The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  She stared at a tree at the edge of the field, blossoms burned red against the cobalt sky. She twitched, sighed, and the tree shook off its leaves like a worn coat. The sky shifted from blue to stark white, the kind that burns your eyes, and the grass soon followed, cracking and freezing as snow started to fall. The boy stood, startled as he examined the landscape. And just before the darkness took me again, I saw that it was Michael.

  I was in motion, turning down an empty hallway and following a girl in thick black boots. She glanced over one shoulder and then the other before creeping to an apartment door marked 312. She tested the knob, slipping something from behind her ear to pick the lock.

  A man stood in front of the kitchen sink, too distracted by the running water to notice her. She stepped behind him, and all it took was her breath on the back of his neck, one hand pressed to his heart and it stopped. He was on the floor and she was scrambling from room to room, stuffing anything valuable into her bag or the pockets of her coat. She checked his jeans last, plucking out his wallet and taking the cash. Then she stepped over his body and out into the hall, closing the door behind her.

  I spun to someplace cold and empty. I saw the table. The chains. The torture room. I looked down on the entire scene, expecting to see my face. But I wasn’t the person panting and writhing beneath Anso’s glare. It was Sebastían.

  Their mouths were moving but the air was mute and it made the entire thing even more unsettling. Anso yelled and Sebastían grimaced, refusing with tight lips. Anso struck him, not with an ephemeral touch but a real one, his hand carving across Sebastían’s face. Anso yelled again and again Sebastían refused. And again Anso cut him open. Over and over until Sebastían’s blood was dripping off the table, a ribbon of it cutting halfway across the room.

  That’s when I noticed the water, Sebastían’s clothes dripping, his hair stuck to his face. He was soaked just like he’d been when he’d dragged me out of the lake.

  This one’s mine.

  Those were his last words before he’d disappeared. I’d hoped that he’d woken up and he had. Except it wasn’t safe in his bed. It was here on this table. Back at the very beginning.

  Without my flesh there were no tears, but somehow, stripped from everything that made me human, the pain was worse. It wasn’t just inside me but all around, floating free in whatever current had carried me to this place, as potent as pure acid.

  I strained away from the vision, wishing that I was in a body that could close its eyes or run. But I was trapped in that moment as much as Sebastían was. And worse, I was just as helpless. Time had disappeared the moment I’d touched the strange girl’s hand, but suddenly it felt real again. Long again.

  Sebastían’s head rolled, eyes barely able to stay open. That’s when Anso finally stopped. He stared down at Sebastían, skin freckled with his blood, and beneath the anger in his eyes, beneath the hunger, there was something…almost like grief. It was too human and it made me catch my breath. Sebastían too.

  His face contorted, confused. Anso bent down, shielding Sebastían from view, breathing words over him. When he moved again, Sebastían’s face was frozen, and the only word I could think to describe it was awestruck.

  After Sebastían there were more. Hundreds. Thousands. I flitted back and forth between centuries, watching them live, watching them die. I saw every Dreamer, every dream, and every nightmare until I was sick with it. With the pain and rage and fear.

  I collapsed and I thought time had finally let go of me, but I wasn’t back in my body. I sensed movement all around me—the rustle of wind, the slow sway of the canopy, the creaking descent of vines. They choked the trees, knotted and black, but they didn’t reach for me. The girl who’d led me here was writhing beneath them. She was The First. I realized it the moment I saw the men standing over her, the blood on her arms, the scream on her lips.

  This scene wasn’t mute. This scene was loud and ripping right through me. Even though they were speaking in a language I couldn’t understand, I could tell the girl was pleading for her life, her father threatening to take it. Empty words until the man next to him handed over a gilded blade, gold and catching the light, and he plunged it into his daughter’s heart.

  The wind mimicked the words of the old priests as they chanted over her bleeding body, words that struck her like new blades, turning the jungle red. But she wasn’t dead or even dying. She was too powerful, and whatever they’d done had only weakened her.

