The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  But not as afraid as I was now, Sebastían almost smiling as he watched my mom take another sip of her wine, elbows on the table as she swayed lazily to the music. My uncle took her hand and Sebastían sighed.

  “She looks just like you.”

  “You mean us,” I said, the ease of it surprising even me.

  Sebastían studied me, wary but also an inch away from manic. “There’s no Dreamer here.”

  My hand slipped from the glass separating me from my mom. “There was.” I glared at him. “I guess you just weren’t fast enough.”

  Sebastían turned back towards my mom, his eyes flashing with the glow of approaching headlights. “I think I’m right on time.”

  I didn’t think. I focused on the sound of the oncoming car’s engine, pushed it to fifty, then sixty, then seventy miles per hour. Then I yanked it towards the sidewalk, swiping Sebastían and sending him skittering down the street.

  A woman screamed, horrified by Sebastían lying bloody and broken but still breathing. I knew he was, my own skin sensing the scrapes, my pulse mimicking the way his still raced. Then he lifted his head, looking straight up as the moon was cut by a band of static.

  I waited for the trill of locusts or even the tight flap of bat wings. Owls or crows or even ashes. But as the fog twisted and changed shape, I realized that it wasn’t insect or animal. It was sleep.

  The shadows fell, at first a wall cloud and then they grew legs, dancing with the people on the street until their heads were hanging back, knees buckled as they slumped to the ground. The shadows reached Sebastían, enveloping him until he was sleeping too. He blinked out in a tangle of ink, the air growing thick as ice crystals painted the wrecked car.

  The shadows slowed, spreading like an open hand in every direction, the crack of ice making the buildings moan. I remembered standing in that alley in Andalusia, wondering if they could still hurt me. When the shadows cut left, billowing against the windows of the restaurant, fog tracing a circle around my mom’s face through the glass, I realized that I’d been wrong. They could still hurt me. They could kill me.

  I lit up, shadows screaming as I broke through to the entrance. Patrons near the front of the restaurant were slowly slumping face-first into their plates. The music stopped, people tripping over chairs as they backed towards the kitchen. But they weren’t staring at the fog. They were staring at me.

  Because all they could see was me. The night the shadows attacked me on my way home from Dani’s house she’d seen nothing but me lying wet and alone in the street. Even when they’d attacked her too, she’d been blind.

  And that was the scariest thing about the shadows that I’d never let myself admit. They had rendered me helpless for so long, their invisibility leading to one misdiagnosis after another. Because of them I hadn’t just been trapped in my own dreams. I’d been trapped in hospital bed after hospital bed. Night after night. Even though I wasn’t sick. Even though I never had been.

  Shadows scraped against my back and I bristled, ice cracking like electricity against my burning skin. That’s when I saw the red lights like fireflies. Cell phones. Recording me.

  My mom shuddered, fighting with whether to run towards me or away. My uncle took the first step. I read my name on his lips, voiceless. I heard the groan of glass, the sharp crack of it splintering. The windows behind me shattered and everyone fell onto their stomachs as the shadows sniffed at them like hounds. I ran towards my mom, yanking her behind me as I fell against the kitchen door. It was locked. Cowards. I kicked it in, the back door leading into the alley already open.

  My mom froze and I stopped short.

  “Bryn…” Her hands floated in the space between us, confused, careful. “How…? What’s happening?”

  To you. I knew she wanted to ask, to stop and marvel at the strange flames beneath my skin. Roman’s flames. My uncle said his name before I could explain and then I knew I wouldn’t have to. He pulled my mom behind us, trying to keep her calm while my senses reached for pockets of warmth, parts of the city the shadows hadn’t reached yet. While the heat travelled south, my feet pulled me north, back towards the front of the restaurant.

  I hesitated, the brick pavement slick and covered in ice. I let myself rise in temperature, melting a path forward. As we reached the edge of the building, streetlights masked but still flickering, I saw the car that had struck Sebastían. Blood dotted the hood, red fingerprints smeared across one of the headlights. It was scuffed and dented but it was still running.

