payment page
Summary
Chapter 62: Where There’s Smoke, There’s a Dead Vampire
Grace opens her mouth wider, and the snake of smoke leaves Jaxon and zooms toward her. Jaxon yells out in horror, and uses his powers to push Grace to the side. He starts to use his telekinesis to make a vacuum between his hands, sucking everything in the room into it. The smoke starts to edge toward him, and is eventually sucked into the vacuum. Once it’s all in there, Jaxon roars in triumph and fires the orb straight at Lia. Instead of being angry, she looks gratefully at Jaxon and thanks him for killing her. Then she explodes into dust. Jaxon and Grace crawl toward each other, but Jaxon is very weak. Grace opens one of the wounds on her arm to feed him blood, and Jaxon begins to feed. He quickly takes too much blood, and Grace passes out once again.
Chapter 63: A Bite to Remember
Grace comes to startled wakefulness in the infirmary at Katmere, confused but gradually recalling the recent events. Nurse Alma informs her that she and Jaxon have been recuperating for two days. Jaxon, who has not left her side, is visibly worn-down but relieved to see Grace awake. He tells her he believes the best thing to do is for them to break up, as she has almost died so many times while they have been together. He feels like the fact that he almost drained her on the altar should be the last straw. Grace abjectly refuses, and the two exchange “I love you”s. Jaxon is still very uneasy, but is happy that Grace wants him enough to fight for him.
Chapter 64: All's Well that Ends with Marshmallows
Grace begs Jaxon to let her walk around a little. He initially refuses, as he worries she’s going to disrupt her recovery from all the injuries Lia and Flint gave her, but eventually gives in. He helps her dress, and disappears briefly before returning with a thermos. The two walk around outside in the grounds, only Grace enjoying the hot chocolate as vampires can’t partake. Jaxon explains that he can’t eat or drink anything but blood and water, and that generally he lives on the animal blood which the school serves its vampire students. Drinking human blood makes him stronger, but also makes him allergic to sunlight for several days afterward. The pair begin to build a snowman, and Grace hopes that she’ll get at least a little time to enjoy Jaxon’s company.
Chapter 65: Why Can’t a Girl Just Have an Ordinary HEA These Days?
Grace is returning to a semblance of normalcy at Katmere Academy after all of the previous traumatic events. She starts her day by discussing her enormous pile of homework with Jaxon and the Order in the cafeteria. She also notes the irony of having to do makeup work despite her recent near-death experience: Katmere’s academic rigor is no joke. Grace is eating brown sugar Pop-Tarts, while Jaxon and the other vampires drink elk blood, provided by the school. Jaxon's intimidating reputation has grown, and most students are keeping their distance from him. Grace jokingly suggests he could mitigate this by smiling more, but he doesn’t seem to be taking her advice. Grace wonders if there really was anything to Lia’s statement about them being “mates,” but decides it’s too soon to bring it up with Jaxon. Things have been relatively quiet: even when they walk past Flint, Grace just acknowledges him with a nod.
The peace is ruptured as Jaxon and Grace are about to part ways for class. A coil of black smoke materializes, and Hudson Vega appears, wielding a broadsword and aiming it at Jaxon's head. In a split-second decision, Grace tries to save Jaxon by pulling him towards her and positioning herself in the path of the oncoming sword. The chapter ends on a cliffhanger with Grace bracing for the impact of the sword.
Chapter 0: Jaxon
The novel’s perspective switches to Jaxon’s point of view. As the sword connected with her, Grace turned into a stone statue-like figure. This revealed the nature of her supernatural powers: she’s a gargoyle. However, she hasn’t yet reverted to her human form, and Jaxon is frantic with worry.
Jaxon confronts Finn, demanding answers about Grace's transformation. Finn, Dr. Veracruz, and Amka struggle to provide a solution for the problem. Gargoyles are rare, and there’s little existing information about a transformation this long. Jaxon vehemently refuses to accept the possibility that Grace might not return. Dr. Veracruz tells Jaxon flatly that everything she knows about gargoyles states that Grace can transform back on her own. This begins a heated debate about whether she is consciously choosing to remain “petrified” or if she is trapped. Jaxon clings to the belief that Hudson is somehow influencing her condition, denying the idea that Grace would willingly remain a stone. Jaxon vows to find a way to separate Grace from Hudson’s influence, adamant that her love for him will bring her back. The novel concludes with Jaxon swearing an oath, promising Grace that he will stop Hudson and wait for her return, no matter what it takes.
