Page 79 of The Reveal
I fall more than once, but I still keep going, crawling if necessary, puking when I can’tnot, until I make it around that fire. Once I do, I kneel right there beside the altar.
I confirm that she’s not dead. Not yet, though that seems like a foregone conclusion, and I can remember feeling the marks that I see all over her gouged deep into my own skin. I feel them again now.
The woman reaches out her bound hands to me, and I don’t think. I take them in mine.
I think that I ought to say something beautiful or comforting orsomething—
Her hands are bloody and mangled, and she shouldn’t be able to grip me as hard as she does. So hard that she jerks me toward her. Much too close, as a matter of fact, though I question my empathy that I should have a problem with a poor, sacrificed woman getting what comfort she can—
She croaks at me.
“What?” I ask, my head swimming again, though I try to give this dying soul my attention—and what tattered empathy I have in me—in her last moments.
She grabs my hand even harder, painfully hard, grinning at me through teeth soaked in blood.
I know I’m not making that up, because she laughs.
“She’s coming,” the woman tells me, a terrible echo of words I’ve heard before.
Then her mouth goes wide, her eyes go dark and opaque, and when she opens her mouth it’s like I’m being sucked inside, lost forever—
And everything I am, everything there is, goes black.
19.
I know I’m awake again because I hurt. Everything hurts.
Hurtbarely covers it.
I feel foggy and strange. It seems to take an enormous, Herculean effort to open my eyes. When I do, I rub them as if that might make what I’m looking at begin to make sense.
But it doesn’t, no matter how much I rub, so I stop.
When I look at my hands, I see blood. Then I remember that woman—and I’m pretty sure I just rubbed her blood all over me.
I start to turn, maybe a little wildly. I wonder what happened to her, and to me, and to all those terrible cloaked figures—
“Settle down,” says a voice close beside me, and I recognize it immediately.
I do as I’m told. I settle, and only then look to see Maddox there beside me. It seems to take me much too long to process the fact that her arm is around me—a lot like she was cradling my form while I ... lay about unconscious?
Because I’m pretty sure I passed out. I’m actually a little shocked I’m not dead.
It’s an incredibly disconcerting thing to consider—the image of me, entirely defenseless and unaware, just ... laid out for any of the dark and terrible things here to do whatever they want with.
It’s more than disconcerting. It makes my back curl where I sit, or would, if that sort of movement didn’t make everything hurtmore. Italso makes my stomach start to act up again when, surely, there can be nothing left inside me to throw up.
I try not to think about it. I look back to the center of the clearing, past the choking black smoke and a charred, sweet scent I opt not to think about too closely. There are cloaked bodies lying all around, many of them ravaged and in pieces. I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in the past three years, and I’m weirdly glad about it now, because otherwise I think I would simply lapse off into shock at what I’m seeing.
Instead, I know to let my gaze skim right over the details without letting them land. I do that, and find myself squinting at the two upright figures in the center of the clearing, surrounded by bodies.
One is Ty, as expected.
The other one is Ariel. This is not expected at all.
And they are not having a quiet, civil conversation.
“How could you risk her?” Ariel is shouting, and he’s angrier and scarier than I’ve ever seen him. For one thing, there’s theshoutingwhen I think of him as still and quietly terrifying. For another, I can see his fangs. For yet another thing, the silver of his eyes has gone dark and mean.
