Page 9 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

The huge werewolf pays me no mind, but that’s not exactly a comfort.

He moves so fast it makes my breath catch in my throat—so fast that I only realize he’s moved in the strangled second afterward, when I’m still standing there at the door and he’s pressing Maddox up against the far porch post.

By her neck.

I struggle to get a panicked breath in. I fight to unlock the heavy door.

“Don’t worry,” Maddox squeaks out, her remarkable eyes aimed my way, which is really something given the giant hand on her neck. “I’m fine.”

“Bold statement, babe,” the werewolf alpha growls.

Only then does the lock on the door open, making it frighteningly clear to me exactly how fast he moves. How vastly different he is from me, and by extension, how different Maddox is too.

It makes me feel fragile, and I hate fragile . It’s the gateway drug to an unpleasant end.

It’s also scary when I don’t have time for scary . There’s only living through the moment and hoping I get another one, repeat and reload. The gun is heavy in my hand.

But when I twitch a little, like I might lift it, Maddox shakes her head. Just slightly.

Just enough to keep me from it.

“Am I losing my fucking mind?” Ty Ceridwen growls, but it sounds more like a curse than a question.

The same Ty Ceridwen I heard once burned down an entire cartel operation in the woods during Oregon’s illegal weed farm days, then dared them to come for him, and this was before we all knew he was a werewolf.

Among other myths and legends that I am pretty sure, now, are all true.

“Tell me I did not come home to hear from your own fucking brother that you ran off and shacked up with prey.”

“You don’t like it when I tell you that you’ve lost your fucking mind,” Maddox replies.

And her tone is so ...

My eyes widen. I realize with a start that she’s not scared. She seems whatever the opposite of intimidated is, standing back against the post as if it was her idea to go there in the first place.

I watch one of Ty’s massive thumbs move down the length of her throat, then up again, and I have no choice but to conclude it’s a kind of temper-fueled caress.

And that she ... doesn’t hate it.

“Pack your shit,” he growls at her.

I have to think that a normal person would be terrified by this. Instead, Maddox tilts her head back so he can grab more of her throat in that giant hand of his.

“I can’t,” she tells him, and she doesn’t sound the slightest bit sorry about it. “It’s not that I don’t want to, except ... I don’t really want to.”

“There comes a point, and you know it, when we are going to be out of choices,” Ty says in a low voice that seems to reverberate through the night outside, and even in me, like one of those asshole Harley engines that splits the sky in half. “And when I say we , babe, I mean you.”

“You’re fully aware of what happens if you go there,” she says as she shrugs, but there’s something different in her gaze. Something harder.

It’s obvious to me that this is an old argument.

“You let me know when you’re tired of playing your little fucking games, Maddox,” Ty grits out, and I don’t know how she manages to simply gaze back at him the way she does.

I can feel my knees beneath me like water, and worry they might splash me right over, when he starts talking in that gravelly way of his again.

“When you feel like stepping up to what you should’ve done years ago.

I’m not the only one you have to answer to. ”

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” she replies, and there’s more steel in her voice than I’m used to, because she’s normally so lazy and disinterested, light and easy.

I don’t see either one of them move, but suddenly their mouths are fused together, and I find myself looking away, feeling embarrassed.

But also frozen to the spot. I don’t know what to do with myself—and then I hear what sounds like a low bit of laughter, again in that deep register that seems to shiver straight through me to threaten my already precarious knees.

I only realize it’s stopped when he’s moving again and is looming right in front of me.

Right there on the other side of the locked gate that seems pretty damn flimsy just now.

It’s possible I swallow my own tongue. But I do have the good sense not to point my gun in his face the way every single screaming cell in my body demands that I do.

And fast.

“Good impulse control,” he bites out at me.

It was one thing to look at him through the door. It was another thing to see the back of his head from across the porch—this whole, huge alpha werewolf leader of all he surveys and can hold with his claws.

Staring up at Ty Ceridwen and finding myself the focus of his attention is like staring up the steep side of a very tall mountain. I can feel sheer, shaking terror coil tight inside me—

But I’m also not blind. I’ve never had occasion to look at him too closely before, but it’s unavoidable now. Knowing that he is a wolf— the wolf—means his features make sense, but it doesn’t make him any more easily palatable.

