“How about two?” he asked, and pressed his lips softly against my skin. I wanted to melt. He brushed my hair back and kissed behind my ear.
I sighed, and my charcoal pencil slipped from my fingers. It hit the edge of the stone bench and then rolled to the base of the statue I’d been sketching. It was the sculpture of Gabriel the Angel that Daniel had shown me the first time he’d brought me here.
Daniel’s firm lips trailed down my neck until they reached the delicate chain of the necklace I almost always wore now. Something stirred inside of me, and my hand clutched at the moonstone pendant instinctively. Daniel pulled back a bit.
“Does it help?” he asked. His breath was so warm and wonderful against my hair. I shivered again as a tingling sensation ran up my neck into my scalp. My hand closed tighter over my pendant, and I let the almost hot, pulsing sensation that emanated from the stone send its calming strength through my body.
“Yes,” I said, but I didn’t mention that I seemed to need it more often now than I had in the first couple of months since my infection. I didn’t want him to worry.
“Good,” he said. “I wish I’d had a moonstone from the very beginning like you.” Daniel’s hands slipped away from my shoulders, and he stepped back, taking his warmth with him. “I wonder if I would have been able to stop myself from ever giving in to the wolf the first time.…” His voice trailed off, and I didn’t have to wonder why. So much pain had come into his life—our lives—because of what happened that night.
I shifted on the bench so I was looking at him now. His shaggy blond hair blew softly above his deep brown eyes in the chilly March wind. “Will you ever forgive yourself for that night?”
Daniel shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. “When your brother does.”
I bit my lip. That required finding Jude in the first place. A prospect that seemed more unlikely with each passing week that he remained missing. “He has to. Eventually. Don’t you think?” My dad once said that someone who refused to forgive would eventually become a monster if he held on to his anger and let it burn inside of him for too long. But I guess that had already happened to Jude. He’d turned into a monster—in a much more literal sense than my father had meant—a werewolf who had infected me and then tried to kill Daniel. All because he couldn’t forgive Daniel for infecting him the night he first succumbed to the werewolf curse himself.
“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.