there she was. Impossibly sitting right there between Patrick and Abby, as if she was part of the research team.

  My brain flashed back to the clearing, to the knife and the taste of fear that I wouldn’t be able to stop her.

  I gave myself a shake, trying to clear my head to address the more relevant question: What was she doing here? As I watched, she shifted in her seat, reaching over to rub a hand over her bandaged wrist. Then, as if she sensed I was standing there, she turned her head and met my eyes.

  Her lips parted on a soft inhalation of surprise, and damn if that didn’t make me wonder what she’d taste like.

  Her eyes were a blue-gray with a darker blue ring around the iris. Witch eyes. The ones I couldn’t stop thinking about. Yesterday they were filled with grief, today recognition and…anxiety? I had the urge to go to her, touch her, tell her it was gonna be okay. And what was that about? Not to mention that such a move in front of this audience would lead to a helluva lot of questions
I didn’t want to answer.

  Everyone else shoved back from the table.

  “Sawyer.”

  I jolted a little and shifted my attention to my father. “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

  “I wasn’t sure you were coming,” he said. His tone was pleased. That irritated me.

  Whatever. I’d make the concession if it meant I finally got to meet this girl. Properly.

  My eyes strayed back to Her. She was still watching me, but any traces of surprise had been replaced by polite curiosity.

  So that’s how you wanna play it. Never met before. Okay then.

  “What’d I miss?” I moved over to the conference table, stepping out of the way as Abby and David headed to the other end of the trailer to start gathering gear.

  “We’ve just been reviewing stuff you already know. We were about to head out into the field,” said Dad.

  I basically ignored him and turned to the girl. “You’re new.”

  “Oh, right. This is Elodie Rose, our summer intern. Elodie, my son, Sawyer,” he said absently, before turning to Patrick.

  “Hi,” she said, offering her hand.

  I could smell some other guy on her and had to suppress a growl as I reached out to take it. “Nice to meet you, Elodie.”

  I curled my fingers gently around hers, clasping instead of shaking. God her hand was tiny. She frowned when I turned it over and brushed two fingers lightly over the bandage on her wrist. Her pupils sprang wide and the pulse beneath my fingertips jumped and skittered, which was awesome in the instant before the sudden scent of fear. I felt like a total jackass.

  She seemed to relax a fraction as soon as I let her go, but I could still see the pulse pounding in her throat. She wanted to run. The desire to escape was clearly etched in every inch of her body. But she didn’t move, a fact that I both admired and appreciated, given that my natural instinct as a predator would have been to give chase, which wouldn’t have helped things at all.

  “Sawyer, you and Elodie will go with Patrick over to Tremont to do some exploring of the original release area there. Abby, David, and I will check out Cades Cove.”

  “Yes, sir.” I spoke quietly, not wanting to spook Elodie any more than I already had.

  Dad shot me a look, as if wondering why I was suddenly noncombative, but I ignored him and headed for the equipment closet.

  I sat in the back on the drive to Tremont and let Patrick do what he was best at. His absent-minded professor look was about as threatening as a flop-eared rabbit, and tended to instantly put people at ease. Elodie was no exception.

  She was shy at first, something I found rather fascinating given how readily she’d sparred with me in the clearing yesterday. Then again, I’d clearly underestimated how badly I’d scared her. Note to self: Behaving like an enraged animal while on two feet is not going to earn Elodie’s trust. Regardless of my issues with my dad, I was going to have to put a leash on my beast and turn back into something resembling civilized if I wanted a shot with this girl. A shot at what exactly, I chose not to analyze too closely just now.

  “So where are you from originally, Elodie?” asked Patrick.

  She looked faintly startled at the question, and I wondered why. It was a normal enough thing to ask.

  “Your accent,” he clarified. “Doesn’t sound like you’re from around here.”

  “Oh. No. I grew up in Texas.”

  When she said nothing else, Patrick shifted gears. “What got you interested in the project?”

  “We went on a field trip to Alligator River Wildlife Refuge in zoology my sophomore year, and I was one of the lucky ones to actually see a few of the wolves while we were there. I just . . . They used to range throughout the entire south eastern U.S. and the fact that now there are comparatively so few . . . It makes me sad, I guess. I wanted to do something to help. So when Mr. Jorgensen told me Dr. McGrath was coming, I put in an application.”

  Well that shot down any crazy notion that she’d somehow discovered my identity and weaseled her way in to get to know me. Not that I’d seriously considered that as an explanation for more than half a second when I first saw her at the conference table.

  “You must be quite the student,” I remarked, reaching between the seats to snag a handful of chips from the bag of Doritos Patrick had shoved into the center console. “Dad doesn’t usually take on anybody below the graduate level.”

