“Why do you always get the glamour, and I always have to look like this?” I ask, waving a hand in front of my face.
“Because you have the gorgeous hair. And you look fine. Honest.”
She wiggles her hands in front of her face and chants a few words under her breath, and suddenly her hair is dry and her face looks a little brighter, a little smoother, a little more beautiful.
“You’re disgusting,” I tell her.
“Fine, fine, fine.” She rolls her eyes. “Come here and I’ll do one on you.”
Excitement flutters in my chest. “Really?”
“Really. I would have done one before, but you never seemed interested. It’s easy-peasy.”
Normally, I’m not interested—I’m pretty resigned to my cute-on-a-good-day looks. But after everything that’s already happened with Hudson and what I’m afraid is still to come once Hudson and Jaxon are back in the same room together, I could use the extra armor.
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 na?ve 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?