The Savage Grace

by Bree Despain

  “No,” Ryan said. “We can’t read each other’s thoughts.”

  “Thank God,” I heard Zach mumble. He and Marcos had edged closer to the porch.

  “All animals have their ways of communicating,” Brent said. “Facial expressions, vocalizations, and such, but with the alpha, it’s more like a feeling. Sometimes it manifests as images or impressions. But mostly, it’s like we feel what he feels.”

  I mulled that over quietly in my head for a moment.

  “What does he feel?” I finally asked, even though I was afraid I already knew the answer.

  Ryan and Brent exchanged a look, but I couldn’t read the meaning of it.

  Marcos stepped forward. “He loves you very much,” he said in his Brazilian accent. “He wants us to keep you safe … but at the same time, it feels like part of him is … I don’t know quite how to say it. Like part of him is leaving.”

  I nodded and bit my lip. That is exactly what I’d been afraid to hear. I didn’t need to be one of his wolves to be able to feel that a part of him—the part that was Daniel—was going away.

  You can’t stop him. Not as a weak human, the monster in my head growled. I hated how often I heard its voice now. My hand went to my neck, hoping to clasp my moonstone to help sooth the beast away. But of course the stone wasn’t there anymore. Caleb had smashed it against a wall in his warehouse, along with most of my hope that we were ever going to escape his evil plan.

  I’d worn that pendant every day for almost a year, and I kept forgetting it wasn’t there anymore until I’d reach for it. And then my neck would just feel empty and bare without it. In my dreams, Daniel kept telling me that he’d given me the moonstone to help me stay in control—to help me stay human. And sometimes now I wondered if I had the strength to stay myself without it.…

  “That’s it!” I jumped out of the swing and practically knocked Brent over. “Oh my goodness, I think I know the answer.”

  I ran down the porch steps, my hands to my head like I was trying to hold in my racing thoughts so they couldn’t escape. Brent, Ryan, Marcos, and Zach bounded up to me. Even Slade came closer, standing at the edge of the yard now.

  “I keep seeing Daniel in my dreams—the same dream over and over again. What if he’s trying to tell me something? What if I’m feeling what he feels? What he wants me to feel? He and I could be connected somehow, too. So what if he’s trying to tell me how to help him?”

  “It’s plausible,” Brent said.

  “What is he trying to tell you?” Marcos asked.

  “My moonstone!” I jogged down the driveway, once again ignoring Gabriel’s warning about running on my fragile ankle. I had to get to the parish. I had to tell Gabriel and my father what I’d realized. The boys followed after me. “In my dreams, I keep reliving a memory where Daniel keeps telling me that my moonstone will help me stay human. But what if he’s really trying to tell me that a moonstone is what he needs to turn him back into a human?”

  Could it really be that easy? Why hadn’t gabriel thought of it before me?

  My hand went instinctively to my neck again to clasp my moonstone pendant—the thing that could save Daniel—and once again I was caught by surprise that it wasn’t there.

  “No!” I practically howled and stopped in my tracks. I should have known there was no easy answer.

  Every moonstone I’d ever known to exist had now been destroyed.

  Unless…

  I closed my eyes and thought through every moment of that dream about Daniel and me in the Garden of Angels: the sketchbook. Daniel’s tender kiss on my skin. His warm fingers lingering on my moonstone pendant. The pendant that was half the stone Daniel used to wear before it had been broken by…

  The beautiful image of Daniel in my head suddenly shifted to one of my most horrible memories—the night Jude fell to the werewolf curse. The night he infected me and almost succeeded in killing Daniel. Jude had pursued us on to the roof of the parish. He’d confronted Daniel, but Daniel had refused to fight. Anxiety ached in my muscles as I remembered the way Daniel had removed his moonstone necklace—the only thing keeping him from going wolf in the light of the full moon—and offered it to Jude. Begged him to take the stone.

  I remembered how for a second it looked like Jude was going to take the moonstone, like all was going to be well. As I watched the memory replay in my head, I knew what was going to happen. I remembered the way I’d screamed when Jude took the stone and pitched it from the roof of the parish, and it disappeared into the dark void beyond the roof.…

  And then it all clicked. My eyes popped open. I knew exactly what my dreams had been trying to tell me.

