Page 55 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

I have a flash of that terrible face and the way it changed, the rot and the beak and the worms that I can suddenly feel as if they’re on me —

But I push all that away.

“She was horrifying,” I say, as calmly as I can manage. “But I was fine.”

I don’t have to tell them how I was fine. I don’t have to explain that somewhere between Ariel’s cock and his cold come and his fangs deep in my neck, I had the strength to keep taking his blood. Or that because of those things, I survived.

I suspect that Gran might already know. Augie can certainly guess, especially given where he’s been lately.

“Your man Samuel had a point,” Augie says, still fiddling with the silverware. “You can’t just roll up to a god and think you’re going to get them to do what you want. If you could, they wouldn’t need to be gods, would they?”

“Both you and I managed to survive vampires,” I point out. “That’s not supposed to happen either. I like our odds.”

When I get up to clear the table because I can’t sit still, Augie helps me. It keeps feeling like a dream, the fact that he’s here. Not just here , but here as the version of my brother who wasn’t around much even when he physically was. I keep thinking I’ll wake up, but I don’t.

He helps me clean up, and then, together, we go with Gran into her room.

And for once I have the very thing I kept wishing might happen. For years now. All three of us together. Both Augie and me carrying the load, caring for Gran in a way she’ll accept.

All of us happy to just be with each other after all the things we’ve lost.

I get her ready for bed. He settles in to talk with her some more, and I kiss her on the forehead, then hug him too before I leave them on their own.

They deserve their own time together.

He stays in there a long while. I go upstairs to the linen closet and pull out what I need to make up the bed in his old room for him to use.

When I take the old bedspread down to the laundry room to wash it, because it’s abundantly floral and I don’t think Augie would appreciate it, I get the creepy feeling that I’m being watched.

Sure enough, when I look up, Briar is there in the doorway.

Scowling, obviously, with that hat jammed down on her head, as always.

Tonight she’s wearing a sweatshirt, I assume in deference to the October weather outside.

Everything is black, so that she looks like a shroud, and I remind myself that she pays to live here.

I can’t demand to know what the hell she’s doing, lurking around like that in the communal kitchen area.

Though I do wonder what the hell she’s been doing while all this has been going on.

Something pokes at me as I think that. Maybe the fact that I don’t know what she is. Human or something else, I have no idea. I remember the weird way she and Savi seemed to face off that first day they showed up here. It seems impossible that she’s not something .

If she knows what’s been happening, though, it’s weird that none of them indicated that she should be involved in the gathering earlier tonight. It’s tempting to consider it a simple oversight, and I almost ask her, but some odd reluctance inside me keeps me from it.

“Do you need something?” I ask instead.

“A man is moving in?” she demands. “I didn’t sign up to live on this property with some man .”

“Briar,” I say, in my best imitation of Savi’s endless serenity, “you don’t interact with anyone. You barely leave your cottage.”

“But I could,” she retorts.

I have no idea how to reply to that, so I don’t. I walk toward her so that she’ll have to back up and let me out of the laundry room, though it seems to take her a beat too long to do that. She moves back into the kitchen, still glaring at me sullenly.

“Anyway, my brother’s home. He’ll be staying here, in the house he grew up in, obviously.

If you happen to run into him in the kitchen, no worries.

He doesn’t bite.” Though as I say that, I have to wonder why I’m assuming she doesn’t.

“Since you don’t seem to be even remotely trepidatious about walking in the woods, you might also enjoy sitting out on the back porch.

Or the front porch. Knock yourself out.”

“This place is bullshit,” she growls at me.

Briar puts a hand up while she says it, then rests it against her own chest. Just below her clavicle.

It makes me do the same, though it makes me realize that I’m not wearing Augie’s medallion.

“This place is bullshit, you’re bullshit, and your brother is fucking bullshit. ”

“I’ll pass that on,” I assure her. I even smile.

I go back into the main part of the house and sit in the living room.

I hear Briar crash around in the kitchen, and though I’m flipping through a book when she storms back outside and circles around the house, I manage to catch her filthy glare from between the boards on the windows all the same.

Maybe I just feel it, but it lands either way.

I can even hear her cottage door slam shut across the yard.

Everything around me is still, then. Quiet.

There are so many things that I could think about, now that I’m alone.

Everything involving Ariel. The whole death goddess situation.

The fact that Ariel returned Augie to me with very little fanfare and no further talk of debt—and I’m not sure if I should celebrate that yet, because maybe it’s coming.

My grandmother, whose condition seems pretty stable these days.

Maybe even better now that I know that a lot of her strangest statements are because she’s an oracle.

Instead of any of those things, I entertain myself by thinking about my one asshole tenant, like a normal person.

And the more I do that, the more I can almost convince myself that everything really is normal.

Just for a little while. Augie’s fine. I’m fine.

No vampires, no werewolves, no supernatural shenanigans.

We have a mortgage to pay, so we took in renters.

Augie’s in with Gran, and I can hear him making her laugh.

I wish more than anything that our problems were no worse than these.

Bills to pay. Family complications.

Honestly, looking back, it all seems a lot more peaceful than I remember it being at the time.

