Crush

by Tracy Wolff

  “I call bullshit,” Hudson grumbles as we leave the library. He’s walking a little bit ahead of us, but he’s turned around to face me as he walks backward. Not going to lie, there’s a part of me that would love nothing more than for him to trip and fall on his ass.

  Petty? Yes. Mean? Absolutely. But I’d still pay good money to see it. Maybe landing on his ass will take him down a peg or ten, which is something he definitely needs. Arrogant prick.

  “Don’t hold back,” Hudson says, and in the blink of an eye, he’s suddenly right behind me, his arrogant, smarmy voice right in my ear. “Tell me how you really feel.”

  “I always do,” I shoot back as a shiver runs down my spine.

  By the time we get to Jaxon’s tower, Macy is already there with a bag full of the least nutritious stuff Katmere has to offer. Chips, popcorn, and even a pack of ten-dollar Oreos.

  “I stole them from my dad’s stash,” she says as she drops them on the table in the antechamber to Jaxon’s bedroom, where he does most of his studying.

  The last time I saw the place, it was a total mess—Lia made sure of it before she dragged our drugged asses to the tunnels so she could torture the both of us. But sometime in the three and a half months I was gone, Jaxon not only put it back together, but he actually redecorated the place.

  I stroll around the room, vaguely paying attention as Jaxon explains to Flint and Macy fully about what the Bloodletter said we need to do to get Hudson out of my head. Flint has some succinct words about the Unkillable Beast—and the Bloodletter, for that matter—but he’s obviously into it. He’s hanging on Jaxon’s every word and even offering a ton of suggestions.

  For once, nobody’s paying any attention to me as I run a hand along Jaxon’s bookshelves and take in all the new decor. And can I just say I like it? The lack of attention and his decorating choices…

  Now, instead of a couple of big, comfy chairs dominating the sitting area, there’s one big, comfy chair and a huge, overstuffed black couch that is definitely large enough for two people to stretch out on. There’s a new coffee table—which looks a lot sturdier than the one he turned to kindling during one of his telekinetic losses of control—and in the corner, under the window that nearly killed me when it shattered, is a big table with four black upholstered dining chairs positioned around it. Because of course everything in Jaxon’s tower is black. Of course it is…

  Except for the books. They’re every color under the sun, and they are still everywhere—on the bookcases, stacked on the floor in the corners, stacked on the coffee table and underneath the big table, piled up in random places throughout the room—and I love it.

  I love even more that there are books I’ve never heard of mixed with books that are old favorites of mine mixed with classics I’ve always wanted to read. Add in the artwork on the wall—the Klimt sketch that made me swoon the first time I came up here along with a few other haunting paintings—and this room is pretty much my favorite place on earth.

  Then again, how could it not be? Jaxon is here.

  I expect Hudson to make a ton of snide comments about the decorating, but he’s strangely quiet, staring intently at something on one of Jaxon’s shelves, a carving of a horse from the looks of it. It’s not a super-intricate carving, but clearly it’s something Jaxon loves, the edges smooth and shiny as though his fingers have spent hours rubbing each curve of the horse’s neck or body.

  Just when I start to wonder what’s so interesting about the horse, Hudson shoves his hands deep into his pockets, shaking his head as he walks away. I think I hear him mutter, “Loser,” but it’s so faint that I can’t be sure.

  Hudson has been in a weird mood since breakfast, and I refuse to let him ruin my focus again. I’m determined to not wait for Jaxon to take care of me anymore. I need to step up and figure out how to solve my own problems.

  Jaxon piles the books on the main table, and I pick one up called The Myth and Mayhem of Gargoyles. I don’t know why I chose it, except for the fact that I like the idea of causing a little mayhem—me, Grace Foster, pretty much the most un-mayhem-like person on the face of the earth. As I flip it open, I can’t help but wonder for a second—or several seconds, if I’m being honest—what it would feel like to just give in to the havoc. To say whatever I want instead of always filtering it, to do what I want instead of what I think I should do.

