Page 112 of The Reveal
She spears herself the third sausage while Augie and I sneak a look at each other. There might have been a time when he would make a circular motion next to his temple after a statement like that, quietly confirming that she was over there losing her marbles.
But that’s not the world we live in anymore.
“Was all of that really supposed to kill me?” I ask her. “Because it felt like I was dying for part of it. For most of it, really. But I don’t see why she would go to the trouble of telling me something if she was going to kill me with it.”
“Gods of every description are deeply fickle and pride themselves on being unknowable. They never wish to be understood, theirs is the mystery of faith, and so on.” Gran rolls her eyes. “In this case, she had the great comfort of knowing that the bloodline continues whether she killed you or not. I’m still drawing breath. Augie is still with us. For all we know, so is your mother. She knew if you were killed, sooner or later, one of us would try to contact you on the other side.”
I remember Ariel saying something very much like that. I don’t particularly want to think about it any more now than I did then. “So you’re a medium, too?”
“Mediums channel spirits around Ouija boards, in headdresses, while brandishing crystal balls, because they are actually con women,” my grandmother says with a sniff. “It’s more accurate to say that what I do is ... look through a window. Just as you do to see the present day. You open a window, something is either there or not there. That’s all there is to it.”
“That sounds like a long way to say yes, you’re a medium,” Augie says after a moment. In that deadpan way of his that makes me want to laugh and cry and maybe smack him upside his head.
“I’m glad to see you’ve retained what passes for your humor after your trials and tribulations,” Gran tells him.
And for a moment, I think we’re actually going to talk about this. Drugs. Vampire blood. What actually happened to Augie, how he went from the open-air prison of despair on the banks of the river with all the other addicts into an actual stone dungeon to feed an even worse master. Or mistress, in his case.
For a breathless moment, I think we’re actually going to have the kind of conversation that we should have been having all along.
But instead, he grins at Gran like the happy golden boy he never quite was. “What I want to know is, do you really think that we’re going to be able to do this?”
What I think is that we have to, but I don’t say that.
“I do think it will work,” I say, with enough uncharacteristic enthusiasm that Augie’s brow lifts. “We have a good team.”
“I’m not sure I’d call it a team,” Augie says mildly. “There’s a pretty strict hierarchy. And a food chain.”
He’s not wrong. And yet ... I keep reminding myself that they could have just killed me at any point. They could have let me die last night.Hecould have.
“You’re the one who came face-to-face with Vinca herself,” Gran says, and I wonder how long I’ve been sitting there without answering. “That can’t have been fun.”
I have a flash of that terrible face and the way it changed, the rot and the beak and the worms that I can suddenly feel as if they’reon me—
But I push all that away.
“She was horrifying,” I say, as calmly as I can manage. “But I was fine.”
I don’t have to tell themhowI was fine. I don’t have to explain that somewhere between Ariel’s cock and his cold come and his fangs deep in my neck, I had the strength to keep taking his blood. Or that because of those things, I survived.
I suspect that Gran might already know. Augie can certainly guess, especially given where he’s been lately.
“Your man Samuel had a point,” Augie says, still fiddling with the silverware. “You can’t just roll up to a god and think you’re going to get them to do what you want. If you could, they wouldn’t need to be gods, would they?”
“Both you and I managed to survive vampires,” I point out. “That’s not supposed to happen either. I like our odds.”
When I get up to clear the table because I can’t sit still, Augie helps me. It keeps feeling like a dream, the fact that he’s here. Not justhere, but here as the version of my brother who wasn’t around much even when he physically was. I keep thinking I’ll wake up, but I don’t.
He helps me clean up, and then, together, we go with Gran into her room.
And for once I have the very thing I kept wishing might happen. For years now. All three of us together. Both Augie and me carrying the load, caring for Gran in a way she’ll accept.
All of us happy to justbewith each other after all the things we’ve lost.
I get her ready for bed. He settles in to talk with her some more, and I kiss her on the forehead, then hug him too before I leave them on their own.
They deserve their own time together.
He stays in there a long while. I go upstairs to the linen closet and pull out what I need to make up the bed in his old room for him to use. When I take the old bedspread down to the laundry room to wash it, because it’s abundantly floral and I don’t think Augie would appreciate it, I get the creepy feeling that I’m being watched.
