The Reveal (Bloodlore), page 13
“Why are you even awake?” I ask instead. “Since when are you up in the middle of the night?”
“The things you don’t know about me, your own family, and your own gifts, not to mention what goes on in this house, are too numerous to list,” my grandmother tells me, and there’s absolutely no trace of the dotty old woman I’ve been taking care of for years.
I can’t decide if it’s a relief or a stab to the heart.
She leans over—more nimbly than I expect—and reaches over for her cards. Then she places them on her lap. Decisively. She taps them expectantly and then looks at me, like she thinks I might . . .
“I don’t want to mess around with your cards,” I say, and I think that I deserve all kinds of applause for not yelling that. “You know I don’t like them. I never have.”
My grandmother only stares at me, pointedly, and I don’t have it in me to disobey her. Not even tonight, when it’s as if she’s transformed into someone else performing the role of the Gran I thought I knew.
I walk over and sink into her usual chair, there beside the bed. I don’t often sit here. It’s her chair, and I like to keep it sacred for her, since we have so few sacred spaces left.
But tonight, as I sit there with the window beside me with all those slatted iron bars and the moon coming in anyway, it reminds me of something else. A confessional, maybe.
Or, a voice inside me suggests, more like a drive-through retail window.
I have an immediate vision of my grandmother and her damned cards sitting at this window, telling futures to whoever might stop by in the dark. While I lie awake upstairs worrying about zombies in the fucking trash, which is at least better than the nightmares that come for me if I fall asleep.
But this can’t be true. This can’t be happening. This is my grandmother.
The window lets in starlight, and a bit of moon, but that’s all. It’s just a window, or as near as we get to windows in a world that doesn’t encourage that many easy entries for the so-called Kind. My grandmother is an old woman. She has dementia.
And for all I know, this is a vampire dream I’m having on a rooftop in downtown Medford while Ariel slowly drains the blood out of me.
Maybe that’s why I say nothing as my grandmother shuffles and reshuffles her cards, then fans them out in front of her, making little sounds in the back of her throat as if she’s having a conversation with the images she sees.
“We have always had the sight in this family,” she tells me. “Like it or not. Sometimes they call us witches. Sometimes they call us grifters. But it doesn’t matter what they call us. They always come back, and, mother to daughter, down we pass it as the years go by.”
“The sight?” I shake my head, which is starting to ache again. “What are you talking about, Gran?”
“You and Augie used to say that I knew what you were going to do before you did it,” she reminds me. Her gaze meets mine. “Because I did.”
I can’t take this in. I don’t want to take this in. “The sight? Really?” I can’t bring myself to go fully scathing, but the look she slides my way suggests that I’ve come close enough. But I keep going. “And you couldn’t predict that Mom and Dad would take off?”
She stares at me, with a kind of knowledge in her gaze that I dislike. Intensely. “I did.”
Those two small words tear at me. Maybe they tear me apart. I feel something thick inside me, like a sob waiting to flood through me, but I can’t let it out. I can’t start, because I don’t know if I’ll stop.
I force a laugh, but it comes out weak and uneasy. “This is ridiculous.”
Gran continues to stare at me, like she expects me to ask for details, but I can’t. I won’t. I refuse. Then she sighs, and that same old shame wallops me once again.
“You are hardly the first member of the family to deny the truth, and the sight itself,” she says, which shouldn’t make the shame heavier, but it does. “Like that vampire, child, it exists whether you believe in it or not. And it is just as fickle.”
It strikes me as funny to think of Ariel Skinner as fickle, but there’s a different sort of tide rising in me now.
“He told me.” I frown at her, taking in that beloved face I know so well. The creases in the corners of her eyes and bracketing her mouth that I like to tell myself mean a life of fun. I might not have seen her laugh in a long while, but it’s not like there’s been much to laugh about. “The vampire king told me that you saw the Reveal coming. That you knew.”
The thing about this betrayal, from her, is that it’s all-encompassing and woven together, so it’s like a whole involved tapestry of a kick to the stomach.
Gran does nothing. She barely reacts. She only watches me, yet there’s nothing blank about her gaze. Nothing confused. It’s a steady focus, intent and unwavering.
It makes me want to sob, but I don’t.
“You knew,” I say, and it’s worse to say it out loud than it was to sit with on the long, dazed drive home. “You knew, Gran, and you didn’t even try to save us.”
I’m not clear which us I mean. Me? Me and Augie? My parents—wherever they are? All the people in the valley? The whole wide world?
Something changes on my grandmother’s face, though I can’t exactly track it. She looks sadder and wiser, all of a sudden.
“And how would I have explained it to you?” she asks quietly. “How would your senile old grandmother manage to convince you that every scary thing you ever heard of was suddenly free to roam and pillage at will? Do you suppose you would have believed me? Or do you think you might have started investigating options for a nursing home instead?”
If I wasn’t sitting down in her chair, I think I would fall over. “Are you actually senile at all? Has this all been an act?”
Looking at her now, it’s hard to believe that I could ever have imagined her anything less than sharp as a tack.
