Page 7 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

It seems more unbelievable to me when I say it out loud, but it doesn’t have to be believable . It just has to pay the mortgage and keep Gran in one piece and without bruises. Nothing else matters.

“Winter.” I can’t help it. Every time she says my name, it makes me want to dance around a little bit. Or cry. Because every time she says it, I worry that it’s the last time. That she’ll never know me again. “You need to be more careful.”

“Careful of what?”

Gran looks at me in that way again, as if she can see straight into me, down deep into my bones. “Can’t you feel it? She is stirring.”

“You don’t have to worry about the new housemates,” I tell her, ignoring the she is stirring part.

My grandmother never had what I would call a sunny personality.

No one would mistake her for Pollyanna on even her best day, but the dark prophecies she likes to mutter are a whole new level.

I’m convinced they’re the reason why my nightmares are so intense, especially when she starts talking about the Goddess of Filth , as she’s been doing all summer.

I try to think of it as Gran Radio, and I do my best to change the frequency.

“They seem nice enough. But we don’t have to be friends with them.

They just live here now. They pay to live here. That’s all.”

“Every lock can be opened with the right key,” Gran mutters, and reaches for her cards. This is her way of dismissing me.

I leave her to her intense shuffling, trying not to look directly at the dark cards with all the golden figures and symbols that always seem sticky , like they’re trying to pull me in.

I back out of the room, lock it tight, then peer out the barred windows to find that most of the moving in has been done.

The cottage doors are all shut up tight with lights visible behind the boarded-up windows.

The motorcycles are gone too. Standing there in the old dining room, with everything quiet around me, I can feel that our home, our land, isn’t ours any longer.

Or isn’t only ours.

It’s tempting to imagine that I can feel the tenants the way I would feel bruises on my own body, but I try not to indulge in flights of fancy. Too much of that and I’ll turn into Gran.

I make my way into the kitchen and stand there, not sure what to do with myself.

If I close my eyes—which I don’t, because I’m too aware that someone could walk in on me and take advantage of that weakness—it could be almost any day from my childhood.

Back when the house was always full of people, slamming in and out, some living out in those very same cottages—under decidedly less cute circumstances.

Back when my grandfather was alive and my parents lived up in the front bedroom, and Augie was always deliberately stomping up and down the stairs, making as much noise as possible because he thought it was funny.

If I take out each one of the people I’ve lost and look at them separately, it doesn’t make me feel the same sense of grief.

Because all of them were complicated losses.

Some so enormously so that I’m not sure I’ll ever untangle my impressions of them, or my feelings about the way I lost them. Maybe that’s what grief is.

Old men like my grandfather, at least, are supposed to die. It’s the natural order of things, no matter that our whole family never quite recovered from it. The other losses were crueler.

Like the twin who was once so much a part of my life, of me, that it was like we were one person, and now he’s just ... out there. Hopefully alive, but alone.

Leaving me equally alone here.

Sometimes I have the deeply unworthy thought that it would be easier if he was actually dead. Even though that’s my worst fear. And even though it breaks my heart to imagine it, at least then it would be over. I would know where he is.

I hear a faint noise at the back door and look over to find Savi standing there. I make myself smile.

“Are you settling in okay?” I ask her.

Because that seems like the kind of thing a landlord-type person would ask.

She smiles at me and seems almost to ... float into the room that would be bright and sunny and happy if the windows weren’t mostly boarded up. And if there wasn’t so much smoke outside.

“This is such a lovely, historic house,” she says, but she says it the way people say things when they don’t have any idea what to say. It’s oddly endearing. Like she doesn’t know how to do this either. “Has it always been in your family?”

“Every generation adds on to it.” I wave a hand toward the place where the kitchen juts out from the original part of the house, because it was once a porch. You can see where my grandfather connected them. “It’s like a collaboration with ghosts.”

Savi pauses at the windows that look out over the backyard, squinting through the little slits between the boards. “I suppose collaborating with ghosts is preferable to fighting them off.”

