Chapter 4 #2
“No vampire king?” I ask brightly, because the idea of Ariel Skinner himself shuffling in for communal coffee is never not hilarious to me.
Winter only smiles, like she’s trying to be mysterious when I can smell him all over her.
Some in the valley like to mutter about how the new oracle might know her way around a vision but is a strange choice for an immortal vampire who has had lovers renowned the world over for their beauty. Some people in this valley will talk shit no matter what.
Winter looks both tough and pretty, even first thing in the morning.
She looks like the warrior she made herself into after the Reveal, which is no doubt why she’s still alive.
Her blond hair is cut in a pixie style that would make me look like a sad, shorn sheep, but it works for her.
There’s a wariness in her indigo eyes, but there always is.
Making it through the Reveal as a human can’t have been easy.
Most didn’t. I don’t like to think about the human friends I had to leave behind in New York, or what likely became of them.
We probably all have that distance in our eyes these days.
Even though, as a card-carrying monster, I’m not supposed to think such things.
I’m meant to make jokes about the all-you-can-eat buffet out there.
Then pretend that I love a world without airplanes to far-off cities, excellent restaurants, and television shows to binge.
But it wouldn’t be life if it wasn’t complicated.
“Did I hear Briar?” Winter goes directly to the coffee machine that takes up most of the counter and requires a lot of barista shit to work right, because apparently working in a coffee stand all day isn’t enough. She has to make snooty coffee at home, too.
Not that it doesn’t taste good.
“She asked me about growing up here,” I tell her. “About you and me being from here and going to high school together. I don’t know. Maybe she’s trying to make friends.”
Winter looks toward the back door with an odd look on her face. “I wonder.”
“Maybe she needed some time to settle in here,” I suggest. I think of what Ty and I were talking about last night.
“Most of the Kind live separate from each other, sometimes underground. That’s how it’s been forever.
It’s only been three years since things changed, and many creatures are going to need longer than that to catch up. ”
Winter frowns like she’s considering that. Then she drags her gaze back to her coffee preparations.
I pile my meal on my plate, take it to the table, and pull Briar’s chair back so I can sit in it. I watch Winter take an inordinate amount of time with her coffee before she comes over and sits down with me.
I take a few bites of my breakfast but then point my fork at her. “Are you okay?”
She blinks. “I’m fine.” When I keep looking at her, she frowns again. “I keep having these weird, muddy dreams. That’s all. So I wake up feeling that way.” She lifts her mug. “Coffee helps. Coffee helps everything.”
“Muddy sounds better than the piercing brain-tumor death goddess dreams,” I point out. “If you have to choose.”
Her mouth curves. “True. These don’t hurt, they’re just odd. Like I can almost remember them, but they disappear into the muck if I get too close.” She takes a pull of her coffee and doesn’t look at me. “Maybe I’ve lost them.”
“Is that bad?” I watch her face as I ask it. “You’re the oracle all day, every day now. Maybe your visions don’t have to come to you in dreams anymore.”
It seems to take her a long time to look up from her mug, but when she does, she smiles. “The last clear dream I had was about Briar. Not long after Halloween.”
That surprises me, but I don’t say anything. I keep my eyes on her and wait for her to tell me.
“It was clear in that I could see everything that was happening,” she says, “just not what it meant. I had to really think about that. But it makes more sense now. I think you’re right that Briar wants to make friends.
I’m almost positive that the dream was telling me that Vin?a was after her.
Whether she knows it or not. Whether Vin?a will ever rise again or not. ”
I sit back in my chair, and she tells me about the dream. About trailing Briar through a forest only for the death goddess to take her over and start speaking out of her mouth. I shudder with distaste. “Why would she want Briar?”
Winter shakes her head. “I don’t know. And the cards have not been forthcoming. I’ve asked them for clarity on this pretty much daily.”
I contemplate this over some bacon. “One thing we know Vin?a hates is you.”
“Yes.” Winter takes a swig of her coffee and sighs happily. “I’m glad Briar is reaching out. That doesn’t feel very death-cultish of her, so really, I don’t see why not to be friends.”
“We can all trauma-bond over being stalked by a vengeful, trapped psycho bitch,” I say merrily. “We’ll be braiding each other’s hair in no time.”
