Page 47 of The Reveal
Vinca,I think.
But first—or maybe I’m moving forward and back in the time of this vision, it’s not clear—there’s a woman surrounded by horror, choking on her own fear and despair. It’s sharp. Acrid.
I see sharp blades in high, thin air that smells of pine awash in copper.
I see something like an altar in the wilderness, and I think the word “sacrifice.”
I have the use of all my senses. I can smell the thick, fall scent of the green Oregon woods. I can smell rotting things and the rich earth, late hints of flowers, and mossier suggestions of dark hollows. There is a snowstorm coming in—I can smell it on the breeze. I understand that I am high above the ground and know that I’m on a mountain.
I have no sense of myself, and yet it’s like I’m standing in the same clearing with the scared woman tied up on an altar. There are figures I can’t identify, wearing garments that don’t make sense to me—like strange, dark cloaks that make my stomach hurt when I seethem—moving in what looks like wild but choreographed movements around a firepit and that altar that sits before it.
I look all around and see nothing but trees. No trails leading to or away from this clearing. There’s what looks like far-off lights in the distance, though I can’t tell if it’s so high up that I’m looking out at a starry night or if it’s a tiny burst of light from settlements far below.
I gaze up toward the moon above, quiet and bright. And full.
Then down to the woman, mangled so badly it’s difficult to tell that she was ever a woman at all. Only the altar offering she’s become is left, flesh carved into signs and sigils.
I breathe out, hard.
And then I slam back into myself. With enough force to leave bruises.
Once again I am sitting in my grandmother’s chair, my hands on her cards, and it’s disorienting because it feels no less or more real than the forest clearing where I was only just standing. I snatch my hands back from the cards as if they’re on fire.
I feel dizzy and a little bit sick. Gran’s eyes are on me, too knowing. Too calm, too certain.
“The first journey is always the most unsettling,” she tells me.
“The journey?” I repeat weakly. I know exactly what she means. But I don’t have it in me to give her the satisfaction of admitting that I believe in this.
I know it’s foolish. Childish, even. I think of all the things I’ve learned to believe in over the past three years, like it or not. This is no different from any of that, and compared to the Reveal, it’s fairly benign. Visions of monsters being preferable to actual monsters at the door, teeth bared and claws sharp.
But monsters are things that happened to us. Just like drugs.
This is apparently something Iam, and I hate it.
Because there were other things I was once, and they were taken from me, one by one. Daughter. Twin. Fully human. Just for a start.
“It can help to talk these things through,” Gran says, the moon making her indigo gaze even more intense. “Visions are not always straightforward, and the future loves nothing more than to contradict itself.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I grit out past the nausea that won’t let up, radiating from my diaphragm as if that dark, bloody altar is stuck there, making it hard to breathe. And the pounding in my head is worse, making me wonder if I’ve been having nightmares all this time—or if they were more of this vision shit.
I’m clearly hitting a wall. There are too many things to process, I haven’t even begun, and I don’t know how to add anything more to that file. Even thinking the word “process” kicks my body back into another wash of all that heat I felt in that MMA school, as if it’s bright and new.
It’s difficult to imagine that my vampire compulsion—king vampirecompulsion—extends hours later and across the valley into this room where my grandmother and I are sitting in the dark and the moonlight.
That means that the greatest danger to me right now isme.
“I felt something,” I tell Gran because I’ve never been all that great at lying to her. “But if I saw anything, I can’t remember what it is.”
This is notentirelyfalse. I know what I saw. I can still see it, the images like noise in my head—I just don’t know what it allmeans.
My grandmother only gazes at me, the same way she used to when she would ask if I happened to know where all her mints went. And I would stand there, mouth sticky with peppermint, and claim I had no idea. Fooling her not at all.
But I don’t have it in me to tell her that I can still taste that dark, slippery copper in my own mouth. That there was asmellthat I don’t want to discuss with anyone, ever. “I think that maybe nothing happened. Maybe I’m my mother’s daughter after all, and I don’t have it. Augie was always the sensitive one anyway.”
Gran sighs. Then she waves at me, dismissing me. “By all means, Winter. Go to bed.” That she’s calling me a liar is barely even subtext at this point. “Perhaps a good night’s sleep will refresh your recollection.”
I want to argue with her, possibly just for the sake of argument, but instead I stand up obediently. I start to move across the room, but she makes a tutting sort of noise that stops me. I look back at her, and she indicates the deck of cards with a jut of her stubborn chin.
