Page 2 of Pack Kasen: Part 1

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 theprofessor 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.

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