Crush

by Tracy Wolff

  Suddenly he’s up and across the room, his face several inches from mine. “Or I’ll stop playing nice, and that’s something I’m not sure you—or your precious little mate—can handle.”

  “You think taking over my body and leaving me covered in blood is playing nice?” I screech, about half an octave shy of the pitch needed to actually break glass. “You think making snide comments about your brother every second I’m with him is playing nice?”

  His eyes narrow to slits. “Compared to what you’re doing to me? Hell yeah, I think I’m playing nice.”

  “Doing to you? Doing to you?” I throw my hand in a “step right up” kind of gesture. “Please, feel free. Tell me exactly what it is that I’m doing to you that’s so awful besides trying to find a way for you to live outside of my head?”

  “You—” He breaks off, fists clenched and jaw working as he stares me down. “I—” With a roar, he whirls around and punches a fist straight through the nearest wall.

  I rear back, shocked at the depth of his fury. Shocked even more by the fact that there’s an actual fist-size hole in the wall next to my head. I look down at my hands, wondering if maybe he took over my mind long enough for me to somehow punch the hole.

  But my hands are fine, and the knuckles aren’t the least bit red. So no, I didn’t punch the wall. Hudson did. The only question is how?

  Fear races through me at the idea that he can wield that kind of power even when he’s bodyless. Even when he’s inside me. I know his main power is that of persuasion, and for the first time, I wonder if he’s using it on me without my knowledge.

  Maybe that’s why I feel bad for him sometimes. Maybe that’s why, last night, I thought that maybe he wasn’t quite the enemy I’d been afraid he would be. Maybe that’s why—

  “Could you just stop?” Hudson whispers, and he looks weaker and more sickly than I have ever seen him. “Not forever, but just for a few minutes. Could you please just stop?”

  46

  Gargoyles Need a

  Little Glamour, Too

  “Stop what?” I ask, baffled, as he turns away.

  His shoulders sag.

  “Hudson?” I prompt when he doesn’t answer, but he just shakes his head as he walks over to the window so he can look out at the snow. “Stop what?”

  He laughs, but it’s not his normal sarcastic laugh. Instead, it’s just…sad. “The fact that you don’t know says everything.”

  I’m not sure how to respond to that, so I don’t say anything. Silence billows around us like a piece of the shiny tissue paper my mom always wrapped my presents in—weightless and so, so fragile—and the longer it goes on, the more I’m afraid to break it. The more I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll also break the weird truce that Hudson and I have had going on for the last two days.

  And if I do, what happens then?

  Thankfully, Macy comes to the rescue—as usual. At nine forty-five, a full fifteen minutes before I have to meet Jaxon at the cafeteria, she comes bopping out of the bathroom looking a million times better than when she went in.

  “Give me five minutes to find my shoes and do a quick glamour, and we can be on our way,” she says as she walks to her closet.

  “Why do you always get the glamour, and I always have to look like this?” I ask, waving a hand in front of my face.

  “Because you have the gorgeous hair. And you look fine. Honest.”

  She wiggles her hands in front of her face and chants a few words under her breath, and suddenly her hair is dry and her face looks a little brighter, a little smoother, a little more beautiful.

  “You’re disgusting,” I tell her.

  “Fine, fine, fine.” She rolls her eyes. “Come here and I’ll do one on you.”

  Excitement flutters in my chest. “Really?”

  “Really. I would have done one before, but you never seemed interested. It’s easy-peasy.”

  Normally, I’m not interested—I’m pretty resigned to my cute-on-a-good-day looks. But after everything that’s already happened with Hudson and what I’m afraid is still to come once Hudson and Jaxon are back in the same room together, I could use the extra armor.

  So I cross the room to Macy, tilt my face up to hers—since she’s eight inches taller than I am, which is also totally not anything I’m jealous about—and wait for her to work her magic.

  “Close your eyes,” she tells me, so I do and wait for her to finish. And wait. And wait. And wait.