  Half a moonstone!

  “Daniel was only able to find half the moonstone that Jude threw from that roof … and I might just know where to find the other half.”

  Chapter Three

  HOPE STONE

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, OUTSIDE THE PARISH

  I stood in the cold, dead grass in the churchyard near the willow tree where Daniel and I used to share occasional picnics after Sunday service. Dad and Gabriel sat on the parish steps. The five boys stood behind me—they’d insisted on coming along, which was good since I was going to need all the help I could get. No doubt they were all wondering why I’d been staring up at the roof of the parish for the last few minutes like a total loon. Only one member of our little group was still missing, and I was taking advantage of what time I had left to gather my thoughts before I shared my revelation with the others.

  I heard the screech of brakes in the parking lot. I could smell April’s pear-scented perfume as soon as she got out of the car—along with another mixture of scents, like maple, donuts, and … bacon?

  “What’s the big emergency?” she asked as she came up to me. Her voice sounded oddly chipper for six thirty a.m. on a Saturday.

  I took my eyes off the parish’s roof for a second to glance at her. I’d given the others only a ten-minute warning to meet me. Dad had creases on his face like he’d fallen asleep at his desk in the parish’s office with only a book for a pillow. Gabriel was just as bleary-eyed, but April looked like she was headed out to the Megaplex in Apple Valley on a Friday night with perfectly placed curls, jewelry, makeup, and an outfit that looked like it was straight off a mannequin at the Gap. I, on the other hand, was still clad in my red pajama pants and shirt under my jacket.

  I gave her one more quick glance and noticed the paper bag from the Day’s Market Bakery sticking out of her large pink purse. The mixture of smells suddenly made sense, and if I had only one guess, I’d bet ten bucks that bag contained a couple of bacon-maple donuts—Jude’s favorite.

  I frowned. no wonder she looked so good. April had spent almost every waking moment in the past week outside Jude’s makeshift cage.

  I ignored April’s question. She must have been headed over here already before she got my text because she’d gotten here a lot faster than I’d expected, and I still wasn’t quite ready to share my idea.

  I’d spent almost a year repressing my memories of what happened that fateful night on the parish’s roof, and now it took most of my concentration to force myself to recall every last detail.

  “Grace has proposed the hypothesis that we need a moonstone in order to help change Daniel back into his human form,” Brent said, as if he could sense my reluctance to speak.

  “What makes you think this?” Gabriel asked me. “I’ve been exploring that possibility myself.”

  “She thinks he’s been trying to psychically communicate it to her,” Brent answered for me, “in her dreams.”

  Gabriel stood. “Interesting. Perhaps it has something to do with your being his alpha mate.” He stared into my eyes for a moment. “Or something else…”

  Dad started grumbling about the word mate. I held my hand up to silence him before he could launch into another lecture and break my concentration.

  “Of course, the issue would be where to procure another moonstone,” Dad said, instead o
f getting all preachy.

  “Can’t we just buy a moon rock off the Internet?” April said. “I’ve been doing some looking around for Jude, and I found a dude on eBay who says he’s got a moon rock from the actual moon mission back in the sixties. We can buy it now for only three thousand dollars. I’ve got some college savings—”

  “Whoa. Hold on to your wallet,” Gabriel said. “First of all, most of the moon rocks you see being sold out there are fakes. Secondly, there are only a relative handful of moonstones in existence that work to counteract the Urbat curse. They were a gift to me from a Babylonian moon priestess who had been taken as a slave. She blessed a few moon meteor rocks and gave them to me in exchange for freeing her from her master. No other moonstone I have ever encountered has the same effect as these.”

  “Oh.” It was almost possible to hear April counting all the money she’d almost lost on eBay in her head—although I did find it heartening that Jude might have been the one who asked her to find him a new stone. “Then let’s call this priestess lady,” she said, “and get some more magic rocks.”

  Gabriel gave her an overly patient look. “That was over seven hundred years ago, my child.”

  “Oh.” April gave a sheepish grin. “I forget you’re so old.”