  Then again, now’s not exactly the time for that. There’s too much going on right now to shake things up just to do it. So I stretch out on Jaxon’s very inviting couch and start reading, while everyone else claims their own separate corner of the room.

  Flint settles at the main table and flips open one of the laptops, announcing he plans to start researching the Dragon Boneyard—how to get there, the best time of day to go, and how to get out alive, because apparently not getting out alive is an actual thing. Yay.

  Macy picks up a book on the magical nature of gargoyles, curls up in the comfy chair across from me, and dives in while nibbling on a giant stack of Oreos.

  And Jaxon—Jaxon grabs the other laptop after offering it to me and settles down at the end of the couch to do more research on the Unkillable Beast.

  I look around at my friends, all of whom are spending their Saturday cooped up inside looking for information to help me, and my heart swells. They could be doing anything right now, and instead they’re doing this.

  Hudson can call me emotional, he can call me naïve or overly sentimental or any number of other things, but I still have to blink back tears of gratitude that these people have found their way into my life. I came to Katmere Academy at the lowest point in my life, desperate, miserable, sad. I figured I would just get through the year and then get the hell out.

  And while nothing here has been what I expected—I mean, a gargoyle, really?—I can’t imagine going back to a life without Macy’s enthusiasm or Jaxon’s intensity or Flint’s teasing (though his murder attempts I can definitely do without).

  Sometimes life hands you more than a new hand of cards to play—it hands you a whole new deck, maybe even a whole new game. Losing my parents the way I did will forever be one of the most horrible and traumatizing experiences of my life, but sitting here with these people makes me feel like maybe, just maybe, I’ve got a chance of coming out the other side of it.

  And that is more, so much more, than I imagined just a few short months ago.

  “Hey, look at this!” Macy sits up abruptly. “I think I just figured out why the glamour didn’t work on you this morning. It wasn’t me. It was you!”

  “Why? Can’t do glamours on stone?” I guess, because that feels about right.

  “No.” She shoots me a “you’re being a dork” look, then flips the book she’s reading so I can see. “It didn’t work because it says right here that you’re immune to magic!”

  50

  It’s Getting Crowded

  Under the Bed

  “Immune to magic?” Flint asks, closing his laptop and coming over to check out Macy’s find. “Really?”

  “And to dragon fire, vampire and werewolf bites, siren calls—the list goes on and on. Basically, gargoyles have a natural built-in resistance to nearly all forms of paranormal magic. That’s—” She holds her hand up to her temple and mimes her brain exploding.

  “No wonder Marise always had such a hard time healing you,” she continues. “We put it down to you being completely human, but it must have been the gargoyle thing all along.”

  “She had trouble healing me?” I ask, because I don’t remember that at all.

  “Yeah, she did,” Jaxon says, a contemplative look on his face. “The first time when she tried to break down my venom and also later, after what happened in the tunnels. With her help healing you, she thought you’d bounce back fast once you got the blood transfusion. But she couldn’t get her powers to work on you the way she thought they should. Everything took lo
nger than it would have with—” He breaks off.

  “You can say it,” I tell him. “With a real paranormal.”

  “I wasn’t going to say real,” he tells me with a frown. “I was going to say with one of the usual paranormals. Big difference.”

  “Small difference,” I answer, but with a smile to let him know that I’m not actually holding it against him. “But whatever. It doesn’t matter. Because I know I’m not—” I break off as my cheeks start to heat up.

  “You’re not what?” Macy asks.

  “Umm, well.” I glance anywhere but at my friends. The wall. The wall looks interesting. “It’s just that I know I’m not immune to all of those things.”

  “I don’t agree,” Macy says, leaning forward. “I mean, how do we know that Lia’s spell would have even worked if Jaxon didn’t get involved? You can’t use her as proof that you’re not immune.”

