Page 4 of The Reveal
At midday I go home, because the Jenny he mentioned is his sister and she runs the paper, because we have a paper again now. There’s power—no one has ever explained how—but no internet, no TV, no radio. All of that blew up. Or someone ate it, who knows. Jenny’s been collecting news for the past couple of years and passing it out all over the valley in the armored truck she got from one of the banks that didn’t make it.
That’s how I advertised for renters right here in the human safety zone.
I get home, I check on Gran and get her settled again, and then right on time, at twelve thirty, when I advertised that I’d talk to any cottage-rental hopefuls, there’s a knock on the front door.
I open the door, but not the metal gate, and stand there with my guns drawn, the way I’d greet anyone.
But this isn’t anyone.
This is a girl my own age.
A girl I recognize.
A girl I haven’t thought about in a long time, because she was one of the few who got out. Back then, it wasn’t monsters that kept people in the valley—it was not having money or sufficient imagination, takeyour pick. People hit ceilings in a place like this and stay put. And often wither. My parents are a prime example of that kind of surrendered life.
Maddox Hemming had never seemed like the college type. Too ... physical. Slinking around with her wild hair, covered in tattoos, she was always followed by a pack of boys who couldn’t seem to decide if she was one of them or their queen. I’d assumed she was having the sort of glorious adolescenceIcertainly wasn’t.
That was a long time ago. Now it’s three years past the Reveal, and I see the truth about Maddox isn’t that she’s secretly an academic, despite her defection to her fancy East Coast school.
Maybe she’s that too.
But the important thing about Maddox Hemming is that she’s a werewolf.
And, I now realize with a kind of horror mixed through with something that’s not exactlyadmiration, always was one.
Because these days I know what a werewolf looks like in its human form—another gift of the Reveal. The way they hold themselves. That wild hair. And eyes that gleam gold when the light hits them just right.
She smirks at me. That’s when I realize I’ve cocked both guns.
“Damn, Winter,” she drawls, like this is a casual conversation in the bathroom of the old high school that someone burned down last year. Like she isn’t a monster. Like I’m not pointing weapons at her face that she must know I’m fully prepared to fire. “That’s an aggressive way to interview a potential renter. No wonder you have space to spare.”
2.
I don’t know how to respond to the idea of Maddox Hemming as a potential housemate, but I also don’t have time to worry about it, because all I can hear is growling.
The kind of growling that makes every hair on my body feel like it’s trying to crawl off and take cover.
It takes me a minute to understand that’s not just inside me, a little hysteria to meet the moment, though if it were, that would be surprising. Given everything else that’s happened, what’s a werewolf at the door? Even if it’sthiswerewolf, who won prom queen in a write-in campaign but was too cool to actually attend?
The growling gets louder, though, and it’s not coming from Maddox, who crosses her arms and leans back against the porch rail like this is an easy, casual moment, with growling wolves and the smoke getting thick.
“Ignore them,” she advises me. “I wish I could.”
I take my eyes off her then, which maybe isn’t the smartest thing in the world. But I don’t lower my guns. There are different levels ofnot smarton this side of the Reveal. And I like my chances at close range.
That’s when I see them, shapes in the smoke out there where the yard turns into tangled knots of madrone trees and tall pines. The wind shifts, so the smoke does too, and the shapes become men in leather jackets, jeans, and motorcycle boots. A pack of them, and I would know them for werewolves even if I didn’t know them by name. More or less.
They are the type of men that everyone could tell were feral before we knew how to identify wolves at a glance.
“My cousins,” Maddox confirms, without turning around. “They’re not real big on the idea of me moving this close to humans.”
I shift my gaze back to her. “You have fangs. And claws. And, you know, superhuman strength and speed. According to all known reports.”
She laughs at that, and I feel the strangest sense of dizziness, because it’s like falling through time. Back before all the monsters and loss and terror. Back to high school, when I would hear that same laugh down a hallway and see a glimpse of Maddox as she glided by, more effortless and powerful than a teenage girl ought to be.
If someone had told me she was a werewolf then, even though it was years before all the monsters would reveal themselves, I would have believed it.
“Historically speaking,” she tells me when she stops laughing, “humans are pretty good at coming up with new and ingenious ways to hunt us down. We take a dim view of that and generally prefer to stick together.”