  “Do I need that much work?” I joke, cracking my eyes open when Macy lets out an impatient sigh.

  “You don’t need any work,” she answers. “Which is a good thing, because my glamour isn’t working on you.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not working on me?”

  “I mean, it’s not working.” She looks baffled. “I don’t understand. The third time I tried, I even used a more complicated one, but it didn’t work, either. And it always works. I don’t understand.”

  “Obviously it’s because I’m already too glamorous,” I tease. “I mean—” I wave a hand up and down myself in a “look at me” joke.

  “Right?” Macy agrees. “That must be it.”

  I laugh and bump her gently with my shoulder. “I was just joking, you dork.”

  “I know.” She winks at me. “But you’re adorable, so…”

  “Adorable sometimes,” I agree with a sigh. “Glamorous? Absolutely never. Even your magic knows that, obviously.”

  She rolls her eyes a second time. “Give me a break. I just wish I could figure out what’s going on.”

  Me too. I wonder if it’s some weird gargoyle thing we haven’t figured out. Some rule like Stone Shall Never Be Glamorous or something like that… Just my luck.

  She reaches a hand across the room to her closet and murmurs something under her breath. Seconds later, her favorite pair of Rothy’s floats right into her hand. “So my magic isn’t on the fritz.” She turns to me with a shrug. “I don’t get it.”

  “Yeah, me neither.” I wait for Hudson to chime in—having lived several hundreds of years, he knows a lot more than either of us about magical things—and usually can’t wait to make me feel naïve by pointing out what he considers obvious. But he is still looking out the window…and being stubbornly silent.

  “I’ll ask my dad the next time I see him. In the meantime, I guess you’re going to have to settle for being adorable instead of glamorous. Think you can handle it?”

  It’s my turn to roll my eyes. “Semi-adorable, and I handle it every other day of my life, don’t I?”

  “Whatever.” Macy crosses the room to get her phone and then gasps when she comes face-to-face with the hole Hudson left in the wall.

  “What happened?” she asks, her gaze darting back and forth between the hole and me. “My dad is going to flip!”

  “Hudson and I were having a fight, so…”

  “So you punched the wall?” Her eyes are practically popping out of her head.

  “Of course not! He punched the wall.” I hold up a hand to stop what I’m sure is about to be a million questions. “And before you ask me, no, I have no idea how he did it. We were arguing, he got mad, and then I watched him punch the wall. When he pulled back, boom. There was a hole directly where he punched.”

  “I don’t understand how someone without a body could do that. I mean, does he still have access to his powers?” She looks horrified at the very idea.

  “I don’t think so. Wouldn’t I know if he did?” But just the idea has me worrying even more than I already was. What if he’s been persuading me all along and I just didn’t know it?

  “Jesus, I haven’t been persuading you,” Hudson snaps. “Can you please give it a rest? I’m not actually Satan.”

  “I never said you were!” I snap back, doing my best to ignore the relief I feel in the pit of my stomach over the fa
ct that he’s talking to me again. “But do you blame me for wondering?”

  Macy, obviously realizing I’m fighting with Hudson again, rolls her eyes and starts gathering up her class supplies into her backpack.

  “You’re bloody right, I do!” The fact that the Britishisms are coming back tells me just how upset he actually is. “Don’t you think things would look a lot different if I was actually using my gift on you? You’d be doing whatever I tell you to instead of arguing with me until I want to pull my bleeding hair out.”

  “Well, excuse me for remaining a sentient being with thoughts and ideas of my own. So sorry to inconvenience you.”

  Is it a bitchy response? Yeah. Do I care? Not even a little bit. He deserves it with his silent treatment one second and his “lord of the manor” attitude the next.

  “You’ve been inconveniencing me since the day I laid eyes on you,” he growls. “Why should today be any different?”

