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I gave all three girls a warning glare.

“Stay away from Julie or you'll get to know my other side!”

My voice was threateningly hoarse. It had been a long time since I had felt so much anger inside me.

I stepped toward Amber and Kelly. Both recoiled, the latter hiding behind the other.

“And remember one thing!” The next words just slipped out of my mouth. “I am a DeLoughrey.” A feeling of power spread through me. “And you only mess with a DeLoughrey once.”

With these last words, I left the distraught girls in their room.

Satisfied with their reaction, I sped through the ground floor, trying to suppress the remaining aggression and growing hunger, but paused when I noticed a slight movement under the dining room table. Grace.

I paused.

The anger returned. Bewilderment mixed in with it.

“Why didn't you help her?”

Grace's head turned up toward me. The warm aura she usually radiated with her dark brown corkscrew curls and brown complexion seemed to have completely disappeared.

“Whatever you were doing up there, spare me...” Her voice broke. “Please.”

Her whole body was shaking.

Grace was afraid of me.

I bent down and she immediately crouched back until she bumped into a table leg.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” I muttered, as the disappointment inside me grew. “At least not until you deliberately hurt Julie or my other friends.”

The fear on her face made me question whether I had really gone too far...

“I don't want to hurt Julie,” she began cautiously. “But she chose against us. She's always with you guys...” The fear in her voice turned to nervousness. “She's dangerous. Her father was a murderer…”

I took a deep breath, trying to suppress the newly arising anger, but my gaze darkened on its own.

“Just look around.” Her eyes wandered over the chaos, the ice, and all the water around us. “No matter where she is, she only causes damage.”

I didn't know if this girl under the table was the same one I had met a semester ago. From the day she had treated Mady like a leper, I should have been suspicious.

“Do you actually realize what those words can do to someone?”

Grace backed away, startled by the anger in my voice.

“Do you have any idea how powerful words can be?”

Memories of my childhood and youth flashed through my mind. All those words that they had said to me.

You'll never find a family. You'll never find people who will love you. No one wants a rebellious child like you. You'll disrupt any peaceful family structure.

I had let those words drive me to rebel further, but somehow all those people had managed to plant seeds of their hatred inside me. Seeds that had eaten away at some part of me.

“Believe me when I tell you that words can build people up or tear them down.”

Grace had managed to calm down, even though she still looked frightened.

“Julie chose her fate!”