The Space Between (The Book of Phoenix)

by Kristie Cook

  I texted Jeric several messages: “Where are you?” “Are you coming back?” When no answer came, I asked, “Did you really leave me?” And I waited for some kind of reply, anything, but none came. About two hours after sending the last one, I knew none would come—my phone showed “No Service” and nothing I did fixed it.

  I tried not to panic, but my heart grew heavy in my chest and my stomach squeezed itself into a tiny ball as the reality of my situation settled in. I had no home except this camper stuck in a podunk, off-the-highway town in northern Florida where I knew nobody. My great-uncle was missing, and now that the pull to go to Tampa was gone, I had no idea where to look for him. He was probably dead by now anyway, murdered by the same “them” who had killed Jacey and Micah. My own existence had faded into the ether, and, if what had happened to Jacey and Micah was happening to us, scary Shadowmen, who might not have been real men at all, hunted me.

  Jeric’s presence had been a buffer to the chaos my life had become. Not only someone to share it with, but a connection that had given me hope. The inexplicable feelings I had for him hadn’t seeped in slowly until they reached my heart, but had sprang from my very soul as if they’d always been there. They kept me optimistic that whatever was going on, however things turned out, I’d be okay because I had him here with me.

  I shouldn’t have put so much stock in him, in us. Foolishness, I knew. He asked if I ever took chances when he’d been my biggest risk of all. He had no idea how much I had put myself out there with him, inviting him to the camper and into my life. Like every other time I’d done something because I wanted to and because it felt good, as he’d put it, I’d made a huge mistake. There was a reason Mama controlled my life—I wasn’t fit to make decisions.

  Don’t go there. I drew in a deep breath. No, I didn’t need to go to that dark place I’d lived in for so long until Uncle Theo had helped me find a way out. Mama’s hold on me reached far, all the way from Alaska to Georgia after she and Daddy had moved, but Uncle Theo tried to teach me to trust in myself. To live my life, not hers. And even when I’d disappointed him so badly, he encouraged me, saying I was bound to make mistakes and that was okay. Okay to make mistakes? To fail? The opposite of what I’d been taught for as long as I could remember.

  “Life’s about falling down and getting back up again,” he’d said before I left for Italy. “This is your chance to get back up. And whatever you do, whatever happens, follow your own heart, little bird. Believe in yourself. In your instinct. That’s your soul talking to you, and it’s much wiser than your brain.”

  My soul, however, felt nothing but emptiness now.

  Needing an escape, a distraction, I picked up Jacey’s journal and read the last several entries again, hoping something had changed but, of course, it hadn’t. “They” had killed Jacey.

  But who were “they”? The Shadowmen? Or the people who were supposedly helping them? Micah could have elaborated a bit more. And did he mean he was about to die, too? Did he kill himself because of heartbreak?

  What does it matter?

  None of it mattered because the whole act of reading the journal had been completely pointless. There were no answers in this book. It was only a tragic story with a horrible ending. Nothing useful for us at all.

  My gut wrenched at the reminder that we really knew nothing. If I went on without Jeric, the thought of which caused another twist of my insides, I could be facing what Jacey and Micah did—death. Maybe that’s what the whole book was for, simply to warn us away.

  But there had to be more to it, didn’t there?

  Like Jeric had last night, I flipped through the blank pages, but more slowly, looking for evidence of torn-out sheets, indentions pens had left from writing on another page, anything. When I returned to Micah’s entry, I gasped out loud. New words had appeared, the ink faded to almost invisible and not in Jacey’s or Micah’s handwriting:

  You know the rest. Remember.

  I stared at the two phrases. Had they been there before, but so light we hadn’t seen them? They had to have been. Because otherwise . . . a chill brought goose bumps to my skin. There was no other explanation. Not in my world.

  But what was I supposed to remember? I closed my eyes and concentrated on the individual pieces of the puzzle, trying to see how they fit together so I could determine which pieces were missing. Which ones I needed to remember.

  My mind danced on the edge of consciousness as I tried to make sense of it all. I needed to figure this out.

  This is important. Urgent. The meaning of it all.

  You know the rest. Remember.

  Chapter 26

  Darkness surrounded me as I drifted away from my body. And from Micah. The raw edges of my soul, where we had been wrenched apart, burned with agony, and I’d never felt so devastatingly alone.

  Then my parents’ smiling faces gazed at me and images of scenes from my childhood appeared. Was this for real? Was I dying and watching my life flash by? You’ve got to be kidding me. Scene after scene shuffled past, but eventually slowed. To that night. I watched myself as a girl, laying out my paintings by the fireplace at the cabin so the watercolors would be dry by morning and my mom could frame them to brighten the cabin’s dark wood interior. But neither my mom nor the cabin would be there in the morning.

  I sat on my cot in the corner of the one-room cabin with my knees drawn to my chest. A nightmare had awoken me and I couldn’t fall back to sleep, so I watched long shadows dance across the walls. The yellowish-orange light of the fire grew brighter, and the wood popped and sparks flew out of the hearth. Some landed on my art, and the paper immediately ignited.