  “You know what? Why don’t you bite me?” I shoot him a mock-innocent look. “Oh, wait. I forgot. You can’t.”

  Hudson’s growl becomes a snarl, and he finally turns from the window and stalks across the room toward me. But then he stops several feet short of me, hands shoved into his back pockets as he stares me down with narrowed eyes. “You’re going to push too far one of these days. You know that, right?”

  “And then what? You’re going to punch another wall?” I narrow my eyes right back. “Don’t threaten me. I’m not some scared little girl who’s just going to fall in line. If you wanted that, you should have holed up inside some sweet little human’s brain instead of mine.”

  “Some sweet little human?” he repeats, and just like that, his anger is gone, replaced by an amusement that’s almost palpable. “So the gargoyle thing is starting to grow on you, hmm?”

  I don’t know what to say to that, don’t even know how I feel about what I just said. So I do the only thing I can do in this situation—I ignore his question completely.

  “Come on, Macy. We need to get to the cafeteria. Jaxon’s going to think I forgot about him—again.”

  “I’m ready,” my cousin answers. She grins. “I’ve just been waiting for you and Hudson to stop tearing into each other. I gotta say, your face was priceless.”

  “How did I look?” I ask as we close the door behind us and start walking down the hallway.

  “Like you wanted to murder a small village. Or, you know, a major metropolitan area.”

  “Now you’re talking my kind of fun,” Hudson joins in. “Just tell me when and where and I’m there.”

  “Wouldn’t you be there anyway? Considering we are currently attached?” I raise my brows at the fact that the worst seems to be over—at least for now.

  “It was a figure of speech. You know what those are, right?”

  “You mean like verbs? Nouns? Adjectives?” I tease him, because of course I know what a figure of speech is. I also know what colloquial phrases are, which is what he actually threw at me.

  Hudson rubs his eyes. “You scare me sometimes, you know that? You really do.”

  I laugh, then throw him a colloquial phrase right back. “Baby, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  He sighs. “Don’t I know it.”

  47

  Are you Bloodstoned?

  “So I have a question,” I tell Macy as we walk to the cafeteria.

  “Sure.” She looks at me quizzically.

  “How obvious was it that I was fighting with Hudson back in our dorm room? Because if people can tell, I’m sure they’re thinking there’s something seriously wrong with me.”

  “Umm, too late for that,” she teases. But when I shoot her an exasperated look, she relents. “I think you forget where you are. Last year, a witch turned herself invisible for almost six months. People spent a semester walking around looking like they were talking to the walls. Weird shit happens here every day. Nobody even blinks most of the time.”

  “Yeah, well, they blink at me. All the time.”

  “We’ve been through this. Dating Jaxon means half the school hates you and the other half wants to be you. That’s just how it is. Add in the gargoyle thing and it’s not the talking to Hudson that’s going to make people stare at you. So relax, okay?”

  I turn her words over in my head. “Yeah, okay.”

  Jaxon is walking into the cafeteria just as we get there—and at least half of the Order is with him: Mekhi, whom I haven’t seen since he brought me Jaxon’s jacket, and Luca and Rafael.

  All three grin at me like I’m Christmas—or at least Halloween. “About time you decided to show your face down here,” Mekhi tells me as he wraps me up in a huge, ocean-scented hug. “We’ve been bugging Jaxon about when we were going to get the chance to see you.”

  Luca’s and Rafael’s hugs are more restrained—we don’t know each other as well—but they both welcome me back enthusiastically.

  Jaxon gives them a couple of minutes, then elbows his way through the group to pull me out and get things moving. “Hungry?” he asks as we walk toward the main cafeteria line.

  “I am, actually.” I’m a little surprised by the fact that I’m starving again. Either fighting with Hudson burns a ton of calories or I’m still making up for the fact that I went fifteen weeks without food.

  I grab a tray, pile it high with eggs, toast, and hash browns. Jaxon adds a packet of cherry Pop-Tarts with a wink, then heads off to get his own breakfast while I pour myself two of the world’s largest cups of coffee.

