“Thanks,” I tell him with the nastiest glare I can muster. “You pushed me to tell you, and now you’re laughing at me. You suck.”
“I’m not laughing at you, Grace,” he manages to say between laughs. “I’m… Yeah, I can’t even lie with a straight face. I’m totally laughing at you.”
“You know, this may be funny to you, but if we don’t do well as a team, we don’t get the bloodstone. If we don’t get the bloodstone, we don’t find a way to free you and you’re stuck inside me forever until, you know, we both die. So I have no clue why you’re so amused.”
“I’m amused,” he answers with a shake of his head, “because you’re going to do fine.”
“You don’t know that—”
“I do know it, and you would, too, if you would just get out of your head for a minute and let yourself breathe.”
“I’m trying to get out of my damn head!” I fire back. “So sorry that I’m struggling with it, but it’s kind of hard to do with you in here demanding my attention all the time! It’s even harder to do when I can’t remember anything. I don’t know what I can do, so how can I have any faith in myself? How can I ‘breathe’?”
“Yeah, well, I know what you can do. I’m the one who was trapped with Gargoyle Grace for more than a hundred days, and I’m the one who remembers every damn minute of it. So listen to me, stop worrying, and just trust your instincts. You’re going to do great.”
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