Page 47 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

The pain is astonishing, a sucker punch—

But this is also the moment when he begins to move inside me, that huge cock finding every sensitive part of me and setting it on fire.

It’s not fast, it’s deliberate. It’s slow, deep, and sure.

I drink him in. He drinks me too, and it’s a different kind of spell. A wildfire alchemy made more intense by how deep inside me he is.

I feel my entire body ... shift.

Not my bones and my ligaments, no thunderclap into a wolf form. This is something else. Something deeper.

Something I might call my soul, if I believed in things like that.

I feel as if I’m flying, soaring somewhere high in a clear sky, and it’s all blood and sex, hunger and joy.

A joy so intense it actually hurts, but not enough to stop.

A deep, hard joy I’ve never experienced before.

I feel him go harder and tighter, this stone statue of a beautiful man. I feel him clench me tighter and bite down harder, and I want to cry out in the mad whirl and wild joy of this.

Instead, I suck harder on his wrist, like I want to consume him the way he’s devouring me.

Not like I do. I do.

If I could, I would bite him too.

He stiffens, then comes. In a flood so cold it almost feels scalding.

As he lets himself go, I feel the mark he left on my back light up. I feel certain that if I were to look, I would see myself glowing.

I think, No wonder everyone knew. They could see exactly what he did.

Right now it feels like a different, better, dirtier tattoo.

He pours himself into me. On and on he goes, and as he does, it triggers something that I understand on some level is another orgasm.

But this one is different.

This one feels like I’m suddenly taking flight.

For real this time.

I soar high, up and up into the cosmos. I am part of the stars and the Milky Way itself, a whirl of planets and asteroids and mysteries that feel both entirely beyond me and a part of me in ways I never understood before.

I grow. I expand. I am everything all at once, I know every atom and every speck of it all, and every last part of it is as simple and as wondrous as me, too.

I want to ride this forever. It feels like I do.

And then everything changes.

I’m no longer a body. Or I am so far removed from mine that it’s like I’ve lost my way back. I’m no longer me at all, even though, somehow, I’m more me than I’ve ever been.

There’s a part of me, some little bit of consciousness, that can still feel that enormous vampire cock lodged deep inside my mortal body far below.

I know that Ariel is the reason why this is happening.

Or it is more accurate to say that I’m aware of him and the fact he’s made this happen, if deeply uninterested in it at the moment. Immortal or not, he is still only a man.

Meanwhile, I am made of galaxies old and new, dancing to and fro. Solar systems glide in and around me.

I feel no draw to ever go back. No need to ever return to the confines of blood and bone and all that useless flesh.

I am made of stars. I am kin to the moon. There are tides at my disposal, and in my fingertips I feel the pulsing power of too many lives to count, mine to play with as if they are nothing but random little thoughts.

Thoughts that scry across my consciousness and disappear as easily, leaving no ripples behind, no rearranging of the universe, no sign they ever were.

What I crave is an immensity, a life so large it can never be taken without planets collapsing all around it, like bowling pins, like scattering insects, all consciousness and matter an afterthought next to my incomprehensible glory—

Wait, some small voice inside me protests, sounding tinny and far away. That’s not me. That’s not who I am at all—

And when I turn, I see her.

I behold her.

She is wondrous and fearsome beyond measure.

One moment the universe is only me. Then she is there, and she puts me and my universe to shame. I am instantly aware that I am nothing more than the head of a discarded pin she cannot be bothered to pick up.

That is how small and insignificant I am.

She changes as I look at her, too vast to settle on one thing. One face. One enormity.

Instead, I see a flicker of a woman, round and fertile, her features a complicated mix of deep beauty one moment ... then something slithery and rotten the next.

And I know her.

She has been in my nightmares for a long time. Last night she stopped being a nightmare and became something else, something that very nearly killed me on Mount McLoughlin.

I am in the presence of the Goddess of Filth, the death goddess of old, at last.

