Page 1 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

There are zombies in the trash again.

Twice already this morning and it isn’t even light yet.

I punch my pillow and stop pretending I’m asleep.

Who sleeps these days? That’s a luxury I barely recall.

I wake up from something resembling bad sleep every morning with a headache, my skull like an egg with a tender shell that’s threatening to crack open.

Thank you, terrible nightmares that plague me all night long, starring hideous creatures who call themselves “dark goddesses” while committing unspeakable acts upon my person.

So really, the zombies outside feel like a delightful escape from my own head.

I get up, scrub the not-enough sleep from my eyes, and mutter the same thing to myself I do every time I live to see another morning. “Monsters are real, and they will eat you without a second thought. Act accordingly.”

A happy little mantra for life three years into the Reveal, because this is actually what “lucky” looks like.

What it feels like is complete shit, but you get used to that. Or you die.

I shrug into my usual uniform, strategically left on the floor last night by yours truly.

Makes it easier to access, should something attack.

Cargo pants to carry the necessities, like extra ammo, because no one goes anywhere without extra ammo.

And whatever T-shirt I remembered to wash, because it’s still hot at the end of September here in Southern Oregon.

I strap on my knives and stick one in each boot.

Then I move to the windows we boarded up three years ago, even up here under the eaves.

I do a quick check to make sure nothing is loose, because monsters are crafty and relentless, the creepy fucks, and a loose board might as well be an invitation.

Through one of the old bullet holes, I look out into the yard behind my grandmother’s house.

It’s littered with an old van my parents claimed they were remodeling but never did and four other broke-down cars no one ever claimed in my hearing.

There’s something that looks like farm equipment, though no one in my family has ever farmed anything.

Everything is covered in the weeds that no one’s cut in three years, because who has time to care about lawns .

My gaze lingers on the remains of the vegetable garden that something dug up the last time I tried planting—leaving claw marks the size of my torso.

That ended my fantasies of freshly grown vegetables at our house.

“Cans over claws,” I mutter, because I talk to myself now. A lot.

Maybe I always did, but back in the before time, I hid it better.

I reach for the BB gun my granddad used to shoot raccoons and pigeons out back when I was a kid. I’d love to see an adorable little raccoon, as a palate cleanser, but no. It’s zombies.

But at least it’s better than my nightmares. And my headache is beginning to ease its tight grip on my temples as I look outside, like real monsters are better than the ones in my mind.

I see them out there in the predawn light, snuffling and thrashing and moaning around in the trash enclosure.

The lock on that gate never holds no matter what I try, so I always have to run them off myself.

Zombies are harmless enough, relatively speaking.

They want dead things, spoiled things. Not brains.

Not blood or living flesh. Mind you, they move slow enough that you could turn into dinner—fully dead and spoiled—before they decide to shuffle on.

I don’t like that I’ve become an unwilling expert on this subject. But there are a lot of other things I like a lot less these days, so I don’t dwell on it.

Or I try not to dwell on it.

I load the gun without thinking about it, then I fire.

Pop pop pop and the zombies do their slow-motion scatter, heaving themselves across the overgrown yard.

I fire off a few more shots just to be sure, but they shamble away into the trees right as the sun comes up, sending golden light to dance through the lingering wildfire smoke.

It’s pretty. The oranges and the reds remind me of the kinds of things Augie used to paint—

But thinking about my twin brother hurts, so I shove it aside.

I put the BB gun back on the shelf by the window and leave the attic, running down the narrow stairs that lead to the rest of the house.

I can already hear my grandmother muttering to herself.

She likes to sit by her window and play with her spooky oracle cards every morning, but I know that in a minute or two she’ll start shouting for me.

If she remembers me today. If not, she still shouts, but she doesn’t use my name.

More stuff I try not to dwell on.

I check all the possible entrances and exits to my attic room to make sure they’re secure.

