Page 63 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

There’s another gathering the next evening, All Saints’ Day, or maybe it’s a kind of wake for the woman we all lost.

We sit around in the living room of the house, and these powerful supernatural creatures tell me stories about my grandmother. The oracle they knew, like it or not.

How imperious she was in the face of creatures who could eat her in two bites. How happy she was to lecture a werewolf or vampire on how they should clean up their act.

How certain she was that they would not dare hurt her ... and she was right.

“She was a terror,” Ty growls, but I’m beginning to understand the werewolf alpha now. I can tell the difference between his bark and his bite. He catches my gaze and holds it. “She will be missed.”

We talk about Gran for a long while.

Later, we turn to other topics, now that we’re all showered and fed and recovered. Or as close to recovered as we’re going to get.

“Do we think that the goddess will stay like that?” Maddox asks from where she sits on Ty’s lap. “My vote is no.”

“Almost certainly not, though the magic was good,” Savi agrees.

She is a bit tired and pale, and she sits in the armchair in the living room, a poultice of unidentifiable herbs pressed to one temple.

Though she smiles a little. “I think we have to assume that we only scratched the surface of her followers. Hopefully the last of that particular type. All those nasty priests and people consumed with religious fervor. There are other ways. Other kinds of interest in death goddesses. It’s not all cults and bird masks. ” She laughs. “I hope.”

When the knock comes on the door, we all know what it is without having to look. Ariel confirms it, inclining his head to indicate to Augie and all the rest of us that it’s his delivery.

My twin brother stands. He looks around the room, and he seems ...

Not defeated. Not exactly.

“I hate this,” he says, baldly. Matter-of-factly.

No self-pity discernible at all in his voice.

“I can’t function without it, but I fucking hate vampire blood.

And I don’t want to leave Winter with all of this again, which I feel is inevitable if I need something like this.

” He shakes his head, and he looks at me .

.. but he’s not talking to me. “I need to detox. I need to kick this.”

There’s a small silence. I’m holding my breath. I’m also certain that no one here understands the importance of what just happened.

I’ve heard Augie talk about quitting things before, but it was always couched in maybes. It was never statements to groups. It was never without drama and emotion, because he was never matter-of-fact about it.

Because he never meant it.

“ Can you kick vampire blood?” Savi asks. She’s looking at Ariel.

He lifts a shoulder and drops it. It is not reassuring. “I have heard that it can happen, though it is rare,” he says. That silver gaze is too knowing. He moves it to Augie. “It is a long, arduous process. There is no guarantee that you will survive it.”

Augie is still standing in the middle of the room. He still looks so good to me. He looks healthy, happy. I have to remind myself that he’s not. That it’s the blood doing this to him.

“Most blood addicts don’t last as long as I have.” His voice is quiet. “They either try to ingest too much and it kills them, or they get drained and discarded by their dealers while they’re still pretty. I spent a lot of time in that dungeon, wondering what made me so lucky.”

The way he says lucky makes my eyes tear up. I blink the moisture away.

“Blood,” Augie says. “It’s always blood, isn’t it?” He’s looking straight at Ariel now. “You wanted that oracle bloodline, and if Winter, the chosen heir, didn’t work out, you wanted to have the spare on hand.”

My heart skips a beat, though I had already gotten there. And Ariel doesn’t deny it. Instead, he nods.

“We are, all of us, controlled by our weaknesses,” he says. “Your sister’s weakness is you. Yours are your addictions. There is no possible way you do not know this already. If you can’t control yourself, anyone can control you. And therefore her.”

I want to slug him. I want to kiss him. I hate him for saying something like that to my twin.

I love him for saying it so plainly, no dancing around it at all.

The kind of no-bullshit intervention we never gave Augie, I’m ashamed to say.

I expect my brother to freak out, but he doesn’t. He nods. Then again. He swallows, hard.

“This is why I want to get clean,” he says in a low voice, and while there’s an anger in it, it doesn’t seem to be focused on anyone but him. “I’m sick and tired of being a fucking bargaining chip.”

Ty eyes him. “I can dry you out. But you won’t like it.”

“It’s my understanding that it’s excruciating,” Augie says. “And it goes on forever. And most people kill themselves rather than face it.”

“Uh. No. That’s not okay,” I say immediately.

“I want to live, Winter,” Augie tells me. He’s standing in a room full of people, but he’s telling me. Just me. I think everyone knows it. “I want to be alive . And I don’t know how.”

That takes my breath away. All I can do is nod.

Not giving him permission. But maybe that’s my blessing.

He turns back to Ty. “I’ll do it. I need to do it. One way or another.”

Ty nods, very slowly. I think there’s something close enough to respect in his gaze, and I don’t need Maddox to tell me that this is unusual.

“We’ll find out who you are on the other side,” Ty says, and it sounds like a promise. “But I’m warning you, the journey will change you.”

“It already has,” my brother says.

He doesn’t go with the vampire who waits for him outside. He lets the wolves take him, meaning he’s diving straight in.

He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t hug me goodbye.

But he doesn’t need to.

You’ve got this, I think at him. I don’t need to be in his head.

I know he hears me.

Deep in his bones, in the cells we once shared, he knows.

Later that night, in Ariel’s bed, I don’t cry. I don’t discuss Augie at all.