  Mom and Dad slept on the pullout bed of the old couch. Right in front of the fireplace. A scream had barely worked its way through my throat before their blankets caught fire. Flames licked hungrily and smoke filled the air. Daddy called for me in the darkness, and I tried to find him, but my eyes watered, and I couldn’t stop coughing to answer him. The entire log cabin lit up in seconds as though it were only dry kindling.

  A dog barked outside, and I tried to make my way toward the sound, toward the door, crawling on my hands and knees like they’d taught us at school. I’d lost my bearings in the cabin when the roof collapsed, but I’d rolled over at the loud crash, trying to escape the fire raining down around me. A burning ember from a beam fell across my stomach and ribs. My scream tore through the night as the ember singed through my clothes and into my skin. But my throat was so parched, my lips cracked, and no tears came from my dried-out ducts. Smoke burned my lungs, and I gave up trying to breathe.

  That’s when Sammy found me. He barked and then grabbed my arm with his mouth and pulled. I could barely feel his teeth digging into my skin, my lungs, stomach and ribs searing with such agony. Somehow, he dragged me outside. Somehow, I managed to crawl several feet away from the cabin. Somehow, I lay on a bed of pine needles on the ground without crying or screaming, but silently watching as the flames grew bigger, as though trying to lick the clouds above, setting everything around me in an orange glow.

  I screamed now. Screamed for my parents. For myself. Why did they have to die? Why not me? Why was I left in the world alone? I’d been a good girl. I’d done everything right as a child—obeyed my parents, earned good grades, received academic and art awards. What had I done that was so bad to be left behind? I understood the semi-boyfriend in high school, even Pops and Bex. I deserved for them to be ripped away from me after everything I’d done since my parents’ deaths. But why Mom and Dad? Was I a bad person from the start? Born to bring only death and destruction? The Grim Reaper after all?

  “No, Jacey, do not go into the darkness. Come to the light.” The voice sounded from far away. “This way, child. To the light where your soul belongs.” The soothing voice offered comfort. Lured me into its warmth.

  Then bright light engulfed me.
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br />   The pain of being separated from Micah, of reliving the fire, of feeling so broken and lost and alone slid away. My soul seemed to grow, yet became lighter at the same time. Lighter as in the weight of the world, of mundane life, of love and loss and stress and fear, had lifted completely. I became weightless, drifting on the air of this place of white nothingness like a feather floating on a stream.

  And I felt . . . free.

  “Yes, you are a free soul,” the deep but soothing voice sounded all around me again.

  The white light I seemed to be drifting in faded and shapes of my surroundings grew defined edges. A room, like a cave, but not dark or dirty. Ribbons of color streamed through the walls and ceiling as if a rainbow river flowed through them, but a turn to my right showed that they reflected the vast, irregularly shaped pool in the center of the room. A pool of light, not water, although a mist rose and swirled along its surface, its colors constantly blurring and changing. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of orbs of blue light bobbed around the curving edges, and a figure in a white robe stood on the side directly opposite me, a hood hiding its face in shadow. I assumed the voice I’d just heard belonged to it.

  “Am I dead?” I blurted out.

  “By Earthly definition, yes,” the figure answered, and I was right about the voice belonging to him. “But this is not Earth.”

  I swallowed. Well, swallowing was the sensation I felt, although I had no real body. I knew this—in fact, I was pretty sure I was another light orb bobbing by the pool—but I still felt like I had some kind of a defined shape with arms and legs and a head.

  “Is this . . . is this Heaven?” I stammered because I never expected I’d wind up here. I hadn’t even been sure Heaven or God existed, but I’d followed the light (was it a cliché or had all those people talking about “the light” really experienced death?). “Are you God?”

  “More Earthly terms.” The white robe chuckled. “But, goodness, no, I am not The Maker. I am the Keeper here.”

  “Where is here? Where are we if not in Heaven? We’re not in Hell, are we?” The place held too much beauty and serenity to possibly be Hell, but maybe the ambiance was part of the deceit.

  “Most definitely not what you would call Hell. We are in the Space Between.”

  I tilted the head I didn’t really have. “The Space Between?”

  “That is where we are. Welcome. We had hoped we wouldn’t see you again quite so soon, but apparently, that was His plan all along. So here we are again.”

  “Again,” I echoed. “In the Space Between. Between what?”

  “Between Heaven and Hell, to use words you are familiar with. Between worlds and realms and dimensions. Between lives and between time. The Space Between it all. This is where all souls come when they leave their physical bodies in their respective worlds so their lives may be reviewed and their souls renewed before choosing their next paths and their next worlds.”

  “And you say I’ve been here before?”

  “Oh, yes, many times. Since the beginning of forever.”

  And somehow, I knew he spoke the truth. The Space Between felt familiar. I felt suddenly certain I’d been here before, although I couldn’t recall it ever looking like this—with a man in a robe and a pool of light and mist before me. Why did I feel like we were in an Earthly cave, albeit a surreal one?

  “You see and smell and hear and feel this place in a way most familiar to you from your last life, your last world. You’re putting the Space into terms you can understand from recent memory. It’s different every time you return.”

