His words give me pause, precisely because they aren’t the ones I expected him—or anyone—to say. “What does that mean?” I ask after several seconds pass. “When you say you were there, what does that mean?”
“It means four months is a long time to just stand around somewhere.” He shifts uncomfortably. “We weren’t just frozen in time while you were gone, Grace. You were a gargoyle, and one of the things you spent that time doing was figuring out what that means.”
His words have my hands trembling and my heart pounding triple-time as I realize he knows more about me than I ever imagined.
I guess I thought we were enemies when we were together, but he makes it sound like that wasn’t the case. Or at least, not the whole case.
Did we talk? Did we laugh? Did we fight? The latter seems the most likely, but the look in his eyes doesn’t make it seem like he hated every second. “You remember what I was doing during those months?” I whisper.
For the first time, he looks wary, like he’s afraid he’s said too much.
And I get it, I do. I know everyone is worried that I have to find my memories in my own time, but I just want to know now.
He doesn’t answer my question, but he does say something even more interesting. “You love being a gargoyle.”
Now his words have my palms dampening and my stomach roiling with excitement. “What did I learn?” I ask.
The need to know is a physical ache inside me.
“What can I do?” I ask him.
“Pretty much anything you want to,” he finally answers. “And if you want to prove it to yourself, you could just shift right here. There’s plenty of room.”
“What do you mean? Here here?” I ask, looking around. “Where anyone could come in?”
“I guarantee you, Grace, no one is coming in. You’re the only one in the entire school doing your laundry on a Saturday night. Honestly, I don’t know whether to be impressed or embarrassed for you.”
“Wow.” I glare at him. “That’s a great way to motivate someone.”
“It’s not my job to motivate you,” he shoots back. “That’s your job. I’m the enemy, if you remember correctly.”
“I do remember,” I snap. “And if I didn’t, God knows it would only take a minute with you to figure it out.”
“Exactly.” He looks me over with that cold smile of his that doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “Now, are you going to do something, or are we just going to stand around here all night while you feel sorry for yourself?”
Those words piss me off more than any others he might have used, and I have to force myself not to scream when I answer, “I’m not feeling sorry for myself!”
He looks me over from head to toe and says, “Okay.”
That’s it. Just a simple okay—and somehow he has me seeing red. “What do I need to do?” I grit my teeth, hating having to ask him. But pride is one thing. Na?veté is another. “What do I have to do to shift?”
“You’ve already got the answer to that.”
“Yeah, but I can’t remember the answer! So will you please help me out instead of just standing there voicing platitudes in my head?” I throw my hands wide in the air.
For long seconds, he looks torn. Like he doesn’t know how much to say. But eventually his need to get the hell out of my head must supersede everything else, because he says, “You told me once that being a gargoyle was the most natural thing in the world for you. Like, you couldn’t imagine how you’d spent seventeen years of your life not feeling it, because it felt like home.”
I roll his words around in my mind, weighing them against everything that I’m feeling now, and they make no sense. “I really said that?”
“You really did.”
How did I go from that to feeling like being a gargoyle is the most unnatural thing in the world for me? Could I really forget that much, I wonder, even as I stand in the middle of the room with my eyes closed and try to look inside myself.
But there’s nothing to see, except the yawning emptiness that has been there all along. “This is hopeless.”
Hudson shakes his head and reaches down to pick up my hands. “You’re trying too hard.” Our gazes meet, and I get lost in the tumultuous blue waves in his eyes. “You don’t have to learn how to be a gargoyle. You are one. It’s a part of you, of who you are. And no matter what—no one can take that from you.”