The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  There were Dreamers out there, Dreamers who belonged in these bodies, who belonged to families and friends, to these Rogues. They looked on, waiting for direction. For hope. Because for the first time in a long time we had some. I would save the Dreamers, even if I couldn’t save myself. I would save my mom and Roman and the world. And it would be enough.

  A smile broke Roman in half. “You’re not—”

  “I’m not done. I’m right here.”

  His face twisted, gaze falling. “But you’re sleeping. You’re dreaming.”

  “No, Roman.” I lifted his chin, the two of us eye to eye. “I’m finally awake.”

  Part IV

  The Daughter of the Night

  1

  Bryn

  I used to think nightmares were like memories, tactile but harmless, the fear confined to that place inside me I could never reach with my eyes open. They would steel me to the bed in panic, turning my thoughts and muscles against me. But all it would take was that first breath back into consciousness and the darkness would let go of me. I could count on that, on the morning always rescuing me.

  But now I was standing in a room full of bodies, some filled with nothing but air, some filled with nothing at all. All dreaming. All wading through darkness waiting for morning.

  For me.

  But I was not a beacon of light. I was not the sun. I was the moon, the night in all its darkness, and the moment I touched them, the moment I woke them, that’s all the Dreamers would know. And I had no choice.

  I remembered sitting with my grandfather’s ghost on the porch steps of the farmhouse as he’d pointed to the sky. I’d been dreaming, trapped in another episode, and he’d asked me if I could see the cracks. I couldn’t, assuming his question was a bit of the dream-state’s residual strangeness. But then Anso’s daughter had asked me the same thing as we stood at the top of the Köln building in yet another dream, her words more of a warning than my grandfather’s had been. She’d warned me that all of this would happen—that the Dreamers would be scattered across the earth like leaves, that the longer they slept and the longer I dreamt, the wider those cracks would become. Until things started slipping through. Nightmares.

  I could sense every monster—restless and stretching into new skin. Waking. And yet, the thought of finding the Dreamers was nothing more than a light nudge. Because despite their closeness, empty faces all turned up, limp bodies breathing in unison, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the one that belonged to me.

  I could see a sliver of it through the hall and the half-closed door. Celia and Dani circled it as if there was nothing but a silent sickness inside that could be chased out. They couldn’t feel what I felt—unsettled and unbound—a strange current casting me adrift now that there was no flesh and bone to tie me down.

  But I let them tend to my corpse the same way I’d let Roman carry it inside. Celia had managed to stay hidden from the shadows for almost four decades and I couldn’t imagine a safer place for the Dreamers to finally wake up. We’d covered the floors of the spare bedrooms in quilts and pillows, moonlight shining in through the lace curtains. It inched across the Dreamers’ skin, streaking shapes and shadows that made it easy to pretend there was still life inside some of them.

  When Roman carried in my body I’d kept my back turned, that tug towards sleep, towards giving up, illuminating like a beacon from behind. I forced myself not to look even when I heard Roman whisper something to Celia about keeping it safe. Even though the request made me bristle. Even though I could smell the blood from this far away.

  I’d breathed hard through my nose until the air wasn’t trying to strangle me. All I wanted was to hurl myself at Roman. At something. Because I was dead. I was dead and I wasn’t and being stuck in that in-between where it wasn’t blood pumping through my veins but something stronger didn’t make me feel weak or sad or even afraid. Thinking about the permanence of it, the freedom, I was relieved.

  And Roman could never know.

  He stood behind me, waiting for me to finally turn around and tell him what to do next. I wondered if it had crossed his mind yet that I didn’t need him, not like before when I was made of flesh that needed protecting. But I wasn’t made of something finite anymore.

  After Anso had broken me into pieces, thrashing me against the walls of his prison, injecting me with thorn-laced dreams, with the pain that had tormented him for centuries, I was stitched back together by something stronger. By thread made of fire and starlight, thread he’d begged me to string around his throat. Whether it was my age or my rage that had changed me, or maybe just fate, I had been woven into something impenetrable, strong enough to make the shadows cower, maybe even strong enough to destroy Anso. But I hadn’t destroyed him. Even when he’d surrendered. Even when he’d pleaded.

