The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  “We have to remove the IVs before—”

  “No…” Zaire tried to sit up, his head barely making it off the bed. “You’ll set it off…you’ll…”

  I crouched close to his mouth. “Set what off?”

  He looked down at the IV in his wrist, made a fist. “If you take them out, they’ll know. There’s a timer, just long enough for the nurses to replace the IVs one at a time.” He rasped, trying to catch his breath. “Five seconds. That’s it.”

  Five seconds. “And then…?”

  Zaire gripped the sheets. “My family.”

  My blood ran cold. “Are they here too?”

  He nodded. “I can’t leave.”

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  His gaze drifted straight down.

  I mapped each IV, trying to imagine how long it would take for us to remove them all and manifest in time to save his family from…I wasn’t sure what. I didn’t even know how I would be able to get them all out. The other Dreamers I’d found had been alone—devastatingly alone. But Zaire was tethered to his family in more ways than one. Because they weren’t just prisoners, they were the chains that made him a prisoner too.

  “We’ll have to time it just right.” I looked down at Zaire. “I have an idea.”

  “Wait.” He tried to sit up, the threat of the IVs breaking skin sending him back down. “You can’t touch it. My blood…it’s…” He slowed, took a breath. “It’s dangerous.”

  “What’s he saying?” Roman asked.

  “He said his blood is dangerous.” I turned to Zaire. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s poison.” He stared at his arms, flexing and afraid. His veins were swollen, the blood driving down to the needle as if it was something to attack. “It kills everything it touches. Everything…” He drifted, drowning in the memory of something awful.

  “Zaire…” My voice yanked him back out but he still looked terrified.

  “I’ve seen men die from just a drop.” He shivered. “But when…it…” he gripped the sheets around his legs, “drank from me it didn’t even sting. It didn’t kill him.” He wrung the sheets until they ripped. “It didn’t work. I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t save my family.”

  “It?” My voice barely broke through. I didn’t want to know what horrible thing I’d set loose that was stronger than Zaire; that might be stronger than me too.

  Zaire looked right at me, eyes wide and pleading for me to look back; to look deep enough to see what he’d seen; to fear what he feared. “From a distance it looked like a ghost.” He exhaled. “From up close it looked like the devil. But even though he was tangled in shadows he spoke like a man.” Zaire’s face twisted, confused. “He…he cried like one too.”

  Memories tumbled inside me like shards of glass. My blood ran cold, chasing the chill all the way to my bones. A drop of sweat traced my hairline. All this time I’d thought Anso was in hiding because he was weak. But if he was strong enough to drink from Zaire without dying what if he was stronger than me too? I looked back at the Rogues, faces painted with worry as they waited for my translation. What if he was stronger than all of us?

  “I’ve seen him too,” I finally said. “Zaire…” The words pressed against my lips. I knew the only thing that would extinguish his fear was the truth. “I found you because I have to take something from you, and once I do, you’ll never have to worry about the devil coming after you again. He’ll come after me instead.”

  “The nightmares.” Zaire’s eyes flooded. “They’ll stop?”

  I nodded.

  Zaire looked towards the rolling cart on the other side of his bed. “Third drawer. There’s gloves in there. I’d put on more than one pair.”

  I doled out gloves, everyone rolling on at least three for each hand.

  Roman snapped a fourth set onto mine, guiding the latex all the way down to my wrists. His thumbs lingered there, reading the memory of my pulse. “No mistakes.”

  The Rogues didn’t have much to worry about besides the potential pain but I still needed to survive, at least long enough to get to Lathan and Valentina’s Dreamers, which meant not acquiring any potentially fatal wounds that could possibly trap me in a perpetual state of dying and therefore render me and my abilities useless.

  I stood next to Zaire’s left arm, directing the others. “Roman, take the IVs at Zaire’s right leg. Andre, you’ve got the left. Shay, I need you at his right arm.” I poised the tips of my fingers over the needle, everyone following my lead. “On the count of three, we pull, and then we lock hands.” I looked down at Zaire. “As soon as Roman reaches for you I want you to think of your family. I need you to picture their location. Every detail.”

