Chapter Twenty-Five
The wave of relief that washes over me when Logan leads me out of the jail and into daylight is intense, but it goes away
before the door to the station shuts behind me and I feel guilty about it anyway.
Because I might be free, but Nora isn’t.
“Why would she do this?” I ask Logan as we walk. I’m blinking back tears. Tears because I’m legitimately crying or tears because
the bright fall sunshine feels like an assault after being locked in a jail cell, I can’t really tell.
Logan looks like his jaw might crack in half, he’s so tense. “I have no fucking idea.”
“But you’ll get her out.” I say this more to reassure myself than anything else. “You’ll fix it.”
Logan fixes everything. Behold my entire life as proof.
But though he has a firm grip on me, leading me toward a large parking lot that I didn’t see while handcuffed in the back
of a police cruiser, he doesn’t respond to what I said. And the more he stays silent, the more uneasy I get.
I frown at him. “You’ll get her out. That’s what you do.”
He doesn’t meet my gaze. “She confessed, Lexi. There’s only so much I can do with a goddamned confession. That’s why I told her not to fucking do it. But she was determined, and she brought that damn bloody cardigan of hers you
borrowed, acted like she’d been wearing it.”
I can’t stomach the idea of Nora stuck in that jail cell, with the bleach-scented clothes and the fluorescent lights and the
noise. I stop walking and try to change directions.
“I’ll go back.” I’m strong enough. I can take it. I’ve had more practice being uncomfortable. “We’ll tell them she’s just
protecting me. We can prove she’s just protecting me.”
But Logan’s grip tightens and he holds me in place, something that is entirely too easy for him. I always forget that Logan
is all muscle, the dick.
Right now his eyes are furious. “You will not sacrifice yourself for her. You’ll just both end up in there. Even I don’t have the bandwidth to get two of you out of this.”
“We can’t just leave her,” I grit out at him.
“We have no choice right now,” he grits right back. “But in case you forgot, Lex, we’re standing outside a jail and almost certainly being watched, because this is a small town, a woman is dead, and there’s no way anyone’s going to be
happy about the killer maybe being the hometown girl when there are two outsiders from New York City in the mix.” When I stare
at him, he looks slightly abashed. But only slightly. “You listen to all the same murder podcasts I do.”
“We are not in a murder podcast, Logan.”
“Yet.”
I think the guilt and grief might actually knock me over, but it doesn’t. Logan walks me to our rental car and we stand there.
I don’t know what to do. I want to talk to Nora. I want to shout at Nora. I want to rewind time and use those disgusting hair wreaths to chain me to my antique-store bed. I know Logan is right
and we need to postpone any meltdowns until we’re nowhere near police custody. I know we need to get in the car and leave.
But my limbs don’t seem to want to reach forward and open the car door.
I just can’t understand why Nora would take my place.
“Get in, Lex.” There’s a gentleness to Logan’s tone now that hasn’t been here today. Like Nora’s confessing weighs on him
as much as it does on me, which doesn’t make any sense. She didn’t sacrifice herself for him. “We’ll head back to the antique store.”
I think about the last time I saw Jack, out by the flood wall. I feel my eyes tear up again. “Does Jack know? About Nora?”
Logan slides into the driver’s seat. He says nothing, which is an answer unto itself—and not the answer I want.
“He doesn’t know?” I can’t imagine what his reaction will be. Or maybe I can.
What was Nora thinking?
“You’re telling him,” my brother says roughly. “I’ve had enough of fucking Bellamys today to last a lifetime.”
Logan pulls out of our parking space, then heads toward the checkpoint at the exit. I look back at the jail. Nora walked in
there of her own free will. She confessed to murder.
“She must not have meant—” I begin.
“Nora knew exactly what she was doing, and who would stop her if they knew,” Logan says, his voice low and furious. “She used
Harrison as a distraction, snuck away, and did this all by her lonesome self. And yes, Lexi. She meant to do it. She did it
on purpose.”
He sounds furious with her, and I’m not exactly thrilled with her myself, but I’m not going to lie. I would have bet that he wouldn’t care too much what Nora did if it got me out, based on the way he’s treated her since we arrived in Midas.
Somehow, I feel that this isn’t the time to push him on that. My brother looks feral, and he never looks anything but polished.
