Page 49 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

If I tell myself that enough, maybe it will make that soft part inside me that feels the gold of his mark and wants to know him settle down.

“I’m calling a meeting,” I tell him. “Tonight, sundown. My house.”

“Are you asking me on a date?” he asks sardonically.

Or I think he’s being sardonic. I don’t want to think what else he could be, sounding intense like that.

I belt out a laugh. It’s too loud, too telling. “You wish.”

I don’t know what makes me say that, but the moment I do, I can feel electricity crackle between us. I think that he probably does wish we were going on a date.

If I’m honest, though, so do I.

I expected to feel better once I put on my clothes and strapped all my weapons into place. Me again, I want to think. That’s what I want—desperately—to feel.

I really don’t.

“I want all three big powers in this valley at this meeting,” I tell him. “I’m going to talk about your adorable and not-at-all-apocalyptic ex, and I’m only going to do it once.”

His eyes take on a darker sort of gleam then, and the silver only emphasizes it. “Will you order us all around now? Do you imagine this will get you what you want?”

“Nothing has yet.” I say that with entirely too much bitterness for someone who wants to avoid feeling anything. “I have to assume nothing ever will. So I guess that means I might as well do what I know I need to do instead and stop worrying about it.”

I don’t know what I expect from him. Speeches. Impassioned monologues. Another rush of movement, then him suddenly holding me when, moments ago, he was across the room—

Nothing happens.

Whatever I expect, all he does is study me as if he can see every single star I encountered out there—every last galaxy, comet, and constellation. And while I can see a complicated kaleidoscope of what I’m pretty sure is emotion in his gaze, all he does is nod.

“Sundown,” he agrees.

It’s not until I make it down from his apartment and out to the parking lot behind the MMA school that I remember. I didn’t actually come here last night.

I didn’t drive here, I mean.

I blow out a breath, and then Ariel is there at my shoulder.

Annoying vampire tricks, I think crossly, when the real truth is that I’m relieved to see him. Again. I’m something a little too close to pleased that he followed me out here.

That he remembered I didn’t drive here when I didn’t.

That he cares—

I stop myself right there.

“Would you like me to take you home?” he asks in such a calm way that it makes me want to scream.

I have to clear my throat so that I don’t.

“Yes, thank you.” I say this so politely it hurts.

The rain is coming down all around us, all over us. I must be soaking wet, though I hardly notice. Or maybe what I mean is that I don’t care.

Ariel’s gaze is too silver to bear, and I can feel his power all around me while what I remember is his bite and his cock and all the ways he made me come apart—I remember every single touch, every single shift of his body and mine—and I go to lift my hand.

Like maybe I want to reach over and put my hand on him, all that marble and power.

His lips nearly curve. Not quite. The rain is relentless. And all he does is reach over and brush his cool, hard thumb over my lips.

Once. Again.

Then, in a flash, I’m standing on my own doorstep.

I’m there on the porch, and Ariel is nowhere to be seen.

I’m wet. It’s cold. I could go inside and get warm, and even though I frown at the door as if I might do just that, I don’t.

I dig in my pockets for my keys and go to my truck instead.

I start the engine and am halfway down the drive before I realize that I didn’t spend a single second looking around the yard.

Because I don’t want to see my usually powerful tenants?

A werewolf queen, a fucking sorceress, and whatever the hell Briar is—a born-again goth?

Or because I’m afraid that what I actually want is to go to them and tell them everything that’s happened to me since I last saw them, like we’re girlfriends on one of those old sitcoms?

I don’t know. Instead of worrying over it, I sneak around the side of the house and put my ear to Gran’s window.

When I hear her snoring, I know she’s okay, so I drive down to Jacksonville and then up over the next hill on Stage Road, making my way out to the coffee stand.

When I pull up, there’s no one around, and I have a terrible, sinking feeling—

But then Birdie appears at the drive-up window and laughs when she sees me.

“I got here at ten,” she tells me. “And people were het up . There was a crowd, recriminations aplenty, and several claw marks on the back door.”

“I hiked McLoughlin yesterday,” I tell her. “I don’t know what I was thinking, but I slept in.”

“I hiked McLoughlin once,” she says. “It sucked, and not only because I was pretending I might be straight. Don’t do that again.”

I think of those cloaked figures in the clearing, the rise and fall of those terrible blades. That laughing, bloody mouth that sucked me in and wanted me dead.

“I won’t,” I promise her. “But I did want to check in here and make sure the stand was still ...”

“Standing?” She laughs again. “Barely. There was a weird message when I got in, though.”

She ducks back behind the counter and comes out with a piece of paper, then passes it out to me through the window. “Supposedly from good old Doug. Who I, personally, haven’t laid eyes on in a very long time.”

“Not since May,” I agree. “I only remember because he was here talking about managerial training like we have to worry about corporate dropping by and then made a May the Fourth joke.”

