Page 56 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

While the supernatural among us do their research, I look at the cards every day. When I take Gran her coffee in the morning, I show her what I’m doing, what I pulled, and how I interpret what I saw.

She listens. She gives advice. Sometimes she offers an alternate interpretation.

Most of all, she teaches me. She shows me how she does things, and why she chose the particular methods she uses.

“Everything you need is already inside you,” she tells me, leveling that stern look of hers on me. “All you need to do is access it. Let your blood lead the way.”

I try.

Every day, I try.

I don’t get used to having Augie home, I revel in it.

Every day, I feel as excited to see him emerge from his old room as if it’s the first time.

Ariel’s vampire shows up regularly, every evening, but it takes me a solid week to realize that what she’s doing is keeping him going along on the same even keel. No ups, no downs. Just Augie.

“I’m not a big drug person,” I say, out of nowhere one day.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” my brother mutters.

We’re in the truck, headed down the hill to pick up various supplies. Eggs. Cheese. With him around again, we have more things to barter—like his labor—and that makes me feel rich. It’s the cash money I have trouble getting a hold of.

“I just mean that it used to be really obvious when you were high, and now ...”

He goes quiet, but I take it as a good sign that he doesn’t freak out. He doesn’t start yelling, jump out of the truck, or come at me swinging—verbally, that is—all things that have happened before.

“The high is euphoric,” he tells me after a fraught sort of silence that I think is him wishing I would start talking about something else. “But they decide whether or not you get high. It’s about intention.”

That echoes unpleasantly inside me, because Ariel said much the same thing. “Seems like heroin would be a better bet, then.”

“With heroin, you’re playing Russian roulette with the fentanyl situation,” he says shortly.

And a little too matter-of-factly, if I’m honest. “With this, part of the game is seeing if you can convince them to give it to you the way you want. But it doesn’t matter, because once you taste it, you’re done. Nothing else will do.”

I want, desperately, to ask him if that’s why all I do is dream about that night in Ariel’s bed—but I don’t.

I drank quite a lot of Ariel’s blood, and the craving I have isn’t for that. Or not only for that. It’s for him. All of him.

I can’t distinguish between the longing for the best sex I’ve ever had or that simple, whole-body relief I feel every time I see him.

Happily, this isn’t about me. “So they’re keeping you even. Not getting you high.”

“They are.” He looks at me then, his gaze intense.

“It’s not a punishment, or whatever you’re thinking.

I asked for this. I keep waiting for them to fuck with me, but it hasn’t happened yet.

If they do, and they probably will, I want you to know it’s not what I wanted. I want to be here, Winter. I do.”

I’m glad we make it down the hill then, because it’s hard to discuss this without crying. When he gets out of the truck to go move a few things for our neighbor so we can get those eggs, I let my eyes go a little damp.

Just a little.

The hours change in the coffee stand. Birdie is on early-morning shifts. My hours are cut down significantly, but my pay is higher. I assume that this is a mistake, but there’s no one to talk to about it. Doug, wherever he is, can’t be reached.

Assuming Doug is the person who’s doing this, which I don’t.

On the fifteenth of October, twelve days since the full moon on Mount McLoughlin, I collect all the rent payments.

I then take great pleasure in presenting them to Franklin Hendry, who gets less and less polite each time I see him.

I take this to mean that he is no longer so certain that he’s going to win this battle of his.

It occurs to me that I should worry about that.

But there are so many other things to worry about that I forget to bother.

We don’t have a full gathering again, but information flows pretty freely between us. Maddox reports back from the werewolves. Savi spends time with Gran, and with me, talking about the things she discovered and what she thinks they mean.

“She’s looking for a spell,” Gran tells me a couple of nights later, once Savi goes back to her cottage, that chanting floating in the air outside the slightly cracked window shortly after.

“It will be a complicated one, to handle such an ancient threat. It will need to happen on a full moon, and now that the second-to-last lock has been opened, it will need to be the next full moon.”

“The next full moon is Halloween,” I point out. “That means we have exactly fourteen days to figure this out.”

“Yes.” Gran nods. “It’s unlikely that she will have the chance to do it but the once.”

