Page 43 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

I wake up surrounded by warmth and softness, like I’m stretched out on a happy cloud, safe and sweet in a way I haven’t felt since I was very young. Too young to know better. Too young to understand what life was going to do to me, like it or not, even before the Reveal.

At first I don’t even open my eyes.

I surface into awareness. I have the sense that I’m coming out of a deep, restorative sleep, not the usual head too full of bloody visions all night long and the pain in my temples to match.

Or the driving anxiety of wondering if the house was breached in the night, if Gran is still alive, if there are zombies snuffling around and dripping body parts out back—or worse threats.

Usually, I wake up hard and fast, my blood pressure already jacked up high because I have to be ready to fight.

Today I’m lying face down on a bed that I know isn’t mine, but I can’t summon up any concern about that. Not yet.

This bed is too remarkably soft for any dramatic cardiac responses. The pillow beneath my head smells faintly of herbs, or maybe I do for some reason. I stretch, wiggling my toes, and I’m so warm and so cozy that it takes me a moment to remember that really, I shouldn’t feel this good.

I open my eyes then, reluctantly. Then I turn over and try to make sense of my surroundings.

The room I’m in is shadowy and cool. I sit up, gingerly, waiting for the usual aches and that awful headache to settle in, but still nothing hurts.

Around me, there’s exposed brick, and very little else. The bed I’m in is all white linens, wide and high off the ground. It’s the paintings on the far wall—actual paintings in serious frames, not prints and posters stuck to the wall—that click.

I’m in Ariel’s apartment. This has to be what this is. It reeks of sophistication in a way nothing else in this valley does.

As I think that, flashes start to come back to me.

The mountain. The blood.

That fight I’d watched and even crawled through, those terrible cloaked figures—I still don’t know what they were, and I’m not sure I want to know—the flashing knives, and that creepy chanting as they slashed and fought.

Werewolves in the midst of all those cloaks, full monsters in every sense of the term—but it’s hard to hold on to the fear I ought to feel, because they saved me.

That woman with blood all over her mouth and the way those hands of hers that should have been weak grabbed on to me. Hard. I frown down at my hands, flipping them this way and that, looking for marks. Looking for wounds or broken bones or something to indicate why it was that I reacted like that.

She’s coming, the woman said, and something about the way she said it knocked me out, tore me up, and—I’m pretty sure—almost killed me.

But what else can you expect when the she in question is a death goddess?

Fucking Vin?a, I think now. The asshole goddess of filth and pain.

But more flashes of memory are hitting me now.

I see myself in Ariel’s arms, something fierce and stark on that gorgeous face of his as he carries me into a bathroom that I know I haven’t seen before. I look to my right from the bed I’m in and am certain that the bathroom in question is there. Just behind that door.

It’s not so much that I remember it. It’s that I know it.

I have a flash of being in a bath filled with hot water that turned red as I sat there, as the vampire king himself washed me. Then rinsed out my hair, making me smell like him. He took his time and, when he was done, wrapped me in the softest towel I’ve ever felt against my skin.

“Bullshit,” I whisper to myself.

I must be having those dreams again. Not visions, just fantasies.

Yet even as I think that, they keep coming.

And they get weirder.

Silver eyes on mine that I would have thrown myself into, if I could. A question and my answer, Yes .

As if I would have shouted it out, if I were able.

His mouth on my neck, licking my pulse, and then those fangs I saw on the mountain piercing my skin.

I can feel the pressure, the pain. Then the way the pain ... blooms into something else, something sensual and good .

Even the memory is a lush, marvelous sensation, washing all over and through my body.

I remember that sharp pain fading, and then a pleasure almost as intense as the orgasms he’s given me.

That’s not all. I have flashes of him running his nail along his own neck, then guiding my head there, holding me in place until I began to lick.

Until I could gulp him down, warm and bright and thick on my tongue.

I’m breathing heavy now and I look around again, wildly, and that’s when I see the still figure standing over by the tall windows that make up the wall above the street, staring out.

It’s just a dream, I tell myself. Just a crazy dream after a crazy day ...

