Page 40 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

Maddox, back in her wolf form, is quick and capable, keeping up with Ty’s pace with what looks like not much effort.

Sometimes she loops ahead or roams off to check things on either side of the trail.

Once or twice I see her tipping her head back, like she’s taking in whatever secrets the trees want to tell her.

I don’t know how werewolves communicate in their wolf forms, but I can see that they’re doing it. It even looks like they make an excellent team. There’s no doubt Ty is in charge, but he looks to Maddox all the time and seems to pay attention to her suggestions.

Or maybe I’m making all this up to entertain myself as my brain eats itself alive, hard to tell.

The moon gets higher. The air gets thinner. Eventually, we stop, so far up the mountain that I can taste snowstorms in the air. I can hear wolf paws against the earth, meaning there’s something to crunch on. Ice. Frost. Whatever it is, it’s cold.

Maddox shifts, then smiles at me. “You good?”

I nod, then wince because the movement makes my head feel swimmy and sick. The pain doesn’t even throb anymore—it’s constant. An endless piercing, lacerating me straight through and expanding as it goes.

Like it wants to consume me whole.

But in the tendrils of it, I see different views of that same damn clearing.

Like Google Images has resurrected itself in my head.

When I realize that Ty is glaring over his furry shoulder at me, I mutter something like an apology and slide off. My knees don’t do their work, so I topple onto the ground, but it’s a slow-motion topple, and I’m so boneless already that I can’t really bring myself to care.

Then I decide I’ll just lie there a minute, my face in the frigid dirt.

This is as close as I’ve been to feeling good in quite a while, so I stay there.

I feel that thunderclap again, all through me, and I don’t have to look up to know that Ty has changed again.

“She’s wearing his fucking mark,” he growls.

“She sure is.” Maddox’s response, though I didn’t sense her shifting, is so bland that even in my state I can tell it’s pointedly so.

“This is bullshit,” he growls at her. “Running around on Mount McLoughlin under a full moon like assholes. Just more of your stupid games.”

“You calling my legitimate feelings about my life ‘stupid games’ is a real good way to make sure I keep playing them,” she drawls, like he’s not the least bit scary at all.

But then, I know now that scary and scary depend a whole lot on a body’s response to the person in question. I know that better than I’d like.

“Keep it up,” he suggests, his voice a soft threat. “You think I don’t know that you keep shifting into human form because you think I’ll behave better when your oracle buddy can understand me?”

“Not everything is about you,” Maddox retorts loftily. “It’s rude to talk about things that affect someone in languages they don’t speak. Common courtesy, babe.”

“ Babe, ” he repeats, as if he can’t believe she dared call him that.

I decide that at this point, the two of them squabbling is like a lullaby. Even if it’s not, there’s nothing I can do about it when even listening hurts.

I let my eyes drift shut. I let my face stay in the dirt, because it’s cold and that feels fantastic against my aching head. It’s like an ice pack provided by the earth itself, and I am eternally grateful.

I feel a weight pressing into me, digging into my side, and I don’t have to reach over to know that the cards have wedged themselves there in the vicinity of my hip. Just in case I want to reach over and grab them from this ridiculous position.

In my current state, I have to admire the cards’ continuing optimism that if they keep on presenting themselves, I’ll surrender to them.

Right now I feel like I’d surrender to anything, but it takes too much energy to reach for the deck.

Ty and Maddox are still sparking at each other. They’re probably touching, too, because they usually are. I find myself thinking about hands on throats, and I wonder what’s happened to me that I now unambiguously find that hot. Both when I saw it and when it happened to me.

Surely someone concerned with her own longevity would think better of responding the way I did to a grip like that.

Though the fact that Ty mentioned Ariel’s mark floats up then, dancing around in what little mind I have left that’s not taken over by the searing pain.

I spent a very long time in the shower before I finally went to bed last night, scrubbing myself everywhere.

Wishing I could reach inside my brain and scrub out some of the images in my head, but in lieu of that, I did the best I could with what I had.

But apparently the damn mark stayed put.

I should probably feel grosser about that than I do. This is becoming a tired theme. I should feel a lot of things, yet I don’t.

What I don’t know is if that means I’m already too far gone.

Face down in the dirt on Mount McLoughlin, chasing a nasty ritual sacrifice under an ominously full moon, it feels a little late to be worrying about such things.

The pain in my head seems to bloom then, brighter and hotter.

It takes over everything. It blots out any other line of thought I could possibly have, until I’m scrabbling around for a rock to start bashing my own face in—

And then I see it.

It’s like an entire map suddenly drops, fully formed, into my head.

I sit up, even though it makes everything seem to lurch, and wipe dirt from my face. I’m vaguely aware of Ty and Maddox off to the side of me, clearly testing the limits of that push-and-pull thing they have going on.

“Hey,” comes Ty’s voice when I start to move, “where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“Winter? Are you okay?”

But I don’t answer Maddox either.

Maybe I think that attempting to speak will take more energy than I have left. Maybe I’m not thinking anymore.

