Chapter Twenty-Three
At first, I tell myself it’s just a dream. Like I usually do.
But I take in the freezing cold air against my skin, making goose bumps break out all along my exposed arms.
The creepy warmth of the blood splattered around me.
A gross, familiar dichotomy that makes me want to throw up.
I’m afraid to take a breath, but I need to. I need to look around. I need to do something other than stare at the blood on my feet.
Because what I learned last time was that here in Midas, these aren’t dreams. Here in the dark, things really can hurt me.
Here in Midas, anything is possible.
Which means my precarious spot crouched on the flood wall is not good and I need to figure out a way to get down. This is
complicated by the fact that this will almost certainly involve crawling down the narrow length of it.
“I figured out a way to get up. I can figure out a way to get down,” I tell myself.
I breathe in and ignore all the different scents assaulting my nostrils when I do.
I’m too high up, and the wind is too cold.
I need to get down, and fast, so that means I need to survey my surroundings and figure out what’s actually going on.
It’s a very dark night, with the suggestion of clouds scudding across a black sky with no stars. The moon is nowhere to be
seen. The town of Midas is behind me when I shift around to look, with tiny pinpricks of light shining from what I assume
are windows, but there’s very little of that. Mostly, I see shadows and what I know must be the old, narrow buildings clustered
together.
I don’t hear any slurping. This should be a good thing but somehow, I find the silence in all this wind that much more terrifying.
But I know where Midas is. I know where the river is. Which means all I have to do is get to one of the ends of the flood
wall. That’s where I’ll find the ladders bolted to the wall.
But as I look around, trying to determine which side is closer as I cling to the narrow top of the wall, I have to contend
with the fact there is nothing but a long stretch of blood-smattered cement either way.
I don’t really want to think about the blood. I tell myself I must have cut up my feet again, though they don’t hurt. And
the longer I stay where I am, the more the blood gets to me, demanding that I figure out where it came from—which I would
be happy to do later, somewhere warm, with light. Not here in the scarily quiet darkness where anything could be watching
me.
I try to estimate the distances again, but both ends of this forbidding wall seem interminably far away. But one ladder will
take me down closer to Main Street. It will lead me closer to Jack.
And I would do a lot to be closer to Jack right now.
I start inching that way, crawling slowly.
I don’t make it very far when a gust of wind takes me off balance.
I teeter alarmingly, scrabbling to hold on to the narrow top of this wall, but I come down hard.
My arm scrapes down the side and I slam into the flat part I’m crawling on, but that’s a good thing.
It helps me stay upright instead of toppling over and plummeting off the side.
Which would be an unpleasant drop. I think I’d probably live. But would I want to with that many broken bones?
For a moment, I simply press my cheek to the cold concrete beneath me and breathe. There’s no blood here. No stains. Except
what I’ve brought with me, of course, though the gradually more intrusive thought that it isn’t my own is terrifying.
I push myself back up straight on something like a sob, because my arm is aching now, throbbing everywhere from my wrist to
my shoulder. But I didn’t fall. I didn’t fall.
But someone did.
My eye catches on something below me. Down on the other side of the wall where there should be no light at all because it’s
outside the town limits and the night is so dark, a light illuminates a figure all the same—but I can’t worry about light sources right now.
Crumpled on the cold ground is a woman with dark hair, matted and tangled. She’s folded in angles that don’t make sense and
it takes me too long to understand why that is, what that means.
She’s bloodier than I am. She’s bloodier than the section of wall I left behind me and anything around me. She’s unrecognizable—
Except I know those Doc Martens on her feet.
I feel my stomach plummet.
“Cleo.” I whisper it first. And then I yell it.
She doesn’t move.
“Lexi.”
It’s Jack’s voice. But from the town side of the wall, so I have to look away from Cleo’s crumpled form back into Midas. I can see him running toward me, toward this wall—toward Cleo on the other side.
“Jack, she’s . . . She’s—” I can’t say the words. I can’t catch my breath.
I’m on this wall, high above the ground, suspended between Cleo’s body and Jack, who’s known her all her life and doesn’t
know this awful thing I know. Yet.
I remind myself I don’t know anything except a dark-haired girl with Doc Martens on her feet isn’t moving.
“Just stay still, okay? I’ll come up.” He’s surveying things, looking for the fastest way to get up on the wall and then all
the way to me.
“We have to get to her. Cleo.” I keep pointing at her, but he can’t see over the wall. “She’s on this side. She . . . She
must have fallen. She needs help.”
Jack looks behind him, back down the street. I see two people rushing toward us. Logan and Nora.
“Jack. Please.”
He looks back up at me. I’m high above him and the wind seems to be picking up every time I speak, but he hears me. Sees me.
I have no doubt about that.
“Stay put,” he tells me gruffly, his gaze intense on mine for a moment. I nod.
Then he takes off running again, sticking close to the wall and heading in the direction I was originally going. I swallow
down all my fear, all my worries. Jack will get to the other side. He will help. Everything will be okay.
It has to be okay.
“Lexi.” It’s Logan this time. He and Nora have made it to the base of the wall under me. “Keep coming this way,” he orders
me. “All the way to the ladder. You have to get down from there.”
I shake my head because Jack has appeared on the other side of the wall—and he comes to an abrupt stop. He doesn’t move any closer to Cleo. He doesn’t kneel at her side.
