“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.