“Then maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
“Yes, I do, Grace. And I know exactly what’s going on inside your head, because I’ve been there. That voice you hear—those terrible things that bombard you. Thoughts that make you think God doesn’t care about us. Those aren’t your thoughts. And they don’t come from God, either. They’re the wolf. The demon. The devil. It’s testing you. Tempting you. But if you can push those thoughts away, if you can reach beyond them, then you’ll find that there’s a true power deep inside of you, a power God has given you to fight the evil, that’s greater than anything you can even imagine. You found that power inside of you once.”
I shook my head. I didn’t know what power he was talking about. The speed, the strength, the agility, they all came from the wolf.
“The night you cured me,” Daniel said, “what were you feeling?”
Gabriel had asked me that same question before. I didn’t know why it mattered, but I did know the answer.
“Love,” I said. “I loved you enough to sacrifice everything for you. I wanted you to be cured no matter what it meant for me. I thought I’d lose my soul, but it was more important to me to save yours.”
“Then don’t tell me you aren’t strong enough, because that’s more strength than most people could ever dream of having. There is no greater gift, no greater power than that.”
“Than true love?”
“Yes. That’s the difference between them and us. We’re still capable of love. The wolf tries to destroy love, tries to push it out of your heart, tries to make you destroy everything that you care about. But if you can hold on to that love, and if you can hold on to your faith, then you are stronger than any monster out there. No outside power, no force, no evil can make you turn into the wolf as long as you hold on to that love.”
Daniel fell to his knees. His chains clanked against the floor. “I should have never stopped training you,” Daniel said. “I should have never stopped believing in your strength. I should have been there supporting you, teaching you the balance that you need. When my powers started to come back, it scared the hell out of me. I thought that meant the cure hadn’t worked—and I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to think you’d sacrificed everything for me and that it meant nothing.”
I moved toward Daniel, closing the distance between us. “But you could have told me. You can tell me anything. Just like I should have told you about Talbot.”
“I know, Grace. We were both being stupid. We should have trusted each other no matter what. But I was also scared that my powers coming back meant there’d be no cure for you, either. No safety net. That’s why I stopped training you when Gabriel told me to. And then I got so wrapped up in trying to find answers that I neglected you. I pulled away. But I shouldn’t have done that. I should have still taught you how to use your powers properly, so you wouldn’t have had to turn to someone like Talbot.” Daniel held up his shackled hands. “But I’m standing by you now. You and me. We’ll fight side by side, and no one will stop us. Nothing is going to tear us apart.”
I was kneeling in front of Daniel now, at the end of my own lead. I tried to cup his face with my hands, but I couldn’t reach him. There was no more give in the chains. Instead, I stared into his deep, dark eyes like I could get lost in them forever.
We weren’t going to walk out of here. There was no way the two of us could fight off these demons. No matter how much faith we had. But there was a way to keep the demon inside of me from winning.
I’d been willing to trade my soul for Daniel once because it was the only way to save him. I’d been willing to become the monster for him. And I’d do it now if I thought it would save him again, but Caleb had other plans. He wanted me to turn into the monster so he could use me to destroy Daniel and my family—and I couldn’t allow that to happen. No, no matter what happened, I wasn’t going to turn. It’s better to die as Grace Divine than to live as a monster.
I leaned out as far as I could toward Daniel, and Daniel leaned out as far as he could toward me. Our lips could barely meet in the middle. I strained against my chains, feeling like my arms were about to dislocate from their sockets, but I gained another quarter of an inch. I pressed my lips against Daniel’s.
I didn’t care that Gabriel was unconscious at the end of the room, or that Talbot was outside the door. I didn’t care about the security camera in the corner. I kissed Daniel like it was the last time we’d ever kiss.
Because I knew it was.
In the morning, I would die to save the ones I loved.
LAST NIGHT
The next few hours stretched on into the longest night of my life—but it also felt like the shortest. It was the first time and last time Daniel and I would ever spend the night together, and we couldn’t even touch. The flickering fluorescent light burned out at some point, so Daniel and I just lay there side by side on the concrete in the dark, able to reach out to each other only with our voices. Sometimes we talked, and other times we fell completely silent, unsure if the other was sleeping until one of us asked a question.
We talked about everything. And nothing. From life’s burning questions to the most trivial sorts of things we could think of. At one point I asked Daniel about his portfolio for Trenton, which was due in only a couple of weeks. He described for me in detail how he’d sketched and mapped out a new design for headphones for one of his submissions.
I told him about how one of the Trenton essays had made me want to be a superhero. Daniel laughed. “You’d make a great superhero. Especially if you wore that outfit. What is it, Little Red Riding Hood meets Wonder Woman?”
I giggled. “That’s what April said. I’m sure I look ridiculous.” Someone had stripped off my boots before they shackled my ankles, but I was actually grateful for the cloak at the moment. It made a light blanket in this cold, dark room.
“You look amazing,” Daniel said.
“You can’t even see me.”
“I’ve got the memory of you emblazed in my head. It’s keeping me rather warm.”
I laughed uneasily and then fell silent for a while. I wondered how long that memory would last in Daniel’s head after I was gone.
Gabriel’s uneasy, sleeping breaths and moans interrupted the quiet of the room. At least that way I knew he was alive. I couldn’t help wondering why he’d come after me if he wasn’t going to fight. Why he even cared at all. He’d come to Rose Crest to find out if I was this Divine One who could cure Urbats of the werewolf curse. So why didn’t he go back home the moment he heard Daniel’s powers were coming back?