Jaxon leaves and Grace’s uncle arrives. Because we’re playing musical characters in this random hallway for some reason. They make small-talk for abut two pages before Uncle Finn just bounces. Wow, super important.

“Are you hungry? I’ll have dinner sent up, since you missed it. And there’s something we really need to discuss.” He narrows his eyes at me, looks me over. “Although…how are you doing with the altitude?”

The thing they need to discuss? The fact that there’s vampires and werewolves in this school. Yeah, spoiler, whatever, it’s obvious. But the point is that Uncle Headmaster gives up on telling her this vital information because….she looks a bit tired.

A guy named Flint comes by to help carry luggage, and he’s of course super hot so here we have our Love Antagonist. You know, the guy that would be the other side of a love triangle, but the MC never has any interest in him so he just hangs out like a love triangle appendix? Anyway, that’s Flint. He’s all smiles and cheer and also very hot. Macy gets extremely flustered around him.

Flint helps her get up the stairs and they start going towards Macy’s room, when they are interrupted by a gaggle of emo boys plus Jaxon walking past. It’s very dramatic, I promise. They…walk past without looking. But dramatically. Wasn’t that exciting?

The entire next chapter is a description of the dorm room Grace will share with Macy, and small talk. See what I mean about this book being hard to break up?

The next day, Grace wakes up at 3:30am.

I sit up, trying to ignore the unfamiliar howls and roars – and even the occasional animalistic scream – in the distance.

This book is obsessed with wild animals in Alaska. Shit like this comes up all the time. There’s this weird assumption that apex predators are just all over the place. Even though you’re more likely to die from a moose in Alaska than from any carnivore.

Now, this is a fantasy book that includes werewolves, so an unknown amount of all that howling she hears could be the weres, but if that’s the case the book never bothers to address it. It’s one of those background details that goes assumed, as if no one reading it would ever question that of course there’s a bunch of animal screaming in the woods.

But once I banish thoughts of my old live, it isn’t Alaska that woke me up […] And it’s not Alaska that’s keeping me awake.

It’s him.

Jaxon Vega.

You…don’t need to explain. You went to sleep at like 7. It’s totally normal to have a weird sleep schedule after a stressful trip. You can even still obsess over him now that you’re awake, but he doesn’t have to be the reason you woke up.

And obsess she does. But, meh, teenager.

I wonder how he got that scar. However it happened, it had to have been awful. Terrifying. Traumatic. Devastating.

Oh, yeah, Jaxon has a scar. It’s a very thin line along the side of his face. Now, when we find out what happened, yeah it was terrifying. But only because he’s a vampire and hard to scar. For a normal person? Eh. Probably bled a lot because head wounds do that, which would be scary. But hell, anything unlucky could have caused it. Sports. Fell out of a tree. Roughhousing. There’s no reason for Grace, with the knowledge that she currently has, to assume it was traumatic and devastating.

But he’s her ~*~*~soulmate~*~*~ so she’s not allowed to be wrong about him. She just ~*~*~knows~*~*~ him so well, right from the start.

Grace starts having non-Jaxon thoughts, dead parent thoughts, and at that point it’s impossible to stay quietly in bed. She decides to wander the castle instead. Sounds like something I would do. Yes, I am the person who dies first in every horror movie.

While wandering, she finds a tapestry that depicts the aurora borealis. She suddenly becomes obsessed with the idea of seeing them in person and wants to go outside to look. This whole bit is just to get her to go to the front door for an encounter with a new character. Because….?????? She was already wandering, she couldn’t just end up at an exterior door?

I’m reminded of how the manuscript Wolff (ALLEGEDLY) borrowed from had the aurora borealis being an integral part of the magic system, and it makes me side-eye all these vestigial bits of Grace supposedly being obsessed with them.

Anyway, two guys come in from the cold, wearing just t-shirts and jeans and acting very amped up. These are Marc and Quinn, and they start mocking Grace. They mention that Uncle Headmaster has been frequently telling the whole school to behave around her. To Grace’s credit, that does get her suspicious, but then she’s immediately distracted by bigger worries.

See, the guys aren’t happy about the annoying meetings and decide to haze her. They want to throw her outside in the snow in her pajamas.

But this is real life, not the movies

Can I just take a break to mention how much I hate lines like this? We all know you’re not real. And the shit you get up to isn’t particularly realistic anyway.

Anyway, when they try to grab Grace it turns into a scuffle, because Grace is not going down easy. She’s yelling to get attention and thrashing around to try and throw them off.

I hit the ground, hard, my legs buckling so that I end up on my knees just in to see Marc go flying across the entryway, eyes wide as he slams into the farthest wall.

I don’t have time to think about how that happened, though

She must mean that literally, because both boys get telekinetically tossed around the foyer and she doesn’t bring it up ever again. We are still 250 pages away from her figuring out that this a supernatural school. Most of the shit in this book is at least subtle enough that if you don’t know what genre you’re in, you wouldn’t immediately jump to magic. But this? THIS? Right at the start? And then it’s never brought up again????? I’m sorry, Grace, but there’s no excuse.

The telekinesis is from Jaxon, who has just arrived to save Grace. The two other boys are clearly scared of him, and they immediately back down and apologize to Grace at his insistence. Then he walks Grace back to the dorm area.

She thanks him for the rescue.

“You have no idea, do you?”

“No idea of what?”

“That I just made you a pawn in a game you can’t begin to understand.”

This is my second biggest gripe with this book because he keeps saying shit like this. But guess what? There’s no game. I know, I know, I’m getting ahead of myself again, but there is no game. No real game, not metaphorical game, no machinations, no power plays. Maybe in later books, but in this one? Jaxon giving attention to her is entirely incidental to the ultimate plot.

Then he wipes blood off her cheek and…licks his finger.

It’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen, and I don’t even know why.

I’m not judging Grace right here.

I’m judging Wolff.

I’m judging Wolff hard.

You don’t need to make it quite so obvious that most of your experience is in action/smut. A little bit of sexy injury is fine in the action/smut genre, but this is YA. Stop calling weird things sexy. Tone it down.