Today he’s in a T-shirt and jeans, which is a far cry from his usual Armani. His dark hair looks almost as wild as mine.
His reaction feels bigger than it should, I think.
But then, immediately, I correct myself, because it’s perfectly reasonable to crash out under these circumstances. Someone
is dead.
Cleo is dead.
I lean back against my seat and close my eyes. Logan drives in silence for a while and I keep my eyes closed. I don’t want
to look at that flood wall. I don’t want to see the place where Cleo was lying. I don’t want to imagine myself back there
in all that spooky quiet, sticky and alone.
Still, I can feel it when we drive back into Midas proper. There’s a weight to it. It’s like the air shifts the moment we cross the barrier,
and I hate it. I hate everything that’s happened since I made the spectacular mistake of daring to think things were good for a few minutes.
But I remember walking up those stairs inside Swamp Fox Shoppes, feeling Jack’s eyes on me and him all over me. I remember
the hum of it, like we were tuned in to our own frequency, and I don’t want to lose that again.
No matter what happens.
When I feel the car come to a stop, I open my eyes against the bright sunlight. The street is thick with people again, but
Logan has managed to find a spot to stop right in front of the diner. Though he doesn’t turn off the engine.
I frown at him. “You’re not coming in?”
He runs his hand through his hair. “I’m going back to deal with Nora,” he says gravely.
“I’ll be able to see her today as her lawyer, but outside a lawyer, she only gets one non-family visit every sixty days.
So you and Jack need to put your heads together.
Figure out if there’s some Midas demon way to fix this.
You’ll only have one real chance to visit her. It needs to count.”
It hits me that reality isn’t what most people think it is here. There’s the world the police operate in, and then there’s
the demon situation that those same police can’t even see.
This has to mean there’s hope.
It steadies me, this little burst of possibility. I manage to push the car door open and get myself upright on the sidewalk, still sporting my prison scrubs, which I’m hoping
the milling tourists will take as festive harvest wear. Logan watches me carefully, clearly torn between staying and going.
“Go,” I tell him. “Help Nora. I’ll be fine.”
I shut the car door and turn with the express purpose of striding into that diner, shoulders back, head held high, ready to
tackle whatever I need to in order to get Nora out. After a very hot shower first.
But there he is.
Jack, standing in the doorway of the diner, an apron tied around his waist.
I’ve crumpled so many times in my life. I’ve fallen down, fallen apart. I’ve cracked and cracked up and crashed out and freaked—and
there are a thousand other ways to say I simply fell apart.
I don’t want to do it now. I won’t do it now.
For everyone who loved Cleo, I am going to hold myself together and figure out a way to get us all out of this. For Cleo,
who deserved a whole lot better than what she got.
But then Jack is across the distance in a flash and his arms are around me, his hold so tight I can barely breathe—but it’s the most soothing thing that’s happened since I woke up on that wall.
A sob hitches inside me and I have to let it out. Into his chest, into him. He holds me. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t
tell me it’s going to be okay, because that would probably sound like a lie right now, but he lets me cry, and it’s the release
I needed.
I manage to pull back a little so I can look up at him. “I’m so sorry—”
Jack doesn’t let me finish. He kisses my temple, my cheek, and then my mouth. It’s desperation and comfort, grief and relief—a
potent combination I want to get lost in.
But then I hear my brother’s voice.
“What the hell is this?”
Both Jack and I turn to look at my brother. The car is still running, but Logan is now standing in front of it. He looks like
the series of events that might have led him to the feral state he’s been in today are nothing next to the sight of Jack Bellamy kissing me.
Or possibly me kissing Jack Bellamy back. Hard to say.
“It’s self-explanatory, I think,” I say, though I can feel how hot my cheeks are. “Especially for a fancy-pants lawyer like
you, Logan.”
Logan looks for a minute like his eyes are going to pop out of his head. Like said head might actually explode—but instead, he runs both of his hands through his hair like he’d rather wrap them around both of our necks, gets back in
the car, and drives off without another word.
“Come on,” Jack says gruffly.
He winds his arm around my waist and leads me inside, moving tourists out of the way with no more than a glare. We walk through the diner and across the way into the antique shop, but he stops me at the door before we get too deep into dead-eyed dolls and empty frames.
Jack turns me to face him. He puts his big, strong hands on my cheeks. He’s studying me intently. “Are you okay?”