  “Grace thinks she may know where to find a moonstone,” Brent said. “She just hasn’t shared it yet.”

  “Any time now would be fantastic,” Slade grumbled. “It’s cold out here.”

  “Then get a jacket,” I snapped. He obviously wasn’t a native Minnesotan if he thought this was cold. “Because we’re all going to be out here for a while.” I kept my eyes on the roof and backed up farther so I could get a better view of the steeple—what Daniel had clung to that night to keep himself from falling. I pictured where Jude had stood in relation to Daniel, and then tried to map out the trajectory of his throw in my mind’s eye.

  “My moonstone, the one I wore for almost the last year, was a piece of the moonstone pendant Daniel used to wear. Jude threw it from the roof of the parish. Daniel searched for it in the snow a few days later, but he was able to find only half of the moonstone for me. The rock must have split when it hit the ground. Which means the other half is possibly still in the churchyard somewhere.”

  April gasped. I could always rely on her for a good reaction.

  I backed up a few more paces, sending the boys scattering to get out of my way. Then I turned and walked slowly, trying to figure just how far the moonstone must have traveled when Jude threw it. The others trailed behind me as I walked with calculated, yet limping steps around the church building. I stopped when I came to what I guesstimated was the approximate area—the gravely overflow parking pad behind the parish for busy church days like Christmas and Easter.

  “It’s here. It has to be here somewhere.” I dropped to my knees and started picking through the rocks. There were thousands of them—hundreds of thousands—but I started by picking up a rock that had a blackish-gray tint, and tested it for that pulsing heat that emanated only from a moonstone.

  Nothing.

  I set it aside and tested another and then another.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Slade said. “It could take an eternity to pick through all those rocks.”

  “Then get started,” I said.

  Brent and Ryan followed my order immediately and bent down beside me to start searching. Then Gabriel, my father, April, Marcos, and Zach joined in. Even Slade sat in the gravel and halfheartedly poked at a few rocks.

  “Set aside any rock that is gray or black: that way I can test them for the pulsing. The stone we’re looking for might still have a crescent moon carved into it, but it might not. Who knows how it could have broken. There might even be more than one piece.”

  It had been almost a year. Three seasons had come and gone. Snow and rain and plenty of cars had passed through the churchyard. But there was still a possibility that the other half of Daniel’s moonstone was here, which meant I wasn’t going to stop searching until I’d actually turned over every stone in this place.

  Chapter Four

  INTERVENTION

  SUNDAY EVENING—ALMOST THIRTY-NINE HOURS LATER

  “If you think I’m going to give up now, then you don’t know me at all,” I said.

  “We’re not telling you to give up.” Dad reached across the desk and gently scooped up the pile of rocks that sat in front of me.

  We’d moved most of “Operation: Find the Moonstone” into Dad’s office at the parish because eight people picking through rocks in a church parking lot was bound to bring on questions from townsfolk passing by. Plus, Dad wouldn’t let us keep working out there once it was time for church services earlier today. The others took shifts discreetly bringing in buckets of rocks from the churchyard and dumping them on Dad’s desk for Gabriel and me to sift through. The others had stopped for dinner an hour ago—and had apparently decided to turn against me while they were out.

  “We’re telling you to take a break,” Dad continued. “You haven’t eaten, you’ve barely slept, and you’ve got so much caffeine in your system your hands are shaking.”

  I glanced at the empty cups from the Java Pot and the several energy drink cans that littered the desk as evidence, and then folded my trembling hands into my lap. “I’m fine.”

  “You need to go home and get some sleep,” Gabriel said. He, my dad, and April all stood on the opposite side of my dad’s desk.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to sleep because I knew I’d have that dream of Daniel and me again—the one that told me to find the moonstone. The dream had grown more and more urgent the few times I’d tried to rest my eyes while sifting through the stones, making me wake up a few minutes later, all the more frantic to keep up the search.

  Without thinking, I grabbed the coffee cup closest to me and gulped down the dregs.

