Chapter 11 #3
She sighs a little, then visibly collects herself. “I didn’t actually stop to talk about villagers with pitchforks or Ariel’s many charms, although I could.” She fixes that indigo gaze of hers on me. I know instantly that this is oracle shit. “I had another dream about you.”
“Then we have to start thinking critically about the fact that there’s only one topic you seem muddy about.” I search her face. “Right?”
“We know there’s a muddy mess,” she returns, evenly. “We might think it’s about a certain topic, but maybe it’s about a number of topics. I have no way of knowing.”
“That sounds very scientific.” I shrug. “I’ll continue thinking that it’s Vin?a. Because if she could, she would. With a literal vengeance.”
“This dream about you was different,” Winter says, clearly not interested in talking about muddiness.
“When Vin?a was planning that ritual on Mount McLoughlin, it was always the same vision, over and over, but grosser and bloodier and scarier each time. I don’t know if that’s because it was specifically aimed at me or if yours is changing because you’re changing things.
” She looks down for a moment. “I miss Gran. She would know.”
Winter’s grandmother was a good lady. I reach over and put my hand on Winter’s arm. I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say. We were all there. We all watched the old oracle die. We watched her go out like a badass, the way she lived, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s gone.
“Anyway,” Winter says after a moment, her voice sounding thicker than before.
“It wasn’t in that same space, those rocks and fires.
It was somewhere darker. I want to say a cave?
” She’s looking in my direction, but she has that faraway look in her eyes.
Whatever she’s seeing, it’s not me. “This time, that same wolf was walking towards you. I thought he shifted, but I couldn’t quite see his face.
There was a shadow. I can’t tell if it was an actual shadow or if that part of the vision was just fuzzy.
” Her gaze clears. Sharpens. “What I do know is that he hates you.”
I feel something cold inch down my spine. I repress a full-body shudder, and it’s a lot harder than I want it to be.
“Good news,” I say lightly. “I’m used to that.”
Winter, I’ve noticed, doesn’t like to argue with people when she knows they’re wrong.
When I think about the house she grew up in, and what I know of the things that happened there, I assume that this is trauma based, like everything else that makes us all .
. . us. In any case, I’m grateful. At the moment I don’t particularly feel like being called out, thank you.
“Meanwhile,” Winter goes on as if it’s not clear to both of us that I’m pretending not to be a little freaked out that her visions are focused on me but nothing else, her voice lowering, “Savi is reporting a serious uptick in the size and number of sacrifices. Ariel says that the ones around the house match hers, but he still won’t let me see them. ”
“He’s protecting you.” I can’t help but smile. “That’s so cute.”
“I was literally in the middle of a cruel and bloody sacrifice on the side of Mount McLoughlin in October, during which I was supposed to die by the way, and managed not to throw up or cry,” Winter reminds me.
“I’ve also lived this long despite the Reveal.
I don’t think a dead animal is going to kill me. ”
“Or maybe,” I say quietly, “you have enough scary shit in your head. You don’t need more.”
Winter makes a frustrated sort of noise, but she doesn’t argue. “It feels like things are ramping up,” she says after moment. “Like it did before Halloween. Except worse this time, because I have no idea what’s going on.”
I nod. “I hear you.”
“I don’t even know what’s going on with my brother.” Her voice is lower, but her gaze is stricken when she turns to me. “Do you? You said he was okay, but is he? Have you even seen him since he went into whatever the fuck werewolf detox is?”
I don’t take the accusation in her tone personally. It’s like the two-body thing. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have the power she does and to accept that she has those powers only after a series of upsetting events—only for them to be taken away. Or diminished, anyway. Muddied.
Of course hearing howling in the hills and thinking about Halloween is going to have her even more worried about her twin than usual. He’s the only family she has left.
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” I tell her, evenly. “When I go back up to the den, I’m going to go see him myself. You’re right, I haven’t visited. It’s not the kind of place and he’s almost certainly not in the kind of state that lends itself to visitors, though. You need to know that.”
“I know detox is terrible. Of course I know that.”
“This is different,” I say. As carefully as I can. “Because it’s a blood addiction. It’s not the drugs you’re thinking about. Drugs are bad enough, I grant you, but there’s magic involved with this.” I blow out a breath and say the other part. “No one’s ever actually done this before.”
“What? Ty said that he could do it!” Her eyes are wide, and for a moment she looks the way I remember her from grade school, a long time ago. A little girl. An innocent.
The way we all were, once.
“If anyone can, Ty can,” I say loyally, though I also happen to believe it. “He knows how to do it, theoretically. But that doesn’t mean that your brother will let him. Okay?”
Winter lets out a breath that sounds more ragged than before, but she doesn’t cry. I can’t remember ever seeing her cry, not even when we were kids. Then again, I’m not big on crying either. “I’m sorry I asked. But . . . I would like to know how he is.”
“I got you,” I promise her.
Though I find I’m feeling a lot less pleased with myself when she gets back into her truck and drives away, leaving me there with too many things left to fix. And what feels like very little time to do it.