Chapter Ten #2
be able to explain it to you in a way you’ll believe if Amelia never warned you. I suppose she was trying to protect you.
Or someone was.”
“Protect us from what?” Logan demands.
Harrison turns his bleary gaze on me, which feels oddly direct when Logan’s the one who voiced the question. “The demon deal,
of course.”
I can hear Logan mutter something disapproving under his breath, but I am caught in Harrison’s warm gaze. Demon.
He said demon deal. I’m sure of it.
And he keeps going. “The harbinger is always a sign that the Feed is coming.”
The Feed. I think of that revolting slurping. The way it’s haunted me. I don’t know who’s doing the feeding or what they’re feeding on, but I know it connects. I know
I connect.
I have heard the echoes of people screaming. They’re feeding.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Logan says, in a voice he usually only uses while getting juries to do his bidding. Often by politely savaging
his opponents. “What is the Feed? Some kind of agricultural festival?”
Both Jack and Harrison look at him like he’s the dumbest man alive—not something Logan is at all familiar with or knows how
to handle, that’s for sure. He’s always the smartest person in any room I’m in.
“Demons, son,” Harrison says gently. “You have to appease the demons. Our ancestors made a deal.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Logan rubs his hands over his face, another rare show of exasperation.
“Do you really think that bullshit is going to work on us just because we’re not from around here?
I’ve spent half my life in courtrooms dealing with people who think a little faked insanity will get them out of jury duty or jail time. You think this act is going
to scare us?”
But I am scared. Because I’ve heard the slurping. I’ve felt the pull. Maybe I don’t exactly believe in demons, but it makes sense in the context of everything happening right now.
It’s a dream, so maybe that’s why I feel like engaging with the information at face value. When I wake up, there will be no
curse, no demons, no feeding. These are dream things, fictional things. I decide that means I should get to the bottom of
them while I’m still in the dream. In dream world, no one looks at me with pity, like my mind is nothing but a bunch of rabid
cats fighting each other.
“What does our grandmother have to do with demons?” I ask Harrison specifically, even though both Harrison and Jack turn their
gazes to me.
“Every generation has its believers, its fighters,” the old man tells me, in the sort of voice that I can imagine has told
a lot of bedtime stories. “Every generation has its cowards and its heroes. And so every generation must prepare for the Feed,
which arrives on the back of a harbinger. Some say that the first harbinger came about thanks to the prayers of a woman who
suffered an unimaginable loss at the hands of the demons. Subsequent legends call those prayers spells and the woman in question a witch from down in Missouri. Either way, the harbinger comes. Years can pass without a Feed, but there’s always another one on
the horizon, and the harbinger always comes first. To let us know the Feed will follow.”
Harrison looks at me meaningfully. Jack looks away.
Logan scoffs audibly.
But in this moment, I know it’s me. The dreams. The sleepwalking. Everything I’ve been plagued by since I was a kid—things
Logan was never haunted by.
I am a harbinger of doom.
And hey, this might be a dream, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to feel untrue when I wake up.
“You mean me,” I say, because it’s probably a good idea to make sure that I’m the one who can be depended upon to show up when feeds involving demons are on the menu. Not the sort of thing a
girl should gatecrash if she’s not invited.
“I mean you,” the old man says kindly. “I knew the moment I saw you.”
Logan scoffs. “Did the demons tell you?”
Jack makes a low noise at that, but Harrison holds up a hand. “Not the demons. Your grandmother. She knew it would be you.
She’s always known. We’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”
“You look like your mother,” Jack says as if he would rather punch himself in the face than tell me this. “Shockingly like
her.”
“Yes,” Logan says impatiently, “there’s a strong family resemblance. Just like there are a lot of photographs in our grandmother’s
house to help sell this story.”
“The original founding families of Midas made a deal with the demons,” Jack says, sounding about as impatient as Logan. “The
demons promised Midas some years of peace and prosperity, some safe places and times. In return, the people of Midas would
allow for a great feed to occur once a generation, in which the founding families would ensure that extra souls were in town
for the demons to sate themselves with. Otherwise known as our annual festivals.”
Logan and I are so quiet I’m not sure either one of us is breathing.
“We’ll mark two hundred years of Feeds this Halloween. A bicentennial.” Harrison lifts his shoulder. “Each generation tries
to stop them, but none have managed it yet. Sometimes winning is just surviving.”
