Page 34 of The Reveal
He does not look back to see if I’m following him. He simply walks, as if my obedience is a foregone conclusion. And that might rankle, but I follow him around and around the spiral to nowhere anyway.
It doesn’t occur to me to do anything but what he wants.
I tell myself that’s just King 101.
We climb and climb, and at the top he comes to a small landing and pushes through the door that waits there.
I have no other choice, so I hit the landing and promptly follow him into the dark.
“Your eyes will adjust in a moment,” comes Ariel’s voice, as if he’s part of the darkness.
Because he is.
I feel it like a deep, wild shudder, and there’s more of me than I’d like to admit that wants nothing more than to melt into the darkness. Especially if he’s a part of it.
But slowly my eyes adjust, and I realize that we’re standing out on the roof of the MMA school.
My breath leaves me in a rush as I make out the stars above and the low moon just starting to rise in the distance. And it’s not that I forget that I’m in the presence of a vampire, but I can’t keep myself from drifting over to the edge of the roof, where I can look out over the dark remains of Medford’s city center.
There are very few lights out there, and it would be foolish indeed to confuse any of them for a beacon. In the early days after the Reveal, there were tales of mooncussers, of a sort, who would roam the darknights, setting up beacons to draw in the terrified masses looking for shelter, then slaughter them for what goods they carried with them.
Or eat them, depending on the story.
It’s yet one more reason why anyone with a modicum of common sense stays locked up inside from dusk to dawn.
Yet here I am, standing up above this town we lost three years ago to the monsters, somehow aching like I’ve lost a limb. It wasn’t that I spent so much time down here. There were always grumblings about the homeless populations that crowded the riverbanks and spilled out into the streets, waxing and waning with various city ordinances. There was always the suggestion of violence here, thanks to the businesses that only opened by day and closed up tight at night. The graffiti no one could seem to keep at bay. The clusters of the homeless and the addicted rising up like zombies come nightfall, or after the police rousted them out of their hiding spots along the river.
I didn’t spend a lot of time here, but it was still mine. It was still home.
There is no reason to suppose that it will ever be safe to walk the streets again, and it’s just one more tide of grief washing over me, washing through me, and never quite leaving me clean. I turn back around and face the king of the vampires, who is closer to me than I thought he was.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on people,” I mutter at him, frowning.
“Maybe you missed the part where I’m a vampire. Sneaking up on people is part of the fun.” He studies me. “Lurking is in the job description.”
“Just so long as we’ve established that you do, in fact, find all the rampaging and murdering fun. To clarify our positions.”
“Tell me,” he says after a moment, “have you killed any monsters since the Reveal?”
I take a moment to make certain I’m keenly aware of how fragile I am. How breakable. How decidedly weaponless.
Maybe he’s brought me here to act as judge and jury. Maybe this is monster justice.
I swallow, though my throat is dry. “I have.”
“So we are all murderers, then. You and me alike.”
There’s that intensity in his gaze. And that power of his that feels stretched out all around me, but not pressing in on me. Not anymore.
I pull in a breath. “I’ve never really thought of it that way. But yes, I suppose. I think you’ll find it’s difficult to live in peace with things that want to kill you. That consider you not just prey, but a snack.”
“Says a representative of a species who has no trouble using wooden stakes or silver bullets to knock out sentient beings a little bit higher up the food chain.”
“Well,” I say after a long, breathless moment, “I hope we can all agree that zombies need killing. If you can kill something that’s already dead. Please don’t tell me that there’s a zombie rights movement too.”
“I prefer not to cast stones on members of the living dead,” Ariel replies in that low hum of a voice. “It would be a bit hypocritical, would it not?”
“Maybe the zombies have it better. After all, they don’t know that they were once alive.”
