Page 36 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

She makes a low noise like she’s mulling it over.

Those alarms in me get louder, and suddenly all I can think about is what Ariel said about those who hide in plain sight. I think about how strange it is that either version of Maddox should be here at all. The popular girl from high school or the future queen of the werewolf pack.

I want to believe that she really does want that space she told me she craved, from Ty and the rest of what sounds like a very fraught powder keg of a family dynamic, and I know from powder kegs.

But.

But.

I turn to face her, thunking my mug down between us on the porch step. “Did you move in here because you knew?” I think about that night when Ty Ceridwen came to the door, that thing he said to me. That I better be worth it . “Did you know that I was the new oracle?”

The cards have chosen, I hear Ariel say again.

Maddox lets out a sound then. A hollow little noise. “Yes.” I suppose it’s to her credit that she doesn’t prevaricate. “I did know.” She looks at me. “But, in fairness, you weren’t the new oracle yet .”

I laugh, and it’s another bit of hollowness. “I guess the joke’s on me that I thought I could actually be friends with the Maddox Hemming.”

I don’t know that I actually meant to say that, but there it is, hanging between us. She blinks, very slowly, and there’s something almost stricken in her smoky-quartz gaze.

“What the fuck is that?” she asks, her voice a little hoarse, like there’s emotion there.

I start to answer her. “You know—”

But she’s on a roll. “What in the high school bullshit do you think that even means?” She’s still gripping her mug, and for a moment I think she might actually crumple it between her hands.

She seems to notice that too and sets it down.

Carefully, I think. And her voice is even hoarser when she speaks.

“I was a literal wolf walking around pretending to be a teenage human girl. And let me tell you, contrary to what you might imagine if you watched a lot of stupid television shows, secret identities suck. It’s hard enough being fourteen.

Fifteen. Try policing yourself constantly for any possible slip, any possible hint you might have inadvertently given away that could lead to the extermination of your entire family and species. ”

She takes a sudden, sharp breath that makes me think she was holding it. When she blows it out again, she sounds tired. Bone-deep tired. “It’s exhausting. Now try doing it when you’re just a kid and you don’t understand that everyone will think you’re a monster if they know.”

I start to say something else, but she lifts her hand.

“In case you wondered, Ty takes a dim view of mistakes. Back then, showing ourselves to outsiders was forbidden. By pack law. And trust me when I tell you that you do not want to break pack law. It isn’t a question of whether or not you will be punished, but how badly, and will you survive it. Harsh but true.”

“That sounds shitty,” I say, feeling off-balance, because it never occurred to me to think about Maddox Hemming’s actual, personal feelings, and I fear that says some things about me. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with—”

“I wasn’t popular, Winter,” Maddox says flatly. “I was mysterious. Unknowable. People like to tell stories about mysteries they can’t solve, that’s all. So in the end, I probably did break pack law. Because they always treated me like a werewolf, even then.”

“Maybe,” I say after some moments spent stewing in my own obliviousness, “high school is a curse upon everyone it touches, simple as that.”

“Everyone knows who you are, Winter,” she says after a while, and she picks up her mug again.

“Your grandmother has been around for a long time, and she’s always been accurate in her predictions.

Not like some, who just want attention. Her kind of sight runs in families.

Everyone in the ... supernatural community, I guess you could call it, knows that too. ”

“You mean the Kind?” I ask.

Something else gleams in that gaze of hers. “You’re learning all kinds of things down at the MMA school, aren’t you.”

Maddox very deliberately—and exaggeratedly—looks from my face to the sweep of my back, then returns her gaze to mine. Letting me know that she does, absolutely, know that mark is there. I can’t decide if the embarrassment is actually life-threatening or not.

Yet.

“Yes,” she says when she’s done making her point.

“The Kind. The way we see it, there’s humankind and then the regular Kind.

There have been other points in history when the Kind have ruled.

Humans just don’t remember it. They call it things like the Dark Ages.