When Augie comes out of Gran’s room, I’m still sitting there. He walks over without a word and throws himself down beside me, and then we sit there for a long while.

His shoulder presses into mine, like our foreheads down in that dungeon.

There are so many things to say that neither one of us says anything.

It feels a lot like peace.

Gradually, however, I realize that he’s tense. Getting tenser by the moment, though he still doesn’t say anything.

I know what it is immediately, and I wonder why I didn’t think of this before. Did I want to believe that Augie could magically be cured of his addictions? If there were a magical way to make him clean, surely, someone would have mentioned it by now.

But ... I don’t want to end this moment. The closest thing to peace I think we’ve ever had. Reveal or no Reveal.

I think he feels the same. I can see when he starts to sweat, but he doesn’t say anything then, either.

Probably because he doesn’t want to lie to me, the way he’s done too many times to count.

Like we both want to believe that part—the lying part—is all in the past no matter what we’re pretending tonight.

But addiction never has given one shit about anyone’s feelings .

“Augie,” I begin, determined to help him, whatever that looks like—

Before I can finish, there’s a knock at the door.

I’m up immediately, drawing one of my guns.

I don’t mind when Augie comes up hard beside me and helps himself to the second gun I carry in my harness.

We go to the door, like the well-oiled machine we were, once.

Because we taught each other how to do this, back at the beginning of what the werewolf alpha called a party .

Augie goes to the door and waits for me to get into position. He reaches over to swipe open up the peephole and I pause, just barely, then look.

Big mistake if anyone was going to attack immediately.

But when I see who it is, I’m not exactly happy. I’d prefer an attack.

“Go away,” I tell the door.

Ariel is even beautiful through a peephole, damn him, and he doesn’t argue. He steps aside so I can see that there’s another vampire with him.

It’s another female vampire. Mercifully, not the one I saw belowground before.

I open my mouth to tell them both to fuck off, but I catch myself.

He’s not here for me. Or he might be, but that’s not why he brought this woman.

I open the door, and I swear I can see how relieved Augie is when he sees who’s there. He lowers his weapon. He swallows hard.

Then the look he gives me is anguished.

“Not inside,” I manage to say. “No vampires in the house where Gran is. That’s all I ask.”

“Understood.”

His voice sounds too thick, and he can’t meet my eyes. I can see him in that cell again, covered in the terrible shame that I saw him like that. He’s not happy about it now, either.

But addiction is addiction. We both know that entirely too well.

He steps outside and walks with that vampire into the dark. He doesn’t look back.

It hurts to breathe. I do it anyway.

“I assume I can trust you not to kill him?” I ask Ariel.

I stay inside. He stays on the porch.

I don’t invite him in.

“I could have had your brother killed at any time,” he reminds me, softly. “And you, and your grandmother. Why would I bother with the rest of this?”

“Because you’re a monster.”

“Aren’t we all,” he says quietly.

“Did you really give him back to me?” I can barely get that out, and it’s barely a whisper. “Or is this some sick little game?”

The look he shoots at me then is ... arrested. As if I’ve wounded him somehow.

As if I should apologize to him .

I nearly do.

When I don’t, he looks away again, and that feels even worse.

And once again, I expect ... something. I expect him to mount an argument. I expect to feel that song of his rise in me, whether he thinks I’ll fall for it or not.

Instead, I feel that silver gaze of his move all over me. Instead, he looks at me as if he is committing me to memory, and then I’m left standing there with the mist he leaves behind.

I wait until Augie comes back inside, the tension gone from his body. He looks completely restored.

Though he doesn’t quite look at me. There were times when I would have lit into him. I would have demanded to know what he was doing, what he was thinking, and most of all, why he couldn’t stop.

Tonight, I do none of those things. I walk to my brother, my twin, and hug him.

Hard.

“I made up your bed,” I tell him as he hugs me back.

“Otherwise, you know where everything is. Just remember, there could be other people in the kitchen at any time.” I see he’s tucked the gun he commandeered into the waistband of his pants.

Though he’s still barefoot. “I didn’t throw your stuff out.

Most of it is packed up in the closet off the laundry room, yours to reclaim. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Winter.” He hugs me again. “I love you. You know that.”

“It is my curse,” I reply, the way I always did way back when.

“You wish it was your curse,” he replies, as is tradition.

His voice is hoarse. I’m not the only one having a hard time with this.

I tell myself that’s something. It’s more than I ever thought we’d get.

When I climb upstairs and lock myself in my bedroom, I reach in and pull the cards out from the pocket they chose to fill. Usually I take them and toss them. Try to hide them, to see if they’ll stay where I put them.

Tonight, I decide to stop fucking around.

I sit down cross-legged on the floor, and I fan the cards out in front of me the way I’ve seen my grandmother do a million times. I run my fingers over them, tracing the runic shapes I see there. I think about tonight, all this hope.

All this wild, foolish, marvelous hope .

Slowly, carefully, deliberately, I pick a few cards out, turn them over, and then surrender myself to the message.

The vision comes immediately, and the good news is, it doesn’t take me over like that last one. It doesn’t slam into me, making me feel like my head might explode. It blooms there inside, like it’s a part of me. Like it’s just another way to see.

The bad news is, all I see is death.