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sea-green eyes, and he swayed like a snake.
    Trick Sokolov, who had bewitched her. The only thing she wanted more than Trick was not to be a werewolf anymore. So far, both were things she couldn’t have.
    She drank in his movements, his face. She remembered what it felt like to kiss him. To be held by him. The video was so sexy, and so Trick, that her heart skipped beats and she played it again, focusing on him, on how she felt about him. It was hopeless: he knew nothing about her werewolf world, and if he ever learned of it, he would be put to death.
    Even now, he was in trouble. Mike Wright, who had bullied and terrorized Trick for years, had been found dead. Katelyn had been unable to confess that she’d beaten him badly after he rammed her car. But she had left him alive. Of that she had been certain. Trick’s only connection to the murder was his known animosity toward Mike — and the fact that he’d been in trouble with the law before. People had it in for Trick, because he was wealthy, and different, and of mixed heritage. Some of the girls who’d warned Katelyn about him were the same girls who wanted him to be theirs. People who detested him had crashed his amazing Halloween party on his family’s vast, sprawling property.
    His parting image was a slow, wicked smile. It physically hurt to think of him smiling that way for someone else. But he would have to, one day.
    “What are you doing?” Magus asked sharply. “Are you texting someone?”
    “None of your business,” she retorted.
    His hand shot out as if to grab the phone, and she yanked it out of his reach.
    “Hey, not cool,” she said.
    “Everything is my business,” he retorted. “For you, that’s a lucky thing.”
    “Why?”
    He looked her full on, and his eyes glowed against the crimson firelight beyond. “Because I can save you, Katelyn, even if you can’t save them.”

4
    KATELYN FIGURED SHE had the rest of the drive back to Wolf Springs to learn all she could about the Hounds of God. She wasn’t sure yet what she would do with the information — go straight to the pack? Call Cordelia first? — but the more she heard, the more convinced she became that the Hounds of God were just as crazy as the executives who attended Jack Bronson’s Inner Wolf Center, with their drumming and their howling at all hours of the night. The Inner Wolf guys stirred up the animals in the forest, and made the locals resentful, hostile. Bronson urged them to let out their wild wolf side, and people were wondering aloud if one of them had gone too far, and committed the murders that were baffling the two officers of the Wolf Springs police department.
    “So in your rituals, you drink this potion, and that’s when you change,” she said, recapitulating what he’d been telling her. With each revelation she had become more doubtful that the Hounds of God really were werewolves. It sounded to her as if they were a bunch of tattooed freaks who got high and then shared some elaborate mass hallucination. When he talked about the werewolf packs they had already “cleansed,” she imagined them riding into town like an outlaw biker gang and physically blowing werewolves away with guns. But she remembered the names: Manarro, Lycanan, Verdulak.
    “You’re not initiated into our order, so I can’t go into detail,” he replied. “But yes, we derive our power from aligning ourselves with God and His avenging angels. The Fenners and the Gaudins are descended from monstrous creatures — the Fenners from the Fenris Wolf, son of Loki, and the Gaudins from the Beast of Gévaudan, who terrorized France in the eighteenth century.” He narrowed his eyes. “The Fenners claim descent from a god, and they say that the Gaudins are upstarts, possibly a mutated offshoot from their godly origins. But there is only one God! And the Gaudins are proud to claim a ravening monster as their forebear.”
    “Is that why they hate each other? Cordelia said they’ve been feuding