  “Well, she sure went through a hell of a lot of pain for nothing,” Jaxon says.

  “No shit,” Flint agrees. “That was awful.”

  “Seriously?” Jaxon tells him, and the fact that his voice is mild makes it all so much worse. “You’re going to complain to us about what happened in the tunnels being awful, when Grace still has scars from your talons?”

  “That’s what those scars are from?” Hudson demands, a sudden glint in his eye that doesn’t bode well for anyone. “Flint gave them to you?”

  “I thought I was doing the right thing, Jaxon.” The look Flint sends him is pleading. “I thought I was stopping a new effing apocalypse by preventing Lia from bringing Hudson back.”

  “The apocalypse? Seriously?” Hudson leans against the wall, arms crossed over his chest and an incredulous look on his face. He hasn’t said a word in what feels like forever in Hudson time, but this comment has definitely woken him up with a vengeance. “You people really think I’m the fucking harbinger of the apocalypse?”

  “You don’t really want to get into that right now, do you?” I turn and ask.

  “Hell yeah, I want to get into it. I’m bloody well sick of being cast as the bad guy.”

  “Like I said before, maybe don’t be the bad guy, Hudson,” I snap. “You don’t get to have it both ways.”

  “We’re getting off track here,” Macy says, waving the book in our faces. “Are you going to tell us why you’re so convinced this is wrong?”

  I don’t want to—it feels like giving everyone here a look into something they have no business knowing about—but at this point, I kind of have to. Plus, I do want to know the answer, and maybe one of them has it, even though Jaxon is currently looking as confused as everyone else.

  “It’s no big deal,” I tell them. “It’s just that I happen to know for a fact that I’m not immune to vampire bites.”

  “How would you know that?” Macy demands. “Has someone tried to bite—” She breaks off, her eyes going wide as understanding dawns. “Ooooooh. So that’s how. Niiiice.” She gives Jaxon an approving look.

  Suddenly Flint is looking anywhere but at the two of us. “Oh, right. Well, then…” He coughs a little, clears his throat, and looks incredibly uncomfortable as he continues. “Maybe the book is wrong, then?”

  “The damn book isn’t wrong,” Hudson snarls. “There are different kinds of bites.”

  “It’s not wrong,” Jaxon unconsciously echoes his brother. “If I was trying to inject my venom into you to kill you—or to change you—it probably wouldn’t work because I’d be using my powers. But the times that I’ve bitten you…that’s not what I’m doing. Hurting you or changing you is the last thing on my mind. I’m trying to—”

  He breaks off, like he hasn’t already said too much. But it’s too late. All three of us know how he was going to finish that statement—with some variation of the fact that his biting me had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with giving me pleasure.

  Which it did. Does. A lot. But no one else needs to know that. Not Flint, who seems strangely disturbed by the image. Not Macy, who has all but turned into a heart-eyed emoji. And definitely not Hudson, who seems to be getting colder—and more pissed off—with each word any of us says.

  Macy’s going to demand details the second I’m alone—it’s written all over her face. And now that I’m thinking about what she’s going to ask, I’m also thinking about how I’m going to answer. Which means I’m thinking about Jaxon biting me and—

  “Enough already,” Hudson growls as I can’t help remembering the last time Jaxon did that to me. “You don’t have to be so graphic. We get it.”

  “I wasn’t being graphic at all,” I answer. “What is your problem today, anyway?”

  “I don’t have a problem!” he snaps back. “I just think some things should remain private.”

  “Yeah, well, me too. But here you are.” I glance back at Jaxon, who’s got his eyebrows raised, like he wants me to tell the whole room what Hudson is saying. I give a quick shake of my head. I just want this entire conversation over.

  As if sensing how embarrassed I am by his nondisclosure disclosure, Jaxon pushes us back to the original topic with sheer willpower and a whole lot of royal attitude. It’s funny how I forget how well he plays the prince because he does it so rarely—unlike Hudson, whose whole demeanor pretty much shouts, I’m royalty and you’re not fit to lick my boots.