I do the same on the second floor, taking in the way the sunlight creeps around the edges of the boarded-up windows, beams of light shooting into the three bedrooms that line the hall.

It’s the only thanks I’ll get for scouring them of any remnant of my parents, my brother, and Gran’s crafting room, which was filled with way too many unnerving little items I wish I didn’t know were there all along, that near to where I sleep—or try to sleep through the dark things in my head, anyway.

I try to look at the house like a stranger would as I head down the main stairs, to get a full sense of all the changes I’ve made.

I’ve spent the past two weeks cleaning the hell out of it so it will match the cottages I’ve overhauled out front.

It’s not just the past three years of panic and hunkering down that were packed into this place, it’s the lifetimes that came before.

There were fingerprints all over this house my great-grandfather built with his own hands, and I wiped them all off myself.

Besides, cleaning out the rooms means I have better vantage points over the handful of cottages that are scattered out in front of the house along the edge of the big, wide yard that keeps the woods at bay.

They were built at various times by various relatives of mine and have served many purposes over the years.

It’s taken me a long time to clean them out and turn them into rustic little dwellings, working on them in what few spare moments I could find.

Something I never would have done if I didn’t think it was necessary.

Welcome to life after the end of the world, at least the one I knew. There are no good choices. Only bad ones, worse ones, and deadly ones.

I make it to the ground floor and pause by my grandmother’s door, but she’s deep into her muttering.

My headache is still kicking in my temples, and the muttering doesn’t help.

So I walk through the living room and the old formal dining room, big and echoey around me now.

It’s hard to get used to. I haven’t heard the floorboards squeak like this since I was small.

That’s how long it’s been since anyone hauled all the crap out of here.

Some of it I packed away in the sheds out back, working fast in whatever sunlight there was.

Some of it I burned in the firepit with all the monster bones.

Some of it I couldn’t bear to get rid of, so I used it to furnish the cottages.

The rest I found places for upstairs in the now airy, empty bedrooms. I touch the medallion around my neck that I took from Augie’s room, the one he never took off until he did, and hate that I still want to feel connected to him.

I know he doesn’t want that. He’s proved that enough times.

He doesn’t want anything but the vampire blood that keeps him high, somewhere down by the river with the rest of them. Those lost souls who lived through the first catastrophic rush of the Reveal, then decided that a living death was better than figuring out how to go on.

Not that I had a choice about that, either.

I go into the kitchen through the metal door I installed—with a locking system that would make a feudal lord jealous and will more importantly keep the rest of the house inaccessible to any tenants—and make the bitter coffee I like because it tastes like my feelings.

And usually helps clear out my morning headaches, too.

I doctor Gran’s with that powdered creamer that might be the only thing she truly loves.

She’s already squawking by the time I make it through her door, and she doesn’t stop when she sees me. She points down at her cards instead.

I hate those cards. Old, weathered, long-used cards that my grandmother has always claimed let her see .

Whatever that means. They’re dark colored—or they were, once, long ago—with strange symbols on the backs and even stranger drawings on each card’s face.

Looking at them always makes me feel funny, like I’m standing on some high cliff and might topple off at any moment.

But there’s no telling Gran that. She says the cards are a sacred family heirloom that I will appreciate in time .

I don’t have the heart to tell her that like most of our family heirlooms, all of which I’ve cleaned out of this rickety old house, they’re junk.

“You have a reckoning coming, Winter,” she tells me loudly, squinting at me, and I feel the usual relief that today is another day she remembers my name, because those are getting scarce.

Reckonings can bite me like everything else that tries.

I set her coffee down. “Before or after I get you to the bathroom, Gran?”

She sniffs, but she lets me help her up.

Then we take care of her usual morning routine.

I don’t mention that she seems more fragile or that she can walk fewer and fewer steps each day.

I tell myself I’m protecting her, but I know better.

As long as she can get herself from the bed to the chair, we can both pretend she’s independent.

Some days I’m not sure which one of us is doing more of that pretending.