Chapter Twelve
Breakfast is delicious. Either I’m starving and delirious or it’s miles above the quality of yesterday’s offering.
I find this suspicious.
Particularly when I try to pay and Marleen tells me it’s already been taken care of. Again, I want to give Logan the credit,
but I didn’t see him pay any bills. The only thing I can see is Jack’s broad back from my spot in the booth, a towel tossed over his shoulder as he moves around behind the counter.
The mystery does not solve itself as I sit there, thinking about shoulders. But now that I’m stuffed and fully caffeinated, I decide I’ll head over to the knitting shop. Not just to poke at Nora for
more information, more understanding of this place and these people and my grandmother, too—to say nothing of generational demon feeds—but also to lose myself
in some yarn. Maybe pick up a new project to keep my hands busy while my mind tries to cycle through the implications of . . .
everything.
I want to be ecstatic that my dreams are being taken seriously, but you know, then I have to accept demons are real. And feed on the humans in this town where I am currently located.
Proving years of dreams about slurping were not just the broken inner workings of my mind. At least, not exactly.
My plan was to leave out the front door and head across the street, I know it was, but somehow I find myself standing in the
little hallway that leads between the diner and the antique store. Maybe, since everything last night actually happened, I should go thank Harrison for the assist in bandaging up my feet. I kind of like that this is the first time I can take
pride in the fact that there’s an actual reason my feet are still tender.
Today is a day of firsts.
But my tender feet don’t move when I tell them they should. I’m rooted to the spot, staring out the window at the looming
clock tower.
I remember with a start that the slurping is not the only thing I dream about.
There’s this clock that has loomed in my head for years.
If my dreams are real—or at least whatever real is here in Midas, the least real-feeling place I can imagine—that means that there’s something awful and dangerous about
that clock, too. Or it wouldn’t creep me out so much, in my dreams and awake.
Do Jack and Nora and Cleo already know this? Is that why Harrison told me that terrible story about the dead baby? Or is this
some piece of information only I know? The trouble with that, of course, is that I don’t know why I would be the repository of secret information in a town filled with people who should already know it.
Harbinger or not.
“It’s safe during the day. Or at least, it always has been. That’s the deal.”
I jerk at the sudden deep voice and glance over my shoulder. There’s not much space in this little corner of the hallway. But Jack is standing there.
Clock tower on one side. Hot guy who doesn’t seem to like me on the other, but who is in possession of extraordinary shoulders.
This is an objective fact.
The fact that his green eyes lock to mine and hold is . . . something else.
My nervous system doesn’t know how to handle this.
I focus on what he said, not the height of him or all that green-eyed nonsense that makes his face . . . a whole thing. I realize belatedly that’s
because he’s not scowling at me.
I don’t know that I know how to deal with a Jack who’s not scowling at me. It seems as overwhelming as demons being real.
Dramatic, yes. I’m still Lexi, after all. And perhaps Jack isn’t scowling at me, but that’s because he’s . . . including me. In whatever this meeting tonight
is going to be about.
So I focus on what he said, not how attractive I find him.
The clock tower is safe during the day. Which implies it’s not safe at night. I already know this, don’t I? That clock is dangerous. I can remember exactly how it felt to drive into Midas
in the dark and find it hulking there, catapulting me straight into a panic attack.
My relationship to the clock tower is the kind of information I would normally keep to myself, because the other way lies
suggestions of sedation and other joys doled out to the so-called mentally fragile.
But I don’t have to mask that shit anymore if the people around me believe in it. I don’t have to attempt to convince this man I’m not crazy, that I really did dream that thing. Grumpy and mean or
not, he already knows that this place is messed up.
Here stands a man who believes in demons and harbingers.
He already knows.
Whether he likes me or not pales in comparison to him believing me.
It’s hard to get the words out around the waves of relief that clog in my throat, but I do it. “I’ve been dreaming of this
clock tower all my life.”
Jack doesn’t say anything to that right away. But he also doesn’t get one of those looks on his face that are far too recognizable to me. No pity. No reproach. No concern.
If anything, he looks thoughtful. “Just the fact that it exists or something worse?”