  I opened the driver’s side door and the man who’d been behind the wheel slumped out. I checked his nose and mouth for blood but he wasn’t injured, just sleeping.

  I held the door back for my uncle. “Get in.”

  He hesitated too, looking back at the lights from the restaurant as they washed onto the street. There was a scream and then they shuddered out. He pushed my mom over the center console and into the passenger seat before falling behind the wheel.

  “Find Aunt Lizzie,” I said. “Then head north. Don’t stop.”

  “She’s back at the hotel,” my uncle said. “It’s in that direction.”

  I tried to push the door closed but my uncle had it wedged open, my mom falling into his lap as she reached for me.

  “Bryn, come with us. It’s not safe.”

  Just like that her delusion was broken.

  I tried not to melt into her touch but I couldn’t help it. The last time I’d said goodbye to my mom it was only temporary. I’d thought that I could just send her on some whirlwind vacation with my uncle and then a few hundred photos and a couple of hangovers later this nightmare would be over. But that was before…

  Before I found my body. Before I couldn’t even save myself.

  But my mother…I had to save my mother.

  All of the years I’d wished for normalcy, believed that I’d deserved it after everything I’d been through with my KLS, the truth was my mom deserved it too. She deserved a normal life. Maybe I could give her one.

  But only after I erased myself from her old one.

  I hadn’t absorbed Cole’s dreams yet but somehow I’d been able to channel Roman’s flames without taking some piece of his soul. Maybe there was still a bit of Cole’s magic left in my mom’s touch. Maybe if I found it, I could make things right.

  “Bryn, hurry. We should go.” My mom gripped my hand, frantic and fighting tears. She could sense me pulling away. Not just from the safety of the car but from her. “Please.”

  One hand on my uncle’s shoulder, the other gripped in my mom’s fist, I felt the threads between each memory, between each moment, each minute, each second of their lives. I imagined a blade hovering over each one, every thread with my face and my voice pressed up against the sharp edge.

  I kissed my uncle on the cheek. “I’m sorry.”

  I faced my mom. “I love you.” The words sunk me to my knees, her grip on me tightening. “I love you more than anything. You saved me. Every day that I was sick and scared and tired of fighting you saved me.” Her hand shook, slipping. Four fingers. “I love you.” Three. “And I’m so…so sorry.”

  I let go, ripping me from my mom’s memories.

  And then I ran.

  Straight for the shadows.

  From outside the restaurant it would have looked like some kind of nuclear explosion. From inside it looked like morning, sunlight piercing straight through the clouds.

  When the dust cleared I was covered in ashes, the ice replaced with a strange warmth that coaxed open the eyes of the sleeping patrons. I’d cast a net over their bodies, shielding them because I knew it was what my mom would have wanted. Even though she would no longer remember me as her daughter that didn’t mean there weren’t still pieces of her inside me; pieces of her that were worth protecting. Her selflessness. Her strength. I wanted to be selfless. I wanted to be strong. I didn’t want Anso’s daughter burrowing inside and replacing those pieces of my mom with black holes.

  “Yolotli.”


  Every muscle tensed, the voice inside my head instead of out. I scanned the swirling dust, one swipe of my hand bringing it down like a curtain. Sebastían was red but he was whole. His eyes trailed down and I thought he was staring at the debris, hesitating at the sight of what I’d done. But then I looked down too, the ashes spilling down my arm and shielding the names. Except one.

  32

  Yolotli

  The village elders lay red stones at my feet, behind me, two more at the tips of my outstretched fingers. The circle closes and so do my fists, my father watching as I watch the sky, waiting for nightfall. One of five I will have to endure alone on this mountain, waiting for…I’m not sure exactly.

