Page 44 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

“I bound you to me.” The way he says it, I can hear that it has meaning.

That it’s something more than his mark. Or maybe even more than his sacrifices of days gone by.

I bound you to me, he said, and it echoes inside of me, like a vow written in blood and pressed deep into my bones.

“I gave you my blood and you accepted it. According to the ancient laws, Winter, that makes you mine.”

Something hitches in me, and while it’s not as simple as fear, it does the same work.

“Or, alternatively, you and your ancient laws can fuck right off.”

That half smile of his hurts a little less, now. “Somehow I thought that might be your reaction to this extraordinary honor I have bestowed upon you. Never fear. The laws hold regardless of your feelings about them.”

His hand moves to cup my face, and I don’t push it away. I should push it away. I really should. I know I should.

I still don’t.

I can hear my heart pounding and pounding and pounding in my chest, as if it’s looking for ways to break free. The way I ought to be right now, but am not.

“Am I ...?” My mouth feels ridiculously dry. I try to swallow. “Am I a vampire?”

His eyes are so silver they hurt. “I did not make you like me, little seer. I saved you.”

I shake my head, though there’s not much shaking to do when he’s still holding on to me, the coolness of his skin making my own seem to burn all the hotter in response. “I don’t know what that means.”

“I healed you.” He tilts his head slightly as he regards me, his gaze so serious. “Could you not feel it? You were dying. That vision in your head was killing you, and then that woman nearly finished the job. I believe that was her plan.”

“That woman was a victim,” I say, and fast, like if I let what he said sit on me it might wound me even more. The confusion is mounting in me, so I step back.

Then I put even more space between us, though it feels foolish.

Foolish, maybe, but necessary. I turn back to the bed, but I don’t see anything that even resembles clothing, so I pull the snow-white blanket off and wrap it around me.

As if my naked body will betray me by simple virtue of its exposure.

Or maybe because he can already read me too well with clothes on.

He stays by the window and I watch his gaze drop, as if he’s tracing the place where my phoenix tattoo claims my abdomen, even through the barrier of the blanket. As if he feels that link the same way I do.

A greater link now, if he’s telling me the truth. Now that my resurrections aren’t entirely figurative.

“She was tied up and brutally killed,” I say, still too fast. “A victim in every sense of the word.”

Ariel looks as if he would rather not disappoint me, and I can’t decide if the warmth I feel at that is temper or a kind of melting sweetness at the idea that anyone might want to protect me from the harsh realities of life. It’s so ... novel.

“That woman was an acolyte,” he says after a long while. “She was a sacrifice, yes, but she chose her role. Fought for the glory of it, I would imagine. And the goddess she serves likes blood and fear, pain and suffering, so that is what she delivered.”

I think about that painful climb up the mountainside. About that last, terrible, stumbling half crawl across the clearing to get to her. I remember—vividly—taking her hands in mine and trying to think what comfort I could offer someone in her position.

“Vin?a is coming,” I whisper. Ariel shifts, stiffening, and I shake my head. “That’s what she told me. That’s why she was there. And I’m not sure that makes her less of a victim, in the end.”

“She wanted to be there, and was tasked with delivering a specific gift,” Ariel says with a certain gentleness.

“It was not a gift for you. It was a gift to her goddess. A further demonstration of her faith. If you hadn’t had the questionable sense to go there in the company of wolves, you would be dead. They were expecting you, Winter.”

I clutch that blanket closer to my chest. “That’s impossible.”

“Don’t you understand? You are an oracle. Visions are not supposed to tear you apart, and yet the one that got you up that mountain was deliberately designed to do just that.”

“To what end?” I demand. “Nothing you’re saying even make sense. How did a woman on an altar even know who I was?”

His gaze seems to sharpen, to get more brilliant and more pointed. “Everybody knows who you are.”

“If they have a coffee addiction, maybe.”

“Your family has always been known,” he tells me, almost impatiently, as if I’m being deliberately obtuse.

“And another thing that everyone knows is that your grandmother could easily contact you across the veil if you died. It’s why oracles are so popular with the longer-lived of the Kind.

They make the burden of outliving everyone you know, over and over again, a little lighter.

” The look on his face is forbidding, so I don’t ask him who he misses.

“The goddess knew that her message would come through no matter what happened. That was the plan. That is the gift she left with you, and she didn’t care if you received it dead or alive. ”

My head is reeling, and I’m tired of reeling. I’m exhausted, and I feel certain, somehow, that this is his fault. Because it has to be his fault. If it’s his fault, he can stop it. He can fix what he did and we can go back to—

But where do I think there is to go?

“One option I had was to let you die, then negotiate with your grieving grandmother for whatever message might have been sent through you,” Ariel says, very deliberate and intent. “Another was to do what I did.”

He’s standing there, so austere. So far apart from me when I still have those images in my head, those flashes. When I can feel how close we were when he was biting into me. When I was sucking his blood deep into my mouth.

“Or you could have killed me yourself,” I say.

He inclines his head, those silver eyes gleaming. “Or that.”

It shouldn’t be this hard to breathe. “But you didn’t do that, Ariel. Why didn’t you do that?”

I keep coming up hard against this thing I don’t want to admit. I don’t want to feel it. It doesn’t make sense to feel it. I go around and around—

It’s too soon. It can’t be real. I can’t discount the fact that he’s a vampire—in many ways, the vampire—and anything I might be feeling he could have planted in me for his own amusement.

