Page 53 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

After my announcement, Ty, Ariel, and Savi all look at each other.

No one else speaks.

Beside me, Gran nods her approval. It feels less like my grandmother supporting me and more like the blessing of a powerful oracle, and I think I’ll hold on to that. It feels like validation when I would have said I had no need of any such thing.

As the powerful staredown continues, I have the urge to leap in and defend myself, or make further arguments, but I don’t.

There’s no need to oversell this. I know where Vin?a is the same way I know where I am right now. I am absolutely certain. Beyond any possible doubt.

When the three-way stare ends, I can feel the air seem to shift in the yard. I stand straighter. Maybe we all do.

Savi is the one who speaks, likely because she can make anything sound like a welcome speech in a spa retreat.

“After the Reveal,” she begins, and though she sounds as serene as ever, I also think she sounds careful. Maybe “diplomatic” is the word I mean. “After the first wave of it was over and there was a settling—”

“She means after the initial bloodbath, when everyone collected themselves and it was time to think about restoring order,” Ariel says coolly.

“After the party, in other words,” Ty chimes in, and his lieutenants all laugh.

Even I have to bite back a laugh at that, which horrifies me immediately. How far have I fallen if I’m laughing at a werewolf calling a massacre a party?

It’s a relief when Savi keeps talking.

“After a few rules were established and cooler heads prevailed, we went looking for her,” Savi tells us. “And not just for Vin?a, specifically. It wasn’t clear, then, which god was responsible. Or if it was any god at all.”

“Most gods are dicks,” Ty says.

Samuel sputters at that, but I’m pretty sure it’s the confused look on my face that gets Maddox to pipe up.

“The Reveal was foretold forever.” She tells me this, then rolls her eyes.

“‘For there will come a day when the black rot of humanity will be peeled back and the Kind shall rise. They will reclaim what is theirs and wash the world clean with blood. Once this earth is cleansed, so too shall the Kind be free.’”

She intones that in such a way that I’m certain I see every other supernatural creature in the yard stand a little straighter.

“That sounds like something you’d say in church,” I say.

Augie nods. “An evil church.”

Specifically like Christmas and Easter, when Gran would drag us in and make us stand too straight, exuding politeness, or she would make us wish we had.

“Some religious sects arranged themselves around that prophecy, yes,” Savi says. “But it has been around as long as I have.” She cuts her gaze to Ariel. “As long as he has, even.”

“Longer,” Ariel agrees, his arms still folded and that forbidding look on his face.

One I should not find attractive. Especially not at a time like this.

I order myself to concentrate.

“Once the Reveal happened, we all felt that same ...” For the first time since I’ve met her, Savi looks ... uncertain. As if she doesn’t know what words to choose.

“An unlocking,” Ariel says, the way he did to me.

“A locked gate flung wide open,” Ty growls.

“And about damn time,” one of the bikers flanking him throws in.

It’s in this moment that it occurs to me that if I view some of these monsters in my yard as friends or a lover, I also have to take onboard the possibility that they lived in some version of their own Reveal for a whole lot longer than I have.

If people are people, but some of them have claws or powers, then none of those people should be hiding away in fear.

I’m going to have to sit with that, and this is no time for sitting .

“There are two further prophecies that follow on from that one,” Savi tells me.

And everyone else. “Two locks to open. And two different keys. The first, a living sacrifice, as painful as possible beneath a full moon. The second, a terrible betrayal and an unwilling sacrifice. You’ll notice those are both quite vague. ”

“The bigger the prophecy, the more likely you can claim it came true no matter what happens,” Maddox murmurs. “It’s all in the marketing.”

Savi nods. “All over the world, there are different cults and sects and communities claiming that they felt that first lock open wide last night. What I haven’t heard reported or whispered about in any capacity is what happened to you, Winter.”

I try my best to catch up. “But you knew it was going to happen. That she was going to come for me. Specifically me.”

“We knew that it would eventually happen,” Savi says, which sounds like splitting hairs to me. “The details were fuzzy.”

“The cards could not make up their minds,” Gran chimes in, with a wave of her hand.

That was exactly the sort of thing I would have taken as confirmation of dementia a month ago. No one in this clearing blinks.

