Page 18 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

I feel as if I’ve been forcibly hurled into a vat of ice water. I feel myself shake with the impact, and I jolt back away from him.

The desire inside me doesn’t shift at all, however, and I hate myself for that.

Augie’s medallion is starting to feel more like a brand, disfiguring me where I stand.

“What do you mean?” I demand, my voice a little too close to a yelp. “What happened to my brother? What did you do to him?”

Ariel only watches me with that stillness that I can still feel like a shudder of heat straight through me, like gasoline on a fire when so much of me has gone terribly, horribly cold.

“Do you not know how your brother spends his time?” he asks me, quietly, so quietly, that silver gaze of his moving over me as if he’s looking for clues. Context.

Weakness, I assure myself. He’s looking for weakness so he can tear you up in more ways than one.

Vampires are famous for the sick games they play.

Because they work.

I never got that before tonight. They work.

I feel a flush of deep shame. It rolls through me, vicious and mean, and I back away from him like that might help. It doesn’t. I stagger a little as I go, and when my calves come up against the line of benches behind me, I sit down. Heavily.

That I’m used to the flavor of this particular shame doesn’t make it any easier or more pliable. That I know it well doesn’t make it sit in me like soft cotton instead of the usual thick, heavy concrete.

It brings back far too many memories, all of them connected to life before the Reveal, which wasn’t exactly the paradise I sometimes like to pretend it was. Maybe there were no monsters like Ariel, but there were monsters all the same.

Heroin. Fentanyl. Meth.

The scumbag dealers who sold it.

The addicts who let those monsters eat them whole.

Just to name a few.

In many ways, my mother’s promises were worse than all of those. That this time she learned a lesson. That this time she meant it. This time , for sure, she was definitely done. This time she was absolutely getting back on her feet.

I know more than anyone should about how to talk to the thing that’s killing the person you love, right there in their own body. While you watch, helpless.

Just like I know the searing shame of having to talk about it with anyone else.

“I’m sure there are a lot of things about what my brother does that I don’t want to know,” I manage to say, and it feels like my own bones want to shake themselves free of my flesh. “But you’re asking me if I know the broad strokes? Yes. Sadly, I do.”

“His addiction has progressed,” the vampire king tells me with what sounds like cool disinterest. How I wish I could share it—but when it comes to the addicts in my family, I’ve never been any good at distance or disinterest.

I try to push back from the wash of shame and from what lurks beneath it—that absolute terror that I’ve lost Augie forever to unspeakable circumstances and terrible choices I can’t accept.

I try to push back enough that I have access to my brain again.

Because beyond all these unwelcome feelings and horrifying needs , what I can’t figure out is what a whole entire king wants with me. Somehow I doubt he’s brought me down here so we can stage an intervention with my brother. Out of the goodness of his unbeating heart.

I think I would have heard if he was the undead Jesus with fangs, ministering to the lost and lonely on the streets of Medford, Oregon.

He looks like nobody’s savior as he watches me, clearly entirely too aware of my reactions no matter how I try to hide them. “The problem with the kind of progression I mean is that sooner or later, there is no longer any way to afford the habit.”

Like this is another Franklin Hendry situation and we’re going to mince around, talking in euphemisms like he’s not the giant dick in this scenario.

It’s even more offensive now that it’s Augie he’s discussing instead of a mortgage payment.

“If only there was a way that the king of all the vampires could do something about the robust black market of vampire blood,” I throw out at him acidly.

Stupidly.

Not that I don’t mean it. But it’s not a smart power move by any stretch of the imagination, and I know it.

When those quicksilver eyes find mine, I swallow hard.

“I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not. But there’s no point in antagonizing a creature so dangerous, especially not when he’s holding Augie over my head.

When I don’t even know what state my brother is in, or where he is.

“I’m sure you know what it’s like to want to help a family member who doesn’t want helping. ”

“The last of my blood relations died so long ago that even their graves have been rendered unto dust,” he replies with a matter-of-factness that reminds me, with a kind of slap, that he really is an immortal creature who’s been around forever.

Or twenty-five hundred-odd years. Six of one, half dozen of another.

“Note to self,” I retort, because apparently I am making suicidal foolhardiness my entire personality. “Stop trying to relate to the scary vampire.”

