“Not a good idea,” I whispered, and pulled my hand out of his. If Mom did come to her senses, I’d be grounded for the rest of my life.
“As you wish,” Daniel said, and picked up another cup to dry. “I’ll help you finish this up before I go.”
I sighed. I knew the house would feel empty and cold the moment he left. Every sound would make me jump. Every minute would drag on for a year until I finally fell asleep. “I wish my dad were here at least … but I doubt he’d be able to protect us, either.”
Daniel frowned and put down the cup. He shifted his weight from his bad leg to his good one.
A wave of guilt washed through me. “I didn’t mean you.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t mean to say that you couldn’t protect us anymore. I was talking about me, I swear.”
“It’s okay. I know I can’t, Grace. It’s kind of a side effect of losing my powers.”
“But you’re still strong. You could—”
“No.” Daniel finally looked back at me. “But you can … someday. I promise. You’ll get the hang of it.…”
“I have a feeling someday isn’t going to be soon enough. I think Jude called me because he needs my help.” I looked down at my stupid red hands that refused to heal. “But I’m not strong enough to do anything.”
“Grace, you’re the strongest person I know. You’d have to be to save me the way you did. You can be a hero like you wanted.” He lowered his voice and glanced back at my mom on the sofa, as if he was worried she might actually be paying attention to us. “You have all this power just beyond your fingertips, and we’ll figure out how to reach out and grab it for good. All you need is a little more time and patience and balance, and we can make it work. Maybe we’ve been pushing it too hard to begin with. Maybe we need to ease into it more. Take more time with your lessons …”
“What if we don’t have more time? What if Jude is right? What if somebody really is after us?” For the first time I really let that fear sink in—the weight of it trying to pull me under. “What if I need my powers right now?”
Daniel grabbed a fistful of his shaggy hair and tugged at it in frustration. “I don’t understand what you want me to say, Grace. What do you want me to do? If you want me to train you faster, that’s not going to happen. You know that wouldn’t be safe. I’m not going to let you lose yourself to the wolf.”
“I’m not going to lose myself to the wolf, Daniel. That’s not what I want … Gah, I don’t even know what I want! A way to stop time, maybe. A magical way to make my powers come faster. I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either.” Daniel picked up a bowl from the counter and then set it right back down. “I still think Jude was just messing with you, Grace. The wolf is probably getting a real kick out of tormenting the people he loved.” Daniel put an extra emphasis on the past tense.
But I didn’t want to believe that. Daniel still loved me when he was taken by the wolf. He still wanted to find a way to come back to our family. I wanted to believe the same thing about Jude now. I had to give him the same benefit of the doubt. Deep down I wanted to believe that he called me tonight not out of some sick joke, but because he needed to warn me. He still wanted to be my brother.
“You didn’t hear the concern in Jude’s voice,” I said. “I think it was a cry for help.”
Daniel shook his head. “I wish I could track him down for you. Find out what the hell he wants, or stop this person, or whoever is supposedly after us. But I’m not the one with the superpowers.”
“And apparently neither am I,” I grumbled.
He looked at me, his dark eyes laced with sadness, but he stayed silent. We both did for a few long minutes. Mom was listening to a different station’s evening newscast recorded by the DVR, but they were playing an almost identical account of the story from earlier. Invisible bandits. Terrible crimes in broad daylight. Even a similar joke about the Markham Street Monster turned to a life of organized crime …
“Do you regret it?” I finally asked Daniel. It was the question I’d held back for months now. The question that came into my mind each time I watched Daniel struggle to keep up with me when we ran, or nursed his knee after a sparring match. “Do you regret that I cured you? It must be hard not to have your powers anymore.” And it must be hard for him to watch me not figuring out mine. Like whenever I struggled as he tried to teach me a new painting technique, and I could feel him itching to grab the brush and just do it himself—but he never did. Good teachers don’t do that.
