Page 22 of The Reveal
I love them both, but I can’t disagree.
It’s just that before today, Gran never really seemed to take a side in all that.
Augie once dared to yell at her about it.
But the last thing I need to be doing while scanning the customers and the surrounding parking lot for monsters is lose myself in old, unhappy memories.
Augie had been mad at me that same night.You think that you’re winning points by saying nothing, don’t you? You think you’re reallydoing something, but all you’re actually doing is sticking your head in the sand.
Not everything I feel needs to be broadcast to the entire fucking world,I snapped at him.
I relive that a lot.
I ask myself, often, if that was the moment he decided to stop fighting the darkness in him. Oh, I have other moments to choose from, but I remember that one so clearly. The look on his face, like I had stabbed him. A kind of dawning understanding, like he didn’t know me at all.
I think about that expression all the time.
It wakes me up in the middle of the night sometimes, with a damp spot on my pillow.
But when a very rude blast from a truck horn slaps me back into the coffee stand and the line of angry, not-entirely-human customers comes back into focus, I’m grateful.
Pathetically grateful to think about nothing but coffee drinks until it’s time to go home.
6.
On the drive home through the late-afternoon smoke, I also think about Ariel Skinner.
He looms over everything, much heavier than the smoke. I’ve never laid eyes on him, but I remember women talking about him years ago.Ruinous,I heard one of them call him, but with a certain widening of the eyes as she huddled with her girlfriends at one of the many coffee shops we used to have here.
I used to wonder what that meant. Now Ireallywonder. What was ruinous back then? We all know the various ways sadistic or even nonsadistic vampires canruinpeople. Anyone who lived through the first few weeks of the Reveal knows this, very likely against their will. But how did vampires—much less their king—do it back when people would have thought he was human?
The kids I know who took classes at his school refer to him, still, as “Master Skinner.” I always thought that was a weird martial arts thing. Now I think about Ty Ceridwen’s hand around Maddox’s neck and wonder if it’s more than that.
I take the road that bypasses California Street, Jacksonville’s main drag, because I don’t want to run into anyone I know. It’s likely that Samuel has shared his feelings about my new tenants with the entire town, and the idea of tending to all that potential hysteria on top of a summons from the vampire king is ... overwhelming.
I can easily imagine someone like the perpetually tutting Candace Wei, proprietress of one of the town’s wine-country inns in the before times, demanding to know how she should sleep knowing that the monsters are not only roaming the darkness but tucked up on my grandmother’s land.
I do not need to school poor Candace Wei on real problems, mostly because I wouldloveto do exactly that.
Though I’m sure her take on Ariel Skinner would be interesting. There aren’t many people in this valley, living or dead or undecided, that she doesn’t know. And none she doesn’t have an opinion on.
As I head up the hill and into the woods, I decide I’mdefinitelynot going to Archangel MMA tonight. By the time I park, look around, and make a run for the front door, I’m back to thinking I should.
I spend the rest of the afternoon vacillating back and forth.
And also accidentally tracking what the tenants are doing. I don’t mean to. I’m still not used to anyone being here but me and Gran, so every time I catch a glimpse of someone else on the property, I automatically pay attention. I think they call that a trauma response.
Briar leaves not long after I get back. I see her out the window, walking with her head low as she goes straight down the drive. This makes her either very brave or extraordinarily foolish. No one I know would risk being out in the open in the woods—up on the hill where no one can see a monster violating Jacksonville’s safe zone—without the temporary safety of a vehicle made of steel all around them. Too much fragile flesh and easily crunched bone on display when you’re walking, to my mind.
Later, I see Savi’s gleaming vehicle as it drives away because I amstillworking on a particularly annoying latch on one of the living room windows. It won’t catch as securely as I want it to, so I’m wrestling with it. I frown at her taillights, because it’s weird that all the rest of the vehicles here are covered in ash from the fires. Hers is the only one that ash doesn’t seem to like.
I’m up in my attic rooms when I see Maddox through one of the windows I’ve decided needs more boards over it before another nightfall. She comes out of the woods, clearly walking back from the path that winds its way into the trail system that used to be one of the selling points of this area. These days, I don’t know many people who go out for a hike, or an evening in the outdoor amphitheater that used to throw summer concerts, because it’s too tempting to the things that live in the forest.
We’re already bait. Why throw ourselves directly at the predators?
Werewolves have no reason to worry about such things. Maddox looks like she’s been for a run. I stare down at her, and it takes a few moments for my brain to filter throughwhyI find what she’s wearing so extraordinary. It’s that she’s dressed the way girls used to dress—before. Cute little running shorts and a sports bra, because back then, no one had to worry about toting around weapons and first aid kits.
The fact that I, personally, would never be caught dead in booty shorts and a sports bra—or out on a run, for that matter—doesn’t keep me from feeling a wild pang of jealousy. Or nostalgia. I’m not sure which it is, but I order myself to get over it as I finish up with the window.
