Page 13 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

On the drive home through the late-afternoon smoke, I also think about Ariel Skinner.

He looms over everything, much heavier than the smoke.

I’ve never laid eyes on him, but I remember women talking about him years ago.

Ruinous, I heard one of them call him, but with a certain widening of the eyes as she huddled with her girlfriends at one of the many coffee shops we used to have here.

I used to wonder what that meant. Now I really wonder.

What was ruinous back then? We all know the various ways sadistic or even nonsadistic vampires can ruin people.

Anyone who lived through the first few weeks of the Reveal knows this, very likely against their will.

But how did vampires—much less their king—do it back when people would have thought he was human?

The kids I know who took classes at his school refer to him, still, as “Master Skinner.” I always thought that was a weird martial arts thing. Now I think about Ty Ceridwen’s hand around Maddox’s neck and wonder if it’s more than that.

I take the road that bypasses California Street, Jacksonville’s main drag, because I don’t want to run into anyone I know.

It’s likely that Samuel has shared his feelings about my new tenants with the entire town, and the idea of tending to all that potential hysteria on top of a summons from the vampire king is . .. overwhelming.

I can easily imagine someone like the perpetually tutting Candace Wei, proprietress of one of the town’s wine-country inns in the before times, demanding to know how she should sleep knowing that the monsters are not only roaming the darkness but tucked up on my grandmother’s land.

I do not need to school poor Candace Wei on real problems, mostly because I would love to do exactly that.

Though I’m sure her take on Ariel Skinner would be interesting. There aren’t many people in this valley, living or dead or undecided, that she doesn’t know. And none she doesn’t have an opinion on.

As I head up the hill and into the woods, I decide I’m definitely not going to Archangel MMA tonight. By the time I park, look around, and make a run for the front door, I’m back to thinking I should.

I spend the rest of the afternoon vacillating back and forth.

And also accidentally tracking what the tenants are doing. I don’t mean to. I’m still not used to anyone being here but me and Gran, so every time I catch a glimpse of someone else on the property, I automatically pay attention. I think they call that a trauma response.

Briar leaves not long after I get back. I see her out the window, walking with her head low as she goes straight down the drive.

This makes her either very brave or extraordinarily foolish.

No one I know would risk being out in the open in the woods—up on the hill where no one can see a monster violating Jacksonville’s safe zone—without the temporary safety of a vehicle made of steel all around them.

Too much fragile flesh and easily crunched bone on display when you’re walking, to my mind.

Later, I see Savi’s gleaming vehicle as it drives away because I am still working on a particularly annoying latch on one of the living room windows.

It won’t catch as securely as I want it to, so I’m wrestling with it.

I frown at her taillights, because it’s weird that all the rest of the vehicles here are covered in ash from the fires.

Hers is the only one that ash doesn’t seem to like.

I’m up in my attic rooms when I see Maddox through one of the windows I’ve decided needs more boards over it before another nightfall.

She comes out of the woods, clearly walking back from the path that winds its way into the trail system that used to be one of the selling points of this area.

These days, I don’t know many people who go out for a hike, or an evening in the outdoor amphitheater that used to throw summer concerts, because it’s too tempting to the things that live in the forest.

We’re already bait. Why throw ourselves directly at the predators?

Werewolves have no reason to worry about such things.

Maddox looks like she’s been for a run. I stare down at her, and it takes a few moments for my brain to filter through why I find what she’s wearing so extraordinary.

It’s that she’s dressed the way girls used to dress— before .

Cute little running shorts and a sports bra, because back then, no one had to worry about toting around weapons and first aid kits.

The fact that I, personally, would never be caught dead in booty shorts and a sports bra—or out on a run, for that matter—doesn’t keep me from feeling a wild pang of jealousy. Or nostalgia. I’m not sure which it is, but I order myself to get over it as I finish up with the window.

When I’m done, I gather up the dirty clothes that are starting to look like a carpet on my bedroom floor and head down to the laundry room off the kitchen.

I meet up with Maddox as she swings in through the back door. She smiles, stepping aside as I move past her with my arms full.

