Chapter Nineteen
Jack leads me into the main building. It’s a kind of office. There’s a big glass case that houses odd and ends—magazines,
patches, papers—that seems to act as a front desk. And there are a few rooms off this main one. The doors are open and I see
desks, actual landline phones with cords, and other office paraphernalia. It smells a little damp and smokey, but it’s not
altogether unpleasant.
The phone is ringing as we walk in. No one is answering it. That feels less pleasant.
But then Cleo sweeps in from a door I didn’t see before. She slides Jack a narrow look before grabbing the closest phone.
“Kirkpatrick Airfield,” she answers, eyeballing us before grabbing a pen and scribbling something down on a piece of paper.
“Sure, he’ll get back to you this afternoon. Yeah, bye.” She hangs up the phone, writes something else, then turns to us.
Surly Cleo is back.
“What the hell do you want?” she demands, arms crossed over her chest. Her hard gaze moves to me. “No offense to you.” It switches back to Jack. “All to you.”
He looks undaunted. “No secrets, Cleo. I get that it’s sensitive, but—”
“This isn’t about demons. So bite me.” She flashes a smile as she says it, but it’s obviously not meant to be construed as
friendly.
My being here might be keeping the yelling to a minimum, but it doesn’t actually do anything to stop them arguing. A wise
person would let these people who have a whole history I have no part in do their thing without any input from my end.
But that’s not the Lexi Darling way. “Maybe it’s not about demons,” I agree. “But if we have to work together, doesn’t letting
us know what’s going on help us do that?”
The way she eyes me is cool and reminds me of that first day in the knitting store when she clearly regarded me as the enemy.
“You’ve been here all of a few weeks.”
She’s not wrong, but it hurts that she says it like that, because we’ve spent so many nights together now. She’s told me about
her late grandfather, who built this airport out of a weird niche dream, the horrible prank on her awful math teacher that
almost got her arrested in high school, and Nora and I have joined forces to try to convince her she needs to go out with
the twenty-three-year-old flight student who’s halfway in love with her already.
Meanwhile, she’s heard my stories of ill-advised partying—some prompted by demon dreams and some by simple youthful indiscretion.
My overzealous goth phase and the horrible social media posts that went with it.
I have come to consider Cleo and Nora friends. Real friends. And she’s throwing that a bit in my face right here. Which I might let shut me up except . . .
I’m a harbinger. I feel like that gives me some leeway, no matter how I might have misread things and how much that might hurt.
“When do I earn the right to have an opinion? When my dreams wake up the whole town and it’s bloody footprints as far as the
eye can see? Or maybe when the clock tower explodes and demons come shooting out like confetti?”
Her mouth quirks like she’s finding some humor in the situation. Even if it’s dark. This is how I know we’re really cousins.
Then she sighs. “Look. I’m not hiding anything. Grandma’s in a rough spot. She’s not remembering things very well. The doctor
thinks she managed to hide a lot of her issues with Amelia’s help, but now that Amelia’s gone, she’s unraveling to her actual
state of dementia. Or whatever.” She shrugs jerkily, trying to show us a brave front but not quite managing it. “It’s got
nothing to do with you guys, or demons, so this is all a wasted visit. Dad and I are handling it.”
I can tell this isn’t quite what Jack expected. Maybe he thought there was some deep conspiracy that was making Cleo act weird—whatever
that means in demonville—but everything Cleo is saying seems to go along with the ghostly face in the window I saw the last
time I was here. I don’t know a ton about dementia, but it makes sense that it could make someone unpredictable.
And might make Cleo act like we’re not friends when we are. She’s protecting herself and her grief.
The phone rings again and Cleo swears under her breath before answering. Then she isn’t swearing under her breath. She drops
the phone and runs out of the office without a word to either of us.
But there was terror in her expression so it doesn’t take me but a second to follow—Jack at my heels.
“Shit.”
Jack sees it before I do. I have to look back at him to see what he’s swearing about, and when I look in the direction of
his gaze—and Cleo’s run—I see a pretty white house with curtains fluttering in the breeze. It’s a bit cold for open windows,
but—
My gaze drifts to the second floor. The windows are open there, too.
And a woman stands on the roof.
Jack and Cleo are racing for the front door, running flat out. I’m frozen for a moment, looking at the old woman standing
there with both feet on the shingles while one hand grips the window. She’s pointing out at something, but I don’t think I’m
the only one who doesn’t dare look away from her while she’s up there.
