Page 88 of Some Kind of Haunted

His mouth is at my ear. “I’ve got you, okay?”

I nod, jerkily. We make our way down the ladder. I’m shaking, weak, but Jack keeps me from falling. Once we reach the bottom of the ladder, where we have to jump a little to get to the ground, Jack basically transfers me from his grasp to Logan’s.

I hold on tight to my brother, my feet on the ground, while Jack lets himself drop from the last rung.

“She’s dead,” I croak out when he turns to look at me. “Isn’t she?”

Because she has to be. No one would be that still, that bloody, in those terrible angles, and be alive.

“Who?” Logan demands.

“It’s Cleo,” Nora chokes out. I realize she’s crying, and maybe has been for a while. “I saw it in my dream.”

Logan makes a low, unbelieving sound, but he reaches out a hand and puts it on Nora’s shoulder.

“She’s on the other side of the wall. Something got to her.” Jack sounds so stern and matter-of-fact but I know better now. I can hear his pain and sorrow beneath it. And even though Logan is the one holding me upright, Jack is there, too, his hand rubbing up and down my back, making me wonder if he needs to touch me as much as I need him to touch me right now.

Nora sways, tears pouring down her face, but she doesn’t speak, cry out, anything. It hits me harder than if she was wailing. Then somehow, we all lean in together, on each other. Everyone holding each other up.

“It isn’t safe out here,” Jack says when a gust of wind rushes at us. I shiver at the cold, and Nora tugs her sweater off and offers it to me. I shrug mine off, thinking I should probably apologize since it’s actually hers and I’ve ruined it, but I can’t get the words out.

When I pull her new sweater on, it’s dry and blissfully warm.

Jack has managed to move us into a little circle of light under a streetlamp, but we’re still too close to the flood wall. Even I know that.

“We need to go back to the store,” he continues. “We can’t figure out what happened until morning.”

“We can’t leave her,” Nora replies, though she sounds rough. “We have to . . .”

She trails off, clearly not sure what to do.

But that’s when we hear the sirens.

Then come the flashing lights, and a few moments later, a police car pulls up to the edge of the road and two uniformed officers get out.

“Did you call them?” I hear Nora ask Jack.

“No, of course not,” he says, his hand moving up and down my spine while Logan pats at me in a way that makes me want to hit him until I realize he’s wiping the blood off my cheek.

The officers have flashlights and they are bright. Intrusive.

But they seem shocked to see the four of us standing there when the beams of light reach us.

“I’m afraid you’re going to need to clear the area,” the bigger one says. “Go with Officer Burns to his car so we can take your information.”

The smaller man, presumably Officer Burns, herds us toward the still-running cop car. The other starts to move into the dark on the far side of the wall, where there is no longer any hint of the light I know I saw over there, because how else would I have seen Cleo?

It takes me a moment to realize that the policeman is moving with purpose, like he knows what’s waiting for him.

I look at the cop who stayed with us. “Someone is . . . Someone is hurt on the other side of the wall,” I say.

He nods. “Yes, we got a call. Now, why don’t you all tell me your names? You can show me your IDs if you’ve got them on you.”

“We don’t,” Logan says flatly.

Static comes over the radio then. Someone talks urgently, throwing out a bunch of codes I don’t understand—though I can see that Logan does. What I do understand, I wish I didn’t.

Female. Dark hair. Blood.