  Elodie shrugged. “I’m good at school.”

  “More than good, I’d say. Grant said with your credentials, you could have your pick of top schools,” said Patrick.

  “Maybe if money wasn’t an object. I’m hoping the experience I get on the project will help me when I start applying for scholarships this year.”

  Smart. Thinking of the future. Okay, she totally didn’t fit the profile of somebody suicidal. Maybe she really was out there for some other reason yesterday. Which just sparked my curiosity all the more. Not that I expected her to actually, you know, tell me.

  “So you’re making the wolves your cause?” I asked.

  “My cause?”

  “Sure. Colleges love to see extracurricular causes. Habitat for Humanity. Literacy drives. Blood drives. Race for the Cure. You know, the stuff that says you have a life beyond school and that you’re interested in the community or the larger world or whatever.”

  “You make it sound so bloodthirsty and calculated.” Her offended idealism made me smile.

  “College applications are bloodthirsty and calculated.”

  Elodie was quiet for a minute, shaking her head in what was probably disgust. “I’ve heard them,” she said at last.

  “Pardon?”

  “The wolves,” she clarified.

  “At Alligator River?” asked Patrick.

  “No. I mean, yes, I heard them there. But I mean I’ve heard them here. In the park.”

  We both looked at her.

  “That’s not possible,” he said.

  “I know there aren’t supposed to be any wolves here. On our field trip, the guide talked all about the repopulation efforts in various parts of the South during the 80s and 90s and how Alligator River was the only place it had been semi-successful and that the remaining wolves from the last attempt here were taken there. And I know you’re thinking it was probably dogs or coyotes, but I know the difference between them and a wolf howling.”

  Patrick absorbed that for a minute. “When was this?”

  “Off and on over the last four years. Mostly at night or at dusk.”

  A muscle in Patrick’s jaw started to twitch, a sure sign that he was excited. But his voice was still bland when he said, “That would be quite the scientific find, Elodie. Have you seen any?”

  Elodie shook her head. “No. But they’re out there.”

  I sat back in my seat, frowning. Claims of wolves where there should be none. I didn’t like the sound of that. Either there were pups from the last attempt that had survived and reproduced without the original scientists being aware of it—which didn’t seem likely given their vulnerability to canine diseases—or there were others of my kind in the area. Werewolves are rare and typically so dominant they can’t live in packs like normal wolves. I wondered if Dad knew anything about this and if that’s what had prompted him to sign on with Patrick to redo a study that had already failed. If he didn’t know and there were others in the area, we could have problems.

  Chapter 3

  Elodie

  “Good job today, folks. We’ll see you back here bright and early tomorrow morning. Now who can give Elodie a ride home?” asked Dr. McGrath.

  Please, please don’t let it be—

  “I’ll do it,” said Sawyer.

  Nobody else volunteered.

  Crap.

  “Take the truck,” said Dr. McGrath, tossing him the keys. “I’ll hitch a ride home with Patrick. We need to go over some things.”

  Sawyer held open the door. “After you.”

  I took a firmer grip on my pack strap and went ou
tside. It was just a car ride, I told myself. And a pretty short one at that. There was no reason to get all wound up. But as soon as he shut his door and started the engine, I felt my muscles coil up. Without any of the others as a buffer, there was nothing to distract me from him.

  At the end of the gravel drive, he turned toward me with a soft smile that put Rich Phillips’ grin to shame. “Which way?”

  My stomach did a shimmy and my hands clutched my pack in a death grip. “Left.”

  Seriously, this was ridiculous. There was nothing about this guy that should impede my freaking breathing. He was just driving. In fact, he seemed to have been going out of his way all day to be non-threatening, always moving slowly and talking in that soft voice like I was a skittish horse or something. And, crap, maybe I was. I was nervous with him. Not awkward or shy like whenever I was the center of attention, but straight up jittery and ridiculously aware of him at every moment. Ever since he’d taken my hand this morning, my body had been charged up like a freaking Duracell. It was nerve-wracking.

  “I wanted to apologize,” he said.

  I jolted at the sound of his voice, then cursed myself for the reaction. This wasn’t like me. Not at all.

  “For what?” I managed.

  “For scaring you,” he said. “I jumped to conclusions yesterday and I reacted. I was really, really angry—not at you—but it just happened to spill over on you when I thought you were . . . Well you know what I thought.” He lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “I just wanted to say that I’m not going to hurt you, and I’m really sorry I freaked you out like that.”

  He thought I was afraid of him because of what had happened in the clearing. Well, that was a helluva lot less embarrassing than the reality.

  “I’m not afraid of you, Sawyer.” At least not the way you think. “I was just . . . really surprised to see you today.”