Page 127 of The Reveal
Too bad I don’t get to choose to avoid it, and not only because my grandmother’s dying wish was that Augie and I live. It feels like a commandment.
I can’t succumb to that urge to simply fall down until the weight of this lessens, because there’s thatthinginside me.
Gran would call it my gift.
I call it fucked up.
Because I know what this is, and what’s coming.
I’ve already seen it.
29.
Seeing another vision of mine come to life, starring the same fuckheads, is clarifying.
It’s not that I stop grieving, it’s that I feel that grief shift. Become fuel.
It helps to know that Gran would have bitten my head off, then told me to wipe my face clean and get to work.
Not sentimental, our Gran.
I do what I know she would want me to do. I retreat to the place where she’s lying, much too still. I pull the cards out from the pocket they chose today and shuffle them, humming a little in the back of my throat. It isn’t a tune. It’s more the suggestion of one, and I let it play through me and into the cards.
Beside me, Augie finishes arranging Gran and turns to handling Samuel. He goes through his pockets. He finds the other weapons Samuel had stashed away on his body. He turns him over and pulls open the pack he was wearing on his back.
Ariel is moving too. I hear him bark out orders, and I realize I’ve heard him do this before. I’ve watched him do it, and watched his vampire minions respond to his commands with their brutal poetry.
When I look up, I see the vampires appearing. They go from mist to corporeal form, then into those same perfect lines I saw in the MMA studio.
It was his army all along.
They melt into formation, Ariel at the helm.
Ty has shifted again, and he lets out a new roar. It isn’t a howl, not that sound.
It’s another call to arms, I realize in the next moment as the wolves begin to pour in, coming from all directions, some of them from behind—like they’ve been hiding out in the hills.
They flank the cloaked figures, the vampires advance, and the battle begins on a much larger scale than the one I barely survived on Mount McLoughlin.
Savi steps over the retaining wall and floats out onto the little spit of cliff on the other side. Maddox goes with her, a sleek and terrible wolf bodyguard.
I keep shuffling my cards. I keep humming. I wait for the sight to take hold.
Augie makes a noise as he digs around in Samuel’s pack. When I frown at him, he pulls out one of those cloaks. I could try to explain that away, but he follows it with a beaked mask.
It’s another blow I didn’t see coming.
I stop humming. I find myself holding the cards to my heart. “He was one of them?”
Was he there that night on the mountain? Did he know what would happen to me?
But even as I wonder these things, I release them. Samuel is dead. I’m not. That’s all that matters.
Augie’s mouth twists as he looks down at the mask in his hand. “Everyone wants power,” my twin tells me in a low voice. “Maybe especially the ones who pretend they don’t. You should know that by now.”
His gaze meets mine. We’re looking at each other, but weareeach other. It feels right. It feels like a much-needed return to form.
But it’s also so new that it aches.
