Page 19 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

I’m not foolish enough to argue with him.

Foolishness doesn’t enter into it, because that implies a choice.

And I don’t pretend to have one. He moves across the polished wood floor, and I follow him.

I can’t help but sneak looks in the mirror to make sure I still can’t see anything but me marching across an empty room.

I can’t.

It’s disorienting.

I focus instead on the sculpted expanse of his muscled back. And the hints of that phoenix I can see peek out here and there when the way he moves makes his hem or collar shift.

I feel the phoenix on the side of my body pulse like it, too, wants to burn.

I tell myself that’s psychosomatic at best, but I burn all the same.

In the corner of the great room, he directs me to the steps that lead up to a loft that looks out over the whole of the space and all those dizzying mirrors. But he doesn’t stop there. He keeps going, leading me to the far corner, where a spiral staircase rises up toward the ceiling.

He does not look back to see if I’m following him. He simply walks, as if my obedience is a foregone conclusion. And that might rankle, but I follow him around and around the spiral to nowhere anyway.

It doesn’t occur to me to do anything but what he wants.

I tell myself that’s just King 101.

We climb and climb, and at the top he comes to a small landing and pushes through the door that waits there.

I have no other choice, so I hit the landing and promptly follow him into the dark.

“Your eyes will adjust in a moment,” comes Ariel’s voice, as if he’s part of the darkness.

Because he is.

I feel it like a deep, wild shudder, and there’s more of me than I’d like to admit that wants nothing more than to melt into the darkness. Especially if he’s a part of it.

But slowly my eyes adjust, and I realize that we’re standing out on the roof of the MMA school.

My breath leaves me in a rush as I make out the stars above and the low moon just starting to rise in the distance.

And it’s not that I forget that I’m in the presence of a vampire, but I can’t keep myself from drifting over to the edge of the roof, where I can look out over the dark remains of Medford’s city center.

There are very few lights out there, and it would be foolish indeed to confuse any of them for a beacon.

In the early days after the Reveal, there were tales of mooncussers, of a sort, who would roam the dark nights, setting up beacons to draw in the terrified masses looking for shelter, then slaughter them for what goods they carried with them.

Or eat them, depending on the story.

It’s yet one more reason why anyone with a modicum of common sense stays locked up inside from dusk to dawn.

Yet here I am, standing up above this town we lost three years ago to the monsters, somehow aching like I’ve lost a limb.

It wasn’t that I spent so much time down here.

There were always grumblings about the homeless populations that crowded the riverbanks and spilled out into the streets, waxing and waning with various city ordinances.

There was always the suggestion of violence here, thanks to the businesses that only opened by day and closed up tight at night.

The graffiti no one could seem to keep at bay.

The clusters of the homeless and the addicted rising up like zombies come nightfall, or after the police rousted them out of their hiding spots along the river.

I didn’t spend a lot of time here, but it was still mine. It was still home.

There is no reason to suppose that it will ever be safe to walk the streets again, and it’s just one more tide of grief washing over me, washing through me, and never quite leaving me clean. I turn back around and face the king of the vampires, who is closer to me than I thought he was.

“You shouldn’t sneak up on people,” I mutter at him, frowning.

“Maybe you missed the part where I’m a vampire. Sneaking up on people is part of the fun.” He studies me. “Lurking is in the job description.”

“Just so long as we’ve established that you do, in fact, find all the rampaging and murdering fun. To clarify our positions.”

“Tell me,” he says after a moment, “have you killed any monsters since the Reveal?”

I take a moment to make certain I’m keenly aware of how fragile I am. How breakable. How decidedly weaponless.

Maybe he’s brought me here to act as judge and jury. Maybe this is monster justice.

I swallow, though my throat is dry. “I have.”

“So we are all murderers, then. You and me alike.”

There’s that intensity in his gaze. And that power of his that feels stretched out all around me, but not pressing in on me. Not anymore.

I pull in a breath. “I’ve never really thought of it that way. But yes, I suppose. I think you’ll find it’s difficult to live in peace with things that want to kill you. That consider you not just prey, but a snack.”

“Says a representative of a species who has no trouble using wooden stakes or silver bullets to knock out sentient beings a little bit higher up the food chain.”

“Well,” I say after a long, breathless moment, “I hope we can all agree that zombies need killing. If you can kill something that’s already dead. Please don’t tell me that there’s a zombie rights movement too.”

“I prefer not to cast stones on members of the living dead,” Ariel replies in that low hum of a voice. “It would be a bit hypocritical, would it not?”

“Maybe the zombies have it better. After all, they don’t know that they were once alive.”

To my astonishment, he laughs. It’s a low, quiet thing, sounding faintly like music, or maybe that’s simply how my body interprets it.

And how it tries to sing along.

“It is very difficult to surprise me,” Ariel tells me. “And you’ve done it more tonight than anyone else has. In a long, long time.”

“Gold star for me.”

But I look away from the curious intensity on his face.

I look up, and there they are. All the stars I didn’t know I would miss like this.

The whole Milky Way itself, a bright, hot mess shining on down from so far away.

Looking at this planet that, on the surface, probably still looks green and blue, spinning lushly about our sun.

Instead of black the way it is down here on the ground, washed over with blood.

I was always about the sunshine. I never would’ve guessed how much I’d come to miss dark. The night.

The stars.

I could tell him that I’ve seen the stars more recently than since the Reveal, but I don’t. It feels too intimate.

A feeling I should not be having around Ariel Skinner, King of the Damned.

I shouldn’t be having any feelings at all.

