Crush

by Tracy Wolff

  “Seriously?”

  “Umm, yeah. The bunny outfit when you were six is also one of my favorites.”

  “Oh my God.” I pull Macy’s pillow tightly over my head and wonder if it’s possible to actually smother myself with rainbow fur. Not that that seems like such a bad idea right now.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I groan as I rack my brain, trying to imagine what horrible, humiliating memories he might run across at any second. I know there aren’t actually that many, but right now it feels like the supply is limitless.

  “I don’t know, even I have to say that you’ve got a few doozies,” he tells me. “That one with the chicken when you were in third grade was pretty embarrassing.”

  “First of all, it was a rooster. And second of all, he was rabid.”

  “Chickens can’t get rabies,” Hudson tells me with an amused smirk.

  “What? Of course they can.”

  “No, they can’t.” He laughs. “Rabies only affects mammals. Chickens are birds, therefore no rabies.”

  “What do you know anyway?” I demand, flopping over on my side. “What are you, the Chicken Whisperer all of a sudden?”

  “Yes,” he answers, totally deadpan. “That’s me, absolutely. Hudson Vega, world-renowned chicken whisperer. How did you know?”

  “Oh, shut up,” I groan and throw the pillow at him, but it doesn’t actually connect. Of course it doesn’t, because he’s not really standing by the window. He’s in my head, watching home movies. I grab another pillow to dive face-first into and moan, “You’re such a pain in my ass, you know that? Giant. Enormous. Massive.”

  “Wow. How did I miss the memory of you swallowing a thesaurus? I should probably get right on finding that one. Maybe it’s next to the one where you lost your bikini top at La Jolla Cove? You remember, right? You were thirteen and had to get your mom to bring you a towel while you waded neck-deep in the water.”

  “I hate you.”

  He grins. “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do,” I insist, even though I know I sound like a cranky toddler.

  His laugh dies away. “Yeah, maybe you do, at that.” He sighs and seems to consider his words carefully before he continues. “You know I’m only looking at the memories you already shared with me, right?”

  “That can’t be true,” I answer. “There’s no way I tell anyone about my tooth. Or the bikini top. Or—” I stop myself before I can blurt anything else out.

  “Or the time you threw up all over your kindergarten teacher’s shoes?” he asks quietly.

  “Why would I tell you these things? I don’t tell them to anyone. Not even Heather or Macy know about most of them.”

  “I think that’s something you need to ask yourself, isn’t it? If you hate me this much, why would you tell me all these things?”

  I don’t have an answer for him. Hell, I don’t even have an answer for myself. Maybe that’s why I roll over and face the wall. Because suddenly, it feels like there’s a whole lot I don’t know.

  The darkness is back, the yawning chasm that I’ve been trying to push my way through since I became human again. Only this time, I don’t just see the emptiness. Instead, I see the wreckage, the destruction, the total wasteland of what is…and more, what could have—maybe even should have—been.

  It hurts so much more than I expected it would.

  Hudson doesn’t disturb me again. But he does finally walk away from the window and slump down on the floor next to me, his back resting against the edge of my bed.

  I keep my eyes closed, and suddenly, right behind my lids, a different memory begins to play. This one is of two dark-haired little boys, the older no more than ten years old, and both dressed in what look to be period costumes in the middle of a dark, tapestry-filled room. A giant table dominates the center of the space, with huge, elaborately carved wooden chairs tucked in all around it.

  Standing beside the table is one of the little boys, his blue eyes filled with tears as he begs, “No, Mummy, no! Please don’t take him. Please don’t take him! Please don’t take him!” He just keeps saying it over and over, and I can feel my chest growing tighter with each word.

  “I have to take him,” she answers in a cold, clipped voice. “Now, stop your crying and say your goodbyes, or we’ll leave without them.”

  The little boy doesn’t stop crying, but he does stop begging as he walks across the room to the younger boy—this one with dark, confused eyes. The blue-eyed boy hugs him and then fades across the room to grab something from the table before fading back to the other boy, a small, wooden horse gripped in his tiny hands.

  He gives the other boy the toy and whispers, “I made him for you and named him Jax, so you wouldn’t forget his name. I love you.” He glances up at his mother before adding in a voice so raw, my heart breaks, “Don’t forget me, Jax.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” his mother tells him. “Go finish your studies. I’ll be back for dinner, and I’ll quiz you on them.”

  His mother and the dark-eyed boy turn and leave the other little boy all alone in the room. As the door clicks shut behind them, he falls to his knees, sobbing the way only a child can. With his whole body and heart and soul. The devastation, the pain, tears through me like an avalanche.

  Just then, a man in a suit walks into the room and towers over the boy. Then smiles. “Use the pain, Hudson. It will make you stronger.”

  The child turns to look at the man, and a chill suddenly slides down my spine. The hatred in his gaze should belong to someone much older, and it has my breath catching in my throat. The boy narrows his eyes on his father, and everything goes still—the man, the child, the very air they breathe. And then everything explodes into particles. The table. The chairs. The rug. Everything but the man, whose smile grows wider.

