Page 97 of The Reveal
I want to throw up.
I’m not sure how I don’t.
“Your fate will be similar,” Vinca tells me. I feel her beak against one temple. I feel her smile, terrible and vast, against the nape of my neck. “You dare to defy me, tiny human? It will not bode well for you. I will see you torn into pieces, shredded and peeled, and I will make certain that you live through most of it.”
It’s hard to swallow. It actually hurts, but it’s that or start puking. “I don’t think I deserve that. I don’t know anything. I’m supposed to see futures, but you’re the past.”
“You smell like night leeches and wolves who cheat the moon,” she tells me, that sickening swell of her words from inside my own body. “It is only a matter of time before I rise. The steps have already been taken. Only one lock remains. When the chains fall, you will know my wrath. I will make sure of it.”
“Tell me where you are and I will tend to you sooner,” I tell her.
I feel something hit me, but I don’t know if it’s merely the force of her or some separate blow.
Once again, I’m entirely too aware that even here, on some astral plane, or whatever the hell this is, she would kill me easily if it weren’t for Ariel. That it is his borrowed power, his immortal blood, that is making this possible.
Another blow slams into me, and though I waver and feel weak, I’m still here. In one piece. In whatever strange space this is.
With Vinca the killer death goddess.
“They sunk me deep into the earth so that no one would ever find me,” comes her hideous voice, inevitable and corrosive, like hot oil choking me from the inside out. “But faith always seeks its own level.”
She laughs then, a terrible wind. And then she is a new storm that howls and destroys, sucking in stars and planets as she swirls all around me. I can feel death pressing in. I can feel the history and the sweep of centuries, all of it a kind of cyclone that leaves me off-balance and fighting to keep my footing as she rages on and on.
There’s a scream inside me. There’s that searing pain in my head. My poor bones shake and rattle, and I don’t know how they don’t snap.
Until, at last, she’s there before me. “I will rise,” comes that voice, tearing through me.
I can hear it inside me. I can see it on all of her faces at once, a terrible rippling all over her as if she’s about to explode.
Then she does, straight at me—
23.
I wake up in Ariel’s arms.
I move carefully, gingerly, not sure whether or not I really did break my bones. Or possibly ingested whatever she was, like a deified chemical spill. I expect to feel fuzzy and hungover again at the very least, but I don’t.
On the contrary, I feel remarkably clear.
Even good.
I move to sit up, but Ariel’s big hand moves to the back of my neck. There’s not much I can do to keep him from swinging my gaze to his.
Maybe I don’t try.
Our eyes meet. They hold.
I can feel every single thing that’s ever happened between us. The depth of his cock inside me. The taste of his blood.
How very much I wanted him to sink those fangs into my neck.
How much I still do.
“What did you do to me this time?” I ask.
“Last time, I healed you,” he says, and he sounds faintly reproving. “By now you must realize that you would have died if you looked upon a being like Vinca without any interventions. She likes killing. She has managed, for centuries, to maintain a small but highly motivated cult of diehards who are only too happy to murder in her name. But she really does prefer to do it herself. She’s always had a grandiose idea of her own greatness.”
“You know her,” I say, following a hunch that comes over me in a rush. Then again, I’m the oracle. Maybe it’s not ahunch. “Personally, I mean.”
