The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  “You remember,” I said, still baffled by the fact that suddenly Bryn was capable of conjuring more than just memories in her dreams.

  “I’ll never forget it,” she said, voice rattled.

  “How are…are you okay? I mean, the dream, did it—?” I reached for her and she pulled away.

  “I’m fine.” She glanced back at Dani. “Obviously you’re okay too.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “We can talk about this later. I need to get Dani back to the hotel.”

  “I…”

  Her eyes flashed to my face. “You’re not coming are you?”

  This time I was the one who couldn’t make eye contact. “I just need to find out what they know.”

  Bryn just shook her head, turning to go. The doors to the tram were sliding open as I reached for her one last time.

  “Bryn…let me at least help you get Dani back to the hotel.”

  “No.” She spoke over her shoulder. “We can go the rest of the way. Alone.”

  She slipped from my grasp as the doors to the tram slid closed. Vogle was already heading back toward the others and finally I forced myself to follow him. But not before looking back. Once. Twice. I waited for her to look back too but she never did.

  35

  Bryn

  I got Dani up to our room without anyone seeing us but when I opened the door my grandmother was standing by the window, her eyes widening when she saw Dani limping and leaning against me.

  “What…what happened?” My grandmother rushed over, helping me get Dani onto the bed.

  “Just lay down for a little while,” I said.

  Dani’s eyes were already drifting closed and even though part of me wasn’t sure whether or not she had a concussion and therefore whether or not sleeping was really the right thing to do, I wasn’t sure what else we could do.

  “Bryn, what happened?”

  “She…” I couldn’t finish. I didn’t know how.

  “Bryn.” My grandmother gripped my shoulders, making me face her. “Tell me.”

  “Something hurt her.” I locked eyes with her, trying to read them. “Something she couldn’t see.”

  I waited for her to say something—that she knew what I was talking about, that she knew what I was and why, that it was her who I’d seen in those trees in the dream with Sam. That she knew everything. But she didn’t speak, her eyes only betraying that she couldn’t manage a single word, and then she was crying.

  “I’m sorry, Bryn.” She looked away, her eyes swollen.

  My lip trembled. “For what?”

  She shifted, hesitating, but I was done waiting.

  “You’re going to tell me the truth,” I whispered.

  But still she said nothing. I could see Dani lying there in the corner of my eye, stirring up all of the panic I’d been feeling since the night Roman went missing, since that first day when the shadow attacked me in the observation room. Time was another adversary now, one I couldn’t fight without the truth, and not just what my grandmother knew but what I knew, what I’d seen and done.

  “I’ve been seeing strange things,” I told her. “Before they happen. And I’m being followed by something.” I held out my arms, pulling up my coat sleeve. “It attacked me and now it’s attacked Dani too.”

  My grandmother’s gaze drifted to Dani.

  “We went to find Roman and I felt this pull, something drawing me to this place in the middle of town. But it was a place I’d been before. A place I’d dreamed about. That’s all the dreams were at first but now when I dream it’s like I’m leaving my body entirely. I’m not just at the farmhouse anymore like I’d always talked about. The other night I saw Roman and he touched me like I was real. I was…” I stopped and in the absence of my voice she finally flinched. “Was it real?”

  This time she didn’t startle even though none of what I’d just said made any sense. Instead, she looked straight through me, almost disoriented. “I…”

  “Please.”

  She finally met my eyes. “I’m not like you, Bryn.”

  “But you know someone who is?”

  She nodded and then she said, “Celia. My sister.”

  “How?” I pleaded. “What am I? What’s happening?”

  Her face softened, those stalled tears glistening.

  “I need to know.”

  She turned away from me, rummaging in her bag. She pulled out a small bottle of oil, a bottle of holy water, and a glass bottle of herbs, the rituals she wouldn’t have always carried with her unless she’d known she’d need them. What else did she know? She left me hanging in that silence, just watching as she knelt over Dani’s body and started praying. She laid out the herbs, dotting Dani’s wrists and ankles with water. All the while Dani never stirred; in such a deep sleep she looked lifeless.

  “Is she going to be okay?” I croaked out.

  “I don’t know,” my grandmother said, the only answer she’d given me. And it was worthless. “She seems alright now. I’m sure she is.”

  “But if she’s not?” I stared at the bruise beneath Dani’s hairline starting to swell. All because she took one step, because it was coming after me and she got in its way. Because she couldn’t see it. “I shouldn’t have let her come with me. I should have gone alone.”

  And I would have, I thought. If I hadn’t been looking for Roman. If I hadn’t only been thinking about him.

  “She’ll never know what—”

  “I’ll know,” I stopped her. “You might be okay with keeping secrets like this but I’m not. Not when they put people I care about in danger. She could have gotten hurt or worse and now…if something did happen, I won’t even be able to help her. I won’t know how.” I gripped my scalp. “I won’t know anything. I don’t know who I am. Or what I am. I don’t even know what you are.”

