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“Oh, Val.” At some point, I’d moved closer. I should be running, and yet my hand was reaching under the stream for him. “Come to bed.” My voice sounded lower, thicker—that hushed tone of intimacies and secrets.
Val’s pectoral flinched as my palm touched him.
He was so solid. So real. Ghosts haunted my past, and nightmares and dreams dominated my present. Real was comforting.
Val didn’t move.
I slipped under the water and into his arms, and even though the water was hot, it seemed as if it took the heat of my body to warm him. Thaw him.
His arms closed around me. “Tell me about your eyeglasses.”
“It’s an object, same as the knife.” My mouth moved against his shoulder. “You see with them like with any pair of eyeglasses, but it can also help you find things—or someone. It connects things that shouldn’t be connected, like stepping stones in a river.”
I didn’t know if he was paying attention, but he seemed to want to hear my voice, nudging me when I paused.
So I kept talking.
I told him about my memories, about the blob I’d fought without him, about my dream. I told him everything except what I was thinking.
The Cucitrice had tried for centuries to destroy the Nightmare King, and here they were, two mostly clueless novices, trying to do the same, with little knowledge and barely enough skills to eliminate one stock-standard Jorogumo.
Our luck didn’t just need to be good. Our luck needed to be phenomenal.
CHAPTER30
Zara
We arrivedin Fairfield and scouted the old hospital that lay a half-mile past the outskirts of the town. Much of the town was fading away, same as back at the farm—it felt as if Val and I were riding around haunting ghost towns. It had to be the fucked-up economy, neighboring towns siphoning off the people and businesses over the years. So maybe it was no surprise then that the hospital was also abandoned, the derelict building creepily still and quiet.
I had seen a few images of places like this on the internet—rusted tables and discarded equipment. Rooms lined with fridges for storing corpses. Old operating rooms. Some of the older buildings were filled with archaic machinery and knives only a deranged person would use on you in modern times.
I shuddered.
Google had found a single wiki page on the Fairfield Hospital—the notes as sparse as the current environment. Erected around the time of the Civil War, when Fairfield may have offered hope for better things. But the farms had failed, the soils had soured, and the people had wandered off.
“Sun will be going down soon,” Val remarked as we sat in the car in front of the rusted barbed-wire fence.
It looked like nobody was getting out, and here we were, trying to get in.
His fingers tapped out some unknown tune on the steering wheel, and I knew he was thinking.
“Nighttime seems to be a bad time as far as nightmare creatures go.” He tapped a few beats more. “Safer to not go in there tonight. We’ll go find a motel.”
Part of me rankled. I could make my own decisions, but Val was right, it was childish to disagree. I nodded.
“But first I want to investigate someone nearby who does exorcisms.” He said it as casually as a remark about the weather, but the hairs on the back of my neck rose.
Funny how rational crazy had sounded in the dark. Exorcism.
But now...
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
He nodded toward the hospital as the car tires crunched gravel. “Yeah. It looks like a dead end. Hell knows why you want to visit it. I can’t really see how that photo and a shop sign says come here.”
“Is this where we play deliberately obtuse? I meant the exorcism idea, and you know it.”
“Why? Tell me why it’s a bad idea. Gut feelings are half our database lately.”
