The Lost Saint (37 page)

My heart suddenly sank for the boys in this warehouse. In this
family
. Some of them were obviously Gelals and Akhs, but most of them had probably been hapless teens, down on their luck—until Talbot and Caleb got their hands … or teeth … on them.

But my heart also sank for myself, and for Daniel, and for all of my family back home. If so many people had fallen to Caleb’s methods, how did I stand a chance?

Caleb made a gesture, and two of his boys picked up Gabriel’s limp body and headed for the door. Then Daniel and I were led toward the exit by our captors.

“Why don’t you just do it now?” Daniel asked.

“Because anticipation is the best part of the game. Feels just like Christmas Eve, don’t you think?”

DOWNSTAIRS

I couldn’t even bring myself to struggle as we were hauled off to a new prison. It seemed completely pointless, and listening to Daniel holler and curse as he tried to break free only made every ounce of hope inside of me vanish. Daniel might be slowly getting his powers back, but superhuman strength wasn’t fully developed yet.

They brought us to a dank, cold, windowless room. A storage room of some sort on the lower level of the warehouse. A single, dim fluorescent light buzzed and flickered above us. Caleb, or probably one of his boys, had made a couple of slight adjustments to the room—shackles attached to the walls by long, thick steel chains and heavy metal bolts in the concrete, and a security camera in the corner. The boys carrying Gabriel dumped his unconscious body at the far end of
the room. They bound his legs and feet with the same kind of cording they’d used before on me. The shackles were apparently designed for Daniel and me, seeing as how our captors chained us by our wrists and ankles on opposite sides of the room.

“I’ll take the first watch outside the door,” Talbot said as he leaned through the doorway.

“I’ll stay with you,” one of the boys said, sounding eager to impress Talbot.

“Very well.”

Talbot gestured the boys out of the room. I looked up at him, but he closed the thick metal door behind them without even glancing at me. I’d noticed a keypad outside the door like the one at The Depot, and now I heard three distinct thumping noises as three heavy bolts locked into place. There was no doorknob. This door had been specifically designed to be impossible to break through.

I sank to the ground, shuddered, and let out a sob. My wrists felt almost too heavy to lift as I brought my shackled hands up to cover my face.

“Don’t.” Daniel tried to rush over to me, but the lead on his chains wasn’t long enough. He could make it only halfway across the room. He leaned forward as far as he could. “Don’t cry, Gracie. Don’t give up. We’ll find a way out of here. We’re going to escape. Even if we have to fight every last one of them.”

“But we’re nothing, Daniel. That’s like twenty
against two. Gabriel won’t fight, and you’re just getting your powers back. We’re no match for them. They’ll turn me, and then I’ll kill you. And then if they send me home, what will stop me from destroying Baby James and everyone else?”

And the more selfish thought that I didn’t voice was that if everyone I loved was gone, there would be no one left to cure me—if the cure even existed. I’d be a monster for all eternity. A Death Dog at the beck and call of a madman.

“You just have to have faith, Grace. Believe in yourself. Don’t give up now.”

“But I have no more faith, Daniel. No more faith in myself. No more faith in God. He doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t care about us. It’s over. This is the end. Tomorrow I become a monster, and the rest of you die. And God doesn’t give a damn.”

“I don’t believe that. You think you’ve lost your faith, but I know you well enough to know that isn’t true. Deep down, you know you still believe. And I believe in you.”

“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?

Then another thought hit me.

“Don’t you worry?” I asked Daniel quietly, not sure if he was asleep.

“Hmm,” he said groggily.

“Don’t you worry about turning into the wolf again? I mean, I’m wearing a moonstone, so that will at least help me stay balanced for a while. But this is all pretty psycho—aren’t you afraid you’re the one who’s going
to change? Maybe you should take the necklace back.”

Daniel’s chains shifted. I could tell he’d rolled over on his side, facing me.

“That’s the thing, Grace. It’s totally different than before. I mean, I’ve got the ability to heal, and my strength and speed are coming back, along with the enhanced senses … but I’ve finally realized over the last few days that even though I’ve been totally freaked out … I don’t feel the wolf inside of me at all.”

I took in a quick breath. “Then maybe you have been cured.”

“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “I really don’t know.” He was quiet for a moment. “The fact that Caleb wasn’t able to recognize the smell of my blood didn’t surprise me. But it makes me wonder … makes me wonder if I’m turning into something completely different.”

“But what?”

“I wish I knew. I had my blood tested. That’s where I was the last few days. I know a guy who works at a research lab in Columbus. He owed me a favor, and I knew he’d be discreet. I drove all the way out there just to find out that he couldn’t tell me anything, either.”

“Is that what you were doing, all those times you wouldn’t tell me where you were? Just looking for answers? I wish you would have told me all along.”