Page 79 of Some Kind of Haunted

“Tell me about this dream,” Jack urges me.

“I wrote it all down.”

He nods like he believes me, and still he repeats himself. Urgently. “Tell me, Lexi.”

I’ve noticed he only says my name in that quiet way when it’s important, and I’ve also noticed that I can’t seem to reject anything he says when he says my name like that.

I lick my suddenly dry lips. It’s important. I know it’s important. But something inside me doesn’t want to go there.

Suck it up. People’s lives are at stake.

Jack touches me then. Gently. He takes my arm and pulls me closer to him. Maybe this is a dream. The kind I’ll be a lot more embarrassed by in the morning—

But he nudges me into the stool next to him. “Tell me,” he says. Again.

I expect him to pull away, but he leaves his hand on my arm like an anchor, and it works. I feel . . . safe. Something I feel so rarely that I’m getting a little emotional.

I clear my throat so I can talk. I look at the words, but more, I try to picture the dream again.

“I’m standing on a rock by a river. I don’t recognize it or where I am or anything. It’s just me. And I don’t know if there was more that led up to that dream.” I look at him, worried. “I don’t always remember everything.”

He squeezes my arm. “That’s all right. You just tell me what you remember.”

I stare at him. He has never been so warm with me. So kind.

He will do anything to find the answers he wants, Harrison said, but I’m not sure I think that’s such a bad thing.

I go on. “I’m on the rock. I’m looking for someone.” Usually, I remember the bad parts of dreams, vividly, but this one is a little fuzzier. Because it didn’t make my blood run cold. Because it wasn’t recurring or like the others. “Nothing really happens. I sit there. I know I need someone to come, but they don’t.”

But that old journal is on the counter between us. I read that old account during my history morning with Harrison. I know I did. Yet, the page is right there, and my eyes can’t help but go over the words again.

Right before our eyes, the shapes of men turned into shapes of . . . something else. Something I couldn’t describe. Something black and wrong.

With claws.

With teeth.

I shudder, the image of teeth flashing into my mind. Claws against rock. Black shapes.

Slurping.

“I guess in the dream I saw what they describe here,” I say slowly. “Men morphing into awful black shapes with fangs. And the rock . . .” I frown, trying to hold on to the images in my head that twist and dance away. “Blood drips from the rock. They made their deal in blood.”

“Yeah.” Jack taps the part of the journal page. “The demons demanded a blood oath from the settlers.”

I frown at the page. I read it and yes, that’s what’s there, but in my dream it was different. “It’s not just the founding families’ blood, Jack.” I lift my gaze to his. “In my dream, the demons bleed, too.”

We stare at each other, and I know we’re thinking the same thing. That this means something, but neither of us knows what. Virginia said only the blood can stop it, but this all points to the blood starting it.

His expression moves into something rueful. “One step forward, two steps nowhere.”

I think he’s more frustrated than he’s letting on.

“You should get some sleep,” I tell him.

“Sleep.” Jack says that like it’s a joke. “Knowing the Feed might be on the horizon?”

“You told the rest of us to sleep.”