Page 36 of The Reveal
I can’t help but feel like this is an opportunity.
I don’t have it in me to refuse. I can’t.
“I’ll do anything,” I say recklessly. “Please don’t hurt him.”
“Addicts hurt themselves,” Ariel tells me, and there’s something stern and old and knowing in his voice that I recognize. But I don’t want to recognize it. It feels too much like truth. “Over and over again.”
“You don’t have to tell me what addicts do.”
Those eyes of his gleam, but I can’t tell if it’s with approval or warning.
“I’ll do anything,” I say again. “What exactly do you want?”
He doesn’t answer that. And it’s in the pause that I can feel his power surge. As if I’ve sacrificed myself right here on this rooftop. Given myself away, bared my neck, and let him bite down, deep and hard—
I don’t know where the image comes from, or why it seems to shatter its way through me, and not in a bad way. I’ve never fantasized about a vampire bite in my life.
Then again, I’ve never met Ariel before.
When he comes to stand beside me to look out over the city, I’m sure he can hear the racket my heart makes. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Just like there’s nothing I can do about the fact that his closeness sets everything in me alight.
It’s a scalding heat, everywhere, pooling between my legs and making me want to press my thighs together—
But I don’t.
On the off chance that he can’t tell what’s happening to me, I don’t want to give him the CliffsNotes version.
“What do you think the Reveal is?” he asks after a moment, when I’m beginning to think this much access to starshine might intoxicate me. I feel dizzy and fragile again.
It’s probably not the stars, I admit to myself.
“What kind of question is that?” I rub at my face. “It’s in the name. All the monsters were revealed.Boom.The end of the world as we know it. Though I suppose it’s more the dawn of the world for you.”
“It’s really just the same world.” Ariel shrugs. “For good or ill. It’s only the rules that have changed.”
“That’s a highly sanitized version of a global slaughter,” I point out. “Or anyway, I assume it was global. It took, what? A week to lose the internet, live television, radio, and all the rest of it. Pretty much any long-range communication device. But before then, it was pretty clear that there was a feeding frenzy, and we were on the menu.”
“But you survived.” He says that like it’s meaningful instead of just dumb luck. And given how these years have been, maybe notluckat all. “Even your brother, despite giving every indication of having an overdeveloped death wish, remains alive. And nominally human.”
I feel, deeply, that he wants me to jump on that. And ask him what he means bynominally.
So I don’t. I let that day three years ago flood back into me, all that dawning horror and sadness, the beginning of all this grief that has nowhere to go.
And the innocuous way it started—for me anyway.
“It was a Tuesday,” I tell him, this vampire king who could have caused the whole thing, for all I know. Who certainly doesn’tcarewhat happened, because why would he? I certainly can’t trust that he’s asking this for any reason but his own, whatever that might be. I even laugh a little. “Just a random fucking Tuesday that no one would ever have remembered if it hadn’t all started that day.”
9.
I’m not sure I mean to speak out loud.
But there I am, speaking with my whole voice on a topic I don’t think I’ve ever discussed. Not in any depth. What’s the point of describing a bomb to everyone else in the same bomb shelter?
I’m not looking at the vampire beside me. Instead, I’m staring out at the dark streets of Medford, down toward the intersection of Main Street and Riverside, where there used to be a bento food cart that always smelled delicious—far better than it looked. There’s an old neon sign above what used to be a decidedly down-market strip club that always looked sticky from the outside. In the years before the Reveal, there had been more new restaurants and other such attempts to bring life and light to the streets. All in vain, now.
Ariel doesn’t say a word, though I can feel his power humming all around me. He doesn’t speak, and somehow that makes it easier for me to keep going.
“It was just a Tuesday,” I say again. Just a random, pointless, boring day in the middle of an unremarkable and otherwise unmemorable week. “Augie was home, which was getting rarer in those days, though we were all not quite talking about it. But I’d called out of my shift at the coffee stand that morning because Augie had come back in the middle of the night, and I didn’t want him waking up disoriented with my grandmother at home.”
