Page 26 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

It hits me like a train.

It’s a vision, hot and intense, and it takes me over. Or takes me down. I don’t have the slightest idea what my own body is doing.

Because I see a body in the woods, mutilated.

I see a great, beaked thing with sharp teeth and a slithering within.

The Goddess of Filth, I understand.

Vin?a, I think.

But first—or maybe I’m moving forward and back in the time of this vision, it’s not clear—there’s a woman surrounded by horror, choking on her own fear and despair. It’s sharp. Acrid.

I see sharp blades in high, thin air that smells of pine awash in copper.

I see something like an altar in the wilderness, and I think the word “sacrifice.”

I have the use of all my senses. I can smell the thick, fall scent of the green Oregon woods.

I can smell rotting things and the rich earth, late hints of flowers, and mossier suggestions of dark hollows.

There is a snowstorm coming in—I can smell it on the breeze.

I understand that I am high above the ground and know that I’m on a mountain.

I have no sense of myself, and yet it’s like I’m standing in the same clearing with the scared woman tied up on an altar.

There are figures I can’t identify, wearing garments that don’t make sense to me—like strange, dark cloaks that make my stomach hurt when I see them—moving in what looks like wild but choreographed movements around a firepit and that altar that sits before it.

I look all around and see nothing but trees. No trails leading to or away from this clearing. There’s what looks like far-off lights in the distance, though I can’t tell if it’s so high up that I’m looking out at a starry night or if it’s a tiny burst of light from settlements far below.

I gaze up toward the moon above, quiet and bright. And full.

Then down to the woman, mangled so badly it’s difficult to tell that she was ever a woman at all. Only the altar offering she’s become is left, flesh carved into signs and sigils.

I breathe out, hard.

And then I slam back into myself. With enough force to leave bruises.

Once again I am sitting in my grandmother’s chair, my hands on her cards, and it’s disorienting because it feels no less or more real than the forest clearing where I was only just standing. I snatch my hands back from the cards as if they’re on fire.

I feel dizzy and a little bit sick. Gran’s eyes are on me, too knowing. Too calm, too certain.

“The first journey is always the most unsettling,” she tells me.

“The journey?” I repeat weakly. I know exactly what she means. But I don’t have it in me to give her the satisfaction of admitting that I believe in this.

I know it’s foolish. Childish, even. I think of all the things I’ve learned to believe in over the past three years, like it or not.

This is no different from any of that, and compared to the Reveal, it’s fairly benign.

Visions of monsters being preferable to actual monsters at the door, teeth bared and claws sharp.

But monsters are things that happened to us. Just like drugs.

This is apparently something I am , and I hate it.

Because there were other things I was once, and they were taken from me, one by one. Daughter. Twin. Fully human. Just for a start.

“It can help to talk these things through,” Gran says, the moon making her indigo gaze even more intense. “Visions are not always straightforward, and the future loves nothing more than to contradict itself.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I grit out past the nausea that won’t let up, radiating from my diaphragm as if that dark, bloody altar is stuck there, making it hard to breathe.

And the pounding in my head is worse, making me wonder if I’ve been having nightmares all this time—or if they were more of this vision shit.

I’m clearly hitting a wall. There are too many things to process, I haven’t even begun, and I don’t know how to add anything more to that file. Even thinking the word “process” kicks my body back into another wash of all that heat I felt in that MMA school, as if it’s bright and new.

It’s difficult to imagine that my vampire compulsion— king vampire compulsion—extends hours later and across the valley into this room where my grandmother and I are sitting in the dark and the moonlight.

That means that the greatest danger to me right now is me .

“I felt something,” I tell Gran because I’ve never been all that great at lying to her. “But if I saw anything, I can’t remember what it is.”

This is not entirely false. I know what I saw. I can still see it, the images like noise in my head—I just don’t know what it all means .

My grandmother only gazes at me, the same way she used to when she would ask if I happened to know where all her mints went. And I would stand there, mouth sticky with peppermint, and claim I had no idea. Fooling her not at all.

But I don’t have it in me to tell her that I can still taste that dark, slippery copper in my own mouth.

