The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  He bucked, gagging. Rafael reached inside Eve with a flaming hand and just like that she disappeared. Without a fight. Without a final word. Because she wasn’t real.

  “Was she—?” Felix stopped, confused.

  “She was a dream.” I swallowed. “A nightmare. Vogle’s nightmare.”

  At the sound of his name Vogle opened his eyes, breathing deep. “Is she gone?”

  Celia used a handkerchief to pat the sweat from his brow. “For now.”

  28

  Bryn

  My feet moved of their own volition down the long white corridor. Anso’s daughter hadn’t just crept into my thoughts, she was whispering commands to every part of me and all my body wanted to do was listen. I itched for her voice; the memory of Roman’s growing louder too. I could sense them both, calling for me and trying to rip me in half.

  I lulled Roman’s warnings as my hand found the door to Mara’s room, the next girl on my list. But as I peered through the small square window and spotted her pale skin, knees tucked to her chest as she lay curled up on a cot, I realized that she wasn’t a girl. She was a young woman. And the quiet all around me wasn’t natural. It was medicinal.

  The smells hit me then, of hospital food and hospital chemicals. My throat clenched, remembering, and I leaned down on the doorknob, cracking the lock and slipping inside her room just to get away from it.

  As soon as the door fell closed behind me, I was assaulted with new smells. Savage ones like something rotting. Mara sat up, eyes widening the moment I made myself visible.

  “That door was locked for a reason, you know.” Her voice was dry. Almost as dry as her hands and feet, the skin cracked like she’d been trying to scratch her way out of it.

  “What reason is that?” I said.

  “Because I’m crazy.” She smiled but the delusion was forced, her brown eyes not as vacant as they should have been.

  “I’m not a nurse or a doctor,” I said. “I’m like you so you don’t have to lie.”

  She gripped the mattress. “Like me?”

  “What do you dream about?” I asked, even though I’d find out soon enough.

  After finding so many Dreamers, I’d realized that it was more than just their power and memories I absorbed. Every essence was unique, an elixir that quenched something ferocious inside me, each taste more potent than the last.

  Mara stared at me so fiercely I wondered if she could see straight through. My body convulsed, sensing something foreign trying to crawl its way inside. There was a sharp pinch and then a drop of blood bubbled up from my palm.

  Mara looked away, the quiet so thick I could hear the sound of my blood hitting the linoleum floor.

  “You can cause people pain.”

  “Just one kind,” she said. “Sharp.” She looked at me. “I cut people open.”

  “How did you end up here?” I asked. I’d expected her to be imprisoned somewhere in filth and chains like the others, not being fed and cared for by doctors.

  “I’ve spent my entire life in and out of places like this.” She leaned against the wall. “When I finally turned eighteen I managed to escape for a while, hiding what I could do as much as possible, almost living a normal life. But then I had an attack.”

  “An attack?”

  “I fell asleep for eight weeks. I thought I’d grown out of the worst of it but I fell asleep one day and when I came to I wasn’t in my body anymore. I was here, tied to a table.” She clutched her knees to her chest. “They knew everything about me, every former diagnosis, every previous address, every police report. They were…studying me.” Her voice broke. “They told me that my body was gone and that if I tried to wake up I’d be dead. That I already was.”

  She held out her arms, revealing the scars. “They performed all of these experiments, injecting me with things, trying to force me into a rage so that I’d hurt the other patients. They’d tie them to a chair, sedated, and make me open them. They made me…” She choked and I sat next to her, careful not to touch her skin.

  This close I could see that Mara’s lips were covered in scabs, dry beads lacing across her skin as if her mouth had been sewn shut. She chewed at them, looking away.

  “Why did they do that to you?” I asked.

  Mara’s eyes snapped to the barred window above her bed. It was just a sliver of glass: milky and rippled and offering no view of the outside world other than the fact that it was night.

  “They’ve been scratching at the windows.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The nightmares. For the past few days they’ve come sniffing and scratching, trying to lure me out.”

