Page 11 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

I assume this means the card is written in blood, which is gross and creepy if not immediately deadly, but when I pick it up off the counter and hand it over to Maddox—it’s more like I throw it—she takes in a deep breath. Then she shakes her head.

“He touched it. But no, that’s ink.”

“You can smell him?” I rub at my face. “And by ‘him,’ you don’t really mean ...?”

She looks at me, her eyes somewhere between that ferocious gold and her usual gray-brown. “An invitation from a king is a summons. You know that, right?”

“What it sounds like is a trap,” I counter, because events might be spiraling beyond my control, but I am still the boss of me .

Though that gross and awful voice from my nightmare seems to swell in me again.

It’s what you’re made for. I repress a shudder and keep going.

“The kind of trap that I walk into and then die. Do you know how I’ve stayed alive through all of this, Maddox? By not walking into traps.”

“Fair.” She frowns at the card, and then goes over and helps herself to some coffee.

She doses it with a hefty pour of what looks like real cream.

She must have brought it with her. That means werewolves must have access to cows—but I order myself to focus on what she’s telling me about the larger, fanged issue at hand.

“But you need to think carefully about the consequences of disobeying a man like Ariel Skinner. Because there will be consequences. Either he will send you a ... more imperative message”—she takes a draw of her coffee, leaving me to imagine what more imperative means to a vampire —“or he will send someone to deliver the message in person.” Maddox looks at me then, and I don’t like the images in my head.

“Or worse, to collect you and deliver you to him. You don’t want those things to happen. ”

She is correct. I don’t.

But. “You can’t possibly be suggesting that I, a very mortal and breakable human, traipse off to the horrors of downtown Medford—in the teeming, terrible dark—to see what a scary-ass vampire wants to say to me.”

“If Ariel Skinner wanted to kill you, he would just kill you,” Maddox tells me, and I think she’s trying to be kind.

I think that’s what her expression means, and maybe that would feel sweeter if I wasn’t envisioning being torn apart by monsters on Main Street in Medford five seconds after the sun sets.

“No truer words have ever been spoken,” says Savi, and we both look up to find her at the back door. She smiles as if she forgot that we could look at her like this. “Ariel is no joke.”

Maddox surprises me by nodding her head toward the card that’s now sitting on the counter again, as if she wants Savi to get a load of it.

As if she thinks Savi will have some insight that I don’t.

Savi exchanges a long look with Maddox that I can’t read—I can’t say I like that, either—and then she goes over and peers at it.

She doesn’t touch it. She wrinkles up her nose as she reads it, then shakes her head.

“I don’t like it.” She looks at me. “You must go, of course. But you’re going to have to be very careful.”

I laugh, but not because I think anything is funny. “I’m not going. I don’t know why you think that I would?”

“He’s not a butcher, not like some.” Savi says this thoughtfully, but she’s looking over at Maddox, not me, like they’re conferring .

It’s weird. If the situation didn’t involve my inevitable bloody and painful death, I would be much more interested in why the werewolf is so chummy with the fancy-pants lady from fancy-pants Ashland, the southernmost town in the valley that people who fled the Bay Area in California flock to the most.

Or they did. Now there is no fleeing from San Francisco. I’m not sure anyone’s made it out of California since the Reveal.

I wasn’t surprised to see Ashland as Savi’s previous address.

“Really, he’s entirely civilized,” Savi is saying, while Maddox nods. “That has its own issues, of course.”

“He is very reasonable.” Maddox shrugs. “That’s why he’s the king.”

Savi stares at the coffee machine as if she doesn’t understand how it functions. Or as if, maybe, she doesn’t know what coffee is. “That and the fact that he is an ancient.”

When she looks back my way, I must be staring at her in befuddlement, because she smiles again. “Rumor has it he was born a Spartan.”

I blink. “Meaning he was raised to enjoy minimal furnishings?”

I expect her to laugh, but she doesn’t. “A Spartan. From the Peloponnese.” Savi studies me and adds, “In Greece.”

That is probably a dig at me and what she assumes is my education, but I can’t really focus on that. “You mean like ... This is Sparta .”

And I mimic the old movie’s iconic kick into the pit.

Their expressions are solemn. They both nod.

I decide that really, it feels better to lean back against the sink, where I keep meaning to wash Gran’s dishes. That or my knees might give way beneath me.

