Page 23 of The Reveal
When I’m done, I gather up the dirty clothes that are starting to look like a carpet on my bedroom floor and head down to the laundry room off the kitchen.
I meet up with Maddox as she swings in through the back door. She smiles, stepping aside as I move past her with my arms full.
“Have a nice run?” I ask her.
“Run?” She blinks. Then her smile widens. “Yes. It was an excellent run.”
She says that so strangely that I look after her as she goes to rummage in the fridge and see what looks a whole lot like more fingerprints on the backs of her thighs.
Oh,I think.
And then I have a lot of trouble sorting out my darks and lights in the laundry room because I keep thinking about Ty Ceridwen’s hand onMaddox’s throat, which was the thing he felt was okay to doin public, and how little she seemed to mind.
But it all kind of shifts around, and I’m suddenly thinking about Ariel Skinner instead, only it’smythroat andhishand with his face in shadow but all the blood in me moving wild like honey—
Only this, too, leads to more waffling on my part. Because I certainly don’t need to have weird fantasies about fuckingvampires. Aren’t nightmares about slithery powers that want to gulp me down gross enough? Isn’t it bad enough that I had to make direct eye contact with the werewolf alpha? Why do I have to meet all the terrible things that live in this valley? Much less convince myself that the ones not in my head arehot. There must be a word for people who decide to lust after the things that will almost certainly kill them. It’s clearly pathological.
What I can’t get past is the distinct feeling that none of this should be happening. Not to me. Samuel is the person who’s made himself visible to all the various monster factions. He’s the one who bravely put that target on his back and is the voice of humans in this valley.
I’m a goddamn barista, for fuck’s sake.
I decide, definitively, that I’m doing absolutely nothing tonight as I sit down to dinner with Gran in the kitchen about an hour before sunset. I wanted to feed her in her room, but she insisted that she could not bear it.
And believe me, once her mind is made up, there’s no changing it.
But I make sure I’m heavily armed, all the same.
I tense a little when Savi walks in the room, because there’s no telling how Gran is going to react. I wait as Gran looks up from her dinner—a selection of her favorite canned delicacies—and blinks, no doubt as taken aback at the sight of such elegance and sophistication in our family kitchen as I am.
“You,” she says.
Savi looks at her and inclines her head. “Me,” she agrees.
“It’s like you two know each other,” I say, and laugh.
Neither of them joins in, and I find myself thinking about the ashless vehicle and the fact that it’s always a little bit cold when Savi ventures near. I thought it was just me reacting to the novelty of more people around, but I don’t have to fight off the urge to shiver when it’s Maddox, do I?
“The cards are filled with portents,” Gran says confidingly, but not to me. It’s like she’s decided that Savi will know what she’s talking about. “Death and destruction are the least of it.”
“Death and destruction are always the least of it,” Savi replies in a tone that suggests that this is a perfectly normal and reasonable conversation. “Dying is a lovely oblivion, if you do it right. Destruction is merely the road map there. It’s the living that hurts.”
“There are worse things.” Gran taps her fork against the inside rim of her bowl, then points it at Savi. “Like the hunger.”
“If you’re hungry, Gran,” I interject, keeping my voice calm as I can, “you could just eat your dinner. Instead of wallowing in all these dark prophecies.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Savi flinch at that. As if I’ve startled her.
But when I look over at her, she is simply unpacking various items of food from a tote bag and placing them on one of the empty shelves in the refrigerator. Not that I’m spying, but I am interested to see that all of it is vegetarian. Vegan, I’m pretty sure. Alternative milks. Leafy greens. Green juices, indeterminate pastes, and other such things that I would have told you were impossible to get this side of the Reveal, even if I’d wanted them.
What I can’t decide is if Savi is some kind of monster I’ve never heard of before, or if she’s the kind of monster I’ve always known about. Like one of those insufferable doctors’ wives who spent their pre-Reveal lives holding court in their giant Italianate houses up in the east Medford hills, sending their children to private schools and summer camps out of state and acting as if their cheating, scrubs-in-public husbands were actual deities.
My intuition tells me that Savi is running from something, and being alive in the world tells me that the thing that women mostly run from is men. Any old human man, as we all know, can become a monster far too easily and without provocation.
But since I don’t know, and her stuff could be trauma based, I don’t ask.
After dinner, I get Gran ready for bed, even though she grumbles that it’s early.
“I suppose you have big nighttime plans again,” she says sharply as I settle her in the bed. “I keep hoping you’ll change, Lilianne.” Her gaze gets sad as she looks at me, and it makes everything in me clench. Even though I know she’s not talking tome. Just the ghost of my mom. “You keep promising and you keep breaking your promises. If you can’t do it for yourself, or for me, what about those babies? Don’t they deserve more?”
