Chapter Twenty-Four
“We’re not doing this here,” Logan tells the officer very purposefully. He shows no sign of emotion, but that’s because he’s
put on his lawyer mantle, and I find myself happy to see it. He’s going to take care of this.
I want to believe that. I really do.
But Cleo is dead. A sob rises in my throat, but Nora is holding on to one side of me and Jack to the other, and I have to
keep it together for them. She was more theirs than mine.
A few tears spill over despite my best intentions, but I manage not to sob.
“We can go to the station,” the cop says, not exactly kindly.
Logan smiles. It’s a razor. “That isn’t necessary, as I’m sure we’re both aware.”
The officer looks past him to me. “We just need to know why you’re covered in blood,” he says, sounding very reasonable. And
much friendlier. “Did you and the deceased have a physical altercation?”
Waking up on that wall is all I remember, sticky and confused. I shake my head.
“Were you trying to resuscitate the body?”
“No. No, I didn’t touch her.” Logan is telling me not to speak, but I can’t help it. I want to make sense of it. I wasn’t
there. I didn’t touch her. I didn’t.
“Then how are you bloody?” the officer asks.
More tears are falling. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Logan shushes me, but I find myself repeating it over and over anyway.
What did I do? Why am I covered in blood? I don’t remember anything. Not even in dream form. One minute I was in my bed, asleep. The next, Cleo
was dead.
I can see her crumpled body in my head and that is not a good thing for me to think about.
“She needs to change,” I hear Jack say sternly, in a kind of far-off voice that tells me I’m not breathing, because if I was
I’d be able to hear him right.
I try to pull in air and count the rest of this away. One-two-three, everything is fine. One-two-three, your imagination can’t hurt you.
Except what’s happening right now is not my imagination.
The officer is treating Logan to an overly bland look, though his voice is impatient. “She needs to come down to the station
and answer some questions. We’ll need to confiscate the bloody clothes.”
“She’s a victim in all this,” Logan argues. “Is this how you treat victims in Midas?”
“What are you a victim of?” the cop asks me, and he is neither sympathetic nor disbelieving. He is like a blank slate.
If he was being a dick, it would give me something to rally against. Instead, I find I can kind of see where he’s coming from.
I’m covered in blood, even with the sweater loan.
I’m in yellow cheese pajamas, no shoes. I’m sure there’s a hair situation.
All signs point to me—and suggest I might also possibly be an escapee from an asylum.
This is not the first time I’ve run afoul of law enforcement while sleepwalking. Usually, I distract them from my typical
confusion with the attitude that has led to Logan interceding on my behalf in a number of New York City precincts.
But this is the first time someone I know lies there in the dark, dead. Someone I liked. Someone I can’t remember if I hurt
or not—and what if I did? Wouldn’t that make me the bringer of doom and destruction after all? Despite what I’ve come to believe
were Amelia’s intentions?
I have no attitude left in me.
“I don’t know,” I whisper.
I can feel Logan’s frustration crash over me. Never talk to cops, Lexi. How many times has he told me that? But Cleo’s dead.
If I did it, I want them to take me away. I want to be locked up forever in the kind of facility I’ve always been afraid I’ll end up in one day.
“She doesn’t have to answer anything,” Logan is telling the officer. “I’m taking her home.”
That’s when the other cop appears, coming swiftly out of the dark with a much harder look on his face. He’s got blue latex
gloves on now. And he’s holding a bloody knife.
Logan’s eyes narrow, but he doesn’t react. I hear Nora make a noise from beside me. I swear that I can feel Jack growl.
All I can seem to do is stare.
“We have a weapon,” the bigger officer says to the cop who’s been talking to us. “Show us your hands,” he says to me.
“She absolutely won’t,” Logan replies immediately.
But I am looking down at my hands. One is very bloody on the palm. One only has blood on the outside. I feel like that is . . . not good. I tell myself that surely I would know if I stabbed Cleo. If I found a knife somewhere and carried it with me and when I saw my friend—
My stomach heaves even thinking about it.
“I couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have. The dem—”
“Don’t,” Jack orders me in a low voice that’s more a rumble inside me than anything else. So they won’t hear him, I realize
a beat too late. His big hand is wrapped around my wrist, the heat of him the only reason I’m not shivering right now. “It’ll
make it worse.”
For a moment I don’t understand what he’s telling me. My head still feels odd and outsized—but then I get it.