She isn’t dressed for the cold or the wind that whips through her wispy white hair. She’s saying something, but I can’t hear
it. She isn’t steady. She—
It clicks then, a breath after Jack’s curse. She must be Cleo’s grandmother. She is the face in the window from the other
night. And she is most definitely not well. I race inside after Cleo and Jack, chasing them up the stairs and arriving at
the top of the house long after they have.
When I find them in a room upstairs, Jack is already out the window. He’s got his hand over the old woman’s, helping her hold
on to the window. Cleo is inside, clutching Jack like they’re a kind of chain, linking her grandmother to safe ground.
“I can see them,” I hear the woman say. I can only see her back, but her head turns to Jack. “Can’t you see them?” she asks
him desperately.
I look to Jack, who is precariously balanced with one hand clasped to Cleo’s grandmother’s hand. “Sure, I see them,” he says
gently. Soothingly. “But there are better places to do that, aren’t there? Safer.”
“It’s coming. They’re gathering. They’re feeding.”
“We know,” Jack says. “Come back inside, Virginia. We’ll talk all about it.”
“Come on in, Grandma,” Cleo echoes. Her voice is strong, but her eyes are dark with worry.
With some finagling, Jack manages to get her back in through the window before he comes back in himself. I think we’re all
a little shaky, but Cleo gets her grandmother to sit down in an armchair in the corner.
“Down by the river,” Virginia is saying, looking at Cleo like she’s searching for something. An anchor, maybe. An answer.
“They’re gathering too soon. It’s worse. Like before.”
Cleo kneels at her grandmother’s feet, clasping her hands in hers. “Shh. It’s okay,” she says. Cleo looks at Jack, then me.
“She’s getting confused. She . . . Sometimes she remembers Feeds from before and thinks it’s happening now.”
It makes sense. How traumatic events might come back to haunt you when your brain is failing you. But something about Cleo
talking to me brings Virginia’s gaze to mine.
It almost makes me jump, because it’s like looking into my own eyes. Or Logan’s. They must be Darling eyes.
My grandmother Amelia’s eyes.
For a weird, topsy-turvy moment it’s like time flows around me. Past and future. In and out. All things and nothing, and I
think maybe I mixed up my sleeping pills last night.
“You see,” she says. To me. At me.
It doesn’t feel like a threat. I’m not even sure it feels like a warning, but I don’t know how to describe how those words
hit me. The you is directed at me.
You see.
“You see it. In your dreams. Don’t you?”
Everything in me freezes. She knows I dream? But . . . Cleo says she’s misremembering. Maybe she’s confused me with someone else. With Nora?
But Virginia sinks deeper into the chair, looking tired. Tired but lucid as she gazes at me with heartbreak in her eyes. “Amelia
so wished there was more she could have done for you. But your father took you, and Midas let you leave.”
I swallow, and I hear Cleo and Jack inhale sharply. Because it’s clear. She’s never met me, at least as an adult. No one introduced
me. But in one look, she knew exactly who I was.
“She brought you back. Amelia sacrificed everything to bring you back.”
My heart is so loud in my ears it’s like a physical pounding, like I am throbbing from the inside out. Sacrificing everything means . . .
“She knew where the real danger was,” Virginia says, her gaze moving to Jack. Something in it hardens, and her grip on Cleo’s
hand tightens. “Where it always is. She knew. Do you know?”
It almost sounds like an accusation.
Jack only looks back at her steadily. “Do I know what?”
But it reminds me of what Harrison said earlier about Jack sacrificing anything and anybody in his way. I wonder if this is
what he means. Whatever Virginia is hinting at. Something Jack knows.
Yet, even as I think that, I also think—Virginia might have some answers, but there’s also a lot of confusion there. She isn’t looking at me anymore. She’s looking out the window. She’s
settled back into the chair.
“They’re feeding. They’re so early to be feeding.” Her face arranges itself in horror and maybe even some pain. “Can’t you
hear it?” Her eyes meet mine again. “You can hear it.”
The slurping. She means the slurping. And I can’t hear it in this moment, but I have heard too much of it, and my heart trembles in my chest at the idea she’s hearing that right now.
“They want you to think you’re safe. None of you are safe. You have to stay together in the dark to be safe. They’ll separate
you in the dark. You have to stay together.”
We all still, frozen in place. Stay together in the dark. She doesn’t sound quite right, and yet . . . The dark is the problem. The demons are the problem.
“Only the blood can stop it,” Virginia says on a long sigh. She yawns. Her eyes droop. “It starts and ends at the beginning.
Only the beginning can end it.”
“What blood, Virginia?” Jack asks, intently. “What beginning?”