I shudder. I can’t help it. “Worse. Obviously.” And since he’s engaging with what I’m saying like this is nothing but a straightforward
exchange of information, I explain. “They come out of it. Slurping.”
His eyebrows draw together. He’s studying the clock out the window now, too. “They come out of it,” he echoes. “The mine and the flood wall aren’t safe spaces at night. Hell, the mine is never all that safe, no matter what
time of day it is. I’ve never heard of the clock tower being a demon zone, but . . .”
He trails off, clearly thinking it over. Clearly taking what I said seriously. This is obviously new information for him,
and since he doesn’t refute it out of hand, I feel . . . I don’t know. Useful?
Maybe being the harbinger of doom isn’t all bad?
Yet, I wasn’t at that clock tower last night. I was at the flood wall. And he was there, too. He stopped me from . . . doing
whatever I was out there doing. I’m pretty sure he saved me. I don’t know from what—this demon zone maybe? When I think about last night, thinking he rescued me from something worse than bloody feet feels right.
But how did he know to be there?
I frown up at him. “Nora dreamed about me. What about you?”
He looks uncomfortable now, and that’s fascinating. No hint of all that authority. Or even his usual scowl. And I’m pretty sure that I can see spots of color on his impossible
cheekbones, but that might be the light in this hallway. “I don’t do the dream thing. I’m a Bellamy. It’s more of a . . .
knowing.”
“Knowing what?”
“We’re all made up of parts of the people who made the deal, and people who’ve fought it. Foundlings dream. The rest of us
know. If someone is in trouble. If I can . . . help.”
“Someone? Like, anyone? Superman vibes?” I study him. “I was always more partial to Iron Man.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Of course.”
My gaze is brought back to the clock. It’s like a tractor beam. I don’t want to look, but it pulls at me. I also don’t mean
to speak, but I do. “Harrison told me about the dead baby.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty normal around here. That one wasn’t demons. Just . . . life.”
I don’t like that. I hardly think a clock tower falling on a baby is normal life.
When I manage to look away from the clock, Jack is staring at me. There’s an intensity to it. An intensity that lacks the
usual animosity. It hooks inside me, this look. This . . . connection or whatever it is. A heartbeat, a pulse.
A need, I think.
I feel my own heart kick at me in return.
“Can I ask you a question?” I manage to force the words out of my mouth when my lips don’t seem to want to move.
He blinks, like he didn’t realize he was staring. He turns away from me abruptly. “No.”
Then he walks off toward a part of the building I haven’t seen yet.
But I decide I’m tired of him walking away. Of letting him. If we’re all agreeing that demons exist and my dreams are real and I’m sufficiently powerful to trigger the demon feed
thing just by showing up, he doesn’t get to walk away instead of having a conversation.
Particularly when he came up to me.
So I follow him. Past a sign that clearly reads Employees Only and into a back room stuffed with packed shelves that looks like it must be a storage space for the diner.
“Can’t you read?” he asks gruffly, without looking back at me, as he moves deeper into the room.
Back to gruffness and scowls, like that little moment of softness and . . . I don’t know, exchanging information we somehow
both believe, didn’t happen.
Like he remembered who I am, and yikes. But harbinger or not, it doesn’t make sense, and I am ready to fight for things to make sense. People believe me here.
Things should make sense.
“Why do you hate me?” I demand.
There is a pause—but he stops what he’s doing. The silence stretches out, but he’s not walking away anymore. It occurs to
me to wonder if maybe the reasons are so broad and vast that he has to gear up for a whole speech.
His voice sounds pained as I watch those shoulders of his stiffen, then sink, and that seems to connect to parts of me I’m
not sure I like. Because it looks kind of like defeat and I know what that feels like, but I don’t know why he’d feel that way. I’d rather he start a hate campaign, really.
“I don’t hate you.” He mutters something that sounds a lot like, you have no fucking clue, but that doesn’t make any sense. Then he runs a hand over his head, shoving his hair out of the way. “I don’t even know you.”
I think there’s a strange emphasis on the word you, but having him believe my dreams has made me want to get everything out on the table, so I keep going.
“You did an amazing and immediate impression of hate on first sight,” I say. I remember that moment in the diner vividly.
