Page 120 of Some Kind of Haunted

I wrap myself around him and he holds me there, where I can feel his heartbeat inside me. “Nora needs help at the shop and Amelia’s house has kind of grown on me. It’ll be good. It might even be happy.”

Remembering the people we lost here will be hard, whether I knew them as well as I wish I did or not. Yet, somehow I think I’d rather accept it will always be a part of me and remember the hurt every day. Turning my back on it would feel too much like that demon amnesia.

“I’m so sorry about Cleo,” I whisper, putting my palm over his heart. “And about . . .” It’s hard to even get his name out. “Harrison.”

“I’m sorry about them, too.” His voice is rough. “I loved him. I respected him. I believed him, but I can also look back now and see all the places he sandbagged me. All the places he manipulated those feelings and used them against me. All the ways I was blind, because . . . because I did love him.”

I can hear the regret in his voice, but I shake my head. I can’t help it. “You shouldn’t feel bad about loving him. You shouldn’t regret love. Love is why we survived.”

He’s not ready to take that on board, and I understand. It’ll take time. Healing. Believing. Trust. It all takes . . . time, experience.

Love.

“But you didn’t let him get away with it,” I tell him, fiercely. I hear that guilt seeping in, and I won’t allow it. Not for any of us. “You did what you knew was right, even when it went against what he said. You followed your heart.”

He stares at me intently, then reaches out and touches his thumb to the corner of my mouth. “So did you.”

I think about him believing me over Harrison at that critical moment.

I think about the Village Lamplighter and Edna Marie Darling’s cleaning solutions. I think of Amelia and Virginia. My mother, out there trying to save little kids like Jack from the creeping dark. Generations of people passing down the pieces of the puzzle that came together and turned into answers. The perfect words. Streetlights. Heart-shaped rocks. And woven into it, nobility and sacrifice, but only for those who really mean it.

A group of men made a terrible deal with evil forces centuries ago, but there have always been good people willing to fight that evil. Always.

I trace patterns over his chest. “I guess that makes us a pretty good pair.”

“Yeah,” he says, running a hand over my damp hair. “I guess it does.”

So we set about proving it . . . with all the lights on, just in case.

And when I wake up the next morning in his arms, in his bed, exactly where I went to sleep—no rituals, no pills, just us—I know I’m home.

For good.

Epilogue

Nora

Jail isn’t so bad.

This is what I tell myself when I wake up here and remember what I did. And that it’s real.

Someday, it might even make a good story. Unassuming, quiet, mousy Nora Bellamy spent some time in the slammer for murder? It will shock the ladies at the Knit and Sip, I think. And everyone else in Midas.

Because none of them know the real me. I’ve made sure of that. Or did Harrison make sure of that? It doesn’t matter right at this moment. What matters is that if I learned anything from Lexi, I think it’s that I’d like to shock more people.

If, that is, I ever get out of here.

But I have to believe I will, I remind myself as I stare up at the dingy jail ceiling. I have to believe that Jack will take Lexi to the site of the original demon deal and do what needs to be done to break that deal. She’s Amelia’s granddaughter. She’s the harbinger.

She’s strong and brave and she can do this. I know she can.

That’s why I’m here.

She won’t end up like Cleo. She can’t.

My throat closes up at the thought of my best friend. The way I saw her in my dream. Crumpled like that at the bottom of the wall, and nothing I could have done about it. And a text on my phone that I didn’t read until morning, telling me to check on Virginia because she had to run out that night to “deal with a problem” and didn’t know if she’d be back before her grandmother woke up.

“My God,” says a voice I know too well, but did not expect to hear again. It’s still a shock. “You’re going to make me cry.”