Frostbitten by Kelley Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page A

Upon consideration, though, I decided that wasn’t necessarily a problem. With the size of Alaska, finding two or three werewolves would be needle-and-haystack work. Now they’d be looking for us, which would make things easier.
     
    As long as we’d already left our scents, we might as well take a better sniff around. We covered every inch of that clearing searching for remnants of the man by the lake, and found not a speck of blood or shred of flesh. That didn’t mean much—the long run through the snow would be enough to clean off their feet—but it bore keeping in mind. It could also suggest a deliberate cleaning before returning to this spot. Maybe one of the mutts was a man-eater trying to hide the habit from his buddies.
     
    Once we were sure we’d gotten all the information we could and had committed their scents to memory, we left the clearing. As I stepped out, I caught a movement in the bushes. I froze, blocking Clay. He nudged my hindquarters. I edged backward, scanning the woods. The only noise was the wind rustling dead leaves overhead. It was too quiet. Clay went still, knowing something was wrong.
     
    I kept looking, ears swiveled forward, nose working. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear. Nothing to smell. Yet the forest stayed deathly silent. Clay nudged me again—now he was worried and wanted to get moving.
     
    I slid from the clearing. Clay followed. We stood in the dense, dimly lit forest, looking, listening, sniffing, catching nothing. Then a bird called. Another answered. A squirrel chirruped and scampered over a branch overhead, dead leaves raining down. I shook one off my head, and I rubbed against Clay, grunting an apology for overreacting. He licked my muzzle and waited for instructions, ready to cede the lead now that any danger had passed.
     
    We found the scent from the werewolves in human form, and followed it. It didn’t go more than twenty paces before ending at a trail thick with the stink of mixed gas and oil. Snowmobiles.
     
    I turned around and loped back a quarter mile toward the kill site, but the men hadn’t left yet. There was no reason for us to linger. By the time the crew removed the body, all their tracks would have erased the faint trail of the killer. We returned to our truck and Changed back.
     
    * * * *
     
    As disappointed as we were over the awkward end to our run, neither of us suggested we crawl into the back of the SUV and finish it properly. We’d already done the quick-and-dirty solution in the airport. Now we wanted more, and if we couldn’t get it on our terms, we’d wait and build up an appetite.
     
    Speaking of appetites, breakfast was long overdue. We drove back to Highway 1—the main route through Alaska… or the 5 percent of it that could be reached by car. It was a two-lane highway that didn’t bear much resemblance to the interstates I was used to, and it didn’t have the facilities I was used to either. Earlier we’d passed only one service center. We returned there now and found a gas station, bakery and pizza parlor.
     
    I was surprised by the neon sign in the bakery window offering espressos—not the kind of thing one expects to find at a highway outpost. But I wasn’t arguing. I’d always considered myself a straight coffee person, but when I’d been pregnant and nursing, I drank decaf lattes to up my dairy intake and developed a taste for them, especially if they came with caramel. These ones did, so I got a large, a coffee for Clay and a bag of pastries.
     
    We headed outside to eat and couldn’t find a single bench or picnic table. Given the view—snow-covered mountains with the sun cresting the ridge—I couldn’t imagine why everyone chose to drink their coffee inside. I suppose the subfreezing temperatures had some thing to do with that.
     
    But the chance to eat with a view like that was too tempting to ignore. And Clay was just as happy not to have to eat with strangers. So we settled onto the wooden ties of a raised