Ariel’s gaze on mine is entirely too steady. It makes me flush, everywhere. It makes me think I might cry. It makes me want to throw myself at him—and I’m not sure if I mean to fight him or fuck him, both of which would likely lead directly to my painful death.

I have no idea what’s wrong with me. What this man—this impossibly ancient vampire —is bringing out in me.

“I am finding this conversation baffling,” he tells me, and he sounds almost as if he’s musing out loud.

I have never heard of a vampire who muses .

Maybe this is that civilized thing Savi was talking about.

He analyzes his prey. How sophisticated and terrifying and .

.. oddly hot. “Usually when I have conversations with mortals, one of two things happens. They froth about until they exhaust themselves, too overcome to make any sense at all. Or they fling themselves upon me, swept away by my ...” His silver eyes are far too knowing. Far too bright. “... charm.”

“Do you get off on that?” I demand. I don’t even know where a question like that came from.

But I have no time to track it as everything between us ... shifts .

There’s nothing but that searing heat.

It’s so hot it makes my eyes water.

He tilts his head to one side. It feels like some kind of accelerant washing over me, and then the match strikes. It’s the way his mouth moves again, curling in one corner.

“I beg your pardon, Winter. Are you interested in how I get off?”

I can’t breathe. Once again, I can’t decide if he’s doing this to me or if I’m doing it to myself.

Or even if I care about such a pointless difference when it’s happening just the same.

“I want to know why you’re trying to come on to me while you’re also bringing up my brother’s challenges,” I manage to get out, though none of my systems seem to be operating at the moment. Everything is haywire. I am lost somewhere in this conflagration. “Talk about things that aren’t hot.”

“Are you sure?” His voice isn’t that song inside me, but it’s a low, curling lick of impossible heat. And I understand immediately that he knows it. He’s doing it deliberately. “Because you seem overheated to me.”

“Is he dead?” I grit out.

And I hate the storm inside me. It shouldn’t be possible. I shouldn’t be this worried about Augie while simultaneously bright hot and wild with this impossible hunger.

Especially not for a fucking vampire.

“No,” he replies.

It takes a long time for that word to penetrate. For it to make sense. For it to actually turn into understanding.

Augie is not dead. Ariel Skinner, King Vampire, did not call me here to pick up my brother’s body.

Something I have been expecting that I will have to do for years now.

I feel the same rush of relief and anguish, shame and fury, that I’ve felt before, and more than once. That time Augie came home and I found him rifling through Gran’s things. The time I saw him on the street, he caught my gaze, and then pretended he didn’t know who I was.

Always happy that he’s not dead. Always furious that this is how he chooses to live.

Always so damned hurt that he abandoned me.

I blow out a long, shaky breath. “So you didn’t call me here to identify his body. You probably could have led with that up front.”

“You seem to have a lot of confidence that I won’t kill you for your impertinence,” Ariel says almost absently.

But I can see the way he’s looking at me. There is nothing absent about it.

It is all a terrible alchemy and it hurts, and yet there’s a worryingly large part of me that just wants more .

“If you want to kill me,” I say, letting out a sound that’s awfully close to a laugh, “you could do it at any time. It doesn’t matter what happens today.

It doesn’t matter what I do. You’re not just any old run-of-the-mill vampire, are you?

You’re the king. Everything that lives here in this valley does so because you allow it, right? ”

He looks at me as if I don’t make sense. As if he’s trying to puzzle me out and not quite managing it, but now that I’m through the sickening punch of relief that Augie’s not dead, I’m on to the other side of that.

That being all the other things Augie could be that would have this particular vampire looking for me.

All the other things that could happen. All of them dark and desperate.

Then, a distant second, all the things that could happen to me .

Right here. Right now. Thanks entirely to this pitiless, beautiful creature who is watching me so closely.

I take a breath so ragged it feels as if it leaves marks behind.

Ariel steps back, and while that doesn’t exactly break the spell, it makes it ... shimmer, somehow. Enough so that this power of his, like a hand wrapped around my throat, recedes.

Just enough so I can breathe.

Just enough so I understand that I miss it. Immediately.

“Come with me,” he tells me.