Page 130 of The Reveal
And the cards are like fire in my hands, their images and symbols scrolling through me, and I don’t need to get to know them anymore.
I am them. They are me.
I see what I have to do, and I do it.
I see everything. Savi up above the lake. The wolves and the vampires. Augie beside me, anchoring me, keeping his vigil over Gran.
I gather up all the threads I found and I pull them, hard.
Vinca is smoke and maggots, fury and blood.
But she isin my head.
If she could hurt me, I would already be dead.
I pull on the threads of magic for strength, I call down the constellations she uses as her stepping stones, and I tie them into knots.
Then I stare the bird-faced bitch who used Ariel as a pet straight in her face while I shove them in my mouth and swallow them whole.
Like I’m a goddess myself, devouring her destruction the way she has eaten entire civilizations whole.
Not this time.
“I don’t see you rising,” I tell her, my mouth full of galaxies. “And maybe go fuck yourself, too.”
And this time when she screams, I can feel the mountains tremble all around us.
The threads of magic find their colors once again.
Vinca is no longer in my head.
Out above the lake, Savi is getting louder, the chanting more insistent.
Inside me, I canfeelVinca scream, on and on and on, but I know somehow that she can’t get to me from there.
I watch the battle instead. With everyone else.
In my head, we watch Ty rip an orc priest in half, then leap on another one—a wraith this time.
Ariel fights his way into the scrum.
And I can see it, I think. All twenty-five hundred years of peak physical prowess, because he moves like poetry, though his verses are deadly and profoundly disturbing.
But . . . not unhot.
Maybe swallowing a death goddess has made me callous. Maybe he’s just that beautiful.
Maybe I need us all to live.
The two of them take the pack of priests apart with focused precision, and when they converge on the final one, Ariel throws his head back, lets his fangs grow, and waits as the last priest cowers.
Until Ty rips his head off.
That scream inside me, inside Wizard Island, gets louder and then louder still—
Until it is nothing but a howl of anguish.
And then it’s gone.