  All I know is that twelve other young men from our tribe have already been sent to the mountain, fasting for five days and nights, waiting for a vision, a voice—something to explain the monsters that are eating everything; the strange looking beasts that are forcing us north—and they all came back with nothing. No messages. No hope.

  No future.

  “You’ll see it,” my father had said on our journey towards the peak. “You’ll find what we’re looking for.”

  “How will I know?” I’d asked, already sweating, not just from the ascent or the hot breath of the jungle. But from the fear of failing, of being blind in the worst way. “How will I know it’s a vision and not a dream?”

  “They’re the same,” my father said. “A great Seer sees both but a Shifter can change only one.”

  “You think I might be a Shifter?” My chest heaved with each step as I tried to keep up with him.

  He was quiet.

  “What if I’m neither?”

  He gripped my arm, pulling me over a jagged rock as if I were still a boy. “I don’t think you’re afraid of being less, Yolotli.” He turned his back, trekking forward. “I think you’re afraid of being more.”

  More. It was the mark that had dyed me a strange color at birth; it was the quickened drumbeat between my ribs too loud for the rest of my tribe. I’d always known I was different but it wasn’t until I started…dreaming…that I began to wonder if I was more. And now, atop this mountain where only God’s voice could reach me, I was finally going to find out just how much.

  They leave me with nothing but a short blade and a hide full of something sour, the taste making my hands sweat. I try to sip on it, using it to stoke my senses for something supernatural. But it only stokes the pit of my stomach, cramps giving way to fever. On the second day I hold my nose and take a full gulp, knowing I have to finish the entire thing before my father returns. The cramps turn to spasms, my body shaking as I roll onto my side.

  I stay there for two more days, watching the clouds as they turn to arrows between the trees, mist a tangled web over my village down below. My village. My village is starving. And I only have one more day on this mountaintop to find out why.

  I sit up, sunlight knocking me back down. I clutch my stomach, concave and growling. My hands scrape for the hide, drawing it towards my lips. I drink it. All of it. And then I lurch, choking into the grass.

  Keep it down. Keep it down. Be patient.

  I grasp at short tight breaths, waiting for the pain to dull, waiting for the truth. Some truth. Any truth. But each second, each minute that passes only wrenches the possibility farther and farther from my grasp. The possibility that I am the one who can save us. Maybe nobody can. Maybe that is the truth behind the silence that no one else has wanted to hear.

  But I hear it. Beneath the low rustle of wind through the grass, the light knocking of the river, the deep bow of the trees as the vines slither up and up, I hear the story of my village. Sung with the same notes as a dying fire. Dying. How can I tell them they are all going to die?

  “Yolotli.”

  My eyes snap open. I didn’t realize they were closed; that I was drifting. I scan empty air, no shadows, only stars. Big bright stars that look close enough to touch.

  “Yolotli, I want to show you something.”

  The voice makes me dizzy, circling me and riding on the breeze. The breeze thickens, slinking and black. It slithers up like a snake, sharper and sharper until it is a man.

  I stutter. “Am I dreaming?”

  The being holds out his hand, slender and grey as if he’s been carved straight from the mountain. “Do you want to know?”

  My hand trembles, itching for my blade.

  “I can show you, Shifter.”

  I want to ask him if he knows how to stop the monsters; if he knows what they are. The look in his eye strikes hot and then I realize that he is probably one of them.

  But…he’s the only voice that’s come with any kind of message and even if his words aren’t those of God that doesn’t mean they can’t still be true.

  My fingers curl around the hilt of my knife. “Show me what?”

  He presses a hand to my chest, the cold scorching my skin as he says, “The truth which you seek and so much more.”

  The earth is a seed, sprouting into veins that grow leaves and flesh and oceans. I see my village when it is just a shadow beneath the waves, sand spilling into piles that turn green beneath the sun. I see the eruption of the forest, tree after tree after tree. But ours isn’t the only corner of the world in motion. Other land masses, other trees, other people rise up—the pigment of their skin as vibrant and varied as the flowers that pock the jungle floor.