“Hey, as long as we get paid, right?” Birdie sighs a little, but what else is there to say?

Disappearances rarely have happy endings.

That was true back in the before times too.

“Just don’t make me have to step up and manage this place.

I shirk responsibility as a matter of course.

The best part of the Reveal is that no one’s around to lecture me on my wasted potential. ”

I don’t think she’s serious, having known her all our lives, but I don’t challenge her. I frown at the message instead.

It doesn’t really make sense. There’s something about protected space and how we should all prepare ourselves for new hours.

“I guess we wait and see what the new hours are,” I say, shrugging.

“Living the dream,” Birdie replies with fake cheer.

But she also hands me my paycheck, so when I wave goodbye to her, I drive back into Jacksonville and park in front of the historic old bank.

I might recently have been bigger than the galaxy, a goddess in scope if not ambition, but there are still small, venal men and their pet goons who need their money.

Somehow I doubt Franklin Hendry will care that I had a face-to-face with a vicious death goddess out on an astral plane.

I doubt he would even know what those words mean.

I get out of my truck and dash for the bank’s door, because it’s still pouring—something I’ll have to chat with Savi about—and wish I really was a devourer of worlds when I push my way inside to find Franklin Hendry and a couple of his dead-eyed thugs inside.

I’ve met monsters I like better than these actual humans.

A lot better.

It doesn’t say great things about me and what I’ve become that I find myself hoping that last night with Ariel rearranged enough stuff in me that I’m coming down on the nonhuman side of that equation.

I shake off the rain, run my hands over my wet hair, and walk in like I’m thinking about having them all as a snack.

I might not be a vampire, but I know how to play one.

The men, who usually leer and make vile remarks—supposedly under their breath but always just loud enough to hear—are shockingly silent.

I take this to mean I’m giving them a show that’s too close to vampire for comfort.

I do nothing to make them feel any better about it.

I look each one of them full in the face, like I’m memorizing them.

There’s the moon-faced one, who I heard likes to beat up women.

And the rat-faced one, who the rumor mill claims lit his mother’s house on fire.

Whether she died before that in a wraith attack or during the fire, thanks to her loser son, nobody knows.

I used to be a lot more wary of them than I am now.

I’d like to see any of them go down into a vampire dungeon and emerge unscathed. To say nothing of a little girl talk with a death goddess who calls herself fate .

I have to remind myself that this isn’t about me. It’s about Gran, who might have turned out to be an oracle and not as impaired as I thought she was, but is still an elderly woman I can’t watch all the time.

I have to remind myself of that repeatedly as I come to a stop in front of Franklin Hendry’s desk and can’t really bring myself to do much but stare at him like the worm he is. And I know from worms today, having seen far too many in a bird goddess’s grotesquely changing face.

“I hear you’ve taken up with the monsters, Winter,” Franklin says, like he’s on close and chatty terms with people who know people and is privy to my private information.

“Everyone’s heard that,” I say, like he’s dumb. “I’m pretty sure it was all around town and the talk of what’s left of the Pacific Northwest. I’m sure I told you I was taking in renters.”

He doesn’t like being talked back to, or any suggestion that he’s a dimwit. His eyes go flat. “I told you it’s a lost cause.”

“It’s not Halloween yet,” I say merrily. “It’s barely October.” I pull my paycheck out of my pocket and slide it onto the desk. “Here’s a little more. I’ll need a receipt on that too, of course.”

The rat-faced one moves, slinking in much too close. The old me wouldn’t have moved any more than the new me does.

But the new me looks him square in the eye. Hard.

And he mutters something I actually can’t hear for once, then retreats.

I decide I like it.

I ride that high through the rest of the unpleasant encounter and take it with me when I head outside again. The rain has let up a little, so I stand there a moment and breathe it all in.

It doesn’t feel as if I’ve seen much daylight lately.

I decide to walk around, the way I used to do all the time.

I go down one side of the cute old town and back up the other, almost too aware of how human I’m acting.

Out here on the streets of Jacksonville, smiling at my neighbors and the people I wouldn’t necessarily call friends but like seeing and would miss if they disappeared.

On a day like this, that feels like love.

I swing down one of the side streets, smiling at the yellow, gold, and orange leaves already carpeting the sidewalk. I’m thinking about the fact that I never made it back east to see the famous New England leaves turn and now probably never will.

When Samuel steps out of a little white house that has been many different shops and a few spas in my lifetime but is now where he and his sister spend their days doing town and human sanctuary things, I’m already smiling.

He is not.

And he doesn’t start when he sees me.

“Where have you been?” he demands.

It takes me an extra-long beat or two to realize that he’s talking to me.

And that’s when I realize something else, too. Something that’s shocking, or should be, given the past few years.

I haven’t thought about him at all.