Page 81 of The Reveal
“Yeah, yeah,” I mutter, though even my lips feel weird and my voice sounds like a death rattle. “Humanity is fragile, inside and out. Tell me something I don’t know.”
But she doesn’t seem to find me funny.
“Here’s something you don’t know,” she says, and there’s more wolf in her glare now. “That bitch did something to you. I don’t know what. She took you down and knocked you out, flat. All tied up to a stone slab in the middle of her own sacrifice. So, I don’t know, maybe take a breather?”
I don’t have time to think about whether or not I’m deeply chastened—or maybe a little bit scared—by that.
All around us, suddenly, there’s a kind of humming that seems to come from the earth itself. It sounds oddly familiar, though I can’t quite place it. I hear scraps of voices in the breeze, up so high on this mountain that I never forget is a volcano.
Then, out of nowhere, there is a column of light.
It beams down into the clearing, blinding gold, and when the brightness dims enough so we can look at it directly ... she’s there.
I can see who it is, but my brain refuses to make sense of it.
It’s like Ican’taccept what I’m seeing.
I feel my teeth chattering, that’s how wild and total my reaction is. The nearly dying part didn’t send me into shock, or not yet, but this is making it happen.
“I’m so sorry,” the figure drenched in light says. “This is not how I expected to reveal myself.”
I expect her to smile at me in that serene, calming way, but her gaze stays on me too long. She frowns, and the sound I thought I recognized gets louder. It’s chanting, I realize. The same chanting I hear almost every night from her cottage.
I have to accept that this really is Savi.
“Why are you letting her bleed out internally?” she asks, but I don’t think she’s speaking to me. I think she’s speaking to Ariel and Ty and maybe even Maddox, but once again, everything is dimming to that worrying gray around me.
I don’t want to fade away. Instead, I try to concentrate on Savi, who I last saw in my kitchen, and the fact that she is standing on amountaintop bathed in a light of her own making. I watch as she moves her hand through the air in a gesture that feels ancient and timeless, graceful and powerful, and murmurs words I don’t pretend to understand as she does it.
More of that chanting fills the air.
As she speaks, the tight, harsh grip of the cold seeping into me ... eases.
Even my headache dissipates enough so that I can take what feels like the first deep breath I’ve had since the moon rose.
Only then, only after she’s looked me over with a critical eye and exchanged one of those too-long looks with Maddox, does she deign to turn her notice to the two men standing before her.
She is not scared of either of them. She makes this very clear.
“I don’t like being summoned,” she informs Ariel. “You are too free and easy with your demands, vampire.”
And whether or not I can comprehend that Savi isthe sorceressI’ve already heard about, the way she says that makes it inarguable that whatever else she is, she is a creature of intense power.
Sorceressfits.
“You must have mistaken me for one of your lost acolytes,” Ariel returns, sounding so deadly it makesmewant to hide, and he’s not talking to me. “I bend a knee to no one. Your parlor tricks do not impress me.”
“How about we stop measuring dicks?” Ty interjects. “We all know I’ll win.”
I still haven’t managed to sit all the way up, but for the moment, I decide that’s okay. I lean against Maddox and watch the scene before me as the three of them face off, standing in their little triangle of power.
The vampire king. The werewolf alpha.
And Savi, who seems impervious to the weather and the raw power emanating from the two of them.
“There seem to be failures of communication all around,” Savi says. She sounds tranquil, as usual, but her words still send a shiver of apprehension down my spine.
“Do you mean like your decision to move into Jacksonville, conceal your true identity, and insinuate yourself into the life of two oracles?” Ariel asks her, each word a different bite, sharp and deep. “All without calling a summit?”
