He places a hand over his heart in mock horror. “You know what? You say that with a lot of conviction. I actually think you mean it.” Contrarily, his grin only gets bigger.
“I do mean it. Want to test me out?”
“No way. I was in the hallway the day you turned to stone. I saw what happened to Hudson,” Flint says. “You’ve become a total badass, Grace.”
“Excuse me, but I have always been a badass. You were just too busy trying to kill me to notice.” It’s pretty hard to look down your nose at someone taller than you, but here, in this moment with Flint, I’m proud to say I manage it.
“I’m noticing now.” He waggles his brows. “And I definitely like it.”
I sigh. “Yeah, well, don’t like it too much. This”—I gesture back and forth between the two of us—“is still a probationary thing. So don’t mess it up.”
He puts his hands on his hips, his stance wide like he’s bracing for a blow he’s totally willing to take. “I won’t,” he says. And he sounds surprisingly serious.
I hold his gaze for a minute and then nod, the smile I’ve been fighting since I saw him again finally crinkling my eyes. “Good. Now, can we please get back to the project? Or are we going to stand out here talking about our feelings all day?”
“Wow.” He gives me a fake wide-eyed look. “Turn a girl into a gargoyle and suddenly she’s all kinds of stone-coldhearted.”
“Wow.” I return his look with one of my own. “Turn a boy into a dragon and suddenly he’s all kinds of ridiculous.”
“That’s not my dragon, baby. That’s all me.”
I roll my eyes but can’t stop myself from grinning at his goofiness. It’s really good to be able to joke with him again. “I hate to break it to you, baby, but I’m pretty sure it’s the both of you.”
Flint pretends to swoon, and I take the opportunity to yank the list of photography subjects out of his hands. I’m smart enough to know if I don’t get the boy on task soon, there’s no way we’re going to finish this. And since I can use all the points I can get, we really, really should start moving.
Except, as I peruse the list again—this time with a much clearer head—I realize that we’ve got a giant problem. “Some of the things he wants us to take pictures of are way up high. There’s no way we’ll be able to get a picture of them good enough to use for research.”
But Flint just winks at me, that wicked grin of his on full display. “You do remember dragons can fly, right?”
Oh, hell no. I shake my head. “I’m sorry, but our tree of trust is still just a twig. No way am I letting you take me up into the sky.”
He laughs. “Fine, spoilsport. We’ll focus on the easy ones today. But one of these days soon, I’m totally taking you flying.”
I shiver and almost remind him he has taken me flying before—in his talons—but I don’t want to break our newfound truce. “That’ll take some convincing.”
“I live to serve, my lady,” he says as he drops into an elaborate bow, and I can’t help but laugh. He is so ridiculous that it’s hard to take him seriously.
I jokingly try to shove his shoulder, but damn, maybe he’s the gargoyle here. He’s definitely hard enough to be made of stone. “Come on, give me your phone and let’s get started, you big dork,” I joke, and Flint quickly hands me his cell. But as I turn around, I find Jaxon watching us with eyes that have turned to flat black ice.
12
#FactionFightClub
“Finished with class already?” Jaxon asks, looking at me with a vague hint of what-the-fuck.
“Oh, no.” I take a sizable step away from Flint—not because Jaxon has said or done anything to make me uncomfortable but because I can only imagine how I’d feel if I were just walking around the school and found him cuddled up with a super-hot, super-charming dragon. No matter how innocent it was. “It’s just the class is taking a midterm, and Flint is exempt, so the teacher volunteered him to help me with an outside project I can do for the same points.”
Flint casually leans a massive shoulder against the stone wall, crossing his arms and ankles as though he hasn’t a care in the world. Jaxon’s gaze stays steady on me.
“That’s awesome. Less of that makeup work you were worried about, right?” Jaxon asks with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. Then again, I’m probably being paranoid.
“Exactly. I just hope all the teachers are as cool as Mr. Damasen.”
“Damasen?” Jaxon repeats with a startled bark of laughter. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone refer to him as cool.”
“Right?” Flint interjects. “I told her the same thing. The man’s a monster.”
Jaxon doesn’t answer him. In fact, he doesn’t even look at him. Which isn’t awkward at all.
“Well, I liked him. I mean, sure, he talks really loudly, but I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“He’s a giant.”
“I know, right?” My eyes widen as I picture the architecture teacher. “I think he’s the largest person I’ve ever seen.”
“Because he’s a giant,” Jaxon reiterates, and this time it’s impossible to miss the emphasis he puts on the last word.
“Wait a minute.” I can feel my mind stretching in an effort to internalize what he’s saying. “When you say ‘giant’…you don’t mean ‘big human.’ You mean…”
“Giant.” The remaining coldness melts from his eyes and is replaced by an amused warmth that finally has the tension leaking from my shoulders.
“Like the whole ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman’ thing… That kind of giant?”
“More like the I-eat-babies kind of giant, but yeah. I guess the Jack and the Beanstalk reference works.”
“Really?” I shake my head as I try to wrap my mind around this new revelation.
“Seriously, Grace,” Flint reiterates. “Damasen’s a giant. Has a whole stack of bones from problem students in his apartment to prove it.”
My head whips around to Flint. “What?”
“But don’t worry,” he continues. “Foster doesn’t let him eat any of the good students, so you should be fine.”
Flint puts a valiant effort into keeping a straight face as I stare at him in horror, but in the end, he can’t do it. He starts to grin, but the moment I narrow my eyes at him, the grin turns into a full-blown belly laugh.