Page 134 of The Reveal
I expect my brother to freak out, but he doesn’t. He nods. Then again. He swallows, hard.
“This is why I want to get clean,” he says in a low voice, and while there’s an anger in it, it doesn’t seem to be focused on anyone but him. “I’m sick and tired of being a fucking bargaining chip.”
Ty eyes him. “I can dry you out. But you won’t like it.”
“It’s my understanding that it’s excruciating,” Augie says. “And it goes on forever. And most people kill themselves rather than face it.”
“Uh. No. That’s not okay,” I say immediately.
“I want to live, Winter,” Augie tells me. He’s standing in a room full of people, but he’s telling me. Just me. I think everyone knows it. “I want to bealive. And I don’t know how.”
That takes my breath away. All I can do is nod.
Not giving him permission. But maybe that’s my blessing.
He turns back to Ty. “I’ll do it. I need to do it. One way or another.”
Ty nods, very slowly. I think there’s something close enough to respect in his gaze, and I don’t need Maddox to tell me that this is unusual.
“We’ll find out who you are on the other side,” Ty says, and it sounds like a promise. “But I’m warning you, the journey will change you.”
“It already has,” my brother says.
He doesn’t go with the vampire who waits for him outside. He lets the wolves take him, meaning he’s diving straight in.
He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t hug me goodbye.
But he doesn’t need to.
You’ve got this,I think at him. I don’t need to be in his head.
I know he hears me.
Deep in his bones, in the cells we once shared, he knows.
Later that night, in Ariel’s bed, I don’t cry. I don’t discuss Augie at all.
I move in the dark, biting him, scratching him, leaving my marks as best I can.
Because no one ever said that forever wouldn’t sting.
He lets me do it, and laughs while I do, then fucks me so good and so long that I couldn’t mount an argument if my life depended on it.
Or sob out my grief when he’s so good at making it into this other song we only sing together.
In the morning, I wake up and go to the roof to see Savi’s hint of sunrise because I missed it yesterday. I know by now that Ariel’s apartment has no eastern exposures, and that’s how he gets away with all that glass.
Outside, it’s All Souls’ Day. November is here, Gran is dead, and I’m looking forward to Franklin Hendry trying to take what’s mine. I really am.
I think of Augie, wherever he is. I turn and look over at the hills in the distance, the ones that rise above Jacksonville, where the werewolves roam along the old mining trails and make their own paths into the old-growth forests so ancient and so impenetrable that people who’ve seen all the monsters the Reveal has offered still think Bigfoot is out there.
“It’s a new day,” I whisper. “It’s a new dawn.”
And we’re all going to be okay.
I drive back through Jacksonville later that morning, where the details of what Samuel did keep coming out. Not just what he did to Gran, though that’s shocked the whole community. But all the rest of the things he was up to on the side.
His sister, Jenny, is shocked, but not as shocked as might be expected.
