Read Marked Clan #2 - Red for Free Online Page B

you know? I always kind of found this bridge a little creepy. The bats.”
    She was a talkative one. Might as well take advantage of it. “I know what you mean. Do you jog here every morning?”
    “Yeah. If I hadn’t slept in a couple days ago, I might have had to call this in. Poor thing.”
    “You saw her body?”
    She nodded. “The cops were already here, but they hadn’t covered her up yet.”
    “Did you see anything strange? Anything surrounding the body?”
    She shifted in her running shoes. “I kind of have to get going.”
    “Please,” I said. “Did you see anything?”
    “Well, I asked the cops if they’d found her dog. Poor thing probably ran off scared to death.”
    “How did you know she had a dog?”
    “The paw prints. Big ones, all around her body.”
    Bingo.
    I went back up the hill and stopped into the grocery store for a coffee. The smell of roasted beans trumped bat shit any day. I hadn’t really learned anything I didn’t already know—a wolf killed the girl. I’d need to case the clubs around here and hope he came out on the prowl again. I doubted he met her on the trail. They weren’t ambush predators. At least, not our local wolves. They liked the thrill of the chase.
    Was Dreama one of them now? I mean, I knew she was a wolf. That much I’d known for years, but what I didn’t know was how much of their instincts she’d taken on with the change. Maybe Poppa knew more. I drove back to the shop and went upstairs. Connor was too busy flirting with a young woman by the flash counter to notice me.
    I went to my closet and pulled out the book with our family crest, and sat down on my bed with it. I’d sat next to Poppa right here as he told me stories from the Old Country. He said it like that, where you could hear the capitals. He’d comforted me when I found the note at Dree’s apartment and knew she was gone for good.
    “It’s a curse, Bon,” he said. “A curse our family started. I tried to tell all this to your uncle, but my Connor is just as stubborn as me. He won’t believe an old man. Will you?”
    “Of course, Poppa,” I said. I was still shocked by what I’d seen the night she left. “Tell me everything.”
    He did. He told me how his great aunt had been disgraced by a gypsy boy, and how the first Mackenzie took his revenge. He showed me the runes that had been carved into his back, cursing him to become an animal, to live near forever in a state of conflict between his instincts and his humanity. They were all in our family album—one rune for each branch of the clan, six in all. The order mattered. He told me to look for the one with our branch first. He was the one we had to kill.
    I recognized the pattern immediately—Dreama had it on her back. All the women he fouled carried his mark to their deaths. Poppa said they died not long after he turned them, but that much I knew wasn’t true. Dree was still out there, for sure. How many others were still around?
    I knew there were turned women in the city. I’d seen them in passing, but I hadn’t killed one…yet. They were monsters in their own right, but victims too – victims of my family’s revenge. Poppa felt sorry for them toward the end. He said I had to promise to try and wipe them out.
    “It’s nigh time we ended it, Bon. The whole bloody mess has gone on too long. The key is inside ye.”
    He tapped my chest with an ancient finger. “Your blood kills them. It will protect ye, and your daughters when ye have them. But at the same time, they’re drawn to it. This one that took your friend wanted you instead. I did’nae want to believe it at first.”
    Poppa had chased the two of us, Dreama and me, out of his bedroom with the same revolver I kept under my pillow. I’d thought he had finally lost it, and Connor probably still did. My uncle didn’t know I’d kept Poppa’s gun.
    I woke up with a sore neck. I’d managed to doze off sitting up, with the family album still on my lap. I pushed it off