Page 135 of The Reveal
“I knew something was up with him,” she tells me, sitting out on the porch of that little white house. “I knew it. At first, I thought all his organizing saved him, and then I thought maybe he was trying a little too hard. He liked the power more than the people. I think he became what he always said he hated.”
“Maybe we all do,” I say. “If we’re not careful.”
The cards hum a little at that, whether to support me or warn me, it’s hard to tell.
November keeps chugging along, more winter than fall most days. Samuel doesn’t leave the vacuum that folks initially expect, because people step up. They decide to expand into what happened instead of shrinking because of it.
“I loved your grandmother,” Birdie tells me the night she leads the community meeting. Her wife, Miriam, is in the front row, a huge smile on her face. “She knew I was gay all along, and when my parents needed to pray on it for a little too long, she was there for me. And to be perfectly honest, I always thought Samuel was a turd.”
“Well. He was.”
“Maddox Hemming, on the other hand...” Birdie says leadingly, and both she and Miriam laugh.
I decide it’s possible that the human contingent of the Rogue Valley is going to do just fine. Maybe better now that there are more hands on deck.
It also doesn’t hurt that some of us have an in with the monsters.
In the middle of all this good stuff, something better happens. Franklin Hendry never comes for me. He disappears.
As far as I can tell, he was there the day before Halloween, smug and vile. But the next morning, the bank was empty. His ledger remained, however, and all the people in it received their money back. It appeared on doorsteps or was shoved through windows.
His thugs disappeared too. A lot like someone went and cleaned house, and I have a few ideas about who that could be. Severalwhos, in fact.
But I don’t ask. I take it as an early Thanksgiving present.
I assume that everyone will move out of the cottages now that there are no more false pretenses, but no one wants to leave.
Savi wants to stay close as she works on the spell to get rid of Vinca for good.
Maddox claims she still isn’t ready to take her place at Ty’s side, and she has the bruises she loves so much to prove it.
Even Briar seems friendlier, though it doesn’t seem like she has the slightest idea what happened.
“It’s like a monster sorority,” I tell Ariel. “I kind of like it.”
“I like it too,” he tells me, in a much more serious tone. “They can protect you when I can’t.”
We are up in my room then, there beneath the eaves. We have just spent a very long time experimenting with each other, scratching at the surface of the time that spools before us.
Of the small bit of this journey I’ll get to share with him before I become another one of his scars.
Something I should think is sad, but I don’t. I think it’s beautiful.
And besides, he has no intention of letting me die.
“I’ve already changed your hours at the coffee stand,” he tells me. When I blink at him in astonishment, he continues. “People know you’re the oracle, Winter. It’s not only cards and visions, it’s a vocation. They will come by that stand and ask you to see things for them. Just as they used to come here and ask your grandmother at her window, and I don’t want them at this house, not anymore. I want you safer than that.”
“Wait.” I’m hung up on the first part of all that. “You changed my hours? What happened to Doug?”
Ariel rolls me beneath him and hikes my knees up wide, then thrusts deep into me once more, that cool, enormous cock nearly making me come that easily.
“Doug,” he tells me in a deeply casual tone, as if this is a tea party, “was an unfortunate casualty. But the people like coffee, and I, as a benevolent king, wanted to make sure they got it.”
“And you,” I say, as he sets a slow, deliriously deep pace, “got your in with the new oracle without having to move house. How clever you are.”
“All’s fair this side of the Reveal, my love,” he tells me, his mouth against my neck, his tongue on my pulse. “I didn’t need a vision to tell me that you would be a problem for me. Though your grandmother took great pleasure in delivering it. All I had to do was look at you, one risen phoenix to another, and I understood that I would never be the same.”
“And while you’re at it, you could be sneaky and underhanded like everyone else,” I say, grinning at him. “No moral high ground after all. I can’t wait to tell everyone.”
