The Lost Saint (23 page)

This time I did gasp. I covered my mouth with my hand.

“One of the unexpected guests decided to leave me with a special birthday present.” Talbot pulled up the bottom of his flannel shirt and showed me the large crescent-shaped scar that looked almost like a tattoo on his well-cut abs.

“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.

Talbot lowered his shirt. “Gabriel is the one who should be sorry. He could have stopped those werewolves, but he didn’t. It would have meant getting his hands dirty. And his alpha, Sirhan, barely even punished the wolves that killed my parents. They deserve what’s going to happen to their pack when Sirhan dies.…” He pursed his lips and looked down at his feet.

“What happened to you after that?” I couldn’t imagine being so young and having your parents killed right in front you. He would’ve been only six months older than Baby James.

“I was sent to live with my grandfather on his farm. He was already caring for my mentally disabled cousin. Our grandfather used to fill the two of us with all these stories of the great Saint Moons. Demon fighters. Brave to the very end. Used to show us this old silver dagger. He died after a stroke when I was only thirteen, and that’s when I decided to carry on the legacy. Only I have an advantage over Simon and all the other Saint Moons—I’ve got superpowers. And unlike cowards like Gabriel, I use them.”

“Your cousin, the mentally disabled one, was he the only family you had left?”

Talbot nodded. “I couldn’t take care of him, and he couldn’t take care of me, even though he was a lot older. I haven’t seen him since the day our grandfather died. But we’re the last of the family.”

“No,” I said. “Don’s dead. I knew him, and he died
ten months ago. But he’d wanted to be a hero like you.”

Talbot lowered his head, and his shoulders slumped. That was why he seemed strangely familiar. Even though none of their specific features were identical, there was still a family resemblance there—that familiarity that struck me so many times before—in the shape of his mouth, the tone of his voice, and the largeness of his hands. Talbot reminded me of a much younger, attractive, mentally and physically sound Don Mooney. There was even a slight resemblance to Gabriel—the two could also be cousins.

“That means
you’re
the last real Saint Moon,” I said.

Talbot bent down. He’d found his baseball cap. He scooped it up and put it on his head. “I’m going to check the rest of the house for bodies. I doubt those creatures were
welcome
houseguests of whoever used to live here.”

He started toward the stairs, then stopped and looked back at me. “You did a decent job here today. We’ve just got a lot to work on before we start thinking about going after the real gang.” He gave me a half smile. “We will find your brother. I promise.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Get to work on healing those marks on your face. I bet you can find a towel in one of the bathrooms and wash up a bit. I can’t take you back to the bus looking like that.”

A FEW MINUTES LATER

I found a small bathroom off the kitchen. Yellow rings stained the inside of the sink, and the mirror was cloudy and cracked. An old, stiff towel hung from a tarnished-brass towel ring. I pulled it from the metal loop and used the corner of it to clean a section of the mirror. I stared at the red-rimmed eyes of my reflection and then my pale face and disheveled hair. Red marks shaped like long-taloned fingers painted my neck where Mishka had grabbed me, and three angry, blistering burns welted my face from the Gelal’s acid blood.

I closed my eyes and concentrated. Tried to picture my wounds healing over like Daniel had taught me—tried to erase them with the power of my mind. But when I opened my eyes, my reflection appeared exactly the same. My ability to control my superhearing, speed, strength, and agility had increased tenfold since my breakthrough run on Sunday. But the healing power still eluded me. Yes, these wounds would probably heal on their own in a matter of hours—compared to weeks for a regular human—but I should be able to speed up the process even more. Make it take seconds rather than hours, if I concentrated enough.

I didn’t have hours to wait, so I closed my eyes and tried again. Healing had been the first power Daniel
had developed as a kid—it was how he’d discovered that he had special abilities in the first place. But for some reason it was the hardest one for me. I opened my eyes and frowned at my unchanged appearance—then jumped at the sight of Talbot standing right behind me in the doorway. I gripped the counter to steady myself.

“I’m sorry,” Talbot said. “I knocked, but you didn’t answer. I was worried.…”

“I’m okay. I was just concentrating.”

“You better concentrate harder. We’ve got to get back to the bus, and you’re not healed up yet.”

“That’s because I don’t know how to do it.”

“Oh.” Talbot stepped into the tight room. Only two more steps and we’d be touching. I cursed my heart for beating faster. “I can help you,” he said.

“How?”

Talbot took one more step. Closer now. I watched his reflection in the mirror as he reached his hands out and brushed my hair back behind my ears. He cupped both of his hands on my face, pressing his palms into the burns on my cheeks. I winced and tried to pull away from his touch.

“Easy,” he said softly. “Don’t think about the pain. Think about where the pain came from. Think about how you got these burns. What were you feeling when it happened?”

“Scared.” I pictured the sight of the Gelal, skewered
right in front of me. Then the way he’d grabbed at the sword and cut his bare hands. “Horrified.”

“Close your eyes.”

I let my eyelids drop.

“Concentrate on what you were feeling,” he said close to my ear. “Hold those emotions inside of you until they burn.”

At first I didn’t know what he meant, and it seemed so opposite from what Daniel had told me that I didn’t think it would work. But I replayed that horrible scene in my head and let the fear of the moment engulf me. Felt the panic rise in my chest. And then I felt tingling warmth under Talbot’s touch. The heat swelled until it felt as hot as white coals, and just when I thought I might faint from the pain, it tingled away into nothing.

