“Oh no,” Macy says after swiping onto my messaging app. “They’re from Jaxon. Oh no…”
“What’s wrong?” I demand, forgetting about evidence as I all but leap across the room. “Did I hurt him? Is this his blood?”
“No, you didn’t hurt him.”
Relief whips through me so fast that I go a little light-headed. Still, it’s obvious from her face that Jaxon had something awful to tell me. “What?” I finally whisper when the silence between us gets to be too much to bear. “What happened?”
She doesn’t look at me, instead scrolling up and down as though she wants to be certain she read the messages correctly. “He texted to apologize for missing breakfast. He’s in my father’s office.”
“Why is he there?” I ask, dread pooling in my stomach even before Macy looks up from the phone with haunted eyes.
“Because Cole was attacked last night. It looks like he’ll be okay after a day or two in the infirmary, but…” She takes a deep breath. “Someone drained him of a whole lot of blood, Grace.”
19
Caught Red-Handed
“Cole?” I whisper, my hand going to my throat at the mention of the alpha werewolf.
Macy answers grimly, “Cole.”
“I couldn’t have.” I glance down at my blood-streaked hands with a new kind of horror. “I wouldn’t have.”
I think, until this very moment, I was holding out for this being some kind of horrible feeding accident with Jaxon. Like, maybe this actually was my blood because I’d gone to his room last night and he’d bitten into an artery or something and then sealed it up like he did last time, after the flying-glass incident.
I mean, of course, if I’m being reasonable, I know Jaxon would never be careless enough to bite into an artery of mine to begin with. He definitely wouldn’t leave me lying in bed, drenched in my own blood. And he sure as hell wouldn’t drop me into a sleep so deep that trying to get out of it felt like what I imagine surfacing from a coma would. But still, I think I would rather have all those things be true than to find out that this is another person’s blood I’m covered in. And that I might have been the one spilling it.
“I know you wouldn’t do anything to Cole,” Macy soothes, but the look in her eyes says otherwise.
Then again, the look in my eyes probably does, too. Because while I can’t imagine under what circumstances I would decide to attack an alpha werewolf—and then actually win the fight—I also can’t deny that it is a hell of a coincidence that I woke up covered in blood the morning after Cole lost a lot of blood in an attack. Oh, and since it happened my first night back, that only ups the coincidence factor.
For me to try to believe that I had nothing to do with what happened to Cole—when even Macy says things like this don’t happen at Katmere Academy—involves telling myself a lie of massive proportions.
And I’m a terrible liar.
“We need to call your dad,” I whisper. “We need to tell him everything.”
Macy hesitates, then says on a breath, “I know.” She makes no move to call her dad or anyone else, though. “But what are we going to say to him? This is serious, Grace.”
“I know it is! That’s why we have to tell him.” My mind is racing from one possible scenario to another as I pace the room.
“You can’t beat an alpha werewolf,” Macy says. “That’s why this doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know it doesn’t. Why would I hurt Cole in the first place? And if I did, why can’t I remember anything?” I walk to the sink. Evidence or no evidence, now that I know for sure that this isn’t my blood, I can’t stand having it on me for one more second.
“Okay, so let’s be logical about this,” Macy says, coming up behind me cautiously. “What do you remember about last night? Do you even remember leaving the room?”
“Yeah, of course,” I answer as I douse myself in soap and water. “I couldn’t sleep, so I left the room around two.”
I glance in the mirror and realize that there are a couple of drops of blood on my cheek as well. And that’s when I almost lose it. That’s when I almost forget about trying to be calm and am tempted to just scream my goddamn head off.
But screaming will only draw attention to the mess I’m in, attention neither Macy, nor I, is currently equipped to deal with. So I force myself to swallow down my horror as I scrub my face over and over. I have this sick feeling I’m never going to feel clean again.