Page 59 of The Reveal
It’s very clear that she wants me to feel every possible misgiving, and I do, but I also hustle to keep up with her. Because I decide I don’t care ifshesees me scurrying.
I have only passing, muddied perceptions of this tunnel we’re in, because it’s so dark and she’s moving so swiftly. I’m sure I can feel the walls closing in all around me, but when I reach out a hand to test that, there’s no wall within reach. Whether it’s my mind playing tricks on me or run-of-the-mill vampire games, it’s hard to say.
My mind whirls, trying to fill the darkness, so I quickly establish some rules with myself.
There will be no thinking about Ariel, his mark, or hissacrifices.
There will be no unnecessarily snarky remarks to all these things that are probably just waiting for reasons to kill me.
I have to assume, as ever, that if Ariel wanted me dead, he could and would do it himself without taking all this trouble with the nightly visits and the sex and themarkingand the wandering around riverside paths in the dark of night when surely all good vampires are out exsanguinating the innocent, et cetera.
I imagine that if I say something like that out loud, the vampire who is my unwilling guide will leap at the opportunity to hiss at me and tell me I’m far beneath her king’s notice in life and death. So I don’t say it.
But deep down, I believe it. And I finally get why Savi thinks it’s comforting.
It’s been my experience that things that want to kill you only let you live when they want something from you. I still don’t quite know what that is, but I’m alive. Despite spending every night in Ariel’s company since he first summoned me.
I decide that has to mean something.
I can hear sounds that seem to suggest that we’re underwater. Maybe that’s the effect of the river that must be rushing around nearby, or maybe it’s just the way sound travels down beneath the earth. Still, when the tunnel opens up some and I see a flicker of light, I’m more thankful than I can remember being in a long while.
Since that first night, maybe, when Gran and Augie and I huddled in the basement, said very little, and waited to see if we would make it to morning. Then did.
I don’t like being thrown back into those memories. I don’t like how clear they are, how crisp.
I try to breathe as deeply and as quietly as I can to get rid of them.
We’re in what seems like a wider sort of subterranean corridor now. It suggests that we’re in a more populated area, though I’m happy not to see crowds of vampires waiting. But there are torches in the walls, actualfires burning on sconces like some medieval castle. Thanks to them, I can see that we’re in some kind of cave.
The vampire doesn’t look back at me. I assume she can hear me just fine, and I already know she can scent me too. I don’t particularly want to focus on what it is she can scent on me tonight.
Or what she thinks it means. Ariel’ssacrifices.
Luckily, I have images from visions and nightmares to keep me entertained as we keep walking. A long walk in the pitch blackness of the tunnel is, it turns out, an excellent way to enhance the visuals. I see beaked things and slithering, and hear that vile voice inside me. The Goddess of Filth like a corrosion in my head. I also see a clearing on the side of a mountain, high up. I see cloaked things whirling and a woman on an altar. I taste blood and fear.
I sneak a hand up to wipe at my face, and I’m not sure if I’m surprised or relieved when it comes away clean.
No blood. No terrible wounds. Just copper in my mouth and all those horrible screams trapped inside me.
I think of the stupid vision that comes to me every night now, weaving its way in and out of too many nightmares of that Vinca bitch. In my nightmares, the vision expands. I get smells, tastes, touch—so viscerally that when I wake up in my bed, I’m shocked to find myself there.
I usually have only a breath or two before the headache kicks in.
Last night, I dreamed that I stood on that mountainside in the cold, my feet bare, because that’s how I went to bed. When I woke up in my bedroom, the damned cards were fanned out all around me and my foot hurt. A sharp pain, and I looked down to find a shallow cut on the sole of my right foot as if a rock’s jagged edge sliced it open.
I could ask Gran about this kind of thing, I know. But I haven’t.
I haven’t actively sought out those cards again, either, but that doesn’t keep them from turning up. I lock them away and find them in my pockets. I reach for a gun and find them tucked into my holsters. Iwake up with them all over me, like they’re either protecting me in my sleep—or trying to smother me.
Despite what I said to my grandmother about sentient cards, and how I scoffed, I already know better.
I can feel them calling me all the time. It’s not a voice like the horror of Vinca in my head, not really. But it’s a call just the same, and it tugs at me. Even now, all the way across the valley floor from my family’s house, I can hear them clamoring for my attention.
If Ariel hadn’t stripped me, I’d expect to find them tucked away in my clothes again.
One night I woke up to find myself clutching them as if I got up at some point, went to pick them up, and crawled back into bed to cuddle with them.
I threw them across my bedroom and they hit the far wall, then spilled all over the floor.