  He nodded. “And they’ll be okay…you promise.”

  I got as close as I could without touching his skin. “I promise.” I glanced at Roman. “One.” Then Andre. “Two.” Then Shay. “Three.”

  My pulse hitched, keeping time.

  Five seconds. Four…

  Zaire hissed as we slid the needles out. A few drops trickled onto the sheets, bright red trailing to the tile floor.

  Three seconds.

  We ripped off the gloves, Roman steadying a hand against Zaire’s skin.

  Two seconds.

  We gripped one another, Zaire counting the beeps.

  “Picture them.”

  One…

  My mind traced our hands, racing through Roman’s touch and into Zaire like a lit fuse until the face of his mother was bright and beckoning me forward. I chased the light until it was pressed over our heads, thrashing and cracking against a force field of Rogue and Dreamer—flames chasing back flames, starlight putting out starlight.

  Zaire had his mother in his arms and she had his younger brother, all of them shaking against the explosion. The snare trapping Zaire in that hospital bed hadn’t just been woven with the people he loved most, it had been rigged to detonate. I watched the destruction, the fire gorging on itself until it finally started to choke.

  My hands wanted to push it up and out, hurling it towards the church and the people in it. My muscles warmed, remembering leading Roman’s flames to Kira’s vines, the heat tearing apart her cell and her safe haven. Fire had destroyed Alma’s captors too, the flames devouring the city the same way they’d devoured that old barbershop where we’d found Ian. But I couldn’t pretend the landscape was all that had changed. Because I hadn’t just used fire to fight. I’d used it to kill and that had changed me too. But not because something had been stolen from me. Death had changed me because I’d let it.

  The flames withered above our heads and I let them. I cast out a cool breeze, dropping the temperature of the Rogues. Mine too.

  Zaire was crouched, looking from his mother’s bound hands to his brother’s. Roman and Andre snapped the chains, Zaire’s mother reaching for them both. She kissed their knuckles, still smoking, before rushing her hands over Zaire and making sure he was still intact. Something fell against my leg and I stared down at Zaire’s little brother’s scalp. He was even younger than Sam, his arms strung around my calf as he looked up at me with a smile.

  My throat clenched, the pain telling me to retreat. I collapsed instead, gripping him tight.

  “You’re safe,” I said.

  He whispered the same thing back. “Safe.”

  I shook, letting go before I scared him, letting go before I cried. I swept the ashes from his cheeks and they turned pink.

  “Thank you.” Zaire’s mother reached for me next and I let her.

  “We’re not out of the woods just yet,” Andre said, fanning the smoke and searching for walls, a tunnel, a way out.

  “Where are we?” Shay asked.

  Zaire stood. “Below the church.”

  I wrangled the smoke and ashes, hurling them like small arrows in every direction until I could finally see where the darkness ended. Most of the arrows erupted, crashing head first into stone. But my ears chased the hiss of one I’d cast to our right, my eyes follow
ing the trail of dust as it turned red. It finally disintegrated, the ashes settling in a pile shaped like the moon.

  46

  Felix

  Rafael lifted a piece of plywood, Yolotli’s Rogue, Eleuia, fitting it against one of the porch columns. She was the first Rogue to answer Bryn’s summons; Damon, the Rogue holding the hammer and nailing the plywood to form a makeshift wall, having arrived only twenty minutes later.

  He’d stumbled over the wreckage of Bryn’s invisible fortress, dazed, afraid. But then he’d found Grace’s face in an upstairs window, his presence waking her from the most restful sleep she’d had in years.

  From the gaping hole Cole’s monster had ripped in Celia’s dining room wall, we’d watched three more reunions, Rogues running into the arms of pajama-clad Dreamers who were barely half awake; some stumbling forward to face a person they’d only ever dreamed about.

