Page 129 of The Reveal
And I keep telling him. Showing him.
It’s her priests who presented her with a key to her lock,I tell him.They didn’t trust Samuel’s claim that he could do it. They took care of it themselves. Worst-case scenario,I say in a voice that doesn’t feel like mine—too ancient and wise—she has unwilling sacrifices to choose from.
I can hear his laughinsideme.That sounds like every death cult I’ve ever encountered.
Then I see him in the air again, this time with no sun to burn him. He leaps up as if he wants the fighters from both sides to track him. They do—all the cloaked figures watch him go—but his own warriors attack them in the next second, taking advantage of their momentary distraction.
Ariel doesn’t fly. He doesn’t hang in the air like Savi. He leaps far higher and farther than any human could, and when he goes down again, he lands where I can’t see him. Not with my eyes.
In my head, I follow along.
“It’s the priests,” I say out loud so Maddox and Augie can hear me, and maybe Savi too, though it’s hard to tell while she’s still in midair, making it storm.
Making that island tremble all the more.
“This can’t end as long as those priests remain.” I say it out loud. In my head.
To everyone.
“Don’t worry,” Maddox says from behind me when I didn’t see her change. “Ty is on it.”
I don’t think about what I’m doing. I want them to see what I see, so I make it happen. I pull on each thread, indigo for Augie, smoky quartz for Maddox, and then we’re all there.
We’re all connected, and we’rein it.
Ty and Ariel have both left their armies to fight the goddess’s acolytes up above as they chase the priests down the old trail that leads to the water’s edge. On one of the switchbacks, the priests turn back to face them, knives out.
It’s a bloodbath, brutal and cruel.
Up at the rim, the three of us sit with our backs pressed together, Gran and Samuel laid out before us, Savi in the air behind us, and these battles in our heads.
Savi’s voice rises. The storm intensifies.
There’s something worse than thunder, more electrifying than lightning.
Then there’s a great and terrible scream.
It seems to erupt out of the crater itself. We all duck as if there’s something shooting straight at us, when there isn’t.
The scream goes on and on, and when my head starts to ache—that sharp pain in my temples that I know too well—I understand.
It’s her.
I have to think that a sound like that, rage and fury and a deep bewilderment, can only be a good thing for us.
But I retract that thought immediately, because suddenly, she’shere.
Wizard Island shakes, Savi is in the thick of it, but there’s a seven-thousand-year-old death goddess of filth and fury in my head. Not just my head. She’s swelling into being down each and every colored thread of magic, blackening them as she goes.
Vinca is here.
And she’s pissed.
“You!” she bellows, and she is a mess of black, slithering worms and beaks red with blood. She is all things and nothing. “Pestilent human, do you believe that you can stand before me? Do youdare?”
“No,” I tell her, though I can feel her all around me, like a wind. And inside me, like some horrific parasite that intends to consume me from within. “Not me. I’m nothing but an oracle.”
Theoracle, I think.
