Page 6 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

“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.”