Page 2 of Pack Kasen, Part 1 (Caught #1)

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KAT

“… f ound another body.” The whisper travels across the campus square, yanking my focus into the present. The way it should have been all along.

People are dying.

No. People are being murdered , and I know all of them.

My mind should be on hurrying across the Gregson College campus, but my pulse is pounding and all I can think about is the overwhelming need to hunt. I have the wolf filling my head with plaintive howls and excited yips to thank for that.

She likes chasing down bunnies, tearing them apart too. I try not to think about that during the day. It makes me hungry.

I like accounting, working on my graduation speech, and the accounting job I have waiting for me when I graduate at the end of this semester.

Since I’m in my human body, human rules apply, so I tune out the whispers and pick up my pace.

I was ten when cops found me scrounging around trash near a dumpster, picking through the remnants of someone’s unwanted meal from the nearby diner.

It’s a strange thing to admit, even to myself, that it was the only time in my life where I didn’t have this heavy pressure in my chest, making it impossible to breathe.

I’m the last one in my economics class, walking in at 9:05, which is so unusual Professor McManus blinks at me in surprise.

I flash him an apologetic smile on my way to my seat at the front of the lecture hall. “Sorry I’m late.”

He nods and returns to scrawling questions on the whiteboard as I slump into my seat.

I slide my bookbag off my shoulder and drop it at my feet, reaching for my notebook as Sadie leans over to me.

“I thought the campus killer got you,” Sadie whispers, tossing her red braid over her shoulder when it brushes her cheek.

We’ve sat next to each other for most of junior and senior semester. Like me, she’s hyper focused on taking college seriously.

I’m here to build a stable and secure life for myself. That can’t happen if I’m living the typical college experience by getting shitfaced all the time.

“I just overslept, and it’s the morning. I was perfectly fine,” I whisper back, placing my notebook on my desk and setting my pen beside it.

As always, the moment I stepped into the room, I started breathing in through my mouth and out through my nose so I won’t choke on the overwhelming scents of the fifty students I’m sharing air with.

“All the victims probably thought the same thing.” She gives me a pointed look. “I bet you weren’t even carrying the pepper spray I got you, were you?”

A door slams shut behind me, letting in a refreshing, but all too brief, puff of cool air into an already overheated room. A disheveled student drops into a seat at the back, and the professor gives him a brief glance before returning to filling the whiteboard.

“Uh, no,” I quietly admit.

When Sadie’s older brother heard about the Gregson Campus Killer, he got her pepper spray for protection. She insisted he get me one too, and I promptly stuffed it into a drawer in my room and haven’t touched it since.

I don’t need pepper spray for protection.

“I like you, Kat. I don’t want your guts chewed on by some weird serial killer.”

The professor clears his throat, and the class starts before I can think up a response.

I’m not sure what I would have said.

Maybe that the campus killer isn’t a serial killer the way some students think. Or even an escaped wild animal from the zoo like the cops have been telling us.

The thing that has been hunting among the Gregson College student population isn’t even human.

I saw a picture a student took of the bite wounds before cops covered the body, and it was all wolf. If anyone would know, it’s Gregson College’s resident werewolf.

I focus on controlling my breathing so I won’t choke on the scents I can’t filter out, which is most of them, given the severe lack of windows in the room. I pay attention. Or I try to.

When my mind is still wandering fifteen minutes later, I order myself to stop thinking about the campus murders. They have nothing to do with me.

In my nearly four years of studying at Gregson College, I have never forgotten I’m at risk of discovery. One slip up and I could lose everything.

Today was the third body cops found.

I told myself that the cops would figure things out on their own. This didn’t involve me. I should keep my head down and concentrate on my last few weeks before graduation.

But I never stopped growing more and more curious as the bodies mounted.

I’ve never smelled anyone who I thought was like me. Before college, I even spent a couple of weeks traveling around Montana, looking for others like me. I could never find them.

I thought I was the only girl in the world who could turn into a wolf.

But maybe I’m not.

The first dead student was, in my opinion, the universe righting a wrong.

I didn’t feel the slightest bit sad when the cops found Liam Wheeler’s wolf-ravaged body hidden in a bush at the back of one of the campus parking lots.

I met Simon and Trevor when my dorm mates dragged me out and turned group outings into surprise double dates because of my refusal to put myself out there.

It’s nearly 10 when I step out of my dorm.

But not to hunt a killer.

I need to silence the itch in my bones.

I head for the bus stop about ten minutes away from my dorm building. After my car broke down a week ago in a quiet suburb that I had no reason to be, I haven’t wanted to risk driving anywhere but to class or the mall in case it happens again.

The bus comes every thirty minutes, and I don’t have long to wait before I jump on a bus headed out to the suburbs, getting off near a park that closed at 9.

This neighborhood must go to bed early, because most of the lights in the nearby homes are off. No one is around to see me climb over the black gate and find a nice dark corner.

I step out of my gray Nikes and quickly strip out of my socks, black long-sleeve T-shirt, black denim coat and my skinny jeans, tucking everything into a hedge. I scratch my arm on a thorn as I pull my hand out and watch as the long, shallow cut stops bleeding and fades into nothing in under ten seconds.

As the moonlight reflects over a stone a few feet in front of me, I wait in the quiet darkness, head down, taking another long moment to ensure I’m alone. No one can see what I do. If even one person did, my life would be over.

My long brown hair hangs around my face as I close my eyes. Ignoring the tiny insects crawling over me, I turn my attention inward.

We’re just having a quick run tonight, I tell my wolf sternly. Just to get rid of this itchy feeling. I thought I could ignore it until graduation, but I can’t. I need this to feel sane. No chasing bunnies or howling.

I don’t think there are any bunnies around here. I can’t smell them. If there are, my wolf would make it her mission to find them.

My wolf huffs, annoyed.

If you so much as howl at the moon one time, I won’t change for a month, I warn her.

It’s a promise I can’t keep.

The need to shift is an itch inside my skin. It grows more intense the longer I leave it, and as someone who went through the foster care system and didn’t always have a chance to slip away, I know all about the intensity of an itch you can’t reach inside yourself to scratch.

My wolf is silent and guilt twists in my belly.

It’s for both our sakes, okay? It’s not safe here. After graduation, we can go on a proper hike in the mountains for days.

An image of a lean, chocolate brown wolf with pale blue eyes pounces on a cute rabbit who shrieks in pain.

My stomach rumbles as I twist my lips.

Sure. Why not, I concede.

She can have her bunny, and I can have a break from all the overpowering stenches that comes from living so close to so many people.

Like letting an excited dog off a leash, my wolf is eager to hunt, and I don’t like to admit to myself, but I am too.

It feels like fire. Like electric currents whispering over my skin, scratching at my bones, and making the important things, tests, always being normal, keeping people at a distance, unimportant.

New priorities take place.

The smell of earth beneath our paws, the sleek light dancing over our fur.

The eagerness to hunt and play.

I blink my eyes open seconds later and my world is a sharper, brighter one than before.

My wolf picks up a scent. Small. Earthy. A mole.

Don’t, I warn her, speaking directly into her mind because I don’t have a human mouth to shape into words right now.

If I don’t keep her on a tight leash, we’ll be hunting moles all night.

But the part that knows rules are important and has always lived by them loves this moment where rules no longer matter. Where I can just be me.

I can be free.