Page 107 of The Reveal
It’s a very close call.
“It’s time for us all to work together,” I say, forcing the words past the lump in my throat before there can be any other surprises. “Some of you have been working together already. Congratulations. But as far as I can tell, I’m the one with a connection to Vinca, the very-much-more-than-foul bitch who wants to kill us all. So maybe it’s time to stop keeping me in the dark.”
“The oracle was never in the dark—you just took your time taking her place,” Ty says with a drawl. “If you want to be in the loop, you have to step up and face the responsibilities of your role. That’s just the way it is.”
Up near the porch, Maddox laughs. “That’s not pointed at all.”
The look he tosses her way is so ferocious that I almost lose my train of thought.
Then I really do, because Samuel’s truck comes bumping up the drive.
I realize I forgot about him again.
I immediately feel guilty. But a look around at everyone gathered here makes it obvious that Samuel inspires a lot of different reactions.
None of them positive.
It makes sense to me that monsters might not love the human agitating to not be treated like food. It also makes sense that Samuel is a little wary of everyone in this clearing.
As he gets out of his truck and joins the gathering, I decide the best thing to do is ignore him and focus on actual issues.
“Some of you were around when she was causing trouble the first time.” I lift a brow at Ariel. “Maybe you have some insight into how you got rid of her then.”
“Even goddesses can be stopped,” he replies. “Anything can be stopped, with the right combination of war and magic. The trouble with Vinca is that no one has been able to discover where she is.”
“We’ve been looking,” Ty contributes. “Nothing fits the description.”
“The goddess was sunk deep,” Savi says in an odd tone, as if she’s reciting a poem from memory. “She was given her temple to remind her of her narcissism and the faithful now lost to her, and she was left to her eternity in the watery deep.”
“That sounds like an ocean,” Samuel says, sounding both confident and impatient.
I watch the three most powerful creatures in this valley turn, slowly, to regard him in varying degrees of arrogant astonishment.
“Thanks, dipshit,” Ty growls. “No one thought of that. You’re a fucking genius.”
“We examined the possibility, obviously,” Savi says coolly. “Some of us have been looking for her for a long time. There’s never been a hint of her in any of the oceans, not for centuries.”
I feel something stirring me, and the cards start poking at me once again, like they can feel it too. When I put my hand down to press against them and hopefully convince them to quit it, one of the cards seems to flash across my vision, as if I turned it over out in the open.
Once it does, it’s like there’s aclickdeep inside of me.
“Why are you all here?” I ask them. These monsters who stand here in the yard an ancestor of mine cleared with his hands. “Once the Reveal happened, surely you could’ve rampaged across the continent at will, then taken the party to Europe. Asia. Wherever. Why didn’t you?”
“There have always been wolves in the Pacific Northwest,” Maddox tells me, and something in the way she says it makes me wonder if there were a lot of politics around this very issue. “Even when the humans tried to kill off the domestic wolf population, we were still here. It’s easier to do pack things in a place where we can run around at night without being seen.”
The other wolves make growling noises of approval. At least, I think it’s approval.
“My people don’t think much of the New World,” Savi says, and I know, somehow, she’s not planning to share even what little she told me about her husband. Or her family. Though surely everyone here already knows. “They prefer the power they have in the Old World, and so they stay there, hiding away in their ancient castles on hills no one dares climb and becoming ever more irrelevant.”
“I find Old World conventions irritating,” Ariel says when all eyes turn to him where he stands, dressed entirely in black, yet with short sleeves, as if impervious to the vagaries of weather. “I also don’t like being told what to do.”
I sigh. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means that when he won the crown there was great commotion all across Europe, because everyone supposed he would take its rightful place in the usual way,” Savi says. “There is a vampire court, many ancient traditions, and all the rest. But he didn’t do it.”
I study Ariel. This beautiful man. This impossible lover. This creature who has changed me, irrevocably.
“Transylvania didn’t do it for you?” I ask.