  Instead, I’d hurled him headfirst into infinity, deciding in that moment that death would have been too kind. Anso didn’t deserve to die. Not after all of the Dreamers he’d tortured; all of the Dreamers he’d traded for…nothing. For the sake of causing them pain. It was his gift, his nightmare, and now there were countless Dreamers trapped in that nightmare. Every minute. Every second. Dreamers as young and helpless as Sam and Chloe; Dreamers like Joseph and Christine and Kira…

  As I finally pulled my eyes from my corpse, it wasn’t my own death that I feared. It was theirs. Had I made a mistake sparing Anso? I knew that I’d weakened him, but even though I was stronger now, the other Dreamers were still at risk. Would be as long as they were still out there. As long as Anso was too.

  Roman watched me closely, trying to read me, the lines on my brow, every breath. I wanted to ask him what he saw this close, if there were still pieces of the girl he once knew. I wanted to know her again too but I had already sensed her retreat. Not because I saw her body. Not even because I felt this horrifying weightlessness that was both freeing and damning at the same time. I knew I was dead because of what I didn’t feel. Roman.

  I stood just inches from him. The inches became centimeters and still there was nothing. No shock, no surge. Nothing stirred in me. He touched me and I waited to feel something…anything but it was buried under the weight of too many ghosts—my grandmother’s and the other Dreamers’. Mine.

  I tried to lean into the memory of the two of us beneath that flowering poplar tree. I tried to reel in the feeling, the static dancing between the tips of our fingers, the sunlight and the sound of the music coaxing our lips together until we weren’t just unraveling memories anymore but making them. I reached. I reached for an ounce of that joy. Because without it…without Roman I’d be fighting for a world, for a future without me in it. Without the possibility of living with Roman, of living at all, there’d be no point in fighting for anything else. And that was a freedom worth fearing. If I could still feel fear. If I could still feel anything at all.

  I looked into Roman’s eyes, black pupils reflecting a face I barely recognized. I reached. But the brush of Roman’s fingers sparked only silence and the joy grew wings, leaping from my grasp.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Roman said.

  I looked down from the landing at the top of the stairs, seeing for the first time the dust that lined Celia’s antiques. A row of clocks ticked on an off beat as if time were speeding up. Maybe because it was. I spotted shadows on the other side of the curtains—Sanders, Magda, and the other Dreamers the Rogues had rescued whispering in clusters on the porch. I couldn’t tell if they were afraid yet.

  “Everything is going to be okay,” Roman said again, a sense of finality to his voice this time.

  But this was just the beginning of something terrible and what Sanders, Magda, and the other Dreamers the Rogues had rescued didn’t realize yet was that it was going to start with them.

  “Bryn…” Roman reached for me with words this time, not daring to graze my skin again. “Please tell me everything is going to be okay.” His voice had changed, desperation and a delusional hope lacing every word.

  I didn’
t want to hurt him so I just nodded. I spotted Vogle in one of the spare bedrooms and I stepped inside before Roman could ask me for another lie.

  When I saw my father’s body on the bed I could barely stand within the emptiness. All around me. Inside him. I’d never seen my father so still; the shadow’s poison turning him to stone. I’d seen him passed out before, drunk, erratic, yelling at my mom. But I’d never seen him still, empty of even his own chaos. I missed that chaos. Not because it was good but because it was him. Looking at this shell, I wasn’t sure if I would ever figure out how to get it back.

  I remembered the startling sight of his truck outside Celia’s house, his hands on me, the frantic look in his eyes. He’d pleaded with me to listen but in his panic he wasn’t making any sense. He’d said something about the Dreamers, about how dangerous it would be for me to find them and take their dreams. He said that if I did, I’d die. He knew. But how much? Nothing made sense anymore. Not then. Not now.

