Chapter Nine
“What are you doing?”
The fact Jack is the one asking me that while his hand is on me is ludicrous.
Then I remember this is a dream and it doesn’t have to make sense, because my brain doesn’t. Because dreams don’t.
That’s why I ground and center myself before bed. So I can remember who I am when things go sideways in my head.
And this has to be a dream. Even if I managed to sleepwalk, how would I end up all the way out here without knowing? Without Logan stopping
me? That’s not reasonable. It’s not real.
I have been haunted by my own mind my entire life, and it has never once been real. I refuse to let myself believe that’s
changed now. I know what happens to the world around me when I give my psychosis too much credence.
But I can also feel every inch of Jack’s large hand, how easily it swallows my upper arm, the rough callouses at the top of
his palm. I can see the earthy green of his eyes here in the lights that illuminate the flood wall in front of us.
The hand is a lot, but the flood wall draws my attention again. There’s that noise, but it’s faint. My head doesn’t want to know what it is, but my body seems to yearn to find the source. Like it’s some kind
of beacon for my soul.
I really need to wake up.
“Lexi.” Jack’s voice is sharp. Authoritative. Certainly pissed off. So I manage to look away from the lit-up flood wall that
horrifies and fascinates me and focus on his face instead.
Sharp, aristocratic nose. Square jaw. In the dim light his expression is no different than it was at the diner. Aloof and
vaguely furious.
This makes sense. I don’t know how else his expression might appear, as I’ve only ever seen it like this. And this is a dream,
so I’m just regurgitating my real life into this weird little collection of senseless events—or so a therapist once told me.
Nothing to fear.
It’s analysis with a side helping of sensation.
But I am freezing. And my feet hurt.
More unnerving, I can still feel his hand on my arm.
“I just need to wake up,” I tell him. Earnestly, but also with great certainty.
This usually works, because dreams don’t like it when I get meta. Talk about the dream in the dream, and the dream is over.
Jack does not get this memo. Neither does the dream. He sighs and rolls his eyes. And sure, it’s not real, but I find that
insulting. So I try to straighten, to pull out of his grasp. He looks down at his hand on my arm, then drops it like he suddenly
realized he had his hand on a gas burner.
He scowls at me and shoves his hands into his pockets. “You need to go back.”
As much as I want to argue with Dream Jack for the sake of arguing with him, back sounds safe. Back to that little house behind the knitting shop. Back to bed.
Maybe back to New York while I’m at it.
I wasn’t having nightmares in New York. Maybe a few here and there of late, but not like this. Maybe, if I really let myself
think about my dreams over the past few months, I have to admit that the slurping sound that seems to haunt me here was in
those dreams, too. But it was different.
You were far away and safe.
I shudder at that unbidden thought that sounds like someone else’s voice in my head. Someone I don’t know.
“It isn’t safe outside at night. It isn’t safe in the dark. You need to go back,” Jack tells me again, his voice even more
gruff this time. “Do you not know the way?”
I look around at the dark night that presses in anywhere there isn’t light. It’s not inviting. And maybe I don’t know the
way, exactly, but I don’t get the sense he’s actually asking because he plans to help me get back to my grandmother’s tiny
house tonight. So I don’t answer his question. I will find my own way back, I decide, no matter how much my body reacts negatively
to the idea of walking around in the dark. Alone. Bloody. Not exactly happy with any of this.
I remind myself that this is a dream, so it doesn’t matter if I’m terrified. Nothing can actually harm me. Especially not surly Jack.
I take a step, then hiss as my foot hits the ground. It hurts. I shift to my other foot but make a little squeak of pain, because that hurts, too.
Nothing is supposed to hurt. Not actually hurt. There are supposed to be rules, even in bad dreams. Especially in bad dreams.
Jack mutters a curse that is only surprising because while I’d expect that from any random person in New York, this is the
Midwest. I was given to understand that they don’t use language here.
“I can’t believe you’re going to make me do this,” he growls. At me.
I have no idea what this is, but when he moves toward me, I flinch back. The bottoms of my feet throb like the skin’s been peeled off them, but more
immediately upsetting is the fact that he’s reaching for me.
And he looks furious.
There is the slightest sense of his expression softening, the fury in those green eyes banking a little. “I’m not going to hurt you.” His voice is damn near gentle.
“Lexi!”
It’s Logan. I’ve never been so thrilled to hear my twin. I sneak a look over my shoulder and am unduly relieved to see him
in the flesh, running at full speed toward us—straight down the center of the road that leads into town. The whole town that
is right there. There’s even a little pathway of light. It’s like I couldn’t recognize it until now.
