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Summary
Chapter 46: I’ll Get You, and Your Little Dog Too
Grace doesn’t know what to say after Flint explains how he plans to hit on her, and reflects that if Jaxon wasn’t around she’d probably be interested. Flint breaks the tension when he gets a text message. He tells Grace urgently that something is happening elsewhere, and that the Order is on the move, which always means trouble. Jaxon and Flint run into the Order walking together in silence, and Grace starts to believe that something serious must be going on. There’s a huge fight happening downstairs between Jaxon and the wolf-shifters, and Jaxon is telekinetically throwing people and furniture around the room. A group of shifters converge on him, and the Order springs into action. A bloody fight ensues, until Grace intervenes to stop Jaxon from killing Cole, the shifter he was fighting. Jaxon doesn’t kill him, but he bites his neck and drains him almost dry. He tells the assembled shifters that “this is the only warning they get,” and pulls Grace out of the room.
Chapter 47: The First Bite Is The Deepest
Jaxon and Grace walk down the hall silently, and Grace struggles with whether to be afraid, furious, or curious. She doesn’t understand the warning Jaxon has just issued, and is horrified to have seen him almost kill someone right in front of her. He doesn’t stop dragging her forward until they reach his room, where he assures Grace he won’t hurt her. Grace tells him she knows, and that she knows he’s a vampire and telekinetic. Jaxon can’t understand why she isn’t afraid, and Grace tells him that she doesn’t feel frightened because he never loses control. The two gradually move closer together, and although Jaxon is concerned that Grace doesn’t know what she’s getting into, he can’t send her away. She reassures him that she wants him, and he suddenly bites her neck.
Chapter 48: Is That a Wooden Stake in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?
Grace is panicked at first, but then realizes that the bite is actually extremely pleasurable. She is suddenly overcome with desire as Jaxon drinks, pressing herself against him. She’s building toward a climax when he stops sucking and seals up the bite marks with a lick. Grace immediately feels relaxed and sleepy. Jaxon checks she is all right, and then gently kisses her. He tells her that he knows has been causing the earthquakes, but that it has never happened with anyone before her. The two kiss again, and Jaxon pulls Grace toward his room. The furniture is destroyed from Jaxon venting his frustration on it. They have a brief flirtatious exchange before kissing again, and Jaxon tells Grace he doesn’t want her anywhere near his mother, who gave him his facial scar.
Chapter 49: Eventually the World Breaks Everyone
Grace and Jaxon make out. Grace is enjoying his scent and feels unable to stop touching and kissing him. She breaks the kiss to tell him that he can talk to her about how he got the scar, and then quietly admits to her that he killed his brother Hudson. Grace is shocked, but knows he must have had a good reason to have done it. Jaxon tells her he feels terrible and that his parents and Lia blame him, but that he’d do it again if he had to. He explains to Grace that Hudson was the heir to the Vampire Throne, and that after Jaxon killed him he became the next in line. He describes Hudson’s thirst for power and his insistence on setting the vampires above all the other supernatural beings, especially shifters. Things between shifters and vampires have always been tense, and when his brother’s plans started sounding genocidal Jaxon knew he had to intervene. The issue was worsened by the fact that Jaxon had the magical power of persuasion. He was able to make anyone do anything he wanted, just by speaking to them. Jaxon murdered him and several of his followers, and—as he explains to Grace—now lives on a “razor thin tightrope of tension” trying to keep the peace between the shifters and the vampires. He looks disgusted with himself, but Grace kisses him to make him feel better.
Chapter 50: He Who Lives In Stone Towers Should Never Throw Dragons
Jaxon and Grace kiss deeply, pressing their bodies together. Grace thinks they are going to go further than kissing, and very much wants to. Jaxon pulls away, however, and tells her he needs to talk to her about her safety. He tells her that Cole was responsible for dropping the chandelier, and although he can’t prove it he thinks Flint was behind the other accidents Grace has had. Flint didn’t actually break her fall under the tree: Jaxon telepathically moved him underneath her. She thanks him, although she’s not sure how much she believes, and they resume kissing until her Uncle Finn pounds on the door. Finn is furious, and tells her that she has to get back to class immediately. As Grace leaves, she hears Finn begin to shout at Jaxon.
