Chapter Thirty
I wake up on the ground.
But I feel more like I’m in the ground. I must have hit hard, because I feel the impact in every part of me. I’m pretty sure I have muddy riverbank dirt
in my mouth, like I became a human trowel. I wonder if I’m dead, or if I’m still unconscious and this is just another all-too-real
dream, because everything is black—but a very different sort of black than that revolting demon viscosity.
I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to give those shadows any access to me, not even in my own head.
I decide that the fact I can feel the entirety of my body—most of it complaining about the whole slamming-into-the-earth thing
in a small symphony of aches and pains and, happily, nothing too urgent or unbearable—means I survived.
Then again, maybe it was all a dream. Hell, maybe I’m back in New York and have been all this time. Maybe my trip to Midas has been one big delusion
and this is just the muddy end of some awful break with reality.
But even as I think it, I immediately reject that old thought pattern. I know who I am now. I know what’s real.
And I also understand then that everything’s black because my eyes are closed. Because I’m facedown in the mucky dirt.
I push myself up and open my eyes to see serious green ones looking into mine.
Jack is here, right here, and when I scrape back the tragedy of my hair to really look at him, he takes hold of one of my hands.
“Where’s Logan?” I ask immediately.
But as Jack puts his arm around me, like he thinks I need help sitting upright—and maybe I do—I see my brother. Way off in
the distance, in the light, he’s standing tall and in perfect condition, speaking with two police officers. The same two police
officers from the night Cleo was killed, who I am not exactly thrilled to see, and he’s talking to them animatedly.
What’s weirder is that they actually seem to be listening this time.
“He made it look like he was the one who called in the cops, that he just happened upon all this,” Jack tells me. But he doesn’t
seem to care about that. His expression goes fierce. His voice is rough. “You’ve been lying here way too still. I should take
you to a hospital.”
“No, no. I’m fine.” And I actually am. Sure, there are a few places I feel a little achy and sore, and there’s the whole mud
situation, but I’m not dizzy. My vision is clear.
Maybe the mud is concealing the cut on my face. I’m afraid to ask.
I take stock of him. He doesn’t look dirty or bloody or like he got flung from an exploding rock at all.
It takes me a moment to realize that the weird lights aren’t a malfunction of my eyesight. They belong to the first responders.
I look over and see paramedics hunched over a figure nearer to the police.
“How long since the rock?” I ask Jack. “Since it . . . blew up?”
“Not long.” Jack is moving his hand on my back in sweet little circles that feel like a kind of homecoming. His voice is still
rough. His eyes are dark.
I nod at my brother. “What is he doing?”
“It was just like Cleo.” Jack clears his throat. His voice is darker. “The police showed up without any of us calling it in.
We didn’t have time. The rock threw us far enough we could wait out of sight. The explosion somehow missed Logan.”
There’s a pause. A beat of something pained, something deep.
But when he speaks, his voice is flat. “Harrison is dead.”
I feel my own ache then. A kind of grief for the man I thought Harrison was, but more, for Jack. The man I love. Losing someone
in this way.
I know he feels too many things to sort through. I can tell that it means something that he didn’t call him Grandpa.
“Oh, Jack.” I don’t have words, so I just wrap my arms around him, and he wraps his arms around me right back. It’s cold sitting
here on the damp ground, but Jack is warm.
“You did it, Lexi,” he whispers to me. “We were thrown into the shadows after the explosion, but look at you. Nothing happened.
No demons came for you. The flood wall stopped closing. The clock never struck midnight. You stopped the Feed.”
He pulls me back and searches my face, and then he lifts a hand to trace the line where Harrison cut me. It’s scabbed over
and there’s definitely mud in the mix, but the bigger issue is that it stings. I pull away.
“Hey.” Jack’s voice is serious enough that I can’t help but look at him. “You need medical attention. Really.”
I shake my head. I’m not leaving his side. Not again. I still haven’t gotten over going to jail after our night in the diner. I have a lot of processing to do, and I can’t imagine that a hospital will help with that.
“I’ve got a hard head and strong constitution. I’m okay.” When he frowns, I shake my head at him. “Besides, what are we going
to tell people? I exploded a rock, ended a demon deal that’s kept this town creepy for two hundred years, and maybe hit my
head a little in the process?”
He sighs, but I can tell he knows I’m right. Especially when he helps me to my feet, though he does study me as I test my
balance. We’re deep in shadows. Logan and the police are just little specks, but I can feel Jack’s worry.
