Page 116 of The Reveal
“I just mean that it used to be really obvious when you were high, and now ...”
He goes quiet, but I take it as a good sign that he doesn’t freak out. He doesn’t start yelling, jump out of the truck, or come at me swinging—verbally, that is—all things that have happened before.
“The high is euphoric,” he tells me after a fraught sort of silence that I think is him wishing I would start talking about something else. “But they decide whether or not you get high. It’s about intention.”
That echoes unpleasantly inside me, because Ariel said much the same thing. “Seems like heroin would be a better bet, then.”
“With heroin, you’re playing Russian roulette with the fentanyl situation,” he says shortly. And a little too matter-of-factly, if I’m honest. “With this, part of the game is seeing if you can convince them to give it to you the way you want. But it doesn’t matter, because once you taste it, you’re done. Nothing else will do.”
I want, desperately, to ask him if that’s why all I do is dream about that night in Ariel’s bed—but I don’t.
I drank quite a lot of Ariel’s blood, and the craving I have isn’t for that. Or not only for that. It’s for him. All of him.
I can’t distinguish between the longing for the best sex I’ve ever had or that simple, whole-body relief I feel every time I see him.
Happily, this isn’t about me. “So they’re keeping you even. Not getting you high.”
“They are.” He looks at me then, his gaze intense. “It’s not a punishment, or whatever you’re thinking. I asked for this. I keep waiting for them to fuck with me, but it hasn’t happened yet. If they do, and they probably will, I want you to know it’snotwhat I wanted. I want to be here, Winter. I do.”
I’m glad we make it down the hill then, because it’s hard to discuss this without crying. When he gets out of the truck to go move a few things for our neighbor so we can get those eggs, I let my eyes go a little damp.
Just a little.
The hours change in the coffee stand. Birdie is on early-morning shifts. My hours are cut down significantly, but my pay is higher. I assume that this is a mistake, but there’s no one to talk to about it. Doug, wherever he is, can’t be reached.
Assuming Doug is the person who’s doing this, which I don’t.
On the fifteenth of October, twelve days since the full moon on Mount McLoughlin, I collect all the rent payments. I then take great pleasure in presenting them to Franklin Hendry, who gets less and less polite each time I see him. I take this to mean that he is no longer so certain that he’s going to win this battle of his.
It occurs to me that I should worry about that.
But there are so many other things to worry about that I forget to bother.
We don’t have a full gathering again, but information flows pretty freely between us. Maddox reports back from the werewolves. Savi spends time with Gran, and with me, talking about the things she discovered and what she thinks they mean.
“She’s looking for a spell,” Gran tells me a couple of nights later, once Savi goes back to her cottage, that chanting floating in the air outside the slightly cracked window shortly after. “It will be a complicated one, to handle such an ancient threat. It will need to happen on a full moon, and now that the second-to-last lock has been opened, it will need to be thenextfull moon.”
“The next full moon is Halloween,” I point out. “That means we have exactly fourteen days to figure this out.”
“Yes.” Gran nods. “It’s unlikely that she will have the chance to do it but the once.”
It gets colder. Darker. Wetter. At night, I stare up at the moon and watch it get larger, rounder.
I think about Halloweens when I was a kid, when I would creep myself out. Every year, without fail. Our parents certainly never monitored what Augie and I watched, so we glutted ourselves on scary movies, which always seemed like fun while we were doing it.
On Halloween, wandering around the neighborhoods in the valley that catered to trick-or-treaters—specific, denser neighborhoods in Jacksonville and Medford, because it’s too hard to walk from house to house farther out in the country—I would regret those movies.
Augie and I would compete to see who could pretend to be the least spooked all night. We would even scare each other when we could, hiding in shadows and leaping out of bushes. We would pretend we weren’treally scared.
But I was happier than most when we got too old to wander around dark streets in unfamiliar neighborhoods, masked-up monsters all around.
Anyway, it’s different now. No one’s dressing up as a monster for Halloween. There are too many real ones just ... around.
The nearer we get to the end of the month, the less certain I am that I want to see a death goddess up close and personal on the night that creeped me out the most as a kid. I’d rather skulk into Franklin Hendry’s office and beg for more time I already know he won’t give me.
Good thing it doesn’t matter what Iwant, only what I’m going todo.
I keep telling myself that, hoping it sticks.
