Page 72 of The Reveal
What does last is the headache, the worst one yet.
As it starts to get dark, I slow down even more, from a crawl to something slugs could beat without trying hard, because all I can see is blood.
Not the trail before me. Not the trees all around.
Those wicked blades piercing flesh. The grotesque dancing and that flickering flame and that blood, everywhere.
As if the point of the whole thing is a wholesale exsanguination.
As if they want to paint the forest, and the mountain, and the whole damn valley with the fruits of their bloodletting.
I have to say, it feels a lot like the sort of Goddess of Filth carnage I’ve heard about and seen too much of in my nightmares. The moment I think it, I know.
It’s her. It’s been her all along.
And it’s grisly, this coming sacrifice. I can feel the weight of it. There’s a sour copper taste in my mouth, and I’m moving slower and slower, as if I’m the one who’s been stabbed.
I have to force myself to keep moving anyway.
“We can stop,” Maddox says. More than once. “I can always run on ahead and scope things out.”
I want that to be the solution. I collapse, maybe at the notion that there can be any solution that isn’t this pounding in my head. She crouches next to me, and when I look at her, I can see that there’s worry there.
Not just for me.
I’m afraid I know why. “You don’t think that you can find it, do you? That only I can.”
Maddox doesn’t look all that cheerful now. “What I’m betting is that it’s the kind of thing that we’ll only be able to find afterward. I think you’re probably the only one who can find it ahead of time. Because to you, it’s already happened.”
Every time I sit down it’s harder to get up, but I keep doing it.
It gets darker and darker and I think,It’s okay. I can fight through this. All I have to do is put one foot in front of the next until I get there—
But then the moon begins to rise.
And the moment I see it, I’m done.
A blinding, nauseating pain shoots through me, a headache so vile it takes my knees out. I crumple, and the pain swells. I’m heaving, emptying my stomach, clutching my head, and thinking that a better idea might be to pick up any rock I can find and bash these fuckingthingsright out of my head—
“Okay, then,” Maddox says, with a quiet finality in her voice, “I think we’re done.”
“I can keep going,” I manage to moan, though I’m not even remotely certain that’s true. “I just need a minute.”
“You can take that minute,” Maddox tells me. “You can take fifteen. I’m going to call in reinforcements.”
She shrugs out of my pack and slings it down to the ground.
The headache hasn’t exactly eased, but I’m getting used to breathing through that bright, vicious clamp of agony. Tears are streaming down my face, yet somehow I don’t care about that. Not even when I can feelthem start to get too cold on my cheeks, because it’s already winter up this way and we haven’t even crossed the timberline.
I watch blearily as Maddox stands up again and walks a little bit farther up the trail. Then she stretches, dipping her head back and seeming to almost sigh, as if she’s arching into the moon itself, and then—
It’s like there’s a burst of light—though I think it’s more the suggestion of it—and then shechanges.
She shifts right there before me. One moment she’s the girl I’ve always known, the mystery no one has ever been able to solve, and the next—
It’s like for a split second, I can see the human and the wolf tangled up together, superimposed, one over the next, but then it’s just her again.
Only now she’s a wolf.
