Page 107 of Some Kind of Haunted

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.