The Space Within (The Book of Phoenix #3)

by Kristie Cook

“We all returned to Earth as Separated souls for the next cycle,” she continued. “All of us except my other half. While we were in the Space Between, you promised me, Jacquelena, that you would find me. You swore to me that you would find my soul and you would help me stay in the Light until we were able to find my Twin Flame and make us whole again.”

  Enyxa paused, stood and walked over to me, towering over my form on the ground. She squatted in front of me and stared me down with her black-as-night eyes.

  “You promised,” she hissed, her voice colder than the ice I lay on, sending a new shiver down my back. “You promised, and you lied. You never found me. You never helped us. You abandoned us!”

  “We … we didn’t … we had no idea,” I stammered.

  “You were our leader! You were supposed to be there for us. Instead you let us go Dark. It’s your fault we lost each other!”

  I rolled onto my knees, lifted myself to her eye level. “We. Didn’t. Remember. You know we never remember. We’ve been through how many lifetimes since then?”

  “Don’t give me excuses!” Her voice rose into a shrill shriek. “It’s all YOUR FAULT, JACQUELENA!”

  She brought us body and soul into the memory of the original Separation. At that time, we’d been a Union for so long, had existed as Ja’mai for so many life cycles, we no longer remembered anything different. And then Satan himself broke through the Gates and through our defenses. He entered our world, destroyed our peace, severed us from each other and everything we knew. It had been the most painful Separation, when Satan had been the one to rip us apart. I knew this now as I relived the full extent of it, screaming through the renewed agony.

  Then Enyxa took us through her memories again, through her hundreds of horrific lives as her soul grew Dark while our souls had been finding each other, re-Bonding, and eventually becoming Unions again. And then to the first time she Separated us. She destroyed another of the Original Seven, permanently Separating them and forcing them to go Dark. She did it again and again, each time waiting for us to grow into Unions, ripping us in halves, and taking one more of us. Until the last time, and only the three of us remained. She’d tried to destroy Rebethannah and Nathayden then when she took his half to the Dark worlds with her. We’d fed ourselves right into her hands by bringing Bex to Hayden—by bringing all of us to the Darkness.

  We’d effectively demolished the Original Seven.

  “You’ve had this vendetta against us all,” Brock snarled, bringing my focus back to the present. He was on his feet, his chest puffed and his arms flexed. “You’ve caused all the tragedies in all of our lives!”

  Enyxa beamed widely. “Yes, Broderick, but you already knew that. Everything that’s happened since I went Dark—every single heartache including your son’s death, even bringing you and Anastasia to be Forged together over and over again, and allowing you to bring Rebethannah to Nathayden—all of it was to lead to this very moment. But now you know who is truly to blame. If Ja’mai had been a real leader, we’d all be Union souls, living in the Light on Earth. If Jacquelena had kept her promise to me, none of us would be here right now. You would have never gone through the horror of losing your child and your mother. You would be with your other half—who you’re supposed to be with.”

  “What does that mean?” Brock barked. “Who am I supposed to be with?”

  Enyxa rolled her eyes. “You have to look within to know that. The real problem is why you are here and not with your other half in the first place.”

  Brock turned toward me, his chocolate-brown eyes nearly as black as Enyxa’s. His lip lifted in a snarl as he glared at me, his biceps flexed, and his chest lifted as he inhaled through enflamed nostrils. He looked every bit as powerful as that Tristan had, and the blame that filled his eyes paralyzed me just as effectively.

  My heart broke for him and everything he’d been through. It cracked into shards for Bex and Hayden and all of their pain, and more for the rest of the Seven that no longer existed. It shattered completely for all of the souls that had gone Dark because of me. I took the full weight of all the blame. Everything Enyxa said was true, I knew now. I remembered it clearly.

  It had all been my fault, and none of us would be here if it weren’t for my failures.

