The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  Six months ago he’d pleaded with me to let him in. He’d pleaded with Carlisle too, taking on Cassie’s face and carving into his skin until he’d finally relented. For me there’d been no moment of surrender because the darkness wearing my face had been there all along. Still was if I dug deep enough into those parts of me I hated, that hated everything and everyone too. I couldn’t let him out. Not after what I’d almost done to Drew. Not after everything I’d done to my dad. Not after ending Carlisle’s life. But I also wondered what would happen if I held him in. Would he claw his way out? Would he destroy me in the process?

  My mind raced, memories yanking me back and forth between Drew’s blood quenching something awful in me and Carlisle’s floating body, black trailing from the gash I’d carved in his forehead. My heart yanked me somewhere else—to the fist I’d hurled in my dad’s direction, to the hole in the wall that matched the one inside me, to the way my dad had held me after I found out that Bryn had slipped into a coma. To the way he’d forgiven me before I’d even mustered the courage to tell him I was sorry.

  My weight shifted and so did the walls, my ghost dragging me to Bryn’s bedside.

  “No…” I strained from the sight, sick. “I—” don’t want to look. I can’t.

  I’d carried her inside myself, the weight of her in my arms almost too much to bear. But I hadn’t allowed myself to stare or even look. I hadn’t allowed myself to absorb this image of her. I didn’t want to remember this Bryn. This body. Because she was more than that and because this wasn’t how it was supposed to end. This was not the end.

  I tried to look away now but something pinned my gaze, forcing me to scale Bryn an inch at a time. The blood was barely drying near her lips, red still lining her fingernails where Dani and Celia’s scrubbing hadn’t reached.

  “I’m…sorry…I’m…” This time there wasn’t a word strong enough for what I was feeling. It was probably on purpose, the human race deciding somewhere along the way that it was a hopelessness too dangerous to name. I was glad for it. I didn’t want to name this thing inside me. I didn’t want to make it real.

  My ghost wrenched my face, grey fingers stinging my skin as he forced me to look closer. So close I could smell the memory of her skin. “Let it in.”

  “No.”

  Heat swirled at the base of my stomach, thickening until I felt like I was going to be sick. The smoke slithered up my throat, singeing my tongue. I clenched my jaw, fighting the flames that wanted to incinerate everything in sight.

  “Let me in…” My reflection trembled and I thought he was about to disappear. But then I felt his cold breath against my face, more real than I’d ever felt him, and I realized he was pleading. “Don’t you want to be with her?” His words burrowed inside me, chipping away until I was an open wound. Until I wanted to say yes.

  “No.” The word barely escaped before the eruption. My mouth unhinged, flames leaping out and strangling my ghost. But he didn’t flinch. The flames tore at his false flesh while he looked at me with the most miserable…pity.

  “Roman…” Adham placed a hand on my shoulder, the room filled with nothing but smoke.

  It swirled around Bryn’s face, tracing her in glowing grey until she looked like a ghost too. I thought I had gotten rid of my ghosts but maybe they were just lying in wait. Simmering coals waiting for gasoline. But Bryn’s death hadn’t just stoked the fire in me. Her death was like an atomic bomb, the heat and flames enough to fuel my demons for a lifetime.

  I didn’t want a lifetime without Bryn but I wasn’t sure if I was willing to destroy myself to get it. That’s something the old Roman would have done. He was the only one who was really dead.

  She’s not…she’s not…

  “I’m sorry, Roman.” Adham’s voice was barely a whisper and I realized that mine had been too.

  I hung my head. “She’s not dead.”

  “Okay…” The word was weak but it was also certain.

  I looked up at him, searching his eyes for that certainty. What I found instead was…so much sadness.

  I wondered if this would all be easier if Bryn and I had a relationship like Cole and Adham—one where she pretended she couldn’t stand the sight of me while I couldn’t stand to have her out of my sight. Adham loved Cole the same way I loved Bryn but there was some kind of miserable magic in being loved back. He had never felt that; without it I wondered if he could ever feel this.

