Unleashed

by Nancy Holder

  ALSO BY NANCY HOLDER &

  DEBBIE VIGUIÉ

  THE WICKED SERIES

  Witch & Curse

  Legacy & Spellbound

  Resurrection

  THE CRUSADE SERIES

  Crusade

  Damned

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié

  Jacket photograph © 2011 by Michelle Monique Photography

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Holder, Nancy.

  Unleashed / Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié. — 1st ed.

  p. cm. — (Wolf springs chronicles)

  Summary: Orphaned Kat McBride, nearly seventeen, must leave California to live with her grandfather in small-town Arkansas, where she is drawn into a paranormal world of feuding werewolf clans.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98346-7

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. High schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction.

  4. Werewolves—Fiction. 5. Moving, Household—Fiction. 6. Orphans—Fiction.

  7. Grandfathers—Fiction. 8. Arkansas—Fiction.] I. Viguié, Debbie. II. Title.

  PZ7.H70326Unl 2011

  [Fic]—dc23 20011023301

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To our readers, bloggers, reviewers, librarians, and booksellers—

  thanks so much for running with us.

  —Nancy

  To my beloved wolf-hybrid, Wolfie—I miss you every day and I

  hope you’re playing your heart out in puppy heaven.

  —Debbie

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Things that love night

  Love not such nights as these …

  —KING LEAR, 3.2.42–43

  1

  I can fly.

  Katelyn Claire McBride was the girl on the flying trapeze. Her sun-streaked blond hair streamed behind her as she soared above the crowd on the Mexican cloud swing. Thick stage makeup concealed her freckles, scarlet smudging her mouth, which she had always thought was too cupid-cutesy. Smoky ash-gray kohl ringed her light blue eyes. The soaring melody of “Alegría” moved through her like blood. Music gave her life. Movement gave her a soul.

  She had made it. After years of sweat, blisters, pulled muscles, and sprains, she was finally performing in the Cirque du Soleil. Far below, in the massive audience, her mother looked on with her dad, their fingers entwined. Their faces shone with pride and maybe just a few hundred watts of suppressed parental fear.

  Like all performers, Katelyn was a chameleon. Away from the spotlight, she was a tanned California girl who preferred Indian-print camisoles, jeweled flip-flops, and big sunglasses decorated with flowers. But now she looked like a dramatic flamenco dancer … and much older than sixteen. She wore a black beaded leotard trimmed with stiff silver lace. A black lace choker encircled her neck, and in the center, a large red stone carved to look like a rose nestled in silver filigree.

  The Mexican cloud swing was Katelyn’s specialty, and she pumped her legs back and forth as she sat in the V created by the two long pieces of white braided cotton fibers. A kind of crazy mania worked its way through her as she breathed deeply, preparing herself for her last trick—her death-defying escape from gravity.

  I’m the only one here who can fly!

  She swung higher, then grabbed the rope dangling from the complicated overhead rigging and, with practiced circular motions of her foot, looped it around her right ankle. The familiar texture of the cotton rubbed against the toughened skin. She looked delicate, but like all dancers and gymnasts, she was made of muscle.

  Cool air expanded her lungs as she leaped, arching like a swimmer and grabbing the V as it went taut. Gracefully she held the pose as applause washed over her. Scarlet rose petals showered her from overhead, high in the rigging, and at the crescendo, she defiantly let go. Thrusting back her arms, she raised her chin, ignoring the forbidden camera flashes. Fearless. Of course she was.

  Yet gasps changed to screams as she plummeted down, down, headfirst, air rushing past. In that split second, her joy flashed into panic.

  The net’s gone!

  The ground rushed up and she flailed wildly.

  I’m going to die!

  Then the floor split open. From the deep, jagged fissure, flames shot up, straight at her. The heat slapped her face as she kept falling, straight into hell—

  “Katie, Katie, oh, my God, wake up!” her mother shouted into her ear.

  Katelyn’s eyes flew open and just as quickly squeezed shut. Coughing, she opened them again. Half-smothered in smoke, she was lying on the sofa in the TV room, and her right arm was slung over her mom’s wiry shoulder. The Art Deco floor lamp behind the sofa tumbled light over the rolling layers of smoke. The feet of the sofa rattled like a machine gun against the hardwood floor; the plaster ceiling was breaking off in chunks. Her mom was wearing her old Japanese bathrobe—nothing else.

  “Earthquake,” Katelyn slurred. Her gymnastics coach had given her something to take for the swelling and pain after she had twisted her ankle in practice, and it had knocked her out.

  “Alors, vite!” Her mom was losing it, screaming at her in French to hurry. She yanked on Katelyn’s arm, then draped her across her back like a firefighter and began to straighten her legs. Katelyn slid off, grabbing her mother’s wrist, trying to fan the smoke away as she doubled over, coughing.

