Page 50 of The Reveal
I freeze up at the window, wondering how anyone could know what happened with Ariel.Already.Was that the whole point of it? Was he filming it?
Do vampires even show up on film? Does that count as a reflection, or is it something else?
And even if he did all those things, where would he show this film? There is no internet these days for revenge pornographers to use.
Focus,I order myself.
“You know what they say about rumors, Birdie,” I drawl, with a careless sort of smile that I don’t feel. “One day you’re spreading them and the next day they’re burying you.”
“Maddox Hemming,” Birdie says. Reverently. “In your house. True or false?”
Samuel really has applied himself to getting the word out, I see. I feel the urge to lie. Or explain. I don’t. “Not in my house,” I say. “But in one of our little cottages, within sight of my house? True.”
Birdie sighs, dropping her hand and getting a wistful look in her eyes. “Maddox Hemming is how I knew I was gay,” she tells me dreamily. “It was sixth grade. I knew I wasn’t like everyone else, but I didn’t know why. All the girls were clustered together at recess talking about boys and bras and who they wanted their first kiss to be with. It was like everyone had a script and I didn’t.”
“I don’t think anyone had a script,” I point out. “If they did, it would just have been school. Instead of twelve-plus years of trauma.”
Birdie isn’t listening to me. “And then one day, in gym class, Maddox Hemming wasrunning.” She sighs again, and it’s deeper this time. “She was just running. In a little pair of shorts. I looked at her and just like that, I cameonline.”
“And here I thought you were going to yell at me for living with the werewolves.”
“In any other circumstances, I would,” Birdie says with a laugh. “But not when it’sMaddox Hemming. Whowouldn’tlive with Maddox Hemming if they had the chance? I would live with her right now, in fact. Do you have an extra cottage? A spare room?”
I laugh too. “I don’t think that Miriam would like that much.”
“My wife is a woman of great discernment,” Birdie says with a cackle, as if I don’t know Miriam, wasn’t at their wedding, and don’t know all about her wife’s so-calleddiscernmentwhen it comes to Birdie ogling other women. Though it’s true that Maddox is a law unto herself. “She would move us both in.”
Birdie’s still laughing when she goes and parks her car, then waits for me to open the back door. Once I’m covering the small parking lot with a shotgun, she jumps out and hurries inside, then helps me throw all the locks.
She smiles at me as she goes to make herself a drink to start her shift. “Tell me everything,” she says. “Like whatshampoodoes she use?”
“I’m not a stalker, actually? So I don’t know?”
“Now I might yell at you,” she says, frowning. “I needdetails.”
I’m feeling almost normal when I get back in the truck a while later. I wave at Birdie—who yells something about documentation—and head back toward Jacksonville. The smoke is brooding today, moving in sullen clumps along the road as I make my way back toward the Jacksonville town line. In some spots I can almost glimpse a little blue sky. In others, the smoke is so thick I can’t see much of the road in front of me.
I almost manage to convince myself that too-hot vampires, cavorting on rooftops with said vampires, and disturbing visions were nothing but a dream.
But as I make my way over the hill that winds its way down from what used to be vineyards into the heart of Jacksonville, a huge, gleaming SUV with ominously tinted windows swings around me as if it means to pass.
It comes out of nowhere. One moment there’s nothing but smoke in the rearview window, then they’re practically in my back seat.
“Shit,” I mutter.
Then I say it again, louder, when the SUV doesn’t pass.
It slows, then careens toward the passenger side of my truck.
I assume it’s going to run me off the road, so I slam my foot on the brake. They swerve ahead of the truck and end up perpendicular to me.
I assume this is an ambush.
Good thing I’m ready. I reach for the shotgun that rides shotgun, as is right and proper, pointing it out my window as someone in the vehicle before me rolls down its blacked-out windows.
And the only reason I don’t shoot is because I recognize them immediately.
First, I realize that they’re vampires. Two of them. Second, I realize that I saw them last night at Ariel’s studio, performing those disturbing, mesmerizing forms to perfection.
