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Crave is a paranormal high school romance novel that takes place in the Alaskan wilderness near Denali. The story is narrated from the first-person perspective of 17-year-old Grace Foster, an apparently normal human teenager who has just lost both parents to a tragic car accident. Following the sudden death of her mom and dad, Grace abruptly learns she has to move to Fairbanks, Alaska. As she’s too young to live alone, she must enroll in Katmere Academy, a Gothic castle school where her Uncle Finn is the headmaster. Her bohemian cousin Macy is there to welcome her, and quickly begins trying to acclimate Grace into her new environment.
In Grace’s first hours at Katmere, she has an unexpected encounter with Jaxon Vega, an attractive and mercurial boy who tries to warn her about the school's dangers. Despite his unpleasant demeanor and attempts to intimidate her, Grace feels a strong attraction to him. Soon after she arrives, two male students attack her, dragging her out into the freezing Alaskan night. An unknown but powerful figure comes to the rescue, and although she’s shaken, she soon returns to trying to fit into her new classes and daydreaming about Jaxon. These fantasies are one of the few bright spots in this difficult time for Grace, as she struggles to come to terms with her parents’ death and with losing every aspect of the life she knew. On top of this, she finds herself facing worsening mishaps, including altitude sickness and a serious ankle injury during a snowball fight. Despite these obstacles, she quickly gets closer to Jaxon, to her cousin Macy, and to Flint, a friendly and handsome classmate. Grace can’t help but feel, however, that something very odd is going on below the surface at Katmere. Her suspicions are only heightened when on a visit to the library, she encounters a girl chanting to herself in a strange language. The girl introduces herself to Grace as Lia, and discloses that she was dating Jaxon’s brother Hudson Vega until his sudden death during the last school year. The more time Grace spends with Jaxon, the more oddities in his behavior she notices, including the occurrence of small earthquakes in his close vicinity. Increasingly inexplicable accidents start to happen around Grace, until a near-fatal incident where an earthquake shatters a window onto her prompts Macy to tell her the truth about her new life.
Katmere Academy, as it turns out, is a school for supernatural beings, including witches like Macy, vampires like Jaxon and Lia, dragon shifters like Flint, and wolf-shifters like the students who initially attacked Grace. As the only human at Katmere, Grace suddenly understands why she feelslt so out of place. She begins to learn about the complex dynamics and hierarchies among these groups, including discovering that Jaxon is not only a vampire, but the heir to the Vampire Kingdom. The plot thickens even further when Grace learns about the death of Jaxon's brother, Hudson. Hudson had magical abilities that allowed him to control people, and he intended to use them to install the vampires as the rulers of the supernatural and mortal worlds. Jaxon, who possesses the power of telekinesis, fought and killed him to prevent this from happening. Jaxon is now next in line to be the Vampire, but he struggles with both his own guilt and the blame his mother places on him for Hudson's death. Jaxon and Grace fall in love, despite the warnings of everyone around them and the escalating tension between vampire and shifter students. Flint and Lia, in particular, are involved in some noticeably odd incidents that Grace tries to dismiss.
It turns out her suspicions are warranted, however. The narrative then takes an even darker turn when Lia tricks Grace and Jaxon into drinking poisoned sedative tea. Grace wakes up restrained and disoriented in the maze of tunnels below Katmere, where Lia tells her three startling pieces of information: Grace isn’t just a human after all, Lia believes that Grace and Jaxon are “mates” and fated to be together, and that Grace has to be sacrificed in a ritual so that Lia can bring Hudson back to life. Jaxon and Flint burst onto the scene, and in a further twist, Flint reveals that he and the other dragon shifters have actually been plotting to kill Grace since she arrived at Katmere, in order to stop Lia from resurrecting Hudson. Jaxon and Flint throw themselves into a dramatic battle against each other and Lia. They stop her from casting her spell, and she disappears in a puff of ashy dust when Jaxon redirects the toxic smoke she has summoned back at her. Jaxon is injured, so Grace lets him drink her blood. This almost goes dangerously wrong, but both recover from their injuries and begin to resume some semblance of normalcy. Jaxon worries that the shifters will continue to make trouble if he and Grace stay together, but she doesn’t allow him to walk away from the relationship. They admit their love for each other, and Grace starts to wonder if she really might be Jaxon’s mate.
Their happiness is short-lived, however; soon after this, Jaxon’s presumed-dead brother Hudson appears in front of them, in a cloud of the same thick black smoke from Lia’s spell. He swings a sword at Jaxon, but Grace steps in front of the blade. The narrative then shifts to Jaxon’s perspective, and we learn that Grace is indeed not human: she is a gargoyle, and she instinctively turned herself to stone in order to block the sword and protect Jaxon. She seems to be stuck in this state, and Jaxon is frantic with worry, but Grace’s uncle and two other members of staff assure him that she’s remaining “petrified” on purpose. Jaxon, however, believes she’s petrified because of something Hudson is doing, and the novel ends with him vowing to unfreeze her or die trying.
