SIX MONTHS AGO
“Are you cold?” Daniel asked from behind me as I sat on a stone bench, working on a charcoal drawing for art class. His arms wrapped around my shoulders, and he pressed his chest against my back. Warmth radiated through his shirt, and my skin tingled in response under my thin sweater. I shivered, but not because I was cold. Not anymore.
“Mmm,” I said, and set my notebook on the bench.
Daniel moved his hands down and up my arms to warm them, and nuzzled his nose against my neck.
“I’ll give you an hour to quit that,” I said with a quiet laugh, even though we were pretty much the only ones who ever came to the Garden of Angels.
“How about two?” he asked, and pressed his lips softly against my skin. I wanted to melt. He brushed my hair back and kissed behind my ear.
I sighed, and my charcoal pencil slipped from my fingers. It hit the edge of the stone bench and then rolled to the base of the statue I’d been sketching. It was the sculpture of Gabriel the Angel that Daniel had shown me the first time he’d brought me here.
Daniel’s firm lips trailed down my neck until they reached the delicate chain of the necklace I almost always wore now. Something stirred inside of me, and my hand clutched at the moonstone pendant instinctively. Daniel pulled back a bit.
“Does it help?” he asked. His breath was so warm and wonderful against my hair. I shivered again as a tingling sensation ran up my neck into my scalp. My hand closed tighter over my pendant, and I let the almost hot, pulsing sensation that emanated from the stone send its calming strength through my body.
“Yes,” I said, but I didn’t mention that I seemed to need it more often now than I had in the first couple of months since my infection. I didn’t want him to worry.
“Good,” he said. “I wish I’d had a moonstone from the very beginning like you.” Daniel’s hands slipped away from my shoulders, and he stepped back, taking his warmth with him. “I wonder if I would have been able to stop myself from ever giving in to the wolf the first time.…” His voice trailed off, and I didn’t have to wonder why. So much pain had come into his life—our lives—because of what happened that night.
I shifted on the bench so I was looking at him now. His shaggy blond hair blew softly above his deep brown eyes in the chilly March wind. “Will you ever forgive yourself for that night?”
Daniel shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. “When your brother does.”
I bit my lip. That required finding Jude in the first place. A prospect that seemed more unlikely with each passing week that he remained missing. “He has to. Eventually. Don’t you think?” My dad once said that someone who refused to forgive would eventually become a monster if he held on to his anger and let it burn inside of him for too long. But I guess that had already happened to Jude. He’d turned into a monster—in a much more literal sense than my father had meant—a werewolf who had infected me and then tried to kill Daniel. All because he couldn’t forgive Daniel for infecting him the night he first succumbed to the werewolf curse himself.
“Do you think he can come back from what he’s done?” I asked. “I mean, even if we find him—do you think he’ll ever be the same person he was before … ?” My arm twinged with a sharp pain in the spot where Jude had bitten me. I rubbed my hand over the scar that hid under my sleeve.
“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “I did—with your help. But that doesn’t mean everyone can. Jude won’t change unless he wants to. And once you’ve gone wolf, its influence is so overwhelming that it’s almost impossible to remember who you used be.”
I nodded, wondering if that fate awaited me someday.