Page 6 of The Reveal
It’s my turn to smile. “I can’t even imagine. Not Lilianne Bishop’s daughter? Not Augie’s twin? Not Sarah’s granddaughter? How would I even exist?”
Maddox nods. “You get it.”
I tell myself that it’s just leftover high school stuff that has me feeling a little silly after that, like my insides are carbonated, because the coolest girl in high school approved of something I said.
This strikes me as a really great way to get eaten.
I order myself to snap out of it as we reach the first cottage. “There’s a kitchen and laundry in the main house,” I tell her. “But other than that, the house is off limits.”
I don’t explain why. The fact of me being human and snackable is why. It doesn’t need stating.
Then again, if her other wolf senses are as good as I suspect her hearing is, she probably doesn’t need any explanation. She can likely scent my wariness as easily as she can smell my grandmother in her room from across the yard.
Or maybe she knows all about me the way I know all about her, because monsters or not, Jacksonville is a tiny little mountain town in a valley that has always been fairly isolated. The population was just under three thousand people before the Reveal. I don’t think anyone knows what it is now, only that it’s smaller.
Much, much smaller.
At the door to the cottage, I motion for her to go in before me. I think I see a glint in those compelling eyes of hers, but she doesn’t argue. She lilts her way onto the front step with that same light, easy athleticism that reminds me—in a jarring sort of way—that I’ve known this woman for most of my life. Maybe not for the past seven years or so, but before that, I would know her at a glance even if I saw her in a crowd.
It feels like a strange sort of intimacy. I’ve had precious little of that the past three years.
I wait outside, my back to a tall tree and my eyes on the growling men across the yard, as Maddox goes in and out of the three cottages. They’re all minimally furnished, with beds and dressers, and rugs to take the cold out of the wood floors. The largest one sits a little bit farther back into the woods, giving the illusion of privacy. I made it nice, but to me, it will always be the shack my parents moved into when they wanted my grandmother out of their business. That led nowhere good. Augie followed their lead after high school, moving into one of the smaller cottages with similar results.
Maddox takes her time exploring, then comes back to find me by the tree. “I’ll take the big one, if it’s available.”
“It is.”
“Look at that,” Maddox says with a smile. “We’re practically roommates.”
I think about that as I take her around to the back of the house and sit at the kitchen table—gun still between us and pointed at her—to hammer out the details. Was she being nice? Or was that a threat? If a person happens to be a supernatural being with excessive agility, speed, and even more athleticism than she has in her human form, she could very easily use her proximity to the house to find a way into it.
Augie and I climbed out onto the roof above the front porch and then down to the ground more than once during high school—and then back in again. It wasn’teasy, but it was doable. And we were not werewolves.
I think about what Samuel said, about not letting monsters live here, but that’s easy for him to say. No one’s chasing him and his sister for mortgage money, which we might all know is just an extortion racket—but everyone in the valley also knows Franklin Hendry is a bully. A mean one.
I name an extravagant rent-and-wolf-deposit figure, or at least it seems extravagant to me, but Maddox only shrugs. “Sounds great. When can I move in?”
I assume this shell-shocked feeling will fade. It better. I need to be more scared of her than awed. “As soon as you want.”
“I’ll be in by tonight.” She stands up from the kitchen table, then digs into one of her pockets and pulls out a very thick wad of cash. “This is half the security deposit. I’ll be back with the rest of the deposit and all of my shit. Can’t wait for girl talk, roomie.”
“That sounds vaguely threatening, actually.” I’m proud that I dare to say that to her.
“What? I can braid hair.” But she laughs at that as she turns and saunters on out of the house.
And it takes me a long few moments to recognize that I’m still sitting there where she left me. At the kitchen table, still holding a gun in front of me.
A gun that didn’t seem to concern her at all.
But beggars can’t be choosers, especially not in times like these. I pocket the cash after counting it out to find that it is, in fact, exactly half of the security deposit.
Then I make my way out of the locked-tight kitchen to the front door to secure the gate from the inside. Out in the yard, I see Maddox and those men. Her cousins.Wolves, just like her.
But what they look like—what they’ve always looked like—is bikers. The dangerous, Harley-Davidson-riding,Sons of Anarchy–type outlaw bikers, that is. There are symbols on the leather they wear, but they’re not in English. Maybe they never were. They’re the kind of menthat encourage you not to make direct eye contact, because even when they were passing as human, they were still predators.
Maddox, meanwhile, weaves through them with total unconcern.
No wonder she found high school entertaining, if this was her homelife.
