The Space Between (The Book of Phoenix)

by Kristie Cook

  I awoke in an unfamiliar bed, but an actual real bed that was soft and comfortable after weeks of sleeping on the floor. Except Micah wasn’t in there with me. I tried to sit up, but my body remained numb and heavy as a truck. I peered around the dark room—a motel room, maybe?—to see Micah’s form silhouetted against a large window as he gazed out of it. He must have sensed I’d awakened because he didn’t look my way.

  “There’s at least twenty of them,” he said quietly. “Maybe thirty. We’ll never make it.”

  I pushed myself up enough to see out the window. I could make out the water with tiny lights on the far side of it, probably Tampa Bay, and felt the pull of the mansion—our refuge—somewhere out there. It must have been on an island, just out of reach. Dozens of shadows flew in the night sky and hovered over the water. I wondered if everyone could see them, or only us.

  “We have to find a way,” I said. My elbow buckled, and I collapsed against the pillows.

  “I’m not taking you into that,” Micah said. “It’s way too dangerous.”

  “We have to, Micah.”

  I blacked out again. Well, not really blacked out, because I dreamt. Except it didn’t really feel like a dream, more like past experiences, memories. Micah and I were one again, our souls united into a single being, and we were in that other world, the one where I and me didn’t exist, but only we and us. Even for the others in this world, so many others, life was about all of us.

  The world itself was like Earth, but not. The sky appeared more teal than blue, and two yellow orbs shone in it—two suns, one big and seemingly close, the other much farther away and the size of our Earth’s moon. A sweet fragrance filled the air, but not anything I’d ever smelled on Earth. Trees with twisting branches and purple bark and leaves lined the edges of a vast space in front of us interrupted by rectangular pools of fuchsia water. The scene reminded me of The Mall in Washington between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Except for the candy-like colors, of course. We stood with others like us at the top of the steps of a huge building I knew to be a castle. Its crystal-like walls reached high above, reflecting the aquamarine sky.

  The people, for lack of a better word, around us revered Micah and me, as if we ranked high above them, although structured hierarchy meant little in this world. At least it hadn’t really mattered until we’d come under attack. I tried to understand what that meant, but couldn’t. We weren’t being attacked now . . . although the sky—no, everything—seemed to be darkening around us. Fading out. Disappearing?

  I couldn’t lift my head when I awoke, still in the bed in the dark room by the water. The pillow under me was soaked and so was my face—covered in tears. My chest felt an unequivocal emptiness, a hole even bigger than Bex’s and Pops’ deaths had created.

  “Micah?” I whimpered.

  A weight settled onto the bed next to me, and he pulled me into his arms.

  “Right here,” he murmured.

  “I thought . . . I thought I lost you.” I didn’t know why—that’s not what I’d dreamt at all—but the feeling was true. I was losing him. The hole in my chest was his absence. And in more than just my heart. His presence in my soul was disappearing, too. “Something’s wrong. I think . . . we need to get to the mansion.”

  “We can’t. I’ve been watching and studying, but there’s no way with all those Shadowmen out there.”

  “We have to,” I cried, fear sending me into a panic. My heart raced, and the dark room suddenly felt like a prison, but I was too weak to escape.

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “I don’t care! We have to get there. If we don’t . . .” My chest tightened with the reality of what I was feeling. “I think . . . I think I’m dying, Micah.”

  He pulled back and stared at me for a long moment, and the same terror I felt filled his eyes. His arms tightened around me as he once again crushed me against him, eliminating any space between us.

  “No. I won’t let that happen. I’ll take you to a hospital.”

  “They can’t help!”

  “They have to! I won’t lose you, Jacey. You can’t leave me.”

  “Just . . .” My constricted chest and tight throat left me panting for a breath. “Get me . . . to the mansion.”

  I passed out again, only to waken to Micah carrying me. But instead of holding me tight against him as he’d done before, his arms felt loose, as if he might drop me. His steps slugged heavily as he struggled to reach the door of the room.