Analysis
Grace is seriously caught between a rock and a hard place at the beginning of this final section. She's forced to choose between her own physical safety—knowing that inhaling the smoke can't be good for her, as it was what Lia wanted—and watching another loved one die. Jaxon, equally unwilling to see Grace die, is forced to exhibit more self-control than he has ever shown before to harness his powers and telekinetically move the smoke away from her. As usual, his anger, frustration, and worry for Grace manifest as seismic activity, shaking and crumbling the walls of the tunnel.
This section draws a parallel between how Jaxon gains energy and life force, and how he prevents the sinister black smoke from killing Grace. He’s a being of control, using both physical and mental forces to push and pull things and people around him. Trying to save his life, Grace opens her mouth, attempting to breathe the smoke in. In doing so, she symbolically exposes her throat to it. Jaxon, a vampire who bites throats and drains blood—and who is particularly interested in and territorial about Grace’s throat—reacts instantly to this incursion. He stops the smoke from “entering” Grace in the same way he “enters” her. In order to do this, he telekinetically creates a suction force so strong that he draws the smoke in and compresses it. However, instead of gaining power from this act as he would from sucking blood, it drains him physically. The effort is so exhausting that he collapses, as this psychic feat has totally depleted him of energy. The only thing Grace can think of to save him is to provoke him to bite her in return. Allowing Jaxon to drink from her restores his energy balance but puts her in grave physical danger.
Lia’s death is a complicated event, because she’s so obviously out of her mind with grief, and because Jaxon still feels so guilty for what he did to Hudson and to her. Lia blames Jaxon for Hudson's death, and Jaxon resents this but also feels incredibly guilty for hurting her. As they were best friends before Jaxon killed Hudson, Lia would have been Jaxon's main source of comfort if the circumstances were different. In this small moment, the reader sees Lia as she might have been before Hudson’s death. After Jaxon hits her with the smoke projectile, she looks at him gently and thanks him for putting her out of her misery. It's a rare moment of true tenderness from a character who has previously seemed only either falsely kind and disingenuous, or cruel and heartless
After Jaxon nearly ends their relationship when Grace wakes up in the hospital—telling her he has endangered her too much by being with him—it seems almost impossibly fast how things go back to some semblance of normalcy. However, at Katmere Academy, all regular interpretations of normalcy have already flown out the window. After all these near-death experiences, Jaxon and Grace are finally able to exchange "I love you's," and Jaxon even relents in his tendency to control the situation by allowing her to walk around outside on the grounds, as long as he accompanies her. It's the first time they've been alone together without a buildup of extreme erotic tension, and also the only time they are alone together without being interrupted by someone else joining them or Jaxon disappearing. It seems, for a brief moment, that the pair might actually be able to have some interactions that involve just the two of them. As Grace is moving on from her grief, and Jaxon is working through more of his own feelings of guilt and shame after the incident in the basement, the other ghosts haunting them and interrupting their happiness are starting to fade away.
However, in classic Grace and Jaxon fashion, this is not actually how things end. Somebody has to make an abrupt and inexplicable exit. A coil of black smoke materializes, and in a shocking twist, Hudson Vega himself appears, swinging the broadsword he is holding at Jaxon's head. Grace, stepping in front of Jaxon, realizes that she wasn't meant to be the damsel in distress in his story; she was meant to be the hero of his. This is an interesting role reversal, showing Grace's journey towards self-understanding and her refusal to remain a passive participant in tragic events.
The shift in the novel's final chapters is jarring, as is the moment where the blow glances off the newly- turned-to-stone, newly-discovered-gargoyle Grace. Unlike Grace's calm, often funny diction in previous chapters, Jaxon's narrative voice is full of fury, expletives, and confusion. Jaxon, who is used to being in control of everything in his life, is incredibly frustrated and frightened that his girlfriend has turned into a statue and he has no idea how to turn her back. Even though everybody around him tells him that gargoyles can turn from stone into their human forms and back at will, Jaxon refuses to believe that this is true. He insists that the reason Grace remains a gargoyle must be to protect him. He thinks that Hudson is still somehow hanging around and that Grace is remaining in her gargoyle form for his safety. He ends the novel by swearing that he'll find a way to turn her back to her soft, human form. It's the book's final irony that Jaxon —who pulled so many disappearing acts in the first half of Crave that it began to seem almost ridiculous—is left blinking in disbelief when his partner disappears in front of his eyes.
