Page 131 of The Reveal
Everything is quiet, except the wind. We can hear it snaking through the trees, almost whistling, as if it’s made of ghosts. When we look down the rim road, there are only bodies and blood.
The wolves move to the fallen, sniffing them out. The vampires come behind them, pulling off the masks and looking at each face.
They are making sure we know who to thank for today’s events,Ariel says. Right there in my head, as intimate as it is possible to be.
Almost.
Because the only thing I can think about that would be more so would be to have his voice in my head, his cock buried inside me, and his teeth sunk deep in my neck.
I don’t need the cards to tell me that will certainly happen. And soon.
I hear the thread of amusement and need in his voice when he responds, and I know he knows it too.I like to know who tries to kill me. And all of their associates. And anyone else who might think the way that they do.
I support this completely,I reply.
“Hey,” Augie says then, “I think you better look.”
Maddox is standing on that wall, hands on her hips as she looks out over the lake. I’m afraid that what she’s looking at is Savi’s dead body, but as I get to my feet, Savi herself lands.
But she lands hard and doesn’t quite stick the landing, the first sign of anything but perfection from her that I’ve seen. She sags against the wall, and I don’t think. I put my arm around her.
She leans against me. “Thank you,” she murmurs.
I only nod.
And together, we all stand there and look out at the temple that hovers, frozen in midair, high above Crater Lake and Wizard Island, where it must have been hidden all these thousands of years.
The goddess, interrupted.
I don’t know how long we stand there. I only know that we did it.
We beat that awful, rotten-faced bitch. I can’t feel her inside me any longer, and I know that the threads of magic from all these supernatural creatures and the constellations dissolved her and shot whatever’s left of her straight back into her prison.
I feel the cards hum in triumph.
Only then, when I tuck them away this time and nestle them of my own volition right next to my heart, do I turn back around, kneel next to my grandmother, and tell her that I love her.
That she is the best parent I ever had, and I wish I’d accepted the gift a lot sooner so I could have known her better.
I tell her all of this, but I think she knows.
Wherever she is now, wherever her soul has taken root, I think she’s known it all along.
We say our farewells to Gran up there in those beautiful mountains where she made her sacrifice, making her funeral pyre and honoring her by letting her burn there, alone, beneath the Halloween blue moon.
We sit in a circle around her. No one speaks. We let her return to the magic she came from.
No one puts bodies in the ground, not anymore. One of the first things the monsters did was dig up the graveyards. The freshly dead are even more of a draw.
So we let her burn. And I promise the flames that carry her onward that I’ll make a monument to this woman, out of materials that monsters won’t care about, but she would. I will.
And I will honor her in as many ways as possible for as long as I live.
When we get home from Crater Lake much later that night, I invite Ariel in.
It’s not the momentous thing it would have been before, because now there are too many momentous things to count, and all I want is him near me. When his vampire friend turns up for Augie, I go to invite her inside too, but Ariel shakes his head.
“There is no need to be too familiar,” he tells me in his stern way, and Augie follows her out into the dark.