So I concentrate on the feelings I’ll allow myself.

“Are you going to tell me about my brother? Or did you bring me up here to toss me off the side of this building so I can die like everyone else?”

“I don’t have to throw people off the sides of buildings to kill them,” he says, as if I’m being amusing.

On purpose.

That makes my temper kick in, and that’s a good thing. I need a little anger. I need ... something . Anything that feels like a weapon in a situation like this.

“You said that Augie is alive. Is he hurt?”

“His demons are bigger than he is,” Ariel says. “You can call that hurt if you like.”

“Let me see if I have this straight. You came to my door. You left a summons. I answered that summons, and you told me that ... what? He owes you money? So does that mean you think I owe you too if he can’t pay you?”

“Something like that,” Ariel says, and I choose not to think too closely about the way he’s looking at me. Or the way he said that, like he means something else entirely.

Maybe I can’t let myself think about it, because that feels like surrender.

“This is very surprising,” I say instead. “I was told you were very civilized. I didn’t realize they meant not only civilized for a vampire, but for the average Mob boss, too.”

“I’ve never cared much for Italian food.

” Ariel drifts over, and for a creature who as far as I know can turn into a bat, suck my blood, and transform into something horrible before my very eyes, he is remarkably .

.. physical. I try to tell myself that this response I’m having to him is false, that he’s doing it, that it’s part of that mesmerizing thing vampires like so much, but I can’t quite convince myself.

Because beautiful is beautiful. And believe me, these days, no one takes beautiful for granted.

“I don’t have any money,” I tell him flat out. “And any money I do have is already being extorted from me, so you’re going to have to get in line.”

I get the sense that he doesn’t like that much, but when I glance at him, his expression is unreadable. So I don’t know if he’s against the extortion part or the fact that I don’t have the thing he wants.

“Money would be easy,” he says. “This is not about money at all.”

I want to be relieved. I’m not.

“Your brother is in a precarious state,” he tells me. “I think perhaps I can help him. If you help me.”

I’ve vowed to myself a thousand times that I’m done with Augie, but who am I kidding?

He’s my twin. Literally the other half of me.

And if he’s addicted to vampire blood like so many people are these days, there’s a silver lining there.

It means he’s off the other stuff. The human stuff.

I don’t know what it takes to detox from blood, but maybe it’s different.

And maybe pigs will start flying around in Jacksonville.

Either way, this is still my only brother we’re talking about. I’ve never been able to convince him to save himself. But Ariel isn’t asking for that. He’s asking me to step in and do something that might save Augie whether Augie himself wants it or not.

And unlike well-meaning pastors and counselors over the years, Ariel has the power to compel Augie to do it.

I can’t help but feel like this is an opportunity.

I don’t have it in me to refuse. I can’t.

“I’ll do anything,” I say recklessly. “Please don’t hurt him.”

“Addicts hurt themselves,” Ariel tells me, and there’s something stern and old and knowing in his voice that I recognize. But I don’t want to recognize it. It feels too much like truth. “Over and over again.”

“You don’t have to tell me what addicts do.”

Those eyes of his gleam, but I can’t tell if it’s with approval or warning.

“I’ll do anything,” I say again. “What exactly do you want?”

He doesn’t answer that. And it’s in the pause that I can feel his power surge. As if I’ve sacrificed myself right here on this rooftop. Given myself away, bared my neck, and let him bite down, deep and hard—

I don’t know where the image comes from, or why it seems to shatter its way through me, and not in a bad way. I’ve never fantasized about a vampire bite in my life.

Then again, I’ve never met Ariel before.

When he comes to stand beside me to look out over the city, I’m sure he can hear the racket my heart makes. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Just like there’s nothing I can do about the fact that his closeness sets everything in me alight.

It’s a scalding heat, everywhere, pooling between my legs and making me want to press my thighs together—

But I don’t.

On the off chance that he can’t tell what’s happening to me, I don’t want to give him the CliffsNotes version.

“What do you think the Reveal is?” he asks after a moment, when I’m beginning to think this much access to starshine might intoxicate me. I feel dizzy and fragile again.

It’s probably not the stars, I admit to myself.

“What kind of question is that?” I rub at my face. “It’s in the name. All the monsters were revealed. Boom. The end of the world as we know it. Though I suppose it’s more the dawn of the world for you.”

“It’s really just the same world.” Ariel shrugs. “For good or ill. It’s only the rules that have changed.”

“That’s a highly sanitized version of a global slaughter,” I point out.

“Or anyway, I assume it was global. It took, what? A week to lose the internet, live television, radio, and all the rest of it. Pretty much any long-range communication device. But before then, it was pretty clear that there was a feeding frenzy, and we were on the menu.”

“But you survived.” He says that like it’s meaningful instead of just dumb luck. And given how these years have been, maybe not luck at all. “Even your brother, despite giving every indication of having an overdeveloped death wish, remains alive. And nominally human.”

I feel, deeply, that he wants me to jump on that. And ask him what he means by nominally .

So I don’t. I let that day three years ago flood back into me, all that dawning horror and sadness, the beginning of all this grief that has nowhere to go.

And the innocuous way it started—for me anyway.

“It was a Tuesday,” I tell him, this vampire king who could have caused the whole thing, for all I know.

Who certainly doesn’t care what happened, because why would he?

I certainly can’t trust that he’s asking this for any reason but his own, whatever that might be.

I even laugh a little. “Just a random fucking Tuesday that no one would ever have remembered if it hadn’t all started that day. ”