Cry Wolf (27 page)

Uh-oh.

The animal glanced up at them. The look in its eyes was easy to understand.

It was
pissed
.

Andrea screamed as the tree beneath them began to shake violently. The flashlight beside her slid and fell off the ledge of the perch, and the video camera rolled, falling to its destruction.

“Andi!” Sean’s voice called out from somewhere nearby.

“Sean?” she yelled back, holding on to the cracking wood for her life. “Don’t come any closer. It’s right below us!”

The shaking tree stilled.

Sean thought his heart would beat straight out of his chest as the animal, not twenty feet from him, turned and met his eyes.

Red. Angry. Frightening. It released a loud growl when it saw him.

“Sean!” Andrea yelled frantically. He didn’t need the reminder. He lifted the rifle and took aim.

He fired one shot, aiming for the creature’s leg. Whether or not he hit his target with the live bullet was unclear. The creature gave off a furious roar as it turned and ran in the other direction.

The sound of splintering wood mingled with the sound of Andrea’s scream. Sean looked up in time to see the platform give way and fall to the ground. Thank God, Andi had managed to grab hold of a tree branch to stop herself from falling along with it. Novotny was braced safely between the tree trunk and another limb.

Sean rushed to Andi’s aid. “Drop down. I’m right here to catch you.”

She did, falling into his arms. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see you.” She buried her face in his shoulder.

“Same here, Sunshine.”

Charlie arrived in time to assist Novotny out of the tree. “We called the sheriff’s department, and they’re supposed to be on their way. What happened to the…thing?” he asked, not quite ready yet to admit what he’d seen.

Novotny demanded they find his backpack. “I’m pretty sure I managed to tag the animal. Now I need the device that will help us track it. Hurry.”

There were several minutes of confusion. Once he had the bag in hand, Novotny found the device. “It’s working. I’d say it’s about one hundred yards ahead of us, traveling north, slowly.”

Sean exchanged looks with Charlie.
Jonas’ farm
.

“Isn’t that where Werewolf Woods is?” Andrea grabbed Sean’s arm.

Charlie nodded. “There’s no telling how many people are out there tonight.”

Andrea looked at Sean. Reed was there, working the haunted attraction. Families, children, teenagers too—they’d all be there.

Charlie pulled out his radio and called the sheriff’s department again. While Charlie told the dispatcher what was happening, Sean and Andrea pulled the researcher aside.

“You’re coming with us.” Sean dragged him along.

Andrea could barely keep up, but she understood Sean’s urgency.

They’d antagonized the animal or whatever the hell it was.

There were lives in danger now.

They had to hurry.

Sean’s feet pounded the grass and dirt. He rushed toward the mob of people gathered around a large bonfire near the entrance to the attraction. He’d parked beside a patrol car, but the deputy working private security wasn’t turning people away yet. Either the deputy wasn’t wearing a radio or dispatch had failed to get across to him the severity of the situation.

Sean spotted the deputy—Trey Parker, no less—almost as soon as he spotted the werewolf.

Sean came to a fast halt and reached out his free arm to stop Andi beside him. She skidded to a standstill. “What?”

He nodded toward Jan Robinson, who sat with her son Michael on a bench near the bonfire sipping hot chocolate. The silhouette of the werewolf was sneaking up on them from behind.

“Jan!” Sean yelled and lifted the rifle. His neighbor was too far away to hear him.

The creature sprang toward the redhead and her son. Sean steadied his aim.

“Sean, no!” Andi grabbed his arm to prevent the shot. “Look—it’s just a kid in a costume.”

She was right. Jan squealed when the werewolf roared—obviously a human roar—and reached to tickle her son.

Relief washed over Sean, along with pure terror at the realization he’d almost shot one of the local teens. A bead of sweat fell down his forehead. He took a deep breath.

Novotny huffed to catch his breath as he came to a stop beside Sean and Andi. “Should I go speak with that officer over there?” Novotny lifted a hand and pointed out Trey. “That’ll give you two a chance to find the person in charge of this event.”

“Good idea.” Andi looked around. “Sean, you do that. I’ll see if I can find Reed.”

“No, we stay together.” He reached for her arm, but she was already gone. Andi stopped a group of people nearby and said something. Most in the group shrugged and walked past, but a few tried to engage her in discussion. Good, it’d slow her down. Sean started to catch up to her but hesitated when the researcher spoke.

“I’ve got it!” Novotny lifted the tracking device and pointed toward the entrance to the haunted forest, where teens in costumes waited to guide paying guests. “There are so many people here, but animals like this usually avoid as many people as they can.”

Sean wasn’t so sure. They’d wounded and angered the creature. That made it dangerous. He glanced at the tracking device to get an idea of where the creature was headed. Hard to tell.

“There, off to the left, do you see?” Novotny pointed to a small blip on the tracking screen.

Sean saw it, slowly moving to the left.

“See, it’s moving the same direction Andrea is.” Novotny nodded toward the entrance of the trail. “Stop her. She’s headed right for the animal!”

