The question as to what to do with Jude had been our first item of business when we’d brought him back from the warehouse with us. Besides doing research, he and Gabriel alternated watching over my brother Jude in his small cell-like den in the parish’s basement. Are you still at the parish? How loud is it there?ĭad had taken to staying at the parish most nights this past week. I pecked out a response to Dad’s text about my needing to do something. My sight shifted from my superhuman night vision back to normal a couple of times before I was able to focus on the screen of my phone again. I’d wondered if his howls were as loud to anyone else, or if my superhearing was just acting up again-that was until the cell phone on my nightstand buzzed with the text from Dad. I didn’t have the patience for mind games tonight.ĭaniel’s howling grew louder from the woods, and my heart ached for him. I shook it off, not letting the demon wolf inside of me feed off my doubt. The forest is claiming him, a harsh voice whispered in my head. But then today my calls had gone unbidden, and he hadn’t come back at all. For a few hours at a time, returning to my backyard when I called for him. The first few days after Daniel transformed, he’d followed me everywhere-which meant I pretty much couldn’t go anywhere, but at least he’d been with me, and I could see him in the white wolf’s deep brown eyes.īut two days ago, he’d gotten skittish, and then he’d started to wander away. And it didn’t bode well that he seemed to be more the white wolf than he was Daniel with each passing moment. I could tell with each unuseful page that was turned that Dad and Gabriel believed more and more that Daniel was going to be stuck forever. He’d been trapped in a prison of bone and fur and claws ever since. I’d escaped a horrific fate that day-but Daniel hadn’t. It had been five days since Daniel had somehow miraculously turned into the great white wolf in order to save me from Caleb’s rabid wolf pack. It had been six nights since the terrible one Daniel and I had spent imprisoned in the Shadow Kings’ warehouse, knowing our deaths would most likely play out in the morning. Nothing at all that could help us change Daniel back. But I think they really sent me away because neither of them could bear to look me in the eye as the hours-days-of searching through book after book on werewolf folklore, shape-shifters mythology, and even scripture, went by and we’d still found nothing. I didn’t know if my sanity could handle it one more time.ĭad and Gabriel had sent me home around eleven o’clock, claiming I needed to get a handle on my sleep debt during the weekend before I was expected to go back to school on Monday. Dreams so wonderful and tangible that the second I woke up and realized they were just that-dreams-the terribleness of reality came crashing in on me all over again. The problem is, it’s hard to fall asleep when deep down there’s a part of you that desperately doesn’t want to ever again.īecause sleep brought on dreams of Daniel. I’d been willing myself not to check the time every few minutes, not to count down how many hours of rest I could still get before morning-if I could just fall asleep in the first place. without even needing to glance at the dim red numbers of my alarm clock. I’d rolled over and sat up in my bed when the howls started only a few minutes before. The high, mournful wolf’s cry that filled my bedroom now sounded like he was just outside my window-but I knew it came from deep in the forest. I knew it was the white wolf without being able to see him. I wish I could say that I’d been asleep when the howling started. He’s going to get himself in real trouble if he doesn’t stop. I blinked several times and read the message again: You need to do something, gracie. I’d been staring at the black void between my bed and my ceiling for so long it was hard to focus my vision-and my mind-on the incoming text. My eyes squinted involuntarily at my phone’s screen, illuminated too bright in the dark of my bedroom. A silver bullet explodes from the chamber. “All you have to do is want to kill me, and you’ll lose yourself.”