Page 29 of Some Kind of Haunted

I know I’ll wake up in the morning and remember there are no such things as demons, aside from my vast selection of private, personal ones that I inadequately exorcise in therapy. And if there aren’t demons, and I know there aren’t, that means there aren’t . . . whatever harbingers are.

But for a moment, it’s like my whole life makes sense at last.

“Not everyone survives the Feed,” Harrison tells me very seriously. “So you must be careful and protect yourself. Amelia should have taught you. Your father should have warned you, if he remembered.”

“He can’t have,” Jack mutters.

Harrison waves a hand at him but keeps his eyes on me. “It’s shocking that you don’t know.”

The idea that there were people who should have taught me, who should have told me I wasn’t actually crazy, lands hard and twists inside my chest.

But he mentioned Dad again. “Did you know our father?” I ask. It’s something I can ask awake, too. In the daylight. When it won’t sound like the rantings of someone you don’t want your kids playing with.

Harrison doesn’t meet my gaze. He’s looking toward me, but not at me. “Only some are allowed to escape. We never know in advance who they’ll be. Many try, only to suffer the consequences of the attempt. Your father, it turns out, was one of the lucky ones who was permitted to go without any issues.”

“I’d say he paid a price,” Jack mutters, but Harrison only waves it away.

I shudder at . . . all of that. And what it means—that you could try to leave but find yourself trapped here in Midas. With consequences that I’m assuming aren’t pleasant, or he wouldn’t call them that.

“Did you know our mother?” Logan asks, his voice rough in a way that tells me he’s more emotional here than he wants to be.

Harrison looks at him, then at me. “Every generation has its champions and its martyrs,” he says cryptically. “Someone who dies so that another can live to tell the tale.”

I shiver at the implications of that. I think Jack must, too, because he seems to stiffen. He looks somehow even more uncomfortable, like he’d rather be anywhere but here, dealing with us. With me, I think.

And the full lack of answers haunts me. It feels like a yes, but the word martyr makes me more than a little sick to my stomach. I don’t like the look on Logan’s face, either. He’s clearly no fonder of that word than I am.

When Harrison finally focuses on me, his gaze is intent. “You must lock your doors. You must use Amelia’s protections.” He seems to read my blank look, because he continues, “Nora can show you.”

Then he gives me a smile. The kind of smile you give a child, reassuring them that everything is fine. When it is . . . not. “But in the meantime, this should help.”

He shuffles over to the glass case he was sitting behind yesterday the first time I met him. He slides it open from behind, then grabs something from the bottom shelf that I can’t see.

Jack goes with him, clearly wanting to stop Harrison from moving around so much. It almost makes me think grumpy, surly Jack might actually care about something.

Harrison waves him away once again, with a small flare of annoyance, then shuffles toward me. He holds out his hand. I don’t even hesitate to hold mine out in return.

He drops the tiniest gold key into the palm of my hand. It can’t be more than an inch long, with what looks like a locket on one end. It’s delicate and warm in my hand.

“Keep it in whatever room you sleep in,” Harrison tells me, his kind eyes crinkling in the corners.

“This is ridiculous,” Logan mutters. He takes me by the arm and helps me to my feet. More yanks me, but I go along with it. “Very funny joke, but some of us have real problems. Not a shock that our dad never mentioned this place.”

He doesn’t believe them.

It’s not like I want to linger, but . . . I turn back to Harrison, resisting Logan’s tug on my arm. The tiny locket is clutched in my palm.

“Can’t I just go back to New York?” I ask the older man. “And pause all the . . . harbingering?”

Harrison looks at me gravely. “The harbinger is nigh. You’re already here and the die is cast.” When Logan sighs and I stare blankly at Harrison, he clears his throat. “You can try to leave, Lexi. But I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

Chapter Eleven

I wake up to full-blown daylight, still exhausted. But I am in my bed. Well, not my bed. Not in New York. Not home.

Midas, Iowa. In my grandmother’s house.

Not cavorting about near flood walls and in old antique shops in the dark of night, because of course, I dreamed all that.