Page 61 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

Seeing another vision of mine come to life, starring the same fuckheads, is clarifying.

It’s not that I stop grieving, it’s that I feel that grief shift. Become fuel.

It helps to know that Gran would have bitten my head off, then told me to wipe my face clean and get to work.

Not sentimental, our Gran.

I do what I know she would want me to do.

I retreat to the place where she’s lying, much too still.

I pull the cards out from the pocket they chose today and shuffle them, humming a little in the back of my throat.

It isn’t a tune. It’s more the suggestion of one, and I let it play through me and into the cards.

Beside me, Augie finishes arranging Gran and turns to handling Samuel. He goes through his pockets. He finds the other weapons Samuel had stashed away on his body. He turns him over and pulls open the pack he was wearing on his back.

Ariel is moving too. I hear him bark out orders, and I realize I’ve heard him do this before. I’ve watched him do it, and watched his vampire minions respond to his commands with their brutal poetry.

When I look up, I see the vampires appearing. They go from mist to corporeal form, then into those same perfect lines I saw in the MMA studio.

It was his army all along.

They melt into formation, Ariel at the helm.

Ty has shifted again, and he lets out a new roar. It isn’t a howl, not that sound.

It’s another call to arms, I realize in the next moment as the wolves begin to pour in, coming from all directions, some of them from behind—like they’ve been hiding out in the hills.

They flank the cloaked figures, the vampires advance, and the battle begins on a much larger scale than the one I barely survived on Mount McLoughlin.

Savi steps over the retaining wall and floats out onto the little spit of cliff on the other side. Maddox goes with her, a sleek and terrible wolf bodyguard.

I keep shuffling my cards. I keep humming. I wait for the sight to take hold.

Augie makes a noise as he digs around in Samuel’s pack. When I frown at him, he pulls out one of those cloaks. I could try to explain that away, but he follows it with a beaked mask.

It’s another blow I didn’t see coming.

I stop humming. I find myself holding the cards to my heart. “He was one of them?”

Was he there that night on the mountain? Did he know what would happen to me?

But even as I wonder these things, I release them. Samuel is dead. I’m not. That’s all that matters.

Augie’s mouth twists as he looks down at the mask in his hand. “Everyone wants power,” my twin tells me in a low voice. “Maybe especially the ones who pretend they don’t. You should know that by now.”

His gaze meets mine. We’re looking at each other, but we are each other. It feels right. It feels like a much-needed return to form.

But it’s also so new that it aches.

“What do you want, then?” I ask.

His mouth twists even more. “Power, obviously. But I want it over me , Winter. I want power over myself .”

He doesn’t say for once , but I hear it.

I reach out my hand, and I don’t know what I’m about to say, but there’s a calamitous noise so loud it makes the air itself seem to shake.

When we turn, the smooth surface of the lake now looks like it’s ... boiling.

“ She is coming, ” I belt out, in a voice that is not mine. I feel it echo not just in me, but in Augie. In everyone around us.

In the tall trees that stretch for the stormy sky.

Out in the blue water of the lake, Wizard Island trembles.

And then, as it shakes, it begins to rise.

Savi is still chanting. Now she catapults herself straight up into the air, then out over the water so that she’s hovering over the intense blue of the lake, and the island seems as if it’s rising to meet her.

She stretches out her arms, as if crucifying herself in midair. Then, as her hair whips around her and her eyes blaze like fire, she begins again.

The counterspell rains down all around her, like more weather.

I shuffle the cards, but I don’t need to look at them. They tell me what I need to know. They pour into me, and I need—

I need something —

I reach out, stretching along the lines of magic that I can suddenly see spooling out of me, and Augie, and every creature here. Lines of brilliant color that dance into the sky and need only to be pulled to lead me to the person in question.

That’s how I find Ariel. I look for the thickest cool-blue line, the one that whispers of age and time, and I pull it.

Hard.

Little seer, he says, but he’s inside me. He’s speaking inside my head, that rich, dark voice like a caress. How clever of you to find me this way.

I whip my head around, and I think I see him, deep in the center of that swirling, deadly mass of cloaks and creatures, fangs and claws. They fight and fight, they stain the snow red below their feet, and still they keep going.

And as the cards pour into me, I pour into him.

I watch as he follows my predictions. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t question. I don’t have to prove to him the things I see.

