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Summary
Chapter 36: No Harm, All Foul
Grace confronts Jaxon in the hallway, where he's standing with Liam and Rafael. Despite his initial reluctance, Jaxon talks to her, expressing frustration and regret for the incident in his room. He insists that Grace should forget about their kiss and him, forcefully insisting that they can’t be together. Despite Grace's attempts to reconnect, Jaxon insists she stays away from him for her safety. He refuses to explain further, and when Grace steps closer to him, he vaults over the banister and drops several floors to escape.
Chapter 37: Don’t Ask the Question If You Can’t Handle the Answer
Grace is bewildered, especially because Jaxon isn’t hurt, and suddenly encounters Lia, who suggests she should go after Jaxon as quickly as possible. When Grace presses her, Lia admits that people are pressuring her to date Jaxon now that Hudson is dead, and Grace is briefly horrified before Lia reassures her that she couldn’t be less interested. Back in the room, Macy is relieved to see Grace but startled to see Lia. Lia advises Grace to rest, offering to bring her special tea the next day and quickly leaving. Grace tries to settle down, but wakes up in the night, restless. The bandage on her neck itches, and she removes it even though she knows she’s not supposed to. When she does, she reveals two small, evenly spaced punctures: the wound looks just like a vampire’s bite.
Chapter 38: Nothing Says “I Like You” Like a Fang to the Throat
Unable to sleep, Grace obsesses over the puncture wounds. She immediately suspects Jaxon, recalling his strange behavior. Determined to confront him, she searches for Jaxon but can’t find him anywhere, including in his room. Mekhi arrives, and Grace confronts him about the bite. Mekhi is horrified, but Grace is even more alarmed when he immediately refers to the punctures as “bites” too. He asks her if she remembers who did it, and she isn’t sure if he’s joking, but he presses her. He tells her it definitely wasn’t Jaxon, and lets it slip that Jaxon is “currently freaking the f*ck out” in his message inbox. Mekhi tells her that Jaxon has gone to the mountains, but won’t say any more about either that or the bite. Grace tries to force him to elaborate, but he refuses to budge. Finally, she asks him what made the marks, and he tells her that “sometimes the most obvious answer really is the right one.”
Chapter 39: There’s Never a Hallucinogen Around When You Need One
Mekhi escorts Grace back to her room, but she doesn’t know what to say to him after the conversation they’ve just had. Grace is both skeptical and overwhelmed, so she rebuffs Mekhi’s attempts to chat with her and the many, many texts Jaxon is sending. Macy lets them into her room, and Mekhi tells her that Grace knows the wound is a bite. Macy goes pale and asks Mekhi exactly how much Grace knows. Grace is furious, and Mekhi leaves. Grace then confronts Macy and tells her she’ll never speak to her again if Macy doesn’t explain what’s going on. Macy relents.
Macy confirms that vampires exist, and that Jaxon is one. She explains that Jaxon used his venom to save Grace's life during a recent injury, leading to the bite marks. Macy also reveals that every other student at the school is some sort of supernatural creature: she’s a witch, Flint is a dragon shifter, other students are vampires and wolf shifters. Macy is relieved to finally be able to share the truth about being a paranormal being, and also discloses that Grace “should have been one too.”
Chapter 40: Be Careful What You Witch For
Grace thinks Macy is messing her around, so Macy demonstrates her magical abilities by making Grace a cup of tea in midair. She explains that Grace's family has a history of witches and warlocks, and that Grace being human was a surprise to everyone. Grace has a million questions, and Macy tries to answer some. She tells Grace that Marise the nurse is also a vampire, and that a vampire’s venom can seal wounds. Jaxon had tried to fix her neck but had failed, and so Marise had to intervene in her capacity as a healer. The neat bitemarks are actually Marise’s, as she bit Grace to use her venom to dissolve the bigger clot Jaxon had made. Macy explains that Grace is lucky to be alive, as it’s hard for vampires to stop drinking blood when they start. Grace is overwhelmed and asks if they can get breakfast, and Macy agrees. She performs a spell on herself to speed up getting ready, and the two head out for the cafeteria.
Analysis
It’s clear by this point in Crave that Grace’s own desire to be understood and to make connections drives all of her actions. Therefore, when people around her are obviously skirting around a secret and hiding things from her, she’s understandably more frustrated than a less curious and straightforward person might be. When she discovers that the wounds that the nurse was so keen to cover up on her neck look just like a vampire bite, she is horrified and immediately starts to put the pieces together of all of the strange happenings at Katmere Academy. No one will give her a straight answer even when she shows them the “bite,” until Mekhi lets it slip that Grace is on the right track. Even he doesn’t overtly say it, however: instead, he ominously informs her that “[s]ometimes the most obvious answer really is the right one” After all of this, as soon as they both get back to their room Grace presents Macy with an ultimatum: tell her what’s really going on, or Grace will leave Katmere and never speak to her again. Macy has been bursting to tell her anyway, so it doesn’t take much to persuade her.
The revelation is a far bigger one than Grace could have ever guessed at. Having made sure that Grace has settled down and sitting comfortably, Macy explains that all of the things that go bump in the night that Grace has been reading about since she was a child are actually real. As Grace stares wide-eyed at her, Macy confirms that vampires exist and that Jaxon is one. She reveals that every other student at the school is some sort of supernatural creature, including herself. She's a witch, Uncle Finn is a warlock, and so was Grace’s own father. Flint is a dragon shifter, as are many of the other students at the school, including the ones who terrorized Grace by pushing her out into the night when she arrived. Macy explains also that there's a complicated issue with Grace's parentage, bringing up the novel’s motif of blood explicitly. No one is sure why Grace isn't a paranormal creature herself, given that her father was a witch. Part of the reason that so many of the students at the school have been looking at her as if she's an animal in a zoo is that it's extremely unusual for the child of a supernatural being to be born a human. Because of this, Grace’s very existence makes them nervous. Macy goes on to say that the reason that the school’s social groups are so fundamentally divided is because there is a very rigid caste system and hierarchy in between these types of supernatural beings.
In particular, there is a long-standing and serious tension between shifters and vampires, who both believe they should be on top of the power pyramid. Grace is absolutely flabbergasted, as she has only just begun to come to terms with the fact that her parents have passed away. Knowing that there was an entire other world going on behind her normal life, and that the future now can’t be anything like she expected it to be is almost too much to take. She was just starting to find her feet at Katmere, and now she faces having to undergo a total reevaluation of her identity and heritage. Grace has some experience in the recent past of receiving horrible news and needing to remain calm about it, but it appears that even she has a breaking point.
Importantly, we also begin to see the theme of supernatural powers as being linked to teenage struggles coming to the fore in this section. Previously, we'd seen literal rumblings of this given the proximity of the earthquakes to Jaxon's regular mood swings, but there hadn't actually been any direct connection drawn between supernatural creatures and teenage cliques. The rigidly divided social system at Katmere suddenly becomes a lot more understandable to Grace. Things make more sense now that she understands that some of the students drink blood, some turn into animals and some, like Macy, can make people's beds with a flick of the wrist.
