Page 63 of The Reveal
“Take whatever you think is happening and amp it up by about a million,” he tells me, and his voice is as serious as his gaze now. “That’s what’s happening here, and believe me, you want no part of it. If you can leave, you need to leave.”
I drink him in. His face looks filled out again. His body isn’t too skinny and bruised everywhere. He doesn’t have that gaunt, haunted look about him. He’s not hunched over or twitching. He doesn’t look like he’s been living rough at all. Even naked in a cell, he looksbright, the way he used to.
I don’t know what to make of it.
“You look good,” I say, and I don’t do a good job of keeping the emotion out of my voice. I don’t really try. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you look like this again. Healthy, I mean.”
His hand snakes out and grabs my arm again. “I’m not healthy,” he grits out at me. “I’m very fucking far from healthy, do you get me? What I am, Winter—and I need you to hear me on this—is fucked.”
“Welcome to life in the Reveal.” I study his face. The one I know better than my own and always have. “What do we have to do to get you unfucked?”
He only shakes his head, something much too close to despair on his face for my liking.
For a moment, we just ... breathe together, and I almost think we’ll be okay. Almost.
I hear sounds from down the line of cells and I don’t turn, but he does. When he looks back at me, there’s nothing to see but panic. It’s all over his face.
“You shouldn’t be here.” He sounds anguished. “Winter, I wish ...”
But he stops, and he moves away from me, deeper into the cell. I move too, stepping back to press myself against the slimy wall that marks the end of this terrible corridor. Because at least that way nothing can come up behind me.
What’s coming toward my face, however, is not exactly great. I’d almost prefer to get jumped from behind so I’d have less time to contemplate the horror.
Vampires pour down into the dank little corridor we’re in. There appear to be hundreds of them, but that’s the hysteria and panic talking. There are at least ten, which is no small number of vampires in these tight and creepy quarters, but that’s nothundreds.
Small mercies, really. They’re all beautiful and terrible, not least because they look like they’re flooding into a club for a party. It’s disconcerting. It makes my head hurt, like my brain can’t process what I’m seeing when I’m standing in an actual dungeon where my twin brother is in literal chains.
At first, I think they’re coming for me and I can’t believe that Ariel threw me to them like this, like table scraps out the back door to feed a little wildlife. If I survive, I intend to excise thatthingin me thatapparently cares whether or not the scary vampire king who probably sees me as little more than a sex toylikes me—
I realize in the next heartbeat that they’re not here for me.
Or not all of them anyway.
One by one, they peel off to go into the cells along the way. Immediately, I hear various cries. Sounds I can’t quite make sense of, chains against stone, laughter.
So much laughter.
Until there are only two, the vampire bitch who brought me here and one of her buddies, this one an absurdly pretty man. They stop at the cell before Augie’s. The male vampire flashes his fangs at me before he opens the cell, and then I see the woman inside. A human woman, I think, until I see that her ears are pointed. She sobs when she sees him, and I think he’s going to beat her, and I don’t know if I can stand here andwatcha woman get beaten no matter if she’s not my species—
Instead, she crawls toward him, making sounds it takes me long moments of disbelief to understand are herbegging.
The vampire laughs, because this is clearly high comedy for bloodsuckers, and then slices open his own arm with a fingernail. He stands over her, letting the blood swell up, pool, and then drip down into her face.
But she’s not lying there passively, letting him splash blood on her.
She’s writhing on the floor, her mouth wide open and desperate, whining a little as she tries to get each drop of blood into her mouth.
My stomach turns and I gag. I try to shrink into the wall, but my favorite vampire bitch is strolling toward me, a smirk on her face.
“Feeding time,” she purrs at me.
She opens the cell door with a wave of her hand, no keys required. Showy vampire tricks, but I have to admit they’re effective. My stomach twists again, but this time when I cramp up, it’s fear.
I expect my brother to do something when she saunters toward him, but he doesn’t. He looks at me with anguish all over his face—
But then he looks back at her.
And I understand, even though it makes me want to heave. Or scream. Or maybe sob.