“I’m no spring chicken.” She considers for a moment. “Some days are cloudier than others. Some days I might forget where in time I am.”
“Gran.”
“I’m old and I’m tired,” she tells me. “I’m not sure what world I’m in, some of the time. But one thing I do know, Winter, is that I need to live until I can pass the torch. I’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”
“You’ve been waiting for me?” I realize my voice is a little too loud. I lower it. “I’ve been right here. Doting on you night and day.”
She waves her hand. “That’s not what I mean. The gift is a tricky thing, like anything else. It can’t be forced. It has to be accepted.”
“If I had that kind of gift,” I tell her in a low voice, “the last few years would have been very, very different.”
But my head throbs, as if to contradict me.
Gran’s eyes gleam. “You would have shown us how it’s done, would you?”
“I don’t want your torch,” I tell her. “I don’t even know what a torch is in this context, and anyway, I’m sick to death of fire.”
“Everyone is sick to death of fire, child,” my grandmother replies. “But that’s no reason to go on burning.”
She picks up the cards in her lap and hands them over to me, placing them down before me on the table next to her chair with a decisive little thump.
I stare at the cards, the same pile of them that she always has in her hands or near enough to swipe up at a moment’s notice. They are worn, with frayed edges and creases, plus the clear sense of her fingerprints all over them.
If I squint, I think maybe I can see those prints on the dark edges. Or pressed into the gold symbols.
“This deck has been handed down in the family for generations,” she tells me, and there’s a certain ringing in her voice that echoes in me. Uncomfortably. As if she’s calling my bones to attention, these words like some kind of tuning fork. “They like to be handled, as they do enjoy a good preen, but only by the blood. Our blood. The cards don’t like being touched by anyone outside the family. They are not simply oracle cards that anyone could pick up in a shop. They are the cards of the oracles that have long been in this family.”
I’m finding it hard to breathe. “Discussing a deck of cards like it’s sentient is not really going a long way towards convincing me that you’re not senile,” I tell her. “In case that’s a concern.”
Gran only sniffs at that.
I shake my head. “I’ve always had an aversion to them. You know this.”
“You loved them when you were little,” she says. Almost sadly. “They liked you from the start, the day you came home from the hospital. That’s how I knew it was you, Winter. They took such a shine to you.” She sighs. “But your mother hated that the gift skipped a generation. So far as she could tell, it was her gift and you had no right to it. She punished you anytime you considered picking them up and getting to know them. If they weren’t hers, she thought the tradition might as well stop dead.”
I want to feel that same sense of bafflement and disbelief again. But I don’t. Instead, the things she’s telling me are starting to feel like memories. And my temples are kicking at me, not as painfully as they do after a nightmare, but enough to get my attention.
I have a snatch of memory in my head then, as if it burst on the scene with these words. With the spike of a headache. My mother catching me on the stairs with Gran’s cards and wrenching my arm so hard as she pulled me away that it still twinges now. I reach over to wrap a hand around that ribbon of pain, like a ghost in my bicep.
Gran nods, like she can see my memories all over my face. “It’s my fault. I should have managed Lilianne better. In a thousand ways. But these things are always more clear in hindsight, which has never been my strong suit. Give me a future any day.”
I stare down at the cards, scowling at them as if the symbols stamped all over them are jeering at me. Wishing I had the nerve to pick them up and throw them out the window for the zombies to ooze all over. There is no part of me that wants to touch them. I can almost feel my skin crawling. As if something is prickling all over me, poking at me, changing me. I hate it.
“Your mother never liked the futures I told,” Gran continues, and she sounds like her old self still, but I can also hear a weariness in her voice. Age showing itself, maybe. Or possibly just the heaviness that is my mother. “She thought I could change them at will and was furious when I couldn’t. That’s my fault too. I want you to know that my intentions were good, Winter. They were always good, even though things never ended up the way I wanted them to. That was a test and I failed it, again and again.”
There’s a growing din in my head. My skin feels uncomfortable stretched over my bones.
That prickling and prodding seems to grow more intense with every jarring beat of my heart. The headache is starting to build.
“What test?” I ask. My voice sounds thick and strange, far away and . . . not mine.
Her gaze looks like precious jewels in so little light. Those deep indigo eyes Augie and I got from her, another gift that skipped a generation. The moon slips and slides all over her, capturing her like a kind of cameo, right there in her bed. I have a feeling I’m looking at a memory of her. It feels slippery inside of me, as if I’m looking around time and not through it.
As if I’ve already lost her, and that notion is far worse than any sense of betrayal I might feel.
Because she’s not wrong. She could have spent the Monday before that horrible Tuesday telling me every single thing that was going to happen, and I would have gently suggested she get some sleep. I would have called her doctor in the morning.
There is no possibility that any version of me would have believed any of the things I’ve learned over the past three years, much less the things I learned only tonight.
“It is a test we must all face, anyone who sees into the wheel of time,” Gran says, and she is watching me intently, in a way that makes my bones seem to rearrange themselves inside me. They take up new positions, hold new weight, and I can feel a coming tide of memories—or maybe not memories—hovering somewhere in all of that. “Do you see the future or your own desires? Would you impose upon the future your interpretation of what it should be or let it do what it will? I’ll tell you now—if you choose wrong, you pay.”
