I gave her one more quick glance and noticed the paper bag from the Day’s Market Bakery sticking out of her large pink purse. The mixture of smells suddenly made sense, and if I had only one guess, I’d bet ten bucks that bag contained a couple of bacon-maple donuts—Jude’s favorite.
I frowned. no wonder she looked so good. April had spent almost every waking moment in the past week outside Jude’s makeshift cage.
I ignored April’s question. She must have been headed over here already before she got my text because she’d gotten here a lot faster than I’d expected, and I still wasn’t quite ready to share my idea.
I’d spent almost a year repressing my memories of what happened that fateful night on the parish’s roof, and now it took most of my concentration to force myself to recall every last detail.
“Grace has proposed the hypothesis that we need a moonstone in order to help change Daniel back into his human form,” Brent said, as if he could sense my reluctance to speak.
“What makes you think this?” Gabriel asked me. “I’ve been exploring that possibility myself.”
“She thinks he’s been trying to psychically communicate it to her,” Brent answered for me, “in her dreams.”
Gabriel stood. “Interesting. Perhaps it has something to do with your being his alpha mate.” He stared into my eyes for a moment. “Or something else…”
Dad started grumbling about the word mate. I held my hand up to silence him before he could launch into another lecture and break my concentration.
“Of course, the issue would be where to procure another moonstone,” Dad said, instead of getting all preachy.
“Can’t we just buy a moon rock off the Internet?” April said. “I’ve been doing some looking around for Jude, and I found a dude on eBay who says he’s got a moon rock from the actual moon mission back in the sixties. We can buy it now for only three thousand dollars. I’ve got some college savings—”
“Whoa. Hold on to your wallet,” Gabriel said. “First of all, most of the moon rocks you see being sold out there are fakes. Secondly, there are only a relative handful of moonstones in existence that work to counteract the Urbat curse. They were a gift to me from a Babylonian moon priestess who had been taken as a slave. She blessed a few moon meteor rocks and gave them to me in exchange for freeing her from her master. No other moonstone I have ever encountered has the same effect as these.”
“Oh.” It was almost possible to hear April counting all the money she’d almost lost on eBay in her head—although I did find it heartening that Jude might have been the one who asked her to find him a new stone. “Then let’s call this priestess lady,” she said, “and get some more magic rocks.”
Gabriel gave her an overly patient look. “That was over seven hundred years ago, my child.”
“Oh.” April gave a sheepish grin. “I forget you’re so old.”
“Grace thinks she may know where to find a moonstone,” Brent said. “She just hasn’t shared it yet.”
“Any time now would be fantastic,” Slade grumbled. “It’s cold out here.”
“Then get a jacket,” I snapped. He obviously wasn’t a native Minnesotan if he thought this was cold. “Because we’re all going to be out here for a while.” I kept my eyes on the roof and backed up farther so I could get a better view of the steeple—what Daniel had clung to that night to keep himself from falling. I pictured where Jude had stood in relation to Daniel, and then tried to map out the trajectory of his throw in my mind’s eye.
“My moonstone, the one I wore for almost the last year, was a piece of the moonstone pendant Daniel used to wear. Jude threw it from the roof of the parish. Daniel searched for it in the snow a few days later, but he was able to find only half of the moonstone for me. The rock must have split when it hit the ground. Which means the other half is possibly still in the churchyard somewhere.”
April gasped. I could always rely on her for a good reaction.
I backed up a few more paces, sending the boys scattering to get out of my way. Then I turned and walked slowly, trying to figure just how far the moonstone must have traveled when Jude threw it. The others trailed behind me as I walked with calculated, yet limping steps around the church building. I stopped when I came to what I guesstimated was the approximate area—the gravely overflow parking pad behind the parish for busy church days like Christmas and Easter.
“It’s here. It has to be here somewhere.” I dropped to my knees and started picking through the rocks. There were thousands of them—hundreds of thousands—but I started by picking up a rock that had a blackish-gray tint, and tested it for that pulsing heat that emanated only from a moonstone.
Nothing.
I set it aside and tested another and then another.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Slade said. “It could take an eternity to pick through all those rocks.”
“Then get started,” I said.
Brent and Ryan followed my order immediately and bent down beside me to start searching. Then Gabriel, my father, April, Marcos, and Zach joined in. Even Slade sat in the gravel and halfheartedly poked at a few rocks.
“Set aside any rock that is gray or black: that way I can test them for the pulsing. The stone we’re looking for might still have a crescent moon carved into it, but it might not. Who knows how it could have broken. There might even be more than one piece.”
It had been almost a year. Three seasons had come and gone. Snow and rain and plenty of cars had passed through the churchyard. But there was still a possibility that the other half of Daniel’s moonstone was here, which meant I wasn’t going to stop searching until I’d actually turned over every stone in this place.
Chapter Four
INTERVENTION
SUNDAY EVENING—ALMOST THIRTY-NINE HOURS LATER
“If you think I’m going to give up now, then you don’t know me at all,” I said.
“We’re not telling you to give up.” Dad reached across the desk and gently scooped up the pile of rocks that sat in front of me.
We’d moved most of “Operation: Find the Moonstone” into Dad’s office at the parish because eight people picking through rocks in a church parking lot was bound to bring on questions from townsfolk passing by. Plus, Dad wouldn’t let us keep working out there once it was time for church services earlier today. The others took shifts discreetly bringing in buckets of rocks from the churchyard and dumping them on Dad’s desk for Gabriel and me to sift through. The others had stopped for dinner an hour ago—and had apparently decided to turn against me while they were out.