So maybe the curse was meant to kill him on his eighteenth birthday, but in many ways, Grey felt like his life had already ended. In so many ways, he’d already experienced a kind of death: the death of himself. The death of whatever he might once have had inside him, the freedom to be kind, the freedom to be a friend, the freedom to love with abandon and without fear. In so many ways—with every single passing day that he lived like this, keeping everyone at bay, going days without saying a single word to another soul—Grey didn’t really count himself as one of the living. In so many ways, he was fully and without question, the beast his father said he was.

He heard Leo sigh and mutter something in French, and after a moment both he and Rahul walked off back to their table. They’d given up on him.

Grey’s eyes stole across the large hall to Jaya again, to the pendant he saw faintly twinkling at him in the light, as if it were able to read the tenor of his thoughts. If he stole it, perhaps returned it to its rightful place in the temple in Mysuru, would it keep the curse at bay? Or had the ending to his story already been written, long before he was born?

Jaya

They’d just gotten their waffles—blueberry for Daphne Elizabeth, strawberries and cream for Jaya—when she saw them. Caterina and Alaric.

Daphne Elizabeth had been in the middle of telling her about the annual fall trip to Aspen, when everyone in their class went shopping together. Apparently, last year Alaric had face-planted in the snow on the way back to the bus, and his dad had sued the city unsuccessfully. This year Alaric’s dad had reserved a company to come out the day of the trip and shovel all the snow within fifty feet of anywhere Alaric might go. Basically the whole town.

“Alaric’s dad is just so over-the-top protective,” Daphne Elizabeth said, sighing. “Must be nice to have parents who actually give a shit,” she added quietly.

Jaya made the appropriate sympathetic noises, though her eyes surreptitiously followed the couple. Daphne Elizabeth hadn’t noticed them yet, and she wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible.

Caterina and Alaric wore the same school uniform as everyone else, but somehow they looked like they could be strolling down a red carpet instead of walking inside a dining hall full of loud teenagers. Caterina’s hair was done perfectly in those same cascading waves as the first time Jaya had seen her. A diamond-studded clip held back the front of her hair, and her makeup was still just as flawless, though she’d toned it down for school. Short of hiring a makeup artist to camp out with her in her dorm room, Jaya could never manage such perfection with her makeup.