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 fact 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.