Crush

I came to Crush straight from Crave because that first book left Grace as a statue and I needed to know what happened next. Tracy Wolff published it with Entangled: Teen in 2020, a 704 page hardcover that is book two in the Crave series. I read it over a few nights with a pencil nearby because there are a lot of names and rules to keep track of. The short version is that Grace wakes up after months frozen in stone, learns she is a gargoyle, and finds out Hudson Vega has been stuck inside her head the whole time. The rest is her trying to get him out without getting herself killed by the Vampire Court.

Grace narrates again, and she sounds lost in a way that felt true to me. She goes to sleep shielding Jaxon from a sword and wakes up walking the halls of Katmere Academy with no memory of the time between. Her uncle Finn, who runs the school, looks shocked to see her moving. Jaxon grabs her like he cannot believe she is warm again. They tell her the date is March 5. She has been stone for almost four months. She missed winter. She missed classes. She missed whatever Hudson did or did not do while she was gone. She keeps asking simple questions and getting careful answers, and that gap between what she asks and what people tell her drives most of the early chapters.

Waking up stone

The gargoyle reveal lands fast. Macy, her cousin and a witch, shows her photos of what she looked like while she was frozen. Short curling horns. Big wings. Small claws. Stone skin. Grace is the first gargoyle in about a thousand years, so nobody at Katmere really knows how to help her. Finn brings in old books. The nurse checks her over. Teachers stare. Kids whisper. Grace tries to act normal and go back to meals and homework, but her body feels different. She is stronger. She heals faster. She feels cold in a new way, like stone sits just under her skin waiting to come out.

What I liked here is how Wolff lets Grace be upset about more than powers. Grace lost her parents before book one. She lost months of her own life between books. She lost trust in her memory. She will reach for a fact and find nothing there. One morning she wakes up with blood on her clothes that is not hers. Another time she wakes up in the witches casting tower with no idea how she got there. Security footage later shows her using a strange persuasive voice on the school librarian to steal a ceremonial blade. She watches herself on video and does not recognize the girl talking. That scared me more than any fight scene, because it is about losing control of yourself in front of people who already fear you.

The explanation, when it comes, reframes the whole book. Hudson Vega, Jaxon brother, the vampire everyone said died in book one, did not vanish when Lia tried her rite. Part of him ended up inside Grace when she turned to stone to stop his sword. He has been riding along in her mind ever since. He can take over her body during blackouts. He sees what she sees. He talks to her when no one else can hear him. Grace tells Jaxon and Finn, and suddenly every odd thing about her return makes a cold kind of sense. The blood. The theft. The missing time. She is not sick. She is sharing headspace with someone the school still calls a monster.

Hudson in my head

Hudson as a voice is the best part of Crush for me, and also the part that will annoy some readers. He is sarcastic and sharp and constantly commenting on what Grace does. He teases her about food. He criticizes how she flies. He pushes her to stand up for herself with teachers and with Jaxon. At first Grace tries to shut him out. She argues with empty air in the shower. She tells him to leave. He answers that he has nowhere to go. Slowly, because they are stuck together, they start trading real facts. He tells her bits about growing up as heir with Jaxon. She tells him about San Diego and her parents and how much she misses normal school drama.

I believed the slow thaw more than I expected. Hudson claims he was not trying to put vampires above everyone else out of cruelty, but because he saw a war coming and thought hard rule was the only way to stop it. You can read that as an excuse, and a lot of characters do. Grace starts to hear grief under the jokes. He lost years. He lost his family. He lost his name. He has been living off scraps of energy from Grace and Jaxon mating bond, which is draining both of them without Grace knowing at first. That detail matters later. For now, it means every sweet scene between Grace and Jaxon feeds the third person in the room. Grace feels guilty about that even though she did not choose it.

Jaxon struggles here, and I felt for him while also getting frustrated with him. He loves Grace. He carried her through snow and waited by her stone form. But he hates Hudson so deeply that he can barely look at Grace without hearing his brother. He gets quiet. He pulls back. He tries to protect her by keeping secrets again, which is exactly what hurt them in book one. Grace wants comfort and plain talk. Jaxon gives her worried looks and rules. Hudson gives her jokes and blunt advice. You can see why her attention shifts even before anything physical happens. I did not love every banter exchange, since some go on a bit long, but the pull felt human. When you are scared and someone talks to you straight, you listen, even if his past is dark.

