Page 5 of The Reveal
“If you move into one of the cottages, what I’ll want to hunt down is your rent money.” I hold her gaze for a moment, noticing how strange and compelling her eyes are. Were they always this unusual? I’m not sure I ever dared look at her directly before. But I’m looking now, and her gaze is like smoky quartz, though it feels silly and overwrought to describe anything so poetically in days like these. But that’s what they’re like. Smoky and dark. I force a little smile. “And a hefty pet deposit.”
I don’t lower the guns as I say that, either.
Maddox looks back at me for a long moment, kicked back there against the post like she can’t personally hear her cousins growling behind her. Then, slowly, her mouth curves into a smile.
“Cute,” she says. She inclines her head. “I don’t blame you.”
We stay like that for a moment, taking each other’s measure, I think.
It must go on too long because one of her brows hikes up. “Are you going to show me what you have available?”
This is the moment of truth. She knows it. I know it.
But I also know Maddox. Or I knowofher, anyway. She went off to college, and not here in Oregon. She went all the way to the East Coast. That makes her different enough from most of the kids we went to high school with, including me, even before we got to the monster situation.
In some places, going to college after high school used to be a given. An expectation, even. But here it was just one possible choice among many and, given that it was the one that cost the most money, not the choice that most people took. I certainly didn’t. Yet Maddox not only made that choice but took herself far, far away after she made it. And I would have heard about it if she’d been involved in a killing spree while she was off studying in one of those cities I’ve only ever seen on TV. It would have been the talk of the valley.
As far as I know, she also never killed anyone in high school, despite the great many fools we went to high school with. Besides, it’s not that werewolves aren’t scary—they’re fucking terrifying, actually—but they don’t attack without provocation. Generally.
They also don’t tend to play with their food. This goes in the plus column.
“Okay,” I say after I do this math a time or two, second-guess it, and then do it again. “Sure. You can look around. See if you’re a good fit.”
She looks like she wants to laugh at that, too, but she doesn’t. Instead, bonelessly, she shifts off the porch rail and looks back over her shoulder. “I’m going to look around. You’re not.”
Maddox says that quietly, as if she’s talking to people standing right beside her, though it’s clearly not directed at me. I make a note that werewolf hearing is as good as people claim it is, because there’s an immediate chorus of growls at that. I don’t have to speak wolf to get that they don’t like it.
She only waves a dismissive hand at them. “You want to keep guard, keep guard. But keep it at a respectable distance.”
Her gaze is back on me. She lifts a brow again, like she’s waiting but possibly getting a little impatient.
And so, second-guessing myself all over again like it’s my only true vocation, I tuck one of my guns into its holster and undo the locks on the gated door. Then I push it open, step out, and basically present myself on a plate to a werewolf.
I keep the other gun trained on her.
“Why do you want to rent a place anyway?” I ask as she glides down the steps to the yard, smooth and inevitable, enough so that I have to question what I think the gun is going to do if she comes for me—but that’s not a helpful line of thought. “Not that I know your life, but I always thought your family liked to stay close.”
I wave the gun in the direction of the line of cottages, off to the left. The other werewolves are clustered at the mouth of the drive toward town, so if they start for me, I’ll have a few moments to react—but I like those odds. I keep an eye on them as Maddox saunters past me toward the first of the cottages and takes her time looking around.
She looks like she’s admiring nature, nothing more, but I doubt it. I imagine she’s calculating the position of each cottage and how defensible they all are, the way I would be.
I should be used to looking impossible things in the face by now.
Her being here, wandering about the yard I cleaned up myself, shouldn’t even register.
She shoves her hands into the pockets of her jeans as she walks, her hair as long and wild as always, not one shade but all the shades. Today she’s wearing a cropped tank top that shows off her mysterious tattoos and the sort of physique that would require a human to commit to nothing but brutal aesthetics forever but I think is just standard werewolf athleticism. It comes with killer abs and a belly ring, apparently.
“Diplomatic,” she murmurs, right when I’m about to forget I asked a question. “My family does stick together. Kind of like a pack.”
The last thing I need to do is insult a fuckingwerewolfwhile standing this close to her. If she decides to attack, I won’t have any moments or odds. I’ll just be dead. “I didn’t mean—”
“Settle down.” Her laugh is throaty. “I’m not looking for a snack, and anyway, you’re not wrong. The family in general likes to keep it close, but I got used to living on my own.”
“Right.” I’m still holding the gun on her, though it’s beginning to seem foolish here in the middle of a perfectly pleasant conversation. But I don’t lower it. “How was that? The whole East Coast college thing?”
Her expression changes and she looks away, but not before I see ... something there on her face. On someone else, I’d be tempted to call it sadness.
But when she looks back, she smiles. “It’s not a bad thing to go someplace where no one’s ever heard of you. I liked it.”
