Chapter Twenty-Seven #3
He practically spits the word. “Another choice, Lexi. Do they mourn you or suffer for you? Will you choose protection, or
your pride?”
“They would insist that I let them suffer rather than let you do this,” I manage to say.
Harrison leans in close, eyes black with shadows and evil. “You have always worried that you’ll disappoint the people you love, lost little lunatic of a girl, the crazy mess who can never be trusted. Now you’re fine letting them suffer and die because of you?”
My eyes water at that. I feel a sharp pain through my heart and I think he’s done something to me—stabbed me straight through—but
when I look down there’s no damage.
I’m just stuck here like I’m fastened to the mucky floor here while his face is pure evil, inches from mine.
“That is your weakness,” he tells me with delight, and another cackle, and the demons around us seem to hiss along with him. “Love.”
I stare at this man. Or is he a demon? It doesn’t matter. There is one thing I know without any question.
He’s wrong.
All my life I have been a problem. A mess. Someone to be worried over and protected and sheltered as much as possible. And
that would have ended me a long time ago, if not for one thing.
Love.
Love is sacrifice. My grandmother and mother embodied this, literally. Maybe Cleo did, too, that night, out there in the dark
when she knew better. Maybe my father sacrificed more than I can imagine by leaving everything he knew behind to keep Logan
and me safe.
All of that was love. All of that is love.
If I am made of those people, if we share that blood, then I am made of that love, too.
If love is a weakness, it is a weakness that saved me. It brought me home. It kept me whole and taught me I could be happy.
It let me understand that there is more to me than waiting to see how I disappoint people next.
It gave me my twin, who has never wavered in his support of me, no matter the cost. It gave me friends like Cleo and Nora when I thought that I was too off, too weird, to get to have friendships at all.
It brought me back to Midas and straight to Jack.
Love isn’t going to be what ends me or hurts them. I won’t accept it. If only because Harrison wants it too much.
My hands are still in my pockets. One is curled around the rock I put there at the antique shop. The other is holding the
rock I picked up from the crack in the sidewalk. Heart-shaped stones that make me think of my mother. My father. My grandmother.
So I have their hearts, I think. Their love, their sacrifices.
None of that was wasted. Love is never lost.
At the very least, with something to hold on to, this immobility keeping me in place doesn’t make me feel quite so panicked.
I can breathe through it, think through it.
Even when Harrison is so close that I feel his nose touch mine and it burns like I’ve been scorched by an open flame.
“Where’s your necklace?” he demands.
“It fell off,” I lie.
“I saved that hair just for you, Lexi,” he tells me, his eyes much too bright. And too cruel. “The hair of every Darling who
died to sacrifice for a lost cause. Your mother. Amelia. Perhaps when this is over, your precious Logan’s will be there, too.”
That, I think, will happen over my dead body, but I suspect that will sound like an offer if I say it out loud. I keep it
locked up tight.
His dark eyes are black now. The shadows dance in there, too. That must mean that they’re in him, and that makes my stomach lurch. There are demons everywhere. Inside and out and the slurping gets louder, like they
know I’m putting it together.
They like it—I can feel it. They want me afraid. They want my panic and my horror. But they haven’t slurped their way into me. My soul is intact.
I am intact. Because I have a choice. Harrison can kill me, but he can’t take my choice away.
He wants me to believe that this all ends in bloody deaths, mine or everyone I love, but why should I believe him? Why should
I believe succumbing is somehow better?
Cleo and Amelia didn’t succumb to him. I can’t, either. And I am the harbinger. Jack said it was a tool of good. Nora said I got to pick a side. It must mean something, or surely Harrison would have just killed me while I slept, because
Jack trusted him enough to leave him to watch over me. He had that opportunity and didn’t use it.
That has to mean that I have something else in me. I have to find whatever makes me special and use it.
I reach down inside me for that strength again. I hold the heart-shaped rocks in my hands so tight that it feels like they’re
burning me, but I like their fire a lot better than Harrison’s.
I shove my panic down, hard, and I stare straight back at Harrison like he’s not bothering me at all.
The beginning is the end, Virginia said, and that is the promise I choose to believe. That a Darling can end this. Because we were there at the beginning,
too.
A Darling and a Bellamy.
Not Harrison. Not his deal with any demons.
Jack and me. And love—which is not a weakness.
But to prove it I have to get to Jack. Which means I have to get out of this fucking clock tower that has haunted me my entire
life.
“I will never, ever give you my blood willingly,” I tell him with all the certainty love ever gave me. “I will never make
any deal with any demon. I will be the end of them, Harrison, and if I have my way, of you, too.”
Then I cry out despite myself as something slices down my face, a blazing trail of white-hot flame that turns quickly into pain.
It’s agony. It throbs and aches, it’s sharp and deep—but I am breathing. I’m refusing the deal, but he hasn’t killed me yet.
This, I understand, is the suffering part.
I feel blood pour down my face. The place where he cut me is a burning ache. I feel hot, fetid breath all around me. His.
The demons.
I want to cry, but I can’t. I won’t.
For my grandmother and my mother. For Cleo.
For Logan and Nora. For Jack.
They were all strong for me. I’m going to return the favor.
I can’t avoid looking at Harrison forever, so I make myself do it. Not just the moving, gooey shadows in his eyes, but down
to where he’s holding a knife in his hand.
I tell myself that’s a relief. That it’s a knife. I was thinking poisonous demon claws or something unimaginably worse. I want
to wipe the blood from my face but I don’t—I don’t want to let go of my little talismans.
And when I say I don’t want it, I mean everything in me shouts to keep them right where they are, curled up tight in the palms of my hands.
Harrison hefts the knife again, and something about it seems to spark something in me. I think about that last night on the
flood wall. The night I found Cleo. I remember the blood on my hands, and the shape of it. The knife the policeman found with
Cleo’s body.
And he doesn’t have to tell me. I know it’s this one.
I know that this man took the knife he’s holding now and used it against Cleo. And me, too. Maybe I sleepwalked straight into
the middle of it.
That would explain how I woke up.
I decide I don’t want to know how he got it out of police custody.
I want to take that knife from him and return it to sender, with the kind of malice aforethought my brother is always telling
me is problematic. I think about all the times my temper tantrums were petty. Silly.
Tonight I’d like my temper to bear a little fruit.
Harrison waves the knife between us.
“Last chance,” he says, and his voice changes octaves as he speaks, making my ears feel like they’re popping. “Give your blood
freely. Make your own deal. What has this world ever given you anyway?”
His voice shifts back to the Harrison I thought I knew. Kind and soothing—but I remember that first day in the antique store
and how disconcerting he was, leading me to needlepoint representations of this horrible tower and smiling while he did it.
Oh, yeah, I think. He’s been twisted all along.
“Nightmares and doubt,” Harrison is saying, answering his own question. Telling me what the world’s given me. “Pain and suffering.