  I thought of the crows that had manifested from my very memories and the beasts I’d carried with us from Emir’s hellish carnival.

  “The nurses told me to stop screaming but I couldn’t help it. Even when I was sleeping I could still hear them scratching. And then they—” She shuddered.

  “They what?”

  Mara rolled up the hem of her gown, revealing her thighs, her stomach, her chest. Every inch of her was covered in scratches.

  I sunk back, trying to decide whether she was less lucid than I’d first thought or if she wasn’t the only dangerous thing in this hospital.

  “I knew the nightmares would find a way inside and now I have nowhere to run. Nowhere.” She stood, slapping her hands against the walls, marching out a maddening rhythm. “Nowhere. Nowhere. I’m trapped in here.”

  “Mara.” I stood too, stopping her short as I tried to get her attention. “What were they? What did they look like?”

  “Dead,” she breathed. “All dead.” She fell against the wall, her voice muffled. “Dead mother. Dead father. Dead sister.”

  “Yours?” I asked, heat climbing me.

  Mara looked at me as if for the first time, her eyes drowsy and taking me in. “Mine…they were mine.” She slid to her knees. “And I killed them.” Her head fell back. “And now you’re going to kill me too.”

  Mara didn’t belong in the world. It was clear that whether I took the dreams from her or not she was still mad. After what she’d done…she always would be. But if I touched her…how much of that madness would be mine? Or maybe I already had my own. Maybe after the things I’d done, it was only a matter of time before the ghosts I’d created found me too.

  Mara crawled forward. “Please, just end it.” And then she grabbed my hand.

  All I could do was watch it happen—Mara descending even further into the madness she’d always been accused of living in. Her memories were scrambled, coming in flashes as sharp as her dreams. And then I saw the night Mara crawled out of her body for the first time, the memory not just sharp but explosive. I saw Mara’s dreams chasing her down the stairs. I saw her family. And then I watched them die.

  The years after were a blur of ambulance lights and harsh white walls. I watched Mara as she was dragged in and out of hospital after hospital, her body restrained by a different set of hands, subdued by a different colored liquid every day. There were so many needles and so many dark rooms, Mara trapped in areas of the hospital that shouldn’t exist. They kept her underground or in the psych ward under a pseudonym, in straitjackets and sometimes in chains.

  After she turned eighteen her dreams made her immune to the drugs and restraints and she managed to escape. Until a long sleep made her weak and Anso took her body. Somehow. She woke herself in the real world before ever facing him and he wasn’t in her memories. But the shadows were and with the same fierce chill as they were in mine.

  But they were nothing compared to the monsters here. I saw every experiment, every patient they forced Mara to hurt. Most of them died and every time they made Mara watch, torturing her with the fact that she could only rip people open, never mending what she’d broken. They wanted to make her a monster too. Just to see if they could.

  It’s working…

  At first Anso’s daughter was nothing more than a whisper.

  Can’t you feel it?

/>   Her voice swelled to an eclipse.

  We’re all monsters.

  Mara’s memories ripped to shreds until my sight wasn’t my own or even Alma’s. When I saw the table, the chains, the blood…me…I knew the vision was Anso’s. I recoiled, trying to push him out of my thoughts. He only sunk deeper, his essence like an oil spill, my insides drowning and dirty and dying. Reliving the memory…watching him twist me and cut me open on that torture table the first time we’d met, I felt like I was dying. But then the pain he’d planted inside me reached its apex and I felt something else.

  Rage.

  I watched as I ignited a storm that made us both shudder, the lightning blinding in beats of green and gold. Fire. Rain. The memory raced forward and I saw myself leading Roman’s flame to Kira’s vines, Dr. Lombard ensnared like an insect. I saw Emir’s captors, snapped like twigs and dissolved to nothing but their insides. I saw the woman who’d taken Ian and I heard her screams on the other side of that sealed brick wall.