  More men came, circling her, digging. They formed a hole in the earth, the priests raising their hands as the vines did the same. They slithered around the girl, binding her while all she could do was watch. Because she was awake, her flesh and bone making her weak.

  The vines drew her down into the earth, and one by one the men took turns covering the hole. Silence. That was all that was left when they’d finished. The men went away and so did the priests. The only person still standing over the girl’s grave was her father.

  Time accelerated but he remained fixed. The night sky was split open by a sunrise, the trees stretching as the seasons changed, the hair on his face growing long and matted. And still he watched over her grave. But I could see in the slump of his shoulders, in the weak tremble of his hands, that it wasn’t out of hate. He was mourning. He was heartbroken.

  The moment it all came to a stop he fell to his knees, wrecked with loss, maybe with guilt. But his pain was palpable, every blister, burn and scrape a physical manifestation of the war inside him. I expected him to claw another hole right beside her and climb inside, but instead he turned to walk away, his face finally revealed.

  Anso.

  As he receded, the girl’s grave nothing but a faint seam in the earth, I saw something else he’d left behind. The blade stood straight, dull and chipped over the place the girl was buried. The light ricocheted and glinting in a nearby patch of earth was another one just like it.

  Two gilded handles. Two seams.

  Two graves.

  Time suddenly restarted and I was hurled somewhere new. But everything felt wrong, something shaken loose inside me.

  The wind surged, its current drawing me back inside my body. I was standing on top of the Köln building.

  “He shattered me into pieces.” The girl stood before me. “The Dreamers, they’re all broken except for you. They ripped you straight from my flesh.” She circled me. “They even gave you my eyes.”

  “They?”

  “The ones who salvaged my rot. Witches. They carved you from bone and stardust and me.” She let out a tight gasp. “All these years…haven’t you heard me screaming in there?”

  I shivered. “You gave me the nightmares.”

  “Not nightmares. Memories.” She traced a finger down my face, mesmerized. “Our memories.”

  Her touch turned my stomach, her deadness trying to creep inside. I tried to decipher whether or not this was real and whether or not I could trust it, but my mind was still reeling from everything I’d just seen, my body numb as if it didn’t even belong to me anymore.

  “You saw them,” she sang. “All of them.”

  “Why did you show me?” The question was more of a plea, everything in me recoiling.

  “You needed to see them, to know them. It’s the only way to put the broken pieces back together.” Her eyes were hooks in my flesh, holding me upright. “You’re a magnet, Bryn, the North Star, and now that I’ve placed their memories inside you, you’ll be drawn to each other.” I was wordless and she gripped me with frozen hands. “You have to find them before it’s too late.”

  “Too late? What’s going to happen?”

  She looked up at the night sky. “Can you see the cracks?”

  My grandfather had asked the same thing when he’d visited me in the dream-state. We’d been sitting on the porch of the farmhouse together, the swarm of locusts approaching as he’d told me not to be afraid. But I was afraid. I was afraid then and I was afraid now.

  “The day they destroyed me, the m
oon and stars shifted, leaving cracks in the world. Cracks that are wide enough now for things to slip through.” Her stare deepened. “Bad things.”

  “What kind of bad things?”

  “Nightmares,” she said. “They are a place full of living things, a place we’ve been separated from by time and space and darkness. Until now.”

  “Why now?”

  “Because you woke.” Her gaze drifted. “And he slept.”

  “He…Anso?”

  She grinned, unhinged, something in her salivating. “My blood cursed him. I watched him drown in it. He’s been trapped in his own nightmare for centuries.” The smile slipped from her face, panic twisting her mouth. “I didn’t know he would find you there. I didn’t know the monster in him would feed off the darkness.”

  “He wants to kill me.” I needed to hear the words out loud.

  Something solitary swept her face—grief. “He wants to kill himself.”

  I remembered watching him stand over her grave, fixed by sorrow as time stood still. “He grieved you.”