  Chapter 21

  I tried to awake from the nightmare, but I wasn’t sleeping and this Darkness wasn’t something I could so easily escape. I’d gone through a bout of severe depression after the miscarriage, but that was nothing compared to the despair I felt now. A Darkness so thick and heavy filled every pore of my skin, every cell of my body, every molecule of air in my lungs, suffocating me under its weight. The black pit I’d been in before was nothing more than a ditch compared to the sinkhole I sat at the bottom of now, the light of the world so far away, I was no longer a part of it. I was alone, completely and utterly alone here, with only hopeless, negative thoughts surrounding me, pulling me further down into the Darkness.

  I couldn’t feel Brock’s presence because of the Separation of worlds, but I somehow knew that he, too, was growing Darker. Although writing in the Book had made me feel closer to him, I hadn’t been able to write about the accident. Still, the memories had come on their own, just as heartbreaking and devastating as the actual event. I’d felt him pull away then. I knew why.

  He blamed me. Rightly so.

  Which was why I deserved everything happening to me now. I deserved the heartache, the agony, the Dark sickness that was taking over my soul.

  Something pounded on my door. I slid deeper under the covers, hiding, wishing the Darkness would consume me completely.

  “Asia!” Jeric pounded again, making the door shake. “Asia, we can’t do this by ourselves. Let me in!”

  I huddled down further and pulled a pillow over my head, muffling his pleas so I could resist them and he’d eventually go away. My own despair was enough. Jeric was wrong. We had to do this by ourselves, because taking on any more than I already had would kill me. Then again … wasn’t that what I wanted? I’d just been wishing for the Darkness to take me away once and for all.

  “Asia!” The door slammed open and banged into the wall.

  I sat up, holding the pillow to my chest and squinting at Jeric’s form in the brightness of the hallway behind him. He flipped a light on. I threw myself back down and covered my head with the pillow again.

  “You’re scaring the shit out of me,” he said as the door clicked shut. I didn’t peek, but I could tell he’d moved to the end of the bed. “Nobody’s seen you in nearly two days. Which means you’re not eating or anything. Are you trying to kill yourself?”

  “Would it matter?” I muttered. I doubted he heard me through the pillow.

  “Fuck yeah, it would matter. What would Brock do if he came back to that?”

  “Brock’s not coming back. Neither is Leni. Get over it and give in.”

  The end of the bed sank. I groaned, threw the pillow off, and scooched up to lean against the headboard. I narrowed my eyes and glared hard at him.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  “Not letting you give in. Weren’t you the one telling me the other day to stop feeling sorry for myself? Well, back at ya, sister.”

  “Screw you, Jeric.”

  “Fuck yourself, Asia.”

  I scowled. He returned it.

  “What are you doing, Jeric?” I asked again.

  He studied me for a long moment, blew out a hard breath, dropped his head into his hands, and leaned his elbows on his knees.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, and I sighed at the sound of his forlorn voice. “I thought I’d try to pull you out of it and bring myself along, but I just can’t do it. Brock would kill me if he came back to you gone, but I can’t bring myself to care any more. Because they’re not coming back, are they?”

  “Ev
en if they were, Brock wouldn’t care,” I muttered. “He hates me. I can feel it.”

  “Bullshit. You’re Twin Flames.”

  “Are we?” I snapped.

  Jeric twisted his head and peered at me between his forearm and bicep. “What the hell does that mean?”

  I frowned and picked at a thread on the blanket. “I’ve never really felt it. Neither has he. We’ve never had what you and Leni do, or Kel and Mat, Melinda and Uri …. Brock and I have always been different. And I know why now. We aren’t Twin Flames. We aren’t each other’s other halves. We were somehow made to believe we are, but we don’t really belong together.”

  Jeric lifted his head up and cocked it to the side. “That’s impossible.”

  “How do we know? We know nothing, do we? You got the memory of the accident?”

  He cringed and nodded.

