Page 61 of Some Kind of Haunted

“You have to stay.” I’m still clutching her arm while my heart beats wildly. “You can’t go out there.”

“Whatever is eating animals is just doing that,” Cleo says calmly, but her voice is weird. Hiding something, I think. “Eating animals. Circle of life, city girl. I have to get back to the airport. Dad can only handle things on his own for so long.”

But she doesn’t try to shake off my grip. Outwardly, she seems perfectly at ease, but I don’t buy it.

“What things?” Nora asks, clearly concerned about Cleo’s home life while I am concerned about shadows eating animals.

Cleo shakes her head. “It’s okay. We both know it’s okay. It always is.” She breaks out of my grasp and opens the door. I’m trying to argue with her, but it’s just a sputter, and Nora is busy flipping light switches on.

When I dare to look outside to where Cleo has gone I see the entire back pathway lit up by the lights Nora must have just turned on.

“Text me when you’re home safe,” Nora calls after Cleo.

Because neither of us can stop her.

There’s no sign of the possum. The horrible screeching has stopped. But I still grab on to Nora again because this is all wrong.

“Nora.”

“It’s okay,” she says, patting my arm. But her eyes are on Cleo’s slowly disappearing form. “That’s the deal. It’s okay, except on Halloween.”

She says this more like she’s trying to convince herself than like she believes it. She tries to smile at me.

“That possum is not okay,” I point out.

“No, but it could have been a stray dog that got it. There was talk of a mountain lion over in Dubuque. Did you know that? Predators might prefer the wild, but they’ll come into town for food. It could have been that.”

It wasn’t. We both know it.

“You’ll text Logan to turn on all the lights before I walk you over,” she tells me, still calm and orderly.

I glance across the yard at the house. Right now there is a porchlight on and the living room window glows. But it is dim against the darkness surrounding the house.

I do not want to walk through it.

“The thing is, Lexi, we have to live,” Nora tells me, serious and quiet now. “Through the scary things. In between the Feeds. We still have to live. It’s kind of the point. And maybe we want to break the deal and send the demons back to wherever demons come from, but in the meantime . . . there’s a deal that our ancestors sacrificed for. So we trust it. Because we have to.”

Kind of how I’ve always tried to live my life in between dreams, really.

But I look past her, out into the inky dark.

And trust nothing.

Chapter Eighteen

I make it back to the house without incident, but then, Logan also turned on the floodlights. When I get inside the tiny house I tell Logan about the possum that he somehow failed to hear right outside. When he seems less scared than I am, I’m annoyed.

When he sounds dismissive it infuriates me so much that I throw a decorative pillow at his head.

“Stay mad, Lex,” he says, after easily ducking my childish missile. “But maybe also put yourself to bed. Your toddler is showing.”

That makes me mad. He knows it makes me mad. That’s why he said it.

I have no choice but to make a dignified exit into my bedroom, and he knows that, too.

Dick.

And I dream about the clock tower with possum tails wriggling into the hour and minute hands that night.