Or the quote ‘barbarian horde,’ unquote.

Whatever. We’ve all been here forever.” She takes a pull of her hot chocolate.

“Oracles aren’t exactly human or Kind. They’re . .. somewhere between.”

“Even more good news,” I say, though really, what’s a little species confusion at a time like this.

“It just keeps coming and coming.” I make myself look at her, and I hope she can’t see anything on my face, because I’m not sure that I’m controlling my expressions the way I wish I were.

“Is that it? You came to live here so you could cozy up to the next generation of oracles?”

“The thing is that big-time ancient goddesses don’t do anything simply,” Maddox tells me quietly. Matter-of-factly. “This particular one was put down a long time ago, for general shadiness.”

“Vin?a,” I say, though naming her tastes sour. And suddenly my nightmare is in my head again, foul and vile. I can feel her breath on me, filled with dead things. My headache pricks to life all over again.

Maddox nods, her gaze becoming something more assessing. “Yes. The infamous Vin?a. Goddess of Filth.”

That she uses a term my grandmother has used makes me go cold. Because I understand immediately that Gran has been telling me about Vin?a all along. I don’t know where to put that.

“And when we talk about goddesses being shady, we’re not talking about the odd war or even wiping out a city or two,” Maddox says.

“We’re talking about widespread pestilence.

Famine. Aspirations to take over the whole world and make it into her personal playground, which usually means excessive exterminations and that sort of thing.

Goddesses like that are powerful, and the things they find entertaining tend to make people sit up and take notice. ”

I remember what Ariel said about her that first night. Carnage. A rabid cult. Centuries of mayhem.

But in my head I see a ripple at the bottom of blue water. A disturbance in the smoothness, like a warning. A whisper.

Maddox is still talking. “But because they like to be worshipped and feared, they also like to herald their comings and goings. That’s where you come in.”

“And you think that a goddess has something to do with a woman being murdered on the mountaintop.”

“I think it could,” Maddox replies. Evenly.

“In a situation like this, when a big event has already happened—that being the Reveal—you’re basically looking for weird shit.

Because weird shit tends to come in threes, and usually, when it does, it fucks everything else up.

That’s how you know.” She lets out one of those short little laughs again. “Consider that Apocalypse 101.”

“So what you’re telling me is that I have vampires after me. And werewolves after me. And everybody wants to know if I know about any upcoming weird shit, is that it?”

“See? You were born for it.”

I want to be furious. Maybe I am. But I can’t help thinking that she didn’t have to tell me any of this. It clearly would have been easier to just lie, like everyone else.

What I can’t decide is if it’s pathetic that I want that to mean that we really are friends.

The thing is, I just like her. And liking her is not complicated by her holding my twin brother naked in a prison cell under the river. Or by my wanting to fuck her. That’s strictly a vampire thing, it seems.

It also doesn’t escape me that there’s no one else in the world who can understand my situation the way she can. For a variety of reasons.

“Maybe if we can find this woman on her mountaintop, we can save her,” I say after a few more moments roll by and the moon is already looking toward the horizon. “But I’m not sure that we can. I’m not sure if a vision is set in stone or if it can be changed.”

“Nobody is,” Maddox replies. “There are a lot of theories, but really? Nobody knows anything. No matter what they might tell you.”

“That’s what I like about you. Filled with platitudes and easy comfort.”

Maddox smiles at that. She looks up at that nearly full moon.

“Tomorrow the moon will be full and bright,” she says softly. “Great hiking weather. And if you’re climbing up mountains, you might need someone with a very good nose and an excellent sense of direction.”

When she looks at me and smiles, I don’t think I’m a fool that I smile back.

Because this is the other side of the Reveal, and everything is complicated, sure. But that doesn’t make it fake.

Still, when I finally go to rest my bones in my bed upstairs, what I think about is Ariel. His hand on my throat and that look in his silver eyes.

As if maybe, just maybe, I’m more than just a pawn to him, too.