“That’s very enticing.”
“You pay either way, child.” Now she sounds almost kind, and that makes my eyes water. As if she’s being gentle with a terrible diagnosis. This is the first moment when I think past the things I feel on a physical level. The first moment I think, This might be a real thing. Gran nods. “There’s no gift without a price. And only you can decide how much you’re willing to pay for the things you see, the way you interpret what you see, and who you tell.”
“Who did you tell?” I ask. But my voice is hoarse. Little more than a whisper.
“There is always, always, a reckoning. Anyone who tells you otherwise expects to die before paying it, or intends to take that price out on you.”
“What a grim and grisly little gift,” I manage to get out.
“They chose you a long time ago, Winter.” Gran nods toward the cards. “They’ve been waiting years and years to speak through you.” When I start to argue, she lifts a hand, and I stop. She cocks her head as if she can hear whispers in the moonlight. “It is time to listen, child.”
I don’t want to listen to anything, but I can’t pretend that the cards aren’t calling to me. Now that she’s made it obvious, it’s like she’s turned up the volume to its highest level.
When I look down, the deck before me is glowing, pulsing.
The cards know me, I think, and the creepiest part is that I’m not weirded out by that thought. Instead, it settles into this new configuration of bones and sinew inside.
Like a key into a lock.
I tell myself it’s the dark. I tell myself that my defenses are down because of Ariel. Because of all the things I did that I shouldn’t have done, or didn’t do at all—but I still can’t think about that. About him.
What I can admit, at last, is that I can hear the cards whispering to me.
I think about Augie. I think about Ariel. I think all the way through the mess of these last few years. And back before the Reveal, too. My mom disappearing. My father not long after. So many secrets. So much deep, dark family ick.
And all the while, Gran and these cards were part of it.
Seeing things no one else sees. Knowing things no one should know.
Maybe I’ve had a secret weapon all along, mine if I can be brave enough to accept it. To use it. To learn how to wield it.
And so, at last, I let my hands creep forward until they rest on that dark deck the way I’ve seen Gran do a thousand times.
I feel something bright and hot shoot through me, filling me up, golden and painful and right.
Like I’m meeting myself for the very first time.
I don’t need to ask what to do. I just know.
I pull a card.
11.
It hits me like a train.
It’s a vision, hot and intense, and it takes me over. Or takes me down. I don’t have the slightest idea what my own body is doing.
Because I see a body in the woods, mutilated.
I see a great, beaked thing with sharp teeth and a slithering within.
The Goddess of Filth, I understand.
Vinča, I think.
But first—or maybe I’m moving forward and back in the time of this vision, it’s not clear—there’s a woman surrounded by horror, choking on her own fear and despair. It’s sharp. Acrid.
I see sharp blades in high, thin air that smells of pine awash in copper.
I see something like an altar in the wilderness, and I think the word “sacrifice.”
I have the use of all my senses. I can smell the thick, fall scent of the green Oregon woods. I can smell rotting things and the rich earth, late hints of flowers, and mossier suggestions of dark hollows. There is a snowstorm coming in—I can smell it on the breeze. I understand that I am high above the ground and know that I’m on a mountain.
I have no sense of myself, and yet it’s like I’m standing in the same clearing with the scared woman tied up on an altar. There are figures I can’t identify, wearing garments that don’t make sense to me—like strange, dark cloaks that make my stomach hurt when I see them—moving in what looks like wild but choreographed movements around a firepit and that altar that sits before it.
I look all around and see nothing but trees. No trails leading to or away from this clearing. There’s what looks like far-off lights in the distance, though I can’t tell if it’s so high up that I’m looking out at a starry night or if it’s a tiny burst of light from settlements far below.
I gaze up toward the moon above, quiet and bright. And full.
Then down to the woman, mangled so badly it’s difficult to tell that she was ever a woman at all. Only the altar offering she’s become is left, flesh carved into signs and sigils.
I breathe out, hard.
And then I slam back into myself. With enough force to leave bruises.
Once again I am sitting in my grandmother’s chair, my hands on her cards, and it’s disorienting because it feels no less or more real than the forest clearing where I was only just standing. I snatch my hands back from the cards as if they’re on fire.
I feel dizzy and a little bit sick. Gran’s eyes are on me, too knowing. Too calm, too certain.
“The first journey is always the most unsettling,” she tells me.
“The journey?” I repeat weakly. I know exactly what she means. But I don’t have it in me to give her the satisfaction of admitting that I believe in this.
I know it’s foolish. Childish, even. I think of all the things I’ve learned to believe in over the past three years, like it or not. This is no different from any of that, and compared to the Reveal, it’s fairly benign. Visions of monsters being preferable to actual monsters at the door, teeth bared and claws sharp.
But monsters are things that happened to us. Just like drugs.
This is apparently something I am, and I hate it.
Because there were other things I was once, and they were taken from me, one by one. Daughter. Twin. Fully human. Just for a start.