“No,” Daniel said. “Sometimes I miss my powers. But I never regret what you did for me. I’m here because of you. I’m a whole person again. I could never go back to that place I was in again—I could never deal with having the potential of becoming a monster again. I think I’d rather die …” Daniel trailed off. He hesitated for a moment and then said, “Do you regret it? Do you regret being there to save me?” From the sound of his voice, I knew he’d been holding that question back for a while, too.
I looked down at the sink. The suds had died into a murky film on the water. “Sometimes I almost wish that I could go back and stop Jude from infecting me with the werewolf curse. But I always stop myself, because I know if it meant being there to save your soul, I wouldn’t risk changing anything about what I did that night. That part I don’t regret. That part I would never trade for anything. Saving you, curing you. That part I’d get infected a thousand times over for.” I made a swirl in the film on the surface of the water with my fingertip. “I just wish things had turned out differently with Jude, you know? I wish I knew what to make of him coming back.” I sighed. “I just wish that if I’m going to be infected with these powers, that I knew how to use them properly, you know? Use them to help Jude now.”
I turned away from Daniel and reached far into the murky water and pulled the drain. I’d wanted the water to be hot on my skin, but it had cooled considerably during our conversation. I felt warmth on my shoulder and realized that Daniel had placed his hand on my arm, right over where my crescent-shaped scar hid under my sleeve. I hadn’t realized that it had been stinging with pain until I felt his soothing touch. He kept his hand there for a moment and then pulled it away and started drying dishes again.
Daniel stayed until after we finished cleaning the kitchen and Mom had drained the DVR of all the other stations’ news programs she’d recorded. I said good-bye to Daniel at the door, and the second he left, the house felt empty, just like I knew it would. I locked all the doors and windows and then turned off the TV and told Mom to go to bed. When I was alone in my room, I tried calling Dad again. It went straight to voice mail.
“Jude was here, Dad,” I finally told the machine. “Right here in Rose Crest. Come home. Please.” I listened to the emptiness on the other line until the voice-mail recorder beeped and cut off the call.
With my phone still in my hand, I checked the lock on my own window and noticed a faint light inside the Corolla. I’d left it parked beside the curb in front of the house. I peered through the blinds and saw Daniel curled up in the backseat of the car. From what I could tell, it looked like he’d nodded off while reading a book.
This evening hadn’t gone so smoothly with Daniel—not at all like I’d pictured it when Daniel suggested we watch the meteor shower together. But seeing Daniel outside my house, knowing he was there, made me feel safe and warm, like nothing could possibly ever tear us apart.
I flipped open my phone and sent Daniel a text: I love you.
As I crawled into bed, my phone beeped with a message back from him: Always.
And then, thirty seconds later, another, which said: Be patient. We’ll figure it out. Maybe when your dad gets back, he’ll know what to do. Then another text: I believe in you.
Then, almost a full two minutes later, like the idea had suddenly crossed his mind for the first time: Please don’t go looking for Jude on your own, ok?
Ok, I texted back.
It wasn’t like I’d even know where to s
tart looking.
CHAPTER THREE
Shattered
MORNING
I wasn’t surprised when Daniel was gone the next morning. He always worked an early-morning shift at Day’s Market before school on Fridays. But I figured he’d be a wreck from sleeping in the backseat of the Corolla all night.
Debbie Lambson, the part-time housekeeper Dad had hired to keep an eye on James—and my mom—while Charity and I were at school, was already at the house making breakfast when I came downstairs. I grabbed a couple of her muffins off the kitchen counter and headed out to the drive-through at the Java Pot. I picked up two coffees to go and then made a beeline for Day’s Market in hopes of catching Daniel before he took off for school.
I knew something was wrong even before I saw the police tape barring the entrance to the parking lot behind the market—the sheriff’s patrol car was parked out front, the OPEN sign whose neon usually blazed above the glass doors was dark, and a small group of would-be customers stood gesturing a few yards off from the store.