  “I’m gonna get us help, babe,” he said, his voice hoarse and distant. My eyes rolled up to his face. A thin sheen of sweat covered his pale skin. He looked as bad as I felt. “It’s just the flu. I have it, too. I’m gonna get us help.”

  He lurched. We both crashed to the floor, and neither of us had the strength to get up.

  The door flew open.

  “Crap,” said a female voice. “They’re not doing well at all.”

  “Let’s get them to the bed,” a male responded. “I’ve got him. You take her.”

  Thin arms slid under my shoulders and knees and lifted me, though not far off the ground. My eyes fluttered open. A young woman, not much older—or bigger—than me carried my lifeless weight with ease. The moonlight through the window shone off her light-colored hair and into her pale eyes as she laid me on the bed.

  A weight settled next to me. I could only move my eyes to find Micah in bed with me, a black guy standing over him.

  “You two need to re-Bond,” the girl said. “Join up and get over there. Otherwise, you’re gonna die.”

  “What do you mean?” Micah croaked.

  “You’re Separating,” the strange guy said. “You need to re-Bond. Do it however you need to do it, but get it done or you’ll both die.”

  “And if it comes to that . . . well, we can’t let you just die,” the girl added.

  They left us alone with that cryptic message.

  With the last bit of strength remaining in my body, I rolled over to face Micah.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  He struggled to roll to his side, then to lift his hand as if to push my hair away, but weakness must have overcome him, because it rested like a dead weight on the side of my face.

  “No idea. They said they could help us, but they haven’t done anything but—”

  My eyes popped wide open as a stabbing pain jolted through my body. A scream blasted from my mouth, and I clutched at Micah’s hand and squeezed it to my chest. Another burst, like a spontaneous combustion inside me. Burning agony exploded through my racing heart, as though it were being smashed into pieces.

  “Micah,” I gasped.

  “I’m here, babe.” His voice came out thick, like molasses.

  “It burns.” I tried to pull in a breath, but my lungs could only muster a wheeze of air. “Micah . . . finish the journal for me . . . okay?”

  “What?”

  “Just . . . promise. Write this . . . all down. Okay?”

  “I promise,” he said as his fingers brushed against my cheek.

  “I . . . love—”

  He gripped my face harder, cutting me off. Panic raised his voice. “No, Jacey. Don’t do this. Stay with me.”

  “I . . . love you.”

  “Help!” he yelled, the scream piercing my eardrums. “Hurry!”

  My vision blurred at the edges. This was it. I felt death at my door. “Love . . . you . . . . Always have . . . always . . . will.”

  “I love you, too, Jacey. But don’t . . . hang on, babe. Don’t do this.” He yelled louder, “Get in here! She needs help!”

  He tried to move away, but I held him to me tightly.

  “Please . . . don’t . . . leave me.” I stared into his warm, brown eyes, falling into them like I had in the beginning as his
gaze remained locked on mine, bathing in the love they now held.

  “Never.” His voice fell away, like a leaf carried on the wind, off into the distance.

  A bright light blasted my vision, and the world faded out as fire consumed me.

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Jeric flipped through the rest of the journal, but no more entries filled the pages. He slammed the book shut, making me jump, and bolted from his seat next to me on the futon at the front of the camper. His arms clamped over his head as if protecting it from a blow, and he turned in a wide circle with his eyes squeezed shut. He strode to the back bedroom then returned to the front. He glanced at me with storming blue eyes and an unreadable expression, swiped his hand over his face, shook his head, and charged outside.

  I scrubbed at the tears on my cheeks as I stared dazedly at the door. Jacey was dead. I couldn’t believe it. Dead. I’d come to know her so well, had grown closer to her than I ever had with a character in a book, I felt like a piece of me had died with her. And we’d put so much hope into her and Micah’s story, and this was how it ended. How could this be it?

