Page 32 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

But deep down, I believe it. And I finally get why Savi thinks it’s comforting.

It’s been my experience that things that want to kill you only let you live when they want something from you. I still don’t quite know what that is, but I’m alive. Despite spending every night in Ariel’s company since he first summoned me.

I decide that has to mean something.

I can hear sounds that seem to suggest that we’re underwater.

Maybe that’s the effect of the river that must be rushing around nearby, or maybe it’s just the way sound travels down beneath the earth.

Still, when the tunnel opens up some and I see a flicker of light, I’m more thankful than I can remember being in a long while.

Since that first night, maybe, when Gran and Augie and I huddled in the basement, said very little, and waited to see if we would make it to morning. Then did.

I don’t like being thrown back into those memories. I don’t like how clear they are, how crisp.

I try to breathe as deeply and as quietly as I can to get rid of them.

We’re in what seems like a wider sort of subterranean corridor now.

It suggests that we’re in a more populated area, though I’m happy not to see crowds of vampires waiting.

But there are torches in the walls, actual fires burning on sconces like some medieval castle.

Thanks to them, I can see that we’re in some kind of cave.

The vampire doesn’t look back at me. I assume she can hear me just fine, and I already know she can scent me too. I don’t particularly want to focus on what it is she can scent on me tonight.

Or what she thinks it means. Ariel’s sacrifices .

Luckily, I have images from visions and nightmares to keep me entertained as we keep walking.

A long walk in the pitch blackness of the tunnel is, it turns out, an excellent way to enhance the visuals.

I see beaked things and slithering, and hear that vile voice inside me.

The Goddess of Filth like a corrosion in my head.

I also see a clearing on the side of a mountain, high up.

I see cloaked things whirling and a woman on an altar. I taste blood and fear.

I sneak a hand up to wipe at my face, and I’m not sure if I’m surprised or relieved when it comes away clean.

No blood. No terrible wounds. Just copper in my mouth and all those horrible screams trapped inside me.

I think of the stupid vision that comes to me every night now, weaving its way in and out of too many nightmares of that Vin?a bitch. In my nightmares, the vision expands. I get smells, tastes, touch—so viscerally that when I wake up in my bed, I’m shocked to find myself there.

I usually have only a breath or two before the headache kicks in.

Last night, I dreamed that I stood on that mountainside in the cold, my feet bare, because that’s how I went to bed.

When I woke up in my bedroom, the damned cards were fanned out all around me and my foot hurt.

A sharp pain, and I looked down to find a shallow cut on the sole of my right foot as if a rock’s jagged edge sliced it open.

I could ask Gran about this kind of thing, I know. But I haven’t.

I haven’t actively sought out those cards again, either, but that doesn’t keep them from turning up.

I lock them away and find them in my pockets.

I reach for a gun and find them tucked into my holsters.

I wake up with them all over me, like they’re either protecting me in my sleep—or trying to smother me.

Despite what I said to my grandmother about sentient cards, and how I scoffed, I already know better.

I can feel them calling me all the time. It’s not a voice like the horror of Vin?a in my head, not really. But it’s a call just the same, and it tugs at me. Even now, all the way across the valley floor from my family’s house, I can hear them clamoring for my attention.

If Ariel hadn’t stripped me, I’d expect to find them tucked away in my clothes again.

One night I woke up to find myself clutching them as if I got up at some point, went to pick them up, and crawled back into bed to cuddle with them.

I threw them across my bedroom and they hit the far wall, then spilled all over the floor.

Yet when I got back from a very hot shower to chase away another rough night on a bloody mountain, they were waiting for me in a neat pile on my desk. Right next to the guns I cleaned and oiled before bed.

“Panic” isn’t the right word to describe how that felt. It’s not the wrong word either.

I’ve stopped throwing the deck at things.

Now, as I walk through these dark underground corridors that I’ll never find my way out of—either to see my brother at last or possibly meet my own death—it occurs to me that I’ve turned out like everyone else in my family after all.

I spent all these years certain that if they just decided they wanted it enough, they could kick these addictions of theirs. These compulsions. The drugs, the cards.

Yet here I am, covered in a vampire’s mark and jonesing for the very same deck of cards I always thought Gran was unreasonably attached to.

Not quite the moral high ground I’m used to inhabiting.

The vampire turns abruptly and pushes through an archway hung with what I decide to believe is fabric.

Though what I think it might actually be is skin.

Once I clear the skin curtain and manage not to scream, I look in both directions.

To one side, I see another long, cavernous hall like the one we came from.

To the other, I can see figures moving in the distance, as if they are coming together for a grand old subterranean vampire party.

“You can go that way if you like,” says the woman in her arch, unpleasant voice. “I’m sure that they would love nothing more than to treat you like a buffet.”

I swallow down the response I’d like to make—because the time for unwise moves seems past—and smile at her. Guilelessly, I can only hope.

She sniffs, then jerks her head in a demand to follow her as she leads me to a door that looks exactly the way anyone who’s ever seen a scary movie would expect a dungeon door to look, only this one is real.

I hear her murmur a few words in a language I don’t understand at all, and the door swings open.

I follow her down a set of stairs, when I would have said it was impossible to go any deeper. The steps themselves are roughly hewn stone. The walls are cold and damp.

Colder and damper , that is.

When we get to the bottom of the stairs, I see that she’s taken me to a row of cells.

I immediately expect her to laugh and toss me into one, and I wonder if that was Ariel’s plan all along.