  Clinging to each other, the two staggered through the acrid haze. Katelyn knew she was holding her mother back. She was slow—still not entirely awake because of the painkiller—and incredibly dizzy. She stepped on something hot, searing her instep, one of the few places on her feet not protected by calluses. The room shook and swayed. The lamp fell over, throwing light against the portraits of her mother, the famed ballerina Giselle Chevalier, as they jittered against the cracking walls and crashed to the floor.

  “Get under the doorjamb!” her mom yelled.

  Katelyn was so disoriented that she couldn’t remember the layout of the living room. For a moment she froze, foggy and confused. Her knees buckled and her mother clung to her, keeping her from collapsing completely.

  The room was exploding around them. Katelyn fought hard to make herself move, to wake up. Her lungs were burning.

  The lights went out. Then her mother moaned and let go of Katelyn’s hand.

  “Mom?”

  Katel
yn swayed, reaching out into the darkness for her mother and stumbling forward. Her toes collided with something soft. Her mother’s face. Then something hard: a huge chunk of plaster, on top of her mother’s head.

  Katelyn dropped to the floor and threw herself over her mother’s still form.

  “Mom!”

  Her mother groaned. “My darling, run,” she managed to say.

  Then the floor opened up.

  And Giselle Chevalier was gone.

  Two weeks later Katelyn was on a very small jet and swathed in black. Black leotard top, black wrap sweater, jeans, and riding boots that were a little too snug around the calves. She wasn’t wearing makeup and the black washed her out. She looked how she felt—drained and half dead. It was better than shrieking with grief—or having another nightmare. She counted off the last three: a repeat of falling to her death in the Cirque du Soleil; dancing the Black Swan in Swan Lake as the roof of the theater crashed down on top of her; and bursting into flames as she carried the Olympic torch for the USA gymnastics team. Her best friend, Kimi Brandao, told her it was survivor’s guilt and to get over it—Giselle Chevalier would have been glad her daughter survived … even if she herself had not.

  Blinking back tears, Katelyn hunched her aching shoulders. She was trapped up against the window. Unfortunately, the purple overnight bag containing her iPhone, which Kimi had helped her load with music for the journey, was stuffed into the overhead compartment three rows away.

  She had figured she could get it once they were airborne, but then the guy on the aisle had made the woman next to her straddle him in an effort to escape the row and use the restroom. Katelyn had decided to stay put. She wasn’t about to straddle anyone. So she sat and tried very hard to ignore the man and woman sitting next to her.

  “Jack Bronson is a genius,” the man was saying to the woman, who grimaced politely at him as she clutched her e-reader with her French-manicured nails. Everything about her body language screamed that she wanted him to shut up. “I’m going to his seminar. Actually, it’s more like a retreat. For executives.”

  The man puffed up a little. He had thin, mousy brown hair and he was a bit on the jowly side. He didn’t look like he was from Los Angeles. In L.A. executives worked out. A lot of them even got plastic surgery. Image was more than half the battle.

  “You need to embrace the wolf side of your nature.” He flushed slightly, as if he just realized he’d said something risqué. “I mean, to achieve your goals.”

  A pause. “What is the wolf side?” the woman asked with a slight Southern accent, and Katelyn couldn’t tell if she was curious or just trying to humor a stranger.

  “It’s the side that knows no fear, that sees what it wants and goes after it.” He leaned toward her with a lecherous smile. Blech. “Committing completely to the goal.”

  Blech to the nth degree.

  Maybe that was why Katelyn was stuck on the airplane. She hadn’t fully committed to the goal of emancipation. Ultimately her grandfather had refused to let her stay in Los Angeles—to try to live her life on her own. She had just started her senior year and would be seventeen in one day shy of six weeks, but that hadn’t mattered to him. He said sixteen was too young. Blindsided with grief, she had caved without protest, even though Kimi had begged her to stay. Kimi’s mom, an attorney, had offered to help her petition the court for emancipation—or at the very least, let her spend senior year living with them.

  Her grandfather had refused to consider it and Kimi had been supremely frustrated when Katelyn had “gone robot.” Hadn’t fought, hadn’t argued, had simply surrendered. Mordecai McBride had ordered her to pack and arranged a one-way ticket from Los Angeles International Airport to Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, a teeny tiny airstrip located in the bustling burb of Bentonville, home to maybe twenty-five thousand people. He lived about ninety minutes away from the airport, alone, in the woods. The closest town was Wolf Springs, and at Wolf Springs High, there were 549 students. Soon there would be 550, even.

  “You’ll shrivel up there, you will,” Kimi had moaned. “You have to speak up! Tell him you are not not not coming.”

  But how could Katelyn speak up for herself when she spontaneously broke into tears over the smallest things?

  In fourteen months she would be eighteen. Then her grandfather couldn’t say anything if she moved back to Los Angeles to resume her life, her real life. And if she got accepted to a California college? He wouldn’t dare stop her from going. So maybe she’d have to stay only eleven months. Some colleges started in August.

  But if I have to go a year without serious training, I’ll never do anything great. And I want to have a big, amazing life.

