Red by Kait Nolan Page B

than big feet
or an overbite or any of a million other inheritable genetic
traits. Because it had to be genetic. I was too much a scientist at
heart to believe in anything like curses. Looking at this story as
a true scientist, it wasn’t Sabine but her lover who’d introduced
the werewolf gene. And evidently it was dominant. Like how the
offspring of a brown-eyed person and a blue-eyed person was
probably going to be brown-eyed, unless the brown-eyed person had a
blue-eye recessive gene to pass on. My AP Biology class hadn’t
covered genetics in enough detail to explain why only daughters had
been born from the line, but I figured there was some scientific
principle out there that covered it.
    Punnett squares weren’t going to fix my
problem, though.
    In the end, it didn’t matter whether it was
genetic or a curse or straight up magic. It was happening .
To. Me.
    And I didn’t know how to stop it.
     
     

Chapter 6
     
    Elodie
     
    Someone is watching
me .
    I twitched my shoulders and resisted the
urge to look behind me. Again. Because that would be too much of an
admission that in the last two weeks, I’d turned into a paranoid
freak. Okay, maybe not so much a freak. The whole town was on edge.
It wasn’t a shock, really. We’d gotten Rich and Molly back, but
nobody had been caught and punished for it. Whoever had snatched
them was still out there. Somewhere. The sheriff was hypothesizing
that whoever had done it had moved on when his plans were spoiled.
Lots of people wanted to believe that, for obvious reasons. No one
wanted to believe that one of our own was responsible for
instilling night terrors in a ten year old or for Rich being laid
up in the hospital still after having reconstructive surgery on his
leg.
    The part that made me a paranoid freak was
that I was starting to wonder if the kidnapper was after me. Which
was crazy. Because why would someone target me? I was nobody. I
mean, unless you were a werewolf hunter who somehow managed to
track my family line down despite all the ridiculous precautions my
dad had taken to make us disappear. And what was the likelihood of
that? The journal didn’t report any hunters for at least three
generations. The entire point of my life was to stay off
everybody’s radar, and I was really good at it. Well, except for
the Barbie Squad, but who listened to them? No one noticed me.
    “ Yeah, that’s the girl that
found the Phillips boy.”
    I froze, my hand inches from the pack of
paper towels. Okay, nobody had noticed me before I rescued Rich.
Since then, I seemed to have acquired a certain level of notoriety,
which Dad was less than pleased about. Given my aversion to being
the center of attention, I didn’t care for it either. But that
didn’t mean that someone was out to get me. What happened to Rich
and Molly had absolutely nothing to do with me.
    I looked casually down the aisle, first one
way, then the other, frowning when I didn’t see anybody. Weird.
She’d sounded like she was right there .
    I grabbed the paper towels and stood,
scanning over the top of the shelves for the others. Sawyer, David,
and I were on a supply run at McIntyre’s Grocery and Mercantile.
I’d learned a lot in the last two weeks on the job with Dr.
McGrath. Not the least of which was the fact that, no matter how
smart I might be, I was still even lower than an undergrad intern
on the totem pole, and that meant I was a grunt, often relegated to
the simplest and most boring of jobs. Any dreams of making some
glorious scientific discovery that would immortalize my name in
scientific journals had pretty well evaporated by now.
    Still, I liked the work. I learned a lot
through observation, and at least I got to be outside in the park.
And I got to be with Sawyer. Not like anything had happened. No
matter how I might wish otherwise, we were just friends. I knew
that’s all we could be. Whatever was happening to me, I wasn’t
willing to risk that final alleged catalyst. But hanging out