Page 117 of Some Kind of Haunted

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.

“None of that makes sense with the note, though,” I say. “The Harrison who was chasing me here was definitely not suicidal. He wanted to kill me if I wouldn’t give him what he really wanted, not himself. He wanted power, and I’m pretty sure the demons were in him.”

“I’m still having trouble imagining that little old man on a killing spree,” Logan mutters.

“There’s something else about that note,” Jack says after a moment, his voice rough. His grip still tight on me. “That’s not Harrison’s handwriting. It’s Amelia’s.”

We all stare at each other.

“Well,” I say, and then don’t know what to say next. “What does that mean?”

“I can’t tell you how. I don’t know. But . . . somehow, whatever she sacrificed, she made sure that even in the eyes of nonbelievers, Harrison was to blame for everything that happened. Because he was.” I can feel the way Jack is still internally working through that, but he turns it into determination. The Jack Bellamy way.

“We’re going to find out everything he did,” Jack says, and I can tell that’s more of a vow. “If I have to tear apart every last part of the store and my grandparents’ old house, I’m going to find out every last secret that Harrison was keeping.”

That seems to ring out a little into the night, and that’s when I fully get what Jack was telling me. The dark is all around us, but it doesn’t press in. There’s no seething weight to it.

It’s just nighttime.

The moon is bright overhead. I can even see some stars.

Even if the clock never struck midnight, it’s officially Halloween and it feels like the first night. Maybe ever. Like we’ve all been granted a whole new chance at life—

Or maybe that’s just me.