  “That should have never happened! If Hope and I hadn’t shown up all persistent and demanding, Brock and Connor would have been gone and far away from that parking lot long before that truck came barreling down the street. But no, I had to fuck things up. I had convinced myself that it was supposed to be him and me together, and I forced him into believing that, too. Dragged him all the way over here, and now our halves have been Forged together when they don’t belong. If I’d left it alone, if I’d let him be with Kami instead of jumping to conclusions and tracking him down at school, she and Connor wouldn’t be dead now. Maybe they’re the Twin Flames.”

  “How can you say that? Can souls even be Forged if they’re not Twin Flames?”

  “Apparently, yeah.”

  “And what about the matching marks you both had?”

  “How do we know one didn’t show up on Kami’s arm, too? How do we know Enyxa didn’t somehow make that happen, just like she’s done everything else?”

  Jeric didn’t answer. He’d apparently felt that today, too—that Enyxa had been setting us up all along.

  “Don’t you remember your past lives together?” he asked.

  “Barely. But here’s another thing: we don’t remember our last life at all. Not. At. All.”

  “Not even after you Bonded?”

  “No! Because we didn’t Bond then. We never found each other last time. Why would that be unless we weren’t supposed to be together in the first place?”

  He rubbed his hand over his face, then shook his head. “You’re grasping at straws, Asia. You don’t believe it. That’s the Darkness making up lies.”

  “It’s not!” I dropped my face into my hands and groaned. “Or in a way it is, because it’s all Enyxa’s doing. She’s brought us to this point. She brought Brock and I together, not our souls or the universe working in weird ways, and definitely not any Guides. Enyxa made it happen. I feel that truth so strongly, it’s like she actually admitted to it.”

  “How the hell can she do that? Force you together?”

  I threw my hands in the air. “Obviously with some kind of help.”

  “I don’t buy it. How the hell can you be so sure?”

  I looked up at him, inhaling a deep breath as I reconsidered what I was about to say. I had to do it. He needed to understand the truth. It was the only way he’d leave me the hell alone.

  “I died last summer.” The words came out flatly, and I watched as he processed this. His brows scrunched together, and he nodded for me to continue. Again, I asked myself if I really wanted to tell this story. I’d never wanted to relive this again, but he left me no choice. “Not this past summer that just ended, but last year. When I had my miscarriage … the baby wasn’t the only one who died that day. My miscarriage wasn’t something sad and unexplainable that randomly happens to many pregnancies. It was deliberate. I wasn’t supposed to wake up.”

  Jeric stared at me for a long moment with those piercing blue eyes of his. “I’m already lost. Start at the beginning.”

  I sighed and pushed my hair back from my face, catching a glimpse of the newly colored strands—they were a deep, dark blue now instead of pitch black. I’d been going for a lighter blue, an attempt to lighten my mood, too, but apparently my soul was already too Dark to lighten my hair any more than this.

  “Fine,” I said. “Rewind several months back, when I’d met this guy at college named Drew. He was a frat boy, ran in the same circles as me. The obnoxiously rich circles, that is.” I snorted when Jeric’s forehead scrunched. “Yeah, I was a rich bitch back then, thanks to my asshole step-father, and I was always after the most eligible bachelors, even if they were dickwads like him. Drew was king of them all. Son of a Senator, but you’d think he was the politician with the power. Smooth as butter and hot as shit. We weren’t serious or anything. Fuck buddies. Booty calls. Whatever you want to call it. But my pills got messed up, or maybe I was just the unlucky one-hundredth of a percent when they failed. Anyway, I got pregnant.”

  My throat began to thicken, and I had to take a moment to clear it.

  “Drew, the great guy that he was, wanted me to get an abortion. He assumed I’d take care of it, and … I … I was going to.” I could barely speak any more. Tears leaked out of the corners of my eyes. I averted my head and let them fall. “I set up the appointment, went to the clinic and everything. But when they called my name, I froze. I couldn’t go into that room.” I pressed my hands to my stomach. My words came out all teary and barely understandable. “I … I couldn’t kill my baby, Jeric.”