Vin?a, I think. But I am an immensity all my own, however puny next to her. Maybe I make my tiny heavens shake with such a thought. Maybe I roar her name until new constellations form.

Here, it is all the same.

There’s another flicker and then she has a new head, this time that of some kind of bird.

A bird of prey, I know without having to ask, or having ever seen something like it before—because I have felt what this bird can do.

It has rent me apart more times than I can count, night after night.

There’s that long, malicious-looking beak and that round body of hers wrapped in something that looks like feathers, with a glossy sheen on the wing tips.

As if she is made of colors so impossible and blinding that my mind can’t process them or even identify them.

Yet I understand at the same time that none of this is the truth of her.

I’m seeing only what little I can comprehend.

My mortal eyes might imagine themselves whole universes, but in the end, it’s simply the blissed-out and blood-high eyes of a twenty-five-year-old barista who might have let herself be eaten whole by a vampire king.

I can’t be expected to approach the vastness of who she is. That part is abundantly clear.

And yet . . .

“Hey, Vin?a,” I say. “Nice to finally meet you.”

I think of that woman on the altar in those cold, high woods. I think of that bloody-toothed smile and the way she gripped my hands too hard. Much too hard.

How she looked for a moment as if she were laughing.

I felt this— her , Vin?a, this immensity before me—then. She brushed me, and the world went dark.

I understand immediately what Ariel was trying to tell me.

It was supposed to kill me.

They lured me there to crush me like the bug I am to them. To her.

“You should be dead,” says this creature, this magnificent and hideous idea too huge to be contained in a normal body. What bones or flesh could hold her?

I realize the word I’m looking for is “goddess.”

I’ve never had occasion to think about what a god means before. How a god feels when it is standing before you, as capable of erasing the totality of your existence—and all existence—as it is in creating new galaxies to orbit the ones it’s already wrecked.

Even thinking these things in the expansive form I’m in hurts me. It makes my head pound—a lot like it did on the mountain last night.

When she speaks, it’s as if the voice rings out from inside my own bones. If she has a mouth at all, I cannot see it move.

“Why are you not dead?” she asks. Demands, more like.

“I’m not sure that I’m not dead,” I manage to reply.

She moves toward me, and I have the sense then that I’m not so much out among the stars any longer. I am in a different sort of enclosed space. It’s another prison, a dungeon without walls.

Yet I also have the distinct impression that I’m standing in a temple.

Her temple.

“You dare to speak to me like this?” comes the voice, from everywhere. From inside me. “You should not dare to speak to me at all. Oracles come to me with humility, cutting their own throats and waiting upon my pleasure to see if I might let them live.”

“Tempting,” I choke out, overwhelm like a thick lump in my throat. “Really.”

“You will scream it soon enough,” comes that terrible voice, swelling up inside me like the urge to be sick.

Like every nightmare I’ve had of her already, combined.

“It will be the only prayer you know, for mine is a worship that requires total and complete attention. If there is one morsel of food before you and it will rot if you do not eat it immediately, you should cast it aside. Better to sing my praises and wait upon my mercy.”

I swallow hard, tamping down that rising horror inside. “I’m sure you will understand if I suspect that your mercy is a bit out of reach.”

What with the trying to kill me and all.

I don’t say that part, but I feel as if she hears it anyway.

“You can think of me as fate,” the voice tells me.

In front of me, all around me, possibly even inside me, she flickers back and forth between visages.

Until it is all rotted beak, slick feathers, and a terrible goddess who makes the bones she is speaking through—the ones inside my own limbs—so brittle and sharp that I worry that if I tremble, they will crack and crumble into dust.

I understand then that if Ariel was not pouring his blood into me, I would not survive this encounter.

I’m not meant to live through this. Vin?a is about death, not life.

I try to pull myself together to make the most of this meeting. I think about all the scraps of things I’ve heard about this goddess, locks and keys, and all the rest.

“You are coming.” I try to pronounce that with some drama, the way Gran did. The way it echoes inside me. “That’s what I keep hearing. I believe my grandmother saw it herself.”

