The Reveal (Bloodlore), page 4
We stare at each other, maybe both contemplating the injustice of this—but we both also know there’s not much I can do about it. Who is there to complain to? Franklin Hendry doesn’t scare me in and of himself, but I know he has his goons on hand to take care of the people he considers squatters. I can’t have them roughing up Gran the way they did the family that lived in a fifth wheel that Franklin had his eye on last fall. He claimed they owed him money, they refused to pay, and next thing you know they’re all beat into little more than bruises. No one’s seen the father since.
Franklin has his own crew of monsters. They just happen to be human.
If it were just me, I’d tell him to go fuck himself and take my chances with his minions, but it’s not just me.
We both know he’s got me.
“Halloween, Winter,” he says softly.
I feel sick to my stomach, because there’s nothing I can do. Because I feel helpless, and I hate feeling helpless. Not that anyone likes it, but it reminds me of too many things, only some of them monster related.
Watching my parents get worse and worse before finally taking off. Watching Augie follow that same path, telling lie after lie until it was easier, somehow, for him to simply disappear.
This almost feels worse, because Franklin Hendry doesn’t have to do this. He’s not compelled by forces outside his control to be a dick. He wants to bully people he thinks are weak and have no recourse.
I just have to come up with more money.
I turn and storm back out of the historic bank onto Jacksonville’s pretty main street and run straight into Samuel.
Straight into him so that he catches me by my elbows and I nearly collide with his chest.
I wish I did.
“Oh,” I say, suddenly feeling the polar opposite of sickened. “Hi. I just—”
“Did you really rent out outbuildings on your property to actual monsters, Winter?” Samuel demands, scowling down into my face. His green eyes are blazing. This is more exhilarating than he means it to be, I’m sure. “Is this some kind of death wish? Because you don’t have to go to all the trouble of putting out ads for monsters, you know. You can just go down to the river, show a vampire your neck, and let it feed. Problem solved.”
3.
“The jury is out on two of them as to whether or not they’re monsters,” I reply almost automatically, not sure if I’m confused or simply taken aback, but his hands are still gripping my elbows and that’s hard to think past. Also, I’ve never seen him angry before. Certainly not at me. “The other one is Maddox Hemming.”
Samuel knows exactly who Maddox Hemming is, I can see that immediately. Because everyone knows who Maddox Hemming is. He lets go to step back, and normally I would consider that one of the greatest losses of all time. But instead, I fold my arms over my chest and frown right back at him because . . . what is this?
“Maddox Hemming is a werewolf,” Samuel tells me, very distinctly and slowly, as if I’m an idiot.
“Thank you,” I reply. Stiffly. “I’m aware.”
“Winter. You can’t live that close to a werewolf.” He shakes his head as if I’ve disappointed him, and unlike the disappointment of crooked and creepy old bankers, this lands. It feels like a punch in the solar plexus. I’m not sure I know how much I rely on his good opinion of me until this moment. “For any number of reasons, but mostly because she’ll slaughter you in your sleep.”
“How did you even hear about my tenant situation?” I ask him, because there’s the usual small-town grapevine that none of us can ever escape entirely, but this feels extreme. “This literally all happened in the past few hours.”
“News travels fast when you do stupid shit,” Samuel says darkly.
“Luckily, I’m not doing any stupid shit,” I reply, stung. “I live in Jacksonville, Samuel. Supposedly a safe zone. We can either choose to believe that or not.”
“One way to keep it safe is not to shack up with fucking werewolves.”
“Of the monster attacks in the past three years that violated the safe-zone boundaries, none of them were perpetrated by werewolves,” I remind him. Maybe a little tensely. “You know that as well as I do.”
Because we go to all the same meetings. We read the same paper his sister puts out. Or maybe I go to his meetings, something that I find sits on me wrong, all of a sudden.
I don’t like it. “Is there anything else, Samuel? Any more character assassinations? Want to call me an idiot a few more times?”
He blows out a breath, though he doesn’t apologize. “I don’t think you should do this,” he tells me gruffly. “It’s not safe.”
I’m touched by his concern. Really, I am. Later, after I barricade myself in my bedroom and put new iron gates on my windows to deter the werewolves I refuse to admit I’m slightly concerned about, I’m sure I’ll trot that out and cuddle up with it. As I try to sleep through another long night of nightmares about some scary, powerful creature with snakes in her face.
Right now, all I can do is laugh. “Samuel. Look around. What the hell is safe anymore?”
I’m still asking myself that when I get back up to the house—after getting extra keys made for the back door and the cottages and taking a trip to the scrapyard, where I avoid another clutch of zombies and find some good pieces of usable iron—to find my three new housemates standing in the yard.
It looks like they’re all about to throw down and get in a fistfight.
This seems deeply unwise for many reasons, but the main one is that there’s a line of dangerous men and Harleys to one side.
“Finally,” Maddox drawls when I get out of the truck, my favorite gun already in my hand. “This is getting very boring.”
She certainly looks bored, but then, she always does.
