“Don’t.” Daniel tried to rush over to me, but the lead on his chains wasn’t long enough. He could make it only halfway across the room. He leaned forward as far as he could. “Don’t cry, Gracie. Don’t give up. We’ll find a way out of here. We’re going to escape. Even if we have to fight every last one of them.”
“But we’re nothing, Daniel. That’s like twenty against two. Gabriel won’t fight, and you’re just getting your powers back. We’re no match for them. They’ll turn me, and then I’ll kill you. And then if they send me home, what will stop me from destroying Baby James and everyone else?”
And the more selfish thought that I didn’t voice was that if everyone I loved was gone, there would be no one left to cure me—if the cure even existed. I’d be a monster for all eternity. A Death Dog at the beck and call of a madman.
“You just have to have faith, Grace. Believe in yourself. Don’t give up now.”
“But I have no more faith, Daniel. No more faith in myself. No more faith in God. He doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t care about us. It’s over. This is the end. Tomorrow I become a monster, and the rest of you die. And God doesn’t give a damn.”
“I don’t believe that. You think you’ve lost your faith, but I know you well enough to know that isn’t true. Deep down, you know you still believe. And I believe in you.”
“Then maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
“Yes, I do, Grace. And I know exactly what’s going on inside your head, because I’ve been there. That voice you hear—those terrible things that bombard you. Thoughts that make you think God doesn’t care about us. Those aren’t your thoughts. And they don’t come from God, either. They’re the wolf. The demon. The devil. It’s testing you. Tempting you. But if you can push those thoughts away, if you can reach beyond them, then you’ll find that there’s a true power deep inside of you, a power God has given you to fight the evil, that’s greater than anything you can even imagine. You found that power inside of you once.”
I shook my head. I didn’t know what power he was talking about. The speed, the strength, the agility, they all came from the wolf.
“The night you cured me,” Daniel said, “what were you feeling?”
Gabriel had asked me that same question before. I didn’t know why it mattered, but I did know the answer.
“Love,” I said. “I loved you enough to sacrifice everything for you. I wanted you to be cured no matter what it meant for me. I thought I’d lose my soul, but it was more important to me to save yours.”
“Then don’t tell me you aren’t strong enough, because that’s more strength than most people could ever dream of having. There is no greater gift, no greater power than that.”
“Than true love?”
“Yes. That’s the difference between them and us. We’re still capable of love. The wolf tries to destroy love, tries to push it out of your heart, tries to make you destroy everything that you care about. But if you can hold on to that love, and if you can hold on to your faith, then you are stronger than any monster out there. No outside power, no force, no evil can make you turn into the wolf as long as you hold on to that love.”
Daniel fell to his knees. His chains clanked against the floor. “I should have never stopped training you,” Daniel said. “I should have never stopped believing in your strength. I should have been there supporting you, teaching you the balance that you need. When my powers started to come back, it scared the hell out of me. I thought that meant the cure hadn’t worked—and I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to think you’d sacrificed everything for me and that it meant nothing.”