“For flying off a rock and doing a face dive into the mud, I feel fine,” I tell him.
I do. Steady and good. More steady and much better than I could have expected.
Maybe that’s some harbinger power. Maybe now that this crisis has been averted, I can use my dreams for less creepy, terrifying
shit. Maybe I can be the harbinger of good stuff for a change.
I’d like to start with this, right here. Me and this man I’m in love with, though we haven’t even gone out on anything that
could be construed as a date. Or done anything without demon overtones.
I decide it’s my harbingerness that tells me I’m going to get to work on that.
“Besides, you flew through the air the same as I did. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he mutters, and wraps his arm around my waist like he’s not sure I can stand or walk—or maybe he just wants to
be close to me. And we stand like that, close together, breathing the same air and letting our hearts beat at the same rate,
while Logan finishes talking with the police.
The police tape off the area, and Logan waits for them to go back to their cars before he steps into the shadows and walks toward us, nearly on the riverbank.
When he approaches, he doesn’t stop where we are. He keeps walking, so we follow. Down along the riverbank. Away from the
rock. Until we are well and truly hidden by the rise of the hill, so no matter what the police investigate, they can’t see
us.
There’s some light from Midas shining well enough to allow us all to see the state of each other. Logan’s gaze is assessing
as it moves over me. He doesn’t like the slash on my cheek any more than Jack did, I can tell. And he’s not a fan of the state
of me, clearly, so that tells me I must be exactly as bedraggled as I think I am.
The good news is that has to mean that Jack . . . just likes me after all.
Loves me, even.
Dreams and mud and demon shit and all.
That makes me maybe a little too giddy when we’re standing here, in the aftermath of holding off the demons. Stopping the
Feed.
Surviving the betrayal that is Harrison.
If I feel a mix of disbelief and grief, despite what happened in that clock tower, I can’t imagine what Jack feels.
“They found a note on Harrison,” Logan tells us as he draws near. “They wouldn’t come right out and tell me, but they think
it was a suicide note. Like the man somehow ravaged his own body from the inside out, leaving him basically emulsified—”
He stops. Looks at Jack. “Sorry.”
But Jack only shakes his head.
Logan continues. “It looks like the demons beat him to a pulp, but sure, he stopped in the middle of that and wrote a careful
note.”
I frown. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Whatever it is likely won’t,” Jack tells us.
“Whatever the police see and find, it’s not necessarily going to be the truth.
Even if we stopped the demons for good, people who didn’t believe before won’t magically know they were here the whole time.
How they explain that rock and Harrison dead is .
. .” Jack shrugs. “Whatever human ways they’ll make sense of a demon aftermath. ”
“I managed to sneak a quick picture of the note.” Logan holds out his phone to us. “I don’t know if you can read it all, but
he also confesses to killing Cleo.”
It’s written in cursive, a dying art, but I can read it. I squint at Logan’s screen.
I am the one you’re looking for, it reads. I left you the Kirkpatrick girl as a clue, but you didn’t get it. I went after the Darling girl, too, but she found the light.
I prefer the shadows.
You either understand them or you don’t.
I don’t fear where I’m going.
I’ve lived long enough that I’d rather die by my own hand than wait for another’s.
“Wow,” is all I can manage. “I would have thought he’d rant some more about the power he thought he was getting tonight.”
“What do you mean?” Logan asks.
So I tell him, and Jack, about waking up to Harrison and the lies he told to get me to go to the clock tower with him. I tell
them about the locket. How Harrison made me wear it and whose hair he said was in it.
“He was going to use it to fuck you up, Lex,” my brother says darkly. “You can be sure of that.”
I try to describe what happened inside that tower, and as I stumble through it, I feel Jack’s grip on me tighten.
I tell them about chasing the light through the town. I tell them about finally understanding why a Darling ancestor was so obsessed with the streetlights. And I tell them how I understood what to do with the rock on some deep, primitive level I couldn’t name if I tried—thanks to Virginia’s words.
Maybe it was magic.
I heard a couple of women in Darling Knits & Notions the other day, talking about an enchanting river town down in Missouri
that they are certain is full of magic. If there are demons in the world, why not magic?
I tell them that, too. And it says something about the month we’ve all had that neither one of these men who pride themselves
on their rationality argues. Even a little.