  The memory of the explosion sent me reeling. Everything burned and everything made sense. Anso wasn’t trying to control me. He was trying to unravel me. The same way his daughter had been. And not because he wanted to turn me into a monster but because he believed I already was one.

  Mara’s memories came again like a flood, drowning me in every feeling she’d ever had. Each vision crested before crashing down like a wave. Over and over. I saw every doctor, every wound, every nightmare. It was all one endless nightmare.

  I finally came to in a cold sweat, still seeing red. Mara lay on the tile floor, whispering secrets into the grout.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  At one time Mara was just a little girl living in a nightmare that was stronger than she was. She grew up surrounded by monsters but even though she was mad with grief she never let them turn her into one too. Because every time she caused someone pain she felt it. She felt everything. Feeling made her human. Feeling…even in this prison…made her free.

  I sat there for a long time, feeling what Mara felt, watching the door, trying to force myself down the hall to find the people who did this to her. I knew their faces and voices, even the smell coming off their skin. I just didn’t know what I’d do once I found them. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

  Destroying things was getting easier but they were destroying me too. But maybe that was the point of all of this. I was the last piece of the puzzle and the last piece would have to be destroyed eventually just like all the others. Maybe becoming a monster was the only way to rid the world of them. Maybe Anso was right to fear me. Maybe I should actually give him something to fear. For Mara. For Emir. For every Dreamer living and dead. For me.

  “Death waits for you.” Anso’s daughter knelt in front of me, reaching out her hand. “What are you waiting for?”

  I traced Mara’s memories through the hospital, finding my way down a private elevator and into a dimly lit laboratory. Vials lined the glass drawers, the liquids inside glinting like Christmas ornaments.

  “Red. Everything should be red.” Anso’s daughter peered through the glass. “Make it red.”

  One brush of my hand was all it took to loosen the locks. I sifted through Mara’s worst memories. Red vials were used to stir her aggression, one dose making her wild. They gave her green vials to calm her down, blue vials to make her sleep. I remembered the nurses strapping Mara’s victims and fellow patients into a chair and pressing a needle to their veins, paralyzing them long enough for Mara to cut them open. Those vials were almost clear, the liquid inside of them a putrid flesh color.

  I searched the drawers until I found the color that matched, the vial like a piece of ice in my palm.

  “Turn their bones to chains.” Anso’s daughter sneered. “Lock them up tight.”

  I let instinct guide me to the needles and then I filled a syringe. My body moved on its own, explaining every necessary step only after I’d already gone through the motion. I watched myself and Anso’s daughter watched me, wicked and proud.

  “Stop following me,” I said.

  She frowned. “But you’re my shadow.”

  I tucked the syringes in the hem of my shirt as I wound my way through the lab, using my senses to pinpoint the exact location of every pair of hands that had ever held Mara down or caused her pain. I kept seeing their faces flash behind my eyes over and over, Mara’s fear bubbling to the surface. There were so many, too many. But one face burned in her memory brighter than the others.

  I came to a tall shelf that cut the room in half, light from computer monitors glinting against the metal on the other side. Footsteps padded across the floor, something grinding just beneath the quiet. Music. When I rounded the corner one of the nurses was thrumming his hands across a keyboard in time with the guitar solo bleeding through his headphones.

  I crossed behind him, his body stiffening. But when the air behind him was empty he turned back to the computer.

  “This one has nice veins,” Anso’s daughter whispered in my ear. “Slice one open. I want to see.”

  I glared at her before trying to reconcile the nurse with one of Mara’s tormentors. I searched her memories but he wasn’t there.

  I startled at a female nurse as she came in through another door. Our bodies almost brushed as she tapped the man I’d just spared on the shoulder and handed him some files.

  “Doctor’s on his way. He wants new versions of these reports.”

  The male nurse rolled his eyes. “Jesus, you might as well start calling me the Doctor with all of these reports I have to forge.” He flipped through the file. “This patient’s been dead for almost three months.”