Tension pricked under my skin as I pulled up behind the patrol car. I couldn’t help thinking about that night a little less than ten months ago when there had been a very similar scene here. On that same terrible night when I’d almost lost Daniel.
The scar on my arm flared, and the pain of my powers tingled into my muscles. I clutched my moonstone and shook off those terrible memories. A more immediate problem stood in front of me now.
I left the tray of coffee cups in the car and headed up to the storefront. The thing that struck me the most was how strangely clean the glass of the front door seemed. That is, until I realized the door was actually missing. Shards of shattered glass littered the ground just inside the doorway. I hesitated for a moment, unsure if I was allowed to enter, but no one tried to stop me, so I stepped through the gap. I heard voices near the cash registers—or where the cash registers should have been. One lay smashed on the ground, and the other two appeared to be missing altogether. Mr. Day slumped on a stool while talking to Chris Tripton, another early-morning employee, and Daniel stood nearby with a broom.
It looked like Day’s Market had been the epicenter of an earthquake that somehow hadn’t touched the rest of town. Most of the shelving had been knocked over like a giant set of dominos, it’s demolished contents scattered everywhere. Spots on the floor were slick with soup oozing out of crushed cans. Basketball-sized holes pocked the walls, and the Halloween display in the center of the store looked like someone had taken a bulldozer to it.
“What happened?” I asked Daniel when I caught his attention. “It looks like a hurricane swept through here.”
“Might as well.” Daniel leaned his weight into his broom. “Somebody ransacked the place last night. They emptied out the registers, tore the safe out of the wall in the back office, and trashed just about everything else.”
“Holy hell,” I said.
Stacey Canova came up to us with an empty box in her arms. “The strange thing is,” she said, “they destroyed everything else, but took every last bag of chips and can of beer in the place.”
“What? Does the sheriff think it was teenagers?” I asked her.
“Only if they make teenagers with superpowers these days,” a voice said from behind me.
I reeled around to Mr. Day. “What was that?” I blushed and crossed my arms behind my back, as if I had something to hide.
“Whoever did this had to be superfast, and strong as a bull. It would take a forklift to knock over one of those aisles. And they got in and out of here in a matter of minutes. I locked up and headed home last night, but I was barely a few blocks away when I realized that I’d left my garage key in the back office. I turned around and came back to the store and found all this. I was gone five minutes tops. And there’s nothing on the security cameras.” Mr. Day indicated the cameras in each corner of the store. “Looked them over with the sheriff last night. They just go black. And these are battery powered, so it’s not like cutting the power to the whole building would do anything. None of you scrawny Holy Trinity kids could have pulled this off.”
He turned to Chris Tripton. “I’m telling you, it had to be those invisible bandits from the city. Either that, or the Markham Street Monster has turned to a life of larceny.” Mr. Day sounded just like the news reporter from last night, only he wasn’t joking.
Stacey rolled her eyes but then shook her head when she saw Mr. Day glaring at her.
Daniel looked down and swept up some broken glass into a pile with his broom.
According to the “official” story, wild dogs had attacked Mr. Day’s granddaughter Jessica and were responsible for the other attacks in town last winter—Maryanne’s mutilation, James’s going missing, and then what happened to Daniel, Jude, and me at the parish—but Mr. Day had been a die-hard believer in the Markham Street Monster ever since.
“Either way, this town is in trouble. I bet I’m just the first of many. Someone—or something—with that much power isn’t going to stop at one store. Mark my words: Rose Crest is going to hell in a handbasket unless somebody can do something.”
The phone rang from the back office. It had a strange, tinny echo. It must have been damaged. “Local paper got ahold of the story.” Mr. Day grumbled. “They keep on calling. Won’t be surprised if we end up with reporters from the city picking through the place like vultures later today. I could be ruined, and they think it makes a great headline. Thought I’d never have to deal with those buzzards again since they got tired of the story about Jessica’s death. Now they’ll want to pick at her dead bones some more with all of this.” He was trying to sound gruff and annoyed, but his voice had a high-pitched catch to it, and I noticed a puffy redness to his eyes.
