Page 48 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

I wake up in Ariel’s arms.

I move carefully, gingerly, not sure whether or not I really did break my bones. Or possibly ingested whatever she was, like a deified chemical spill. I expect to feel fuzzy and hungover again at the very least, but I don’t.

On the contrary, I feel remarkably clear.

Even good.

I move to sit up, but Ariel’s big hand moves to the back of my neck. There’s not much I can do to keep him from swinging my gaze to his.

Maybe I don’t try.

Our eyes meet. They hold.

I can feel every single thing that’s ever happened between us. The depth of his cock inside me. The taste of his blood.

How very much I wanted him to sink those fangs into my neck.

How much I still do.

“What did you do to me this time?” I ask.

“Last time, I healed you,” he says, and he sounds faintly reproving.

“By now you must realize that you would have died if you looked upon a being like Vin?a without any interventions. She likes killing. She has managed, for centuries, to maintain a small but highly motivated cult of diehards who are only too happy to murder in her name. But she really does prefer to do it herself. She’s always had a grandiose idea of her own greatness. ”

“You know her,” I say, following a hunch that comes over me in a rush. Then again, I’m the oracle. Maybe it’s not a hunch . “Personally, I mean.”

His silver gaze is brighter than before. I can feel it everywhere. “If you’re asking if I fucked an ancient death goddess, I did. She wanted a pet vampire and picked me for the role, thinking she could control me because I was new. Only a few hundred years old. She was wrong.”

My imagination is too vivid for this. I can conjure up entirely too many scenarios to fit in and around what few words he actually said. I can come up with timelines and storylines and entire bedroom scenes between a vampire and that long-beaked horror—

This is not healthy. I know this is nothing close to healthy.

More importantly, I have other things to do.

“I have to go,” I tell him.

And I do. I can feel it like an itch, deep in these bones of mine that she tried so hard to snap. I have to find some kind of touchstone, something as close to normal as I can in all of this, or I’m not going to make it.

But he still hasn’t told me what he did to me this time.

Maybe that’s written all over my face, because one of his brows lifts, as if he needs to look more arrogant. “I gave you some armor, that’s all. You’re not undead. You are not precisely mortal any longer, not in the way most humans are. You can be killed, but it will take effort. Even for her.”

“I don’t know if I should thank you for that or not.”

He moves so fast I don’t even see it. I only really know that he does it after the fact, when my brain tries to reconstruct the split second it took for him to go from lying down on his back to crouching over me, holding my face between his hands.

While my body tries to convince me that what I should do is melt against him, I try to convince myself I should be mad at him.

“If I hadn’t done it, you would have died.” He growls this at me, his eyes dark the way they were on Mount McLoughlin. “For the second or third time now. I can’t have that. I told you, Winter. I need you alive.”

“Everyone needs me alive. For their own purposes. I get it.”

“I don’t think that you do,” Ariel says, his voice little more than a dark thread.

And his kiss lights me on fire all over again, but this time, I’m the one who pulls away.

I think of immensities and galaxies. I think of Augie.

“I didn’t ask for this,” I grit out at him. “I didn’t ask for any of this. Not you, not a sorceress and a werewolf playing games on my land, not the entire fucking Reveal in the first place— none of this . But I’m handling it. What I need from you—”

“Do you truly believe that I don’t know what you need by now?”

“I’m not talking about sex.”

I move away from him and see the glint of gold on the simple nightstand beside his bed. Augie’s medallion. I don’t want to touch it. I feel actively repelled by it, actually—

But I tell myself that’s just shame. That I’m embarrassed—as I should be—because I certainly understand my twin’s vampire blood thing now, don’t I? I took a deep dive into it and didn’t exactly come away with the desire to be a teetotaler.

I feel like a fraud.

I make myself scoop up the necklace and drop the chain over my neck, and it feels like a harder blow than it should when the medallion thuds against my chest.

Ariel scowls at the sight of it. “As if anything that’s happened between us is as simple as sex. That’s not the kind of need I mean.”

The tide that rises in me at that statement, not to mention the look on his face, terrifies me in a completely different way than death goddesses and monsters do. I lean into the temper that hurries along after it instead. I lean in hard.