“Soon I will rise,” she agrees. Her head moves to an unnatural angle, and I feel as if that long, pointed beak is pressed hard against my solar plexus.

And she digs it in, all without touching me.

“I will rise, and when I do, this world you consider ruined will be my playground. I will feast. I will play. Immortals will worship before me, mortals will cower, and I will kill them all as I please. I will build this world in my image, as I have always meant to do.”

It’s difficult to know where I am in a space that feels like death on all sides, a 360-degree sphere of that same intensifying horror. It grows and grows. I remind myself that it doesn’t matter where I am. It matters where she is.

I do my best. “Where are you now? Where have you been all this time?”

“I have been looking out through the eyes of the faithful for a very long time.” She flickers into the sacrificed woman’s face, but it’s wormy and foul. “I have ordered them to find me, and time and again, they have failed.”

Another flicker, and there is something malevolent staring out at me from behind that dark beak. I don’t ask what became of those who failed her. I figure I can guess, and I definitely don’t want any details.

“There was a priest, in the old days. He was meant to protect me, but he did not.” Again, I see things on her face and in it as she shifts between them all, things I already wish I could scrub out of my head.

“He brought in his sorcerer to cast nasty little spells. The last thing I did before they sunk me in my hole and locked me up tight was to make sure that every follower I ever had, any of my faithful, need only look upon him and know him. Then tear him to pieces, with their own dull fingernails if necessary.”

She drip-feeds images to me as she tells me these things, so that instead of making some quip about dull fingernails versus a set of sharp knives, I can see it.

I see shadowy images of people dressed in styles of clothing I can’t make sense of, converging on a single man.

I see a pack of them all over him, grunting in satisfaction as he screams. Shoving their hands against him to bruise him, then digging their way into him with their bare hands.

Tearing him apart by the fistful, tossing chunks of flesh and gristle to the dark earth.

I want to throw up.

I’m not sure how I don’t.

“Your fate will be similar,” Vin?a tells me.

I feel her beak against one temple. I feel her smile, terrible and vast, against the nape of my neck.

“You dare to defy me, tiny human? It will not bode well for you. I will see you torn into pieces, shredded and peeled, and I will make certain that you live through most of it.”

It’s hard to swallow. It actually hurts, but it’s that or start puking. “I don’t think I deserve that. I don’t know anything. I’m supposed to see futures, but you’re the past.”

“You smell like night leeches and wolves who cheat the moon,” she tells me, that sickening swell of her words from inside my own body.

“It is only a matter of time before I rise. The steps have already been taken. Only one lock remains. When the chains fall, you will know my wrath. I will make sure of it.”

“Tell me where you are and I will tend to you sooner,” I tell her.

I feel something hit me, but I don’t know if it’s merely the force of her or some separate blow.

Once again, I’m entirely too aware that even here, on some astral plane, or whatever the hell this is, she would kill me easily if it weren’t for Ariel. That it is his borrowed power, his immortal blood, that is making this possible.

Another blow slams into me, and though I waver and feel weak, I’m still here. In one piece. In whatever strange space this is.

With Vin?a the killer death goddess.

“They sunk me deep into the earth so that no one would ever find me,” comes her hideous voice, inevitable and corrosive, like hot oil choking me from the inside out. “But faith always seeks its own level.”

She laughs then, a terrible wind. And then she is a new storm that howls and destroys, sucking in stars and planets as she swirls all around me.

I can feel death pressing in. I can feel the history and the sweep of centuries, all of it a kind of cyclone that leaves me off-balance and fighting to keep my footing as she rages on and on.

There’s a scream inside me. There’s that searing pain in my head. My poor bones shake and rattle, and I don’t know how they don’t snap.

Until, at last, she’s there before me. “I will rise,” comes that voice, tearing through me.

I can hear it inside me. I can see it on all of her faces at once, a terrible rippling all over her as if she’s about to explode.

Then she does, straight at me—