Page 101 of The Reveal
Once. Again.
Then, in a flash, I’m standing on my own doorstep.
I’m there on the porch, and Ariel is nowhere to be seen.
I’m wet. It’s cold. I could go inside and get warm, and even though I frown at the door as if I might do just that, I don’t. I dig in my pockets for my keys and go to my truck instead. I start the engine and am halfway down the drive before I realize that I didn’t spend a single second looking around the yard.
Because I don’t want to see my usually powerful tenants? A werewolf queen, a fucking sorceress, and whatever the hell Briar is—a born-again goth? Or because I’m afraid that what I actually want is to go to them and tell them everything that’s happened to me since I last saw them, like we’regirlfriendson one of those old sitcoms?
I don’t know. Instead of worrying over it, I sneak around the side of the house and put my ear to Gran’s window. When I hear her snoring, I know she’s okay, so I drive down to Jacksonville and then up over thenext hill on Stage Road, making my way out to the coffee stand. When I pull up, there’s no one around, and I have a terrible, sinking feeling—
But then Birdie appears at the drive-up window and laughs when she sees me.
“I got here at ten,” she tells me. “And people werehet up. There was a crowd, recriminations aplenty, andseveralclaw marks on the back door.”
“I hiked McLoughlin yesterday,” I tell her. “I don’t know what I was thinking, but I slept in.”
“I hiked McLoughlin once,” she says. “It sucked, and not only because I was pretending I might be straight. Don’t do that again.”
I think of those cloaked figures in the clearing, the rise and fall of those terrible blades. That laughing, bloody mouth that sucked me in and wanted me dead.
“I won’t,” I promise her. “But I did want to check in here and make sure the stand was still ...”
“Standing?” She laughs again. “Barely. There was a weird message when I got in, though.”
She ducks back behind the counter and comes out with a piece of paper, then passes it out to me through the window. “Supposedly from good old Doug. Who I, personally, haven’t laid eyes on in a very long time.”
“Not since May,” I agree. “I only remember because he was here talking aboutmanagerial traininglike we have to worry about corporate dropping by and then made a May the Fourth joke.”
“Hey, as long as we get paid, right?” Birdie sighs a little, but what else is there to say? Disappearances rarely have happy endings. That was true back in the before times too. “Just don’t make me have to step up and manage this place. I shirk responsibility as a matter of course. The best part of the Reveal is that no one’s around to lecture me on my wasted potential.”
I don’t think she’s serious, having known her all our lives, but I don’t challenge her. I frown at the message instead.
It doesn’t really make sense. There’s something about protected space and how we should all prepare ourselves for new hours.
“I guess we wait and see what the new hours are,” I say, shrugging.
“Living the dream,” Birdie replies with fake cheer.
But she also hands me my paycheck, so when I wave goodbye to her, I drive back into Jacksonville and park in front of the historic old bank.
I might recently have been bigger than the galaxy, a goddess in scope if not ambition, but there are still small, venal men and their pet goons who need their money. Somehow I doubt Franklin Hendry will care that I had a face-to-face with a vicious death goddess out on an astral plane. I doubt he would even know what those words mean.
I get out of my truck and dash for the bank’s door, because it’s still pouring—something I’ll have to chat with Savi about—and wish I really was a devourer of worlds when I push my way inside to find Franklin Hendry and a couple of his dead-eyed thugs inside.
I’ve met monsters I like better than these actual humans.
Alotbetter.
It doesn’t say great things about me and what I’ve become that I find myself hoping that last night with Ariel rearranged enough stuff in me that I’m coming down on the nonhuman side of that equation. I shake off the rain, run my hands over my wet hair, and walk in like I’m thinking about having them all as a snack.
I might not be a vampire, but I know how to play one.
The men, who usually leer and make vile remarks—supposedly under their breath but alwaysjustloud enough to hear—are shockingly silent.
I take this to mean I’m giving them a show that’s too close tovampirefor comfort.
I do nothing to make them feel any better about it.
