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?”