Page 1 of Pack Kasen: Part 1

PROLOGUE

“Hey, little girl. It’s okay, you can come out of there. We won’t hurt you.” The two men crouch in front of me.

I stay right where I am, squished in the corner of a smelly dumpster, staring at the men’s dark blue uniforms and wondering how I can get past them.

“How long do you think she’s been out here?” one man mutters under his breath. He had bacon for breakfast. It wafts from his breath and makes my tummy grumble.

“Awhile. She stinks.” The man with an arm like a hairy snake stretches it closer toward me. “It’s okay. You’re all right. Let’s get you?—”

I dart past him, scuttling on my hands and knees like a crab.

I yelp when someone grabs the back of my shirt, crying out and wiggling to get free.

Hiss and scratch. Nails. Elbows. Anything to escape.

A man curses, another laughs, while at the end of the alley, a man takes a step toward us, bellowing, “Hey! Watcha doin’ down there?”

I twist and bite.

“Fuck! She bit me.”

Suddenly, I’m free. I slam into the concrete, too dazed to move.

I get my knees under me, prepare to run for it.

Too late.

“I’ve got her.” The man tightens his hold on me, and no matter how hard I fight to get free, he’s too big or I’m too small.

A bright light flashes from the end of the alley, blinding me. Blinking, I twist my head away so whatever it is can’t blind me again.

“Look at my arm. The girl’s half-feral.”

“There’s no half about it.” The man with bacon breath holds me by the back of my shirt and marches me down the alley to a white car with flashing lights. “She’s social’s problem now. Let’s get her out of here.”

1

KAT

“…found 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 beingmurdered, and I know all of them.

My mindshouldbe 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.

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

Ilike 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.

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