Unleashed by Nancy Holder Page A

eyes went unfocused then, as if she were gazing at a faraway place. “I’d give anything to live in L.A. It must be so …  different .”
    “Well, after you graduate, you can move there,” Katelyn offered.
    “Maybe. Most of the kids here will wind up living here. Some of us get out.” She shrugged. “Anyway, take it slow. Sometimes it’s hard to separate out the phonies, you know what I mean?”
    “Okay. Thanks for the advice.”
    “I just don’t want to see anyone else get hurt,” Paulette said. She looked hard at Katelyn. “Because Cordelia Fenner will hurt you, if she feels like it.”

    Katelyn had no clue what to think about what Paulette had told her, but it weighed on her for the rest of the day. As soon as the final bell rang, she headed for the senior parking lot. Cordelia had beaten her there, and stood waving to her from beside a black pickup truck. Katelyn hadn’t pictured Cordelia as the truck type, although she shouldn’t have been surprised, given the large ratio of trucks to cars in the parking lot. As Katelyn climbed inside the cab, she noticed that it was sparkling clean and smelled like cinnamon.
    “Nice truck,” she managed to make herself say.
    “Thanks!” Cordelia said. Her voice was upbeat, as usual, but her expression was strange—tense, almost—her smile fake. Katelyn thought about what Paulette had said about her. She couldn’t agree with it. Cordelia seemed genuinely nice. And now she was genuinely upset about something—and trying to hide it.
    She’d thought about telling Cordelia about the wolf attack. But Cordelia didn’t seem to want to chat. Maybe she was sorry she’d invited Katelyn over.
    “This is okay, my coming home with you, right?” Katelyn asked.
    “Oh, yes, sure,” Cordelia blurted, too quickly and too brightly.
    She pulled out of the parking lot and in silence they drove through the town and turned onto the narrow road that climbed into the mountains. Like Ed, Cordelia’s family lived far outside town. When they turned off the main artery into Wolf Springs, there were no paved roads, and Katelyn couldn’t distinguish one twisted Snow White tree from another. Cordelia focused on her driving so intently that Katelyn remained silent, suppressing the urge to fill the space with chatter. Her mind wandered and she found herself thinking about Trick. She thought about asking Cordelia to tell her more about him, partly to see if it was true that she didn’t like him. But Katelyn didn’t want to seem too curious about a guy Cordelia clearly didn’t approve of. Or maybe it was that she didn’t want to admit she liked him to anyone—including herself—just yet.
    They turned down a winding trail and Cordelia sighed softly. Katelyn glanced at her just as Cordelia’s eyes widened like she’d seen something in the rearview mirror, but all Katelyn saw when she glanced at it was Cordelia. Shadows slid over the truck hood, then across the windshield. The trees seemed closer, denser. They slowed down.
    “We’re he-ere,” Cordelia announced in a singsong voice, mimicking an old horror movie. Katelyn couldn’t remember which one.
    It took a moment for Katelyn to take the structure in completely. She had seen a program on television once where wealthy people into “living green” had built a house around a tree. Cordelia’s house reminded her of this, but at the same time it was nothing like it. A rambling structure of redwood, stone, and stained glass seemed to rise naturally from the earth, twisting and sprouting with turrets and bay windows like the limbs and trunks that grew around it and even through it. Leaves the color of flames swirled in eddies in what appeared to be open-air patios. Set at the top of a large stone staircase, situated on a massive stone porch, the front door was a double arch of redwood interspersed with panes of frosted glass. There were window boxes containing pretty purple flowers. Katelyn had seen plenty of mansions before but