Page 105 of Some Kind of Haunted

If things Jack and I did make this harder for him, I’m fiercely glad. I just wish we’d known, for a lot of reasons—and so we could have thwarted him on purpose.

Harrison’s smile is oozing now and the creep-show chuckle has taken on undertones that settle into me and make my stomach heave. And I know I have to give up the idea that the Harrison I thought I knew is in there still.

Or ever was.

Because clearly, it was all a lie. Whatever is happening here, now, is something Harrison chose. He made this happen—and he had to know that doing this would hurt the rest of us.

As I think that I know, deep down, that hurting us was a feature, not a bug.

That hurts. But not as much as it’s going to hurt Jack and Nora. Knowing that makes me hurt even more.

“You’re a liar, Lexi,” Harrison clucks at me. That chuckle reverberates, bouncing off the tower walls and slamming into me like feedback from a speaker, not that he seems to care. “I know you now. I know what you are. Amelia thought she could bring you to Midas early and stop me?” He shakes his head, a dark joy spreading his lips wide. “Instead, it gave me the opportunity to learn. We all have a weakness. You think I don’t know yours?”

He leans in close. I’m trying not to hyperventilate, because of course, I have a million weaknesses and have no reason to think I can stand up in the face of this—except the fact I’ve survived every dream version of this so far. And I’m not dead yet.

It doesn’t feel like enough, but hey.

“Your self-righteous grandmother’s weakness was thinking you could stop this, so she had to die rather than make the deal,” Harrison tells me, and his eyes are gleaming with satisfaction in a way I really don’t like. “If she’d given herself over to the inevitable and surrendered to the demons the way she knew she should have, everyone would be just fine.”

I don’t know how to process what I think he’s telling me here. I also don’t know how it makes any sense, given that what demons do is feed, but he’s not done.

“And your cousin Cleo.” He sneers. “She was selfish, Lexi. She could have stopped all of this by giving her Darling blood to me freely, but she fought me instead.”

That processing I couldn’t quite manage happens fast, like a sucker punch. “You . . . She fought you?”

I inhale sharply against the pain and this knowledge I don’t want. He killed Cleo. And is involved in Amelia’s death, too, even if he just pushed her to it. Because neither one of them would make a deal.

His deal.

“She shouldn’t have listened to that addled grandmother of hers,” Harrison is seething at me. “Virginia always was a mess, Lexi. A lot like you.” That’s meant as an insult, I’m sure, but I remember meeting the old woman’s gaze, and refuse to be insulted. He keeps going. “Cleo should have let it be. She shouldn’t have tried to save you from what was coming. She should have known that the harbinger always has a choice. They all should have known that you and only you have the choice.”

That choice thing again. He’s been harping on that this whole time, and I thought it was benevolent. I thought he cared about me and the kind of life I was living, or what Midas was asking of me. Now I get that he only wanted me to have a choice so that I’d choose his way.

The demon way.

He’s scowling now, and I can tell he expected me to be falling apart. Wailing, maybe. Shaking and cowering in fear. Or convinced my tenuous sanity had finally cracked up for good.

I can tell he’s underestimated me and it gives me a strength I didn’t know I had in me. To look him in the eye without even a little cower—even if my insides are shaking apart.

“What choice did you make, Harrison?” I ask him.

He inhales—dramatically, in my opinion—and lets out a slow exhale that ends up another chuckle. “I always do like your questions. Insightful girl, despite how disastrously messy you are. I’m no harbinger. I’m not bound to any choice. I am a founding family ancestor. If my ancestors could do it, why not me?”

Harrison asks this as though it’s the most sensible thing in the world, and it’s wild that no one asked this before. He shakes his head in a kind of aw, shucks way that is actually terrifying under these circumstances, and I have to fight to maintain my composure.

“Why should we be bound to a bargain made two centuries ago when this place was little more than mud?” he demands. “Why not ask for more?”

“More horrible slurping deaths?” I suggest, my voice maybe a little higher pitched than necessary.

But he doesn’t even hear me. “More power. More chaos.” His gaze is getting flat and hot, not exactly markers of sanity, and I would know. “More for me, Lexi. My father thought he could weasel his way out of the original deal our forefathers made, and both he and my mother died. So I dedicated my life to knowing everything about that deal so I could make my own. When I finally had all the pieces, my wife refused to join me, and she died. Bloody. Brutal. And completely avoidable.”

I look for some kind of grief in him, because maybe that would be the place to press for weakness, but if he ever felt anything for these people—his family—it’s long gone.

There’s only a frustrated kind of disgust inside him now when he turns his gaze to me.

And gets quiet. And worse, sure. “They were weak, but I am strong. With knowledge. With understanding. With blood. I made my deal, and I am already imbued with the strength and power to do what needs to be done.”

“Great,” I manage to say, also trying to keep it quiet, like we’re just having a friendly chat here in the tower of hell. “Then you don’t need me.”