Page 4 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

At the door to the cottage, I motion for her to go in before me.

I think I see a glint in those compelling eyes of hers, but she doesn’t argue.

She lilts her way onto the front step with that same light, easy athleticism that reminds me—in a jarring sort of way—that I’ve known this woman for most of my life.

Maybe not for the past seven years or so, but before that, I would know her at a glance even if I saw her in a crowd.

It feels like a strange sort of intimacy. I’ve had precious little of that the past three years.

I wait outside, my back to a tall tree and my eyes on the growling men across the yard, as Maddox goes in and out of the three cottages.

They’re all minimally furnished, with beds and dressers, and rugs to take the cold out of the wood floors.

The largest one sits a little bit farther back into the woods, giving the illusion of privacy.

I made it nice, but to me, it will always be the shack my parents moved into when they wanted my grandmother out of their business.

That led nowhere good. Augie followed their lead after high school, moving into one of the smaller cottages with similar results.

Maddox takes her time exploring, then comes back to find me by the tree. “I’ll take the big one, if it’s available.”

“It is.”

“Look at that,” Maddox says with a smile. “We’re practically roommates.”

I think about that as I take her around to the back of the house and sit at the kitchen table—gun still between us and pointed at her—to hammer out the details.

Was she being nice? Or was that a threat?

If a person happens to be a supernatural being with excessive agility, speed, and even more athleticism than she has in her human form, she could very easily use her proximity to the house to find a way into it.

Augie and I climbed out onto the roof above the front porch and then down to the ground more than once during high school—and then back in again. It wasn’t easy , but it was doable. And we were not werewolves.

I think about what Samuel said, about not letting monsters live here, but that’s easy for him to say. No one’s chasing him and his sister for mortgage money, which we might all know is just an extortion racket—but everyone in the valley also knows Franklin Hendry is a bully. A mean one.

I name an extravagant rent-and-wolf-deposit figure, or at least it seems extravagant to me, but Maddox only shrugs. “Sounds great. When can I move in?”

I assume this shell-shocked feeling will fade. It better. I need to be more scared of her than awed. “As soon as you want.”

“I’ll be in by tonight.” She stands up from the kitchen table, then digs into one of her pockets and pulls out a very thick wad of cash. “This is half the security deposit. I’ll be back with the rest of the deposit and all of my shit. Can’t wait for girl talk, roomie.”

“That sounds vaguely threatening, actually.” I’m proud that I dare to say that to her.

“What? I can braid hair.” But she laughs at that as she turns and saunters on out of the house.

And it takes me a long few moments to recognize that I’m still sitting there where she left me. At the kitchen table, still holding a gun in front of me.

A gun that didn’t seem to concern her at all.

But beggars can’t be choosers, especially not in times like these. I pocket the cash after counting it out to find that it is, in fact, exactly half of the security deposit.

Then I make my way out of the locked-tight kitchen to the front door to secure the gate from the inside. Out in the yard, I see Maddox and those men. Her cousins. Wolves , just like her.

But what they look like—what they’ve always looked like—is bikers.

The dangerous, Harley-Davidson-riding, Sons of Anarchy –type outlaw bikers, that is.

There are symbols on the leather they wear, but they’re not in English.

Maybe they never were. They’re the kind of men that encourage you not to make direct eye contact, because even when they were passing as human, they were still predators.

Maddox, meanwhile, weaves through them with total unconcern.

No wonder she found high school entertaining, if this was her homelife.

I stand there watching as they walk back into the trees. When I finally hear the sound of their motorcycles firing up, it’s far enough away that I get the impression they parked down at the bottom of the drive.

It feels a lot like they walked up to get the lay of the land without alerting anyone to their presence. Something that wouldn’t have occurred to me three years ago, but I think a lot more about defense strategies now.

When the earsplitting sound of their Harleys is gone, I take the opportunity to walk out into the yard and look around.

I don’t see any lurking monsters, which is good.

But looks can be deceiving. I’m hoping that the presence—and, I can only hope, lingering scent—of that many werewolves in the front yard will keep all the rest of the tooth-and-claw crowd at bay.

