Page 35 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

I let myself into the house, the heavy door falling closed behind me. I throw all the locks, then test them by rote.

It’s late again. Very late.

I should be used to these late nights since Ariel came into my life, but I’m not. I can’t say I’ve slept well over the past three years, but at least I spent most of those nights actually lying down. Resting my bones, as Gran would say, even with all the nightmares.

There’s been very little resting lately. Of my bones or anything else.

The moon lit my path all the way home, only the faintest sliver away from the fullness it will achieve tomorrow. But everything felt weird already. I was convinced I could see shadows acting of their own accord from the corner of my eye.

When I drove into Jacksonville, I felt so separate from the group of humans I saw congregating on the sidewalk, in clear violation of curfew, that I felt like I might as well be a different species already.

I swallow hard and stand there in the front hall, my forehead against the front door.

Like I can’t decide if I want to pound my head against it until I think a little less loudly, or open it back up and run screaming into the forest to see what might become of me. I consider both options.

For a while.

The pounding in my head would likely bring unwanted attention from my tenants and possibly even require explanations to Gran, all of which would defeat the purpose of it.

And running off into the forest would almost certainly lead to my death, when I have things to do.

Some of those things involve continuing to take care of my spicy grandmother, whether she wants me to or not.

Whether we talk about visions and prophecies, goddesses and lies, or not.

I turn around, but I don’t move away from the door.

I think about Augie. I don’t want to sob, or scream, or throw up.

I kind of want to do all three. I can almost envision it.

It feels like relief, me on my hands and knees in my own bathroom, purging my body of .

.. everything. Starting with the past three years, my parents’ disappearance, my brother’s slow slide into addiction preceding it.

All the way back to high school, when we would both sneak out to parties but he was the one who got obliterated and I was the one who got him home.

I could start with all that and end with everything I saw tonight, and from far too close.

I’m tempted to indulge in a full-on fit, but I’m not sure I’d ever stop.

I push away from the door, my whole body feeling jerky and strange. Like the hangover I had the day after our twenty-first birthday that inspired me to never, ever drink that much again, no matter how many times Augie called me a lightweight.

I think of him looking healthy. I think of him being able to focus on me, to talk to me. I think of our foreheads pressed together, and even the memory of it is soothing. Maybe in time I’ll stop remembering where we were. Or the bars between us.

I head toward the kitchen, thinking I’ll make myself a nice snack and try to quiet down my feelings with a hefty dose of sugar.

But when I open all the locks and make it into the kitchen, I stop short.

The lights are all off, but Maddox is standing there. She’s staring out between the bars and the planks over the window toward the moon up above.

She looks back over her shoulder when I walk in, and for a moment, we stare at each other.

I don’t have to ask where she’s been. I can see the usual marks on her shoulder since her sweatshirt is drooping halfway down her arm. Her smoky-quartz gaze sharpens and traces over me, and I know immediately that she can scent Ariel’s mark, but when her gaze meets mine again, she doesn’t ask.

There are more similarities between us than differences, at least in this moment. Sure, she’s a whole werewolf as well as being her , but we both look a little rumpled. A little shaky. More than a little off our game.

Something passes between us that feels like communion. She nods. I smile. Then we set about making ourselves more of that decadent hot chocolate, and when it’s done, we go and settle outside on the back porch again.

It’s already significantly colder than it was last time we did this. I don’t even remember when that was. It seems like a lifetime ago. Another life I lived before Ariel, but I think that really, it was a week.

Just a week.

We sit there for a while. It feels much better than being sick and sad on an impervious floor.

Maddox keeps looking at the moon, so I do too. I try to imagine what it must be like to live a life that’s consciously arranged around moon phases. Maybe we all follow the moon, in the end, and only some of us know it.

As I think that, I shift where I’m sitting and realize that the cards have found me again. I can feel the weight of them, pressing there between my breasts like they’re aiming to press deep into my heart.

That’s not the kind of creepy I’m in the mood to share, so I don’t. I think about what Ariel said. That I’m the next oracle. That the cards have chosen .

I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what that means. On the other hand, the cards pressing into me feels almost soothing, so maybe I know more than I want to admit.