Aside from Samuel, that is.

“We explored this entire territory looking to see if there was anything we should worry about,” Ty said gruffly.

“Most gods are narcissistic fucks and like to flash it all up with the douchey temple and all the trimmings. There’s none of that around here.

There’s a very dramatic collection of vampires in Grants Pass who claim they see a temple every time they turn around, but I’ve never taken Grants Pass vampires seriously. I’m not starting now.”

Ariel inclines his head as if to say, Fair enough .

“Where does this leave us?” I ask, instead of tossing myself down a rabbit hole into heretofore unknown-to-me vampire politics.

“It leaves me intrigued,” Savi says at once. “I think we have some research to do.”

Ty nods. “I’m going to lead a team up to Crater Lake myself. Get a sense of what we’re walking into. Last time I was up there, last night hadn’t happened. She’ll be stronger now. We should be able to feel her.”

“We,” Ariel says, indicating Savi, “will examine the lore. We will do well to reacquaint ourselves with the specifics involving Vin?a and her cult.”

“Which specifics are those?” I can’t keep myself from asking, unable to stop thinking of him as her pet .

Ariel’s gaze is bright and silver. I feel it inside me, and all over me, and that mark I wear hums a little. Like the gold is a musical instrument only he knows how to play.

“Her preferred form of a reign of terror,” he tells me coolly. “Better yet, her aspirations. Some gods live for worship, others prefer to destroy all they touch. It’s different forms of power and obedience, that’s all.”

“That’s all,” Augie says under his breath.

“If you think about it,” Maddox says quietly, “a god is only a god because they say so. Everyone else who has a power or two has a community. Not gods. They want to be the one and only, they’re big on killing their own families, and they’re constantly rising here, rising there, fucking everything up.

They’re never just living or minding their own business. Honestly, it’s exhausting.”

“We will gather more details in places you can’t access,” Savi tells me when no one else jumps in.

It made me think about the place I met Vin?a and wonder if that’s the sort of place I shouldn’t have been able to access—way out there in the midst of too many galaxies to count, out on some plane of existence I can’t even name.

“We’ll come up with a plan of action from there. ”

“Can I ask the obvious question?” Samuel says then, with a short little laugh.

Instead of being rapt and attentive the way I’ve traditionally been with him, all I want to do now is point out that he is already asking a question.

I hold myself back. “What the hell do you think you’re all going to do against a god? ”

Ty laughs at that. “I like to start by shoving their religion up their ass,” he grunts. “But then, I like to make a good first impression.”

After that, the conversation seems to fizzle out—or maybe some people are communicating by other means.

I tell myself I don’t care when Ariel simply disappears, leaving only mist behind.

I tell myself I can’t feel that golden glow of his mark all over me, and that even if I can, I’m not taking any comfort in it.

Ty and his men roar away. Savi and Maddox walk off toward the cottages.

“All things considered, it could have been much tenser than it was,” I say brightly to the humans who remain. “The last time I saw the three great powers of the Rogue Valley in one place, there was significantly more blood.”

“We need to talk, Winter,” Samuel says, frowning at me.

I probably would have entertained his request, not because I’m interested in anything he has to say but because I feel a kind of secondhand embarrassment for him.

All this time I’ve believed—and he’d made sure all the humans in Jacksonville believed, if I really think about it—that he has some kind of power around here. Now I know otherwise.

But Augie is shaking his head. “We’re going to have some family time, man,” he says, with all that charm he somehow got at birth that allows him to tell people to fuck off and get them to leave smiling.

It has the same effect now. Almost. Samuel doesn’t smile. But he leaves.

Then we go back into the house. Gran and me and, for the first time in a long, long while, Augie.

“I can’t believe you actually rented out those cottages,” Augie says as we make our way into the kitchen and settle Gran into a chair. I’m still thinking about tense creatures and a far tenser Samuel, but I stop when he laughs. “I didn’t realize you were so enterprising. Way to go.”

“We talked about doing this for years, even before the Reveal,” I remind my twin, trying so hard not to act like it’s weird that he’s back home and in the house and standing here in the kitchen like when things were normal that I ... am clearly making it weird anyway. “Mortgages need to be paid.”

“There are still banks?”