The Lost Saint (9 page)

“How?” I asked. I wondered just how much Jude had told her about what had happened—or at least
his
version of it.

“Jude always called him a monster. At first, I thought he was being metaphorical. But then I saw Daniel turn from a wolf into a person in the parish, when you pulled that knife from his chest. I’m not completely stupid. It didn’t take a lot to figure out that he’s a werewolf.”

“Was,” I corrected her. “He’s been cured. And I’ve forgiven him for the things he did while he was under the influence of the wolf. If Jude had been capable of that, then he wouldn’t be where he is now.”

April stared at the bead she held in her fingers. She bit her lip.

“Do you know about Jude, then?” I asked tentatively. “What
really
happened to him?”

“He’s a werewolf now, too. Because of what Daniel did to him. Jude said he was going through changes, and I figured it out on my own. You’ve always treated me like I was dumb or something. You’ve never given me enough credit, but at least Jude does. He trusts me.”

Whoa. Maybe I hadn’t given April enough credit. She knew my family’s secret, and still she was standing here talking to me? And I’d always thought that Jude’s interest in April was based purely on rebounding from
his emotions—but if he’d been in contact with her since he left, then maybe I’d been wrong about their relationship. But the most important part of that thought was that April had been in contact with Jude.

“So you have talked to Jude since he’s left?” I asked.

April used her finger to roll the bead around in the palm of her hand.

“I know you care about him, April. I care about him, too. I think he’s in trouble, and all I want to do is bring him home.”

“He has a new home,” April said. “He told me that he found a new home, and a new family who wouldn’t turn their backs on him the way you did. But the way he talked about them … I don’t know, Grace. They sound dangerous. Not like a real family at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were involved in what happened at Day’s Market.”

I put my hand over my mouth. What had my brother gotten himself into?

April placed the bead carefully on the table and then looked up at me. “I knew he was in the city, but I honestly didn’t think he’d come here.”

“So you’ve known all along where Jude is, and you haven’t told anyone? Do you know how hard my dad’s been looking for him?”

“I haven’t known
all along,
” she said. “He sends me emails every once in a while. I can’t respond to them or anything. My messages just bounce right back.”

I nodded. I used to send a daily email to Jude at his school address, asking him to come home, but I gave up after a while when my messages kept bouncing back to me. “And he told you where he is?”

“No, he never said anything about his location. But I think I’ve traced him.”

My eyebrows went up involuntarily. “You know how to trace emails?”

“No. But I do know how to trace blog comments. Check this out.” April sat on her desk chair and wiggled her computer mouse. Her screen came to life and she logged on to the Internet. “In addition to the emails, I started to get some random, anonymous comments on my blog a couple of months ago. After a while I figured out it was Jude.”

“Your blog?” Jude had been hiding from everyone in his family, yet he’d had time to comment on April’s blog?
I
didn’t even know she had a blog.

“I design jewelry”—April pointed at the stuff on her desk—“and sell it on a blog.” She pointed at her computer. There was a blog pulled up on the screen with pink swirls around a banner that said APRIL SHOWERS JEWELRY and then pictures of rings, necklaces, and bracelets.

“I didn’t know.” But now that I thought about it, whenever I saw April lately, it seemed she had a new necklace or bracelet. They were beautiful. “I guess that kind of happens when somebody stops talking to you.”

April shrugged. “Anyway, like I said, I started getting these anonymous comments on my blog, and they all seemed like they were from the same person. Like when I posted a pic of this necklace.” She clicked on a picture of a tree-shaped pendant. It was the same necklace she wore now. “I got this comment.” She scrolled down a bit and hovered the cursor over the comment. “I don’t know how this could be from anyone other than Jude. It’s the last thing I’ve heard from him.”

I leaned over her shoulder and read the comment.

My heart tightened in my chest, and I looked away from the words. The first two lines had sounded so much like the old Jude, but the rest stung too much to read again.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but that comment had a time stamp of three a.m. on September twenty-fifth. Three weeks ago.” I heard the click of a mouse and when I looked back at the screen, she was on a new website. “This is my stat counter. It shows where my blog visitors come from.” She clicked on something else, and it pulled
up a list of times and dates and locations. “You can see from this that the only person who visited my blog at three a.m. on September twenty-fifth was located in the city.”

“Wow, that’s really possible to see?” I fingered my moonstone necklace. It always pulsed with a warm vibration. To me, it meant hope. But then I let go of the pendant and sighed. “But Jude could still be anywhere. The city’s a big place.”

“Ah, but it gets better than that. I can drill it down even more and actually see the IP address of the visitor and the server he’s using.”

“Seriously?” Apparently, there was a lot I didn’t know about April these days. She used to have zero interest in computers, and now she was talking about tracing IP addresses and servers? “How did you learn to do all this?”

“You know Avery Nagamatsu—Miya’s older brother? The one who’s studying to be a software programmer?”

I nodded.

“I went with him to a couple of frat parties over the summer to make it look like he had a girlfriend. And in exchange, he helped me set up a blog for my jewelry business and showed me how to do all this so I could see where my customers were coming from. But it has its added benefits for tracking down rogue boyfriends.”

“Huh.” Well, I’d always known the girl had gumption.

April made a few more clicks with her mouse. “Usually,
the server name is too vague to really tell me anything, but Jude’s just happens to belong to a business.”

April pointed at a name on the screen. I almost gasped when I saw it.