  Macy—who is a self-proclaimed caffeine addict—gives me a wide-eyed look when I reach for the second cup, but she doesn’t say anything. A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, after all.

  It’s not long before we’re seated at a table. Jaxon and the other vamps are all drinking their breakfast out of stainless-steel tumblers—a concession to the fact that I’m new to watching the whole blood-drinking thing, I’m sure—while Macy and I drink our coffee like we’re mainlining it.

  My bizarre life is definitely catching up with me, and right now I feel like there’s not enough caffeine in the world. Jaxon must feel the same way, because he’s looking a little haggard, too.

  “You okay?” I whisper, sliding my hand into his as the others laugh and joke around us.

  “Yeah.” He smiles back. “This is the first time I’ve fed in a couple of days, and I think it’s wearing on me. Especially after the trip to the Bloodletter.”

  “Jaxon, you can’t do that! I know you’ve been worried about me, but you need to take care of yourself, too.”

  I burrow into him, and as I do, I feel that same warmth glowing inside me…and between us. The mating bond? I wonder. Most of the time I barely notice it—maybe because I still don’t know as much about it as I should—but right now I can feel a connection between us, bright and lovely.

  I lean into it a little, loving the way it feels. Loving even more the way Jaxon feels at the other end of it—warm and welcoming and strong and steady.

  I don’t know what I’m doing, don’t know, even, how to interact with the bond. But Jaxon looks so soft and sleepy and unlike himself that I can’t help reaching out. Can’t help closing my eyes and putting a hand across his heart, on this space where it feels like something exists between us, and smiling at him warmly.

  Jaxon’s cheeks start to have a little more color in them, and his eyes look more alert, so I pull back even as I squeeze the hand I’m still holding in my own.

  His midnight eyes heat up at the connection between us, his brows quirking in a sexy way that has me burrowing even deeper into his side and whispering, “Later,” into his ear.

  As I relinquish the last of my hold on the bond, Hudson flops down in an empty spot at the table and snarls, “At least warn me the next time you’re going to do something so completely nauseating,” he orders. “I can go look out a window or
something.”

  He’s my mate. I’m allowed to fawn all over him if I want to.

  Hudson’s only response is a narrowing of his eyes and a growl so intense that it actually sends a shiver down my spine.

  “You’re really going to spend the afternoon jumping off the castle?” Macy is asking the vamp contingent at the table.

  Jumping off the castle? I mouth to Jaxon, who just inclines his head in a “what can we do?” way.

  “Got to start practicing for Ludares, don’t we?” Mekhi answers her. “It’ll be here before we know it.”

  “So you guys are really going to compete?” I ask, looking at Jaxon. “I heard it was dangerous.”

  The entire table turns to stare at me, eyebrows raised.

  “So what if it’s dangerous?” Rafael answers. “It’s our last year at Katmere—been waiting for the chance to dominate the tourney forever. Damn straight we’re going to compete.”

  “Besides, there’s danger, Grace, and then there’s danger.” Mekhi grins at me. “No one’s actually died from competing in the Ludares.”

  “Nobody’s died? Are you kidding me with this? How is the fact that nobody’s died yet a ringing endorsement for this game?” I look to my cousin for a little solidarity, but she’s right there with the others, a patronizing look on her face, like I’m the one who doesn’t understand.

  And that’s when it dawns on me. “Wait a minute, Macy. You’re not actually going to compete in a game where danger is the first adjective that comes to everyone’s mind, too, are you?”

  “‘Danger’ is the second adjective,” Luca tells me with a grin. “‘Fun’ is the first.”

  “Oh, well, in that case, of course we should all compete,” I tell him. “Wouldn’t want to miss out on a good time.”

  “Exactly!” Rafael says with a wink. “Plus, you know, if any of us ever hopes to end up on the Circle, well…training starts now!”