Page 54 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

I can’t tell if that’s a dry little joke on his part or if he’s acknowledging how little he knows about the life that passed him by while he was out there letting it run him right over.

Though when I think about the contents of said life, I’m not sure why I would want anyone I love to share that experience. Maybe he’s had the right idea all along. Oblivion sounds fantastic right around now.

Though if I were oblivious, off in my own little world, I would miss this.

Gran beaming at the kitchen table. Augie leaning against the counter as if he’s never been away.

If I squint my eyes and think only about the here and now—and, at all costs, do not ask myself when, exactly, things were really ever normal—everything feels right.

I decide to believe in it. Because nothing has felt right in a long, long while.

“I’ll make dinner,” I say, and I don’t wait for either one of them to respond to that. I need to do something with my hands. I need to perform some kind of task, because the alternative is succumbing to the feelings inside of me, and I can’t do that.

If I start letting all these feelings win, who knows where it will end?

I feel Augie’s gaze on the side of my head, but I don’t look at him.

I don’t ask anyone what they want to eat, I just bustle around like it’s one of those nights back before.

When there were still too many things no one wanted to talk about hanging heavily in the air, but we would gather around the kitchen table, determined not to fight, and figure out how to enjoy each other for a while.

I break out the eggs that I buy in bulk from one of my neighbors on the hill who figured out a way to enclose a chicken coop in her house to keep the predators out, now that it’s not foxes she worries about.

I whip up golden, fluffy scrambled eggs, get some cheese on there too, and I find a fresh loaf of bread in the freezer that a previous version of me cut into slices so I could make toast whenever I pleased.

If I could high-five previous me, I would.

I find some sausages and a rasher of bacon, and when I’m done, I’ve created the breakfast-for-dinner feast of my dreams.

“Now it feels like a homecoming,” Augie says when I start ferrying the plates over to the table, where he and Gran have been talking intently, but only about easy topics. Her health. His take on the state of the house. The weather.

Breakfast for dinner was how Gran made it fun when our mother was too high to take care of us after school, or up and disappeared altogether. She would gather us in the kitchen, act like it was a holiday, and then we would pull out all the breakfast food we could find.

Sometimes we even forgot to be sad that our mom wasn’t there.

Even Gran cackles with glee when I slide her plate in front of her, piled high with eggs and buttered toast. She spears a few sausages and tucks in, acting as if she hasn’t been fed in months.

I sit down with my plate, and I see Augie studying his eggs as if he thinks they might bite him. It occurs to me that he might not eat food in his current state.

But when he catches me looking, he digs in.

And because I’m pretending tonight, I let him do it too. I don’t ask about the ghosts in his eyes. I don’t mention our last meeting or what I saw there. I don’t look too closely at the watchfulness he wears too easily, then hides too quickly.

For a while, then, the only sound is the three of us not only eating but seemingly taking pleasure in it as we do.

There weren’t a lot of safe spaces for me growing up, and I understand now, finally, that this quiet sort of moment—when there was family together with no yelling, no dramatics, no upset or acrimony—is the only thing that got me through.

Once again, I feel tears pricking at the back of my eyes, because I couldn’t possibly have imagined that this would ever happen. It wasn’t that I’d given up on Augie, because I never did. I never will. I can’t, physically. Unless and until he’s dead, it’s like the very cells in my body refuse.

But I’d long ago given up on this .

On ever feeling anything like happy with my family again.

For a long while, all I do is bask in it. In them. In us .

“So you’re the oracle now,” Augie says when we’ve all finished eating and have all gone back for seconds, too. When he looks at me, and I see Gran doing the same, I think about the fact that all three of us have the same indigo eyes.

“Mom’s eyes were blue,” I say. When both of them blink at me, I make a face. “Am I remembering that wrong? A pretty blue, but just blue. Not like ours.”

“You’re remembering it right,” Augie says.

“The indigo eye has always indicated that the sight can or could be evident,” Gran says. “It has been handed down for centuries, with little attention paid to scientists and their recessive genes.”

