Page 52 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

Up near the porch, Maddox laughs. “That’s not pointed at all.”

The look he tosses her way is so ferocious that I almost lose my train of thought.

Then I really do, because Samuel’s truck comes bumping up the drive.

I realize I forgot about him again.

I immediately feel guilty. But a look around at everyone gathered here makes it obvious that Samuel inspires a lot of different reactions.

None of them positive.

It makes sense to me that monsters might not love the human agitating to not be treated like food. It also makes sense that Samuel is a little wary of everyone in this clearing.

As he gets out of his truck and joins the gathering, I decide the best thing to do is ignore him and focus on actual issues.

“Some of you were around when she was causing trouble the first time.” I lift a brow at Ariel. “Maybe you have some insight into how you got rid of her then.”

“Even goddesses can be stopped,” he replies. “Anything can be stopped, with the right combination of war and magic. The trouble with Vin?a is that no one has been able to discover where she is.”

“We’ve been looking,” Ty contributes. “Nothing fits the description.”

“The goddess was sunk deep,” Savi says in an odd tone, as if she’s reciting a poem from memory. “She was given her temple to remind her of her narcissism and the faithful now lost to her, and she was left to her eternity in the watery deep.”

“That sounds like an ocean,” Samuel says, sounding both confident and impatient.

I watch the three most powerful creatures in this valley turn, slowly, to regard him in varying degrees of arrogant astonishment.

“Thanks, dipshit,” Ty growls. “No one thought of that. You’re a fucking genius.”

“We examined the possibility, obviously,” Savi says coolly. “Some of us have been looking for her for a long time. There’s never been a hint of her in any of the oceans, not for centuries.”

I feel something stirring me, and the cards start poking at me once again, like they can feel it too. When I put my hand down to press against them and hopefully convince them to quit it, one of the cards seems to flash across my vision, as if I turned it over out in the open.

Once it does, it’s like there’s a click deep inside of me.

“Why are you all here?” I ask them. These monsters who stand here in the yard an ancestor of mine cleared with his hands. “Once the Reveal happened, surely you could’ve rampaged across the continent at will, then taken the party to Europe. Asia. Wherever. Why didn’t you?”

“There have always been wolves in the Pacific Northwest,” Maddox tells me, and something in the way she says it makes me wonder if there were a lot of politics around this very issue.

“Even when the humans tried to kill off the domestic wolf population, we were still here. It’s easier to do pack things in a place where we can run around at night without being seen. ”

The other wolves make growling noises of approval. At least, I think it’s approval.

“My people don’t think much of the New World,” Savi says, and I know, somehow, she’s not planning to share even what little she told me about her husband.

Or her family. Though surely everyone here already knows.

“They prefer the power they have in the Old World, and so they stay there, hiding away in their ancient castles on hills no one dares climb and becoming ever more irrelevant.”

“I find Old World conventions irritating,” Ariel says when all eyes turn to him where he stands, dressed entirely in black, yet with short sleeves, as if impervious to the vagaries of weather. “I also don’t like being told what to do.”

I sigh. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means that when he won the crown there was great commotion all across Europe, because everyone supposed he would take its rightful place in the usual way,” Savi says. “There is a vampire court, many ancient traditions, and all the rest. But he didn’t do it.”

I study Ariel. This beautiful man. This impossible lover. This creature who has changed me, irrevocably.

“Transylvania didn’t do it for you?” I ask.

Ariel’s eyes gleam. “A vampire king cannot inherit the crown, they must fight for it. The life of a traditional vampire king involves endless challenges from hopefuls.”

“You didn’t want to be challenged?” Samuel asks. He makes it sound like Ariel is too cowardly for that, and I’m not the only one who frowns at him. I think I hear Ty growl. “Makes sense you’d take off.”

“It wouldn’t be fair to them,” Ariel corrects him, with a certain menace I can feel beneath my own skin.

“I have lost one fight in my entire life, living or dead. So I decided that, instead, I would find myself a remote spot of no particular interest to anyone, and any young hopefuls who came my way I would train, not kill. Because I would have the opportunity to talk to them outside the din and nonsense of court.”

“Of course,” I breathe. “That’s why you have the school. And you were a Spartan.”

“I am always a Spartan,” he says, correcting me this time, but with far less menace. “Since those days, I have studied every martial art there is.” He tosses a scathing look Samuel’s way. “I don’t have to fight.”

“Don’t you know?” Savi asks quietly, and while she seems to be speaking to me, I think her real target is Samuel. “Ariel did not seek the crown. The previous vampire king challenged him and in such a way that he couldn’t refuse.”

“I decided that I’ll be the last vampire king,” Ariel says, and I feel the cards hum, suggesting that what he’s saying carries far more weight than is evident here in the yard in the growing dark. “In the hundred and fifty years since, I have had no serious challengers.”

I can’t be the only one who hears the threat in that. The promise.

“I was born here,” Augie drawls from behind me. “Less exciting, I know.”

The fact that he’s here and sounds like him and is now sitting on the steps of the porch looking like I dreamed him here—healthy and normal and him—makes me want to break down and sob.

I don’t have time for that. I smile at him, but then I look back out at the raggedy group of people in my front yard. Well. Maybe they’re not all that raggedy, but this is a far cry from any other gathering that’s ever taken place here.

“I don’t think it’s coincidental that the ritual happened here.

” I see Augie’s gaze sharpen when I say that, but he doesn’t ask questions.

I’m sure he’ll save them for later. My brother, when not high, was always a master of timing.

One of those childhood trauma gifts that keeps on giving.

“I think that if the goddess wasn’t nearby, the ritual wouldn’t have been here either. ”

“Agreed,” Ty says impatiently. “Got any ideas? Or are you all headaches and fainting spells?” I’m pretty sure he mutters something like “weak-ass human” under his breath to his buddies, who growl low in obvious approval.

Luckily, I don’t care if Ty Ceridwen thinks I’m weak. Compared to him, I am.

“I think she’s here,” I say, but I don’t think it.

I know it. I see it, clear as day, in my head.

“I think they stuck her at the bottom of the deepest lake around, and I think that’s why she keeps reaching out, stirring shit up.

She knows exactly where to go when she gets out. She’s practically in the neighborhood.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Samuel says then, sounding annoyed. Like I’ve lost it completely.

But if I don’t care what the wolf who hauled me up the steepest part of McLoughlin thinks, I really don’t care what Samuel the Human thinks, so much so that not caring about him isn’t even a revelation.

I can hardly remember who the version of me was that did care about him.

Tonight my gaze is on Ariel. He nods, either because he’s come to the same conclusion I have, or because he trusts me.

Either one is heady enough.

“She’s in Crater Lake,” I tell the gathering. “I’m sure of it. What we have to do is keep her there.”