I remember that he hurt my feelings, even if he is one of the first and only people to take my dreams and sleepwalking at
face value. “And every single moment since.”
Except maybe when he said he wouldn’t hurt me. Or when he almost carried me. Or when he wanted to handle my first aid last
night.
Jack shakes his head but says nothing. He’s really good at that.
But I am really good at letting nothing go. Ask anyone. “Is it because I’m the harbinger? A sign that all this bad stuff is
coming?”
He shakes his head again. I hold my breath, wanting him to look at me, but he doesn’t. When he speaks again, he’s quiet. “You
can’t help who you are, Lexi.”
My eyes prickle suddenly, and I don’t want that. Not here in a storage facility in a weird nowhere demon town in Iowa. But
I can’t stop the sigh I let out, either. “I’ve been trying all my life to.”
He doesn’t look at me right away, but when he does, there’s that flash of something soft in all that usually judgy green.
I decide it’s a figment of my imagination, because it immediately hardens into what I would call his more natural wariness.
Like he needs to be wary around me, when he is a whole rugged man and I get lost while sleepwalking in my ridiculous pajamas.
I want to tell him that, but we’re standing in this dim closet with the shelves pressing in, and the way he looks at me makes
me almost think, if he was anyone else—
His gaze drops to my mouth.
I think, is Jack Bellamy about to kiss me?
But that has to be certain evidence that my belfry is nothing but bats, because didn’t I follow him in here to find out why
he dislikes me so much? The man would probably kiss one of his grandfather’s creepy, vacant-eyed dolls first.
I think about the dolls and shudder, and that’s when his gaze rises again.
His face hardens. That thing in his eyes goes away. I feel the loss of it like a panic all its own.
“Jack,” I begin, and I step closer.
But he’s scowling at me. “Like I said, princess, I’ve got work. You want to ask questions, save them for tonight.”
He grabs a giant tub of what I think might be mayonnaise, because I can’t think what else would look like that, pale and creamy,
and my stomach revolts a little at the thought of all that mess slopping about in that gigantic container. He moves past me,
carrying the mayonnaise with him, and I follow him into the hall—because I don’t want to molder away in that storage area,
because I’m not sure he won’t lock me in there, because of other reasons I can’t really articulate—but I don’t trail him into
the diner.
Not only because he is carrying entirely too much mayonnaise.
Tonight, he said. Our meeting at an airport that is somehow wily enough to avoid, say, a simple map search on any given phone. With Cleo and Nora and, no big deal, the
common knowledge we all share now that demons are real and might crack out of that clock tower, slurping all the way.
Though it’s not a might anymore, I realize. It’s a when.
Because I came to town, and my being here means it’s happening.
But something dawns on me then.
My grandmother is the reason I came to Midas. She deliberately left her shop not only to Nora and Cleo, but also to the grandkids she didn’t know. The grandkids who didn’t know her. Pretty much guaranteeing we’d show up here.
After Harrison made it sound like . . . I was kept away on purpose. Kept safe on purpose. But leaving us things that require us to come here speaks to something different, doesn’t it?
Almost like a harbinger isn’t a bad thing. A thing to avoid and hide from. Not forever.
Because I might never have met the woman, but I’ve been in her house and her shop. I’ve heard the way people who did know
her talk about her.
I can’t believe that she would wish harm upon any of them. There are too many photos in her living room telling stories about
joy for me to think she’d want to hurt anyone.
I have to think that if she wanted me here now, she had to have a reason to believe that I’m not going to Grim Reaper everyone
she loves. Surely whatever role I play, it can’t all be doom and gloom.
She was a knitter, I remind myself. I may even have inherited my love of fabrics I can make with my hands directly from her,
like we’ve been more connected all this time than I realized.
And veteran knitters know that sometimes, you just have to trust the pattern whether it makes sense to you or not.
I feel myself holding on to that as I finally walk out of this building—feeling a lot like it was trying to keep me there,
or maybe it’s a green-eyed diner owner who didn’t really answer the questions I asked him, and definitely wasn’t thinking about kissing me, that’s wild—and head toward the knitting shop.
Though I make a note of all the questions Jack is going to have to answer for me tonight, like me or not, when he’s done slinging
mayo.