That there was a smell that I don’t want to discuss with anyone, ever.

“I think that maybe nothing happened. Maybe I’m my mother’s daughter after all, and I don’t have it.

Augie was always the sensitive one anyway. ”

Gran sighs. Then she waves at me, dismissing me. “By all means, Winter. Go to bed.” That she’s calling me a liar is barely even subtext at this point. “Perhaps a good night’s sleep will refresh your recollection.”

I want to argue with her, possibly just for the sake of argument, but instead I stand up obediently. I start to move across the room, but she makes a tutting sort of noise that stops me. I look back at her, and she indicates the deck of cards with a jut of her stubborn chin.

“You have to take the cards. They’re yours now.” I stare at her, but she doesn’t relent. “They won’t want to come back to me.”

“They are cards ,” I grit out through my teeth. “They don’t have feelings.”

“If you say so.” She doesn’t quite roll her eyes. “But I do. If the only gift you can accept tonight are these cards, I know that I can trust you, Winter, not to let your old grandmother down. After all, I’m not all here, am I?”

Maybe later I’ll sit back and admire how adroitly she locked me into that.

I can either claim that she’s senile and all of this is false, in which case why wouldn’t I take a deck of cards she wants to give me?

Or I can admit that all of it is true, tell her what I saw, and accept not only that she’s an oracle but I’m apparently one too.

In which case I would also have to accept that the cards are mine now.

And that they probably do have feelings. Or rather, whatever animates them does.

Just another list of things I don’t want to deal with tonight.

I take the easy way out. I go over, scoop up the damn cards I still don’t actually like touching, and make a show of tucking them into my shirt so they can rest against my heart.

She looks ... touched. As if I’ve done something deeply honorable.

Obviously, that makes me feel like shit.

“I see no one had to tell you to treat them with respect.” Gran sounds proud, and that doesn’t make me feel any better. “It’s like you know.”

“I like to keep my hands free, Gran.” I growl it out, feeling surly and mean. “My pockets are full of ammo.”

I don’t stick around for more middle-of-the-night chats and other opportunities to feel selfish and small. I go to the door, let myself out, and lock her back in. Assuming she doesn’t have secret keys to go with her secret life, that is.

Out in the hall, I feel like the house is breathing all around me, heavy and close. Not like it’s threatening me, but like it’s as out of breath as I am.

I climb the stairs, listening as I go, but everything is quiet. I must have been in Gran’s room for a long time because when I get to the windows on the second floor, I can see that all the lights are out in the cottages across the yard.

I only really start breathing once I unlock the door to the attic stairs, lock it again behind me, and start the steep climb.

Once I’m finally safe in my own space, with no eyes on me from any direction, I find myself just .

.. standing there under the eaves. Working on breathing past the collection of overwhelming sensations, feelings, and images storming around inside of me.

I don’t know what to do with myself.

The whole night spirals through me, drip-feeding that cataclysmic heat everywhere—but it’s mixed up with all the rest of it.

That ritual on a mountaintop that something in my bones tells me is close.

The nightmares that might not be as simple as nightmares after all.

Death goddesses. And the truth—or truths—about my grandmother that I’m finding hard to accept.

The fact that, like it or not, all these years have been a lie.

Not just the past three.

I stand in the shower and let it run hot enough to sting, but it doesn’t help. I let the water beat into me until I can’t tell if I’m flushed inside or out, and then, following an urge I can’t pretend to understand, I turn the water to cold.

Ice cold.

For a moment, or maybe for a lot of moments, I can feel the heat of my own body as it’s pelted with the sudden chill, and it feels like pressing up against Ariel all over again.

I brace myself against the wall, squeeze my thighs together, and come in a hot, shocking rush that nearly takes my knees out from under me.

They’re so compromised that I lower myself down into the shallow tub and sit there, cold water pouring all over me, while my body reminds me of its various betrayals.

Over and over again.

And it’s like touching those cards rewired my brain, because now I’m remembering what happened on that rooftop in the same high-definition, surround-sound way. Complete with sensory input. Touch and taste and smell, and my god, am I fucked.