“ ‘The Depot,’ ” I read out loud. “Do you know what that is?”

“I’ve been asking around,” she said. “I couldn’t find out anything at first. Not even anything on the Internet that wasn’t in a locked forum. But then I was at that old movie theater in Apple Valley with Miya and Claire the other night. And you know that stoner-looking guy who works at the concessions stand—the one who always wears those gamer hats?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I was buying some popcorn when I heard that kid going on about some new club he was dying to play at—a place called The Depot.”

My mouth popped open. “Did you find out anything else?”

“Yeah. I had to give him ten bucks, but he finally told me that The Depot is like this superexclusive emogamers’ nightclub in the city. And for another twenty bucks he gave me the address.”

She opened her drawer and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper.

“What … really?” I reached for it.

April pulled it away. “I don’t know if I should tell you where Jude is.”

“Why?”

“Because if I tell you, then you’ll go tell Daniel or your dad, and they’ll go down there and just scare him off. If he wanted
them
to find him, then he would have contacted them … not me.”

“Not
us
. Jude contacted me, too.”

April looked down at the folded piece of paper. She turned it over in her hand a couple of times and sighed. “I don’t know if this will even do you any good. You can’t just walk into The Depot. I told you, it’s, like, superexclusive. Not even the kid who gave me the address had actually even been inside yet. You have to have a special keycard or you can’t even get in the door.”

Keycard?
I stuck my hand in my jacket pocket and pulled out the plastic card I’d found at the market yesterday. “You mean like this one?”

April’s jaw dropped. “How did—?”

“You’ve got the address. I’ve got the card. We can do this together, or not at all.” I took a step toward her. “What do you say?”

“Okay.” April stood up. She shook in that excited-nervous way of hers. “But we’re going to need makeovers.”

I almost dropped the keycard. “We’re going to need … what?”

THAT NIGHT

Yeah, so this is pretty much the dumbest thing I’ve ever done
, I thought as I listened to the weird
vroom-vroom
noise the borrowed pair of vinyl pants I wore made as I walked. The sound was so distracting that I didn’t see the crack in the sidewalk, and stumbled in the high-heeled red leather boots April had insisted that I wear.

April caught me by the arm before I fell. “Those are hard to walk in, huh?”

“The pants or the boots?” I grumbled. “Seriously, why do you even have vinyl pants?”

“They’re for my Halloween costume. I’m going as Lady Gaga.” She pointed to the pink sequined top she wore with a denim jacket and a black miniskirt. “This goes with it.”

Great, I was headed to a nightclub for the very first time in half a Halloween costume. I wrapped my arms
around my waist, trying to cover up my bare midriff. This lacy red top was far too short for my taste, but April had forbidden me to wear my wool jacket over it because she said it would ruin the “ensemble.”

And not only was I dressed like a pseudohooker, I was also walking down a street only two blocks away from Markham—the worst neighborhood in the Midwest—after dark.
Yep, this definitely ranks on the list of the stupidest things I’ve ever done
.

April looked down at the paper in her hand and then did a full circle, looking at all the buildings on the street. “This is supposed to be the address, but this doesn’t look like a nightclub to me.”

I’d been so distracted by my ridiculous clothes, and the prospect of getting mugged and/or solicited by a total stranger, that I hadn’t even paid attention to the architecture around us. I looked up at the building we stood in front of. It was long and wide, with boarded-up windows and a huge chain wrapped around the handles of the decrepit double doors. I could feel a slight vibration under my feet. “Isn’t this that abandoned train station they’re always talking about on the news? How it needs to be demolished?”

April shrugged. “All I know is that I’m going to punch that stoner kid in the ’nads if he doesn’t give me my twenty bucks back. He totally ripped me off.”

I took a couple of steps closer to the building. The vibration in the ground got stronger, rumbling through
the soles of my shoes and up the pointy four-inch heels. Another two steps closer and I could feel the vibration in my ears now. Music—coming from somewhere nearby. Underneath us, perhaps? If it weren’t for my powers, I probably would have missed it.

“No,” I said. “I think we’ve found it. The Depot? Train station? Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“I guess,” April said. “But this place is totally boarded up.”

I motioned to April as I followed the musical vibration around the side of the building and down the narrow alley between the train station and an equally abandoned-looking warehouse.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
, I kept chanting to myself with every quick step, but if this was the only way to track down Jude, I wasn’t going to turn back now. The sounds of a screeching car and a shouting man back out on the street made me pick up my pace until I came to a metal door on the side of the building. It looked far more modern than the chained-up doors out front. The vibration was strong from behind the door, and I could even pick up the faint rhythmic pulse of techno music.

“I think this is it.”

“Are you sure? This doesn’t look like a club entrance. I mean, shouldn’t there be bouncers or something?” April’s earlier courage seemed to have washed right out of her. The pale look on her face made it seem like she’d been half anticipating/half hoping we wouldn’t be able
to get into the club without fake IDs. A consideration I hadn’t even thought of until now.

I tried the handle, but a bolt in the door stopped it from opening. Then I noticed a keypad next to the doorway with a small red light. “I think all we need to get into the club is the keycard.” I pulled the card out of my pocket—a harder feat than it sounds when your pants are made out of vinyl—and swiped it through what looked like a credit card reader. The light on the keypad turned green, followed by a loud clicking noise as the bolt in the door unlocked.

I pulled on the handle. The door slid open, and a wave of pulsing music flooded the alley. “You ready?” I asked April.