Augie laughs that delightful, infectious laugh of his, and I tell myself I can’t hear the strain in it. I pretend I can’t see that he’s acting the part, maybe partly because that’s a major upgrade from some of his visits home in a lot of dark years. “I guess I’m the exception that proves the rule.”

“I’m not sure even you know what visions might have come to you in the state you’ve been in the past few years,” our grandmother says tartly.

Ordinarily, this would set Augie off. Even when he’d come back claiming he was balanced and good and ready to change, a comment like that would send him off into a spiral. I brace myself, but all he does is smile wider while he fidgets around with his fork.

Maybe we’re all onstage tonight, but I can’t bring myself to hate it.

“Yes,” I say, jumping back to the original question before this shifts and that twitch I’m sure I see in his eye makes him explode. “I’m the oracle, I guess. Fun fact—not only did I not sign up for the honor, you apparently can’t opt out, either.”

“It’s a gift.” Gran eyes me, but I’m sure I can see the rare hint of her smile on her lips. “Surely, I raised you to know that returning a gift is rude. As is refusing it outright.”

“I have no choice. The cards never leave me alone.” I don’t give them the satisfaction of moving them from where they’re pressing hard against my solar plexus. “That vision didn’t ask me if I was in the mood either. It came for me, no consent, like it or not.”

“That’s a goddess for you,” Gran says matter-of-factly, as if she has spent her life—born at home in the tiny town of Ruch out in the Applegate, then come all of eight miles into Jacksonville, where she’s remained ever since—neck-deep in too many pantheons to name.

“They always think that all the world is their shrine, and woe betide you if you don’t worship them precisely the way they like. Wearisome, every one of them.”

She spears herself the third sausage while Augie and I sneak a look at each other. There might have been a time when he would make a circular motion next to his temple after a statement like that, quietly confirming that she was over there losing her marbles.

But that’s not the world we live in anymore.

“Was all of that really supposed to kill me?” I ask her. “Because it felt like I was dying for part of it. For most of it, really. But I don’t see why she would go to the trouble of telling me something if she was going to kill me with it.”

“Gods of every description are deeply fickle and pride themselves on being unknowable. They never wish to be understood, theirs is the mystery of faith, and so on.” Gran rolls her eyes.

“In this case, she had the great comfort of knowing that the bloodline continues whether she killed you or not. I’m still drawing breath.

Augie is still with us. For all we know, so is your mother.

She knew if you were killed, sooner or later, one of us would try to contact you on the other side. ”

I remember Ariel saying something very much like that. I don’t particularly want to think about it any more now than I did then. “So you’re a medium, too?”

“Mediums channel spirits around Ouija boards, in headdresses, while brandishing crystal balls, because they are actually con women,” my grandmother says with a sniff.

“It’s more accurate to say that what I do is .

.. look through a window. Just as you do to see the present day.

You open a window, something is either there or not there. That’s all there is to it.”

“That sounds like a long way to say yes, you’re a medium,” Augie says after a moment. In that deadpan way of his that makes me want to laugh and cry and maybe smack him upside his head.

“I’m glad to see you’ve retained what passes for your humor after your trials and tribulations,” Gran tells him.

And for a moment, I think we’re actually going to talk about this.

Drugs. Vampire blood. What actually happened to Augie, how he went from the open-air prison of despair on the banks of the river with all the other addicts into an actual stone dungeon to feed an even worse master. Or mistress, in his case.

For a breathless moment, I think we’re actually going to have the kind of conversation that we should have been having all along.

But instead, he grins at Gran like the happy golden boy he never quite was. “What I want to know is, do you really think that we’re going to be able to do this?”

What I think is that we have to, but I don’t say that.

“I do think it will work,” I say, with enough uncharacteristic enthusiasm that Augie’s brow lifts. “We have a good team.”

“I’m not sure I’d call it a team,” Augie says mildly. “There’s a pretty strict hierarchy. And a food chain.”

He’s not wrong. And yet ... I keep reminding myself that they could have just killed me at any point. They could have let me die last night. He could have.

“You’re the one who came face-to-face with Vin?a herself,” Gran says, and I wonder how long I’ve been sitting there without answering. “That can’t have been fun.”