“If you had the slightest idea what I need,” I bite out at him, “my twin brother would not be languishing in a cold, damp dungeon , forced to feed from a vampire bitch with a chain around his ankle.” That feels both good and terrible to say.

It feels risky. But I keep going. “You’ve been holding him over my head since you demanded I come see you in the first place.

I thought he was dead, Ariel. Actually, permanently dead, not whatever dead means to you.

That’s what families of addicts do. We assume they’re dead and pray they’re clean while you just use it —”

I cut myself off. The medallion is in my fist, and that’s where Ariel is staring.

I didn’t mean to say any of that. It doesn’t feel like I’m telling him anything he needs to know. It feels like guilt—mine, for wasting time with him that isn’t actually rescuing Augie, not that I could do that without him anyway.

It feels like I’m baring my neck and my soft belly and daring him to sink his fangs in deep.

And not in a fun way.

I can still taste the layers of his blood on my tongue. The complexities of his kiss.

I am bright with shame and disaster.

“I have to go,” I tell him when he raises his gaze, very slowly, from that medallion to me. “There are things that have to be done, and we don’t have much time.”

“You sound like her,” he says, in a very measured tone that I find I don’t like at all. “I tried to tell her that she had all the time in the world, that being the curse of eternity. But she could never hear it.”

I drop my hand from the medallion. I decide that, actually, I don’t want to imagine Ariel with that bird-faced goddess. I certainly don’t want him to fill me in on how things went for them, way back when.

I might have more masochistic tendencies than I thought I did, and I certainly proved that last night, but it turns out I have a line after all.

“I’m going to take a shower,” I tell him, and I try my best to match that measured tone he seems to use so easily. “I live with a werewolf, in case you missed that. I don’t need to smell more like you than I already do.”

That’s not even getting into whatever the sorceress and the other oracle— Gran —might know, simply by looking at me. Or reading my aura. Or whatever it is either one of them does.

Something is changed now. I can feel his power all around me, as always, but it’s like I’m inside of it now. Not like it’s pressing into me, but like it’s part of me. Or I’m a part of it.

It’s different, and it feels intimate.

Too intimate.

If I think about it too closely, I can feel that tide start to rise inside of me again, and it’s already too big, too unwieldy. Too fucking intimate to bear.

But if I think about naming it—really looking at it and calling it what it is—I think it might take me down to my knees. So hard I won’t get up again.

I can’t let that happen.

I walk across his bedroom, let myself into his bathroom, and stay in his marvelously expansive shower until I’m a pickle.

When I get out, I use one of his absurdly fancy towels that feels like a cloud against my skin. I look at myself in the clearly unnecessary mirror—here in a vampire’s lair—and turn so I can see my ass and a swath of my back.

Obviously I don’t actually expect to see anything.

But I do.

His mark is all over me. It looks like gold.

Like he has made me something precious, and the gold not only gleams, it holds me. Like he gave me a place to rest and—

“You have to stop,” I order myself in a voice that’s barely above a whisper.

I come out of the bathroom expecting to have to fight him some more, but he’s not in the bedroom. My clothes are, though—washed clean of blood and dirt and laid out on his nicely made bed, and I spend a lot longer than necessary thinking through his domestic arrangements.

Do vampires do their own laundry? Is this just that magic he seems to use as he pleases? Does he actually make his own bed —but if not, does that mean there are invisible servants scuttling around in here?

Obviously, I’m putting off having to face him.

When he was kind enough to lay out all my weapons, too, arranged next to my clothes in a way that makes it clear he knows exactly where and how I wear them all.

Even though I never wear them here.

For no reason at all that I choose to entertain or acknowledge, that makes me want to cry.

Instead of indulging such a strange and dangerously soft urge, I dress quickly and make myself walk out into his living room, where I find the vampire king lounging in a chair in a gloomy room with only a small lamp switched on beside him and a book in his hands that I can’t identify.

When he sets it aside to look at me, I see that it’s in a foreign language.

It makes me wonder how many he speaks, but I don’t ask.

I remind myself that I’m not building a relationship here. I’m not getting to know him.

I’m negotiating my brother’s release and, apparently, I’m neck-deep in saving the world that I don’t even like that much from a beaked bitch who wants to make it even worse.