Page 56 of The Reveal
I realize what he’s doing is licking my pulse.
It’s unbearably erotic. It makes my knees so weak that if he wasn’t holding me up I’m sure I would collapse, something that should alarm me more than it does.
He sets me apart from him after a few moments, but I can barely stand.
Ariel turns me around to face him and takes a look at me as I sag back against the wall. I’m sure that the gleam in his eyes is amusement. That I’m entertaining him somehow, and that makes me feel proud—something else that should set off a claxon or two inside me, but doesn’t. He reaches down and pulls my pants up, fastening them with great intent and care.
That makes an entirely different part of me shudder.
“I think I need to shower,” I manage to say.
Ariel makes a sound that I think is his laughter, low and deep. And rare. “In some centuries, it was considered an honor to bear my mark. Those lucky enough to be anointed would rub it deep into their skin and praise me for bestowing such a gift upon them.”
“Um. Thanks?”
I stand up, and it’s strange. I can feel where he came all over me, but it doesn’t feel cold. Or gross. Or even really the slightest bit sticky. It feels like heat, as if I’m glowing.
I decide not to tell him that.
“Such a graceless age this is,” the vampire king says quietly. “No wonder the world crumbles all around us.”
“I thought that had more to do with the rise of the monsters.” I remember what he told me and correct myself. “Excuse me. I meanthe Kind.”
“Monsters have manners,” he tells me. “Even if you don’t see that, I assure you, they know how to behave. Our hierarchies demand it.”
“What hierarchies?”
“There are always hierarchies, Winter. Humans are sent to your schools to learn this. All creatures have rules, and whether they break them or follow them, those rules still exist.”
“Spoken by someone who gets to be king.”
“I didn’t happen upon that title. I earned it. All monster enclaves are meritocracies. What you wish to hold, you must defend. Might is always right. That’s the way of the world, little seer. If you thought otherwise, you’ve been kidding yourself.”
That strikes a spark in me, and happily, for once, it has nothing to do with my insatiable lust for this man and his perfect body.
This time it’s temper. Maybe it’s thatlittle seerbusiness. It makes me think of what Gran said to me about the cards waiting for me. About them no longer wanting her. It makes me wonder if he knew that telling me that Gran was the oracle would trigger ... whatever that was. Whatever that means.
“I don’t need you to tell me how hard life is,” I grit out at him. “You’re not prey, are you?”
“Do you think you are?” He laughs, and this time it’s big and loud and for show. Not that real laugh I heard before. “Do you think it’s theluck of the draw that the oracle and her family remain untouched? Why do you think Jacksonville is the safe zone?”
I don’t like the way he’s looking at me. I don’t like the intensity of that silver gaze bearing down on me. “Because that’s what Samuel negotiated with you. You and the werewolf king.”
“There are three major powers in this valley,” Ariel says, and there’s something too watchful about his gaze. Too ...careful. “The vampire king, you are lucky enough to know all too well. The werewolf alpha, you’ve met. But you must not count out the sorceress.”
“The sorceress?” I repeat, in disbelief.
Again, he studies me for a moment that stretches on too long.
“Among other things, she controls the weather.” He shifts his weight, calling attention to his previous stillness, then crosses his arms over his chest. “Every now and again, to remind me of the part she plays, she allows us a sunny afternoon or two. But mostly, it rains or it’s smoky, and we live happily in the gray. At her whim.”
“A sorceress,” I say again, possibly with less disbelief, because it shouldn’t be hard to believe in even more impossible things. Not at this point.
“A refugee from a major sorcerer family.” He sounds as close to merry as I’ve ever heard him. “You won’t know these families, but they have wreaked their own brand of havoc since the first sorcerer willed himself into being by an unnatural collusion with certain dark texts in the bowels of the Dark Ages. All the infighting and drama and world-altering nonsense you can imagine, like any other subset of the Kind. Only with more weather events, because they do like a show.”
I blow out a breath, suddenly aware of how much more there is to the world of monsters than my own small despairs here in a forgotten valley. “How many kinds of the Kind are there?”
“That is a question that can never be answered.” Ariel lifts a shoulder and drops it, though his gaze is unwavering. “There are always more. There is no ceiling. What should concern you are the clans that act as one.Surely, even humans know that when you band together, your strength is amplified.”