  The way Jeric tore out of here, he was beyond pissed. I couldn’t blame him. All of our hopes and expectations had been in that stupid book, and they’d died along with Micah’s last words. Jeric would need a long run to settle down from this, but when ten minutes passed and he still hadn’t returned, worry began to form in the pit of my stomach.

  I finally rose from the futon and went outside, hoping to find him out there. No sign of him anywhere. I looked up the campground’s narrow dirt road toward the highway, but the dim streetlamp fifty yards away cast a brownish-yellow pool of light only at its base. I glanced the other way, toward the rear of the park, but it was lost in darkness.

  A shudder of fear ran up my spine.

  I ran inside, grabbed my shotgun and headed out, with Ghost by my side, to look for Jeric. Why wasn’t he back already? How could he have run off in the first place? Here we both were, traipsing around in the dark in a strange place with people . . . creatures . . . whatever the Shadowmen were possibly out here right now with us. There was a chance they weren’t, a small chance they hadn’t followed us from Georgia, but the prickly sensation on the nape of my neck told me they lurked nearby, watching. Waiting. For a time like this.

  The campground’s dirt road made a lopsided circle through the park with sites on each side of the path. Campers and RVs sat on most of the sites, nearly all lit up at ten o’clock at night, but plenty of sites remained empty between them. With Ghost trotting along with me, I jogged through these black spaces, keeping a tight grip on my gun. If anyone saw me, I’d probably be hauled off to jail. I came full circle with no sign of Jeric, only to find him sitting on top of the picnic table outside my Airstream, a half-empty bottle of whiskey in his hand.

  I stared at him with my mouth hanging open. He returned my glare while taking a long draw of the amber liquid, his eyes hard and accusing. As if I had been the one who’d had a hissy fit and then disappeared. I took my gun inside and put it away, then came back out.

  “So what now?” I asked with my hands.

  Ghost sat on his haunches next to me and stared at Jeric, as if waiting for his answer, too. He didn’t respond at first but took another drink before setting the bottle down next to him.

  “Nothing,” he signed. “I’m done.”

  “What?”

  “I’m done.”

  When he didn’t clarify, I signed, “Done with what? What do you mean?”

  He threw his hands out in a sweeping motion. “With everything. Most of all with that fucking book.”

  “Yeah, we’re done with it anyway, but that doesn’t mean you can quit on everything else. We have to figure this out.”

  “There’s nothing to figure out! I want nothing to do with any of it. Nothing. You should forget about it all, too.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, then pointed at the flame on my wrist. “What about this? What about Uncle Theo and Mira? We can’t just give up! On us! On them!”

  “Watch me.” He picked up the bottle and took another swig and then another, as if determined to get drunk.

  Something else was wrong. Something was going through his head that he didn’t want to face. He couldn’t have given up so easily just because Jacey and Micah had left us with nothing to work with. Did he know something more? Had something occurred to him and flipped a switch in his mind? If so, he apparently had no intentions of discussing it now, and the more pulls he took on the bottle, the less likely I would understand anyway.

  “We’ll talk in the morning,” I signed, and I went inside, hoping he’d change his mind.

  I dropped to the futon, crossed my arms and legs and waited for him to come inside. And waited. And waited. I peeked out the window. He still sat on the picnic table, his head hanging low, his hands clasped behind it, and his mouth moving as though he muttered under his breath. I sat down again, but couldn’t stay still, so I paced the camper several times. From the bedroom, I watched him through the window again. Now his hands were planted on the table behind him, bracing him as his head hung back and he stared at the sky. Every once in a while, he pulled another swig until no more whiskey remained in the bottle. Surely he’d be coming inside soon to pass out.

  No such luck. I returned to the front and huddled down on the futon, still waiting, then ended up on my side and then my back. I’d been staring at the camper’s cloth-lined ceiling and worrying about Uncle Theo and Mira, when Jeric broke into song outside. He was singing! His words were slurred, but good gravy did he have a voice. Pure as fresh rain, nearly smooth as honey, but a little rough from lack of use, giving it a sexy edge. He really could have been a rock star, even deaf. If he only knew.