  But then I remembered the way Bryn had looked at me as I’d carried in her corpse; the way she looked through me, past me, every time I tried to talk to her. Losing her wasn’t easier now that she was so far away. That’s what that feeling was, my grief exponentially more agonizing because I hadn’t just lost her once. I’d lost her twice. And I was still losing her, inch by inch, second by second.

  My ghost had sensed it, promising relief if I’d just let him out. If I’d just lose control. If I didn’t believe in even the slightest possibility that I could find a way to save her I would have let myself do just that. But even before Bryn and I had met in the real world she’d taught me to hope. Now that hope was all I had left. I wasn’t going to let death steal it from both of us.

  “Let’s get you downstairs,” Adham said, trying to lead me back toward the hallway.

  I was still steaming and I wiped my brow. “Adham…”

  “What is it?” His hand was still on my arm, his grip reminding me of the roots of a tree. “Roman, everything is going to be okay.” His answered the question I’d so desperately asked Bryn, his words still and calm and sure.

  I wanted to know how to be that still, that calm, that sure. I didn’t know if it was Adham’s religion—the one that believed we were some kind of divine creation—or maybe his mom’s meditations—the patient fuel he used to cast a safety net over Cole as he slept—that grounded him in every storm. But if I was going to keep my ghosts at bay I was going to need him to teach me how. That meant admitting that I was still being haunted at all.

  I stared at Adham’s shoes. “I…think I need your help.”

  3

  Bryn

  I descended the stairs just as headlights streaked across the front of the house, Adham and Cole heading out on their supply run for Vogle. We’d organized their exit before dealing with the Dreamers outside so that Cole wouldn’t realize he was next. I hoped that maybe it would calm the Dreamers’ fears too, a sign that everyone would make it out of here alive, that we really were just trying to help them.

  When I reached the bottom of the stairs everyone was on their feet, exhaustion forcing them to fight gravity. Even Dani. She leaned on Felix, the parts of her that loved him still intact. Her face was pale; eyes bruised from the tears she’d left on my corpse. She looked cored, like whatever darkness Celia had ripped out of her was trying to slither its way back in.

  Andre and Vogle were on edge, looking from me to where Shay stood guard outside, urging me to do something before the Dreamers realized they were confined to the porch because we were talking about them. We’d sequestered them when we started moving the bodies inside, afraid that one would catch a glimpse and think the worst. Or that they’d see their doppelganger in Andre’s arms and think that they’d been saved. Until they looked up close and saw the scars and the burns and the emptiness.

  “They’re asking questions,” Andre said through tight lips.

  “I know.”

  “If we’re going to do this we have to do it now,” Vogle said. “Before they even realize what’s happening.”

  The Dreamers were lit fuses and if I was going to take their dreams before successfully reuniting them with their bodies—living or not—then we had no other choice but to be careful with them, which meant that for the ones who were dead, we had no other choice but to lie.

  I didn’t know what would happen after I touched each Dreamer—to the ones who’d live; to the ones who’d die. It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was that we were running out of time. Now that I was awake, fully and truly aw
ake, the cracks in the universe that Anso’s daughter had warned me about were only going to widen, letting dangerous things through. Unless I stopped them. Unless I woke every Dreamer the same way death had woken me.

  “Who’s the most dangerous?” I asked, watching the window.

  “There’s a girl out there,” Andre said, “belongs to the dead; claims she can solidify her skin, like metal scales or something.”

  “Then we can’t spook her,” I said, nodding for Domingo to step outside and retrieve her. “I need her skin to be exposed or it won’t work.”

  “Fan out,” Andre said, backing towards the stairs. “Cut off every opening.”

  “You think she’ll run?” Felix asked as he pulled Dani behind him.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Roman said.

  Felix stared at the door, bracing himself. “If someone was trying to steal my magical powers and force me inside a dead body I’d do more than run.”

  Roman lit up, ready for a fight.