I try to nod or smile, but it all kind of gets caught in a tangle. “Probably not, but I’m holding up.”
Before Jack can reply to that, we both hear the telltale thud of Harrison’s cane on the floor. I look beyond Jack as Harrison
makes his way toward us.
“There’s a girl,” the kindly old man says.
My eyes prickle again, but I’ve gotten a hold on it. Still, I disentangle myself from Jack and cross to Harrison and give
him a hug—a careful one, because I don’t want to crush him. He pats my back. I think he actually murmurs there, there.
Everything is horrible, but going through all this alone would be more horrible. And I am very much not alone.
“How’d Logan do it?” Jack asks me, but he’s already ushering me into one of the old chairs. He does the same with his grandfather,
like he doesn’t believe either of us can stand on our own two feet.
I want to oblige him, but his question means I have to tell him about Nora. Both him and Harrison, who’s looking a little
ashen as he leans hard against his cane while he sinks down into the chair Jack pulled up for him.
I hate that they don’t know. I hate that they have to know. I hate that I have to tell them.
But waffling about it isn’t going to make anything better.
“He didn’t get me out,” I manage to rasp out. “Nora did. She went in and confessed.”
The silence is deafening. I can see the slow realization cross Jack’s face. Then a kind of dark fury much like Logan’s descends, and he starts to move
to the door.
I’m barely fast enough to jump to my feet to stop him, to put myself in his way, because I know he won’t bowl me over. He doesn’t.
I put my hands on his chest, but that’s more for me than to hold him back. “Jack, listen to me. Logan is going there right
now to do what he can, legally, and while he does that we need to do what we can.”
His gaze is green and sharp as it lands on mine.
“I don’t know why she did it,” I say. “I don’t know what possessed her, but—”
“I do,” Jack interrupts. “We were talking. About your dream about the rock.” He puts his hands over mine, wraps his fingers
around them, and then pulls them off his chest. But he doesn’t let me go. “About me wanting to take you down there. About
what Virginia said about endings and beginnings, and I thought if I could get you there, maybe we’d get some answers, but
obviously that couldn’t happen while you were in jail.”
I inhale sharply. She sacrificed herself for me. Or for the cause anyway. I feel dizzy. “Okay. Then we should go. Now.”
Fuck my shower.
“I think you have to wait until Halloween.”
I look over at Harrison when he says this. He’s looking at his stack of journals, not me, a thoughtful frown on his face.
“Jack’s been filling me in on everything. Halloween is the day the original deal was made. So if we’re believing in these
dreams, in Virginia’s ramblings . . .”
He says both of these like he does not believe, but not meanly. He’s giving off a sort of experienced exhaustion, like we are young and naive and he’s indulging
us.
I typically don’t love being indulged, but these are desperate times. I can’t manage a smile, but I try to give an encouraging nod.
“If you’re risking yourselves to go to the rock, it should be on Halloween,” Harrison says. He taps his finger on the top of the stack of journals. “It’s two hundred years since the original date. Time has weight. I think it matters.”
It makes sense, but Halloween is tomorrow night. The thought of Nora being incarcerated that long makes me sick, but Jack
is already agreeing with Harrison.
“Okay, Grandpa. I bet you’re right.” He reaches over and pats Harrison on the shoulder. “I’m going to take Lexi back to the
diner. She needs to eat. Maybe shower.”
“Definitely shower,” I mutter.
Jack is focused on his grandfather. “Maybe you could find out what sort of things we can do once we actually get to that rock?
Just going can’t stop it, right? We need words or something.”
Blood, I think.
Harrison nods, looking pleased to be involved. He pats the journals on the counter next to him. “Will do.”
Jack drops one of my hands, but not the other, and leads me out of the antique store. He’s wrong to say we should wait—I feel
this all over me and deep inside me, like an ache. If nothing happens today, then we can go back tomorrow, on Halloween, too.
We can go a hundred times if it comes to that.
What’s the sense in waiting? Especially with Nora behind bars? Even five minutes there is too many.
“Jack—” But he doesn’t let me speak.
“Don’t worry,” he says, pulling me to a stop in the hallway and looking down at me. “We’re not waiting for Halloween.” His
eyes are so green they almost hurt, and I can read the fury and determination in them. “We’re going tonight.”