It feels like an achievement when she laughs.
Then she heaves a heavy breath, so I know she’s getting serious. “How is he?” she asks, avoiding my eyes.
She means her twin brother, August. After treating him like the pawn he was, Ariel returned Augie to Winter.
But Augie came home still addicted to that vampire blood.
After what happened at Crater Lake on Halloween, which included Augie and Winter losing their grandmother so violently, he decided to go clean.
Except, of course, there’s no going clean from vampire blood. Those who don’t get killed for irritating their drug pushers—the vampires themselves—usually die anyway, because nothing around is supposed to meet that high.
Augie had to know that better than anyone, but he wanted to clean up. Ty told him he could make that happen—it’s just brutal. And long.
“He’s okay,” I tell her.
I’m pretty sure she knows better than to ask for details.
Winter clearly thinks better of that. She blows out another breath. “Okay.” But she sounds like she’s saying it to herself. “Okay is good. More than we got some years. I’ll take it.”
I don’t like it when my friends sound sad, so I eat those feelings. She gets up to fix herself another cup of coffee and looks more alert when she sits back down.
“Another full moon last night,” she murmurs. “Would I be able to tell by looking at you if . . . ?”
“I don’t actually know,” I tell her. Though I know I’ll have a new tattoo, at the very least. “But no need to worry about what a claiming looks like from the outside, because none took place.”
I guess my attempt to sound jaunty and unbothered falls flat, because she gazes at me a little too intently, those indigo eyes of hers more confronting than I’d like. “Are you okay?”
I wouldn’t answer anyone else on this. But I was there the night that Winter pretty much died on the top of Mount McLoughlin. There was more than one moment when I thought that I was literally holding her poor, battered body together with my own hands.
I’ve never been a fan of unearned intimacies, but I’m pretty sure this is about as earned as it gets.
“There’s always been a time limit,” I say quietly. “And we’re coming up on it. Fast.”
I expect her to reach for her cards, or to tell me that she dreamed about all the North American wolves who will be appearing shortly in Jacksonville, or the power of the solstice, all the usual oracle things. Instead, all she does is study me. Like I need some figuring out.
I don’t like that, so I keep talking. “I’m sure it will be fine. After all, I was fated to be his mate, not his victim. So I have that going for me.”
“Do you really think that he would kill you?” Winter asks, after failing yet again to smile at my attempt to lighten things up.
Again, this is not a question I would answer if anyone else dared put it to me. But this is Winter. Her boyfriend is an immortal vampire. They share blood.
In comparison, Ty and I are nowhere near as toxic. We’re relatively healthy as fuck.
I wave a hand. “At this point I’m less worried about Ty and more worried about other douchebag wolves thinking they can step to him because they imagine there’s some weakness in us not being fully mated.”
“Is there?” Winter asks, her gaze a little too heavy on mine.
“No,” I say, automatically. Maybe a little defensively.
“No, of course not. It’s about the perceived weakness they assume must lurk in Ty because he hasn’t put me in my place.
That’s the only strength they recognize.
And it’s not that I think he can’t take them if they try to fight him, because he can.
He will. But it will be a whole thing, and guess who they’ll all blame? ”
Winter nods and drains her coffee, but even after she leaves the kitchen so she can head off to her coffee stand on Stage Road, I find myself turning what she told me—and asked me—over and over in my head.
I do my dishes, and virtuously do Briar’s, too, because that’s the kind of giving person I am when I’m feeling aggrieved. I tell myself it’s nothing less than a goddamn olive branch toward an incarcerated goddess’s intended victim when really, it’s an empty cereal bowl.
I push my way back out into the yard. It’s still cold, and the fog is clinging on for dear life.
I let my gaze move over the old vegetable garden pen, long since gone to seed.
At this time of year, the pen and the yard itself are little more than mud.
The evergreens keep the woods that press in around the house from looking too bare, and I like that.
I missed these cool winters of green and gray when I lived back east.
I breathe in, scenting the air, but can’t smell anything or anyone out of the ordinary.
Not that I would expect to. As I once told Winter, my moving onto her land pretty much guaranteed that the pack would keep it safe.
Savi renting a cottage here practically catapulted this whole hill into sanctuary status.
Winter being the oracle and the consort of the vampire king means it’s even safer here now.