  His weight lifted from the end of the bed, and he came around to Brock’s side and sat down. He put an arm around my shoulder, and I leaned into him and sucked in a jagged breath so I could go on.

  “I ran out of the clinic and all the way home bawling. Later, when I came to accept my decision, I went to the support group. Kami was there, a few months further along than me. She had a tiny little baby bump already. That’s the only reason I remembered her being there—she was the only one who did.” I rubbed my eyes. “Anyway, I couldn’t have an abortion, I knew that for sure, and I went home for the summer thinking I’d figure out exactly what I was going to do. I was sick the first month and a half of summer break, until I reached the second trimester. By then, I had a bump, and it’d become my baby. I decided I was going to have him or her and be the best mother I could be. My stepfather was livid. I was an embarrassment to him and his elite country club reputation. My pregnancy somehow made him look bad to his top executive clients. He said I’d be keeping the pregnancy a secret and giving the baby up for adoption, or he’d disown me. I didn’t really care if he did.”

  “What about your mother?”

  I rolled my eyes. “She’s just a damn doormat. She let him walk all over her from the moment she met him, and he rescued us from a life of poverty. That’s what she called it when her own parents disowned her because I was born out of wedlock, but she really had no idea what poor is. So yeah, Mark thought he’d threaten to do the same to me, thinking I wouldn’t want to be like my mom. And I didn’t want to be like her, but not in the way he thought. He didn’t know me at all. The only thing my mom did was not let him kick me out until after the baby was born. But then, right after the Fourth of July, Drew showed up at my parents’ house. He didn’t live around there, but his dad had a place close by for when he was in Washington. Drew wanted another booty call, I guess, but wasn’t expecting to see me pregnant.”

  My throat started closing again as the memories returned.

  “What happened?” Jeric asked quietly when I didn’t continue.

  I chuckled, the sound flat with no humor. “Saying he was pissed off doesn’t even begin to describe it. He looked like a cartoon character, the way his face turned beet red and his eyes bulged the moment he saw my bump. We were already inside, in the kitchen, and I saw he was about to lose his shit, so I rushed him outside to the deck. I didn’t need Mark to hear the argument. I tried to explain to Drew that I was doing this all on my
own …”

  “You lied to me!” he’d yelled. “You said you took care of it!”

  “You never bothered to find out,” I’d said. “You didn’t give two shits about us. So go on back to your life and don’t worry about it.”

  “Don’t worry about it? Until you come after me in two years for child support? Yeah, right, you conniving little bitch. What do you think my dad’s going to say about this? You’ll ruin my whole family!”

  Mark had been outside and heard the argument after all. He came running up the deck stairs. “What’s going on? Who are you?”

  “Drew Cavendish, sir.” The polite politician coming out.

  “Cavendish? As in Andrew Cavendish?”

  “That’s my dad.”

  “God damn it, Asia,” Mark snapped at me, his hands on his hips. “A Senator’s son? You had to screw up with a Senator’s son? What the hell were you thinking? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  He glared at me as though I’d been the only one there the night I got pregnant, as if I’d gone and done it on purpose.

  “She was supposed to get a fucking abortion,” Drew snarled as he took a step closer to me. Mark did the same. I backed up against the railing that circled the deck.

  “You lied to us, Asia?” Mark demanded. I shook my head. I felt so tiny and out of control as they both towered over me. “You said the father didn’t care if you had the baby.”

  “I said the father didn’t care period,” I said, trying to be bitchy, but sounding weak.

  “Why didn’t you just get the abortion, Asia?” Drew asked. “Why do you have to fuck things up so badly?”

  “That’s all she knows how to do,” Mark muttered. “If you don’t want the baby, Drew, and we don’t want it, we can still take care of this. There are certain clinics that will do it this far along.”

  “I want it!” I said, finally finding my voice. “You’re not taking care of anything!”