“You good?” I ask her, eventually.

She laughs a little, or maybe it’s more of a sigh that the night breeze twists into something new. “You know. Ty gets a little cranky around the full moon. It’s not unexpected.”

“Your ritual.”

“To be honest, though, I don’t really mind it from him. I get where he’s coming from. My whole family, on the other hand.” Maddox shakes her head. “Anyway, it’s been a long night.”

“Apparently, it’s a big night for family drama,” I mutter.

I feel her gaze on me, but I’m still looking at that moon.

That horrible vision takes the opportunity to pummel me again, like it’s offended I might find a little solace in the night sky. It’s not a jumble of vision and nightmare this time. It’s crisp. It hurts .

I could ask my grandmother for guidance, but I still don’t want to. That feels like surrendering, and I’m full up on surrender at the minute. I have to interpret these things on my own.

I breathe through it, telling myself I’m in charge. That I’m looking for clues, so it’s not so much a surrender as a deliberate immersion.

It sucks me in, hard.

I get the distinct and immediate impression that the vision feels like I’m not taking it seriously enough. This time, I’m less an observer of the ritualistic slaughter and more a participant. Not just any participant—this time, it’s me on that altar.

And I can feel everything.

The ropes on my wrists and ankles, so tight that they’re sawing into my skin, leaving a bloody mess. I can feel how shredded my throat feels from the screaming, and how much every part of me hurts. I can feel the burn of the cold against my naked body.

I can feel, too well, every sickening blow from the cloaked figures who swirl and chant around me, and the blades that tear me apart.

Everything is blood and agony, tiny and overwhelming at once.

I shudder back into myself, and for a moment, I’m standing there on that frigid mountainside, watching from afar.

I see the trees all around, the moon up above, and rock formations in the mountainside that look like goblins frozen into place—goblins who sneer and snarl at me like only they know I’m there—

In the next breath, I’m back.

I’m on the steps outside my house with Maddox, a surprisingly comforting presence next to me. I glance at her, but she doesn’t appear to have noticed that I was outside my own body for who knows how long.

I tell myself that’s good news. I can quietly have visions without alerting everyone around me. It doesn’t have to be me frothing on the ground, foaming at the mouth, or rolling my eyes in the back of my head while moaning about messages from the great beyond.

Where that impression of oracles came from, I don’t know, as I’ve never seen Gran do anything of the kind.

I blow out a breath. I can’t get the full moon tomorrow out of my head—especially the view of it I keep having from the same blood-soaked mountainside—and looking at it nearly full now doesn’t exactly help with that. I can’t seem to get the claws of that vision out of me.

That’s not even getting to Augie and all the vampires.

Or all the things my grandmother never told me.

Somehow, a werewolf seems like the safest space around right now. “What if I know something bad is going to happen and I want to stop it before it does?” I ask.

Maddox doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t ask me what the hell I’m talking about. She doesn’t question how I could know something is going to happen before it does.

What she does is tilt her head a little, like she’s considering it.

“Are you certain that you can stop it?” she asks.

Something about her reaction is poking at me, but I put that aside. “If I don’t try, I know that I can’t. Do you really think it matters if I know I can stop it?”

When she looks at me, there’s something in her gaze I can’t quite place. It’s not pity. But it hits me in a similar way. “I think that if something is so huge that involving yourself, or revealing yourself, will only harm you and do nothing to change what’s coming ... there’s no point.”

That sets off a soft little chime deep inside me. A kind of alarm, maybe. I tell myself it’s simple recognition of the enormity of what I’m about to do. The knowledge that I should keep this secret is like a hand around my throat—

But that only makes me think of Ariel, and I flush.

I frown hard to sober myself up. “A woman is going to be murdered horribly on a mountaintop tomorrow night.” My voice sounds sharper than expected.

Again, Maddox doesn’t react the way I expect her to. She doesn’t question the murder part. She holds my gaze. “Do you know which mountain?”

“I have an idea,” I say. “A vague idea.” I gesture in the approximate direction of the distant mountain range on the far side of the valley, not that it can be seen from this porch.