Analysis
The pacing of the novel has picked up significantly in these chapters. Rather than unfolding slowly, and taking a gradual exploration of the emotional lives of her characters, Wolff begins to race through plot developments and escalations of relationships as if Grace were running out of time. It's not just tensions between romantic partners that seem to be escalating, however. The enormous fight scene in the hallway of Katmere where Jaxon telekinetically throws other students around and almost kills Cole is an escalation of the tensions between vampires and shifters.
Fear plays an interesting role in this section of the novel. One could be excused for thinking that it would be completely reasonable for Grace to be terrified of every single person she had met at Katmere by this point. However, the characters who seem to feel the most fear in this book are actually the supernatural creatures who care for Grace. Jaxon does his best to stay away from her because of fear, and even characters like Flint seem more worried about her than concerned for their own wellbeing. Grace, by contrast, is more focused on how Jaxon feels about her than the fact that he is a vampire. It's unsurprising that Grace goes to Jaxon's room with him immediately after she's seen him almost kill someone, because her sense of judgment doesn't seem to be particularly well placed when it comes to her safety around him.
The gray area in Crave between desire, hunger, and sexuality becomes very apparent when Grace and Jaxon are alone after this point. They have been navigating through a treacly morass of sexual tension, fear and distrust ever since they have known each other. Given this, it seems fitting that when they finally have an uninterrupted moment alone, Jaxon bites Grace's neck and drains her blood instead of trying to sleep with her.
However, as in many supernatural romances, the bite is only painful for a moment, and actually becomes intensely sexually pleasurable after the initial shock. Grace is so aroused that she feels herself building towards an orgasm before Jaxon stops sucking and seals the bite marks. She's then thrown into an afterglow-like haze. As she seems relaxed and receptive, Jaxon chooses this moment to tell her that he is the cause of all the recent earthquakes. Grace makes him feel so strongly that she's making his telekinesis manifest without him being able to control it. Grace breaks the spell—and the make-out session that Jaxon tries to rekindle—by telling Jaxon that she needs to know how and why he got the scar on his face. He struggles to admit it, but finally reveals to her that it was actually him who killed his brother Hudson. Hudson was not the kind, benevolent figure that everyone imagined. He was a power-hungry maniac, who planned to use his position as Vampire King and his ability to magically control people to place vampires at the top of the social pyramid. He wanted a new world order where other supernaturals and humans were subservient to vampires.
Here the novel begins to explore the connection between desire and blood more deeply. The fact that Hudson was so evil that his own brother had to kill him still makes Jaxon feel a sense of horrible shame and remorse. Vampires like Jaxon and Hudson don’t get to choose their supernatural abilities, meaning that Hudson was born with the power to control others. However, he chose to use that power for evil ends, which was why Jaxon eventually had no choice but to try and stop him. As with many other things in Jaxon's life, the response other people have to this choice seems disproportionate given the circumstances. This is partially because some of the vampires still agree with Hudson's genocidal ideas that vampires should rule every other class of supernatural creature. It’s also because Hudson was his mother's favorite child, and Jaxon's murder of his brother has only deepened the rift between them. Jaxon's mother expressed her fury with Jaxon by physically scarring his face, so he would always carry a reminder with him that he spilled his brother's blood and then his mother spilled his in return. However, as Grace has previously said that she finds his scars to be “extremely sexy,” it doesn’t seem to have had quite the disfiguring effect his mother intended. Indeed, the fact that Grace finds it attractive actually draws another link between sexual desire and blood. The action of this section, primarily concerned with sex, blood and family, comes full circle when Grace's only parental figure himself comes and interrupts her one-one-one with Jaxon. It's implied that Grace and Jaxon are about to have sex, but Grace's uncle Finn bursts into the room and disrupts the moment before anything can happen.
