Page 20 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

I’m not sure I mean to speak out loud.

But there I am, speaking with my whole voice on a topic I don’t think I’ve ever discussed. Not in any depth. What’s the point of describing a bomb to everyone else in the same bomb shelter?

I’m not looking at the vampire beside me.

Instead, I’m staring out at the dark streets of Medford, down toward the intersection of Main Street and Riverside, where there used to be a bento food cart that always smelled delicious—far better than it looked.

There’s an old neon sign above what used to be a decidedly down-market strip club that always looked sticky from the outside.

In the years before the Reveal, there had been more new restaurants and other such attempts to bring life and light to the streets. All in vain, now.

Ariel doesn’t say a word, though I can feel his power humming all around me. He doesn’t speak, and somehow that makes it easier for me to keep going.

“It was just a Tuesday,” I say again. Just a random, pointless, boring day in the middle of an unremarkable and otherwise unmemorable week.

“Augie was home, which was getting rarer in those days, though we were all not quite talking about it. But I’d called out of my shift at the coffee stand that morning because Augie had come back in the middle of the night, and I didn’t want him waking up disoriented with my grandmother at home. ”

I was afraid he would wake up in one of his rages, and I couldn’t in good conscience leave Gran to deal with that alone. Mostly because she has always been the one most likely to pull out the shotgun in moments of stress, and our family was jacked enough already.

Gran had been more mobile then. She didn’t require all the tending to, not yet. Maybe, looking back, it should have been clear that things were slipping. But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t realize things could slip the way they would shortly thereafter.

I’d slept in past my usual predawn wake-up time, and when I went downstairs, I found Gran watching TV in the study on the first floor, which was odd for her in the morning. I frowned at the sight, but she didn’t move or seem to notice that I’d come downstairs. Also weird.

I went into the kitchen and made myself espresso in my stovetop percolator like a European, because working at the coffee stand has ruined me for drip coffee.

And I think about those moments a lot, even now.

Standing in the kitchen when the windows were still glass.

Letting the morning light stream in and dance all over me like that wouldn’t be a luxury within days.

Waiting for the espresso to be ready and sighing a little as the rich, earthy scent filled the room.

Taking my first sip gratefully, sighing again as I stared out back toward what must have been a kicking garden back then, because Gran could always grow a plant or a flower seemingly at will.

I try to think back to what was on my mind on such a run-of-the-mill day. What was filling up my head. What I thought was important before the world changed.

I can remember every detail of what I did in the kitchen in those last few moments of normalcy, but I never have been able to recall what I was actually thinking about. Augie, probably. Whatever sad social life I didn’t really have going on.

At some point—a few minutes later? An hour? I’ll never know—I padded into the study to see why my grandmother was glued to the television set on a Tuesday morning when she had been known to unplug the TV on weekends to force us kids outside.

But somewhere between the doorway and the seat I took on the couch beside her, I forgot anything I might have said.

I don’t know which images I saw first. They all jumble together in my head.

The explosions in far-off cities and the creatures celebrating them in force, though I thought, at first, that there was something wrong with my eyes.

The CN Tower in flames with what I thought were people in ghoulish masks dancing around.

Big Ben, swarming with those horrible bug things I prefer to believe stay on that side of the Atlantic, because the alternative is too horrible to accept.

Gruesome scenes from everywhere, but the horror of the actual destruction of cities on television—like too many action movies except real , though at first it didn’t seem real—faded as I came to realize what was doing the attacking.

Then, of course, came the real horror.

And it came in stages.

Disbelief was first. It couldn’t be real. It was some Hollywood thing. I remember initially feeling angry and removed, furious that a joke like this could be played on so many people.

But that faded into a kind of numbness as image after image, with less and less commentary from newspeople, showed the hideous truth.

Monsters were real. And they weren’t hiding any longer.

At some point, Augie woke up too, and whether he was detoxing or not, what I remember is him sitting silently on that couch with Gran and me. For hours.

The three of us in a silence marred only by the disgusting, grisly scenes unfolding on the screen before us, sometimes staring at each other, sometimes weeping quietly, sometimes frozen still.

Maybe it was days. Time flattened out and never recovered.

There are things that stand out to me. That deep rejection of what I was seeing. My instant, bedrock conviction that it had to be a cut of some movie. A marketing experiment that some film studio was doing, like that Orson Welles thing from back in the day.

Though even as I kept thinking that, I knew better. I knew it wasn’t fake.

Death in the movies is a whole lot prettier.

We all have images in our heads now that we’ll never get out. It’s why some folks lose it altogether and opt in to whatever opiates they can find, and as much as I hate it, I get it.

It had to be the first night, though it’s hard to remember how time moved then. I remember that it was dark, or maybe it simply got gloomy enough in that room. Maybe the power had gone out by then, because it was off for months once it went.

Then again, it could have been the bright light of day. What I know for sure is that the three of us were sitting there, silent. Stricken. But together in a way we hadn’t been in a long, long time.

And then, together, we heard the wolves begin to howl.

It was the first time in my life I learned that “bloodcurdling” wasn’t just a thing people said, because I felt it.

It’s here, Gran said in a raspy whisper. It’s not just the cities. It’s happening here, too.

“We were lucky,” I tell Ariel now. “The people who were out doing errands and living their lives—very few of them made it. There were bodies in the streets. Augie and I went down at some point. It could have been days later, maybe a week, and we saw them. Then learned a valuable lesson about leaving the house without enough weapons. The hard way.”

It’s difficult to remember now that there was a time when I didn’t know how to fight. That I was ever foolish enough to drive into an unknown situation without numerous weapons at my disposal.

Once things changed, everything changed. And fast.

That particular day, a pack of wraiths swarmed the truck while we were still reeling from the piles of dead everywhere, and all Augie and I had going for us was that we were raised just rural enough.

Our dad had taken us hunting since we were small.

We knew our way around guns. Augie had taken the shotgun with him when we left the house, and that was all we had to work with, so we made it work.

He shot. I drove.

We didn’t speak.

We didn’t have to. I could feel his terror. He could feel mine, mixed in with that hollow despair.

But neither one of us could bear the thought of not making it back to Gran.

“It wasn’t long after that the monsters started roaming the hills at night,” I tell Ariel.

“And I know that by the time they made it to our house, we’d boarded up all the windows and installed metal gates on all of them.

For those long, terrible first months, all three of us huddled together down in the basement because we figured we were more likely to make it through the night if there were heavy metal doors between us and the roving bands of nightmares everywhere. ”

“It would certainly offer a bit of a buffer,” he says. Very politely, since I doubt very much he would have any trouble getting in—or, more likely, forcing us out so as not to have to deal with that pesky invitation issue.

I try not to think about what it would be like to stagger out of a burning house to face down my impending beautiful death in the form of this creature.

I think about it anyway. Until it makes me quiver, though I do my best to hide it.

“As far as I know, it was a feeding frenzy,” I tell him, trying to sound serious and not like I’m imagining his fangs on me.

In me. “A free-for-all. Power was out. Internet was out. We had a hand-crank radio for camping that lasted the longest, but even that was eventually nothing but static. After a while, there were fewer attacks in the night. They used to come and try to tear off the windows and scratch up the house, but they stopped. I don’t really know why. ”

“I can tell you why.” Ariel gazes down at me, his silver eyes bright and unreadable. “But you seem remarkably incurious as to why it happened in the first place. Do you not wonder why that Tuesday of all Tuesdays?”

It’s tempting to feel chided, but I don’t.

Or more accurately, I won’t.