  “Maybe it’ll be quick,” Dani said, peering out from behind Felix.

  “Yeah.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “Quick. Easy.” I took a deep breath, turned to Roman. “Cool off or she’ll get suspicious.”

  The sun set beneath his skin, sparks dying near his fingertips. “You can do this.”

  Through the curtains I could see Sanders hanging his head back, laughing, while Magda was discreetly trying to peer inside. Another Dreamer sat on the bottom steps, hugging her knees, while the rest, strangers whose names I didn’t know yet, were whispering amongst themselves, talking about where they’d come from and who’d they’d left behind. Things I would know as soon as I touched them.

  That was the real reason I was so nervous.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Eve. I remembered chasing her through the trees behind Dr. Banz’s farmhouse, the shadows hunting us both in a nightmare of her father’s creation. He’d drugged me in the hope that I’d find Eve and I had. And then I’d touched her. Her memories had rushed into me, the brush of my skin setting her free and confining her entire existence inside me at the same time. The same thing had happened the moment I’d touched Sam just before she disappeared from my dreams, all eight years of her life injected straight into my heart like a serum made of moonlight and laughter.

  But the Dreamers outside and the Dreamers we’d yet to find weren’t all children. They were slaves or runaways or just afraid. The aftershock of their identities wouldn’t look or taste or sound like joy. Anso had already stolen that from them and all that would be left for me would be their nightmares. Every single one. I would watch and feel and live them all. Over and over until every Dreamer was awake or dead. Until I was finally neither.

  “Bryn?” Roman’s voice jolted me. “Are you ready?”

  Domingo shut the door before I could answer, the sound startling the girl too. The silence was artificial and too abrupt, heightening her senses.

  She examined us one by one. “If you wanted to see my parlor trick…” her arms grew scales, hard and made of metal, “…all you had to do was ask.” The transition took over the rest of her body in the blink of an eye. There was not one exposed surface for my hands.

  “What’s everyone looking at me like that for?” Her voice was a sharp spike, frantic but full of attitude. Her face changed, confused, and she took a step back. “What’s going on here?”

  “We…” I thought the lie would just fall out of me like the others but all I could think about was her body upstairs, limp and covered in burns.

  She stilled. “Did you find it?”

  I knew she was talking about her body and it worried me how close the Dreamers’ theories had gotten to the truth.

  “Yes,” I said, the feigned lightness in my voice the very thing that gave me away.

  This girl wasn’t just made of armor. She was good at spotting others who were made of it too.

  “Show it to me,” she hissed, the fear already manifest into tears.

  I nodded, wracking my brain for a way to explain, to convince her that waking back into it was still a possibility. Because that was the only way she was going to let me touch her, taking the dreams that never belonged to her in the first place.

  Andre carried her body into the living room, a line of Rogues blocking the windows—Vogle, Roman, Rafael and Domingo. Celia had wrapped it in a sheet, hiding the mark of flames that, luckily, hadn’t reached the girl’s face.

  When the girl saw her body strewn across the couch she couldn’t speak, every word dissolved to air. I looked away before the sight of her could tie me in a knot. Strangely, the moment I wished away the feeling it disappeared.

  “Your name,” I said, trying to distract her, just long enough to expose an inch of skin.

  Her breath caught as she registered my words. Suddenly, whatever concentration had turned her into a human shield was broken; the metal scales turning back into flesh one at a time. She turned to me, fraught. “Devyn.”

  “Devyn,” I repeated with as much gentleness as I could muster, “it’s going to be okay.”

  She nodded or trembled but I could tell she was desperate to believe me. I approached her, stopping every time she tensed like prey. She could feel that’s what she was. I tried my hardest not to hunt, but to reach with my humanity instead, even though I could barely reach it myself.

  “I need you to give me your hand,” I said.

  It was still shielded but I knew if I could just get her close enough I could reach for her cheek or some other exposed part of her instead.

