Page 68 of The Reveal
I can feel, too well, every sickening blow from the cloaked figures who swirl and chant around me, and the blades that tear me apart.
Everything is blood and agony, tiny and overwhelming at once.
I shudder back into myself, and for a moment, I’m standing there on that frigid mountainside, watching from afar. I see the trees allaround, the moon up above, and rock formations in the mountainside that look like goblins frozen into place—goblins who sneer and snarl at me like only they know I’m there—
In the next breath, I’m back.
I’m on the steps outside my house with Maddox, a surprisingly comforting presence next to me. I glance at her, but she doesn’t appear to have noticed that I was outside my own body for who knows how long.
I tell myself that’s good news. I can quietly have visions without alerting everyone around me. It doesn’t have to be me frothing on the ground, foaming at the mouth, or rolling my eyes in the back of my head while moaning about messages from the great beyond.
Where that impression of oracles came from, I don’t know, as I’ve never seen Gran do anything of the kind.
I blow out a breath. I can’t get the full moon tomorrow out of my head—especially the view of it I keep having from the same blood-soaked mountainside—and looking at it nearly full now doesn’t exactly help with that. I can’t seem to get the claws of that vision out of me.
That’s not even getting to Augie and all the vampires.
Or all the things my grandmother never told me.
Somehow, a werewolf seems like the safest space around right now. “What if I know something bad is going to happen and I want to stop it before it does?” I ask.
Maddox doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t ask me what the hell I’m talking about. She doesn’t question how I could know something is going to happen before it does.
What she does is tilt her head a little, like she’s considering it.
“Are you certain that you can stop it?” she asks.
Something about her reaction is poking at me, but I put that aside. “If I don’t try, I know that I can’t. Do you really think it matters if IknowI can stop it?”
When she looks at me, there’s something in her gaze I can’t quite place. It’s not pity. But it hits me in a similar way. “I think that if something isso huge that involving yourself, or revealing yourself, will only harm you and do nothing to change what’s coming ... there’s no point.”
That sets off a soft little chime deep inside me. A kind of alarm, maybe. I tell myself it’s simple recognition of the enormity of what I’m about to do. The knowledge that I should keep this secret is like a hand around my throat—
But that only makes me think of Ariel, and I flush.
I frown hard to sober myself up. “A woman is going to be murdered horribly on a mountaintop tomorrow night.” My voice sounds sharper than expected.
Again, Maddox doesn’t react the way I expect her to. She doesn’t question the murder part. She holds my gaze. “Do you know which mountain?”
“I have an idea,” I say. “A vague idea.” I gesture in the approximate direction of the distant mountain range on the far side of the valley, not that it can be seen from this porch.
She makes a low noise like she’s mulling it over.
Those alarms in me get louder, and suddenly all I can think about is what Ariel said about those who hide in plain sight. I think about how strange it is that either version of Maddox should be here at all. The popular girl from high school or the future queen of the werewolf pack.
I want to believe that she really does want that space she told me she craved, from Ty and the rest of what sounds like a very fraught powder keg of a family dynamic, and I know from powder kegs.
But.
But.
I turn to face her, thunking my mug down between us on the porch step. “Did you move in here because you knew?” I think about that night when Ty Ceridwen came to the door, that thing he said to me. That Ibetter be worth it. “Did you know that I was the new oracle?”
The cards have chosen,I hear Ariel say again.
Maddox lets out a sound then. A hollow little noise. “Yes.” I suppose it’s to her credit that she doesn’t prevaricate. “I did know.” She looks at me. “But, in fairness, you weren’t the new oracleyet.”
I laugh, and it’s another bit of hollowness. “I guess the joke’s on me that I thought I could actually be friends withtheMaddox Hemming.”