I opened my eyes. Talbot pulled his hands away from my face and placed them on my shoulders. The burns were gone.

“Good as new,” he said.

I met his gaze in the mirror for a second, then quickly turned my head away.

I didn’t know if I could look at Talbot the same way again. He’d changed so much for me in the last few hours. He wasn’t just a dimpled-cheeked farm boy who just happened to be another Urbat and reminded me of comforting things. Under that flannel shirt beat the heart of a powerful hunter—one strong enough to kill a demon with a single swing of his steel sword.

Talbot was dangerous.

I had no doubt about that.

But at the same time, I couldn’t help picturing him as a little boy, shrieking with fear as his parents died in front of him. It made me want to wrap my arms around him, hold him like Baby James, and tell him everything was going to be okay—that I could help him make the monsters go away.

I pulled out of his grasp and turned to leave. It wasn’t right to be this close to Talbot. I loved Daniel.

“Grace.”

“Yes?” I glanced back at him.

He stood quiet for a moment. No happiness in his expression at all. “Take that towel and wipe down anything you think you might have touched.”

“Why?”

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “I was right. Somebody
did
live here. I need to call the police so they can take care of the body.”

LATER, BACK AT THE BUS

“Whoa, what the heck happened to you?” April asked when I approached her and Claire in front of the rec center.

“Uh …” Did I really still look that bad?

“Ew. Seriously, what’s on your shirt?”

I looked down at my white polo. The Gelal acid had apparently eaten away little holes in my shirt, and traces of the black ooze lingered around the edges of each.

“Oh, guts,” I said.

Claire made a gagging face. “What did you guys have to do?”

“Oh, um. We were helping out at some old guy’s house, and it turns out it was all infested. We had to squash some bugs.”

“Sick!” April said. “Dude, I’m so sorry. All we had to
do was help paint a fence behind an elementary school … and then we got cookies!” She pulled a cookie wrapped in a napkin out of her purse and handed it to me. “Seriously, I think you deserve it.”

“Oh, thanks,” I said.

But I didn’t know when, or if, I’d ever be able to eat again. Not after what Talbot found in the master bedroom of that run-down house. That old man had never stood a chance against those monsters. At least Talbot had called the police so the old man’s body would be found soon and be taken care of. The only thing keeping me from bursting into tears over a total stranger was knowing that I had at least—in a way—been a part of destroying the demons that had killed him.

Claire gave my clothes another once-over. “So what kind of bugs did you have to kill anyway?”

“Really big nasty ones,” I said. Then I mouthed the word
demons
to April.

Oh
, she mouthed back. She grabbed Claire’s arm and pulled her toward the bus. “Let’s not make a big deal about Grace’s nasty assignment,” she said. “You don’t want to make people jealous or anything.” April laughed uncomfortably.

“But I want to know what …,” Claire said as April pushed her up the bus steps.

“Hey, did you know that Jeff Read said you look hot in that sweater?”

I followed them into the bus and sat a row behind
them. I listened as they chattered on about what else Jeff Read had said recently about Claire. I smiled and nodded in all the right places, but I didn’t really feel like talking anymore.

When we pulled into the parking lot of the school, I saw Gabriel waiting for us by the front doors. I knew I could fool Claire about the damage to my shirt, but I figured Gabriel would be a harder audience—besides, he could probably smell the Gelal and Akh stench that clung to my hair—so I made a beeline for Dad’s Corolla in the parish parking lot.

I pulled from my backpack my set of house keys, which also happened to have a spare to the Corolla on the ring. Hopefully, Dad wouldn’t mind if I borrowed it to get home. I even called and left a message on his cell phone, telling him I was doing so. He could always take the parish’s truck if he didn’t feel like walking.

I parked in the driveway and ran into the house. Mom called my name from the kitchen—followed by the wafting goodness of her pork tenderloin in Marsala sauce—but I pretended not to hear her and dashed up to the bathroom. I pulled off my nasty shirt, wrapped it in the towel I’d used to clean up with at the old man’s house, and shoved the bundle deep inside the bathroom trash can. I pulled off the rest of my clothes and stepped into the shower.

I lathered and rinsed my hair three times before I felt like the noxious scents from the afternoon had been
washed away. But what were impossible to scrub out were the memories of the day that clung to me now—wiping down a crime scene, watching a demon die right in front of me, the expression on the face of that bodiless head, and Talbot finding that dead old man. I scrubbed and scrubbed. I sat in the shower with my knees pulled up to my chest and let the scalding water rain down on me. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t rinse those images out of my mind.

My life had changed in the last few hours.

I’d changed.

I felt like a different person, and part of me longed for Daniel’s arms, strong and true, to wrap me in his warm embrace. I wanted to hear him tell me that it was okay for me to be different now. That he still loved me no matter what.

When the water turned cold, I got out and changed into fresh clothes. My plan was to hide in my room for the rest of the night. I still buzzed so much from what had happened this afternoon I worried that if I spent too much time with anyone, they’d be able to tell I was hiding something. They’d be able to see the changes in me. I was just about to start in on homework at my desk when Charity knocked on my door.