Learning to fly

Katmere still feels like a school in the middle chapters, which helped me stay with a long book. Grace goes to classes. She eats with Macy and Flint. Flint, the dragon shifter who was like a brother in book one, stays close and funny. Macy tries to help Grace practice shifting without breaking furniture. Grace learns she can turn parts of herself to stone at will. She can take hits that would break a human. She is immune to a lot of magic, which surprises the witches. Old lore says gargoyles were made to keep balance between groups, to step in when one side got too strong. That is why the Vampire Court watches her so closely. A living balancer changes every plan they have.

Flying takes a while, and I appreciated that Wolff does not let Grace master it in one lesson. Her wings are heavy. Her landings are bad. She scrapes her hands. She gets winded. Hudson coaches from inside, telling her when to tuck and when to push. There is a scene on a cold ridge where she finally stays up for more than a few seconds and laughs out loud from shock. It is a small win in a book full of councils and threats, and I needed it. Her gargoyle senses also pick up things others miss. She hears stone hum in tunnels. She feels old magic in walls. One thread I wish got more time is her link to another old gargoyle voice she mistakes for instinct. It pays off near the end, but early on it reads as vague gut feelings. A bit more grounding there would have helped.

The trip to the Bloodletter breaks up the school routine. Jaxon carries Grace about five hundred miles through Alaska wilderness to see the ancient vampire who raised him. The Bloodletter is blunt and strange and not interested in comfort. She teaches Grace how to build a mental wall to wall off Hudson so he cannot grab control as easily. The image Wolff uses is simple, bricks and doors inside the mind, and Grace has to practice daily or it slips. The Bloodletter also lays out what it will take to pull Hudson out of Grace and strip his vampire strength so he cannot hurt others. Five things. An alpha werewolf eyetooth. A moonstone talisman. A bloodstone from a born vampire. A whole dragon bone. A heartstone held by a creature called the Unkillable Beast. It sounds impossible, which is the point. Grace agrees anyway because living split in two is wearing her down.

Ludares games

The Ludares tournament gives the middle a spine. It is Katmere yearly contest, part sport and part magic test, played through portals with teams using their gifts. The prize this year includes a bloodstone, one of the five items Grace needs. So Grace team has to win. Her group includes Jaxon, Flint, Macy, and others like Mekhi and Xavier and Cole, though loyalties shift as the book goes. Matches are rough. Players get thrown through gates. Weather changes mid game. Spells misfire. Grace uses flight and stone skin and quick thinking more than raw power, since she is still new. Hudson feeds her tips mid play, which feels like cheating and also like survival. I am not usually a big sports section reader, but these games moved fast and showed how each species fights. Witches link spells. Wolves run in packs and hit hard. Dragons bring heat. Vampires bring speed. Grace brings the one thing nobody can plan for, since magic slides off her.

Winning comes at a cost. King Cyrus and Queen Delilah, Jaxon and Hudson parents, arrive with the full Circle, the ruling group over paranormals. They watch every match. They smile in ways that do not reach their eyes. After the win, the group sneaks to the Dragon Boneyard, a cavern full of old dragon remains, to claim a small bone for the spell. Guards jump them on the way out. One guard rips into Mekhi throat. Grace saves him by scraping powder from her own horn and packing it into the wound while Hudson talks her through it. It is gross and vivid and very gargoyle, healing with stone. Flint stands guard. Macy holds light. Jaxon holds the line. For a moment they work like a real team instead of rival factions. Then politics crash back in. Grace wants to free Hudson but keep his powers intact because she has started to trust him. The others vote to strip him. She loses that argument, and it stings because she is the one who has lived with him.

The Circle makes its move right after. Queen Delilah announces they will take Grace to the Vampire Court in London. Grace knows enough by now to know that trip would end with her caged or used. Hudson tells her about an old law. Gargoyles have a right to a seat on the Circle. She can demand a Trial to claim it. So she does, in front of everyone, voice shaking. Cyrus has to agree. They set the Trial for two days later. It is brave and reckless, very Grace. She buys time but paints a bigger target on herself. Finn tries to prepare her. Jaxon tries to talk her out of it. Macy just hugs her hard and starts packing supplies.