I walk. I leave the trail and start picking my way across the mountainside. I can hear that they’re following me, thunderclaps and all, though I don’t turn around to check.

After a while, I start climbing again, and the great part of the continuing headache is that I don’t really pay any attention to how my quads scream at me or how tender my feet feel in the damn hiking boots. I just keep going.

And it’s not too long before I see those rock formations that look like goblins, leering down at me as if, if it were up to them, they’d devour me here and now.

I stagger past the rocks and then, finally, I see the trees that have been haunting me for what feels like a brand-new forever.

I hear a growl from behind me and know that it’s Ty. It’s so deep it sounds like a Harley engine, which maybe explains the whole werewolf/biker connection, but I’m too messed up to follow that or any other line of thought.

Besides, he’s not growling at me.

I don’t know how I know that—I just do.

“Blood,” Maddox says, like she’s agreeing with something he said. I’m surprised that she’s not in her wolf form, not that I turn back to confirm that. Her speaking is the confirmation. “I smell it too.”

I make myself keep going, putting one foot in front of the other until the pounding in my head nearly knocks me over. I sag against the nearest tree in despair, until I realize I’ve made it to the clearing.

The clearing that’s been haunting me.

I made it. We’re here. I force myself to look around and see ...

Exactly the scene I saw laid out in my head.

“Winter,” Maddox murmurs, urgently. She’s crouching next to me, but her eyes are on the scene in front of us. The scene I’ve seen so many times in my head that seeing it in living color, scent, and sound feels unreal. “Stay here.”

“No problem,” I assure her.

Ty growls at her, and I have no trouble interpreting it. Hurry up.

I try to stay upright, gripping on to that tree, as she lunges forward and shifts in midair—

Then she’s a blur of teeth and fur, and she and Ty streak straight into the dark heart of the ritual.

At first it seems like there are too many cloaked figures to count.

I get the overwhelming sense that they are not quite human, though they are shaped as if maybe they were.

Once. I force myself to focus and try to count them, whatever they are.

At some point I realize my vision is doubling and that there are only thirteen.

This is not excellent, but it’s a far cry better than twenty-six.

There’s a split second when the werewolves move in like death while the figures dance and chant, waving those nasty-looking blades in the air, entirely unaware.

I have the feeling that moment is burned into me, that splayed-out instant only I see.

Then the next moment comes, and it seems that there are suddenly werewolves everywhere.

I know there are only two of them, but I have to keep reminding myself of that. Because if I didn’t know not only how many there are, but who they are, I would think there were a great many more.

A whole damn pack.

Ty is astonishing. It’s amazing to me that anything that large could move the way he does, sleek and too fast to believe, like a terrifying wave of singular mayhem.

He’s all claws and teeth, tearing through the cloaked figures with a vengeance.

Maddox is no slouch herself.

She smaller, so she’s faster and, to my eye, more vicious. She goes for the throat every time, and she doesn’t miss.

The pain in my head shifts somehow, or maybe I’m finally used to it.

Then again, it could be something else.

It sounds like a whisper at first, though I don’t get the sense that I’m hearing it. Not with my ears.

Yet I know what it is. A beckoning. An invitation.

I look around, blinking against the clamp of pain—however dull in comparison—and I see the figure, bound and still on that flat stone altar.

Then I suck in a sudden, ragged breath, because she’s looking right at me.

Not dead.

Not yet.

Her eyes are wide and glazed, there’s blood all over her face, and her mouth is open wide like she’s panting.

Or screaming.

I force myself to my feet. I make my way toward her, doing my best to stay out of the way of the cloaked figures and the furious werewolves battling it out before me. I figure they’re giving the cloaks and blades a lot more to worry about than I could.

Besides, it seems to me as if the moon itself is leading me along, guiding me.

Making sure I keep going, no matter how much every step hurts.

I fall more than once, but I still keep going, crawling if necessary, puking when I can’t not , until I make it around that fire. Once I do, I kneel right there beside the altar.

I confirm that she’s not dead. Not yet, though that seems like a foregone conclusion, and I can remember feeling the marks that I see all over her gouged deep into my own skin. I feel them again now.

The woman reaches out her bound hands to me, and I don’t think. I take them in mine.

I think that I ought to say something beautiful or comforting or something —

Her hands are bloody and mangled, and she shouldn’t be able to grip me as hard as she does. So hard that she jerks me toward her. Much too close, as a matter of fact, though I question my empathy that I should have a problem with a poor, sacrificed woman getting what comfort she can—

She croaks at me.

“What?” I ask, my head swimming again, though I try to give this dying soul my attention—and what tattered empathy I have in me—in her last moments.

She grabs my hand even harder, painfully hard, grinning at me through teeth soaked in blood.

I know I’m not making that up, because she laughs.

“She’s coming,” the woman tells me, a terrible echo of words I’ve heard before.

Then her mouth goes wide, her eyes go dark and opaque, and when she opens her mouth it’s like I’m being sucked inside, lost forever—

And everything I am, everything there is, goes black.