“Which one of you told all of Jacksonville that I’m taking on a werewolf as a boarder?” I ask as I make sure to lock my own truck. “Just out of curiosity.”
“Oh, that was me,” Maddox confesses with a grin, all boneless there against the side of her vehicle. “You know how it is. Mrs. Bosko always hated my guts, but she loves you. It was petty, but it had to be done.”
“Mrs. Bosko lives two doors down.” I shake my head. “She’s never going to sleep again.”
Maddox grins wider. “I did say it was petty.”
This is another reason I don’t think Maddox is planning to feast on my bones while I sleep. It’s too small-town here. Maybe the wolf pack wouldn’t care if she ate me, but everyone else will gossip about it forever after, and if she’s still upset that Mrs. Bosko—our sixth-grade teacher—doesn’t like her, she’s small-town too.
This I find comforting. Almost feels like old times—the before times, when a person’s behavior in preschool could haunt them for a lifetime.
“Maybe you don’t see the pack of werewolves right there,” Briar interjects from where she’s standing back near her cottage. “I thought you said one werewolf.”
Savi, still in silk, looks unperturbed. But this seems like deliberate provocation to me.
Maddox shrugs. “I keep telling her to ignore them. They’re not a pack, they’re just my cousins. And, this time, as a bonus, one of my brothers.”
She glances over at the extraordinarily scary and dangerous-looking men standing there like they’re getting ready to wade into war, arms folded, with stony glares moving from Maddox to each of my other two housemates, and now to me.
Having never drawn the attention of the local werewolves, I can’t say that this thrills me either.
“They really don’t want me moving in here,” Maddox tells me lazily. “They prefer to keep the home fires burning the way they always have. Very traditional, apparently, for a bunch of dudes who take pride in calling themselves outlaws.”
This inspires a low sort of communal rumble. It takes me a moment to realize it’s all those scary men growling again.
Now only Maddox seems unperturbed, but I think she might be faking.
“He’s gonna kick your ass,” says one man, who I recognize, with a shock, as her brother Liam. The last time I saw him was in high school. He was a senior when I was a freshman, and I’d thought he was dangerous then. Now it’s hard to find that boy’s face behind the beard and the tats and what looks like pure fury aimed straight at his sister. “And you’ll have it coming.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Maddox tells me. “I don’t.” She looks slightly less boneless, I notice, and maybe that’s her version of alarm. “Can we move in?”
It’s not like I haven’t thought about this from every angle, despite what Samuel seems to think. I had a lot of time to think about it while I cleaned out the cottages to make room for the new tenants and then the house, too, to make room for vantage points. The truth is, everyone and everything is dangerous in its own way. If there were only humans here, it’s not like I could trust them either. Everyone’s out for themselves.
Maybe that was always true, but it’s only after the Reveal that those things became a lot starker and more likely to involve someone dying.
Opening up our property is risky no matter what I do.
But not opening it up means handing over these acres my ancestors tamed to revolting Franklin Hendry without a fight.
And deep beneath all the reasons that can’t happen is this one: There’s a part of me that thinks that some member of this family has to stay in this house in case the ones we lost find their way back. My mom and dad. Augie.
There’s almost something about inviting a werewolf here myself that feels like some small measure of control in the middle of all the rest of this shit that I can’t seem to do anything about.
“Welcome home,” I tell the three of them.
Then I give each one of them a key to their particular cottage and stand back with an eye on the werewolves in the yard as my life changes once again.
Briar rushes inside her shed with nothing more than a beat-up duffel bag slung over her shoulder. She looks around furtively, then barricades herself inside. I can hear her throw the bolt from the porch, across a decent span of grass and dirt.
Savi unloads a collection of bags, all of them pristine-looking in matching white hardshell, and zipped up tight. There’s no clue as to what might be in them. Books? Clothes? Weapons? The secret to looking so unruffled all the time? She brings them out of her gleaming SUV two at a time and carries them across the yard to her cottage as if they are weightless, because she never seems to break a sweat.
Maddox takes her time, unloading that big old Ford Explorer she drove up here and appearing to lollygag while doing it. I immediately understand that she’s doing this to irritate her family—because the more they grumble, the slower she goes.
I can’t help but find it amusing that even werewolves have family drama.
But when I step inside to leave them to their games and settling in, I can hear Gran muttering. It’s true that I don’t think Maddox is here to hurt me, but I can’t say the same for her relatives, so I lock the gate and the front door tight behind me. I do the same with the door to her room once I’m inside.
I help Gran out of bed and into her chair. Once she’s settled, she eyes me, cannily enough that I am tempted to imagine that she’s all there this afternoon.
“Who is on my land?” she asks.
The way she asks this reminds me—sharply—of years ago when Augie and I would run around, get into all kinds of trouble, and then have to explain ourselves to our stern grandmother when we came back home. Gran was never the pushover our mother was.
Gran liked consequences. She was never afraid of delivering them. Mom just liked getting high.
“I told you earlier that we’d be getting tenants today,” I say, cheerfully, because she sometimes responds to cheerful. “I’ll be honest with you, Gran. I thought it would take a while. Not everyone wants a very simply furnished room in a rustic little cottage. But I got three takers within an hour.”