The Beast and the break

The quest for the heartstone is the darkest stretch. The team flies to a volcanic island that feels wrong from the air, all heat and ash and old chains. The Unkillable Beast lives there, something nobody has beaten. Xavier, a werewolf on the team, jumps in front of Macy when the Beast strikes and dies on the spot. I had to put the book down for a minute there. Xavier had been steady and kind, and Macy scream stayed with me. Grace gets close enough to see the truth. The Beast is not a beast at all. It is the last gargoyle besides Grace, chained for centuries, mad with pain, immune to magic just like her. The heartstone they came to take is its actual stone heart. Grace refuses to cut it out. She promises the chained gargoyle she will come back. Macy gets the survivors home with transport magic, but Xavier body does not come through whole and is lost. The grief on campus after feels heavy and real. Classes pause. Kids cry in halls. Nobody pretends a game prize was worth that price.

Then the bond breaks. Cole, the alpha wolf, corners Grace and Jaxon and reads aloud a spell to sever a mating bond, one Jaxon once got from the Bloodletter and threw away. The words tear something deep. Grace describes pain like ice and fire at once. Jaxon drops. Both are left hollow and weak. Jaxon is too spent to fight in the Trial. Grace nearly gives up. She sits on the floor and cannot get air. What pulls her back is Hudson voice, rough and urgent, telling her she is stronger than this and refusing to let her quit. He admits what he did. He moved all his power into her and hid it inside her memory of her mother encouraging smile, leaving himself mortal so she could have a chance. I found that reveal moving even though it leans big. He gave up the one thing that made him feared to give her a shot at living.

The Trial itself is brutal. Grace walks into an arena alone against eight opponents in a version of Ludares with no safety rules for her. They beat her. Cole chokes her on the ground. Others pile on. She shifts one knee to stone and drives it up into Cole to break his hold. She lets magic hit her and pours it back out bigger. She moves rivals off the field. She carries the burning comet ball over the line to win while the crowd goes silent. Cyrus answers victory by sinking his fangs into her neck and giving her his eternal bite, a venom nobody has survived. Hudson, now in a real body but mortal, drags her away and tears the arena apart in rage. Jaxon piles stones over her in a granite grave and prays her gargoyle healing will take. She pulls the stone into herself, breath by breath, until her eyes open. She gives Hudson powers back, saying he could have crushed everyone but held back. She tells Jaxon she loves him. Then Hudson speaks from the side, claiming Grace as his mate after months stuck together on another plane while her bond with Jaxon thinned. The book stops there, with two brothers and one girl breathing hard in the wreckage.

What held and what slipped

Crush worked best for me when it stayed close to Grace body and choices. Stone skin. Lost time. A voice that will not leave. Learning to fly while grieving a friend. Those parts felt physical and specific. The banter with Hudson carried long chapters that could have dragged. The side cast got moments that mattered, especially Macy and Flint and Mekhi, though I wanted more Flint point of view when he had to choose between dragons and Grace. The politics stayed a bit blurry for me. The Circle wants control. The Court wants Grace. Cyrus and Delilah are cold and cruel. Clear enough, but the laws and seats and Trials pile up fast. I sometimes lost track of who could order whom to do what.

Length is fair to name. At 704 pages, the middle sags between games and quests, with a few training scenes that repeat the same beat of Grace failing then almost getting it. The love triangle will frustrate readers who want Grace to pick and stick. She does not choose here so much as survive, and the final mate claim will upset Jaxon fans. I also wish the Bloodletter rules were shown more than told. Five items is a lot to hold in mind, and two of them get found quickly while others wait for later books. Still, I turned pages fast at the end because the cost felt real. Xavier stays dead. The bond stays broken. Grace lives but carries venom memory in her bones. If you liked Crave for snow and blood and big feeling, Crush gives you more of that with higher stakes. Read Crave first. You will be lost without it, since this sequel starts in the wreckage of that cliffhanger and never slows to explain twice.