Except there’s this: the way he’s looking at me in this unlit room with only the rain outside. It feels like it’s inside both of us. As if the downpour is washing us clean, too, not only that clearing high up on McLoughlin. As if it’s washing away all the excuses.

I desperately want them back. I want to hide in them.

But I can’t seem to make myself say the things that could make that happen.

All Ariel does is gaze at me much too long. Until, finally, when I think there will be no more words between us, he shifts slightly where he stands.

“I found the notion of your death, with no hope of resurrection, unappealing.”

He says it so stiffly. As if he’s perplexed and somewhat outraged that he feels such a thing at all.

As declarations go, you might think it anemic.

But inside of me, it catches hold. It lights a spark.

And inexplicably, impossibly, it begins to burn.

“Careful,” I say, though my voice hardly sounds like mine. “Be very careful, Your Bloody Highness. Don’t go soft on me.”

I’m shaken. I’m shaken straight through, but there is that flickering flame inside me and it’s growing by the moment. He found it unappealing . This creature, who traffics in death as a matter of fact and preference and no doubt no small personal delight, found my death unappealing .

I pull in a ragged breath. “I hope you got what you wanted, anyway.”

But if that’s an attempt to change this conversation or lighten the mood, it fails.

Ariel does not change his expression or his stance at all. “You kept lapsing off into a coma, and for reasons I still cannot explain, you’re one of the only creatures I have ever encountered who appears to be entirely capable of keeping me out of your head.”

I try to digest that. I don’t think I’m understanding him. I can’t be understanding him.

“So none of this is you ... doing that thing? That song inside of me that makes me think ...?”

“Most people can’t even tell that I would like them to start singing,” he says dryly.

“And when I say most people , I mean none. Only you, Winter. If I had to describe it, I would say that I saw the door, opened it as I always do, and you slammed it back in my face. Trust me when I tell you this has never occurred before.”

I have to make myself breathe. I don’t really want to. What I want to do is ... I don’t even know. Disappear. Lie down.

Scream?

“I’m sorry,” I say, very carefully, almost warily, “that my mind is my own, I guess?”

He starts toward me, and even though there’s a large part of me that screams at me to run, I don’t.

This would all be so much easier if he truly terrified me like that.

Even from the start, he fascinated me more than he scared me.

He comes closer, and then he’s too close, so I have to tilt my head back up to look at him. And he helps me, putting his hands on either side of my head as if he’s still trying to find his way between my temples.

“I am not a merciful creature,” he tells me. “I am not soft. If I had done what I would have done to any other human in your position, I would already have the answers I need. Instead, what I have is—”

But I don’t want to hear what he wants to call me. I don’t want to know what I am to him.

If I do know, it’s too much. It’s too overwhelming.

I am bound to him , that’s what he said.

“How did you find me up there anyway?” I ask him, interrupting him.

Ariel reaches over and runs his finger down my back. I feel his hand moving along my spine, then flaring out over my hip. “Why do you think I marked you?”

“One of your vampire minions suggested it was what you always do with your sacrifices,” I say, the flare of temper that comes with it bubbling up from a place inside me I didn’t even know was there.

“I have always liked a sacrifice.” He sounds somewhere between sardonic and nostalgic. “But in your case, it was strategy. Marks are like flares. They make you easy to find, even on the top of a mountain in the middle of the woods.”

“So why bother binding me?” I snap at him, because I feel vulnerable. Wide open. Naked in more ways than one. “You just wanted an extra charge on that flare?”

“As I said, the mark was strategy. As for binding you to me ...” He pauses then. His hands on me almost feel warm, as if I’m giving him my heat. As if it’s enough for the both of us. Again, the way his mouth curves makes me want to cry. “I don’t know what this is.”

The admission sounds torn from him. I can hear it. I can feel it. I just know it.

But I don’t want it. That’s what I tell myself.

“What this is,” I say with as much bravado as I can summon, “is over, because I have to go sling coffee in a drive-through shack on Stage Road—”

Ariel shifts. He sighs a little, then strokes my temples.

It’s then that I realize there are lingering bits of a headache remaining, and he’s soothing them away. Stroking the sides of my face as if he knows exactly where to touch me to make all the pain simply ... disappear.

“You are an oracle,” he tells me. “And oracles are not built to keep their visions to themselves. It’s time to share what you’ve seen, Winter. What you know.”

I can feel the truth of what he’s saying. It pulls at me, but I don’t want to go there. I can’t bear how real this feels, and if I feel terror in his presence at last, it’s not because of what he might do to me.

It’s because of how he makes me feel already when he’s barely done anything at all. When he’s protected me. When he’s cared for me. When he has at no point tossed me in the dungeons I know all too well he has at the ready.

But I don’t have it in me to worry about Augie right now, not when I am bound by blood to a vampire king and an ancient goddess left her shit in me and I have no idea what any of this means or what it makes me—

I take a breath.

Part of me would prefer all of this to be one big mind game. That way, everything I’m feeling would be fake and I could happily move on, secure in the knowledge that he never really got to me and I never really felt like I might—

I refuse to admit it, even to myself.

“The only thing I see is my paycheck disappearing if I don’t get to work,” I begin, because the coffee stand is just about the only normal thing I have left, the last relic remaining from life before monsters.

I need it.

But Ariel leans forward then and presses his hard, cruel, beautiful mouth to mine.

He kisses me like I am something precious to him.

And he sets the whole world on fire.