Page 84 of The Reveal
I surface into awareness. I have the sense that I’m coming out of a deep, restorative sleep, not the usual head too full of bloody visions all night long and the pain in my temples to match. Or the driving anxiety of wondering if the house was breached in the night, if Gran is still alive, if there are zombies snuffling around and dripping body parts out back—or worse threats.
Usually, I wake up hard and fast, my blood pressure already jacked up high because I have to be ready to fight.
Today I’m lying face down on a bed that I know isn’t mine, but I can’t summon up any concern about that. Not yet.
This bed is too remarkably soft for any dramatic cardiac responses. The pillow beneath my head smells faintly of herbs, or maybe I do for some reason. I stretch, wiggling my toes, and I’m so warm and so cozy that it takes me a moment to remember that really, I shouldn’t feel this good.
I open my eyes then, reluctantly. Then I turn over and try to make sense of my surroundings.
The room I’m in is shadowy and cool. I sit up, gingerly, waiting for the usual aches and that awful headache to settle in, but still nothing hurts.
Around me, there’s exposed brick, and very little else. The bed I’m in is all white linens, wide and high off the ground. It’s the paintings on the far wall—actual paintings in serious frames, not prints and posters stuck to the wall—that click.
I’m in Ariel’s apartment. This has to be what this is. It reeks of sophistication in a way nothing else in this valley does.
As I think that, flashes start to come back to me.
The mountain. The blood.
That fight I’d watched and even crawled through, those terrible cloaked figures—I still don’t know what they were, and I’m not sure I want to know—the flashing knives, and that creepy chanting as they slashed and fought.
Werewolves in the midst of all those cloaks, full monsters in every sense of the term—but it’s hard to hold on to the fear I ought to feel, because they saved me.
That woman with blood all over her mouth and the way those hands of hers that should have been weak grabbed on to me. Hard. I frown down at my hands, flipping them this way and that, looking for marks. Looking for wounds or broken bones orsomethingto indicate why it was that I reacted like that.
She’s coming,the woman said, and something about the way she said it knocked me out, tore me up, and—I’m pretty sure—almost killed me.
But what else can you expect when theshein question is a death goddess?
Fucking Vinca,I think now.The asshole goddess of filth and pain.
But more flashes of memory are hitting me now.
I see myself in Ariel’s arms, something fierce and stark on that gorgeous face of his as he carries me into a bathroom that I know I haven’tseen before. I look to my right from the bed I’m in and am certain that the bathroom in question is there. Just behind that door.
It’s not so much that I remember it. It’s that I know it.
I have a flash of being in a bath filled with hot water that turned red as I sat there, as the vampire king himself washed me. Then rinsed out my hair, making me smell like him. He took his time and, when he was done, wrapped me in the softest towel I’ve ever felt against my skin.
“Bullshit,” I whisper to myself.
I must be having those dreams again. Not visions, just fantasies.
Yet even as I think that, they keep coming.
And they get weirder.
Silver eyes on mine that I would have thrown myself into, if I could. A question and my answer,Yes.
As if I would have shouted it out, if I were able.
His mouth on my neck, licking my pulse, and then those fangs I saw on the mountain piercing my skin.
I can feel the pressure, the pain. Then the way the pain ...bloomsinto something else, something sensual andgood.
Even the memory is a lush, marvelous sensation, washing all over and through my body.
I remember that sharp pain fading, and then a pleasure almost as intense as the orgasms he’s given me.