  April snatched the cup out of my hand. “Geez, Grace. You’ve got circles the size of hockey pucks under your eyes. I’m totally going to have to get you some heavy-duty concealer before we go back to school tomorrow. People are gonna think—”

  I shot an accusatory glare at April. As my best friend, she was supposed to take my side in this. “I don’t care what I look like, and I don’t care what people think.” At least I wasn’t still in my pajamas. At some point in the last twenty-four hours or so, April had brought me fresh clothes along with the supply of caffeinated beverages. “And I’m not going to school tomorrow. How can I without … ?”

  My voice caught in the back of my throat, but I pushed down the rush of emotion that rose up from deep inside my chest when I tried to say Daniel’s name out loud. “How can I sit there next to his empty seat in class and pretend he’s just at home sick?”

  That was the story Dad had come up with to explain Daniel’s absence from school so he wouldn’t lose his scholarship now that the midterm break was over and we were supposed to head back to class tomorrow. Dad had filed a “home and hospital” release for Daniel, and as far as everyone else in town was concerned, Daniel had a nasty case of walking pneumonia. I still wondered how Dad had actually gotten a doctor to sign the release without examining Daniel … or if Pastor Divine had forged the report himself.

  He never did answer the question when I’d asked.

  “You’re not missing school, Gracie.” Dad pulled the rock away that I’d tried to snatch from a pile on the desk. “College applications are due soon, and you can’t afford any more difficulties with your grades. Your future is too important.”

  “My future? What future? If we can’t turn Daniel back into a human, I don’t have a future.” Why didn’t they understand? “The cure could be in this very room right now. I am not giving up.”

  “We told you, Grace, we’re not telling you to give up. We’re telling you to take a break. It could take weeks, maybe even months, to go through all these rocks.” He swallowed hard, no doubt trying to hide the hopelessness that echoed in his voice. He didn’t believe we were ever
going to find it. “You won’t be any good to anyone if you get sick or lose it.…” He paused again, and I knew he was thinking about Mom. Mental instability did run in the family. “April is going to take you home so you can get some sleep. Gabriel and I will pick up here where you left off with these rocks tomorrow.”

  I stared at the three of them as they stared at me, and I realized what exactly this was: an intervention.

  How dare they try to stop you from helping Daniel? a soft but harsh voice whispered inside my head. They’ve given up already, and they want you to also. They don’t understand how important this is for you. Nobody knows you like I do. I shook my head hard, trying to get rid of the demon wolf’s voice. My hand flew to the nape of my neck, searching for the moonstone necklace that wasn’t there. I tried to disguise the move by scratching at the collar of my shirt.

  But I couldn’t fool Gabriel. He nodded with recognition. “The more tired or stressed or emotional you are, Grace, the more the wolf will be able to invade your thoughts. You’re making yourself vulnerable by wearing yourself out. How would Daniel feel if your fears for him are what led you to losing your own self to the wolf?”

  I clenched my hands at my side. The voice inside my head wanted me to lash out at Gabriel and tell him that he was wrong—he and I had never really gotten along—but deep down I knew he was right. Losing my moonstone at the warehouse meant I needed to be more careful and guarded than ever against the wolf … oh!

  “I need to go back to the warehouse,” I blurted out before I’d even finished processing the thought.

  “Why the heck would you want to do that?” April fidgeted with the beaded bracelet on her wrist—no doubt one of her new creations. I’d think it was an odd digging-through-rocks accessory if she hadn’t spent an extra-long lunch break downstairs with Jude. “I’d never want to go back there if I were you.” April shivered dramatically. “I get the willies just thinking about that place.”

  I shivered, too. So do I. “We need a moonstone. And Dad’s right, it could take months to go through every rock in that gravel-strewn parking lot.” I indicated the buckets and bowls full of rocks, trying not to feel defeated admitting that it was a near-impossible task. “But Caleb smashed both my and Jude’s moonstones at the warehouse, and since a pack of teenage boys aren’t exactly the best housekeepers, I’m guessing there’re going to be moonstone fragments scattered all over the place there. What if I can find enough pieces—maybe April can weld them onto some sort of necklace or dog tag?” Finding enough fragments to make a difference seemed like a long shot—but not a shot as long as going through all these rocks. “I’ll go now.”