Page 66 of The Reveal
Ariel lets go of my throat and slides his hand up against my temple. A cool press against my flushed skin and it makes me tremble. I’m sure he can feel that too.
“I want your visions, little seer,” he growls at me. “I want to know what’s coming and when. And I’m the only one who’s going to ask you straight out. You should be significantly more respectful.” I stare up at him blankly, my pulse going haywire. He laughs, that stark and hollow sound. “All the others playing their little games, hiding in plain sight. The difference between them and me is that I want you walking into what comes next with your eyes wide open. I want you knowing exactly what you’re signing up for.”
“Idon’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about prophecy,” he belts out at me, and I can’t imagine that the knives against skin he mentioned can cut any deeper than the blades of his words. “I’m talking about the fact that you, Winter, are the new oracle. Everyone knows it. The cards have chosen. What I don’t understand is why you’re bothering to pretend otherwise. It is as clear to everyone as the mark I left on you myself.”
I feel cold. I don’t know how I could have felt that sense of relief just moments before, or why I can stand here so calmly while this man—not a man, a predator, and I need to remember that—keeps that hand on me as if he’s being gentle when we both know how easily he could kill me.
I’m not sure why he hasn’t.
Surely, there are other avenues toward whatever prophecies he wants without getting this involved with one fractured little family here in a rural valley in Oregon.
I feel colder. At the same time, that same shivery heat is making its way through me with a certain inevitability. I think of my brother, kneeling before that terrible vampire bitch. I think about the susceptibility to addiction that clearly runs in our bloodstream.
I wish I could believe that I was being compelled too.
“I hate you,” I tell the vampire king, and I say it starkly. Without drama. Without heat. A simple statement of fact.
Ariel only smiles. That cruel mouth of his succumbs to a curve, and he shifts that hand from the side of my head to my throat again, but only for an instant. He keeps moving, tracing a path down my neck, and then stays there a moment, fiddling with Augie’s medallion.
I should slap his hand away.
I don’t do that. I tell myself I’m only imagining the burst of sudden heat I feel, just for a moment, but it’s gone again too quickly to mention.
“I know it doesn’t matter,” I tell him, holding his gaze, though it makes every part of me ache. “But I do. I truly hate you. I think it’s important that you know that.”
I wouldn’t describe that smile of his as sad, exactly. But it’s no expression of joy, especially when it deepens.
“Little seer,” he says, and even his voice sounds bittersweet, “that won’t help you either.”
16.
I let myself into the house, the heavy door falling closed behind me. I throw all the locks, then test them by rote.
It’s late again. Very late.
I should be used to these late nights since Ariel came into my life, but I’m not. I can’t say I’ve slept well over the past three years, but at least I spent most of those nights actually lying down.Resting my bones,as Gran would say, even with all the nightmares.
There’s been very little resting lately. Of my bones or anything else.
The moon lit my path all the way home, only the faintest sliver away from the fullness it will achieve tomorrow. But everything felt weird already. I was convinced I could see shadows acting of their own accord from the corner of my eye.
When I drove into Jacksonville, I felt so separate from the group of humans I saw congregating on the sidewalk, in clear violation of curfew, that I felt like I might as well be a different species already.
I swallow hard and stand there in the front hall, my forehead against the front door.
Like I can’t decide if I want to pound my head against it until I think a little less loudly, or open it back up and run screaming into the forest to see what might become of me. I consider both options.
For a while.
The pounding in my head would likely bring unwanted attention from my tenants and possibly even require explanations to Gran, allof which would defeat the purpose of it. And running off into the forest would almost certainly lead to my death, when I have things to do. Some of those things involve continuing to take care of my spicy grandmother, whether she wants me to or not.
Whether we talk about visions and prophecies, goddesses and lies, or not.
I turn around, but I don’t move away from the door. I think about Augie. I don’t want to sob, or scream, or throw up. I kind of want to do all three. I can almost envision it. It feels like relief, me on my hands and knees in my own bathroom, purging my body of ... everything. Starting with the past three years, my parents’ disappearance, my brother’s slow slide into addiction preceding it. All the way back to high school, when we would both sneak out to parties but he was the one who got obliterated and I was the one who got him home.
I could start with all that and end with everything I saw tonight, and from far too close.