  They had so many questions—questions only Bryn would know the answer to—but we did our best to make them feel normal. To make them feel safe. It was a strange thing to comfort someone with super powers, especially since, not only did I not have any myself but I didn’t even have the necessary human parts.

  “I think the patch makes you appear…wiser,” Dani had said.

  “Dangerous,” Adham had added.

  Cole had nodded. “Dangerously mysterious. Or maybe it’s mysteriously dangerous.”

  “Or maybe they’re just scared shitless and willing to listen to anyone,” I’d argued.

  Vogle had interrupted. “Definitely that.”

  He and Celia were explaining to the Rogues who didn’t know they were Rogues why they were so prone to setting things on fire and self-combusting when their tempers flared. I overheard one of the Rogues recalling the story of how she’d accidentally set her cousin’s cat on fire when it scratched her face. She learned two things that day—that cats are assholes that don’t like being hugged and that there was something very very wrong with her.

  Cole dropped the rest of the fallen tacks into my open hand and I waited for a break in Damon’s hammering before I stuck them back on our map. Cole called out the most recent disasters and I stuck a new tack over Melbourne, Australia. Another over Patagonia, Argentina. He tore me off two pieces of string and I drew a straight line between them and the tack over our location. Two hours ago there were only thirty-four pieces of string. Now there were sixty.

  The media was either too slow or too small, what was left of the big stations barely able to keep up with national news, let alone what was going on in other parts of the world. While one reporter covered a tsunami off the coast of Alaska another was running for their life against the backdrop of a giant dust cloud that had already destroyed the panhandle and was now working it’s way south. An underground volcano had awoken in Colorado, mountains sinking from the inside out, entire towns choked under ash. Trees across New Mexico had grown legs and uprooted, ripping apart the soil and the roads and the houses that lined the roads. The people in the houses.

  We’d marked every major disaster and every monster sighting, switching to sifting through videos online as we filled in the blank spaces abroad. There were zombies in central Africa and hundreds of beached whales lining the coast of Brazil. Something giant was plucking the planes right out of the sky over the English Channel, and despite the fact that the sun hadn’t been out for days, temperatures in India were close to reaching 150 degrees Fahrenheit. There was video of masses of people converging on the Ganges River to try and keep cool. But then one by one people dipped beneath the surface—dozens, hundreds gone with a splash. It took three minutes for the river to swallow them and then it ran as red as the moon.

  “Uh, Felix…” Cole still had the feed up. Someone had spliced the video of the river with a video from a drone hovering over the coastline of the Indian Ocean.

  “What is it?” It was too dark to make out anything below the water. I could barely see the tips of the waves.

  Cole pointed to the river, tracing the edges. “It’s shrinking.”

  I looked closer, switching between the evaporating river and the waves lapping against the beach. The waves shifted, barely slapping the sand before they raced back. Farther and farther until the lights of the city were no longer reflected in the current.

  “How do we know it’s not another tsunami,” Adham asked.

  I clicked on one of the links in the side panel. Another video popped up of a lake near the Iranian and Turkish border. A series of flashlights shone on the lake’s edge as it receded, another drone racing down the waterline to show that it was evaporating from all sides.

  “They’re all shrinking,” I said.

  “More like disappearing. What kind of a nightmare is this?” Cole mimicked the waves, shrinking back towards the wall. A pin stuck him in the back and he turned to face the map.

  From here it looked like the world was mostly water. How long would it take for each drop to disintegrate? When the world’s oceans were reduced to sand and that sand started devouring people whole would we still be alive to care?

  Dani carried in another round of coffee, mine with extra witch’s brew or whatever Celia was putting in it. After twelve glasses over the past thirty-six hours I wasn’t sure how I’d ever be able to switch back to regular caffeine.

  “What are you guys talking about?” she asked.

  We showed Dani the videos of earth’s dwindling water supply.