  “Fantastic. I’ll tell your mother to get you a puppy tomorrow.” And then he turns and leaves the room, leaving the boy on the hardwood floor, with the carpet disintegrated now, the splinters cutting into his knees.

  He could have destroyed his father as easily as the chairs, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He wouldn’t be what his father wanted him to be. A killer.

  And then the memory fades away as easily as it came.

  Oh my God. “Hudson—”

  “Stop,” he tells me so matter-of-factly that I almost start to doubt what I just saw. At least until he says, “I don’t have many childhood memories, at least not ones that a human would understand, so my pickings were fairly slim. But it only seemed fair that I show you something after all the ones that you’ve shown me. I mean, you’ve seen it before, but you don’t remember, so…”

  “You showed me this before?” I ask him as I surreptitiously wipe the tears off my cheeks.

  He laughs, but there’s no humor in the sound. “I showed you everything before.”

  The emptiness in those words echoes inside me, and I close my eyes, unsure of what to say to him. Unsure, even, if I can believe him, though I find myself wanting to. Badly.

  “Hudson—”

  “You’re exhausted, Grace,” he tells me as he stands up, and I would swear that I felt his hand brush across my hair. “Sleep now.”

  There’s so much I want to say to him, words on the tip of my tongue that I suddenly don’t know how to voice. So I do what he says. I close my eyes and let myself drift away.

  But right before sleep claims me, I find a way to say at least one of the things that I want to. “You know I don’t want you to die, right?”

  Hudson freezes, then sighs wearily. “I know, Grace.”

  “But I can’t let Jaxon die, either,” I tell him. “I can’t.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Please don’t make me choose.” My eyes are closing, and I’m starting to drift off.

  But I still hear him when he says, “I’ll never ma
ke you choose, Grace. How could I when I know that you’d never choose me?”

  69

  To Bite or

  Not to Bite

  “Oh my God, Grace! Get up!” Macy’s squeals echo through our dorm room before light has even begun to filter through our window.

  “Not yet,” I groan, rolling over and burying my head under my pillow for the second time in eight hours. “Still dark.”

  I burrow deeper into my blankets, start to fall back into a dream about a little blue-eyed boy and his horse, when Macy shakes me. “I’m serious! You need to get up.”

  “Make her go away,” Hudson groans from what sounds like the floor next to my bed.

  Macy’s phone rings, and she gives up trying to get me awake while she takes the call.

  I peek over the edge of my bed and, sure enough, he’s sprawled on the floor. He, too, buries his head under a pillow—one of my hot-pink pillows, to be exact.

  “Don’t judge me,” he complains. “It’s slim pickings in this room.”

  I smile. “Yeah, but I’ve got to say, hot pink might just be your color.”

  “You know I bite, right?” he growls as he pulls the pillow tight around his head.

  “Yes, because I’m so scared you’re going to bite me.” I roll my eyes. “While you’re—you know—in my head.”

  He doesn’t answer, and I’m just about to congratulate myself for winning this round when I feel his fangs scraping gently down my neck. They don’t stop until they get to my pulse point, and then they hover there for one second, two.

  Unexpected heat races through me at the familiarity of his touch, followed closely by an icy blast of panic—because he’s not Jaxon. “Hey! What are you doing?” I start to push him away, but he’s already gone.

  “Showing you that even if I’m in your head, I can still bite you anytime you want me to.”

  “But I don’t want you to!” I all but screech, even as my body still resonates from his touch. “That’s my whole point.”

  “I know,” he answers calmly. “That’s why I didn’t do it.”

  My hand goes to my neck, and I realize he’s right. There’s not even a tiny scratch. Thank God. “Don’t ever do that again,” I tell him, just to make sure he gets the message. “I don’t want anyone but Jaxon to bite me. Ever.”

  His smile turns mocking and maybe even a little grim, but he doesn’t argue with me. He just nods and says, “Message received. I promise I won’t do that again.”

  “Good.” Still, I run my fingers over my neck one more time, strangely disturbed by the warmth I feel under my skin despite the fact that Hudson never actually did anything to me. “Thank you.”

  “Of course.” He grins slyly. “I mean, at least not until you ask me to.”

  “Ugh.” I hit him with my pillow. “You’re disgusting, you know that?”

  “Because I told you I wouldn’t touch you without your permission?” His look of wide-eyed innocence isn’t nearly as good as he thinks it is. “I was only trying to be a gentleman.”

  “You know what? Bite me.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realize what I’ve said. Even before Hudson leans forward with a wicked glint in his blue eyes. I throw a hand up and block his mouth. “No! I did not mean that in the good way.”

  “That’s okay, Grace.” He gives me a look that I’m pretty sure would melt my panties off my body if I wasn’t mated to his brother. “I don’t mind being bad.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that about you.”

  I throw back the covers—determined to end this conversation even if it means running away to the shower—and realize that Macy is off her call and speaking to me.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her, trying to figure out why her eyes are so big and her face is so pale. “I was still asleep, so I didn’t hear what you said. What’s going on?”

  “The Circle!” she tells me. “They’re here.”

