Page 69 of Some Kind of Haunted

We step back into the autumn afternoon. The sun is hiding behind a fluffy white cloud that might have seemed cheerful if I didn’t feel so . . . uncomfortable. Shaky and worried.

About Cleo and demons, beginnings and ends.

Jack glares at the house, standing resolutely in place while the breeze ruffles his dark hair. I stand in front of him, blocking him from heading back inside. Not that he couldn’t bulldoze right past me if he wanted to.

He clearly doesn’t want to. He wants to fight something, but not me. Not Cleo. Not Virginia.

His green eyes meet mine, flinty and frustrated. “She’s being willfully ignorant. Virginia was lucid for parts of that. She knew you. There is danger. It’s here. Early.”

I can feel his frustration, just as achingly as I felt Cleo’s grief. It’s this horrible mix of emotions with no relief. Because there are no answers here. Everything kind of sucks.

I am so familiar with dealing with that, I can’t help myself. I move close to Jack, reach out and put my hands on his chest in a kind of comfort I know he doesn’t want—at least not from me—but he needs. “Cleo’s hurting,” I tell him gently. “It’s not willful. It’s the kind of hurt that means she can’t carry anything else.”

He grunts, which is as close to acknowledgment that I’m right as I’m likely to get. There’s a dichotomy here. A man desperate to get answers—maybe even at the cost of others on one side. On the other, there’s the man who helps, no matter the danger.

But also, he doesn’t move my hands off him. We stand there, in the breeze, in a maze of emotions, just looking at each other.

My hands are still on his chest. We’re closer than we need to be, and there’s a band of something around my lungs I don’t fully recognize. Because it isn’t fear or anxiety or worry, not really. It’s something about the green of his eyes.

And I want to keep him here, right here, in this moment. So I keep talking. And I think about Cleo’s direct, steady gaze after Knit and Sip, and how it held me up. “We’ll just have to carry it for her right now,” I tell him.

There’s a wariness in his gaze now, but I can feel his heartbeat under my palm. Steady. Determined. Just like him.

“We?” he asks me gruffly. His gaze drops from my eyes to my mouth, and I swear he’s closer. I lean into that closeness as something in me sighs. We.

But that’s not what either one of us is talking about right now. This is about Cleo and Virginia and demons and safety. “We’re all a big demon-fighting team, right?”

He nods his head slowly, and he isn’t looking at my mouth anymore. He’s stepping back. “Right.” He turns from me—my hands, my leaning into him, my everything, and starts for his bike.

I’m not sure what just happened, but I’m beginning to think all the imagining I’ve convinced myself I’m doing isn’t fully a figment of my imagination.

But I sure don’t comprehend it. Or him. Except . . . in truth, there are parts of him I’m beginning to understand. That part that helps before he thinks.

I follow him to his bike. “You jumped right out on that roof.”

“What the hell was I supposed to do? She could have lost her balance,” he grumbles. Uncomfortable, maybe, that I saw a flash of something more in him than what he’s been showing me.

Or maybe that I’m noticing it.

Because he’s done this before. When I was sleepwalking. Even barely knowing me and not so thrilled with what he did know, he kept me safe.

I can hear Virginia’s quavering voice in my head. They want you to think you’re safe. None of you are safe. You have to stay together in the dark to be safe.

“Jack . . .” He stops at his bike and looks back at me warily. “What are we going to do?” I ask him, because this is . . . There is something to be done, and I do not know what it is.

But I see it on his face, a stark kind of pain. He doesn’t know what to do, either, and it’s killing him.

I want to touch him again. To reach out and be a we, but before I can, he’s speaking. Finding answers to questions. Always.

“If Virginia is right, if that warning was as lucid as it sounded,” he says gruffly, moving to the other side of his motorcycle so we’re separated by something more than good intentions. “It isn’t safe for you—you or Logan or Nora. Not at night, when it’s dark. She wants us all together.” When I don’t argue, he continues. “Maybe Cleo’s right and it’s just dementia, but Virginia knew who you were. She clearly thinks Amelia sacrificed herself to get you here. That means it was already more dangerous, much earlier than we thought.”

I don’t speak. My heart aches for a million reasons.

“I think we should all be under the same roof at night.” Jack sounds as if he regrets having to say this, but I’m not sure I disagree. “Amelia’s place is too small, and besides . . .” But he trails off.

“Besides what?”

“Maybe it’s dangerous, too.” He says that flatly, and it leaves me a little winded. Because that raccoon was on the back porch of Nora’s store—right across from the house. Then there was the possum, in the shadows between the store and the house. Maybe even if nothing has happened yet, even if I’ve tried to hold on to Nora telling me it’s fine because we have to live anyway, he’s right.