Page 60 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

Augie clotheslines me.

One moment I’m lunging for Samuel with every intention of landing on him or in him or whatever works to get him off Gran—

“Stop,” Augie orders me when I slam to a halt and start coughing because he threw that arm across my chest so hard.

I’m lucky it wasn’t my throat.

“You can’t die,” my twin grits out at me. “ You can’t fucking die , Winter.”

I recognize that look on his face. I know exactly how he feels. I can see, in this shitty little moment, that he finally gets it. What these years have been like. How many times I’ve had to say goodbye to him, always certain that the next time I saw him it would be on a funeral pyre or in a box.

He gets it, and I wish he didn’t, but I can’t deny that there’s a part of me, deep inside, that’s glad.

But there’s no time for our stuff. Not now.

We both throw ourselves on our knees next to the pile of Samuel and Gran, then pull Samuel off her roughly.

Samuel is dead. His eyes are wide open and vacant. The little bloom of red on his shirt has spread.

It turns out Gran hit the bull’s-eye.

“I always was a straight shooter,” she says, weakly, and even laughs, and it feels for a moment like Savi brought the sun out again.

Good riddance, I think, still looking at Samuel. Fucking Samuel, who I thought was so special and then stopped thinking about at all, then felt sorry for, and who turned out to be another human monster. Might as well have joined up with Franklin Hendry’s team of thugs.

For all I know, he did.

I feel Ariel’s mark begin to ... shimmer , and I have to gulp back the sob that wants to escape me. It’s a full-body sob, and I know, somehow, that if I indulge it I won’t stop until it tears me in two, and there is still a whole death goddess to handle.

I feel the mark throb a little, all along my back, and I think, Is this how I know he’s dead?

But how can he be dead? He’s twenty-five hundred years old and three seconds of sun does him in?

I can’t bear it. I have survived far too many things, but this one might kill me.

This one I don’t want to survive.

Maddox whines, still in her wolf form, and when I look up, I follow her gaze.

I see mist between the trees, rising slowly.

I hold my breath.

Then he’s there. Silver eyes blazing.

And burns. Nasty, awful-looking burns all across his face, down his neck, and all over his arms.

But he’s here. He’s not gone. He’s here .

The relief that courses through me is so profound that it feels like a blow. Like another whole body landed on me, too, and knocked all the air out of mine.

Who needs air if he’s not dead? I’m happy to keel over if it’s for a good reason instead of the worst—

“ Gran. ” Augie’s voice is intense. “ Shit. ”

I stop worrying about whether or not I can breathe and return my attention to my grandmother. She’s covered in blood, and it can’t be Samuel’s blood, because new blood is still welling out of her. She’s panting, heavily, and the hands that held her handgun in front of her have fallen to her sides.

Revealing the hilt of a knife sticking straight out of her chest.

“No,” I say, or maybe I scream it.

Savi starts chanting again. The wolves are howling.

Everything is terrible, but then Gran opens her eyes. She looks between Augie and me, and she smiles.

“I’m an oracle,” she croaks out at us. “I came here today knowing this would happen, precisely like this. I was not betrayed. This is a willing sacrifice. He wanted this to be the key that unlocks her, but it’s not.”

“He did not betray me either,” comes Ariel’s dark, furious voice. “I always thought he was a two-faced fool.”

Ty roars, and I think we all know it’s in agreement.

Everything feels charged and slow and terrible, but I remember what Savi said at our first gathering. 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 would have to have trusted him to be betrayed by him,” I manage to say, looking at Ariel. I look back down at Gran. “And you knew what he would do. That means you sacrificed yourself. Willingly. ”

Though my voice cracks when I say that word. Willingly.

“Why else would I bring your grandfather’s gun?” Gran asks with a rough approximation of her usual saltiness.

“There will be a different betrayal, a different sacrifice,” Savi says, her eyes blazing gold. “And there is nothing to say it will be amongst us.”

“It wasn’t last time,” Ariel points out. “It was all entirely triggered by Vin?a’s acolytes.”

