Page 132 of The Reveal
I show the man whose head I’ve been in, whose body I know so well, up to my room. When he pulls me into his arms, I kiss him like he’s a fever and all I want to do is burn up with him.
But then I pull away. “There’s something I have to do.”
He nods, his gaze so silver it hurts. “These first deaths are the hardest,” he tells me. “They are the ones that scar.”
Someday he will tell me who it is he misses. All of those he lost who scarred him.
Tonight, I sit there, right on the floor in my bedroom. I pull out the cards.
And I find her.
In my head she’s young again. Her eyes are sharp. She smiles at me, though she shakes her head too. “You don’t need me, child. You have everything you need, right there with you.”
“But . . .” I begin.
“I will always be here for you when you need me,” she says. “That’s a promise. But it’s your time now, Winter. And there is still so much to do.”
She leaves me there to sit on the floor a long while, letting tears fall down until they make puddles on the cards themselves.
I let them.
When Ariel comes out of the shower, he finds me there. On the floor, still covered in mud and blood and all the rest of the things that happened today. And I think that if I learned one thing up in the snow today, it’s this: There can only be love. That’s the only thing we really have, no matter what it looks like.
Even though it makes me feel panicked and dizzy to even think such a thing, given the fates of everyone I’ve ever loved.
Still. That doesn’t change anything. Hiding from love is like hiding from the dark, pretending the stars aren’t shining all the while. Hiding from love is breaking your own heart, then wondering why it hurts.
Love turns into grief, I know that part, but love is why it matters to lose someone.
If I’m going to lose everyone and everything I love—and isn’t that the deal? Isn’t that how this always worked, even before the world ended?—then I better love them hard while I’m here.
That’s really all there is.
I look at Ariel, like a marble statue before me. I feel my heart ache inside my chest, telling me what I already know.
“I love you,” I tell him, like I’m confessing a terrible sin. “You should know that.”
He comes over and he lifts me, straight up from the floor without so much as a grunt to indicate he feels my weight. Then he holds me in his arms.
I lock my legs around his waist. I wrap my arms around his neck.
I revel in his perfect, unburned skin.
“You are my heart, little seer,” says this twenty-five-hundred-year-old vampire king. Out loud and inside me, at once. “I don’t have my own. I have only yours, and so you will have to let it beat for the both of us. I will insist upon it.”
“You can just say it,” I whisper, there against his mouth. “You love me too. And you should know better.”
“I do,” he growls, and then his mouth is on mine and his hands are gripping my hair, and then everything is heat and madness.
I can’t get enough. Too much death, too much blood, but then blood is the basis of all of this.
Blood is what keeps us all alive. Blood and love are tangled up in each other, and so are we.
Soon enough, he’s inside me. His cock so deep I can barely breathe. His fangs sunk into my neck.
This time, he opens up the vein on the side of his own neck, and that’s where I drink from him.
I love you,he tells me as he thrusts inside me, making me come and come and come.When I say forever, Winter, I mean it. You’ll see.