“How do you know about all this stuff?” I think to ask Savi, because that’s better than thinking too much about Sparta. In the Peloponnese. In ancient fucking Greece.

Maddox directs her attention to her coffee.

“I make it my business to know things like that,” Savi tells me in her lovely, cultured voice. “If there’s a king in the mix, you can bet that there are subjects. And I prefer to be an informed one.”

I hear a sound a lot like a snort, but when I look over, Maddox is coughing. “Wrong pipe,” she mutters, and pounds on her own chest.

“I know who he is,” I tell Savi. And also Maddox, who coughs again—pointedly, I think—and looks like she’s trying too hard to appear innocent. Which, obviously, has the opposite effect.

“Do you have any idea why Ariel would want to talk to you?” Savi asks.

“None whatever,” I reply, and the crushing anxiety about all this is making me feel something akin to giddy. I laugh. “I make it a personal policy to spend as little time around vampires as possible.”

“Solid plan.” Maddox raises her mug in my direction. “The good news is that this particular vampire doesn’t need to summon random human girls to feast on. I’m not even sure if he bothers to feast on humans any longer. He’s next level.”

I stare at her. “How is that good news?”

There is a thudding sound, and then Briar slams her way in through the back door, looking assaulted by the sight of us.

“Why did I smell fresh werewolf in the yard?” she demands in a surly tone. She glares at Maddox. “Did you bring one of your dogs here?”

Maddox only bares her teeth in reply.

This could be a moment for me to tell everyone that yes , speaking of local kings, Ty Ceridwen was here last night and will likely be here again, given his relationship with Maddox. But I don’t.

I don’t know why I don’t.

I’d like to think it’s because Maddox and I are friends now. Or getting there, after last night and the hot chocolate.

But a part of me worries it’s because of who she is. Not the werewolf part. I can’t really process the wolf of it all. I mean the other part. The high school part, where I was like every other kid there, sitting around daydreaming that I could one day be as cool as she already was.

This makes me so unhappy with myself that all I can think to do is make myself an overly big breakfast. My feelings on toast.

Maybe what I’m really worried about is that it will be my last.

But I don’t eat it. It’s like I can’t. I slide it directly into the trash.

Maddox and Briar clear out. I can hear them muttering at each other as they walk outside, and it does not sound like anything leading to hot chocolate. Savi stays behind, looking as effortlessly perfect as she did before.

She is not in baby-doll pajamas or even the sweats and flannel and ubiquitous beanie Briar appeared in.

I’m tempted to think that she’s fully dressed for her day, but I suspect that the hoodie and drawstring trouser set she’s wearing is made of the finest cashmere and, more, is what she considers lounging attire.

“There are certain precautions you should take,” she tells me, and something about her direct gaze makes me want to sit a little straighter at the table with the remnants of my feelings on plates before me.

“The fact that he chose to summon you to him indicates that at the very least there’s the expectation of a conversation. That could be interpreted as good.”

“Meaning he won’t kill me on sight.”

“He could do that anywhere.” Savi says this more matter-of-factly than Maddox did, and oddly, it’s more comforting. “Or have one of his many minions do it. What’s more interesting is how you came to attract his notice.”

“Yes.” My voice sounds faint. I tell myself it’s the not eating, but I’m still not hungry. “Very interesting.”

“You don’t know why?”

I sigh. “I really don’t.”

Savi frowns. “I would warn you against being armed. It will be tempting, but there’s no possible way that you will be able to fight him. I think going before him unarmed is more of a power move.”

“And you think ...” My throat is dry. I take a long pull from my coffee—and I should probably stop drinking so much of it when I’m already jittery, but I know I won’t. There are only so many pleasures left. “You think I should be making power moves on a vampire king?”

“Creatures of power respect only power,” she tells me, so frankly that something about it seems to trickle down inside me, setting off alarms as it goes.

Once again, it makes me wonder who she is. What she’s running from. Yet I get the feeling that if I ask her, she not only won’t tell me, she’ll stop helping me, too. And yes, as forthright and breathtaking as her advice feels to me, I do believe she’s trying to help me.

I’m self-serving enough to keep the questions to myself.

“You know where the MMA school is,” she says after a moment, and it’s not a question.

“Everyone knows where the MMA school is.”

“Don’t go in the front door.” This part is clearly a warning, and she holds my gaze until I nod to indicate I understand.

“Um. Why not?”