  I’d been clutching him, trying to piece together his words when we were attacked. He’d tried to fight off the strangers who’d come for my body but they were stronger. They were Dreamers. They’d ripped me from my body while the shadows tore my father from his. And this was all that was left.

  I touched him and it turned my stomach, his hardness inhuman. I imagined what this body would look like if another day passed, two more, a week. He was deteriorating even if I couldn’t see it. Just like everything else in my life he was another bomb I’d have to diffuse before time ran out.

  And it was running out. For all of us. Whatever anchor I’d been between this world and the one we only dream about was gone. There was nothing separating us now and I didn’t know how to fight something I couldn’t control. Maybe the chaos I’d grown up seeing in my father hadn’t disappeared after all. Maybe like me, and like everything else, it had only grown and evolved into something too big to recognize.

  Vogle leaned over my father, examining him. But I didn’t want to know the diagnosis, only the cure, if there was one at all.

  “Is this my nightmare?” I asked. “Is that why I can’t wake him out of this?”

  Vogle cleared his throat. “Maybe you’re not supposed to.”

  “Then who? I’m the one who’s supposed to fix everything else.”

  Vogle scrubbed the lenses on a pair of glasses. He didn’t wear them much and they reminded me of Dr. Banz. I thought back on the first day we’d met, reconciling the slightly menacing presence I’d thought belonged to Vogle with Dr. Banz’s true intentions to trap me in a dream with his daughter Eve so that I could somehow set her free. Regardless of what I’d felt, they’d still been my only hope of finding a cure and I’d followed them all the way to Germany. But then I learned there wasn’t one. Maybe there wasn’t one for my father either.

  “I’ll do what I can for him,” Vogle said. “Cole and Adham have agreed to pick us up some supplies from the hospital.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You mean stolen supplies, which Cole and Adham will acquire unscathed after Cole manipulates the memories of the people who work there.”

  It was hard to imagine Roman making friends in the real world, especially friends who were strange in the same way we were. But that wasn’t the only reason Cole and Adham were here. Cole had dreamt up a monster so big it clawed straight out of his nightmares and now they were afraid of it finding him. It was probably wreaking havoc on some innocent community a thousand miles away from San Antonio. But despite the low risk, Cole was useful to have around, his ability to manipulate people’s memories keeping him off my hit list. For now.

  “Just long enough for us to get what we need,” Vogle said, “including supplies to provide your father some kind of nutrition intravenously if it comes to that.”

  “If…”

  “It won’t,” he said.

  “And if it does?”

  “I’ve done it many times before, Bryn.”

  “For me.” I looked down. Vogle and I hadn’t had much time to speak since I’d woken up in the hospital and there were things I needed to say to him, that I needed him to know without a doubt. “Thank you.”

  His voice wavered. “For what?”

  “For everything you’ve done for me,” I said. “For taking care of me. For taking care of my family and Roman.”

  “Bryn…”

  “I need you to know how close I was Vogle…to giving up. I need you to know how grateful I am that you never did.”

  “I would never,” he said, his voice more certain than I’d ever heard it. “We don’t give up, Bryn. Ever.”

  I’d never really thought about all of the time that had passed since Eve’s death or how hard it must have been on Vogle. How hard it still was. He could have given up on everything—I know that he wanted to—but he never did. Instead, he’d devoted his life to studying Eve’s disease and finding others out there like her. Like me. Like Sam. I knew he felt like Sam’s death was all his fault; Eve’s too. But even now he was still trying to make things right.

  “Thank you,” I said again.

  He dismissed the thought, turning his attention to the sounds coming from the other rooms. Doors opened and shut as whispers and groans escaped between the seams.

  “The Rogues are getting restless,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Lathan’s been crouched next to his wife’s body for the past hour and Andre’s been pacing up and down the stairs like a caged animal.”

  “Domingo’s on edge too,” Vogle went on. “He won’t admit it yet but I know he senses Stassi’s body is in danger. It doesn’t make any sense why it wasn’t with the others. But neither does the fact that she hid it from us all this time.”

