Free Wolfen by Madelaine Montague Page B

all of them.

     

      So—setting aside the ridiculous—what could their motives be?

     

      A practical joke?

     

      She could be wrong, but they didn't seem the malicious type to find that sort of thing amusing. She still didn't think she could dismiss it altogether. She barely knew them and they were a totally unknown entity to her anyway since she'd never been around any men quite like them.

     

      To distract her?

     

      That seemed plausible, except she couldn't figure out what they might be anxious to distract her from. If they were thugs, and that seemed less likely to her now that she'd been around them a little, Maynard was a damned strange town to set up shop. It was between nowhere and bum-fuck nowhere. If it had been even close to a major national highway, maybe.

     

      She managed to push the puzzle aside from time to time while she worked, but the thoughts kept swarming back. It wasn't until her stomach started complaining that she realized she'd been out for hours. When she'd dug her watch out of her bag, she discovered it was mid-afternoon.

     

      She wasn't going to learn any more from the little she had to work with, she decided. She'd gone up and down the trail for a couple of miles in both directions and she hadn't seen any sign of a lair. All she'd really been able to determine was that the pack had come this way a number of times.

     

      It was just as well she hadn't stumbled upon their lair, she thought wryly. She'd been too distracted. The chances were she would've been attacked before she could get her trusty tranq pistol out of her bag. That sobered her, especially in view of the fact that the pack was so big and there'd already been one reported attack on a human.

     

      She supposed the sheer size of the pack might account, to a degree, for their brazenness. Their numbers would make them feel stronger.

     

      She just wished she could've actually tracked down the man that was supposedly attacked and questioned him. It seemed most likely that he must have accidentally stumbled upon them, rather than that the wolves had either stalked him or otherwise gone out of their way to attack. Unless they were rabid, very few wild animals would hunt humans—bears and cats for certain, although even they tended to go the other way, for the most part, if they caught the scent of a human.

     

      The wolves certainly weren't rabid, although the thought had occurred to her as one possible explanation for the attacks. They would've been dead in this length of time, though, not still roaming the countryside terrorizing the locals.

     

      She felt a little better after the jaunt into the woods. At least she had something to report. She was going to have to try to discover their lair. Even if she hadn't managed to find the man who'd supposedly been attacked, the wolves had been after livestock. They didn't belong in the area and they were creating problems because they didn't. Game was going to have send people in to either kill or trap the pack and remove them. Some were likely to end up in zoos. The others might be relocated, though, to an area that had the right eco system to support them.

     

      They were going to want to know exactly how many wolves they had to account for if she could possibly furnish them with that information. If they didn't get them all, the people in the area would have another problem with wolves in a few years.

     

      She still couldn't fathom what had brought them so far south of their native habitat. There'd been a particularly bitter winter several years before, but she didn't think the wolves had been in the area that long. Of course, she supposed it was possible they had been and there'd been earlier attacks and they'd just been blamed on something else.

     

      She was in the middle of cooking herself a quick meal when she heard the bikers returning. Her heart fluttered uncomfortably in her chest, but she couldn't convince herself it was