  “Not me.” She clutched her stomach, staring down at the emptiness beneath her smock. She was just bones. “Her ghost never sleeps and I can still feel her kick.”

  The wind was finally still, winter frozen all around us.

  “He…he knew and he still…?”

  “He buried us both alive.”

  “The second grave…”

  Her cheeks flamed. “No. She lay with me, clawing at my insides.”

  “Then who was it for?”

  She met my eyes. “My brother.”

  “Your…”

  “They carved us from twin moons, one light, one dark. Now he roams the ether, just as lost. Find him, Bryn. Find the others.”

  “And then what?” I said. “We’re still being hunted.”

  “In pieces. Pieces that belong to you.” Pain flashed across her face. “Because that’s who they really want, who they’ve always wanted.” She brushed my cheek, cold hand like stone. “They can take your body or they can take your mind but they can’t take both. Find the pieces, Bryn. Put them back together.”

  It wasn’t gravity that grounded me, but Roman’s breath by my ear. My hand fell at my side, the forest empty.

  “What happened?” he said. “Are you okay?”

  I wasn’t sure about either question.

  “Bryn?”

  I faced him, looked right into his eyes. “It’s over.”

  He reached for me, hesitant, and just as hesitantly, I reached back. He pressed into me, strong and sturdy and real. It hurt to feel him but I couldn’t pull away. I couldn’t tell him the truth. I stood in his embrace, waiting for it to make me feel safe. He rested a hand on my brow, brushing back the hair until I was forced to look at him.

  He smiled, so thin I almost missed it. “I missed you, Bryn. I missed you every day.”

  He’d had days. I’d had an eternity. Of pain. I buried my face, trying not to remember being trapped.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, as if he knew he was to blame for some part of what I was feeling.

  I looked past him, resting my chin on his shoulder so he couldn’t see my face. “Let’s go home.”

  42

  Roman

  Water rushed past me, dry grass scraping across my stomach. I hit the ground and choked, air fighting its way down to my lungs. When I blinked I saw swirling lights and strangers in uniform. Someone spoke to me, my ears ringing. I gagged, coughing up more water as someone held me upright.

  A bright light shone in my face and I hissed, fighting a pair of hands I couldn’t see. They lifted me onto a stretcher, towels wrapped around me, so heavy I could barely move.

  And I knew it.

  I could see it on their faces that I shouldn’t be alive.

  I could see it on their faces that only one of us was.

  I woke up in the hospital, my dad standing by the window. I couldn’t think of anything worse I could have done to him. I wondered if he knew about Carlisle, about what I’d done. Maybe he’d known all along what was inside me, the same thing that was inside my mother. Maybe now he finally hated me.

  This time I didn’t ride with my dad down to the station. Instead, I rode in the back of a squad car to the county jail, the only courtesy that I didn’t have to be cuffed and dragged out like a criminal. Even though I could tell from the look in the officer’s eyes in the rear-view mirror that that’s exactly what he thought I was.

  Because Carlisle had confessed, and even though no one had mentioned him since I’d woken up in the hospital, I’d felt his absence the moment they came to pick me up. I’d seen it in their eyes that they thought I was a monster.

  My dad’s voice cut through the walls as they booked me and led me to a cell. “You tell Judge Wells that I want to see him now.”

  “We have to do this by the book, you know that.” The officer’s voice, quieter, more contained. “He’ll grant bail, he’ll be lenient.”

  “You’re eighteen?”

  “What?” I looked up at the guard. “Oh, yeah—”

  “This way.”

  She led me down a wide corridor lined with holding cells. Some had cots; some just had metal benches. She threw open the door of one that had neither, lock grinding shut behind me.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked.

  The guard looked back at me. “Judge will set bail. Your dad can pick you up then.”

  “When will that be?”

  She shrugged and walked away.

