The Savage Grace: A Dark Divine Novel(11)

My voice had risen louder than I’d meant it to. From the expressions on their faces I could tell I must look all wild-eyed and insane. How could I make them understand?

“And I miss him,” I said, my voice much softer now. “I miss him so bad, it makes my heart ache like there’s something inside of it, pushing out, and the whole thing is just going to burst open at any moment if the pressure gets any greater. I miss being held in his arms.” I turned to April because I felt more comfortable telling her these things than my dad or Gabriel. “I miss that look he gets in his eyes when he’s really in the groove with a new painting. I miss the look in his eyes when he looks at me. I miss how everything I said to him was important. Like I was the most important person in the world to him. And now, I don’t even know if he understands me when I speak.”

“Gracie…”

I shook my head to stop Dad from interrupting. “It feels like he’s dead. Only it’s worse because he’s still here. Only it isn’t him. Not completely. He’s physically here, stuck inside that white wolf, and at the same time he’s never felt so far away. He’s not Daniel. We don’t even know what he is.” I looked back at Gabriel and Dad. “I swore I wouldn’t give up on him. And I’d move a whole damn mountain if I thought it would change him back. So how can you ask me to give up and go to school when all I have to do is search some abandoned warehouse for a few priceless stones that might change him back?”

“Letting you go to the warehouse in this condition is not an option—”

“Then I’ll go to Sirhan,” I said, even though that idea scared me more than the warehouse. “He’s the keeper of the rest of the moonstones, isn’t he?”

Gabriel nodded solemnly, and I knew he’d been thinking the same thing.

“Over my dead body,” Dad said. “The warehouse is foolhardy, but going to Sirhan is akin to suicide. I barely survived my encounter with him, and I’m not allowing any of you to go. He hates Daniel for being Caleb’s son, so what makes you think he’d want to help him?”

This time I could see my dad’s point. I knew Gabriel was in hot water with Sirhan for not returning weeks ago—with me as his unwilling guest. If we sent Gabriel to get a moonstone for Daniel, I had serious doubts we’d ever see him again. And I didn’t know what Sirhan wanted with me, but the pure fact that he had ordered Gabriel to bring me to him made me fear him even more than Caleb sometimes. If I went to Sirhan, I probably wouldn’t be allowed to come back. And then there was the fact that Daniel had been banished from Sirhan’s pack, not only for being Caleb’s son but also because Sirhan recognized Daniel as a true alpha. I had no idea what they might do to him now that he’d embraced his own true alpha–ness. Sirhan might see Daniel as the ultimate threat.

“I won’t go to Sirhan if you let me go to the warehouse. But I need to go soon. I’m afraid if Daniel keeps wandering farther into the forest … that he won’t come back again at all.” We’d heard him howling again last night, and it had sounded much farther away. I’d sent Marcos and Ryan to quiet him down, and they’d told me they’d had to run for almost a half hour at full speed to get to him in the depths of the woods.

Dad sighed. “Then let me go for you.”

“That’s a terrible idea, Paul,” Gabriel said. “If anyone should go, it should be me.”

“You and the girls have school. I’ll go tomorrow while it’s daylight. I can at least have a look around to see what I can find.”

“No way. You don’t have any powers at all. That’s even more dangerous than me going.” I couldn’t believe how quickly this conversation had turned surreal. I was used to Dad trying to convince me not to wander into dangerous places—but the vice-versa situation suddenly made me understand why he worried so much. “What if someone is waiting there—?”

“So you acknowledge the danger now?” Dad folded his arms in front of his chest.

I opened my mouth, but I didn’t have a response.

“I’ll go with him,” came a familiar voice from the doorway of the office.

I spun around to find Talbot standing there. He wore his favorite blue baseball cap and held a bowl from the parish kitchen filled with parking lot gravel in one hand. The thumb of his other hand was jammed into one of his belt loops next to his Texas Ranger star-shaped belt buckle. He gave me a look like someone who was crashing a party he knew he wasn’t invited to.

I scowled. “What the heck is he doing here?”

“Good evening to you, too, kid,” he said, and tipped his baseball cap to me and then winked at April.

My hands balled into fists. I’m pretty sure I’d warned him what I’d do the next time he called me “kid.”

“I come bearing gifts, at least,” he said, and indicated the bowl of rocks. “Those boys out there looked like they were about to fall over. I sent most of them home. Marcos and I are sharing rock duty for a while.”

By home I assumed he meant Maryanne Duke’s old house, where the boys had been crashing for the time being—until Dad and I can figure out what the heck to do with five homeless teenage werewolves.

“But that still doesn’t explain why you came here in the first place,” I said. “I told you to stay away from me.”