  I watch them build things and I watch them tear them down. I watch them fight and fall in love. But the fighting…

  I have never seen anything like it. Each clash shakes the earth, staining it and setting it on fire. The earth fills with holes and smoke and still…they don’t stop.

  They can’t stop.

  Towers take the place of trees, glinting like blades beneath the sun as people move like ants on black tracks that wind and tangle into knots. They all race in the same direction and I can see their voices. Each breath is its own wisp of smoke, the sounds turning to static as their cries trap them in a thick fog. It rises, choking everything.

  I choke too, the darkness matching the smoke that’s been rising south of our village. And I realize that I am no longer looking into the past or even the present. I am watching the future unfold and it is terrible.

  But then the world gets even darker. The sun is swallowed by a giant mouth, blood-red and hungry. Then I see the cracks, the stars joined by lines of static growing wider and wider. The first ghost slips through, then another. Some look like the man in front of me. Some only resemble the beasts in my nightmares.

  For a second I wonder if that’s all this is. His voice, this vision. It’s all a nightmare and if I could just wake up…

  The earth looks back at me like a bruised eye, shrouded in darkness. But there are bright spots across its surface, starlight winking in and out. My gaze is pulled closer until I see the light is not a star but a girl. She looks human but she is made of lightning, a flaming arrow pointed right at the beast whose hand is still pressed cold to my chest.

  She strikes him. He screams.

  I see him fall, endless. He waits for his death and so do I. But the black hole only widens, my brow sweating as I fear getting sucked down too.

  “I see,” I gasp, pleading for release.

  He grips me, drawing blood. “Now change it!”

  At the shock of his voice, the universe turns to string. I watch the threads between every living thing go slack then taut; my breaths making them quiver. I spot the thread around the girl made of stardust and I pull. Another thread slithers into my grasp, this one attached to an open wound, the young man’s blood dripping into a deadly pool that poisons the earth. I summon another thread, fibers glinting gold around a man in love. He whispers to a woman with a long grey streak in her hair and I shift the strings attached to each letter, rearranging them until they spell, “I’m sorry.”

  I tie all three threads into a knot, saving the one attached to the devil for last. They thicken, fibers weaving in and out until they form a rope st
rong enough to hang him with. Then I wrap the noose around his neck before setting the vision back in motion. His fall stops short, the beast letting go of me with a shudder. And then he smiles.

  33

  Bryn

  Grass grazed my waist, thick and so dark it was almost black. A tall chain link fence separated us. Yolotli was tall and thin, skin as dark as the damp earth. He trembled as he balanced on a block of wood, every gust of wind startling him as if it was an open flame. His knees bent, another breeze trying to knock him over. He called out, using all his strength to keep himself upright.

  I tried to spot a building or another person but there was nothing but trees and the chain link fence. The solitude was as wild as the jungle. But he wasn’t trying to escape. He wasn’t moving at all.

  A strange hum dragged my focus down and then my hands. I pressed them into the mud until they disappeared beneath the earth. The buzz absorbed all the way to my teeth.

  Land mines. They were everywhere.

  I tried to map them, chasing one charge of heat to the next. I looked back at Yolotli and then I breathed in deep. I took one trembling step toward him, testing the soil. But then I heard another hum, this one radiating from the fence in front of me. I hesitated, examining the length of it until it curved, circling Yolotli. What if it wasn’t just rigged to explode? What if it was some kind of security measure meant to keep him in, or at least to alert whoever had taken him that he was trying to escape?

  I couldn’t risk setting it off, especially if it was meant to detonate. I’d suffered injuries in my dreams before, always waking back into my body healed, nothing but glistening scars left to prove I’d been weak at all. But this time I couldn’t wake. And if I got hurt…badly, I wasn’t sure what exactly that would mean. Would I drift back into my corpse somehow, killed for a second time? Or would my wounds just never heal, the pain torturing me until I climbed back into my body?