“Have a nice run?” I ask her.

“Run?” She blinks. Then her smile widens. “Yes. It was an excellent run.”

She says that so strangely that I look after her as she goes to rummage in the fridge and see what looks a whole lot like more fingerprints on the backs of her thighs.

Oh, I think.

And then I have a lot of trouble sorting out my darks and lights in the laundry room because I keep thinking about Ty Ceridwen’s hand on Maddox’s throat, which was the thing he felt was okay to do in public , and how little she seemed to mind.

But it all kind of shifts around, and I’m suddenly thinking about Ariel Skinner instead, only it’s my throat and his hand with his face in shadow but all the blood in me moving wild like honey—

Only this, too, leads to more waffling on my part.

Because I certainly don’t need to have weird fantasies about fucking vampires .

Aren’t nightmares about slithery powers that want to gulp me down gross enough?

Isn’t it bad enough that I had to make direct eye contact with the werewolf alpha?

Why do I have to meet all the terrible things that live in this valley?

Much less convince myself that the ones not in my head are hot .

There must be a word for people who decide to lust after the things that will almost certainly kill them. It’s clearly pathological.

What I can’t get past is the distinct feeling that none of this should be happening. Not to me. Samuel is the person who’s made himself visible to all the various monster factions. He’s the one who bravely put that target on his back and is the voice of humans in this valley.

I’m a goddamn barista, for fuck’s sake.

I decide, definitively, that I’m doing absolutely nothing tonight as I sit down to dinner with Gran in the kitchen about an hour before sunset. I wanted to feed her in her room, but she insisted that she could not bear it.

And believe me, once her mind is made up, there’s no changing it.

But I make sure I’m heavily armed, all the same.

I tense a little when Savi walks in the room, because there’s no telling how Gran is going to react.

I wait as Gran looks up from her dinner—a selection of her favorite canned delicacies—and blinks, no doubt as taken aback at the sight of such elegance and sophistication in our family kitchen as I am.

“You,” she says.

Savi looks at her and inclines her head. “Me,” she agrees.

“It’s like you two know each other,” I say, and laugh.

Neither of them joins in, and I find myself thinking about the ashless vehicle and the fact that it’s always a little bit cold when Savi ventures near. I thought it was just me reacting to the novelty of more people around, but I don’t have to fight off the urge to shiver when it’s Maddox, do I?

“The cards are filled with portents,” Gran says confidingly, but not to me. It’s like she’s decided that Savi will know what she’s talking about. “Death and destruction are the least of it.”

“Death and destruction are always the least of it,” Savi replies in a tone that suggests that this is a perfectly normal and reasonable conversation. “Dying is a lovely oblivion, if you do it right. Destruction is merely the road map there. It’s the living that hurts.”

“There are worse things.” Gran taps her fork against the inside rim of her bowl, then points it at Savi. “Like the hunger.”

“If you’re hungry, Gran,” I interject, keeping my voice calm as I can, “you could just eat your dinner. Instead of wallowing in all these dark prophecies.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Savi flinch at that. As if I’ve startled her.

But when I look over at her, she is simply unpacking various items of food from a tote bag and placing them on one of the empty shelves in the refrigerator.

Not that I’m spying, but I am interested to see that all of it is vegetarian.

Vegan, I’m pretty sure. Alternative milks.

Leafy greens. Green juices, indeterminate pastes, and other such things that I would have told you were impossible to get this side of the Reveal, even if I’d wanted them.

What I can’t decide is if Savi is some kind of monster I’ve never heard of before, or if she’s the kind of monster I’ve always known about.

Like one of those insufferable doctors’ wives who spent their pre-Reveal lives holding court in their giant Italianate houses up in the east Medford hills, sending their children to private schools and summer camps out of state and acting as if their cheating, scrubs-in-public husbands were actual deities.

My intuition tells me that Savi is running from something, and being alive in the world tells me that the thing that women mostly run from is men. Any old human man, as we all know, can become a monster far too easily and without provocation.

But since I don’t know, and her stuff could be trauma based, I don’t ask.