Page 88 of The Reveal
But if that’s an attempt to change this conversation or lighten the mood, it fails.
Ariel does not change his expression or his stance at all. “You kept lapsing off into a coma, and for reasons I still cannot explain, you’re one of the only creatures I have ever encountered who appears to be entirely capable of keeping me out of your head.”
I try to digest that. I don’t think I’m understanding him. I can’t be understanding him.
“So none of this is you ... doing that thing? That song inside of me that makes me think ...?”
“Most people can’t even tell that I would like them to start singing,” he says dryly. “And when I saymost people, I mean none. Only you, Winter. If I had to describe it, I would say that I saw the door, opened it as I always do, and you slammed it back in my face. Trust me when I tell you this has never occurred before.”
I have to make myself breathe. I don’t really want to. What I want to do is ... I don’t even know. Disappear. Lie down.
Scream?
“I’m sorry,” I say, very carefully, almost warily, “that my mind is my own, I guess?”
He starts toward me, and even though there’s a large part of me that screams at me to run, I don’t.
This would all be so much easier if he truly terrified me like that.
Even from the start, he fascinated me more than he scared me.
He comes closer, and then he’s too close, so I have to tilt my head back up to look at him. And he helps me, putting his hands on either side of my head as if he’s still trying to find his way between my temples.
“I am not a merciful creature,” he tells me. “I am not soft. If I had done what I would have done to any other human in your position, I would already have the answers I need. Instead, what I have is—”
But I don’t want to hear what he wants to call me. I don’t want to know what I am to him.
If I do know, it’s too much. It’s too overwhelming.
I ambound to him, that’s what he said.
“How did you find me up there anyway?” I ask him, interrupting him.
Ariel reaches over and runs his finger down my back. I feel his hand moving along my spine, then flaring out over my hip. “Why do you think I marked you?”
“One of your vampire minions suggested it was what you always do with your sacrifices,” I say, the flare of temper that comes with it bubbling up from a place inside me I didn’t even know was there.
“I have always liked a sacrifice.” He sounds somewhere between sardonic and nostalgic. “But in your case, it was strategy. Marks are likeflares. They make you easy to find, even on the top of a mountain in the middle of the woods.”
“So why bother binding me?” I snap at him, because I feel vulnerable. Wide open. Naked in more ways than one. “You just wanted an extra charge on that flare?”
“As I said, the mark was strategy. As for binding you to me ...” He pauses then. His hands on me almost feel warm, as if I’m giving him my heat. As if it’s enough for the both of us. Again, the way his mouth curves makes me want to cry. “I don’t know what this is.”
The admission sounds torn from him. I can hear it. I can feel it. I justknowit.
But I don’t want it. That’s what I tell myself.
“What this is,” I say with as much bravado as I can summon, “is over, because I have to go sling coffee in a drive-through shack on Stage Road—”
Ariel shifts. He sighs a little, then strokes my temples.
It’s then that I realize there are lingering bits of a headache remaining, and he’s soothing them away. Stroking the sides of my face as if he knows exactly where to touch me to make all the pain simply ... disappear.
“You are an oracle,” he tells me. “And oracles are not built to keep their visions to themselves. It’s time to share what you’ve seen, Winter. What you know.”
I can feel the truth of what he’s saying. It pulls at me, but I don’t want to go there. I can’t bear howrealthis feels, and if I feel terror in his presence at last, it’s not because of what he mightdoto me.
It’s because of how he makes me feel already when he’s barely done anything at all. When he’s protected me. When he’s cared for me. When he has at no point tossed me in the dungeons I know all too well he has at the ready.