I want to follow that up, but I figure that attempts at intimacy might kill us both. I can come up with some theories as to why an upscale woman like Savi might flee wherever she came from to hide out in a place like this. None of them are pretty.

I move over to the refrigerator instead and open the door. “I divided this up so that everyone has space,” I say, waving my hand at the interior shelves. “So we don’t have to worry about sharing things or taking other people’s things by accident. You can claim a space now if you want.”

I have the impression that Savi doesn’t really know what to do with this information. As if she’s never shared anything in her life.

She smiles at me. “How thoughtful.”

I excuse myself and leave her there, because I don’t know how to interact with strange people living in the house. No matter how much money they pay me. Left to my own devices, I will be awkward and direct, and no one wants that in a landlady.

No one wants that at all, come to think of it. Augie was the charming one.

Besides, there’s only so much daylight left.

I spend it hauling all the iron I got at the scrapyard up to the attic and pretend I don’t notice Briar’s door open a crack each time I go out to my truck, as if she’s peeking out but doesn’t want to be seen.

We didn’t sign up to be friends. I don’t need to pay any attention to what anyone here is doing as long as it doesn’t bother me or anyone else—and someone watching me walk in and out of the house doesn’t bother me.

The threshold for that is significantly different than it was three years ago.

So is everything else. I never considered myself particularly good with my hands back then. That’s another gift of necessity. There are no other hands to do the job, so mine had to learn. The good news is, I don’t care if the results of my handiwork are pretty.

I fix the iron bars across my windows, leaving spaces so I can still shoot.

Anything that tries to come inside will have to work for it.

I don’t try to convince myself that a few bars could keep whole werewolves out if they want in, but it might slow them down a bit.

Just long enough for me to get a weapon. That’s all I need.

I hope.

It’s getting dark as I finish, but I jog down the stairs toward Gran’s room, once again a little too keenly aware of the fact it’s not just the two of us any longer. I expect them all to come bursting into the kitchen, or to hear them in there, but everything is quiet.

I find Gran still in her chair but, more surprisingly, still awake.

“Are you hungry?” I ask her, not that it matters. She will sometimes say no and eat her dinner anyway.

“Not like she is,” Gran tells me, and nods toward the window.

I hear a crow squawk and wonder if she’s made a little friend. A little, creepy, carrion-eating friend.

I help her up, get her neatened up, and then we shuffle out to the kitchen together. I take the precaution of barring the back door, just to keep us safe from any tenant incursions. I seat her at the little table there, and she looks up at me balefully. “My home has been ransacked.”

I blink, then remember that she’s still resistant to the fact I cleared out all the crap in this place. She hasn’t met the tenants yet. Those complaints are yet to come.

“We just cleaned up a little,” I reply, keeping my voice as cheerful as possible.

I put together a supper for her of easily digestible things, which is simple enough because such things tend to come in cans, and cans are where it’s at these days.

Supply chains ruptured almost immediately.

Since then, there have been all kinds of enterprising black-market options, but the trouble is, the black market costs money.

Or higher-level bartering that I’m not prepared to enter into with the people involved.

Not everyone is Samuel Ruiz, determined to build community. Some people out here think that communities are pointless, and it’s better to thin out the herd so as not to have to compete for resources. Those are the kinds of people that Franklin Hendry uses to do his dirty work.

I would rather live on BPAs and sodium. I sit down with Gran and watch as she sullenly eats a slice of canned peach.

She frowns at me. “You should eat, Lilianne. You’re going to need your strength.”

“I’m already strong.” I don’t correct her. I don’t tell her I’m not my mother. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not just that she’s confused these days but filled with wishful thinking.

Wishful thinking I understand.

After she eats, I clean up, unbar the back door, then take her in for her nightly routine. I run her a bath and tend to her nails, hands, and feet. She reads her books for a while and tries to get me to look at her cards with her. I decline. Then I tuck her into bed.

I don’t know if she likes my company. I don’t know if she likes anything. But these are the sorts of questions it’s better not to ask, so I never do.

We are who we’ve got. That’s all there is to it.