  I stood in the center of the room for what felt like hours, afraid to touch or be touched by anything. There was a toilet in the corner, pipes rattling every time someone down the corridor flushed. It smelled like urine and skin and stagnant water.

  I thought of the way Carlisle’s body had twisted in the current like a rag doll. I thought of the gash on his forehead, the one I’d put there. The memory made me sick to my stomach, but then I thought of Bryn and I couldn’t be sad. I couldn’t feel anything but relief. Even though I was here and even though I probably would be for a long time, as I relived that moment of waking to her, I didn’t care about what I’d done. I didn’t care that once she knew she would hate me too.

  I leaned against the wall, against my better judgment, but I felt like I was about to topple over. I felt sick. I felt sick and scared. Shit. What was going to happen to me? If they convicted me of manslaughter, or worse, murder, what would happen? Would I rot away in jail? And what about Bryn? How would I ever get her back? What if the shadows came for her again? What if she woke up?

  Tears pricked the back of my throat like tiny insects trying to tear their way out. I choked them down, over and over again, afraid someone would hear me. I wasn’t supposed to be here and I wasn’t supposed to feel this way. I wasn’t supposed to be afraid of anything.

  I blinked against the lights, shadows everywhere. They slinked up and down the corridor, knocking against the bars, taunting me. They were whole here, flesh and bone monsters just like my mother had been when she’d dug into my insides and made me even more rotten. She’d coaxed the darkness out, promising that I wouldn’t be able to fight it. And she’d been right.

  I stared at the deep scar on my hand from Carlisle’s blade. Light fluxed against my skin, my entire body a fuse. I paced, afraid I’d explode at any moment.

  I killed him.

  I killed him.

  I tore at my clothes, wishing I could rip right out of my body. I killed him. I fucking killed him. I hadn’t planned to destroy Carlisle, but I’d thought that if I destroyed the shadow it would all be over. That whatever was haunting me, whatever was…tempting me would be gone too.

  But it wasn’t. It swam between my ribs, stronger than ever. I struck the wall, shards breaking off and crumbling at my feet. I heard footsteps, my back shielding the broken concrete just as a guard approached my cell.

  He examined me but when he couldn’t find the source of the noise he moved on without a word. I recognized him as one of
the guards who’d spoken with my dad earlier. I crossed my fingers, hoping they knew each other, that maybe they even liked each other. Just as he was about to disappear down the corridor I called out.

  He turned back. “What is it?”

  “I just, um…don’t I get to make one phone call?”

  He paused, confused. “Your father was just here. Who else you need to call, boy?”

  I leaned against the bars, letting him see my face. “My girlfriend.”

  He let out a long exhale and then he fiddled with his keys. “You’ve got two minutes.”

  I could barely hold myself up as I dialed Vogle’s phone number, my ears plugged like I was still under water. I leaned against the wall, counting each ring. By the fourth one I started to sweat. Then I heard a click, his voicemail rolling, but I couldn’t make myself hang up.

  There was a noise down the corridor and the guard jerked his head, just long enough for me to hang up the call and dial Felix’s number instead. It rang once. Twice. Please. Come on. The third ring was clipped, someone taking a breath.

  “Felix?”

  “Roman?”

  “Felix, please. Have you heard anything about Bryn? Is she—?”

  He stopped me. “Vogle just called.”

  “How is—?”

  “Roman…she’s awake.”

  43

  Bryn

  Waking up didn’t feel like I thought it would. I didn’t feel relieved. I didn’t feel saved. Instead, I woke back into my body, feeling that all too familiar itch—the one to move, to think, to figure things out—that I’d spent the last year trying to satisfy. But every time I thought I’d gotten a handle on things, on what was happening to me and who I was, everything changed again. Everything.

  I stayed perfectly still beneath the blankets, feeling them coarse against my skin. I heard the low hum from the air vents mixed with the soft beep of machines, my pulse drumming along with the monitor next to me. I smelled antiseptic, bleach, and chocolate pudding. I heard someone cough.