Kitty's House of Horrors by Carrie Vaughn

Author:Carrie Vaughn [Vaughn, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Horror & Ghost Stories
ISBN: 9780446199551
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2010-01-03T10:00:00+00:00

chapter 12

The Wolf had strength, agility, and stamina that the human side didn’t. The Wolf could run all night when she Changed under a full moon. I wasn’t as strong as that right now, but I didn’t stumble when a normal human would have. My lungs didn’t sear with hard breathing, I didn’t fall over after a mile. I found a rhythm, and my muscles flowed. My strides were long, steady, smooth, and my breath came easily. Letting the animal side fill me, I could keep this up for hours.

I became as much Wolf as I could without shifting entirely. If someone had spoken to me then, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. I’d have had to pull myself back from that edge first.

Jerome was stronger and faster than I. He pulled ahead, but only by a few strides, then adjusted so that he could see me by looking over his shoulder. We kept to the edge of the trail; the ground was softer and trees offered some shade. We probably couldn’t continue this all day, but we could slow to a trot during the heat of the afternoon, pick up the pace again after resting, and still make good time. My vision collapsed, focused on the way ahead of me, while my other senses expanded. I tasted the air, which was filled with scents of pine sap, insects, heat; and sounds roared around me—wind in trees, birdsong, our steps padding on the road.

I was still in that zone when Jerome pulled up suddenly, backpedaling to get away from something ahead. I nearly collided with him, but stopped myself and knelt. He also ducked to a defensive crouch and stared ahead, as if making a challenge. I took a breath through flaring nostrils, and smelled something out of place, metallic.

Crossing the trail a few yards ahead of us, a shiny object. I focused on it as a human rather than a wolf.

“Is that what it looks like?” Jerome said.

It looked like three coils of razor wire strung on hastily planted steel T-bar fence posts. Like someone had tried to rope in a prison in a hurry. I crept closer for a better look. The stuff was so shiny it gleamed, even in the shaded forest.

I put my finger on a section of wire, well away from the protruding sharpened spikes. In a few seconds, my finger started itching. A few more seconds, the itching was painful enough I had to pull my hand away. An allergic rash reddened my fingertip.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. “Silver,” I said, glancing back at Jerome.

“Shit.”

Someone hadn’t just wanted to rope in a prison—they’d wanted to make a prison for lycanthropes. We couldn’t make our way over or through the fence without risking cuts and scrapes, and if the silver taint entered our bloodstream, we were dead. I looked one way and the other, trying to see how far the fence went. From here, I couldn’t see the end of it.

“It can’t go on that long,” Jerome said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.