  “Who…I don’t understand.” She glared. “What are you supposed to be?”

  “Please, Devyn.”

  She looked from me to her body, distressed. Her eyes widened as they settled over a charred scab barely visible along her hairline. “You’re going to try to put me back in there.” She barred her arms over her chest, sensing the death. “No, you won’t. You can’t.”

  “It’s going to be okay.” I pleaded. “Trust me.”

  The truth was I didn’t need Devyn’s trust. I knew that eventually she would make a mistake, letting her guard down and letting me in. It was me who needed to trust. My instincts. My mission.

  I looked into Devyn’s eyes, trying to measure the life she’d lived. It wasn’t long enough. She flinched against a tear as it chased its reflection down her armored chest and I allowed myself to be tempted by the idea of just taking her dreams and letting her go. Just for a second before Fate intervened. She whispered to me the same way Death had, her voice wordless but clear.

  There is no cheating death. Not for the Dreamers. Not for you.

  I felt her breath against skin, then bone, sinking deep until every cell understood. I shivered.

  I felt myself weakening and I took a slow step in Devyn’s direction, relenting before it was too late. “Please. Just trust me.”

  She stopped moving and for one second I thought I had her. But then Devyn shed every bit of flesh, trading it for something unbreakable. She was a wrecking ball, running for the door, knocking over Celia’s coffee table and tea set; picture frames shattered as she tried to throw herself into something that wasn’t made of flames. But the Rogues were alight, sending sparks across her metallic surface.

  “Let me go! It’s dead. I’m dead. You’re all liars!”

  As Devyn screamed, the voices outside grew hushed. She went hurtling towards the old wooden piano that sat in the corner but all I had to do was think the word silence and it was thrust out like a wave. The quiet was tangible, like a sharp breeze that started from the floorboards and soared up. I saw the shimmer like heat as it rounded over us, the sound of the breaking piano keys, of Devyn’s cries, of her landing with a thud among the debris swallowed up into nothing.

  She startled, crawling onto her feet and searching for the sound as if it was something she could see. She screamed. Silence. She hurled a table lamp in my direction and I caught it. My eyes flicked to Roman, just for a second, and then he lunged for her, sprawling her o
nto her back as I climbed on top of them both. She thrashed, spitting at me, the horror behind her eyes making me dizzy. They were blue, the ocean churning within each iris. She blinked back tears, a muffled scream raging up her throat, and then I plunged my finger into her right eye.

  She was still; we both were, wild static pouring out of her and into me.

  I tasted it first, flames licking the tip of my tongue before filling me like a wave, roiling and rising. I wondered if she could feel it too; if I was hurting her worse than the hole I’d dug into her skull. Even if I was, it felt too good to stop. Whatever I was taking from her felt good and it made me feel strong. On fire. Awake. Alive. For the first time since finding my corpse I felt alive.

  The moment I let go, the taste lingered like an electric charge, and as I stared down at her body, registering the blood and the limp pieces of her that were still writhing in agony, all I wanted was more.

  4

  Roman

  “How is—?” Andre nodded toward the small bathroom off the kitchen, the door closed, probably locked.

  “I think…she just needs a minute,” I said.

  The second Bryn had retreated, fingers splayed and covered in Devyn’s blood, I’d followed her. Then she’d slammed the bathroom door shut behind her and I stopped.

  Andre pulled a chair between his legs, arms hanging over the back as he joined Felix and I at the kitchen table.

  “I’m worried about Lathan,” he said.

  Dani set down four steaming cups of coffee before sitting next to Felix. “I think Celia tried to knock, to see if he needed anything. He didn’t respond.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was worried about Lathan too. He’d been the one to put all of this in motion, rescuing the Rogues in an effort to unravel the mystery of the Dreamers’ disappearances. And now when it came time to finally see his Dreamer’s face after so many years of searching for her, it was going to kill him. He’d find her, hold her, tell her all of the things he’d been collecting between his ribs, and then he’d have to tell her goodbye. Forever.