The Savage Grace

by Bree Despain

  The white wolf’s head arched farther back, and another desperate howl ripped through the night, louder and more deranged sounding than ever. The two wolves behind me picked up Daniel’s cry and joined in with their own howls. great, just, great. Surely, the whole town would be at their windows now. I imagined bullets being locked into the chambers of more than one shotgun.

  “Get!” I snapped at the two wolves that had followed me here, and stomped my good foot in their direction. “Get out of here, now!” I said, harsher than I’d meant to. The two whined and backed away with their tails low to the ground. When they were gone, I turned back to the sight of the howling white wolf.

  “Daniel!” I screamed louder, my voice echoing his desperation. “Daniel, please. Dan—” A sinking feeling pulled at my stomach, and I realized that if by chance I wasn’t the only one in the woods searching for the howling wolf, I shouldn’t go shouting Daniel’s name. “Stop, please…” I left off his name, even though I hated to. Like doing so was acknowledging that he wasn’t “Daniel” anymore.

  “Please stop! You have to stop this, now.” My voice caught in the back of my throat, and I clutched my hand over my mouth. I couldn’t let myself cry. “Please. Stop before you get hurt,” I whispered against my fingers.

  The white wolf’s howl trailed off suddenly, and when I looked out across the ravine, I saw him staring at me. His furry head cocked with curiosity. I met his glinting eyes for a moment, and then he backed up slowly on his four paws.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t leave.” I held my hand up as if to signal “stop”—the same motion I learned when training my old three-legged dog, Daisy. “Don’t run away again, please.”

  The wolf took two steps forward to the edge of his side of the ravine and looked at me again with that curious tilt of his head. Did he still recognize me? Hope burned in my chest, and I stayed as still as I could so as not to frighten him away. And I swear, in the silence that engulfed the dark woods now that his howling had stopped, I thought I could hear his heart beating.

  His solitary heartbeat. Not two heartbeats like every other werewolf I knew. I still didn’t know what that meant. I still didn’t know what he had become.

  For a moment it looked like the Daniel wolf contemplated making the jump over the ravine to get to my side as he crouched back slightly on his hind legs.

  “Come,” I motioned to him. “Please, Daniel,” I said softly. “I need you. We need each other.”

  The Daniel wolf seemed to startle at the sound of his name. He dropped my gaze, and my heart felt like it fell right into the depths of the ravine as I watched him turn away from me.

  “No!” I shouted, both of my hands extended as if I could reach out and grab him, stop him, as he bounded away into the trees, deeper than we’d ever ventured together in these woods before.

  For half a second I contemplated trying to go after him—trying to jump the ravine, even if I didn’t have the strength to make it in one piece. Anything to be near him again. But without the support of my hands against the tree trunk to hold me up, my ankle finally gave out, and I collapsed at the base of the tree.

  I pulled my knees into my chest and listened for the howls to start up again from some unreachable part of the forest, counting my own lonely heartbeats as the minutes passed and no sound followed. A sigh of overwhelming exhaustion shuddered through me—mixed with relief that the howling had stopped and remorse that I wasn’t able to get Daniel to come back to me—and for the first time since we escaped Caleb’s warehouse, I allowed myself to cry.

  I let out a string of long sobs against the forest floor until a terrible voice whispered inside my head, You’re losing him. And there’s nothing you can do.

  Another wail tried to escape my throat, but I swallowed it back down. “No,” I told the monster in my head. I pushed myself up and wiped the muddy tears from my face, hating myself for giving in to that weakness. “Daniel and I have been through too much, we’ve come too far, and I am not going to lose him. I won’t let that happen.”

  No matter the cost.

  Chapter Two

  LOST BOYS

  SIX MONTHS AGO

  “Are you cold?” Daniel asked from behind me as I sat on a stone bench, working on a charcoal drawing for art class. His arms wrapped around my shoulders, and he pressed his chest against my back. Warmth radiated through his shirt, and my skin tingled in response under my thin sweater. I shivered, but not because I was cold. Not anymore.

  “Mmm,” I said, and set my notebook on the bench.

  Daniel moved his hands down and up my arms to warm them, and nuzzled his nose against my neck.

  “I’ll give you an hour to quit that,” I said with a quiet laugh, even though we were pretty much the only ones who ever came to the Garden of Angels.

  “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 thre
e 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.

  I waved them off and regained my breath. “Now, would you like to tell me what the hell you’re doing in my bedroom?”

  “Oh great, now she’s lost her mind,” Brent said.

  Ryan shoved him away. “You’re not in your bedroom, Miss Grace. We helped you home last night, and you fell asleep on your porch swing. We stayed to protect you. Don’t you remember?”

  I opened both my eyes now and gave them a few seconds to focus on my surroundings. Brent. Ryan. The top branches of the walnut tree. Purple early-morning sky. Porch swing. And apparently, that thing jabbing me in the back was my cell phone, which I must have fallen asleep on top of. A vague recollection trickled into my brain, and I remembered following Daniel’s howls into the forest, then attempting to limp home on a newly rebroken ankle. I’d given up about halfway through the forest and allowed one of the two wolves who followed anxiously at my side to carry me home—only to discover that I’d locked myself out of the house. I remembered sitting on the porch swing with the intention to call my dad for help, but I must have fallen asleep before dialing the number.

