Page 19 of The Reveal
I am suddenly, terrifyingly aware that she isn’t a girl I know who sometimes turns into a cute little monster—she’s a wolf.
Who only pretends to be human when it suits her.
Maddox inhales, deep. Then she peers at me with those molten eyes, and I find I’m holding my breath. “Why the fuck do I smell vampire blood?”
5.
I assume this means the card is written in blood, which is gross and creepy if not immediately deadly, but when I pick it up off the counter and hand it over to Maddox—it’s more like I throw it—she takes in a deep breath. Then she shakes her head.
“He touched it. But no, that’s ink.”
“You can smell him?” I rub at my face. “And by ‘him,’ you don’t really mean ...?”
She looks at me, her eyes somewhere between that ferocious gold and her usual gray-brown. “An invitation from a king is a summons. You know that, right?”
“What it sounds like is a trap,” I counter, because events might be spiraling beyond my control, butIam still the boss ofme. Though that gross and awful voice from my nightmare seems to swell in me again.It’s what you’re made for.I repress a shudder and keep going. “The kind of trap that I walk into and then die. Do you know how I’ve stayed alive through all of this, Maddox? By not walking into traps.”
“Fair.” She frowns at the card, and then goes over and helps herself to some coffee. She doses it with a hefty pour of what looks like real cream. She must have brought it with her. That means werewolves must have access to cows—but I order myself to focus on what she’s telling me about the larger, fanged issue at hand. “But you need to think carefully about the consequences of disobeying a man like Ariel Skinner. Because there will be consequences. Either he will send you a ... more imperativemessage”—she takes a draw of her coffee, leaving me to imagine whatmore imperativemeans to avampire—“or he will send someone to deliver the message in person.” Maddox looks at me then, and I don’t like the images in my head. “Or worse, to collect you and deliver you to him. You don’t want those things to happen.”
She is correct. I don’t.
But. “You can’t possibly be suggesting that I, a very mortal and breakable human, traipse off to the horrors of downtown Medford—in the teeming, terrible dark—to see what a scary-ass vampire wants to say to me.”
“If Ariel Skinner wanted to kill you, he would just kill you,” Maddox tells me, and I think she’s trying to be kind. Ithinkthat’s what her expression means, and maybe that would feel sweeter if I wasn’t envisioning being torn apart by monsters on Main Street in Medford five seconds after the sun sets.
“No truer words have ever been spoken,” says Savi, and we both look up to find her at the back door. She smiles as if she forgot that we couldlookat her like this. “Ariel is no joke.”
Maddox surprises me by nodding her head toward the card that’s now sitting on the counter again, as if she wants Savi to get a load of it. As if she thinks Savi will have some insight that I don’t. Savi exchanges a long look with Maddox that I can’t read—I can’t say I like that, either—and then she goes over and peers at it.
She doesn’t touch it. She wrinkles up her nose as she reads it, then shakes her head.
“I don’t like it.” She looks at me. “You must go, of course. But you’re going to have to be very careful.”
I laugh, but not because I think anything is funny. “I’m not going. I don’t know why you think that I would?”
“He’s not a butcher, not like some.” Savi says this thoughtfully, but she’s looking over at Maddox, not me, like they’reconferring.
It’s weird. If the situation didn’t involve my inevitable bloody and painful death, I would be much more interested in why the werewolfis so chummy with the fancy-pants lady from fancy-pants Ashland, the southernmost town in the valley that people who fled the Bay Area in California flock to the most.
Or they did. Now there is no fleeing from San Francisco. I’m not sure anyone’s made it out of California since the Reveal.
I wasn’t surprised to see Ashland as Savi’s previous address.
“Really, he’s entirely civilized,” Savi is saying, while Maddox nods. “That has its own issues, of course.”
“Heisvery reasonable.” Maddox shrugs. “That’s why he’s the king.”
Savi stares at the coffee machine as if she doesn’t understand how it functions. Or as if, maybe, she doesn’t know what coffee is. “That and the fact that he is an ancient.”
When she looks back my way, I must be staring at her in befuddlement, because she smiles again. “Rumor has it he was born a Spartan.”
I blink. “Meaning he was raised to enjoy minimal furnishings?”
I expect her to laugh, but she doesn’t. “A Spartan. From the Peloponnese.” Savi studies me and adds, “In Greece.”
That is probably a dig at me and what she assumes is my education, but I can’t really focus on that. “You mean like ...This is Sparta.”
And I mimic the old movie’s iconic kick into the pit.
