Page 33 of The Reveal
Especially not for a fucking vampire.
“No,” he replies.
It takes a long time for that word to penetrate. For it to make sense. For it to actually turn into understanding.
Augie is not dead. Ariel Skinner, King Vampire, did not call me here to pick up my brother’s body.
Something I have been expecting that I will have to do for years now.
I feel the same rush of relief and anguish, shame and fury, that I’ve felt before, and more than once. That time Augie came home and I found him rifling through Gran’s things. The time I saw him on the street, he caught my gaze, and then pretended he didn’t know who I was.
Always happy that he’s not dead. Always furious that this is how he chooses to live.
Always so damned hurt that he abandoned me.
I blow out a long, shaky breath. “So you didn’t call me here to identify his body. You probably could have led with that up front.”
“You seem to have a lot of confidence that I won’t kill you for your impertinence,” Ariel says almost absently.
But I can see the way he’s looking at me. There is nothing absent about it.
It is all a terrible alchemy and it hurts, and yet there’s a worryingly large part of me that just wantsmore.
“If you want to kill me,” I say, letting out a sound that’s awfully close to a laugh, “you could do it at any time. It doesn’t matter what happens today. It doesn’t matter what I do. You’re not just any old run-of-the-mill vampire, are you? You’re the king. Everything that lives here in this valley does so because you allow it, right?”
He looks at me as if I don’t make sense. As if he’s trying to puzzle me out and not quite managing it, but now that I’m through the sickening punch of relief that Augie’s not dead, I’m on to the other side of that.
That being all the other things Augie could be that would have this particular vampire looking for me.
All the other things that could happen. All of them dark and desperate.
Then, a distant second, all the things that could happen tome.
Right here. Right now. Thanks entirely to this pitiless, beautiful creature who is watching me so closely.
I take a breath so ragged it feels as if it leaves marks behind.
Ariel steps back, and while that doesn’t exactly break the spell, it makes it ... shimmer, somehow. Enough so that this power of his, like a hand wrapped around my throat, recedes.
Just enough so I can breathe.
Just enough so I understand that I miss it. Immediately.
“Come with me,” he tells me.
I’m not foolish enough to argue with him. Foolishness doesn’t enter into it, because that implies a choice. And I don’t pretend to have one. He moves across the polished wood floor, and I follow him. I can’t help but sneak looks in the mirror to make sure I still can’t see anything but me marching across an empty room.
I can’t.
It’s disorienting.
I focus instead on the sculpted expanse of his muscled back. And the hints of that phoenix I can see peek out here and there when the way he moves makes his hem or collar shift.
I feel the phoenix on the side of my body pulse like it, too, wants to burn.
I tell myself that’s psychosomatic at best, but I burn all the same.
In the corner of the great room, he directs me to the steps that lead up to a loft that looks out over the whole of the space and all those dizzying mirrors. But he doesn’t stop there. He keeps going, leading me to the far corner, where a spiral staircase rises up toward the ceiling.