It gets colder. Darker. Wetter. At night, I stare up at the moon and watch it get larger, rounder.

I think about Halloweens when I was a kid, when I would creep myself out. Every year, without fail. Our parents certainly never monitored what Augie and I watched, so we glutted ourselves on scary movies, which always seemed like fun while we were doing it.

On Halloween, wandering around the neighborhoods in the valley that catered to trick-or-treaters—specific, denser neighborhoods in Jacksonville and Medford, because it’s too hard to walk from house to house farther out in the country—I would regret those movies.

Augie and I would compete to see who could pretend to be the least spooked all night. We would even scare each other when we could, hiding in shadows and leaping out of bushes. We would pretend we weren’t really scared .

But I was happier than most when we got too old to wander around dark streets in unfamiliar neighborhoods, masked-up monsters all around.

Anyway, it’s different now. No one’s dressing up as a monster for Halloween. There are too many real ones just ... around.

The nearer we get to the end of the month, the less certain I am that I want to see a death goddess up close and personal on the night that creeped me out the most as a kid. I’d rather skulk into Franklin Hendry’s office and beg for more time I already know he won’t give me.

Good thing it doesn’t matter what I want , only what I’m going to do .

I keep telling myself that, hoping it sticks.

“So,” Maddox says on the last Saturday before Halloween, while I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my cards spread out before me, conducting what Gran called a getting to know you reading.

They already know me, I argued when she told me I needed to do this. They know too much.

It’s not about what they know, Gran retorted with a roll of her eyes. It’s about what you know, and what you can pick up, and the relationship you have to build with them.

I stared at her, dead-eyed.

Yes, Winter, she said after a moment, still sounding impatient—but a bit softer with it. You have to build a relationship with the cards. With everything in your life. With life itself, and death too.

Death can take care of itself, I protested.

Death is a gift, she replied. Think of all the other things that could happen that are much worse.

She has a point.

I’m only too happy to look away from the bright gold images on their dark backgrounds with frayed edges, all of them oddly evocative, though half the time I don’t have any clue what they mean.

I only know the messages they send. Gran is certain that if I get to know them better, I’ll understand the deeper meanings in the images on the cards themselves.

I’m happy for a break.

“So what?” I ask Maddox.

“So ... the vampire king situation.” She eyes me. “Haven’t met up with you sneaking back into the house in the middle of the night in a while.”

“I haven’t invited him into the house.” It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, but we all have to pick our hills to die on.

“Trouble in undead paradise?”

I sit back, contemplating what to say. How to say it. The house feels cavernous around us. Gran’s in bed. I haven’t seen Savi in days. She’s off doing sorcery shit, as far as I can tell. Briar was lurking around earlier, but whether she’s hidden in her cottage or off in the woods, I couldn’t say.

Augie told me he was going down into Jacksonville to have a beer at the tavern.

I couldn’t help myself. I made a face.

He laughed, though it was a bitter sort of sound. Oh, how I wish that a beer was the problem, he said. I would be fucking delighted to be a goddamn alcoholic.

Somehow, after he left, I was the one who felt ashamed. I could have not made a face. Why did I?

“Ariel and I were never together ,” I tell Maddox after a moment. “If that’s what you mean by ‘undead paradise,’ I don’t qualify.”

She laughs. When she sees I’m not laughing with her, she sobers. “Oh. Sorry. You’re being serious?”

“He released my brother, which is great. But he also imprisoned my brother to pressure me into giving him access to my visions, so we have no other reason to interact.” I sigh. “Aside from the whole saving the world thing.”

“Winter.” Maddox looks like she can’t decide whether she wants to laugh, shake her head, or maybe shake me. Or possibly all of the above. “His mark is upon you. More than that, you’re bound to him.”

She waits, as if she expects to see a light bulb literally burst into its brightest shine above my head.

“I don’t know what that means.” I cross my arms and glare at her, mostly because she’s the one in the room and this is an enduring frustration.

“You all know exactly what’s going on all the time.

I don’t. In case you’ve forgotten, I thought you were just a girl in high school.

I don’t know how vampires operate. I don’t know what it means—”