  “The Circle?” At first, her words don’t make any sense to my sleep-addled brain, but when Hudson curses low and long in a corner of my mind, it registers who she’s talking about. “Jaxon and Hudson’s parents are here?” I whisper, horrified at the thought.

  “Yes! The king and queen, plus the other three mated pairs showed up at five this morning. No advance warning, no call ahead. Just eight of them at the front gate, demanding entrance. My dad is beyond pissed.”

  “Why are they here?” I ask, shoving my super-obnoxious curls out of my way.

  “Officially?” Macy answers. “For their twenty-five-year inspection. Which they scheduled at this time to support the Ludares tournament in order to promote interspecies cooperation and friendship.”

  “And unofficially?” I ask, a little afraid to hear the answer.

  “They want a look at you,” Hudson and Macy both reply at the exact same time.

  “Me?” Okay, that was unexpected. “Why me?”

  I mean, I get why maybe Jaxon’s parents would want to meet me—seeing as how I’m mated to their only living (that they know about, at least) son. But why get the rest of the Circle involved in what should be a personal family matter?

  When I say as much to Macy and Hudson, they laugh—at me this time, definitely not with me.

  “This isn’t about you being mated to Jaxon,” Hudson tells me. “I don’t think they care, one way or the other, about that—unless they think it threatens their power. What they do care about—what I guarantee you all members of the Circle care about, even the non-power-hungry ones—is that you’re the first gargoyle to be born in more than a thousand years.”

  “Why does that matter? What is one lone gargoyle going to do to them? And a not very powerful gargoyle at that?” I say to the both of them.

  “First of all,” Macy says emphatically, “you’re a new gargoyle, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a powerful one. It means you’ve got to take some time to figure out what’s up. You don’t even know all the things a gargoyle can do yet, let alone what you specifically can do.

  “So yeah, of course they’re scared. If they weren’t, the king wouldn’t have murdered all the gargoyles on his last horrific rampage and the Circle sure as hell wouldn’t have let him get away with it. They may be cowards, for the most part, but normally they wouldn’t be okay with full-on genocide unless it actually served them.”

  “Damn, Macy, tell us how you really feel!” Hudson exclaims. Then adds to me, “What she said.”

  I laugh a little bit at that, which leads to a questioning look from Macy. “Hudson approves of your summation,” I tell her.

  “That’s because my summation is right-on. And his father is an asshole.” She gives me a look that speaks volumes. “Like father, like son, apparently.”

  Hudson rolls his eyes but surprisingly has nothing to say in response. Which might actually be a first, now that I think about it. He does, however, sit up and lean against the side of my bed, then runs a hand through his short, tousled hair. I know he’s not really real—so why is he sleeping in just a pair of flannel pajama pants and no shirt? Did he take off his shirt, or am I just—inexplicably—choosing to imagine him without one?

  And of course, he hears that stray thought and winks at me over one bare shoulder. “I’ll let you decide.”

  I ignore the heat stinging my cheeks and focus on Macy.

  “So why exactly does the fact that the Circle decided to pay us a not-so-auspicious visit mean that I have to get up at”—I glance at my phone—“dear God, five fifteen in the morning?”

  “Because, apparently, they’ve called a before-school assembly. And that means we all have to be in the auditorium at six thirty in full dress uniform.”

  “Full dress uniform? You mean the skirt, tie, and blazer?” I think I’ve worn the whole uniform only once the entire time I’ve been here.

  “Not the blazer,” Macy says with an exaggerated si
gh. “The robes.”

  “Robes?” I look toward my empty closet. “There’s no robe in there.”

  “No, but I have an extra—from when I was shorter, thankfully. Otherwise, you’d fall on your face.”

  “So skirt, tie, robe?” I ask, making sure I’ve got it.

  “Yeah.”

  “Like graduation robe?” I ask, just to be clear. Because right now I’m kind of picturing a room full of students in fuzzy black bathrobes. Not that that would be a bad thing…

  “More like ceremonial robes.” Macy sighs.

  Which puts all my senses on red alert. “Not like human-sacrifice robes, right?”

  Macy narrows her eyes at me. “No one’s going to sacrifice you, Grace.”

  Easy for her to say. I tamp down the little spurt of annoyance and lead with humor instead. “Says the spider to the fly…”

  Macy laughs, just as I intended her to. Which eggs me on. “I’m just saying, no one gets to criticize me for being skittish until they’ve had to fight off a homicidal bitch with talons through their arms, a dislocated shoulder, a concussion, and gaping wounds on their wrists and ankles from clawing their way out of shackles. On an altar. Surrounded by blood. In the dark. While drugged.”

  Macy looks at me, completely deadpan, and says, “Well, who hasn’t? I mean, really.”

  I burst out laughing, like full-on belly laughter, because the delivery was just too perfect. “Is that your way of telling me I’m being too much of a drama queen about the whole near-death-experience thing?”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s my way of telling you that I would like nothing more than a chance to dropkick that bitch straight to hell a second time.” She crosses to her closet and pulls out two dark-purple robes. One she tosses on her bed and one she hands to me.

  “It’s purple,” I tell her.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “The robe is purple.”

  She nods. “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “I’m going to look like Barney if I put that on.”