Chapter Twenty-One #2
For a few moments, we’re just looking at each other in the dim light. Understanding each other, I think. And when his gaze
drops to my mouth this time, I’m not thinking about anything besides what it would feel like to have Jack’s mouth on mine.
But then he sighs, looks down at his work, so I do, too. He’s got an arm over what appears to be a spiral notebook, almost
like he’s trying to hide it, so of course, I look more closely.
I’d recognize my own handwriting anywhere. My notebook. My accounts of my dreams—and it’s open to an account of one I had long ago in New York. Is he only just reading
them now? When I thought he found no value in them weeks ago and, really, was just giving me something to do in the mornings?
I don’t know what I feel. I shouldn’t be offended. He never said he read them. He acted like they were important, but he never promised anything. And I haven’t asked about it in all these weeks, so this is on me. “I thought you read that already,” I say flatly.
He looks at me like I said something bizarre.
“I did read it,” he replies. “All of it, a few times, and the new entries, too.” He moves his arm and I can see he’s made
a lot of notes just on this one page.
It’s weird—his handwriting over mine.
And I feel a little breathless when I see just how seriously he takes my dreams. It makes something in me go shivery, deep within.
“Oh,” is all I can manage to say.
Jack swallows like he’s making a presentation. “At first, I was really focused on the clock tower stuff. It’s new, and different from any previous accounts or journals that discuss the Feed. The clock tower has never been associated with demons, except in your dreams.”
We’re back to business, away from the personal. I figure I could push us back there, but . . . Well, soul-sucking demons should
probably take prominence. “Maybe my dreams are wrong.”
He fixes me with a hard look. “You’re the harbinger. You’re from a founding family. Your mother was a foundling. Your dreams
are not wrong, Lexi. They’re one of the best resources we have.”
I don’t know how to react to that. It’s so . . . validating.
And terrifying.
He taps the journal page in front of him, looking down at it, away from me. “Virginia said the end is in the beginning. I
can’t get it out of my head. So I went back to the beginning.” He flips a few pages in the journal, then hands that to me.
I’ve read this. It was the first recounting of a deal with the demons. “Harrison had me read this first. The three founders
go to the river, meet with what they thought were a group of French fur trappers who’d been harassing their townspeople. And
the fur trappers turned into demons.”
“Yes. Down by the river. Beyond the flood wall. Beyond Midas proper. On a big boulder.” Jack leans in, holding my gaze. “A
big boulder that all children of Midas—founding family descendants or not—are taught to stay away from and have been taught
that in every record I’ve ever read. A place by the river that would have been great for a bridge or a mill or a million other
things, but oddly enough, no one wants anything to do with that piece of land. It’s not even incorporated. I’ve lived here
my whole life, and I’ve never gotten close.”
I swallow. The words boulder and river stick out at me like a fleeting memory, but I can’t quite catch it. Something about claws on rock.
He flips a few pages in the notebook, then hands it to me. I see he’s underlined the word rock.
I skim what I wrote. It’s odd because there’s no clock tower, no black or slurping noises. It’s a dream I’ve only had once.
I had it the night Amelia died, though I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know it until I got here. August fifteenth. Before
I even knew she existed.
“Tell me about this dream,” Jack urges me.
“I wrote it all down.”
He nods like he believes me, and still he repeats himself. Urgently. “Tell me, Lexi.”
I’ve noticed he only says my name in that quiet way when it’s important, and I’ve also noticed that I can’t seem to reject
anything he says when he says my name like that.
I lick my suddenly dry lips. It’s important. I know it’s important. But something inside me doesn’t want to go there.
Suck it up. People’s lives are at stake.
Jack touches me then. Gently. He takes my arm and pulls me closer to him. Maybe this is a dream. The kind I’ll be a lot more embarrassed by in the morning—
But he nudges me into the stool next to him. “Tell me,” he says. Again.
I expect him to pull away, but he leaves his hand on my arm like an anchor, and it works. I feel . . . safe. Something I feel
so rarely that I’m getting a little emotional.
I clear my throat so I can talk. I look at the words, but more, I try to picture the dream again.
“I’m standing on a rock by a river. I don’t recognize it or where I am or anything. It’s just me. And I don’t know if there
was more that led up to that dream.” I look at him, worried. “I don’t always remember everything.”
He squeezes my arm. “That’s all right. You just tell me what you remember.”
I stare at him. He has never been so warm with me. So kind.
He will do anything to find the answers he wants, Harrison said, but I’m not sure I think that’s such a bad thing.
I go on. “I’m on the rock. I’m looking for someone.” Usually, I remember the bad parts of dreams, vividly, but this one is
a little fuzzier. Because it didn’t make my blood run cold. Because it wasn’t recurring or like the others. “Nothing really
happens. I sit there. I know I need someone to come, but they don’t.”
But that old journal is on the counter between us. I read that old account during my history morning with Harrison. I know
I did. Yet, the page is right there, and my eyes can’t help but go over the words again.
Right before our eyes, the shapes of men turned into shapes of . . . something else. Something I couldn’t describe. Something
black and wrong.
With claws.
With teeth.
I shudder, the image of teeth flashing into my mind. Claws against rock. Black shapes.
Slurping.
“I guess in the dream I saw what they describe here,” I say slowly. “Men morphing into awful black shapes with fangs. And
the rock . . .” I frown, trying to hold on to the images in my head that twist and dance away. “Blood drips from the rock.
They made their deal in blood.”
“Yeah.” Jack taps the part of the journal page. “The demons demanded a blood oath from the settlers.”
I frown at the page. I read it and yes, that’s what’s there, but in my dream it was different. “It’s not just the founding
families’ blood, Jack.” I lift my gaze to his. “In my dream, the demons bleed, too.”
We stare at each other, and I know we’re thinking the same thing. That this means something, but neither of us knows what. Virginia said only the blood can stop it, but this all points to the blood starting it.
His expression moves into something rueful. “One step forward, two steps nowhere.”
I think he’s more frustrated than he’s letting on.
“You should get some sleep,” I tell him.
“Sleep.” Jack says that like it’s a joke. “Knowing the Feed might be on the horizon?”
“You told the rest of us to sleep.”
“I am a Bellamy.” He says this with a great and heartbreaking sincerity. All that weight. All that responsibility.
“This falls to me,” he insists. “Not just because of my ancestor. Look, Grandpa . . . He’s not in the best health. I’m sure
even you can see that. And he spent his whole life trying to stop this thing that took his parents.” He stands, then, paces