These cops don’t believe in the demons. Me claiming invisible demons came and killed my friend while I’m standing here bloody
is hardly going to work in my favor.
I can’t see any way out of this, and that makes me go cold despite Jack’s hand on me, because I know what that means. The
asylum. The nuthouse. The nearest psychiatric facility for broken creatures like me.
Yet, before I woke up on that flood wall, I didn’t feel broken at all. Pretty much the opposite. Jack is beside me, and I
can remember what happened between us with perfect clarity. Nora is on my other side, pale and quiet, but I remember sitting
on my bed with her, convinced we were already friends.
Midas is the place that healed me. Not the place where I break apart and release the heretofore unknown slasher within.
One-two-three, everything is fine, I count out. One-two-three, your imagination can’t hurt you—
So I won’t let my imagination fill in the gaps here.
I did not kill Cleo.
I let that settle in me, calcify like bone.
I did not kill Cleo.
But I have no memory of what I did do. Clearly, we were together at some point tonight. How did she end up dead at the base of the wall while I ended up alive?
Where did that knife come from?
And that’s not even getting to the blood.
“We’re going to have to take you in,” the larger officer tells me, and he is deadly serious. He sounds businesslike and certain about the outcome of this interaction. “I’m going to read you your rights, ma’am. Then I’m going to cuff you.”
He looks at Jack when he says that, because Jack doesn’t look like he has any intention of releasing his hold on me. On my
other side, Nora presses in closer, too, looking lost.
Logan’s starting to lose that lawyer polish enough I’m worried he’s going to get arrested. He’s arguing, throwing out statutes and case law, and I can see the officers are both beginning to
wonder if he’s a problem they’re going to have to address.
We can’t both be locked up. Who would get us out?
“Logan.” I say it softly, but he immediately turns to look at me. “Maybe this is the best way to sort it all out.”
He curses. Loudly. But he gets close and meets my gaze.
“They’ll take you in. They can only hold you for twenty-four hours while they apply for a warrant, and I’ll be right behind
you.” I nod, and he frowns, and I get the impression that he would be grabbing me by my upper arms right now, the way he used
to do when we were younger to get his point across, if he didn’t think the police were running out of patience with us.
If I wasn’t covered in blood.
“They’re going to take your clothes, take pictures, collect evidence. That’s all fine. You let them. But if they question
you, don’t say a word until I get there. Understood? Not one word.”
I manage a nod, my eyes on the increasingly unamused policemen behind him.
“I’ll get you out before the damn sun rises. Got it?”
I nod again, even though I doubt that he will, in fact, get me out that quickly. I glance at Jack. He looks a bit like he’s ready to commit assault on an officer.
It’s not going to help any of us.
“I’m okay,” I tell him. “I’ll be okay.”
There are so many other things I want to say to him. To Nora. To my brother.
But I’ve run out of time.
The policemen aren’t brutal or too rough, but they take control of the situation. They peel me away from Jack and Nora. One pulls my arms behind my back at an
angle I can’t say is comfortable, and I don’t have to see the handcuffs to know exactly what’s happening to my wrists. While
he does this, the other one is reading out the words everyone knows, because we hear it on television so often.
It feels like I’m in some kind of play where even I know the words, but not what’s going to happen next. I look over my shoulder
and see the other three, standing there and looking as shell-shocked as I feel.
But it’s Jack whose gaze I hold. Jack, whose fierce expression makes me feel, if not soothed, at least a little bit better.
And then I am unceremoniously led to a cop car, encouraged to duck my head as I get in and try to sit with my hands bound
by unforgiving metal behind me, and driven away.
I’m exhausted, and it doesn’t get better as the night wears on.
If anything it gets worse, but there’s nothing I can do about it. They take me to a part of Midas I’ve never seen, farther
down the river on the other side of the flood wall so that when the Feed comes, there will be police to talk to the news cameras
about a flash flood and what a tragedy it all is.
I remember reading something about the deliberate placement of the police away from the old town, where the original jail still stands and is, of course, a tourist attraction. But tonight I’m marched into a very real jail that no one would pay to visit.
It’s smaller, a lot more generic office building than I imagined, but it’s still a jail. One cell instead of a row of them. No prison guards to yell at me, just the two officers
from tonight.
They have to take pictures. Of my arms, my face, my clothes. I can’t shower—they don’t have one of those, they inform me,