Gran nods. Her breathing is getting shallower. “Remember,” she says, though she has to struggle to get her words out, “I walked into my death with my eyes open. I chose it. I didn’t hide from it, I didn’t try to change it. I want the two of you to live .”

“It should be me,” Augie grits out, his voice thick with the same fury and disbelief that I can feel eating me up inside. “I’m the fuckup. I’m the disappointment. It should be me. ”

“I’m a seventy-five-year-old woman,” Gran tells him, her indigo gaze bright. “Death and I are no strangers to each other. And you, August, would do well to remember that it will come for you when it’s ready. No matter how you court it. No matter how you chase it. You don’t get to decide your time.”

“Gran,” I whisper.

Augie is sobbing, gripping one of her hands. I only know that I am too, because I see my tears splash on her coat.

“If I had to choose the perfect way to go, it would be exactly like this,” Gran says, her voice getting weaker. We have to lean in to hear her. “All of us together. The way it should be.”

We hold on to each other for as long as we can. Until, no matter how many times I try to plead or bargain, her grip goes slack.

And she is no vampire. She is not supernatural, only a gateway to the supernatural. There is no possibility that she will come back in the mist, or at all.

The finality of this beats down on me, a weight too great to bear.

I feel the rain begin. It’s warmer than it should be on Halloween this high in the mountains, courtesy of Savi, I imagine.

The wolves howl, though the sound is changed from the howls I’ve heard before, and I understand that it’s a tribute. A lamentation to fill the air, and it’s beautiful. It’s lonely. It’s one of the most mournful and lovely things I’ve ever heard.

It breaks my heart again and again and again.

Augie sits up first. He wipes at his face, then begins arranging Gran’s body so she looks the way she did when she was alive. Perfect. Unruffled.

Ready to cut everyone down to size with a few well-chosen words.

I sit back too. I feel ... dazed. Hollowed out with this new grief that’s like the sharp edge of that knife stuck deep into my own chest. And while I know that it’s sliced into me good, I also know that the real pain hasn’t hit yet.

There will be a lifetime for that.

I look around blindly, but Ariel is already there. He crouches down and wraps me in his arms. His burns are already gone, only the faintest shadows over his skin to show that he was ever marked or marred.

I find I can revel in that, and find it desperately unfair, all at the same time.

He holds me there, tucked against his body. His strong arms wrap tight around me, like he’s holding me together. I don’t just feel that mark on me glow.

I glow straight through.

And this is the scariest thing that’s happened with him yet, because it isn’t sexual at all.

He gives me pure comfort. And I take it. I sink into it and feel that deep, resonating relief . Not that his hug takes away the pain. But somehow, because he shares it, the pain is slightly more bearable.

I think that maybe I won’t just die right here after all.

“I hate to interrupt,” comes Ty’s low, furious voice after a thunderclap I barely register. “She was a decent lady. But we have bigger problems.”

That’s when I hear it. The shouting in the distance, a terrible din.

Ariel stands, bringing me with him. We all move back up toward the place where the road that lazily circles the crater would be, if there was no snow.

But I can’t focus on the snow or the road in my memories.

They’re coming in fast.

It’s those same figures in their creepy cloaks and horrifying masks, looking like plague doctors from another time, only far more ominous and terrible.

And it’s clear that they’re heading straight for us.

“What the fuck are those ?” Augie demands.

“The Goddess of Filth has many species of acolyte in her cult,” Ariel says. “Orcs. Ghouls. Harpies. Every creature you can imagine. She collects them. I’d suspect this lot are not human, however. Too easily broken.”

Augie makes a low, anguished noise. “Not easily enough.”

I can feel something in me sit up and take notice, even though every other part of me wants to lie down and let grief do what it will. I want to let the grief eat me whole. I might not want to die the way I did a few moments ago, but living holds no appeal at all.

Too bad I don’t get to choose to avoid it, and not only because my grandmother’s dying wish was that Augie and I live. It feels like a commandment.

I can’t succumb to that urge to simply fall down until the weight of this lessens, because there’s that thing inside me.

Gran would call it my gift.

I call it fucked up.

Because I know what this is, and what’s coming.

I’ve already seen it.