I move in the dark, biting him, scratching him, leaving my marks as best I can.

Because no one ever said that forever wouldn’t sting.

He lets me do it, and laughs while I do, then fucks me so good and so long that I couldn’t mount an argument if my life depended on it.

Or sob out my grief when he’s so good at making it into this other song we only sing together.

In the morning, I wake up and go to the roof to see Savi’s hint of sunrise because I missed it yesterday. I know by now that Ariel’s apartment has no eastern exposures, and that’s how he gets away with all that glass.

Outside, it’s All Souls’ Day. November is here, Gran is dead, and I’m looking forward to Franklin Hendry trying to take what’s mine. I really am.

I think of Augie, wherever he is. I turn and look over at the hills in the distance, the ones that rise above Jacksonville, where the werewolves roam along the old mining trails and make their own paths into the old-growth forests so ancient and so impenetrable that people who’ve seen all the monsters the Reveal has offered still think Bigfoot is out there.

“It’s a new day,” I whisper. “It’s a new dawn.”

And we’re all going to be okay.

I drive back through Jacksonville later that morning, where the details of what Samuel did keep coming out. Not just what he did to Gran, though that’s shocked the whole community. But all the rest of the things he was up to on the side.

His sister, Jenny, is shocked, but not as shocked as might be expected.

“I knew something was up with him,” she tells me, sitting out on the porch of that little white house.

“I knew it. At first, I thought all his organizing saved him, and then I thought maybe he was trying a little too hard. He liked the power more than the people. I think he became what he always said he hated.”

“Maybe we all do,” I say. “If we’re not careful.”

The cards hum a little at that, whether to support me or warn me, it’s hard to tell.

November keeps chugging along, more winter than fall most days. Samuel doesn’t leave the vacuum that folks initially expect, because people step up. They decide to expand into what happened instead of shrinking because of it.

“I loved your grandmother,” Birdie tells me the night she leads the community meeting.

Her wife, Miriam, is in the front row, a huge smile on her face.

“She knew I was gay all along, and when my parents needed to pray on it for a little too long, she was there for me. And to be perfectly honest, I always thought Samuel was a turd.”

“Well. He was.”

“Maddox Hemming, on the other hand...” Birdie says leadingly, and both she and Miriam laugh.

I decide it’s possible that the human contingent of the Rogue Valley is going to do just fine. Maybe better now that there are more hands on deck.

It also doesn’t hurt that some of us have an in with the monsters.

In the middle of all this good stuff, something better happens. Franklin Hendry never comes for me. He disappears.

As far as I can tell, he was there the day before Halloween, smug and vile. But the next morning, the bank was empty. His ledger remained, however, and all the people in it received their money back. It appeared on doorsteps or was shoved through windows.

His thugs disappeared too. A lot like someone went and cleaned house, and I have a few ideas about who that could be. Several who s, in fact.

But I don’t ask. I take it as an early Thanksgiving present.

I assume that everyone will move out of the cottages now that there are no more false pretenses, but no one wants to leave.

Savi wants to stay close as she works on the spell to get rid of Vin?a for good.

Maddox claims she still isn’t ready to take her place at Ty’s side, and she has the bruises she loves so much to prove it.

Even Briar seems friendlier, though it doesn’t seem like she has the slightest idea what happened.

“It’s like a monster sorority,” I tell Ariel. “I kind of like it.”

“I like it too,” he tells me, in a much more serious tone. “They can protect you when I can’t.”

We are up in my room then, there beneath the eaves. We have just spent a very long time experimenting with each other, scratching at the surface of the time that spools before us.

Of the small bit of this journey I’ll get to share with him before I become another one of his scars.

Something I should think is sad, but I don’t. I think it’s beautiful.

And besides, he has no intention of letting me die.

“I’ve already changed your hours at the coffee stand,” he tells me.

When I blink at him in astonishment, he continues.

“People know you’re the oracle, Winter. It’s not only cards and visions, it’s a vocation.

They will come by that stand and ask you to see things for them.

Just as they used to come here and ask your grandmother at her window, and I don’t want them at this house, not anymore. I want you safer than that.”

“Wait.” I’m hung up on the first part of all that. “You changed my hours? What happened to Doug?”

Ariel rolls me beneath him and hikes my knees up wide, then thrusts deep into me once more, that cool, enormous cock nearly making me come that easily.

“Doug,” he tells me in a deeply casual tone, as if this is a tea party, “was an unfortunate casualty. But the people like coffee, and I, as a benevolent king, wanted to make sure they got it.”

“And you,” I say, as he sets a slow, deliriously deep pace, “got your in with the new oracle without having to move house. How clever you are.”

“All’s fair this side of the Reveal, my love,” he tells me, his mouth against my neck, his tongue on my pulse.

“I didn’t need a vision to tell me that you would be a problem for me.

Though your grandmother took great pleasure in delivering it.

All I had to do was look at you, one risen phoenix to another, and I understood that I would never be the same. ”

“And while you’re at it, you could be sneaky and underhanded like everyone else,” I say, grinning at him. “No moral high ground after all. I can’t wait to tell everyone.”

“You won’t, little seer,” he tells me. “You wouldn’t dare.”

And then he shows me why.

Over and over and over again.