“Call for help,” I call down to him, my desperation and panic hiding what I’m afraid I already know to be true. “A doctor,
Jack. Paramedics. Something.”
I’m imploring Jack to fix this. To change what I can see but don’t want to believe. Jack looks up at me, and even from the
long distance from the top of the wall to the base of it, I see it in his eyes. That there is no help. That it is too late.
That this is not a dream, and my friend is dead.
“Right now, we have to get you down,” he tells me. “We can’t do anything until we get you down.”
He says this very calmly, very seriously. He is giving me an anchor to hold on to. There’s just one problem. “How?”
“Keep heading for the ladder. I’ll follow along with you, okay? Just stay on all fours and crawl toward the end.” He starts
moving back toward the end of the wall, like he’s showing me where to go.
Cleo is dead. And I don’t know how to accept this, absorb this, deal with this, no matter how it pounds in me like a terrible
heartbeat.
So I don’t. I focus on Jack, on Nora and Logan on the other side.
They all want to help me get down, and I have to let them.
Because this isn’t a dream. And I can’t do this all alone, no matter how the hell I got up here.
I crawl, balancing myself on this narrow ledge for what feels like forever. Everyone is calling encouraging words at me. Telling
me I’m close and doing great.
But Cleo is still dead.
I choke on another sob, but I keep going forward until I reach the ladder. Jack is already on the top, waiting for me. He
holds out a hand.
“Jack. She . . .”
“I know.” His voice is hoarse, affected, but he holds my gaze. “But we’ve got to get you down.”
He’s right. I can’t stay up here. It’s cold. I’m covered in blood and I don’t know what happened. I don’t know anything that happened. The last thing I remember is being in bed.
Jack makes room for me and I manage to get my leg onto the first rung. I’m not sure my muscles will hold me, but Jack wraps
himself around me. He’s keeping me supported.
And warm. The heat of him floods through me, reminding me of the diner earlier. Of this connection of ours that might make
him mad, but right now feels like everything to me.
His mouth is at my ear. “I’ve got you, okay?”
I nod, jerkily. We make our way down the ladder. I’m shaking, weak, but Jack keeps me from falling. Once we reach the bottom
of the ladder, where we have to jump a little to get to the ground, Jack basically transfers me from his grasp to Logan’s.
I hold on tight to my brother, my feet on the ground, while Jack lets himself drop from the last rung.
“She’s dead,” I croak out when he turns to look at me. “Isn’t she?”
Because she has to be. No one would be that still, that bloody, in those terrible angles, and be alive.
“Who?” Logan demands.
“It’s Cleo,” Nora chokes out. I realize she’s crying, and maybe has been for a while. “I saw it in my dream.”
Logan makes a low, unbelieving sound, but he reaches out a hand and puts it on Nora’s shoulder.
“She’s on the other side of the wall. Something got to her.
” Jack sounds so stern and matter-of-fact but I know better now.
I can hear his pain and sorrow beneath it.
And even though Logan is the one holding me upright, Jack is there, too, his hand rubbing up and down my back, making me wonder if he needs to touch me as much as I need him to touch me right now.
Nora sways, tears pouring down her face, but she doesn’t speak, cry out, anything. It hits me harder than if she was wailing.
Then somehow, we all lean in together, on each other. Everyone holding each other up.
“It isn’t safe out here,” Jack says when a gust of wind rushes at us. I shiver at the cold, and Nora tugs her sweater off
and offers it to me. I shrug mine off, thinking I should probably apologize since it’s actually hers and I’ve ruined it, but
I can’t get the words out.
When I pull her new sweater on, it’s dry and blissfully warm.
Jack has managed to move us into a little circle of light under a streetlamp, but we’re still too close to the flood wall.
Even I know that.
“We need to go back to the store,” he continues. “We can’t figure out what happened until morning.”
“We can’t leave her,” Nora replies, though she sounds rough. “We have to . . .”
She trails off, clearly not sure what to do.
But that’s when we hear the sirens.
Then come the flashing lights, and a few moments later, a police car pulls up to the edge of the road and two uniformed officers
get out.
“Did you call them?” I hear Nora ask Jack.
“No, of course not,” he says, his hand moving up and down my spine while Logan pats at me in a way that makes me want to hit
him until I realize he’s wiping the blood off my cheek.
The officers have flashlights and they are bright. Intrusive.
But they seem shocked to see the four of us standing there when the beams of light reach us.
“I’m afraid you’re going to need to clear the area,” the bigger one says. “Go with Officer Burns to his car so we can take your information.”
The smaller man, presumably Officer Burns, herds us toward the still-running cop car. The other starts to move into the dark
on the far side of the wall, where there is no longer any hint of the light I know I saw over there, because how else would
I have seen Cleo?
It takes me a moment to realize that the policeman is moving with purpose, like he knows what’s waiting for him.
I look at the cop who stayed with us. “Someone is . . . Someone is hurt on the other side of the wall,” I say.
He nods. “Yes, we got a call. Now, why don’t you all tell me your names? You can show me your IDs if you’ve got them on you.”
“We don’t,” Logan says flatly.
Static comes over the radio then. Someone talks urgently, throwing out a bunch of codes I don’t understand—though I can see
that Logan does. What I do understand, I wish I didn’t.
Female. Dark hair. Blood.
Worse yet, deceased.
And then the very last thing that comes through the radio is loud and clear, and we all hear it just fine.
Don’t let the witnesses go anywhere.