  A series of memories flashed through me of thousands of lifetimes on thousands of different worlds, including the one with the glass palace reflecting the teal-green sky with its two suns. A darkness flickered through me with this last thought.

  The Keeper suddenly stood right next to me, and a warm current washed through me. I formed the visual of him taking my hand, because that’s how it felt to my soul.

  “Come, child, we must hurry. You must remember it all before you go back.”

  “Go back?”

  “Well, I assume that’s what you will choose, but, of course, the choice is yours.”

  “Please explain.”

  I could feel his smile, although I still couldn’t see his face. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  He tugged on me to follow him, so I did as we moved around the edge of the pool, the orbs bobbing out of our way.

  “You have been many people and have gone by many names throughout the millennia of time, but your soul has always meant protector of the light. The one you currently know as Micah, the uplifted leader of armies, belongs to you and you to him. You are dyads. Your souls were created for each other in the beginning and, after many life cycles of learning and growing together, they became one. The Union is the highest form dyad souls can take. You have both always been warriors, and in recent lives you had reached the highest of the world echelons.”

  “Wait. What does that mean?”

  The Keeper seemed to sigh. “We only have a short time. I’ll explain briefly. The Maker created thousands of worlds, realms, and dimensions across the universe and beyond, and He created the souls to populate them, more than any Earthly human could comprehend. Souls travel to different worlds for different life cycles. Some worlds are in lower dimensions, where souls are challenged with the foundations of love and life. At the other end of the spectrum are the highest echelons, where Union souls can go to learn about the most complex truths—concepts only The Maker and those closest to Him, whom you would call the angels, truly understand.”

  As I processed this, one of the orbs by the pool changed from a bluish color like the others to a bright pink. The Keeper left my side to attend to the orb. After a few moments, the ball of light vaulted high above the pool and then dove down, disappearing into the misty swirls of light.

  “So sorry to keep you waiting,” the Keeper apologized. “She’d chosen her next destination, and I had to send her on her way.”

  “That’s how souls go to the next place? Through the pool of light?”

  The Keeper’s hood bounced in a nod. “When physical bodies die, the souls inside detach from the corporeal world they’d inhabited and come here to the Space Between. They review their most recent life and how it affected their souls, then based on their growth—or lack thereof—they’re given a choice of what comes next. They may be limited to a few choices, or I may be able to offer them many. Each soul and each life cycle is different, as are the worlds. Some, the highest levels, only allow Union souls. You had been on such a world before your trip to Earth.”

  I stopped in the path we were making around the pool. “If Earth is one of those higher level worlds, I don’t even want to know what the lower ones are like. They must be in Hell.”

  “Well, no. Only the Dark worlds are in Hell, as you call it. But Earth is not a higher level, nowhere close to Heaven.”

  I blew out air I didn’t really breathe. “That’s a relief. So if Earth is a lower level and Micah and I were at the highest level before, why were we here? There—on Earth, I mean?”

  “Yes, yes.” Excitement filled his “voice.” “This is the part you must try to remember for next time. The part we must deeply embed into your soul.”

  As if on cue, the memories began to return.

  “Wait. I know this.” I paused to gather the thoughts and images and clarify them in my mind, the thinking part of my soul. “We were warriors. Micah and me. Actually . . . we were one warrior, together, a mighty one, right?”

  The Keeper nodded. “You have always been Guardians.”

  “We led an army on that world,” I continued, still pulling the memories in one at a time. “We shouldn’t have needed it, though. I remember a peace we’d never had on any other world, in any other realm or dimension. Except .
. . darkness had come in. Darkness consumed us.”

  “Yes. Enyxa, ruler of the Dark worlds—Hell as you call it—had found her way into that world, forcing you to fight. Her Lakari infiltrated.”

  “There were too many dark spirits, and they overtook us.” My soul filled with grief as more memories came. “Oh, my god. The pain. I remember the pain. And the screaming. They separated the Union souls. Ripped them apart!”

  If I had an actual heart, it would be breaking with the agony. Like what I had felt when pulled away from Micah, but a hundred times worse. Although I had no physical eyes or tear ducts, I felt as though tears streamed.

  “All of those souls . . .” I sobbed.

  The Keeper placed a hand on my shoulder, and his voice came out low and heavy with grief. “Enyxa found a way to bypass the Space Between and sent those Separated souls to different worlds, where they’d never be able to find each other and rejoin.”

  I instantly knew what this meant. After several life cycles of not finding each other, Separated souls grew Dark, and eventually they succumbed to Enyxa. They became her Lakari. Or Shadowmen, as I’d called them in this last life.

  “We were lucky the two of you made it here together, although you’d already been Separated.”

  I couldn’t remember this part. The torture of our Separation eclipsed the memories of what happened next.

  “And we chose to go to Earth?” I asked as a guess. “Why?”

  “I don’t think it was really much of a choice. You see, Enyxa has been working to destroy Earth. She’s been sending more and more Lakari there, darkening the world with all that she offers—greed, power, and self over love, kindness, and others. Earth continues to slide into the shadows of heartache and hopelessness, and eventually, it will become hers. You and Micah, hurt and angry and the warriors you are, seized the opportunity to fight for the souls there.”