“What?”

Sean followed the older man’s gaze and saw the back of Andi as she disappeared into darkness and trees. In the distance, he heard screaming, and hell, he didn’t know if it came from happily frightened patrons or truly terrified people.

He swore and yelled her name.

Andrea hadn’t gotten twenty feet along the trail when a masked man jumped out at her wielding a fake machete. “Mwahaha!” he yelled dramatically.

She grabbed his shirtfront and shook him. “There’s a rabid dog lose on this trail. Tell people to turn back.
Hurry.
”

The teenager behind the mask laughed. “Are you serious?”

Frustrated, she pushed him away and ran, following the footpath on the trail. She told everyone she passed to turn back. She kept changing her story from a rabid dog to a rabid wolf to a fire raging out of control. The fire tactic seemed to work best, or maybe people were just afraid of the crazy lady screaming “Fire!” on a dimly lit trail.
Whatever
. Most people had reversed directions, but Andrea had yet to find Reed.

She arrived at a dark path. She hadn’t seen anyone in a while. Maybe that was a good thing. Or maybe not, she thought, glancing around at the ominous forest surrounding her. Should she yell out Reed’s name? Or would that attract the dog-man or werewolf or whatever it was?

Think, Andrea. Think.

She heard a scream again. A group of teenagers came charging at her as if the devil himself were on their heels. A young man appeared to limp, and he was using a friend for a crutch. Andrea spotted blood on his pants leg. She reached out and stopped the only one in the group she recognized—a boy from the Werewolf Club she’d briefly interviewed—and asked what had happened.

“There’s something back there,” the teenager said. “It attacked our friend. I think it was—I think it was a real werewolf!”

“Have you seen Reed Coleman? What about anyone else out here?”

The boy tried to pull away. “I think he ran toward the barn. A few others too. Man, I don’t know!”

Andrea let him go and glanced in the direction from which they’d run. It would be so easy to turn back around and run toward safety with the group. Except Reed was out there. Reed had a family that would be devastated if anything happened to him. She couldn’t leave him without at least trying to help.

Please let him be okay.
She prayed as she ran.

Andrea heard rustling beside her. She stopped. She thought it was someone trying to scare her as part of the attraction, so slowed down to warn them to leave. Then her nose was assaulted by a bad odor, and she heard a faint, familiar growl.

She turned. Two glowing eyes watched her from behind a tree.

Andrea screamed and ran.

Her bones jarred together. Andrea had no idea where she was running to, but she could hear rustling behind her and knew the animal was following close.

She pushed her way through brush and almost slammed smack-dab into the side of a barn.
Oh thank God.
She made her way to the front, to find the door closed and unmovable.
Oh no, please, no!

Andrea gave a muffled cry of distress and pounded the door in despair. She grabbed the handle again and shook it desperately. The door s jerked wide open and she stumbled inside.

“Andrea! Are you okay?” Reed slammed the door shut behind her. “The werewolf! It chased us off the trail! Is it still out there?”

“Reed!” She pulled the teen into a ferocious hug. “I was so worried. I thought—”

A sudden bang against the barn door accompanied by growling and snarling interrupted her words. She hadn’t had a moment to spare. The creature pushed and tore at the bolted door.

A few people Andrea hadn’t noticed scrambled up into the hayloft. Andrea and Reed rushed the door, lending it extra support.

When the door stopped shaking against her back, she glanced at Reed. He was dressed as a popular character in horror films, minus the mask. She laughed at the absurdity of the situation. Then again, everything that had happened to her since she’d arrived in Woodbine had been absurd.

“It gave up after a while earlier and left,” Reed said. “We just have to wait it out.”

That would have been good advice, Andrea thought a few minutes later, if only the animal wasn’t so smart. She and Reed walked the insides of the barn, checking for signs of the creature. Andrea felt the hair on her neck stand at attention. Something was watching her.

Oh hell.

Andrea stopped in her tracks when she saw the loose boards—one of which was swinging like a pendulum. There was a hole in the barn!

She sensed something before she heard the rustling at the back of the barn. Something metal hit the ground with a clang, as if it had been tipped over.

She recognized the stench of the animal. It had grown worse, stronger. She moved closer to Reed, catching sight of a movement in the shadows.

Reed saw it too. “Everybody get up in the hayloft. Be calm. Don’t rush!”

He helped a few stragglers climb the unsteady ladder and reached for Andrea. “You go first,” she told him, keeping her eyes on those shadows. Her heart fell to her feet when the creature started to come forward, walking on all fours. It was huge!

Andrea scurried up the ladder, grabbing Reed’s hand for an extra boost up. She felt the ladder shake as her foot made it onto the platform. Looking down, she saw the creature standing on two legs, gripping the ladder and snarling up at her. Was it going to climb up? Her eyes grew big as she watched it try. It couldn’t manage, and Andrea breathed a sigh of relief.

Reed grabbed her shoulder and squeezed. “What now?”