I examine the front of the house and the yard, then the cottages, and not with the usual surge of nostalgia and emotion.

Because right now it doesn’t matter that this is my childhood home.

That it has its own tangled little history, plunked down here in the Jacksonville hills.

Right now I’m looking for access points and weaknesses in my perimeter.

It will obviously be no trouble at all for werewolves to hop right up onto the roof of the porch of the main house and go inside, should they decide they want to.

That means they can also get up on the actual roof, giving them access to me in the attic, so that means it’s time to install some more iron gates over the windows.

Probably should have thought of that before I put an ad in the paper, but in my defense, I thought humans would be the ones moving in here. I thought we’d unite against the monsters, if necessary—but just in case the humans were untrustworthy too, I’d blocked access to the house from the kitchen.

I remind myself that Maddox could have killed me at any moment during the house tour. She didn’t. Not to mention, there’s no reason I can think of that the local werewolf pack would want to go to such lengths to station one of their own here.

Besides, she gave me money. I need money. So that kind of answers any questions right there.

I go back inside, close the heavy gate but not the door, and check on Gran.

Thankfully, she’s deep into her afternoon nap.

She mutters a little as I look at her, and I wonder what she dreams of.

Or if she has nightmares like me. But if she can recall her dreams when she wakes, she never remembers them long enough to tell me.

I ease her bedroom door shut behind me and lock it again, just in case anyone else drops by.

The ad said I would be entertaining candidates from 12:30 to 3:00 p.m. I expected that no one would come.

When Gran came up with the idea to make room for renters in the cottages, it was to help people.

But that was a long time ago, when we thought folks would band together and take care of each other. We learned better.

Franklin Hendry made the rental idea a necessity, though, so here we are.

As I’m thinking that, I hear a vehicle approaching. My first, wild thought is that it’s the werewolves, coming back to tell me it was all a joke and it’s snack time after all—

But they wouldn’t come up the drive, which is half washed-out and not something I’m in a hurry to fix, in an SUV.

Particularly not the gleaming, scratchless, shiny Land Rover that pulls up in the yard outside and parks next to my poor old beat-down truck. I’m so dazzled that it takes me a minute to recognize that someone’s climbing out of the driver’s side and alighting on the dead grass of the yard.

My second thought is that this woman is much too expensive to be looking for housing.

She looks upper crust, whatever that means.

Almost otherworldly, because everything about her looks smooth and soft and cared for in a way I would have found alien even before the Reveal.

She’s wearing a dress , first of all, instead of the more utilitarian clothes that suit this postapocalypse.

A silk dress, if I’m not mistaken, not that I’m a fabric expert.

Her hair is long, thick, and glossy brown, and her bangs expertly frame her face.

When she slides her oversize sunglasses down her nose to look toward the house, her eyes are luminous, a shade darker than her hair.

She looks as if a harmful ray of light has never dared touch her glowing skin. The smoke seems to clear a path around her, and the yellow tinge the wildfires leave in the sky doesn’t make her look the least bit jaundiced. Not like the rest of us.

But she doesn’t cross toward the house. She doesn’t check out the cottages, either. Instead, she frowns. She shoves her sunglasses back into place and looks back down the drive, toward the trees, where the smoke seems heavier and thicker.

I feel the urge to shiver, but I don’t. I pull out my second gun and am thankful I’m safe behind the gate.

The woman by the Land Rover cocks her head slightly to one side, and the trees seem to shake, but I have to be imagining that. I make myself breathe.

And then, oddly enough, a girl who looks about my own age walks out of the forest and into the yard.

She and the woman look at each other, and I swear there’s some kind of ... ripple of recognition between them. Or maybe the smoke seems to move. It’s weird, and it leaves me winded, but they don’t speak.

Both of them walk to the front door, though to me it seems as if there’s some kind of humming electricity all around them. Or maybe an incoming storm, as rare as those are before October.

“Do you two know each other?” I ask when they draw close.