Page 87 of The Reveal
I think about that painful climb up the mountainside. About that last, terrible, stumbling half crawl across the clearing to get to her. I remember—vividly—taking her hands in mine and trying to think what comfort I could offer someone in her position.
“Vinca is coming,” I whisper. Ariel shifts, stiffening, and I shake my head. “That’s what she told me. That’s why she was there. And I’m not sure that makes her less of a victim, in the end.”
“She wanted to be there, and was tasked with delivering a specific gift,” Ariel says with a certain gentleness. “It was not a gift for you. It was a gift to her goddess. A further demonstration of her faith. If you hadn’t had the questionable sense to go there in the company of wolves, you would be dead. They were expecting you, Winter.”
I clutch that blanket closer to my chest. “That’s impossible.”
“Don’t you understand? You are an oracle. Visions are not supposed to tear you apart, and yet the one that got you up that mountain was deliberately designed to do just that.”
“To what end?” I demand. “Nothing you’re saying even make sense. How did a woman on an altar even know who I was?”
His gaze seems to sharpen, to get more brilliant and more pointed. “Everybody knows who you are.”
“If they have a coffee addiction, maybe.”
“Your family has always been known,” he tells me, almost impatiently, as if I’m being deliberately obtuse. “And another thing thateveryone knows is that your grandmother could easily contact you across the veil if you died. It’s why oracles are so popular with the longer-lived of the Kind. They make the burden of outliving everyone you know, over and over again, a little lighter.” The look on his face is forbidding, so I don’t ask him who he misses. “The goddess knew that her message would come through no matter what happened. That was the plan. That is the gift she left with you, and she didn’t care if you received it dead or alive.”
My head is reeling, and I’m tired of reeling. I’m exhausted, and I feel certain, somehow, that this is his fault. Because it has to be his fault. If it’s his fault, he can stop it. He can fix what he did and we can go back to—
But where do I think there is to go?
“One option I had was to let you die, then negotiate with your grieving grandmother for whatever message might have been sent through you,” Ariel says, very deliberate and intent. “Another was to do what I did.”
He’s standing there, so austere. So far apart from me when I still have those images in my head, those flashes. When I canfeelhow close we were when he was biting into me. When I was sucking his blood deep into my mouth.
“Or you could have killed me yourself,” I say.
He inclines his head, those silver eyes gleaming. “Or that.”
It shouldn’t be this hard to breathe. “But you didn’t do that, Ariel. Why didn’t you do that?”
I keep coming up hard against this thing I don’t want to admit. I don’t want to feel it. It doesn’t make sense to feel it. I go around and around—
It’s too soon. It can’t be real. I can’t discount the fact that he’s a vampire—in many ways,thevampire—and anything I might be feeling he could have planted in me for his own amusement.
Except there’s this: the way he’s looking at me in this unlit room with only the rain outside. It feels like it’s inside both of us. As if thedownpour is washing us clean, too, not only that clearing high up on McLoughlin. As if it’s washing away all the excuses.
I desperately want them back. I want to hide in them.
But I can’t seem to make myself say the things that could make that happen.
All Ariel does is gaze at me much too long. Until, finally, when I think there will be no more words between us, he shifts slightly where he stands.
“I found the notion of your death, with no hope of resurrection, unappealing.”
He says it so stiffly. As if he’s perplexed and somewhat outraged that he feels such a thing at all.
As declarations go, you might think it anemic.
But inside of me, it catches hold. It lights a spark.
And inexplicably, impossibly, it begins to burn.
“Careful,” I say, though my voice hardly sounds like mine. “Be very careful, Your Bloody Highness. Don’t go soft on me.”
I’m shaken. I’m shaken straight through, but there is that flickering flame inside me and it’s growing by the moment. He found itunappealing. This creature, who traffics in death as a matter of fact and preference and no doubt no small personal delight, found my deathunappealing.
I pull in a ragged breath. “I hope you got what you wanted, anyway.”