He treats my visions like cold, hard facts, and because he does, the tide begins to turn.

The cards are shuffling so fast in my hands I can barely keep up, and my fingers ache, but they would need to be cut off before I stopped.

I won’t stop.

Not until we all do.

The priests, I tell Ariel down the line that chains us to each other now. Maybe it’s magic. Maybe it’s our bond. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s ours. I know it’s permanent.

And there’s not one part of me that wants to fight it.

I hate priests, he replies, and his voice in my head is so cool, so calm.

Then I can see what he’s doing, with my own eyes, and in my head, too. I see the fight before me as if the battle is on a movie screen. I glimpse it occasionally through his eyes, and on top of this, the cards show me different views as they please.

It’s a whole kaleidoscope, ever shifting, but I understand each view and where it fits.

And I keep telling him. Showing him.

It’s her priests who presented her with a key to her lock, I tell him. They didn’t trust Samuel’s claim that he could do it. They took care of it themselves. Worst-case scenario, I say in a voice that doesn’t feel like mine—too ancient and wise— she has unwilling sacrifices to choose from.

I can hear his laugh inside me. That sounds like every death cult I’ve ever encountered.

Then I see him in the air again, this time with no sun to burn him. He leaps up as if he wants the fighters from both sides to track him. They do—all the cloaked figures watch him go—but his own warriors attack them in the next second, taking advantage of their momentary distraction.

Ariel doesn’t fly. He doesn’t hang in the air like Savi. He leaps far higher and farther than any human could, and when he goes down again, he lands where I can’t see him. Not with my eyes.

In my head, I follow along.

“It’s the priests,” I say out loud so Maddox and Augie can hear me, and maybe Savi too, though it’s hard to tell while she’s still in midair, making it storm.

Making that island tremble all the more.

“This can’t end as long as those priests remain.” I say it out loud. In my head.

To everyone.

“Don’t worry,” Maddox says from behind me when I didn’t see her change. “Ty is on it.”

I don’t think about what I’m doing. I want them to see what I see, so I make it happen. I pull on each thread, indigo for Augie, smoky quartz for Maddox, and then we’re all there.

We’re all connected, and we’re in it .

Ty and Ariel have both left their armies to fight the goddess’s acolytes up above as they chase the priests down the old trail that leads to the water’s edge. On one of the switchbacks, the priests turn back to face them, knives out.

It’s a bloodbath, brutal and cruel.

Up at the rim, the three of us sit with our backs pressed together, Gran and Samuel laid out before us, Savi in the air behind us, and these battles in our heads.

Savi’s voice rises. The storm intensifies.

There’s something worse than thunder, more electrifying than lightning.

Then there’s a great and terrible scream.

It seems to erupt out of the crater itself. We all duck as if there’s something shooting straight at us, when there isn’t.

The scream goes on and on, and when my head starts to ache—that sharp pain in my temples that I know too well—I understand.

It’s her.

I have to think that a sound like that, rage and fury and a deep bewilderment, can only be a good thing for us.

But I retract that thought immediately, because suddenly, she’s here .

Wizard Island shakes, Savi is in the thick of it, but there’s a seven-thousand-year-old death goddess of filth and fury in my head. Not just my head. She’s swelling into being down each and every colored thread of magic, blackening them as she goes.

Vin?a is here.

And she’s pissed.

“ You! ” she bellows, and she is a mess of black, slithering worms and beaks red with blood. She is all things and nothing. “Pestilent human, do you believe that you can stand before me? Do you dare ?”

“No,” I tell her, though I can feel her all around me, like a wind. And inside me, like some horrific parasite that intends to consume me from within. “Not me. I’m nothing but an oracle.”

The oracle, I think.

And the cards are like fire in my hands, their images and symbols scrolling through me, and I don’t need to get to know them anymore.

I am them. They are me.

I see what I have to do, and I do it.

I see everything. Savi up above the lake. The wolves and the vampires. Augie beside me, anchoring me, keeping his vigil over Gran.

I gather up all the threads I found and I pull them, hard.

Vin?a is smoke and maggots, fury and blood.

But she is in my head .

If she could hurt me, I would already be dead.

I pull on the threads of magic for strength, I call down the constellations she uses as her stepping stones, and I tie them into knots.

Then I stare the bird-faced bitch who used Ariel as a pet straight in her face while I shove them in my mouth and swallow them whole.