Maybe I really am a fool who fell for age-old vampire tricks, just like everyone else.

After all, why wouldn’t I? I’m nothing special.

I’m just a twenty-five-year-old barista who somehow didn’t die three years ago like most of the people in this valley.

How could I possibly stand a chance next to vampires and werewolves and sorceresses ? And everything else that goes bump in the night—or any other time of day they damn well please.

I brace myself for getting flung behind bars, which is at least not immediate death. Anything that’s not immediate death is a chance to fight. I tell myself that once or twice or maybe twenty-five times, but she makes no move toward me.

She leads me down the row of cells, and I dart anxious glances into each one as we pass. The first two look empty, but when we pass the third and I see a hint of movement, I realize that probably, the people—or creatures—are pressed back against the farthest wall, where the shadows are deepest.

There’s the sound of moaning. The air is thick with despair and the scent of something foul beneath it.

As we pass the fourth cell, I see that the moaning is coming from one of the Kind.

It’s chained to one of the near walls, a huge being that looks half beetle and half man and is covered in a green goo that it takes me a second to realize is probably its own blood.

It makes me feel like a monster that I look away.

I don’t look back at the cells again as we pass a few more. I can’t bear it.

But then, at the end of the row, my vampire guide abruptly stops.

She sniffs at me. It occurs to me that she’s literally taking in my scent, and Ariel’s mark, which must come with some kind of instructions, because she wheels around again and starts walking back the way she came.

And it takes me what feels like a vast, inordinate amount of time to turn my head and look inside the cell in front of me. So long that I have what feels like several eternities to understand how terrified I am to see what might be waiting for me there.

I pivot slowly.

I can’t breathe.

And I see him.

It’s Augie. It’s really Augie.

An earthquake of relief rattles through me, shaking my bones and the teeth inside my head and making my eyeballs hurt.

Only now that I’m looking at him right here in front of me do I let myself think about how long it’s been since I last laid eyes on him. This has been the longest stretch yet. And here, in this dank and vile place, I can admit to myself that it’s been brutal.

It’s October now, but it was still winter when I glimpsed him from afar, in a huddle down by the river, looking deeply unhealthy.

He’d been wearing clothes that didn’t fit him, his always impressive cheekbones looking like switchblades, smoking cigarettes with people who looked just like him. Desperate and twitchy.

He looked gaunt then. Weathered in that way addicts get when they live outside, one with the elements but not in a good way, and have given up worrying about things like laundry.

I watched him as long as I could—until a nasty-looking thing that looked like it wanted to be a great bird but got stuck shifting ran at the truck, then started squawking loudly when I brandished my weapons at it, which drew way too much attention.

I pounded the steering wheel so hard all the way home that my hands were bruised for weeks.

I remember going up to my room and lying there, breathing too fast. I remember thinking, We’re really going to lose him .

Part of me thought we had, it’s been so long.

And this isn’t better, these circumstances we’re now both in, but he’s not dead.

He’s not dead.

Though I wait a moment, holding my breath, until I see his chest move. Proof of life.

Only then can I take in the rest of it. He’s been stripped naked.

There’s an iron manacle around his ankle, connected by a tough-looking chain to an iron clamp in the center of the cell.

There are no facilities to speak of—not even the minimal toilet and sink that used to be the only amenities in prison cells, according to the weird docudramas Augie and I used to watch while our parents were fighting.

I don’t really like what any of this suggests about the way he’s been treated here, but it does allow me to see the full state of his health.

And I ... don’t know what to make of it, because he’s lying there spread out on the floor like a starfish, his phoenix tattoo gleaming in what light filters in from the torches on the walls, but that’s not the wild part. The wild part is that he looks ...

It can’t be. He can’t look this healthy .

He looks like my Augie, my twin. He looks like he’s taking a peaceful nap, possibly on the couch in the study like he used to do when we were in high school and Gran wanted us to do yard work.

His hair is blonder than I remember, but then it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it clean.

He has a full beard, though it no longer looks scraggly.

He looks clean in more than one sense of the word.

He looks like the brother I had, not the tense stranger I lost.

“If you’ve come to taunt me some more,” he drawls, though he’s still lying there with his eyes closed and his limbs outstretched like maybe he’s on a lovely beach instead of a cold stone floor in a cell somewhere deep underground in a vampire lair, “I still don’t know anything.

You’re still wasting your time. I don’t know how many times I can tell you that. ”

And for a fierce, jagged sort of moment, I’m glad he hasn’t looked over yet. Because that means he won’t see me cry. The tears spill over even though I don’t want them to, because he sounds ... normal. He sounds like him again.

My twin. The other half of me.

My broken heart beats hard. Painfully hard.

I wipe my cheeks ferociously because I know better than to let him see me cry over him.

Few things make him angrier, probably because few things make him feel when clearly, what he’s wanted all this time is to stay numb.

He heaves a sigh, lying there on the ground. Then he jackknifes up, turning his head and opening his eyes.

And then it’s another eternity, both of us frozen in place. The two of us on either side of a set of bars, identical indigo eyes locked together.

“Augie,” I whisper, “what have you gotten yourself into?”

But his reaction is bigger.

He leaps to his feet and slams himself against the bars, reaching out a hand—

Though it’s not clear if he wants to grab me or try to bend one of those bars before him.

“Winter,” he growls, and he doesn’t sound the least bit beachy any longer. He sounds pissed—which I know is Augie’s first sign of terror. “What the fuck are you doing here?”