Page 41 of Some Kind of Haunted

My heart is kicking at an unsteady pace over the shock of the car crash. I can’t help but turn to look back. I can see that someone is crawling out of the smashed car. There’s blood on their face. I open my mouth to tell Nora to stop, to call 911.

But then the figure smiles—at me, I could almost swear—blood dripping down his chin.

I turn back around in my seat, fast. I squeeze my eyes shut and clutch my hands on my legs for that pinch myself awake vibe. Not real. Not real. Not real.

Except . . .

“It’s real and it’s not,” Nora says gently, like she can read my thoughts. I’m too freaked out to question it just now. “It’s hard to explain because not everyone sees the same thing. Some people would have called 911. Emergency personnel would come and treat what they thought was a normal car crash. They wouldn’t have seen the smile or how . . . warped it all is underneath. For some people, everything looks . . . Well, normal.”

Logan makes a noise. “But we’re the lucky ones who get to see all of that shit?”

I watch Nora meet his gaze in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t realize you saw it,” she says, but there’s a tone in her voice. It’s not accusing. Not like Jack to me, and yet . . . there’s something about it that kind of makes me want to stick up for Logan.

But I don’t. Because he’s been a dick to her since they met. The girl can have a tone if she wants.

Once we pass the Now Exiting Midas, the Jewel of the Upper Mississippi Valley sign, the drive gets significantly less creepy. Or maybe it’s finally so dark that I can’t make out anything creepy any longer. I’ll take it.

But Logan can’t let anything go. He leans forward, his head between mine and Nora’s seat now. “Okay, so what if up until this very point I was planning on coming back to Midas, but now I’ve changed my mind? I’m not going back and—”

The car kind of shudders and there’s a grinding noise coming from the engine. I grip the handle of the door.

Nora’s expression betrays nothing.

The shudder stops. The car sounds normal.

Logan offers no more scenarios or questions. He sits back in his seat.

No one says anything for the rest of the drive.

Eventually, a few lights shine in the distance and Nora drives towards them, turning into a gravel kind of drive. There are a handful of squat buildings, each with lights over the doors, but nothing else. No terminal. No parking lots.

It doesn’t look like any airport I’ve ever been to, but a shadow is waiting for us in front of one of the squat buildings. I brace myself—a new habit now, apparently—until Cleo steps into the faint light and gives us a wave. Nora pulls to a stop and we all get out of the car.

I will admit it takes me a minute. I have to psych myself up to step out into the distinctly unfriendly Iowa night.

Though when I do, it feels . . . better. Not as heavy as the darkness does in Midas.

“Things are safer outside Midas,” Nora says, like she’s reading my thoughts again. But I note Logan gets suddenly tense. Like she was talking to him and not me. “But far as we know, that doesn’t mean it can’t all go wrong if you’re not careful.”

Gravel crunches under our feet as we move toward the buildings. Everything is colder out here but . . . lighter, somehow. I guess it doesn’t feel like there’s a demon shadow in every corner waiting to pounce. There’s definitely no threatening clock tower hovering over us.

It’s like I can take a full breath, even relax, for the first time in a long time.

It feels good here. Yes, safer, like Nora said, whether that was an assurance for me or Logan.

Cleo leads us around one building and toward a bigger one. It’s huge with barn-style doors that are pulled open, and there are lights on inside. Small, old-looking planes seem haphazardly parked all over the giant concrete pad.

This is the airport. This is an airport hangar, in fact, even if every plane here looks ancient, like it might have starred in an old Peanuts cartoon.

The roar of an engine has us all turning. A sole beam of a headlight appears, and once it gets close enough to see beyond the glare, I realize it’s Jack. Riding a classic-looking motorcycle with Indian written on the side, like the reincarnation of James Dean.

He pulls to a stop in front of the hangar opening, cuts the engine so that the quiet seems loud again, and then swings off.

It’s really not fair. To be that hot. To have this effect on me when he is so surly and really doesn’t like me, no matter what he says. And sure, I’ve enjoyed questionable attraction to shitty men before, but this is different.

Jack did save me from something last night. One guy I dated didn’t even try to save me from an unhinged individual in a Halloween mask screaming at me on the subway, so close I could smell the dude’s cloying aftershave.

This is probably not the time to be thinking about the hotness of Jack, I tell myself. Primly.