Macy giggles and says, “I’m with you on that one. Luckily, I’ve already got”—she pulls out her spell book—“a portal back to school ready and waiting. Before we left, I made sure to do the spell that opens up our dorm room as the other side of the portal, remember? Because honestly, I don’t think I could do that dragon ride again, guys.”
“I could literally kiss you, Macy,” Xavier says, and I can tell my cousin has no idea how to reply…even though she is suddenly all smiles.
87
All the Right Moves
I wake up to Macy dancing around the room with her headphones in. She’s still in her pajamas, and I can see a ton of cuts and bruises on her arms and upper back—thank you, Dragon Boneyard—but she looks happy. Really happy, and I don’t blame her.
Last night was terrifying, and I’m feeling pretty glad to be alive, too, even though we’re both running on fumes after—I glance at the clock—only about four hours of sleep. Maybe that’s why, instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, I convince her to switch to her phone speaker and then dance around the room with her.
We’re laughing at each other as we shimmy and shake our hips, but it doesn’t even matter because we’re alive…and because we got the dragon bone.
We. Got. The. Dragon. Bone.
That means we’ve got all four things necessary to get Hudson out of my head. I mean, yeah, we still have the Unkillable Beast to get through, but we’re almost there. Why shouldn’t we celebrate?
“Oh, I don’t know,” Hudson interjects from behind me, sitting up and leaning against the wall on my bed. “Because the Unkillable Beast is going to kill you, perhaps?”
“Hush!” I tell him as I collapse next to him, out of breath as the song ends. Macy plops down on her own bed as well. “Don’t be raining on my parade this morning.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” He looks somber, but there’s an underlying note of something in his voice that has me narrowing my eyes.
“You’re happy,” I accuse.
“Excuse me?” Immediately, the tone is gone, replaced by his normal sardonic one.
“You are,” I tell him as surprise courses through me. “You’re actually happy for once.”
He sniffs but doesn’t say anything else, which means I’m right. The knowledge only makes me grin more widely. A happy Hudson can only be a good thing.
“Xavier held my hand last night,” Macy says, and now she’s smiling up at the ceiling she’s been contemplating so hard for the last couple of minutes.
“What?” I shoot up in bed. “When?”
“When we were walking back from the Boneyard.”
“How did I miss that?” I demand. “I was right there, wasn’t I?”
“You were one of the first to go through the portal, with Flint and Jaxon. Xavier and I were walking together at the back and…” She pauses, a dreamy smile coming over her face. “About halfway back to school, he told me to watch out for something in the tunnels and tugged my hand to pull me away. And then he just never let go.”
“Seriously? That’s great. I mean, if you like him?”
“I do, actually.” She rolls over on her bed and hugs her pillow to her chest. “He gives me butterflies. Not like the ‘oh my gosh, the most popular boy in school is in my room’ butterflies, but real butterflies. Because of who he is, not because of what he is.”
“Oh, Macy, that’s awesome. That’s how I feel about Jaxon, actually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Like it doesn’t matter that he’s this badass vamp. It only matters that he’s Jaxon.”
“You certainly know how to kill a mood, don’t you?” Hudson snarks from where he’s sitting on top of my dresser. “I think I need a dose of insulin after all that sweetness.”
“Bite me,” I answer with a roll of my eyes in his direction, and Macy grins.
“If you keep saying that, one of these days I’m going to take you up on that offer,” he tells me.
“I’ll worry about that after you actually get some teeth,” I shoot back.
“Wow. Looks like you don’t have that problem,” he tells me, all mock hurt. But there’s a glint of amusement in his eyes that he doesn’t even try to hide. “Maybe I’ll borrow some of yours. Sounds like you’ve got plenty of teeth to go around.”
“Yeah, I do.” I snap said teeth at him. “My gargoyle fangs may not be as badass as yours, but they get the job done. You should probably remember that.”