  My grandmother pursed her lips, face pained. Then, defeated, she slowly made her way to her bag again, searching for a moment before pulling out a photograph and handing it to me. There were three faces, all with the same dark hair, the same dark eyes. But the one in the middle—young, thin smile already a little wicked—I knew that was my grandmother.

  “I saw her,” I said. “I mean you.”

  The photo trembled in her hand. “What?”

  I narrowed my eyes, examining her face. “When I was dreaming.”

  She stepped to the bed, her back to me.

  “It was you.” I’d been so sure before. “Wasn’t it?”

  She pulled out another photograph and handed it to me.

  “Who is this?

  “My mother,” she said.

  “Your mother…” I found the wall, leaned against it. They looked so much alike, the similarities almost unsettling. “This was who I saw? But why?” I knew Sam had said she was there to protect us but now none of that made sense. This didn’t make sense. How many women in my family were somehow a part of this?

  “Bryn…” My grandmother sat in one of the chairs in front of the window and I sat in the other. Then she pointed to the faces in the photo. “These are my sisters Celia and Amaya. This was taken in our home in Lorica.”

  I knew my grandmother was from Colombia but after she moved to the U.S. as a teenager she never discussed it much.

  “This was the last time I ever saw my mother.” The corner of the photo was slightly bent and she scraped at it with her thumbnail. “Right after this photo was taken she disappeared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was her thirtieth birthday. We’d made her a cake and I’d given her a pearl necklace that took six months for me to save up for. We had dinner together when my father got home from work, my sisters and I went to bed, and then the next morning she was gone. I never saw her again.”

  “Did you look for her?”

  “My father spent the rest of his life looking for her. When he died five years later, I was fifteen, and I decided to move to Texas with my aunt Ula. I just couldn’t stay in that house anymore. None
of us could.”

  “Did they come with you?” I asked, nodding to the photo.

  “No. Not with me. Losing my mom was hard on us. We were angry a lot, especially with each other. I haven’t spoken to either of my sisters in almost thirty years.”

  “What do you think happened to her?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid…something terrible.” She blinked back tears. “My mother never would have left us. Not after Celia started having the dreams.”

  My throat was suddenly dry. “Dreams…”

  “My mother had them too and the other women in the family used to call her Maldita. It means—”

  “Cursed,” I finished. “But what about me? I mean, am I…?”

  She let out a long breath, stalling. “My mother used to tell us stories about Los Niños de la Luna. The Children of The Moon.” Her eyes flashed to mine. “They were just fairytales.”

  “About what?”

  “Children with strange dreams,” she clarified. “I used to think she’d made it up just for Celia, to make her feel better about the dreams, less afraid of them somehow, and less ashamed about what she was.”

  “What was she?”

  She gripped the photo again, staring down at it. “I don’t know. All I know is that I haven’t spoken to her in thirty years but six months ago she sent me a letter. It was just three lines, no return address.”

  “What did it say?”

  “They were instructions.”

  I thought of all of those nights she’d been creeping into my room. “The rosemary.”

  “That wasn’t all.”

  “Your garden,” I said. “And the roses.”

  She reached into her purse again, pulling out something ashen and wilted. It was a bud from her garden.

  “Dead,” I said.

  She looked away. “All of them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She had me bind them to you, the petals wilting as a kind of warning.”

  “Warning of what?”

  “She didn’t say. There was only the instructions and…”

  She pinched her forehead, digging in her bag once more. She pulled out a cream-colored envelope, a letter peeking out from beneath the ribbing. She handed it to me and I traced the torn seam, afraid that what I was about to read might change everything, that it might spiral me to somewhere even more foreign and dangerous.

  Just then the door pushed open and we were interrupted by my mom coming inside to see if we wanted lunch. My aunt stopped at the foot of Dani’s bed, ready to shake her awake when I quickly explained that that would be a very bad idea.

  “Is she alright?” my mom whispered.

  “Girl’s fine,” my grandmother said. “Just a klutz like her mother.”

  My aunt didn’t even flinch; she was too busy staring at Dani, a strange look on her face. Something between worry and confusion.

  “I’ll stay with her,” I said, shielding the envelope beneath my thighs. “I’ll just order room service or something when she wakes up.”

  “Are you sure?” my mom asked.

  “Yeah, I didn’t get very much sleep last night either.”

  My mom glanced at my grandmother, probably assuming I meant her snoring or never ending battle with the thermostat. In truth I’d been exhausted ever since I’d seen Roman. Ever since I’d touched him and…I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened but I knew how it had felt—like a thousand volts of electricity were pulsing through my body.

  “Okay, well, call me if you want me to bring you anything,” she said before kissing me on the head and ushering my aunt and my grandmother out the door.

  When I was finally alone I carried the photograph and the envelope to the empty bed. I fiddled with the ribbing until the paper was damp from my sweaty hands and then I took a deep breath before pulling it free. My grandmother was right, the instructions were precise, the intention behind them vague. But then my eyes found the last line and I stopped.

  Tell the girl she was never meant to just see the future. She was meant to control it.