  Hudson’s voice is as dry and British as my mother’s favorite shortbread cookie when he answers, “To be fair, a lot of people aren’t.”

  I roll my eyes and flick my gaze back to him. “You need to be careful, or people are going to start believing you mean the ridiculous things you say.”

  “Good.”

  I just roll my eyes again, then focus on Jaxon, who is quizzing people in a round-robin format on what they’ve found so far. Not for the first time, I’m grateful that I’m mated to someone like Jaxon, who not only doesn’t try to insert himself into my conversations with Hudson but who also steers attention away from the fact that a hundred-years-old vampire is yammering in my head whenever I need him to. Some of these conversations are bad enough the first time—I couldn’t imagine having to repeat them to Jaxon. He doesn’t need to know all the weird little side trips my brain makes, especially with Hudson egging me on.

  Feeling like I’ve dodged a bullet, I settle back down on the couch and continue reading. Sadly, I haven’t really learned anything new at all. Certainly nothing of the scintillating “mayhem” I’d been promised. In fact, the most exciting thing the book has mentioned so far is that gargoyles can stand as sentries for months on end, without a need for food or sleep as long as they are stone.

  Just as I suspected, I make an excellent garden gnome. Paint me pink and stand me on one leg and I might even be able to pull off yard flamingo. Fantastic.

  I’d feel useless, except Flint hasn’t learned anything yet, either, about the actual Dragon Boneyard that he didn’t already know.

  “The only other thing I learned,” Macy says when Flint is finished, “is that gargoyles are supposed to have the power to channel magic. It’s weird. Magic doesn’t work on them, but they can—supposedly—borrow magic from other paranormals and use it themselves.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask, intrigued at the idea of having some power, any power, that actually does something. I mean, turning to stone is cool and all if you want to spend your life as a tourist attraction, but it’s not very exciting. Neither is being immune to other powers.

  Yeah, it’s a great defensive gift, but it doesn’t let me actually do anything. And considering the company I’m keeping, that seems totally unfair.

  “I think it means that if I share my power with you, you’ll be able to use it,” Jaxon tells me.

  “If that’s the case, we have to try it!” Macy says, jumping out of her chair. “Me first!”

  51

  Get Your Magic On

 
; Jaxon shakes his head, amused, but does a go-ahead hand gesture as he settles into the couch to watch what happens.

  “Okay, cool.” She looks at me. “I’m going to send you some fire energy. See if you can light one of the candles on the bookshelf.”

  I look at her like she’s gotten a little too close to her own fire and singed a few brain cells. “You don’t actually think I can light a candle without a match, do you?”

  “Of course you can! It’s easy.” She holds an arm out—palm facing up—and focuses on a black candle on the top shelf of the bookcase. Then she curls her fingers into her palms, and the candle wick catches flame. “See? Easy-peasy.”

  “Easy for you,” I tell her. “If I try that, one of two things is going to happen. Either nothing will happen or I’ll set the entire bookcase on fire—neither of which seems like the outcome we’re going for here.”

  “Yeah, well, better here than at the Dragon Boneyard, don’t you think?” Macy says, a rare hint of exasperation in her tone as she looks at me, eyes narrowed and hands on her hips. “Now, come on. Hold your hand up and let’s try it.”

  “Okay, fine,” I tell her, standing up even as nerves drop the entire bottom out of my stomach. “But if I set your hair on fire, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “I am a witch, you know. If you set my hair on fire, I’ll just grow it back.” She grins, moving to stand about three feet from me. “Now, come on. Arm up.”

  “Okay.” I take a deep breath, then blow it out slowly as I do what she requests. “Now what?”

  “I want you to try to open yourself up so that I can send some power your way.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “Just breathe. And try to reach out for me.” She holds her arm out straight at me, but where mine is palm up, hers is palm down. “Okay, Grace. Lower your guards and reach.”