He has long dirty-blond hair currently twisted back out of his way, though parts of it hang down in the front.

His beard is slightly darker, and it’s hard to tell if it simply grows that way or if he trims it to look just rough-edged enough.

He’s huge, and seems bigger up close. Easily six foot five, though I might be underestimating that, and like a wall of muscle.

A tank. Everything about him is big and bold, and he’s staring down at me as if he’s imagining frying me up in a pan and eating me like a midnight snack.

“You better be worth it,” he says to me.

“I don’t know that I’m worth anything,” I say, alarmed.

He scowls at me, then looks back at Maddox. “I want a detailed map, babe,” he tells her. “A point-by-point analysis of the road ahead. You get me? Or I’m taking it out of your ass.”

She seems remarkably unconcerned with a threat that would probably have me tossing up my dinner in the nearest toilet. All she does is shrug, still standing there against the porch post with his fingerprints on her throat and a look of complete ease.

“When don’t you?” she asks.

He laughs again, like a reckoning, and then he’s gone.

It’s not that he disappears in a puff of smoke, though that would be alarming enough. It’s that when he moves, he goes so fast that my brain can’t quite make sense of it.

Once again, there’s the slamming grate long after he’s disappeared, and there’s nothing outside but the smell of the wildfires in the distance. And, now and then, the sound of the critters either too brave or too foolish to keep quiet in the dark.

But when I stop scanning the dark in disbelief that anything can move that fast , Maddox is still standing there.

“So,” I say, drawing out the syllable.

She looks away, letting out a rueful noise that isn’t quite a laugh. “Yeah. So. ”

And somehow we end up sitting out on the back steps after it turns out we both think that sugar is the only thing that can get us through this moment.

I don’t let her walk through the house to get there, and it makes me feel like an asshole, but she doesn’t seem to care.

Besides, she gets to the back door quicker than I do.

We make mugs of contraband hot chocolate, which is so hard to find these days that I hide it from my own grandmother and would normally share with no one.

Then again, this is the werewolf who lives here now, and I think I feel something like shell-shocked.

Part of that is because we take those mugs and ... sit outside.

“I don’t go out in the dark if I can avoid it,” I say quietly as we hang out there on the back steps. “I’m not sure why I let you talk me into doing it now. Maybe this is an elaborate plan to get me set upon by monsters, after all.”

“I am a monster,” Maddox says serenely from beside me.

“And anyway, you’re safe. First of all, there are only a few things that actually scare me, and none of them are likely to be lurking around in your vegetable garden.

” She takes a sip of her hot chocolate and makes a little humming noise of approval.

“Second, and probably more important where you’re concerned, I live here now.

That means this whole house, this whole property, probably the whole hill, is protected. All of Jacksonville, really.”

“Jacksonville is already protected.” I frown at her. “That was the deal. A safe zone for humans.”

“Sure.” She’s not looking at me. She’s studying her bare feet as she flexes them on the step below. “But now, if something happens up here, Ty will take it as a personal attack on him. There aren’t a lot of folks who want that.”

I take that in. I think about that massive hand on her throat and the way she keeps putting her free hand up to touch the fingerprints that I can still see like stains on her neck.

She does not look like she’s touching them because they hurt.

I clear my throat and wonder what Ty Ceridwen’s “protection” might cost me. “So you and Ty, then.”

We’re sitting so close that it’s almost tempting to forget both that she’s a werewolf and that she was that Maddox Hemming in high school.

Maybe I have forgotten, because I’m not pointing my gun at her.

Maybe because I’m not, she leans in, pressing her shoulder to mine.

For some reason she doesn’t scare me when I think she should.

Maybe I’m just pathologically desensitized.

“Me and Ty,” she says, and again, there’s that rueful sound. “How much do you actually know about werewolves?”

I wrap my hands around my mug. It’s cooler out here than I expected, but I wasn’t kidding. I don’t go out much at night. I forgot that even when the days are warm this late in September, the nights get cold, and fast. The mug feels good in my palms.