It seems more unbelievable to me when I say it out loud, but it doesn’t have to be believable. It just has to pay the mortgage and keep Gran in one piece and without bruises. Nothing else matters.
“Winter.” I can’t help it. Every time she says my name, it makes me want to dance around a little bit. Or cry. Because every time she says it, I worry that it’s the last time. That she’ll never know me again. “You need to be more careful.”
“Careful of what?”
Gran looks at me in that way again, as if she can see straight into me, down deep into my bones. “Can’t you feel it? She is stirring.”
“You don’t have to worry about the new housemates,” I tell her, ignoring the she is stirring part. My grandmother never had what I would call a sunny personality. No one would mistake her for Pollyanna on even her best day, but the dark prophecies she likes to mutter are a whole new level. I’m convinced they’re the reason why my nightmares are so intense, especially when she starts talking about the Goddess of Filth, as she’s been doing all summer. I try to think of it as Gran Radio, and I do my best to change the frequency. “They seem nice enough. But we don’t have to be friends with them. They just live here now. They pay to live here. That’s all.”
“Every lock can be opened with the right key,” Gran mutters, and reaches for her cards. This is her way of dismissing me.
I leave her to her intense shuffling, trying not to look directly at the dark cards with all the golden figures and symbols that always seem sticky, like they’re trying to pull me in. I back out of the room, lock it tight, then peer out the barred windows to find that most of the moving in has been done. The cottage doors are all shut up tight with lights visible behind the boarded-up windows. The motorcycles are gone too. Standing there in the old dining room, with everything quiet around me, I can feel that our home, our land, isn’t ours any longer.
Or isn’t only ours.
It’s tempting to imagine that I can feel the tenants the way I would feel bruises on my own body, but I try not to indulge in flights of fancy. Too much of that and I’ll turn into Gran.
I make my way into the kitchen and stand there, not sure what to do with myself. If I close my eyes—which I don’t, because I’m too aware that someone could walk in on me and take advantage of that weakness—it could be almost any day from my childhood. Back when the house was always full of people, slamming in and out, some living out in those very same cottages—under decidedly less cute circumstances. Back when my grandfather was alive and my parents lived up in the front bedroom, and Augie was always deliberately stomping up and down the stairs, making as much noise as possible because he thought it was funny.
If I take out each one of the people I’ve lost and look at them separately, it doesn’t make me feel the same sense of grief. Because all of them were complicated losses. Some so enormously so that I’m not sure I’ll ever untangle my impressions of them, or my feelings about the way I lost them. Maybe that’s what grief is.
Old men like my grandfather, at least, are supposed to die. It’s the natural order of things, no matter that our whole family never quite recovered from it. The other losses were crueler.
Like the twin who was once so much a part of my life, of me, that it was like we were one person, and now he’s just . . . out there. Hopefully alive, but alone.
Leaving me equally alone here.
Sometimes I have the deeply unworthy thought that it would be easier if he was actually dead. Even though that’s my worst fear. And even though it breaks my heart to imagine it, at least then it would be over. I would know where he is.
I hear a faint noise at the back door and look over to find Savi standing there. I make myself smile.
“Are you settling in okay?” I ask her.
Because that seems like the kind of thing a landlord-type person would ask.
She smiles at me and seems almost to . . . float into the room that would be bright and sunny and happy if the windows weren’t mostly boarded up. And if there wasn’t so much smoke outside.
“This is such a lovely, historic house,” she says, but she says it the way people say things when they don’t have any idea what to say. It’s oddly endearing. Like she doesn’t know how to do this either. “Has it always been in your family?”
“Every generation adds on to it.” I wave a hand toward the place where the kitchen juts out from the original part of the house, because it was once a porch. You can see where my grandfather connected them. “It’s like a collaboration with ghosts.”
Savi pauses at the windows that look out over the backyard, squinting through the little slits between the boards. “I suppose collaborating with ghosts is preferable to fighting them off.”
I want to follow that up, but I figure that attempts at intimacy might kill us both. I can come up with some theories as to why an upscale woman like Savi might flee wherever she came from to hide out in a place like this. None of them are pretty.
I move over to the refrigerator instead and open the door. “I divided this up so that everyone has space,” I say, waving my hand at the interior shelves. “So we don’t have to worry about sharing things or taking other people’s things by accident. You can claim a space now if you want.”
I have the impression that Savi doesn’t really know what to do with this information. As if she’s never shared anything in her life.
She smiles at me. “How thoughtful.”
I excuse myself and leave her there, because I don’t know how to interact with strange people living in the house. No matter how much money they pay me. Left to my own devices, I will be awkward and direct, and no one wants that in a landlady.
No one wants that at all, come to think of it. Augie was the charming one.
Besides, there’s only so much daylight left.
I spend it hauling all the iron I got at the scrapyard up to the attic and pretend I don’t notice Briar’s door open a crack each time I go out to my truck, as if she’s peeking out but doesn’t want to be seen.
