“Do you think he can come back from what he’s done?” I asked. “I mean, even if we find him—do you think he’ll ever be the same person he was before … ?” My arm twinged with a sharp pain in the spot where Jude had bitten me. I rubbed my hand over the scar that hid under my sleeve.
“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “I did—with your help. But that doesn’t mean everyone can. Jude won’t change unless he wants to. And once you’ve gone wolf, its influence is so overwhelming that it’s almost impossible to remember who you used be.”
I nodded, wondering if that fate awaited me someday.
Daniel stepped toward me. He reached out and brushed the moonstone pendant that rested against my chest. His finger traced along the stone’s rough edge where it had broken in half when Jude had pitched it from the roof of the parish three months before.
“I just thank God every day that I was able to find this for you. Even if it’s only half the original stone, it’s still enough to help keep you safe. Help stop you from losing yourself like I did. Like Jude. It’ll help keep you human.” Daniel’s fingers left the pendant, and he cupped my face in both of his hands. His thumbs brushed my cheeks, and he stared deep into my eyes.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“For what?”
“For the moonstone. For believing in me.” I half smiled. “For not dying. I would have killed you if you’d died on me like that.” I jabbed him in the chest with my finger.
Daniel laughed. I loved the sound of it. Then he leaned in and pressed his mouth against my upturned lips. I pressed back, and our mouths melted together into a kiss that told me that everything I felt for Daniel, he felt for me.
I shuddered in his arms. “You are cold,” he said when our lips parted, and he held me tight in his warm embrace.
SATURDAY MORNING
“Is she dead?” a voice asked somewhere nearby, waking me from a deep sleep.
“No,” a second, slightly younger-sounding voice responded.
“I think she’s dead.”
An “unnnmmmm” sound escaped my lips. Why did my ankle ache so badly? And why did my mattress feel more like wood slats?
“Yep, she’s dead. He’s going to be so mad.”
“She just made a noise, and her … um … chest … is moving up and down. Obviously, she’s not dead.”
“Dead, dead, dead. Do you think he’ll kill us? That’s what Caleb would have done. Do you think we can request how we want to go out? I don’t want to drown. That just looks so unpleasant on TV.”
“He’s a wolf. How would he drown you? Most likely he’d rip out your throat. And anyways, she’s not dead.”
“It’s ‘anyway’ not ‘anyways.’”
“What?”
“Guys,” I tried to say, but it came out more like, “Gaaaahh.” I cleared my throat. How early was it?
“You said it wrong. It’s ‘anyway.’ Putting an ‘s’ on the end makes you sound like an idiot. And anyway, she’s dead. How fast do you think we need to run to get to Canada before he finds out?”
“You’re the idiot!”
I heard a scuffle and a shout. One of my eyelids cracked open just enough to see Ryan grab Brent in a headlock right next to me. Everything else in my vision was still blurry.
“Guys!” I shouted. “Cut it out!”
Ryan dropped his hold on Brent, and the two snapped to attention. They stood straight as rails with their hands at their sides, like soldiers responding to the bark of their drill sergeant. I’d never get used to their response to my commands. Brent leaned slightly toward Ryan and whispered—loudly—“I told you she was dead.”
Ryan’s nostrils flared. “Why you effing—”
I burst out laughing at the look on Brent’s face. He could pull off that innocent, yet sarcastic “Whaaat?” look like nobody else. I’d known him for only a few days, but the kid knew how to crack me up—and I was thankful for anything that could make me smile lately. My laugh turned into a coughing fit. The two boys leaned over me like they were afraid I actually was going to die.
I waved them off and regained my breath. “Now, would you like to tell me what the hell you’re doing in my bedroom?”
“Oh great, now she’s lost her mind,” Brent said.
Ryan shoved him away. “You’re not in your bedroom, Miss Grace. We helped you home last night, and you fell asleep on your porch swing. We stayed to protect you. Don’t you remember?”
I opened both my eyes now and gave them a few seconds to focus on my surroundings. Brent. Ryan. The top branches of the walnut tree. Purple early-morning sky. Porch swing. And apparently, that thing jabbing me in the back was my cell phone, which I must have fallen asleep on top of. A vague recollection trickled into my brain, and I remembered following Daniel’s howls into the forest, then attempting to limp home on a newly rebroken ankle. I’d given up about halfway through the forest and allowed one of the two wolves who followed anxiously at my side to carry me home—only to discover that I’d locked myself out of the house. I remembered sitting on the porch swing with the intention to call my dad for help, but I must have fallen asleep before dialing the number.
Asleep.
Truth hit me like a smack in the face as I realized—once again—that the time I’d spent with Daniel in the Garden of Angels last night had been just a dream. It was the same vibrant memory that played in a loop in my head every time I’d allowed myself to sleep since we’d escaped from the warehouse: Daniel and me in the Garden of Angels about six months ago. Before Jude came back. Before Caleb and Talbot. Before Daniel became trapped as the white wolf. It felt like heaven.
Last night, the dream had kept me warm as I slept in the frosty November air. But now I felt colder than even before, realizing all over again that Daniel hadn’t really been there to wrap me in his arms.
And he may never be able to again.
“Did you two stay out here with me all night?” I asked.
Ryan and Brent were the youngest of the five of Caleb’s boys who had chosen Daniel as their new alpha. Ryan couldn’t be more than fourteen. Brent was probably almost sixteen, but he had a boyish roundness to his face, and he pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose often enough to make me wonder if he’d worn glasses before he’d been turned into an Urbat. And there was something just plain ironic about “Brent the Werewolf.”
In fact, it was hard for me to imagine either of these two as part of the vicious werewolf pack that had tried to attack me at Caleb’s command. I couldn’t help thinking of them as a group of lost boys. Like in the Peter Pan play my mom made us put on at the parish when I was ten. The way they’d never really grow up. And how they lived in that warehouse next to the Depot club. I’m sure it was all fun and games—until the killing-people part started.
Ryan nodded. “Your safety is our first priority. It’s what he wants.”
I sat up and scanned the yard. If Brent and Ryan were here, I wouldn’t be surprised if the other three boys weren’t far off. They were a pack, after all.
Zach and Marcos sat at the base of the walnut tree, but Slade stood so far down the street that I wouldn’t have noticed him without my sharper-than-average eyesight. While it was hard to imagine Brent and Ryan as bloodthirsty werewolves, I had the opposite reaction to Slade. His ripped arms were painted with tattoos of flames that extended from his wrists to shoulders. He had a steel bar in one eyebrow and ten other piercings in his ears. And he almost always had a lighter in his hand, which he’d flick to life just to watch the flame dance for a while before singeing off the hair on his arms—seemingly just for fun. But it wasn’t Slade’s appearance that made me shiver in his presence. It was the way he looked at me. I was almost certain he had been the large gray wolf that had sunk his venemous teeth into my leg when I was attacked by Caleb’s pack in the warehouse, because every once in a while I’d catch this look in Slade’s eyes, like he’d tasted my blood—and he just might want more.