  The reason Stassi had needed constant physical contact wasn’t because her powers were transitioning or because they were getting stronger. It was because she was sleeping. This whole time she’d been sleeping, a secret she had kept from everyone. Until I’d named the bodies, hers not among them, and Domingo crumbled, realizing what she’d been hiding.

  “Maybe she really doesn’t remember what happened,” I said. “You weren’t there when Sam and I found her. She was delusional, traumatized by what she’d been through. She still is.”

  Vogle got to his feet. “She won’t be the only one.”

  2

  Roman

  I stood in the hallway, staring at Bryn through the half closed door, fighting with whether or not to follow her inside. I pressed my back to the wall instead, hanging my head as I absorbed Andre’s pacing footsteps.

  I could practically hear Olivia’s heartbeat through the walls, her body wrapped in Andre’s coat in one of the guest rooms. I knew he was haunted by it, the sound like a ticking time bomb now that he had proof his Dreamer was really out there somewhere. He was lucky.

  Lathan’s wife didn’t lie with the living. I stared down the hall at the closed door where Lathan had been all night. He’d carried Cora to the darkest corner of the house; curled up in a coffin for two. But his silence was nothing compared to the moment he’d found her among the fiery debris in Anso’s prison.

  The Rogues had spent a lifetime searching for their soul mates, agonizing over every false lead, driven to destruction, hopeless. Lathan had been the one to drag so many of them out of their madness, giving them not just a home but a reason to live. Then he’d vanished, Michael taking over their mission to find the Dreamers. And then they’d found them, flushed beneath the glow of Michael’s rage as he’d tried to set their sleeping bodies on fire. He’d been possessed by Anso’s shadows the whole time, the darkness feeding off his most desperate desire—to find his Dreamer, Darina.

  I remembered the gasoline glistening against the Dreamers’ skin, any hope of saving them all, snuffed out the moment Michael ignited. It was too dangerous for me and the other Rogues to do the same, the gasoline ready to turn our flames into winding rivers. But then Bryn’s tears had turned to rain. Her thoughts turned to chains and she strung them around Michael’s
throat. She stopped him. She…destroyed him while I watched a piece of her being destroyed too.

  Once the ashes had settled and the rain had stopped, we carried the Dreamers out, one by one, to the beat of Lathan’s breaths. He’d screamed, whatever nightmares Anso had left behind skittering into every empty crevice of the cave, afraid of something even more powerful. Love. The sound…the look in Lathan’s eyes as he’d held Cora’s corpse in his arms—he’d made me afraid of it too.

  But nothing made that fear more real than when I looked at Bryn. Because no matter how close I was, no matter how deeply I stared into her eyes, she wasn’t staring back.

  I love you. Please. I love you.

  I wanted to say it. I wanted to scream it. Every time she stared right through me I wanted to scream.

  “Let it out.”

  At first his scowl didn’t register, his outline a smudge beneath misty eyes and sweat. And then the sweat pouring from my neck and hands began to freeze, each drop burning my skin like the hot end of a cigarette. The last time the shadows had used my past to haunt me I’d been searching the corridors of Anso’s prison for Bryn. My mother had stopped me with just the sound of her voice. She’d called me a killer. She’d told me that I should have died the night of the car accident. That it should have been me instead of Bryn…

  She was right.

  Not because she was real—I knew the vision I’d seen wasn’t my mom—but because the only reason I existed at all was to keep Bryn safe. And I’d failed. If anyone should have been lost in Anso’s destruction it should have been me doing what I was made for—protecting Bryn. With my last breath.

  The second I thought the word my ghost snatched the air from my lungs, forcing me to meet his eyes. They were endless, black holes pulling me in. He smelled like smoke and sleep, the winter beneath his skin churning grey and white like a storm. He was covered in scars I hadn’t seen before, black lines ripped across his face. My face. “Let me out.”