  Asleep.

  Truth hit me like a smack in the face as I realized—once again—that the time I’d spent with Daniel in the Garden of Angels last night had been just a dream. It was the same vibrant memory that played in a loop in my head every time I’d allowed myself to sleep since we’d escaped from the warehouse: Daniel and me in the Garden of Angels about six months ago. Before Jude came back. Before Caleb and Talbot. Before Daniel became trapped as the white wolf. It felt like heaven.

  Last night, the dream had kept me warm as I slept in the frosty November air. But now I felt colder than even before, realizing all over again that Daniel hadn’t really been there to wrap me in his arms.

  And he may never be able to again.

  “Did you two stay out here with me all night?” I asked.

  Ryan and Brent were the youngest of the five of Caleb’s boys who had chosen Daniel as their new alpha. Ryan couldn’t be more than fourteen. Brent was probably almost sixteen, but he had a boyish roundness to his face, and he pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose often enough to make me wonder if he’d worn glasses before he’d been turned into an Urbat. And there was something just plain ironic about “Brent the Werewolf.”

  In fact, it was hard for me to imagine either of these two as part of the vicious werewolf pack that had tried to attack me at Caleb’s command. I couldn’t help thinking of them as a group of lost boys. Like in the Peter Pan play my mom made us put on at the parish when I was ten. The way they’d never really grow up. And how they lived in that warehouse next to the Depot club. I’m sure it was all fun and games—until the killing-people part started.

  Ryan nodded. “Your safety is our first priority. It’s what he wants.”

  I sat up and scanned the yard. If Brent and Ryan were here, I wouldn’t be surprised if the other three boys weren’t far off. They were a pack, after all.

  Zach and Marcos sat at the base of the walnut tree, but Slade stood so far down the street that I wouldn’t have noticed him without my sharper-than-average eyesight. While it was hard to imagine Brent and Ryan as bloodthirsty werewolves, I had the opposite reaction to Slade. His ripped arms were painted with tattoos of flames that extended from his wrists to shoulders. He had a steel bar in one eyebrow and ten other piercings in his ears. And he almost always had a lighter in his hand, which he’d flick to life just to watch the flame dance for a while before singeing off the hair on his arms—seemingly just for fun. But it wasn’t Slade’s appearance that made me shiver in his presence. It was the way he looked at me. I was almost certain he had been the large gray wolf that had sunk his venemous teeth into my leg when I was attacked by Caleb’s pack in the warehouse, because every once in a while I’d catch this look in Slade’s eyes, like he’d tasted my blood—and he just might want more.

  I glanced away from Slade. Unlike the other boys, I couldn’t help questioning just how devoted he was to Daniel as his alpha. Or whether he might be a danger to us all.

  “Who wants you to keep me safe?” I asked Ryan.

  “Alpha.”

  “You mean Daniel?”

  “The great white wolf. Your safety is to come first and foremost.”

  I smiled slightly at the idea that Daniel still cared, in some way, about me.

  “We only left you for a while—to change back.” I knew Ryan not only meant to transform back into human form, but to also change back into their clothes. That was one of the difficulties of the werewolf transformation—clothing usually wasn’t optional.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, glad not to wake up in a yard full of naked guys. That definitely wouldn’t go over well with the neighbors if anyone were to look out t
heir window this early in the morning. And I was glad they weren’t hanging out in their wolf forms anymore, either. With all that howling last night, it wouldn’t be safe.

  “I’m just glad you didn’t die while we were gone,” Brent said. “He’d be so pissed. And you know, you’d be dead. So that would suck.”

  “Thanks for the concern. I’m pretty sure I’m safe on my front porch, though.”

  “With all due respect, Miss Grace, our father—I mean, Caleb—and the rest of the Shadow Kings are still out there somewhere. You should be more careful.”

  I nodded. “You’re right.” It really had been stupid of me to drop my guard like that. That was “rule number one,” as both Daniel and Talbot used to tell me. Caleb was still out there, and it was impossible to predict what a madman like him was capable of doing next. Considering the state of my stupid ankle, I wouldn’t have stood a chance if I’d encountered him or any of his still-loyal boys last night.

  I stretched forward and concentrated my healing powers into my throbbing ankle until the pain subsided into an uncomfortable ache. Then a thought hit me. “How do you know what Daniel wants? Can you … can you talk to him when you’re in wolf form?”

  A trill of hope ran up my spine, and I no longer cared about the soreness of my ankle. Maybe I could get one of the boys to talk to Daniel for me. Tell him…

  “No,” Brent said. “It’s just like we know what he wants. And we do it. That’s how it works with an alpha.”

  “Like telepathy?” My brain was running much too slow this morning. But it couldn’t be any later than six a.m., so I didn’t blame myself for being so sluggish running on less than three hours of sleep. But there was a much quicker thought—too quick to be my own—that flitted through my mind. If you were a wolf, you could communicate with Daniel, too. You could be together.