Page 113 of The Reveal
Sure enough, when I look up, Briar is there in the doorway.
Scowling, obviously, with that hat jammed down on her head, as always. Tonight she’s wearing a sweatshirt, I assume in deference to the October weather outside. Everything is black, so that she looks like a shroud, and I remind myself that she pays to live here. I can’t demand to know what the hell she’s doing, lurking around like that in the communal kitchen area.
Though I do wonder what the hell she’s been doing while all this has been going on.
Something pokes at me as I think that. Maybe the fact that I don’t know what she is. Human or something else, I have no idea. I remember the weird way she and Savi seemed to face off that first day they showed up here. It seems impossible that she’s notsomething.
If she knows what’s been happening, though, it’s weird that none of them indicated that she should be involved in the gathering earlier tonight. It’s tempting to consider it a simple oversight, and I almost ask her, but some odd reluctance inside me keeps me from it.
“Do you need something?” I ask instead.
“A man is moving in?” she demands. “I didn’t sign up to live on this property with someman.”
“Briar,” I say, in my best imitation of Savi’s endless serenity, “you don’t interact with anyone. You barely leave your cottage.”
“But I could,” she retorts.
I have no idea how to reply to that, so I don’t. I walk toward her so that she’ll have to back up and let me out of the laundry room, though it seems to take her a beat too long to do that. She moves back into the kitchen, still glaring at me sullenly.
“Anyway, my brother’s home. He’ll be staying here, in the house he grew up in, obviously. If you happen to run into him in the kitchen, no worries. He doesn’t bite.” Though as I say that, I have to wonder why I’m assumingshedoesn’t. “Since you don’t seem to be even remotely trepidatious about walking in the woods, you might also enjoy sitting out on the back porch. Or the front porch. Knock yourself out.”
“This place is bullshit,” she growls at me. Briar puts a hand up while she says it, then rests it against her own chest. Just below her clavicle. It makes me do the same, though it makes me realize that I’m not wearing Augie’s medallion. “This place is bullshit, you’re bullshit, and your brother isfuckingbullshit.”
“I’ll pass that on,” I assure her. I even smile.
I go back into the main part of the house and sit in the living room. I hear Briar crash around in the kitchen, and though I’m flipping through a book when she storms back outside and circles around the house, I manage to catch her filthy glare from between the boards on the windows all the same. Maybe I just feel it, but it lands either way. I can even hear her cottage door slam shut across the yard.
Everything around me is still, then. Quiet.
There are so many things that I could think about, now that I’m alone. Everything involving Ariel. The whole death goddess situation. The fact that Ariel returned Augie to me with very little fanfare and no further talk of debt—and I’m not sure if I should celebrate that yet, because maybe it’s coming. My grandmother, whose condition seemspretty stable these days. Maybe even better now that I know that a lot of her strangest statements are because she’s an oracle.
Instead of any of those things, I entertain myself by thinking about my one asshole tenant, like a normal person.
And the more I do that, the more I can almost convince myself that everything really is normal. Just for a little while. Augie’s fine. I’m fine. No vampires, no werewolves, no supernatural shenanigans. We have a mortgage to pay, so we took in renters. Augie’s in with Gran, and I can hear him making her laugh.
I wish more than anything that our problems were no worse than these.
Bills to pay. Family complications.
Honestly, looking back, it all seems a lot more peaceful than I remember it being at the time.
When Augie comes out of Gran’s room, I’m still sitting there. He walks over without a word and throws himself down beside me, and then we sit there for a long while.
His shoulder presses into mine, like our foreheads down in that dungeon.
There are so many things to say that neither one of us says anything.
It feels a lot like peace.
Gradually, however, I realize that he’s tense. Getting tenser by the moment, though he still doesn’t say anything.
I know what it is immediately, and I wonder why I didn’t think of this before. Did I want to believe that Augie could magically be cured of his addictions? If there were a magical way to make him clean, surely, someone would have mentioned it by now.
But ... I don’t want to end this moment. The closest thing to peace I think we’ve ever had. Reveal or no Reveal.
I think he feels the same. I can see when he starts to sweat, but he doesn’t say anything then, either. Probably because he doesn’t want to lie to me, the way he’s done too many times to count. Like we both wantto believe that part—the lying part—is all in the past no matter what we’re pretending tonight.
But addiction never has given one shit about anyone’sfeelings.