Jack looks away from his grandfather then. I can’t read his expression, but it feels deliberate on his part. Maybe a sign he doesn’t agree? Or maybe Logan is right and this is all a joke and Jack is just hiding his face so we can’t see him laugh at us.
To me, though, this all feels serious and ominous and real. It feels plausible. It feels like an explanation for all the weirdness in my life. Forked tongues and threatening garden
gnomes. Old women who act like they know me and want to hurt me. That creepy clock tower and all the slurping. Is this what I’ve been dreaming of all along?
I know I’ll wake up in the morning and remember there are no such things as demons, aside from my vast selection of private,
personal ones that I inadequately exorcise in therapy. And if there aren’t demons, and I know there aren’t, that means there
aren’t . . . whatever harbingers are.
But for a moment, it’s like my whole life makes sense at last.
“Not everyone survives the Feed,” Harrison tells me very seriously. “So you must be careful and protect yourself. Amelia should
have taught you. Your father should have warned you, if he remembered.”
“He can’t have,” Jack mutters.
Harrison waves a hand at him but keeps his eyes on me. “It’s shocking that you don’t know.”
The idea that there were people who should have taught me, who should have told me I wasn’t actually crazy, lands hard and
twists inside my chest.
But he mentioned Dad again. “Did you know our father?” I ask. It’s something I can ask awake, too. In the daylight. When it
won’t sound like the rantings of someone you don’t want your kids playing with.
Harrison doesn’t meet my gaze. He’s looking toward me, but not at me.
“Only some are allowed to escape. We never know in advance who they’ll be.
Many try, only to suffer the consequences of the attempt.
Your father, it turns out, was one of the lucky ones who was permitted to go without any issues. ”
“I’d say he paid a price,” Jack mutters, but Harrison only waves it away.
I shudder at . . . all of that. And what it means—that you could try to leave but find yourself trapped here in Midas. With consequences that I’m assuming aren’t pleasant, or he wouldn’t call
them that.
“Did you know our mother?” Logan asks, his voice rough in a way that tells me he’s more emotional here than he wants to be.
Harrison looks at him, then at me. “Every generation has its champions and its martyrs,” he says cryptically. “Someone who
dies so that another can live to tell the tale.”
I shiver at the implications of that. I think Jack must, too, because he seems to stiffen. He looks somehow even more uncomfortable, like he’d rather be anywhere but here, dealing with us. With me, I think.
And the full lack of answers haunts me. It feels like a yes, but the word martyr makes me more than a little sick to my stomach. I don’t like the look on Logan’s face, either. He’s clearly no fonder of that
word than I am.
When Harrison finally focuses on me, his gaze is intent. “You must lock your doors. You must use Amelia’s protections.” He
seems to read my blank look, because he continues, “Nora can show you.”
Then he gives me a smile. The kind of smile you give a child, reassuring them that everything is fine. When it is . . . not.
“But in the meantime, this should help.”
He shuffles over to the glass case he was sitting behind yesterday the first time I met him. He slides it open from behind,
then grabs something from the bottom shelf that I can’t see.
Jack goes with him, clearly wanting to stop Harrison from moving around so much. It almost makes me think grumpy, surly Jack might actually care about something.
Harrison waves him away once again, with a small flare of annoyance, then shuffles toward me. He holds out his hand. I don’t
even hesitate to hold mine out in return.
He drops the tiniest gold key into the palm of my hand. It can’t be more than an inch long, with what looks like a locket
on one end. It’s delicate and warm in my hand.
“Keep it in whatever room you sleep in,” Harrison tells me, his kind eyes crinkling in the corners.
“This is ridiculous,” Logan mutters. He takes me by the arm and helps me to my feet. More yanks me, but I go along with it.
“Very funny joke, but some of us have real problems. Not a shock that our dad never mentioned this place.”
He doesn’t believe them.
It’s not like I want to linger, but . . . I turn back to Harrison, resisting Logan’s tug on my arm. The tiny locket is clutched
in my palm.
“Can’t I just go back to New York?” I ask the older man. “And pause all the . . . harbingering?”
Harrison looks at me gravely. “The harbinger is nigh. You’re already here and the die is cast.” When Logan sighs and I stare
blankly at Harrison, he clears his throat. “You can try to leave, Lexi. But I wouldn’t, if I were you.”