Page 7 of The Reveal
I stand there watching as they walk back into the trees. When I finally hear the sound of their motorcycles firing up, it’s far enough away that I get the impression they parked down at the bottom of the drive.
It feels a lot like they walked up to get the lay of the land without alerting anyone to their presence. Something that wouldn’t have occurred to me three years ago, but I think a lot more about defense strategies now.
When the earsplitting sound of their Harleys is gone, I take the opportunity to walk out into the yard and look around. I don’t see any lurking monsters, which is good. But looks can be deceiving. I’m hoping that the presence—and, I can only hope, lingering scent—of that many werewolves in the front yard will keep all the rest of the tooth-and-claw crowd at bay.
I examine the front of the house and the yard, then the cottages, and not with the usual surge of nostalgia and emotion. Because right now it doesn’t matter that this is my childhood home. That it has its own tangled little history, plunked down here in the Jacksonville hills. Right now I’m looking for access points and weaknesses in my perimeter.
It will obviously be no trouble at all for werewolves to hop right up onto the roof of the porch of the main house and go inside, should they decide they want to. That means they can also get up on the actual roof, giving them access to me in the attic, so that means it’s time to install some more iron gates over the windows.
Probably should have thought of that before I put an ad in the paper, but in my defense, I thought humans would be the ones moving in here. I thought we’d unite against the monsters, if necessary—but just in case the humans were untrustworthy too, I’d blocked access to the house from the kitchen.
I remind myself that Maddox could have killed me at any moment during the house tour. She didn’t. Not to mention, there’s no reason I can think of that the local werewolf pack would want to go to such lengths to station one of their own here.
Besides, she gave me money. I need money. So that kind of answers any questions right there.
I go back inside, close the heavy gate but not the door, and check on Gran. Thankfully, she’s deep into her afternoon nap. She mutters a little as I look at her, and I wonder what she dreams of. Or if she has nightmares like me. But if she can recall her dreams when she wakes, she never remembers them long enough to tell me.
I ease her bedroom door shut behind me and lock it again, just in case anyone else drops by. The ad said I would be entertaining candidates from 12:30 to 3:00 p.m. I expected that no one would come. When Gran came up with the idea to make room for renters in the cottages, it was to help people. But that was a long time ago, when we thought folks would band together and take care of each other. We learned better.
Franklin Hendry made the rental idea a necessity, though, so here we are.
As I’m thinking that, I hear a vehicle approaching. My first, wild thought is that it’s the werewolves, coming back to tell me it was all a joke and it’s snack time after all—
But they wouldn’t come up the drive, which is half washed-out and not something I’m in a hurry to fix, in an SUV.
Particularly not the gleaming, scratchless,shinyLand Rover that pulls up in the yard outside and parks next to my poor old beat-down truck. I’m so dazzled that it takes me a minute to recognize that someone’s climbing out of the driver’s side and alighting on the dead grass of the yard.
My second thought is that this woman is much tooexpensiveto be looking for housing. She looks upper crust, whatever that means. Almost otherworldly, because everything about her looks smooth and soft andcared forin a way I would have found alien even before the Reveal. She’swearing adress, first of all, instead of the more utilitarian clothes that suit this postapocalypse. A silk dress, if I’m not mistaken, not that I’m a fabric expert. Her hair is long, thick, and glossy brown, and her bangs expertly frame her face. When she slides her oversize sunglasses down her nose to look toward the house, her eyes are luminous, a shade darker than her hair.
She looks as if a harmful ray of light has never dared touch her glowing skin. The smoke seems to clear a path around her, and the yellow tinge the wildfires leave in the sky doesn’t make her look the least bit jaundiced. Not like the rest of us.
But she doesn’t cross toward the house. She doesn’t check out the cottages, either. Instead, she frowns. She shoves her sunglasses back into place and looks back down the drive, toward the trees, where the smoke seems heavier and thicker.
I feel the urge to shiver, but I don’t. I pull out my second gun and am thankful I’m safe behind the gate.
The woman by the Land Rover cocks her head slightly to one side, and the trees seem to shake, but I have to be imagining that. I make myself breathe.
And then, oddly enough, a girl who looks about my own age walks out of the forest and into the yard.
She and the woman look at each other, and I swear there’s some kind of ... ripple of recognition between them. Or maybe the smoke seems to move. It’s weird, and it leaves me winded, but they don’t speak.
Both of them walk to the front door, though to me it seems as if there’s some kind of humming electricity all around them. Or maybe an incoming storm, as rare as those are before October.
“Do you two know each other?” I ask when they draw close.
“I just know the vibe,” says the girl, and I can see the piercing in her tongue as she rolls her eyes. “Fancy car, fancy clothes, fancy life. Not like the rest of us.”
It’s true that she doesn’t look like she possesses any of those things. She has a stocking hat jammed on her head, with black hair braidedmessily beneath. She’s wearing a faded old Pixies T-shirt, baggy cargo pants, and is covered in tattoos. There’s even one wrapped around her neck, like a background canvas for all the other piercings I can see on her face.
The beautiful woman sighs. I hear Gran’s wind chimes move in the old oak tree, though I can’t feel any breeze. “I’m looking for a private cottage to call my own,” she says to me, as if the other girl never spoke. “Are any left?”
I catch the girl looking at her with such animosity that it’s hard to imagine there isn’t at leastsomepersonal feeling behind it. Then again, it could be the silk and the smooth skin, like she’s spent the past three years in a spa.
But I stop worrying about their interpersonal dynamics, because I’m too busy trying to scan them for signs. That they might shift into something scary. That they are some kind of monster I can’t identify on sight. I check the smoky sky behind them, and that’s the trouble. They could be vampires. Especially the fancy one.
Substitute “crypt” for “spa” and she makes sense.
Despite some initial hopes that the vampires who turned up after the Reveal would sparkle and long to keep taking high school classes as their main form of entertainment, that has not proven to be the case. They’re mostly just vicious and terrifying as they rampage at will, but true to most myths, they can’t go out in the sun.