She thought for a second and shook her head. “I don’t know”

Andrea peered over the ledge of the hayloft, only to gasp and jerk back when the creature took a swipe at her face. It growled, low and menacing, and she heard the sound of splintering wood again.

It was trying to figure out a way up. Andrea wiped her sweaty palms on the material of her jeans and felt a hard lump in her left pocket. One of Reed’s lighters.
The lighter!
“Do you think it’s afraid of fire?”

“In the movies they are.” Reed picked up a handful of hay. “Then again, so am I, and this place could go up in flames and kill us all if we’re not careful.”

“Good point.”

The wood continued to crackle, echoing through the barn. A small part of the hayloft to their left collapsed. Andrea watched wood and hay tumble to the ground and met the frightening stare of the werewolf animal below. It moved out of sight, and Andrea heard more banging and groaning wood.

What kind of animal is this smart?

“Look, I don’t think we have any choice but to risk it.” Andrea glanced around for something to create a torch. “If we can just scare it off until help comes…”

Reed nodded and glanced around. He grabbed a pitchfork, and Andrea watched him rip the sleeve of his costume and wrap the material around the forked end of the pole. “Maybe if we light the cloth long enough to scare the animal, we can put it out and keep the handle from catching fire too.”

“How? What about all this hay?”

“Would you rather burn to death or be ripped to shreds by that thing?”

Good question
. The animal emitted an intimidating growl that sounded too close for comfort. Andrea pulled out the lighter. “Here goes nothing.”

The cloth caught fire easily. A man rushed toward her from the shadows and tried to grab the torch from her. “Are you crazy, lady? You’ll kill us all!”

Andrea lost her grip on the torch and stumbled backward. She grappled to keep the pitchfork from falling but watched helplessly as it flew through the air and landed on the ground below. A bale of hay caught fire, and it spread quickly.

Some of the people hiding in the hayloft screamed and scrambled for the only opening they could find. On the floor below, the animal circled, looking up and snarling as the people scurried. A pulley used to transport hay bales looked like a great escape. It was a long jump down, but Andrea watched one guy attempt it.

“Andrea, come on!” Reed helped her regain her balance and pulled her toward the opening.

She dug in her heels. “I’m afraid of heights.”

“Would you rather be eaten?”

She shook her head. “What if we break a leg and can’t run?”

He smiled sort of awkwardly. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it?”

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

“You go first.” She pushed him toward the pulley. “If you make it, you can catch me.”

“Deal!”

Everyone else had already leaped to safety. Andrea watched people run away from the barn in one piece. Maybe it wasn’t so bad.
Maybe
. Reed certainly made escape look easy. He grabbed the pulley, swung outward and dropped to the ground below as if he were doing nothing more complicated than jumping from a tire swing into a lake. He rolled and came up fine.

“Come on, Andrea!”

She moved toward the pulley and her foot fell through crumbling wood. The animal swiped at her boot and she screamed as humanlike fingers gripped her ankle and tugged her downward. She couldn’t pull free—she could feel the splinters poke through her jeans and cut her legs as she tried to kick her foot loose from the creature’s grip.

She managed to grab hold of the pulley, but her grip slipped, and she let out a frustrated yell. Rotted wood beneath her creaked and she felt the floor beneath her stable foot start to give way. Next thing she knew, she was falling down into the leaping flames, down toward the creature.

Andrea landed in a pile of debris on top of the werewolf.

She was winded and dazed, but the fierce heat of the fire surrounding her brought her concentration back into sharp attention. Beneath her, the animal growled. Andrea reached for the nearest piece of wood she could get her hands on and used it to hit down at the creature as she tried to scramble to safety. She screamed in pain and went down again.

Too late, she felt a sharp pain in her leg and glanced down to see a deep, bloody gash at her thigh.

The werewolf pushed itself to all fours, shaking off hay and dust and wood. It turned and saw her. She was lying on the ground, trying to crawl backward away from it. The fire was everywhere.

She would never survive this. If the fire didn’t kill her, the creature would.

It was so cliché. Her life flashed before her eyes. She saw herself as a child, laughing with Nick. Being told of his death years later. Going to college and meeting Sean. The accident and Lisa’s funeral. The surgeries that followed. Laughing again with Reed and Sean and feeling the rush of being a true journalist flow through her veins again.

No
, she thought with a sudden fierceness.
I’ve survived too damn much to have it all end like this.
If she was going down, she was going down swinging.

She had a future to look forward to. A future full of love and laughter, of hot nights in the moonlight tangled up with Sean, of marriage and maybe even babies. Dammit, even Kitty needed a mother.

The animal lunged at her. “Arrrghh!” she yelled, and she stabbed the piece of wood into its chest.

She could have sworn she heard the sound of a gunshot too, but it was probably just the sound of the barn coming undone around her.

The werewolf grabbed at the stake as it fell back onto its haunches. Its eyes softened, fear and pain etched in them as it fell backward away from her.