Page 37 of Some Kind of Haunted

“Someone? Like, anyone? Superman vibes?” I study him. “I was always more partial to Iron Man.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Of course.”

My gaze is brought back to the clock. It’s like a tractor beam. I don’t want to look, but it pulls at me. I also don’t mean to speak, but I do. “Harrison told me about the dead baby.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty normal around here. That one wasn’t demons. Just . . . life.”

I don’t like that. I hardly think a clock tower falling on a baby is normal life.

When I manage to look away from the clock, Jack is staring at me. There’s an intensity to it. An intensity that lacks the usual animosity. It hooks inside me, this look. This . . . connection or whatever it is. A heartbeat, a pulse.

A need, I think.

I feel my own heart kick at me in return.

“Can I ask you a question?” I manage to force the words out of my mouth when my lips don’t seem to want to move.

He blinks, like he didn’t realize he was staring. He turns away from me abruptly. “No.”

Then he walks off toward a part of the building I haven’t seen yet.

But I decide I’m tired of him walking away. Of letting him. If we’re all agreeing that demons exist and my dreams are real and I’m sufficiently powerful to trigger the demon feed thing just by showing up, he doesn’t get to walk away instead of having a conversation.

Particularly when he came up to me.

So I follow him. Past a sign that clearly reads Employees Only and into a back room stuffed with packed shelves that looks like it must be a storage space for the diner.

“Can’t you read?” he asks gruffly, without looking back at me, as he moves deeper into the room.

Back to gruffness and scowls, like that little moment of softness and . . . I don’t know, exchanging information we somehow both believe, didn’t happen.

Like he remembered who I am, and yikes. But harbinger or not, it doesn’t make sense, and I am ready to fight for things to make sense. People believe me here.

Things should make sense.

“Why do you hate me?” I demand.

There is a pause—but he stops what he’s doing. The silence stretches out, but he’s not walking away anymore. It occurs to me to wonder if maybe the reasons are so broad and vast that he has to gear up for a whole speech.

His voice sounds pained as I watch those shoulders of his stiffen, then sink, and that seems to connect to parts of me I’m not sure I like. Because it looks kind of like defeat and I know what that feels like, but I don’t know why he’d feel that way. I’d rather he start a hate campaign, really.

“I don’t hate you.” He mutters something that sounds a lot like, you have no fucking clue, but that doesn’t make any sense. Then he runs a hand over his head, shoving his hair out of the way. “I don’t even know you.”

I think there’s a strange emphasis on the word you, but having him believe my dreams has made me want to get everything out on the table, so I keep going.

“You did an amazing and immediate impression of hate on first sight,” I say. I remember that moment in the diner vividly. I remember that he hurt my feelings, even if he is one of the first and only people to take my dreams and sleepwalking at face value. “And every single moment since.”

Except maybe when he said he wouldn’t hurt me. Or when he almost carried me. Or when he wanted to handle my first aid last night.

Jack shakes his head but says nothing. He’s really good at that.

But I am really good at letting nothing go. Ask anyone. “Is it because I’m the harbinger? A sign that all this bad stuff is coming?”

He shakes his head again. I hold my breath, wanting him to look at me, but he doesn’t. When he speaks again, he’s quiet. “You can’t help who you are, Lexi.”

My eyes prickle suddenly, and I don’t want that. Not here in a storage facility in a weird nowhere demon town in Iowa. But I can’t stop the sigh I let out, either. “I’ve been trying all my life to.”

He doesn’t look at me right away, but when he does, there’s that flash of something soft in all that usually judgy green. I decide it’s a figment of my imagination, because it immediately hardens into what I would call his more natural wariness.