The phone kept ringing, and Mr. Day stalked toward his office. “You two get on to school,” he said, pointing back at Daniel and me.
“But we can help,” I said.
“You kids got college applications coming up soon. Don’t want you messing up your grades because of this. But I expect you back here after school,” he said to Daniel, then grabbed the receiver of the ringing phone on his desk. “Hello!” he practically shouted into the phone before he shut the office door behind him. Mr. Day really didn’t deserve this—especially after what had happened to Jessica.
“I guess we should head out, then.” Daniel handed his broom to Chris. “I’ll be back right after my last class.”
“We’ll still be here,” Chris said, sounding like he wished he had an excuse to take off, too.
Daniel took my hand and we headed toward the nonexistent door, but after about four steps I noticed something sticking to the bottom of my shoe. I let go of Daniel and reached down and peeled some kind of plastic card from the heel of my boot. I flipped it over. It was a plain white card with a small logo on the front that said THE DEPOT and a magnetic strip on the back. It reminded me of my frequent buyer’s card for the Java Pot that they swiped each time I bought something.
Daniel stopped and looked back at me. “What’ve you got?”
“Looks like a membership card or something. You ever heard of a place called The Depot?”
Daniel shook his head.
I held up the card. “This could be a clue, don’t you think? Maybe the person who did this dropped this card.”
“Hmm, could be, I guess.” Daniel looked like he didn’t put much stock in that idea.
Stacey made a snorting sound from behind me. “You sound like one of those Scooby-Doo kids,” she said. “Don’t get your hopes up, though. Customers drop crap like that in here all the time. We’ve got a whole box of lost-and-found stuff in the office, but hardly anyone ever comes to claim anything. I’d just chuck it in one of the trash piles.”
I flipped the card over again. Rose Crest hosted only a handful of businesses, and none of them were called The Depot. It probably is just trash, I thought, but I tucked it into the pocket of my jacket instead of throwing it away.
Daniel raised his
eyebrows at me, but he didn’t say a word.
FIVE MINUTES LATER
Daniel left his motorcycle at the market and hitched a ride with me in the Corolla. It rattled and groaned the few blocks to school, as if telling me that it didn’t plan on making it through another winter. Hopefully, Daniel could keep it running for a while longer, considering money was tighter with Mom not working anymore and the extra expense of a housekeeper. I wondered how much longer Dad could afford to keep paying Debbie—let alone even think about buying a new car.
I parked in my usual spot near the parish, and then we started across the school parking lot together. Daniel sipped his coffee and made an appreciative grunt. His face looked gaunter than it had in a while, and his shaggy hair was tussled more than usual. He ate the cinnamon muffin I’d given him in three huge bites, and then cleared his throat.
“He’s got a point,” Daniel said. “What Mr. Day said—it would take someone with a lot of special abilities to pull this off in that short amount of time. A superpowered teen, perhaps?”
I held up my hands. “I’m innocent, I swear. Unless I ransack stores in my sleep …”
Daniel smirked, but it lasted only a second. His face was straight and serious when he said the name I’d been trying to deflect with my humor: “Jude. It makes sense, don’t you think?” Daniel asked. “He was in town last night. He went to Maryanne’s house, and he was probably outside James’s window. It makes complete sense that he’d go to Day’s next.”
“What, like he’s taking a tour of all the places …? Oh.” I stopped right in front of the main doors of the school, suddenly knowing what Daniel was getting at. Maryanne’s house, James’s window, Day’s Market. These were all the places where the wolf had caused him to lose control last year. He’d mauled Maryanne’s frozen body as she lay dead on her porch, then he’d gone through a window at my house and stolen Baby James to make it look like he’d been carried off into the forest, and then he’d left Jessica’s body in the Dumpster behind the market where Daniel worked—all in an effort to frame Daniel as the monster.