Feral by Holly Schindler Read Free Book Online Page A

girl in the passenger seat was eyeing her through the windshield as the car swerved around the gas pumps toward the exit. Suddenly feeling self-conscious, Claire reached for the lapels of her coat, cinching them together.
    â€œWhat’s that all about?” Dr. Cain wondered, as the car screeched onto the street.
    â€œLooking for their friend,” Claire assured him. “Trying to beat the worst of the storm.”
    They walked down the front steps, into the lot, grocery sacks propped on their hips. Claire flicked her free hand, once, as though to toss off the way her fingers were inexplicably trembling.
    She pulled the nozzle from the Gremlin’s tank and lowered herself into the passenger seat, her paper bag crackling loudly into her lap.
    As her father pulled out from the lot, steering toward the farmhouse they’d rented, Claire glanced through her window just in time to see a yellow tabby cat step into the gray sheet of icy rain and completely disappear.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
    HarperCollins Publishers
    ..................................................................
FOUR
    C laire felt as though night had taken her up in its fist by the time her father’s car snaked its way off the main road and down a gravel path. A dark charcoal sky loomed just beyond the windshield; bare tree limbs etched an even deeper, darker black into the horizon, like a kind of deathly-looking fringe. Claire’s ears filled with the sounds of deep-voiced dogs barking. Gravel popping against the tires. And the icy rain, of course. It pattered against the windshield, the roof, ceaselessly.
    An animal skittered straight into the headlights, making Dr. Cain hit the brake. Claire wrapped her hand around the door handle, eyes wide, as the car slid in a diagonal line, the front tires skidding to a stop an inch from the ditch.
    The cat they’d nearly hit pulled himself out of his defensive crouch and raced toward the opposite side of the road.
    Dr. Cain let out a shuddery sigh as Claire shook her head at the creature who raced off into the darkness. Just how many cats are there around here? she wondered. Her eyes darted about, taking in the barbed wire fence in the headlights, the thick, winter-dead underbrush that seemed to have gone untouched for the better part of a century.
    â€œClose one,” Dr. Cain muttered, backing the car up to square it in the lane, then shifting back into drive again.
    He steered past a looming two-story house, down a road without a single streetlight to help cut into the darkness.
    He finally pulled into a driveway, paused to let the headlights shine on a two-story white farmhouse. The house featured all the quaint details Claire had expected to find when her father announced he’d rented a home built at the turn of the twentieth century: a large covered porch complete with a swing, wooden shutters, and filmy white lace curtains hanging in old sash windows. A second-story balcony wrapped the entire home.
    The years had bullied the house, though, giving it a sad, used-up look. The place was desperately in need of paint; the asphalt shingles were starting to curl, the clogged gutters coughing and sputtering in the rain like an old man with emphysema.
    Tonight, the house was also wrapped in a thin sheet of ice, which caught the hazy moonlight in a break between the clounds, sparkling like a star against the black sky.
    Claire took a step from the car, her shoe sliding underneath her. She gripped the door for balance, and glanced up to find a figure in the front window of the house across the street. A hulking figure, enormous, standing so close to the glass that he looked like a featureless silhouette as he stared at her, the light of his living room shining brightly behind him.
    She narrowed her eyes, refusing to gasp. Turning back toward the car, she tugged her suitcase from the backseat and her phone from the glove compartment. She slammed the car door as she stared at the