Page 62 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

Like I’m a goddess myself, devouring her destruction the way she has eaten entire civilizations whole.

Not this time.

“I don’t see you rising,” I tell her, my mouth full of galaxies. “And maybe go fuck yourself, too.”

And this time when she screams, I can feel the mountains tremble all around us.

The threads of magic find their colors once again.

Vin?a is no longer in my head.

Out above the lake, Savi is getting louder, the chanting more insistent.

Inside me, I can feel Vin?a scream, on and on and on, but I know somehow that she can’t get to me from there.

I watch the battle instead. With everyone else.

In my head, we watch Ty rip an orc priest in half, then leap on another one—a wraith this time.

Ariel fights his way into the scrum.

And I can see it, I think. All twenty-five hundred years of peak physical prowess, because he moves like poetry, though his verses are deadly and profoundly disturbing.

But . . . not unhot.

Maybe swallowing a death goddess has made me callous. Maybe he’s just that beautiful.

Maybe I need us all to live.

The two of them take the pack of priests apart with focused precision, and when they converge on the final one, Ariel throws his head back, lets his fangs grow, and waits as the last priest cowers.

Until Ty rips his head off.

That scream inside me, inside Wizard Island, gets louder and then louder still—

Until it is nothing but a howl of anguish.

And then it’s gone.

Everything is quiet, except the wind. We can hear it snaking through the trees, almost whistling, as if it’s made of ghosts. When we look down the rim road, there are only bodies and blood.

The wolves move to the fallen, sniffing them out. The vampires come behind them, pulling off the masks and looking at each face.

They are making sure we know who to thank for today’s events, Ariel says. Right there in my head, as intimate as it is possible to be.

Almost.

Because the only thing I can think about that would be more so would be to have his voice in my head, his cock buried inside me, and his teeth sunk deep in my neck.

I don’t need the cards to tell me that will certainly happen. And soon.

I hear the thread of amusement and need in his voice when he responds, and I know he knows it too. I like to know who tries to kill me. And all of their associates. And anyone else who might think the way that they do.

I support this completely, I reply.

“Hey,” Augie says then, “I think you better look.”

Maddox is standing on that wall, hands on her hips as she looks out over the lake. I’m afraid that what she’s looking at is Savi’s dead body, but as I get to my feet, Savi herself lands.

But she lands hard and doesn’t quite stick the landing, the first sign of anything but perfection from her that I’ve seen. She sags against the wall, and I don’t think. I put my arm around her.

She leans against me. “Thank you,” she murmurs.

I only nod.

And together, we all stand there and look out at the temple that hovers, frozen in midair, high above Crater Lake and Wizard Island, where it must have been hidden all these thousands of years.

The goddess, interrupted.

I don’t know how long we stand there. I only know that we did it.

We beat that awful, rotten-faced bitch. I can’t feel her inside me any longer, and I know that the threads of magic from all these supernatural creatures and the constellations dissolved her and shot whatever’s left of her straight back into her prison.

I feel the cards hum in triumph.

Only then, when I tuck them away this time and nestle them of my own volition right next to my heart, do I turn back around, kneel next to my grandmother, and tell her that I love her.

That she is the best parent I ever had, and I wish I’d accepted the gift a lot sooner so I could have known her better.

I tell her all of this, but I think she knows.

Wherever she is now, wherever her soul has taken root, I think she’s known it all along.

We say our farewells to Gran up there in those beautiful mountains where she made her sacrifice, making her funeral pyre and honoring her by letting her burn there, alone, beneath the Halloween blue moon.

We sit in a circle around her. No one speaks. We let her return to the magic she came from.

No one puts bodies in the ground, not anymore. One of the first things the monsters did was dig up the graveyards. The freshly dead are even more of a draw.

So we let her burn. And I promise the flames that carry her onward that I’ll make a monument to this woman, out of materials that monsters won’t care about, but she would. I will.

And I will honor her in as many ways as possible for as long as I live.

When we get home from Crater Lake much later that night, I invite Ariel in.

It’s not the momentous thing it would have been before, because now there are too many momentous things to count, and all I want is him near me. When his vampire friend turns up for Augie, I go to invite her inside too, but Ariel shakes his head.

“There is no need to be too familiar,” he tells me in his stern way, and Augie follows her out into the dark.

I show the man whose head I’ve been in, whose body I know so well, up to my room. When he pulls me into his arms, I kiss him like he’s a fever and all I want to do is burn up with him.

But then I pull away. “There’s something I have to do.”

He nods, his gaze so silver it hurts. “These first deaths are the hardest,” he tells me. “They are the ones that scar.”

Someday he will tell me who it is he misses. All of those he lost who scarred him.

Tonight, I sit there, right on the floor in my bedroom. I pull out the cards.

And I find her.

In my head she’s young again. Her eyes are sharp. She smiles at me, though she shakes her head too. “You don’t need me, child. You have everything you need, right there with you.”

“But . . .” I begin.

“I will always be here for you when you need me,” she says. “That’s a promise. But it’s your time now, Winter. And there is still so much to do.”

She leaves me there to sit on the floor a long while, letting tears fall down until they make puddles on the cards themselves.

I let them.

When Ariel comes out of the shower, he finds me there.

On the floor, still covered in mud and blood and all the rest of the things that happened today.

And I think that if I learned one thing up in the snow today, it’s this: There can only be love.

That’s the only thing we really have, no matter what it looks like.

Even though it makes me feel panicked and dizzy to even think such a thing, given the fates of everyone I’ve ever loved.

Still. That doesn’t change anything. Hiding from love is like hiding from the dark, pretending the stars aren’t shining all the while. Hiding from love is breaking your own heart, then wondering why it hurts.

Love turns into grief, I know that part, but love is why it matters to lose someone.

If I’m going to lose everyone and everything I love—and isn’t that the deal? Isn’t that how this always worked, even before the world ended?—then I better love them hard while I’m here.

That’s really all there is.

I look at Ariel, like a marble statue before me. I feel my heart ache inside my chest, telling me what I already know.

“I love you,” I tell him, like I’m confessing a terrible sin. “You should know that.”

He comes over and he lifts me, straight up from the floor without so much as a grunt to indicate he feels my weight. Then he holds me in his arms.

I lock my legs around his waist. I wrap my arms around his neck.

I revel in his perfect, unburned skin.

“You are my heart, little seer,” says this twenty-five-hundred-year-old vampire king. Out loud and inside me, at once. “I don’t have my own. I have only yours, and so you will have to let it beat for the both of us. I will insist upon it.”

“You can just say it,” I whisper, there against his mouth. “You love me too. And you should know better.”

“I do,” he growls, and then his mouth is on mine and his hands are gripping my hair, and then everything is heat and madness.

I can’t get enough. Too much death, too much blood, but then blood is the basis of all of this.

Blood is what keeps us all alive. Blood and love are tangled up in each other, and so are we.

Soon enough, he’s inside me. His cock so deep I can barely breathe. His fangs sunk into my neck.

This time, he opens up the vein on the side of his own neck, and that’s where I drink from him.

I love you, he tells me as he thrusts inside me, making me come and come and come. When I say forever, Winter, I mean it. You’ll see.

I decide, then and there, that I will.

No matter what.