The Lost Saint(57)

I sighed. Is there a difference between being a pacifist and being a coward?

I went to the kitchen and deposited the dishes in the sink. When I came back through the hall toward the dining room, I found Gabriel standing in the study’s doorway.

“Did you want to ask me something?” Gabriel stepped sideways so I could enter the study if I wanted.

I hesitated and almost said no, but I couldn’t shake the image of Gabriel standing aside while a mother and father were murdered at a little boy’s birthday party. Had he actually been there? Or was it merely something that had been out of his control? I followed Gabriel into Dad’s study and sat in one of the chairs in front of the desk.

The only thing was, I had the same problem here as I did with Daniel. How could I ask him the questions I had without revealing how I knew what I knew in the first place?

“Something troubles you,” Gabriel said. “Are you still not seeing the merits of your service project? I can assure you, Grace, charity and compassion will provide a much fuller life than any other avenue in front of you.”

“But everyone is capable of charity and compassion. What I don’t understand is why you don’t use your special abilities to make a difference. There are a lot of dangerous things out there. Shouldn’t we be doing everything we can do to stop them?” I couldn’t let go of the thought of that old man killed in his house by those demons. What if Talbot and I had been able to find them earlier? What if we could have saved his life? “I don’t understand you. You have the ability to make a difference, but you just hide up in the mountains with your pack, completely cut off from the world. Why would you turn your back on what the Urbat were originally created to do? Why do you want me to do the same?”

“Because I am one of those dangerous things, Grace. And I don’t want you to become one of them, too.”

I looked away from his steel-blue eyes.

“My pack lives in seclusion because we removed ourselves from society for the sake of mankind—and for our own safety.” Gabriel picked up the book he’d been looking through. It was one of Dad’s werewolf lore books, filled with mostly myth. Gabriel flipped it open to a page with a drawing of a strange hyena-wolf-like creature. “Have you ever heard of the Beast of Gevaudan?”

I nodded. It was one of the more gruesome stories I’d read in the book.

“What do you know about it?”

“I read that a beast terrorized the French countryside in the 1760s or sometime like that. In three years, it killed a hundred and two people. Mostly women and children. Finally, a poor peasant supposedly killed the beast with a single shot to the chest with a silver bullet. He took the body of the beast to the king and was rewarded with a fortune. Scientists claim it must have been some sort of hyena, but many people back then believed it was actually a werewolf that had been responsible for all those deaths.”

“They were partially right. It was werewolves, actually,” Gabriel said. “And there were a hundred and seventeen deaths. This book isn’t accurate. Well, actually, none of them ever are, since there’re only a handful of us who know what really happened.”

“You were there?”

Gabriel nodded. “You see, there was a time when my pack lived close to society. We intermixed like normal people. I even tried my hand at being a priest for a while—not quite the same as a monk. But our alpha at the time—his name was Ulrich—let the werewolves in our pack hunt at will. They were discreet at first, but many of them got out of hand. They believed that we, as superior creatures, should rule the countryside with terror. Ulrich started to believe that he could overthrow the government if the peasants were afraid enough to revolt. Many of the pack took pleasure in attacking women and children and leaving their disemboweled bodies near roads and forest paths for others to find. They’d sit in the town’s square and joyfully listen to the wails of the bereaved and the cries of the frightened.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. This was worse than the account in the book.

“King Louis XV eventually listened to the concerns of his people and raised a bounty on the head of the supposed beast. He conscripted peasants as soldiers to kill wolves, and sent his greatest noble huntsmen into the surrounding villages and forests. The king’s men pillaged many of the peasants’ homes for food and supplies, raped their daughters, and decimated their farms—all in the name of finding the beast. It became a very dangerous time for anyone suspected of knowing anything about wolves. Many in my pack were shot by the hunters while in their wolf forms. They all survived, of course, but it was still a very unpleasant way to live. Yet Ulrich and many of the wolves in our pack continued to kill—even at the risk of exposing us all.”

“That’s terrible. What did you do?”

Gabriel rubbed one of his fingers, which had a lighter band of skin on it than the rest of his hand. “I was concerned for the townsfolk. Heartbroken to see so many innocents die for sport. I was the presiding priest at so many of their funerals. Luckily, I was not the only one who was disgusted by Ulrich’s ways. My mentor, Sirhan, who should have been the true alpha of our pack, had not claimed the position out of respect for his father, Ulrich. However, he feared there would be no pack left for him to inherit if he waited too long. He and a couple of other pack mates devised a plan. I refused to take part in it directly, because it involved killing, but as a priest, I did bless a handful of silver bullets for them. Sirhan then waited until Ulrich turned into a wolf, and when he was just about to attack a peasant hunter, Sirhan shot him through the heart with one of my silver bullets. He then told the peasant that if he took the body of the giant wolf to the king and claimed he had killed it, he’d be rewarded handsomely.