Of course, even now, the shadows seem to have claws and teeth . . . trying to reach out into that path of light.
As Logan gets closer, I can see the rare fury in his expression. He doesn’t stop until he can put himself between me and Jack,
and I love him for that. He might have sandbagged me with that shit about doing everything all the time, but out here in the dark, it’s serious and he’s on my team.
If the run cost him anything, he doesn’t show it. Not even a hint of heavy breathing. Even in my dreams, Logan is his perfect
self.
This is actually comforting instead of annoying, for a change.
“What the hell is going on here?” he demands of Jack. He sounds mean and suspicious, the way he usually only does in court—and,
now that I consider it, in the knitting shop yesterday.
I have to lean to one side to see around Logan’s tall frame so I can see Jack.
Jack’s expression is no longer even slightly soft. Maybe that was a trick of the light. The dream light, I remind myself. Believing my dreams has never done anything but cause problems. No matter how real they feel, I cannot
give in to the imagination that whispers this could be true.
It can’t be.
“You tell me,” Jack says, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Me? I just got here and my sister is bloody. What the hell are you doing?”
I look down at my feet and sure enough, they’re still bleeding. It makes me a little woozy, so I look away. Back to where
my brother stands like he’s my personal bodyguard between me and a man who . . . confuses me.
But then, Logan has always been my bodyguard. In his own way.
“Your sister—” and I feel that Jack makes that sound like a curse word “—probably shouldn’t be wandering around town in the
middle of the night barefoot if she wants to keep her feet from getting cut, but again, that’s got nothing to do with me.”
There’s enough accusation in his words that even in my dream state, I’m offended. “Yes, because that’s a cognizant choice
I made. I thought, I know, let me traipse around a creepy little village in the dead of night and make sure it hurts.”
He flicks me a glance—and it’s just a glance, so I don’t know why it makes my chest feel tight—but his green eyes immediately
shift back to Logan. “If you two don’t know enough to lock your damn doors and protect yourself at night, I don’t know what to tell you. Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
“You’re out here, too,” Logan points out. “Alone. In the dark. With my sister, who is bloody while you seem perfectly fine. I should call the cops.”
Jack’s expression is somehow more grim and even more furious than before, but there’s also a new kind of exasperation under it. “Didn’t Amelia find a way to tell you two anything?”
That brings us both up short. Our grandmother? What was she supposed to somehow tell us? How to keep ourselves locked away
in the sort of small town that surely contains those people who claim they haven’t locked their car or house in the whole
of their lives? I thought that was the point of small towns.
Logan looks back at me. He slips his arm around my waist, wordlessly encouraging me to lean against him so I can take some
of the pressure off my feet. I’m happy to do it.
Jack looks openly frustrated with us, so I’m not surprised when he turns away from us and starts stalking off toward the street.
Like he’s going to leave us here in the shadow of a flood wall that feels more and more threatening—I swear it’s looming at us—the farther he gets away from us.
“Are you coming or not?” he growls, not bothering to look back at us, though he’s stopped some yards away.
I stare at his back. He’s mostly in shadow. And he hasn’t done anything to me. In fairness, neither has the slurping or the flood wall. The pain in my feet is from walking around barefoot, I assume,
so Jack isn’t wrong when he says it’s kind of my own fault.
“Are we coming where?” Logan demands. He’s still propping me up and I’m relieved that someone here is on my side—and is in
their right mind—but I don’t feel safe.
I can’t imagine I’ll ever feel safe here.
“Do you want answers or do you want to play the ignorant asshole tourists wandering around in the middle of the night?” Jack
demands.
And he doesn’t wait for an answer. He keeps on walking.
Leaving Logan and me standing in the floodlights that are aimed at the wall. I’m not sure what I want—but then I hear that awful dream slurp coming from somewhere in the shadows. I reach out for Logan’s arm and get a grip on the sleeve of his sweatshirt.
“We have to go after him, Logan.” I look at him and nod when he shakes his head.
Because even if it’s a dream, we have to go. Jack is offering answers.
And we don’t have any of those. Maybe dream answers don’t really count in the light of day, but they’re something. They’re
better than more questions.
Especially when the main question I want to ask—but won’t—is whether I’m right to think that just before Logan got here, Jack was going to pick me up.
As in, up into his arms.
Like a princess, not a problem.
And the real problem is I wish he had.