Page 46 of The Reveal
Because she’s not wrong. She could have spent the Monday before that horrible Tuesday telling me every single thing that was going to happen, and I would have gently suggested she get some sleep. I would have called her doctor in the morning.
There is no possibility that any version of me would have believed any of the things I’ve learned over the past three years, much less the things I learned only tonight.
“It is a test we must all face, anyone who sees into the wheel of time,” Gran says, and she is watching me intently, in a way that makes my bones seem to rearrange themselves inside me. They take up new positions, hold new weight, and I can feel a coming tide of memories—or maybe not memories—hovering somewhere in all of that. “Do you see the future or your own desires? Would you impose upon the future your interpretation of what it should be or let it do what it will? I’ll tell you now—if you choose wrong, you pay.”
“That’s very enticing.”
“You pay either way, child.” Now she sounds almost kind, and that makes my eyes water. As if she’s being gentle with a terrible diagnosis. This is the first moment when I think past the things I feel on a physical level. The first moment I think,This might be a real thing. Gran nods. “There’s no gift without a price. And only you can decide how much you’re willing to pay for the things you see, the way you interpret what you see, and who you tell.”
“Who did you tell?” I ask. But my voice is hoarse. Little more than a whisper.
“There is always, always, a reckoning. Anyone who tells you otherwise expects to die before paying it, or intends to take that price out on you.”
“What a grim and grisly little gift,” I manage to get out.
“They chose you a long time ago, Winter.” Gran nods toward the cards. “They’ve been waiting years and years to speak through you.” When I start to argue, she lifts a hand, and I stop. She cocks her head as if she can hear whispers in the moonlight. “It is time to listen, child.”
I don’t want to listen to anything, but I can’t pretend that the cards aren’t calling to me. Now that she’s made it obvious, it’s like she’s turned up the volume to its highest level.
When I look down, the deck before me is glowing, pulsing.
The cards know me,I think, and the creepiest part is that I’mnotweirded out by that thought. Instead, it settles into this new configuration of bones and sinew inside.
Like a key into a lock.
I tell myself it’s the dark. I tell myself that my defenses are down because of Ariel. Because of all the things I did that I shouldn’t have done, or didn’t do at all—but I still can’t think about that. About him.
What I can admit, at last, is that I can hear the cards whispering to me.
I think about Augie. I think about Ariel. I think all the way through the mess of these last few years. And back before the Reveal, too. My mom disappearing. My father not long after. So many secrets. So much deep, dark familyick.
And all the while, Gran and these cards were part of it.
Seeing things no one else sees. Knowing things no one should know.
Maybe I’ve had a secret weapon all along, mine if I can be brave enough to accept it. To use it. To learn how to wield it.
And so, at last, I let my hands creep forward until they rest on that dark deck the way I’ve seen Gran do a thousand times.
I feel something bright and hot shoot through me, filling me up, golden and painful andright.
Like I’m meeting myself for the very first time.
I don’t need to ask what to do. I justknow.
I pull a card.
11.
It hits me like a train.
It’s a vision, hot and intense, and it takes me over. Or takes me down. I don’t have the slightest idea what my own body is doing.
Because I see a body in the woods, mutilated.
I see a great, beaked thing with sharp teeth and a slithering within.
The Goddess of Filth, I understand.