My hand moves of its own accord, up to my neck, where I can feel what ought to be a terrible, open wound or nothing but the smooth bit of skin it was yesterday—

But what I feel instead is a faint, raised scar.

Like a wound that’s already healed.

I’m scrambling out of bed before I know what I’m doing, and it’s only when my feet hit the hardwood floor that I realize I’m naked.

I should probably care about that, but I don’t. That phoenix tattoo on his back is like some kind of homing beacon and I move toward him, not sure why I’m running directly toward the very creature who made me drink his blood .

I don’t know what I might have said when I get to the window where he’s standing, but the rain stops me.

Because I remember, then, that Savi makes it rain. That she’s doing this right now.

I remember that clearing, how it was soaked with blood. This must be her way of washing it all away.

It’s suddenly clear to me then. This ecosystem I’ve lived in for years now without knowing it. How they work together—vampire games, werewolf brawn, and a sorceress to tie it all together and sometimes make it pretty.

I put my palms on the glass and let the chill seep into them. I have the urge to press my forehead against the glass, but that makes me think about Augie belowground, and that’s another spiral of shame and fury.

“How long have I been out?” I manage to ask.

He doesn’t look at me. “You slept all night once I brought you here.”

I shut my eyes. “What did you do to me?”

It takes Ariel so long to answer that I open my eyes again, then turn to look at him. He’s staring out toward the rain, out over the buildings across Main Street, and I find it ... odd.

All our other interactions were heavy on contact and intensity.

Now I’m naked and in his bedroom, and he won’t even look at me. If even half of what’s in my head happened last night, doesn’t that mean ...?

“Ariel.” I make my voice as stern as I can. But maybe what comes out is scared. “What did you do to me?”

“I saved you.” He says it quietly. As if he is saying it to himself. Or maybe to the rain. “I saved you, Winter, when what I could have done, more easily and without your input, was simply help myself to whatever gift you received from last night’s sacrifice.”

Ty called it a gift too, I remember. And clearly not a happy one. I decide I can’t focus on that. My heart pounds, but I remember the taste of his blood, and I don’t know if it’s his or mine I feel rushing too hard inside me. “What do you mean, help yourself?”

He turns to me then, his silver eyes blazing, though his mouth is stern.

“If I take your life, I get your life.” There’s a starkness in his voice that I don’t understand. A bleakness. “That means all your visions. All your memories. All your hopes and dreams, everything you carry in your blood and bones, all mine.”

I don’t know why that makes me ... not as upset as he looks. “Thanks for showing restraint, I guess?”

He does not look restrained at the moment. He looks ... bothered. Furious. Confused, even—though it seems ridiculous to imagine that a twenty-five-hundred-year-old vampire could be confused about anything.

On him it looks a lot like temper.

Yet I don’t flinch when he reaches over and runs his fingers over that very same mark on my neck that I found myself.

“I could have simply helped myself to the gift you received from last night’s sacrifice.

It would have been so easy. Of course, if I had, even if I’d showed restraint, you would be little more than a vegetable now. ”

I lift my hand as if to push his away, but it doesn’t end up that way. Instead, the two of us stand there, rain beating against the windowpanes, both of us holding tight to that bite mark on my neck.

“You bit me,” I say.

In my head, this comes out as an accusation. Stark and short.

That’s not how it sounds here in this room, though. The gloom all around us seems almost seductive, whispering secrets whether I wish to hear them or not.

Ariel’s mouth curves, though his gaze remains stark. “I did much more than that, I’m afraid.”

He moves his hand beneath mine, his thumb sweeping over the bite mark, making it feel ... bright.

Bright like blood, I think.

I can’t seem to think of much besides that.

Besides him. His silver gaze. His body, so big around mine, blocking out the world.

The fact that the terrible headache that plagued me yesterday is gone.

The fact that there’s a part of me that wishes that scar on my neck would stay there forever, a mark even humans could see.

“What exactly did you do?” I dare ask again.

His mouth curves, but again, it’s bittersweet. It makes a low ache start in me, and I don’t know how to combat it. It sweeps all through me like a fever, and it feels far more dangerous than any bite.

Because it has emotion written all over it.

It’s almost as if I already know what he’s going to say.