Chapter Thirteen
“I don’t see why we have to ride with her.”
I stare at Logan from where I’m curled up on our grandmother’s sofa. Now my brother’s bed. He can be baffling when he wants
to be and apparently today he really wants to be. “Nora said this airport is hard to find.”
“I’m sure I can find it.”
I’m not sure he’s wrong, since everything seems to work out for him so easily, but . . . “I have seen you treat actual criminals
with more courtesy than you use with Nora. What’s the matter with you?”
He moves away from the mantel where he’s been scowling at all the pictures, and shoots me an exasperated look. “I don’t know,
Lex. Maybe the fact these people are asking me to believe in collective dreams and demons and feeding on souls.”
He says it with a certain kind of derision that has all my muscles tightening in anxiety. Logan has always, always been the one person who didn’t treat me differently because of all my . . . problems.
Will other people believing me . . . change that? I can’t stand the thought the answer might be yes. I sit up, trying not
to sound uncertain and desperate, even though I feel that inside me. “But you . . . do believe it? Right?”
If Logan doesn’t believe my dreams are real, I’m going to have a hard time believing it myself, no matter how many Midas residents
do.
“I don’t want to. I have no reason to. But . . .” His expression is strange, then. He looks like he doesn’t know what to do. Or what to believe—and that has
never once been Logan Darling.
I’m pretty sure he was making executive decisions in the womb.
That’s how he made it out three minutes ahead of me.
He moves over to the coffee table and picks up his tablet. “Last night, after I got you back to bed, I did some research.
It occurred to me that local newspapers might have archives of when . . . Well, if Mom was here, there should be a story about
her. Some . . . inkling she existed here.” He clears his throat and holds out the tablet to me. “She did.”
I take it and read the headline of this old news article he’s unearthed, because of course, Logan has.
Local Woman Dies in Abandoned Mine.
The minute I see the abandoned mine part, I don’t want to read about it. And I especially don’t want to read it when I see the name Laura Darling. Our mother.
I shake my head as I stare at the article, trying not to think about Logan at said abandoned mine yesterday. “But Dad always
said . . .”
“That she died in childbirth. Giving birth to us.”
“That’s the story,” I say, but the way Logan looks at me, I find myself second-guessing that.
“Is it really?” he asks. “Because I can’t actually remember anyone saying those words. Do you?”
I open my mouth to say that of course I do, but stop. Because the only memory I actually have is knowing she was dead. Always. We knew she was dead before we knew
what it even meant. Maybe Logan and I just assumed we were why she died, because otherwise she’d have been there.
And maybe no one ever corrected that assumption because she was not a topic of conversation anyone encouraged. It was too
sad. It still is.
“It’s the same mine we went to,” Logan says quietly while I stare at my mother’s name there on the screen without engaging
with any of the other words. “I don’t know what I felt when I was there. I didn’t like it. But it was something. Something . . .”
He blows out a breath. “Scary.” I know it’s hard for him to admit that, but then he looks at me.
His eyes are the same brown as mine, ringed with gold. And they seem particularly intense, suddenly. “And you’ve never been
crazy, Lex. This explains . . . you. How can I deny that, even if I want to?”
A lump forms in my throat.
But he’s not done. “No matter how the things you told me sounded, I never thought you were nuts. Maybe I didn’t understand
what you said sometimes, but I knew it wasn’t bullshit. A lot of those psychiatrists Dad sent you to, on the other hand, I
always thought had their own problems.”
On some level I’ve always known this. Or I wanted to believe he supported me like this, because for the most part—outside
of some typical brother shit—Logan always did. He was always willing to fight for me while Dad was always worried about me
being okay.
Dad’s approach came from a good place, but it weighed heavily. So heavily that Logan became my only safe ground, and even then, he was so much like Dad that in the back of my head I always worried one day he’d wake up and see me for what I really was, too.
I let out a slow breath. But he hasn’t. He won’t. We’re here, where people give credence to everything that’s haunted me my
entire life, and Logan is on my side. And not just because he felt something at the mine where our mother died, apparently.
But because he believes me, and always has.
“Come on,” he mutters then, clearly not wanting to get any further into all the emotional land mines of this any more than
I do. “We’ve got to meet what’s-her-name so we can figure out what the hell is going on in this godforsaken town. Because
I might be considering buying in to the idea of demon deals, but I’ve got a hell of a lot of questions to ask on the way there.”
