Page 115 of Some Kind of Haunted

I don’t know how to do this, or if we’re doing it all wrong. I don’t know if there’s a right way to perform a demon ritual, so I just say what I feel. What’s in my heart.

Like I trust me, too.

“I’m breaking any deal you have here!” I yell—at Harrison, at the shadows, at Midas itself. “You will not feed here ever again. Our blood ends this. Our fight ends this.” I think of Amelia and Cleo, who won’t get to see this. My mother. “The sacrifice of everyone who came before ends this. That is our choice.”

And the rock explodes.

I am thrown hard. I’m really in the air this time.

I lose my grip on Jack and it feels like I’m careening through the sky. The only thought I have in this weird, weightless moment is that maybe I went ahead and sacrificed everything after all.

And if it frees the people I love, maybe that’s okay.

Chapter Thirty

I wake up on the ground.

But I feel more like I’m in the ground. I must have hit hard, because I feel the impact in every part of me. I’m pretty sure I have muddy riverbank dirt in my mouth, like I became a human trowel. I wonder if I’m dead, or if I’m still unconscious and this is just another all-too-real dream, because everything is black—but a very different sort of black than that revolting demon viscosity.

I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to give those shadows any access to me, not even in my own head.

I decide that the fact I can feel the entirety of my body—most of it complaining about the whole slamming-into-the-earth thing in a small symphony of aches and pains and, happily, nothing too urgent or unbearable—means I survived.

Then again, maybe it was all a dream. Hell, maybe I’m back in New York and have been all this time. Maybe my trip to Midas has been one big delusion and this is just the muddy end of some awful break with reality.

But even as I think it, I immediately reject that old thought pattern. I know who I am now. I know what’s real.

And I also understand then that everything’s black because my eyes are closed. Because I’m facedown in the mucky dirt.

I push myself up and open my eyes to see serious green ones looking into mine.

Jack is here, right here, and when I scrape back the tragedy of my hair to really look at him, he takes hold of one of my hands.

“Where’s Logan?” I ask immediately.

But as Jack puts his arm around me, like he thinks I need help sitting upright—and maybe I do—I see my brother. Way off in the distance, in the light, he’s standing tall and in perfect condition, speaking with two police officers. The same two police officers from the night Cleo was killed, who I am not exactly thrilled to see, and he’s talking to them animatedly.

What’s weirder is that they actually seem to be listening this time.

“He made it look like he was the one who called in the cops, that he just happened upon all this,” Jack tells me. But he doesn’t seem to care about that. His expression goes fierce. His voice is rough. “You’ve been lying here way too still. I should take you to a hospital.”

“No, no. I’m fine.” And I actually am. Sure, there are a few places I feel a little achy and sore, and there’s the whole mud situation, but I’m not dizzy. My vision is clear.

Maybe the mud is concealing the cut on my face. I’m afraid to ask.

I take stock of him. He doesn’t look dirty or bloody or like he got flung from an exploding rock at all.

It takes me a moment to realize that the weird lights aren’t a malfunction of my eyesight. They belong to the first responders. I look over and see paramedics hunched over a figure nearer to the police.

“How long since the rock?” I ask Jack. “Since it . . . blew up?”

“Not long.” Jack is moving his hand on my back in sweet little circles that feel like a kind of homecoming. His voice is still rough. His eyes are dark.

I nod at my brother. “What is he doing?”

“It was just like Cleo.” Jack clears his throat. His voice is darker. “The police showed up without any of us calling it in. We didn’t have time. The rock threw us far enough we could wait out of sight. The explosion somehow missed Logan.”

There’s a pause. A beat of something pained, something deep.