I feel bad for him sometimes. Maybe that’s why, last night, I thought that maybe he wasn’t quite the enemy I’d been afraid he would be. Maybe that’s why—
“Could you just stop?” Hudson whispers, and he looks weaker and more sickly than I have ever seen him. “Not forever, but just for a few minutes. Could you please just stop?”
46
Gargoyles Need a
Little Glamour, Too
“Stop what?” I ask, baffled, as he turns away.
His shoulders sag.
“Hudson?” I prompt when he doesn’t answer, but he just shakes his head as he walks over to the window so he can look out at the snow. “Stop what?”
He laughs, but it’s not his normal sarcastic laugh. Instead, it’s just…sad. “The fact that you don’t know says everything.”
I’m not sure how to respond to that, so I don’t say anything. Silence billows around us like a piece of the shiny tissue paper my mom always wrapped my presents in—weightless and so, so fragile—and the longer it goes on, the more I’m afraid to break it. The more I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll also break the weird truce that Hudson and I have had going on for the last two days.
And if I do, what happens then?
Thankfully, Macy comes to the rescue—as usual. At nine forty-five, a full fifteen minutes before I have to meet Jaxon at the cafeteria, she comes bopping out of the bathroom looking a million times better than when she went in.
“Give me five minutes to find my shoes and do a quick glamour, and we can be on our way,” she says as she walks to her closet.
“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 naïve by pointing out what he