“You know her name,” I reply, caught between frustrated and entertained at his insistence on being so weird when it comes
to Nora.
But I follow him outside, hugging myself against the chill of a dark night. I don’t hear any slurping, for which I praise
all attendant gods, but I look around all the same. I’m half expecting to see yellow, glowing eyes in every shadow.
We cross the grassy space between the house and the knitting shop. The back door of the shop is wide-open and light streams
out into the grip of the dark fall night. Nora is waiting inside, standing in the brightness of the back room like she’s in
no hurry to wade out into the darkness.
She smiles at us, but I’m sure I can see a little desperation around the edges. Maybe it’s because I recognize it. I wish
I understood what was underlying all her nervous, anxious energy.
If Nora dreams like I do, I pretty much want to know everything about her, but I know better than to come on too strong with people.
Especially with my brother here acting so prickly for no good reason.
One benefit of having been considered a fringe human all my life is that I’ve had the opportunity to observe how so-called “normal” people interact. And I’m not bad at mimicking it.
“Hi, guys,” Nora says, with what feels like excessive brightness, but that could be a perfectly reasonable reaction to the
Midas night outside, thick and heavy. “My car’s parked back this way if you want to follow me.”
When we both nod, Nora closes and locks the door behind her and then leads us around toward the alley Logan and I walked down
that first night. Instead of following it up to Main Street, she follows a thin pathway of light toward a parking lot behind
the building across the alley.
There is something very careful about the way she walks, like she won’t dare to step one foot into shadow. I find myself following suit. Like something about
the light makes it safe.
“It’s about a twenty-minute drive,” Nora explains as we climb into her old but very well-tended sedan.
Logan takes the backseat, another strange choice from the man who’s always in charge of everything, so I slide into the front
passenger seat and smile winningly at our new friend. Or my new friend anyway. I hope.
“The airport isn’t in Midas proper,” Nora continues as we buckle in. “That’s why Jack wanted to meet there.”
“Because that way the demons won’t eavesdrop?” Logan asks, somewhat sarcastically. Okay. More than somewhat.
I shoot him a disapproving glare over my shoulder, especially considering he just told me he’s buying in to all this, but
he doesn’t meet my gaze.
“Something like that,” Nora replies. Carefully, I think. And with only a glance at Logan through her rearview mirror. Then
she begins to drive.
“I thought people couldn’t just leave Midas?” I ask her.
Shadows seem to loom and gather as she pulls onto Main Street, drives for a moment, and then turns off onto a side street.
When I look at the broken-out windows of the abandoned, crumbling buildings just a few yards behind the cheerful storefronts on the main drag, I swear I see flashes of something .
. . viscous dripping down the jagged edges.
I would ask myself what the hell that could possibly be, except I have a personal policy never to investigate anything that
could possibly be described as viscous. Because you know going in that it can’t be good. Especially as we pass what is clearly the lump of a dead animal on the side
of the road—normal, probably, but the ears were decidedly . . . cat.
“Well,” Nora hedges, still driving along, “it’s complicated.”
A big black dog lunges into the street suddenly. It stops in our path, directly in front of our car, illuminated in the headlights.
It’s big and hairy and bares its fangs, but Nora doesn’t slow or stop. I brace myself in my seat—
But just in the nick of time, just before we hit it, it darts away.
I’m halfway to convincing myself it was a hallucination when it dawns on me that if my dreams at night are real, the waking
ones probably are, too.
“Was that a—”
Before I can find the right word for what I just saw, a car comes careening out of nowhere like it’s trying to hit us. It
swerves around us on the narrow street and races ahead—then swerves again and crashes right into the side of an abandoned
brick building.
I think I scream. Logan swears.
But Nora doesn’t even flinch. She doesn’t stop for the crash or make a move to grab her phone and call the police. She keeps
her eyes straight ahead.
She doesn’t even slow down as we pass the wreck.
“What the hell was that, Nora?” Logan demands.
Nora seems flustered then, but I’m pretty sure it has more to do with Logan saying her name than what just happened. Or maybe
the fact that they actually looked at each other in the rearview mirror. “Oh, that happens sometimes. The crashes. People blame it on all sorts of things—these