  I drifted off at some point and awoke with a start, sun streaming through the window onto my face. I blinked, momentarily disoriented. Yellow and orange tie-dyed curtains meant I was still up front, on the futon. I sat up and looked around. Ghost lay at my feet, but no Jeric. I looked outside at the picnic table, but he wasn’t there either, so I rushed to the bedroom, throwing pillows and blankets around, although he’d obviously not slept there. My heart stuttered as panic gripped me full force.

  Shadowmen.

  What if he’d passed out on the picnic table and they’d attacked? Why hadn’t I made him come in?

  I ran outside, looking for signs of a struggle, but there were none. Running down the road, I searched for evidence of someone being dragged through the dirt, tire treads by our camper, anything, but I found nothing. These weren’t normal people, though. Could they fly off with him? Could he be in the woods at the edge of the campground, his dead body abandoned like Bex’s? My stomach rolled with that thought.

  I dashed back inside and spun in circles, not knowing what to do. And then I noticed. All of his stuff was gone. His bag, his shoes, his tablet . . . all gone.

  And a note I hadn’t seen before, scrawled on a paper towel left on the counter, the handwriting like chicken scratch. Jeric’s writing in his journal was pretty neat for a dude, so he must have still been drunk when he wrote this:

  Leni,

  I can’t do this anymore. It’s all bullshit. I’m out of here. You should go home, too.

  Love Take care,

  J

  I swallowed the melon-sized lump suddenly blocking my throat and blinked against the sting in my eyes. The paper towel fluttered in my shaking hand as I read the note again, each word tearing a piece from my heart. No. He couldn’t have left me. He was all I had left.

  Wadding the note and stuffing it into my pocket, I sprinted out of the camper and up to the office. The bell above the door rang loudly, calling a giggling Bethany to the front. The stench of cigarette smoke followed her in. Her face fell when she saw me, probably because of my own expressi
on.

  “The guy I was with—did you see him leave?” I demanded, panic wavering my voice.

  A crashing sound came from the other room, and Bethany glanced that way, then looked back at me with both worry and apology filling her eyes.

  “Sorry,” she said as she moved for the door connecting the front office to whatever lay beyond. An adjoining apartment, I thought. “But I—”

  “Sorry to bother you,” I muttered as I rushed outside.

  With fists on my hips, I looked over at the truck stop across the road. My truck was still in the mechanic’s bay, pumped up on a jack, but I didn’t care about it now. I couldn’t leave even if it was done. The need to go to Tampa had disappeared at the same time Jeric had, and all I felt now was the need to find him.

  When traffic allowed, I jogged across the highway, through the large store and around the pumps and parking area outside, then into the onsite bar. I blinked at the sudden darkness, the cavernous room dim and empty except for a bartender and one guy wearing a cowboy hat sitting at the bar. Not Jeric. The mechanical bull sat still in its corner, unlike last night when we’d come in for hamburgers and fries before going back to the journal. I’d been tempted then to show Jeric my special talents, but had chosen not to. Maybe if I had, he wouldn’t have left me . . .

  I shook myself out of it and hurried outside, thinking maybe he’d tried to hitch a ride from one of the truck drivers. As a guy old enough to be my daddy climbed down from his cab and leered at me, though, I gave up and ran across the street and to my camper.

  Inside, I fell to the futon, hoping he’d change his mind and return. What else could I do but wait? I was stranded, no way to leave until my truck was done and nowhere to go anyway. And left completely and utterly alone.

  I checked Jeric’s Facebook page, although he didn’t get on much. I admonished myself for the ridiculous thought that we hadn’t even been able to update our status to “In a relationship.” At least there would be no need to change it back. I couldn’t find him on there, though. Not on my Friends list and not when I searched for him. Then my phone screen showed, “Please log in,” and when I tried, it denied me access. None of my online accounts worked. Great. There went another part of me.