Page 2 of The Reveal
I know he doesn’t want that. He’s proved that enough times.
He doesn’t want anything but the vampire blood that keeps him high, somewhere down by the river with the rest of them. Those lost souls who lived through the first catastrophic rush of the Reveal, then decided that a living death was better than figuring out how to go on.
Not that I had a choice about that, either.
I go into the kitchen through the metal door I installed—with a locking system that would make a feudal lord jealous and will more importantly keep the rest of the house inaccessible to any tenants—and make the bitter coffee I like because it tastes like my feelings. And usually helps clear out my morning headaches, too. I doctor Gran’s with that powdered creamer that might be the only thing she truly loves. She’s already squawking by the time I make it through her door, and she doesn’t stop when she sees me. She points down at her cards instead.
I hate those cards. Old, weathered, long-used cards that my grandmother has always claimed let hersee. Whatever that means. They’re dark colored—or they were, once, long ago—with strange symbols on the backs and even stranger drawings on each card’s face. Looking at them always makes me feel funny, like I’m standing on some high cliff and might topple off at any moment.
But there’s no telling Gran that. She says the cards are asacred family heirloomthat I will appreciatein time.
I don’t have the heart to tell her that like most of our family heirlooms, all of which I’ve cleaned out of this rickety old house, they’re junk.
“You have a reckoning coming, Winter,” she tells me loudly, squinting at me, and I feel the usual relief that today is another day she remembers my name, because those are getting scarce.
Reckonings can bite me like everything else that tries.
I set her coffee down. “Before or after I get you to the bathroom, Gran?”
She sniffs, but she lets me help her up. Then we take care of her usual morning routine. I don’t mention that she seems more fragile or that she can walk fewer and fewer steps each day. I tell myself I’m protecting her, but I know better. As long as she can get herself from the bed to the chair, we can both pretend she’s independent.
Some days I’m not sure which one of us is doing more of that pretending.
I settle her in her chair again when we come back so she can slurp her coffee. I make her bed because she complains if I don’t.
“Remember what I told you,” I say, though I don’t expect her to. Her memory took off right around when my parents did. That was maybe a month before the Reveal, and it was a blessing, in its own way. For a while, Augie and I told her they were on their way back from the store.
Now she thinksheis.
I wish I didn’t know better myself.
She frowns at me suspiciously, a little gnarled root of a woman in a chair that dwarfs her. Her frail little ankles stick out from beneath her nightgown because she likes slippers, not socks, and I find the sight of them heartbreaking, the way I always do.
“I remember,” she says, the way she always does.
“We’re going to have some new people around,” I tell her in this weird, cheerful voice I only use in her room. Neither one of us buys it, but I can’t stop. “I’m finally renting out the cottages. It’s going to be fun.”
She scowls at me, clearly not remembering that it was initially her idea that we open up the cottages to neighbors in need after the monsters started burning people out of their homes. “My mother always said that only a dire house takes in strangers.”
I want to tell her that the house is dire as is. That it was so dire that cleaning it out made me feel as close to actual tears as I think I’ve ever been, and I’m the stern twin. That was what Augie always called me. I was the stern one and he was the sensitive one, but that’s another dire thing, because now he’s too sensitive to live and I’m so stern it might kill me.
I don’t tell her that.
I want to tell her about my meeting with Franklin Hendry, the local mortgage broker who is my father’s age and once dated my mother when they were kids—according to him, and she’s not around to confirm or deny—at the bank at the end of last month. I want to share with her how direthatwas. It’s the end of the world in real time, but Franklin Hendry’s out here ruining what few lives remain. I couldtell her that it never occurred to me that anyone would come for the bills when there hasn’t been an internet or cell phone service in years, or even any way out of this valley.
But Franklin Hendry was not devoured by the werewolves who cluster in the hills around the still-standing historic town of Jacksonville and no longer wait for full moons to change shapes. He was not exsanguinated with sneering contempt by the vampires who came out of the shadows and never went back in. He apparently avoided whatever that horrible clawed thing is that tore up my vegetable garden.
Some monsters are human, and this one has given me a deadline. I have until Halloween to pay off the back mortgage or Franklin Hendry is throwing us out.
I don’t tell Gran that it’s not me I’m worried about. It’s her. I’d love to tell Franklin Hendry to go fuck himself, but I can still pretend there are things I might outrun, given enough of a head start. She can hardly walk.
Taking in a few tenants is the least of all these evils. If I could find my manager at the drive-through coffee hut on the road that heads south, toward Ashland, I would officially ask for more hours and a raise, but no one’s seen poor Doug in months. Someone stocks the place, though. And I get an envelope of cash every Friday. That’s the only reason I still show up. That and because I like a routine that feels normal when nothing else does, or ever will be.
Also, it turns out monsters like caffeine, like anyone else.
I don’t tell Gran any of this. “It’s a new adventure,” I say instead,brightly. “When I was a little girl, you always told me that being afraid of new adventures was my cross to bear.”
Gran frowns at me in that censorious way she never used to, but it’s better not to think about the past. The good memories are harder to deal with. At least I know I survived the scary shit when the Reveal hit. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s something.
