Page 53 of The Reveal
But when I’m home, I find myself less eager to look my grandmother in the eye, and not only because of the things she told me. Or the cards she gave me, which I don’t want to look at and yet seem to see when I close my eyes. It makes my heart ache and my head hurt—and I already have enough headaches.
Though, these days, when I wake up with horrific images in my head and that piercing, throbbing pain in my temples, I also have a death goddess’s name on my tongue. Vinca the terrible. Vinca the foul.
“Vinca the fucking bitch,” I mutter to myself while scouring the back garden for zombies, who still don’t venture near. “Vinca the giant pain in my ass.”
I’ve decided that self-loathing is just another form of grief.
But I also decide that I have to stop avoiding my life during the day if I’m going to keep doing these nightly meetings with Ariel. For the lastfew days of September, I work my usual hours at the coffee stand like always—but in less of a daze. I find myself looking forward to this thing in my life that remains entirely straightforward. Working coffee and dealing with customers, both the human and monster variety, requires that I think about nothing else, and I like that.
It’s a small daily holiday from all the things I’d rather not think about.
Like my grandmother, who, I am forced to accept,really isthe powerful oracle the vampire king told me she was. I’m still sifting through my feelings on that. She’s also neither as senile as I thought she was all this time nor as consistently shrewd or with-it as she was that first night I came back from meeting Ariel.
On the one hand, it’s good to know that she wasn’t snowing me completely. She isn’tthat muchof a liar.
On the other hand, she wasn’tnotsnowing me, either.
This doesn’t change the fact that I need to take care of her. That I would and will no matter what. It just means that everythingfeelsdifferent.
When I’m at the house, I never can tell which of my tenants I’ll encounter. You’d think that I’d develop a sense of their routines, but I don’t. Savi is as mysterious as ever, with her chanting. Maddox slouches about, seemingly boneless, but I couldn’t tell you what she does with her time.
Briar is a mystery. Sometimes I think she reminds me of someone, though I can’t think who. Other times I entertain myself by imagining that her entire cottage is filled with yarn, and she sits inside it knitting herself an endless array of those beanie hats to cover her hair.
But most of the time I’m home, I think of Augie and vow to myself thatnext timeI’llmakeAriel tell me what he’d done with him. Next time I’llinsist.
Next time I’ll do more than betray my own twin with these things I feel for the monster who knows too much about both of us ... over and over again.
13.
It’s the first night of October and suddenly cold outside. It is now a week since I met Ariel, and I am no closer to finding out what happened to Augie than I was on night one. This does not make me happy.
But rather than brood on this privately, as I’ve been doing, I am sitting in the kitchen before my nightly drive into Medford. I’m watching Briar—in a knit hat, as usual—stomp around the kitchen making dire predictions that we should live it up tonight because tomorrow night is a full moon and Maddox and her friends will eat us all alive in our beds.
“Like a bag of chips, served up to them on a silver fucking platter,” she seethes.
I opt not to express my feelings on how unlikely I find it that anyone would serve bags of chips on silver platters, especially to silver-avoidant werewolves. Because I doubt that is an observation that would lead to peace on this property, and as the landlord, I need to consider such things.
Also, Briar speaks so seldomly. I’m fascinated thatthisis what she wants to talk about.
“Maddox and her friends could eat you at any moment of any day or night,” Savi replies in her serene way, which only makes Briar fume. Visibly. She is clearly as comforted by this observation as I was when they told me Ariel could kill me at any time yet hadn’t, lucky me.“Why would they wait for a moon rising to lead the way when Maddox already has a key?”
It does occur to me to wonder why Savi is always so sure that a killer who hasn’t murdered youyetis somehow safer than one whotries, but this doesn’t feel like the right moment to explore her worldview. Likely because that would come with more questions about who she really is.
“What makes you think you’d be a good meal?” Maddox asks mildly, seeming completely unperturbed by Briar’s accusations as she makes herself some dinner. Rare meat she slaps into a frying pan for about three seconds on each side that looks like it might squeak when she bites into it. She smiles at Briar as she slides her steak onto a plate. “Have you showered even once since you’ve moved in? That’s not a personal question, it’s just that I take my food prep seriously. That includes washing.”
“Besides, I assume that werewolves have better things to do under a full moon,” I add, because that seemed reasonable enough to assume. And also because Briar looks murderous. “What with all the myths and legends and whatnot.”
And then, suddenly, it becomes another one of those moments when I realize that I’ve stumbled onto something. All my tenants stare at me, as if waiting for me to say the very obvious next thing—
Except I don’t know what that is.
If it weren’t for the vampire problem occupying my thoughts, I would probably brood on that more than I have.
“Yes,” Maddox says after a moment, carefully returning her attention to her actual dinner. “There’s a lot of magic in the moon. Everyone knows that.”
For some reason, this makes Briar scoff, then storm out, slamming the back door behind her.
I remember what Maddox said that night on the back stoop about the moon and the ritual she keeps putting off. And I don’t realize how much I’m worrying about that until she comes over to the kitchen table with her plate and laughs when she sees the expression on my face.
