Page 96 of The Reveal
It wassupposedto kill me.
They lured me there to crush me like the bug I am to them. To her.
“You should be dead,” says this creature, this magnificent and hideousideatoo huge to be contained in a normal body. What bones or flesh could hold her?
I realize the word I’m looking for is “goddess.”
I’ve never had occasion to think about what a godmeansbefore. How a godfeelswhen it is standing before you, as capable of erasing the totality of your existence—and all existence—as it is in creating new galaxies to orbit the ones it’s already wrecked.
Even thinking these things in the expansive form I’m in hurts me. It makes my head pound—a lot like it did on the mountain last night.
When she speaks, it’s as if the voice rings out from inside my own bones. If she has a mouth at all, I cannot see it move.
“Why are you not dead?” she asks. Demands, more like.
“I’m not sure that I’mnotdead,” I manage to reply.
She moves toward me, and I have the sense then that I’m not so much out among the stars any longer. I am in a different sort of enclosed space. It’s another prison, a dungeon without walls.
Yet I also have the distinct impression that I’m standing in a temple.
Her temple.
“You dare to speak to me like this?” comes the voice, from everywhere. From inside me. “You should not dare to speak to me at all. Oracles come to me with humility, cutting their own throats and waiting upon my pleasure to see if I might let them live.”
“Tempting,” I choke out, overwhelm like a thick lump in my throat. “Really.”
“You will scream it soon enough,” comes that terrible voice, swelling up inside me like the urge to be sick. Like every nightmare I’ve had of her already, combined. “It will be the only prayer you know, for mine is a worship that requires total and complete attention. If there is one morsel of food before you and it will rot if you do not eat it immediately, you should cast it aside. Better to sing my praises and wait upon my mercy.”
I swallow hard, tamping down that rising horror inside. “I’m sure you will understand if I suspect that your mercy is a bit out of reach.”
What with the trying to kill me and all.
I don’t say that part, but I feel as if she hears it anyway.
“You can think of me as fate,” the voice tells me. In front of me, all around me, possibly even inside me, she flickers back and forth between visages. Until it is all rotted beak, slick feathers, and a terrible goddess who makes the bones she is speaking through—the ones inside my own limbs—so brittle and sharp that I worry that if I tremble, they will crack and crumble into dust.
I understand then that if Ariel was not pouring his blood into me, I would not survive this encounter.
I’m not meant to live through this. Vinca is about death, not life.
I try to pull myself together to make the most of this meeting. I think about all the scraps of things I’ve heard about this goddess, locks and keys, and all the rest.
“You are coming.” I try to pronounce that with some drama, the way Gran did. The way it echoes inside me. “That’s what I keep hearing. I believe my grandmother saw it herself.”
“Soon I will rise,” she agrees. Her head moves to an unnatural angle, and I feel as if that long, pointed beak is pressed hard against my solar plexus. And she digs it in, all without touching me. “I will rise, and when I do, this world you consider ruined will be my playground. I will feast. I will play. Immortals will worship before me, mortals will cower, and I will kill them all as I please. I will build this world in my image, as I have always meant to do.”
It’s difficult to know where I am in a space that feels like death on all sides, a 360-degree sphere of that same intensifying horror. It grows and grows. I remind myself that it doesn’t matter whereIam. It matters wheresheis.
I do my best. “Where are you now? Where have you been all this time?”
“I have been looking out through the eyes of the faithful for a very long time.” She flickers into the sacrificed woman’s face, but it’s wormy and foul. “I have ordered them to find me, and time and again, they have failed.”
Another flicker, and there is something malevolent staring out at me from behind that dark beak. I don’t ask what became of those who failed her. I figure I can guess, and I definitely don’t want any details.
“There was a priest, in the old days. He was meant to protect me, but he did not.” Again, I see things on her face and in it as she shifts between them all, things I already wish I could scrub out of my head. “He brought in his sorcerer to cast nasty little spells. The last thing I did before they sunk me in my hole and locked me up tight was to make sure that every follower I ever had, any of my faithful, need only look upon him and know him. Then tear him to pieces, with their own dull fingernails if necessary.”
She drip-feeds images to me as she tells me these things, so that instead of making some quip about dull fingernails versus a set of sharp knives, I can see it. I see shadowy images of people dressed in styles of clothing I can’t make sense of, converging on a single man. I see a pack of them all over him, grunting in satisfaction as he screams. Shoving their hands against him to bruise him, then digging their way into him with their bare hands. Tearing him apart by the fistful, tossing chunks of flesh and gristle to the dark earth.