  The female nurse crossed her arms. “And the Doctor needs him ‘alive’ for three more. He thinks he’s made some kind of breakthrough with the De Luca woman and he needs the funding.”

  The male nurse raised an eyebrow. “Breakthrough, huh? He better be careful or one day she’s going to break through him.”

  “After years of conditioning, she’d never turn on one of us unless she had some kind of death wish,” the female nurse said. “The Doctor’s used her fears very strategically in order to keep us all safe.”

  “You mean terrified her out of her mind.”

  The female nurse shrugged. “If she wanted to commit suicide she would have done it already.”

  My skin was on fire. This woman talked about Mara as if she was inhuman. As if her suicide would have been some kind of relief. What they didn’t realize was that Mara knew her body was out there somewhere and the only reason she didn’t inflict the wounds on herself was because all she wanted was to climb back into it. Then death would mean something. Then she would finally be free.

  What am I doing?

  I loosened my grip on the syringe and took a slow step, retreating. I’d left Mara alone in her room, locked away while I did what? Got revenge? Hurt people just so—

  “You can feel.” Anso’s daughter peered at the nurses over my shoulder. “Don’t you want to feel it again?” She craned her neck, tracing a breath from my collarbone to just behind my ear. “Don’t you want to feel alive again?”

  I shivered. “No.”

  Both nurses turned at my voice, examining the empty space.

  The door behind me swung open. The Doctor stepped into the room. He smiled at the nurses and I saw red again. The syringe in my hand became four. I lunged at him and then I plunged them straight into his neck.

  His hand caught mine but I knew he couldn’t see me. I stumbled back as he collapsed, waiting for his eyes to grow still. He was supposed to be paralyzed, frozen by whatever was inside those vials. But I’d stuck him with four and his body convulsed, fighting off a stillness more permanent.

  I dropped the rest of the syringes and manifested back onto Mara’s floor, her door appearing cracked as it came into view. I pushed it open, Mara still lying on the floor, mumbling to herself. But she wasn’t alone.

  The red Anso’s daughter had begged me for was smea
red across the walls. It dripped onto the floor, pressed into the shape of hands and feet. Mara’s father bled out on the bed next to his daughter. Her mother was a dark mess in the corner of the room and her sister sat at my feet, red hands reaching up to pull on my wrist.

  I snatched my hand away, staggering back into the hallway. It was full of ghosts too. Patients and apparitions mingled, the hallway washed white with pale skin and hospital gowns.

  A woman, mouth agape, stumbled right past me, the brush of her skin like ice. A large man orbited in a slow circle, dizzy and dying. Some patients were covered in blood just like Mara’s family while others were sheath-like and empty, skin grey and covered in scars.

  Their faces flashed in my memory, in Mara’s memory. I stared at their wounds—new and old—and reconciled every stitch and spatter of blood with Mara’s worst nightmares. These were the people she’d cut open, some more than once. These were the people she could never put back together.

  They marched in pieces, crawling on their hands and knees, falling towards the door to Mara’s room. I heard the squeal of knobs turning, more doors falling open, more patients stumbling out. Footsteps thundered up the stairwell, but among the mass of blood covered corpses I saw a flash of green. A pair of eyes lit up and alive. Sebastían.

  He wrestled with limbs and I backed against the doorframe, cold hands pulling me inside before he could spot me.

  Mara’s mother grabbed my face, blood slick against my cheeks. “Make it stop.” She buckled, a new wound slicing across her stomach. Another line carved into her cheek. “Please. Make it stop.”

  I gagged, forcing her hands away. Mara’s little sister clutched at my clothes, her handprints bleeding through and staining my skin. At first I thought they were only dreams, Mara’s madness making them whole again somehow. But as the walls began to shake, fists pounding out the same rhythm Mara had, I realized that maybe they weren’t. These ghosts weren’t just memories. They were alive the same way Emir’s wolves had been. They were alive and they were hunting me.