  My mind raced, thinking of the fire at the farmhouse and then the fire in our home while we were gone. I thought of the vision of my dad, how it had felt familiar but at the same time like it was just in the midst of unraveling. And then I thought of Dani. Of when she’d hugged me down in the lobby, the vision of her trapped and screaming in agony.

  I re-read the line over and over again, waiting for something inside me to lock in place or shudder to life. But there was no revelation, no relief. Instead I was angry. Angry with my grandmother for not knowing more and angry with Celia for being the only other person who might have understood what I was going through and leaving me to go through it alone. Who was she? What was she? And what did all of this mean?

  I crawled in bed next to Dani, pressing a hand to her shoulder, the side of her face. I tried to sense her distress as if just the brush of her skin would reveal where she’d really drifted off to. What if she was trapped? In that nightmare? In her body?

  “Dani?”

  She breathed deep, looking the same as she always had on those mornings I’d woken to find her in my bed after she’d stayed out past her curfew. And my grandmother had said she looked fine. That she probably was. Probably. It gnawed at me but so did my own exhaustion. I tried to fight it off, re-reading Celia’s letter and flipping through the photographs my grandmother had given me.

  My fingers traced over the fading film. The colors were dull, washed behind a pale yellow but I could still make out the furniture in the room—a loveseat, two maroon filigreed chairs, a small oval coffee table, and two paintings on either side of a large gold mirror, one of fall, the other of spring, pink blossoms contrasting with dark wilting leaves.

  I let my head fall back against the pillow as I examined each face, the sound of Dani breathing lulling me in the background. They were hard quiet breaths, her shoulders heaving off the bed. I wondered if she was dreaming, if she really was trapped in some kind of nightmare.

  I wondered why it wasn’t her who had the dreams instead of me.

  I thought of what it would have been like if I’d always known how to manipulate the dreams, the future muddled by just my imagination, and I was glad I’d never had to make the choice between keeping things the way they were or…not. I tried not to think about the freedom. I tried to think about Dani sleeping next to me, about how much that freedom could cost.

  Finally her breathing slowed or maybe I was finally slipping into the kind of exhaustion that makes you fall asleep one sense at a time. The silence hit me first and then I couldn’t feel the air blowing from the vent. The smell of shampoo wafting from my pillow disappeared and then I closed my eyes, waiting for nothing but the shadow of my eyelids, though I could still see their childhood faces—my grandmother’s, Celia’s, Amaya’s.

  My eyes were tugged open and I was standing in a small sliver of light, the shadow of lace curtains against my skin. I heard the trill of wind chimes as the warm breeze tangled them into knots but there was a chill lurking just beneath it. My hands grazed the window in front of me as I peered through and that’s when I saw my grandmother standing in the kitchen, her sister Celia reaching a finger into the icing-filled bowl my grandmother was holding when she wasn’t looking.

  She finally caught her, snatching Celia by the wrist. They laughed. I leaned against the pane and saw my great-grandparents sitting on the couch, their shoes off as they rested their feet on the scuffed wooden coffee table. They looked so warm in there. They looked happy.

  My foot scraped against a slab of wood leaning against the side of the house. It knocked against the exterior with a thud and I ducked just as my grandmother pulled back the curtain and peered outside. I waited until their voices weren’t muffled against the glass and then I stood up again, watching as they moved to set the table.

  They talked for hours together, laughing and telling old stories until the food was cold and my legs were stiff. But I couldn’t tear myse
lf away. I knew I could force myself awake at any moment—something about this place didn’t feel dangerous, not like before when I’d had to fight my way back to my body—but for some reason I didn’t want to.

  I didn’t want to stop staring at my grandmother’s face, a smile cutting into those same round cheeks like I’d never seen. Even though I knew it wouldn’t last. And maybe there was an awful part of me that wanted to see that too. Not just how it had happened, how their mom had suddenly disappeared, but how my grandmother tore out of her childhood skin, replacing that laugh with sarcasm and that smile with a lone hard edge.

  Or maybe that was the very reason I’d ended up there.

  Tell the girl she was never meant to just see the future. She was meant to control it.

  The words tolled inside me like a bell. This was the past but maybe it didn’t matter, maybe time wasn’t linear but an infinite loop. And what if I was meant to alter its course, to stop whatever happened this night and set things right? The thought made my knees buckle, the weight of it heavy and foreboding. Could I really do it? Should I?

  A bright flash drew me back to the scene inside, the three girls lined up on the couch as my great-grandmother snapped a picture. She was smiling, proud, and I knew in that instant that she hadn’t left on her own. Which meant that I might not be the only person lurking outside their house tonight.

  A chill racked my spine and I bit down hard on the inside of my cheeks, trying to hold it together. I watched as they cleared the table, everyone dressing for bed, and I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long. My skin pricked, a new chill cooling me from the inside. But when the lights shut off, one by one, and stayed off, I thought I’d be standing outside until morning. Until I saw a dark silhouette moving through the house and then I heard the front door creak open.

  I slid to the front porch, peering around the side of the house. My great-grandmother slowly made her way down the porch steps, her bare feet carrying her across the grass. I searched the darkness, trying to figure out where she was heading, but she swayed like she was trapped in sleep.