  Cole stared into his coffee mug. “I’m afraid to drink this.” The steam floated around his face and I could tell he was holding his breath, afraid to even inhale it. “How many cups do you think we have left? What if this is it?” He scanned our faces. “I don’t think I could survive the apocalypse without coffee.”

  “If there’s an apocalypse you probably wouldn’t survive, period,” I said.

  Cole gestured to the map covered in red string. “And what the hell do you call this?” He paced, stopping short as Dani crossed in front of him to kneel in front of the TV.

  She stared at the muted screen we’d been ignoring all afternoon. The same video of Roman they’d shown a few days ago was playing on repeat, analysts arguing in the side panel about whether or not Oswald’s theory about Roman being responsible for the apocalypse could be true.

  I turned up the volume, a man’s voice narrating the entire scene. “They’re made of flames and can self-combust at any moment. What’s even more dangerous is when you combine that ability with rage. You can see how close he was to killing me…”

  Adham took a step closer to the television. “It’s him.”

  The video shrunk to the left side of the screen. On the right sat a pudgy man with glasses. He was wearing a homemade t-shirt that said: There Are Gods Among Us. And They Are Very Angry.

  “That’s the man in the video?” Dani asked.

  “Oswald,” Adham answered.

  “AKA the man who Roman tried to kill,” I added.

  “AKA the man who tried to kill me,” Cole jumped in.

  Dani shushed him, hiking the volume again.

  Oswald cleared his throat. “What we have here is a demonic force that is unleashing hell on earth and he must be stopped.”

  The news anchor sat back. “You mean the young man in the video…”

  “He’s still trying to expose Roman…” Dani said.

  “And others like him,” Oswald went on. “According to my calculations there could be hundreds. Maybe even thousands.”

  “Others?” The news anchor glanced at someone behind the camera and then back to Oswald. “How can people spot them? How should people be protecting themselves?”

  “That’s the dilemma,” Oswald answered. “The untrained eye cannot spot them. They could be standing next to you at the grocery store or sitting across from you at the dinner table and you’d never know it. That’s why I’ve come forward to share this video and to alert people to the presence of these paranormal beings.” Oswald turned toward the video where it played on a screen behind the ne
ws desk. “But he is the one…he is the key to stopping this.”

  The anchor spoke to someone off camera. “Can we get a still-shot of his face? And zoom in. We want to make sure our viewers at home get a good look at the perpetrator. A nineteen-year-old Roman Santillo. In addition to attacking Oswald Grimly he is also responsible for the murder of Carlisle Reid and escaped the Albuquerque jail where he was awaiting bail. This individual is considered armed and dangerous and we ask for the public’s help in locating him…”

  A number for a 24-hour hotline popped up on the screen. The news anchor listed Oswald’s contact information and a web address where people could find out more about how to get involved.

  I typed it into the browser window. A black screen popped up, Roman’s face ringed in flames. There was a link called “the origin of the beast,” another on “types of demons,” and another on “advanced demon-hunting weaponry.”

  “I thought Oswald knew what Roman was,” Dani said. “Isn’t he the one who filled in the holes in Bryn and Roman’s origin story?”

  I nodded. “He does.”

  “Then why is he lying?” Dani asked.

  “Because he’s not trying to expose Roman.” Adham sighed. “He’s trying to kill him.”

  “You mean us…” The hammer hung at Damon’s side, knuckles blanched around the wooden handle. “That’s what I am, isn’t it?” He nodded to the screen. “I’m like him.”

  “And like me,” Adham said. “And like Vogle and Rafael and—”

  “They think we’re killers.” Damon faced Adham, earnest, afraid. “Are we?”

  This time Dani spoke. “No. You’re not killers and you’re not evil.”

  “But what about the people he killed?” Damon asked, still trying to make sense of everything. “What about the people he tried to kill?”

  Everyone was quiet, not sure how to explain the inevitability of this grey area where Bryn and Roman were allowed to kill people. To get away with it and still have friends. To do something so awful and still be heroes. But they were. Despite the things they’d both done, they were our only shot at survival.