  The thought flooded her with anger and even deeper grief. It wasn’t enough that both her parents were dead. Her dreams—the good ones—were dying, too.

  Reflexively, she gripped the stuffed bear Kimi had shoved into her hands at the security checkpoint at LAX. Soft and white, the bear was dressed like a gymnast in a sparkly aqua leotard and matching leg warmers. When she pressed the embroidered heart on its chest, it said, “Kimi misses Katie,” in her friend’s voice. She’d tried plugging her earbuds into it so she could listen on the plane without embarrassing herself, but no luck.

  “And so all y’all are going into the forest, to show y’all’s wolf side,” the woman was saying to the man. For a few blessed seconds, Katelyn had managed to tune them out.

  “Just outside Wolf Springs, at the old hot springs resort? That’s where it’s happening,” the man affirmed. “It starts tomorrow. Tonight … I’m free.”

  Katelyn rolled her eyes and leaned her head against the Plexiglas window. She didn’t want to watch the so-not-a-wolf making goo-goo eyes at an uninterested woman. Then she remembered that she’d been dreaming that her dad was alive on the night of the earthquake. He used to flutter his lashes at her mom to tease-flirt with her. Her mother had always laughed hard. Now they were both gone.

  And if I hadn’t taken that pill, none of this would be happening.

  The tears welled up and flowed and she bit her lower lip to keep herself from sobbing. She pushed the bear under her chin and thought of Kimi.

  “Oh, the black gums are startin’ to change,” someone said in the row behind her. “Look at all the red leaves.”

  “How pretty,” another voice replied. “Fall’s comin’ early.”

  Katelyn shut her eyes. She didn’t want to see anything pretty, least of all in Arkansas. Kimi had started calling it Banjo Land.

  “Football tomorrow night. Tigers have already got it sewed up.”

  “That’s right.”

  She wondered if the Tigers were playing the Timberwolves. Despite being small, Wolf Springs managed to field a football team. She’d lived her entire life in Santa Monica. High school football wasn’t on most people’s radar there. Certainly not hers.

  Actually, there wasn’t much about high school that held her interest. Her mind had been on other things—gymnastics, dance. The last thing she and her mother had done together was attend a Cirque du Soleil performance—Alegría. Katelyn had been enchanted, telling her mom that she could combine her dance and gymnastics skills if she joined a troupe like Cirque du Soleil—or even Cirque itself.

  “Maybe,” her mom had replied before changing the subject.

  Katelyn had never had a chance to ask her if “maybe” meant she thought it was a bad idea. Or if she thought Katelyn wouldn’t make it. Or if, as Kimi insisted, her mom couldn’t bear the idea of Katelyn leaving home to do anything at all.

  During her career as a reigning prima ballerina, Giselle Chevalier had been called the Iron Butterfly, because both her will and her stamina were unmatched. But after Sean, Katelyn’s dad, had been murdered, her mother had become fragile and frightened. Katelyn had tried to make her mom’s life as easy as possible, teaching the little kids’ classes at the studio, making dinner … and trying to convince herself she was okay with becoming a classical ballet dancer,
too. Katelyn thought the ballet world was old-fashioned and confining, but she’d never told Giselle that. It had been hard enough to get her mom to let her take gymnastics classes.

  “What if you hurt yourself?” Giselle had asked her over and over. “What would happen to your dance career?”

  Katelyn didn’t know how to respond. She only knew gymnastics did something for her that ballet didn’t. She’d been dreading the day she would have to “declare a major,” as Kimi used to put it. Just say what she wanted to do with her life. Giselle had told Katelyn professional dancers had no time for college. But Katelyn and Kimi had spent hours poring over course catalogs. Lots of colleges and universities had dance departments.

  “Those are not for real dancers,” her mother had retorted. “Don’t you care about your career?”

  Katelyn didn’t know. She did know that she cared about her mom. And she cared about being friends with Kimi, who had her own dreams. And yes, maybe Alec, who had agreed to help her learn the flying trapeze at their gym. To be her catcher as she let go and flew. No Alec for you, she thought. So there was no point in rehearsing inviting him to prom anymore, though it was hard to stop. It had become a habit.

  Hey, so, Tarzan, how’d you like to catch me on the dance floor?

  A week and a half before the earthquake, Katelyn had started senior year at “Samohi”—Santa Monica High School. Tons of stars and film people had gone there; Zac Efron had filmed a movie there. Kids there dreamed big, and “big” could really happen. Kimi had no doubt that they would catch the wave of magical lives. “ ’Cuz we’ve got the mojo,” Kimi would crow as they strolled down the street in their sparkly flip-flops and shades.

  On the plane, sighing, Katelyn tried to smile at the memories, but her heart filled with fresh sorrow. Kimi would need someone new to hang out with, go shopping for her prom dress with, all that. Katelyn wanted that for her, even though the thought of being replaced made her free-fall inside. Kimi was her last link to home, and family.