Me: Can’t believe your parents bought you a ticket to Alaska for your bday!!!!! Can’t wait to see you xoxoxo
It was so good to talk to her last night that I never wanted to hang up. I miss her so much and can’t believe she forgave me for my four-month absence as easily as she did. I was totally prepared to grovel.
Instead, I found out she’s going to come visit me for spring break…if I survive the next few days, anyway. And if I can figure out how to break the news to her that paranormals exist and that I’m a gargoyle. I could try to hide it, but there’s no way I’m bringing her here and treating her the way they treated me when I first got to Katmere. No damn way.
Heather: Me too!! Also, calculus sucks balls
“We’re here,” Macy says, just as she and I step into the dungeon where Eden had texted everyone to meet her. I’ll admit my heart stuttered last night when I realized that must mean the Dragon Boneyard was beneath the school—near the dungeons.
Although honestly, once I thought about it, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. I mean, I’d already guessed Katmere was more closely tied to the dragons than any other faction, what with the jewels embedded in the tunnel walls and bone corridors. In one of my hours of research in the library, I’d stumbled upon a whole history of the school.
Turns out Katmere hadn’t always been a school.
It had started as a dragon lair.
And not just any dragon lair but the original ruling family’s lair. They’d sided with Cyrus in the Second Great War, though, and as a concession after their loss, the lair had been claimed and Katmere established to foster interspecies relationships by making all the factions school together.
I’d asked once what happened to the original family, since I knew it wasn’t Flint’s parents, but Flint just shrugged and said most of them died in the war, and no one really knew where the rest scattered.
So much loss and tragedy in this supernatural world. And for what? So one group is in charge and another isn’t? Is it really all about power?
“It rarely is,” Hudson says, and I walk over to where he’s idly running his fingertips along the jeweled walls. He’s been in a funk all morning, and I’m going to need him to check his attitude at the door if I hope to keep my wits about me in the Boneyard. Hudson can make me forget everything else in a blink when he pushes my buttons. Zero to sixty in 2.8 seconds.
“What are you, a Bugatti?” he asks. “That’s the only car in the world that can go that fast.”
“When you start bugging me, yeah,” I answer, and he groans.
“Worst. Pun. Ever.”
“I do what I can,” I tell him with a grin before glancing back at the group. Jaxon and Flint are discussing potential issues before we enter the Boneyard, Macy is checking her wand and swapping small potion bottles back and forth from her backpack to a pouch wrapped around her waist, and Eden and Xavier are betting each other over who can carry back the heaviest bone. My heart fills with pride at my newfound family.
At least until Xavier demands of Macy, “Are you wearing a fanny pack?”
Macy doesn’t even spare him a look as she answers, “It’s my potion accessory kit.”
“Don’t you mean your potion ASSessory kit?” he shoots back with a sly, wolfish smile.
We all laugh, even as I turn to Hudson and say softly, “You know we’re risking our lives for you, right?”
“Yeah, that’s why you’re all doing it,” he scoffs. “More like to stop me from feeding on your precious Jaxon.”
I shake my head. “Well, it’s why I’m doing it.”
That makes him pause. He stares at me for several long seconds, his indigo eyes blazing into mine with a dozen emotions I can’t begin to name. I wait for him to put a voice to one of them, wait for him to say something—anything—that will help me understand why he’s being so difficult right now.
And for a minute, it looks like he’s actually going to do it. Like he’ll open his mouth and say something that has some emotional depth to it.
But in the end, he just shakes his head and looks away. Shoves a rough hand through his hair. Does anything and everything but actually talk to me about something that matters.
He does, however, say, “Then by all means let me get my pom-poms ready.”
And there we go. Zero to one hundred and sixty. “Fine. And to get you out of my damn head so I don’t have to listen to you ruin my mood ever again.” I huff and give him my back. We’re all very likely about to die. Would it really kill him to just say thanks?