The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  Bryn

  It wasn’t that first breath of air that woke me or even the familiar bite of those thorns. What shook me back into my body after watching Chloe and Sebastían disappear was Roman’s voice.

  You made me this way. Monster. Bryn. Bryn. Bryn.

  I felt the blood drain from me inch-by-inch, dread, thick and burning, filling me in its place. And yet, when he knelt over me, all I wanted was to reach out and touch him. For him to hold me or destroy me, I didn’t care which. All I knew was that I missed him. In the deepest hollows of me, his memory was still burning, and I missed the boy I loved, the one who used to love me back.

  “You made me this way, Bryn.”

  You. You. You.

  He spoke the words that had driven me mad, over and over until there was nothing but pain. But this was all wrong. I’d already escaped him once. He’d crippled me, driven me out of my mind, and then I’d woken up. I’d woken up.

  I thought of Mona and Scarlett, faced with their nightmares, driven mad. They’d disappeared but where to? Had they gone back to the place where they’d gotten lost? Was I on my way there too?

  Panic struck me, my fear churned to rage, so silent that Roman didn’t even notice. I strained against the vines, knowing what was coming. But this time I wasn’t going to just let him kill me. Because this time I was awake. Not in my body, but in those parts of me that could carve a waterfall out of stone, that could turn a gust of wind into a tornado.

  But the vines were awake too. They coiled around me, pulling me deeper. The ground opened up, a mouth that sucked me down, down. The light vanished and so did the heat, the earth shifting between my limbs until I was just another part of the soil.

  It pressed down hard over my lips, my cries muffled. I tried to slow down, to think. Think. I could hear Roman’s voice above me and I could feel the weight of him packing the earth. I tried to move my arms and legs but the vines were nothing but teeth now, sharp points drawing blood.

  Think, Bryn. Concentrate.

  I imagined the vines were thread, thin and torn and ready to snap. I imagined I was something else too, not just a girl or a Dreamer, but a weapon. The vines unraveled into something soft, knots untangling themselves. I stretched, my lungs convulsing as I clawed towards the surface. My fingers brushed wind, sunlight, skin. And then the soil parted over my face just as a small hand reached out and took mine.

  34

  Roman

  Cole was supposed to clock out at three. Adham and I idled in the parking lot as the clock ticked to 3:11 then 3:20. It was obvious he was trying to ditch us.

  I slid out into the cold. “I’ll be right back.”

  Chelsea was the first person I saw when I walked into the restaurant. I waited for her to show some kind of sign that she remembered seeing me and Adham last night, but she just smiled and said, “I didn’t think you were scheduled today…”

  I ran a hand through my hair, pretended to be confused. “Oh, I must have mixed up my days. Is Cole here? I needed to ask him a quick question anyway.”

  “Yeah, he’s in the back. Showed up on time for once.”

  I found him standing over the stove, his headphones in. I leaned into his line of sight and he jumped.

  “Shit, man, you snuck up on me.” He spooned sauce over a row of pasta-filled bowls; trying what I assumed was his best attempt at looking normal. In actuality he looked ready to piss himself.

  “How you feeling?” I asked.

  “I’m fighting off the fucking shakes. I couldn’t sleep at all last night.”

  I lowered my voice. “And Chelsea?”

  He looked back, spilling sauce all over the counter. “She doesn’t remember.”

  “And how is that exactly?”

  He let out a breath, obviously not in the mood to talk about the very weirdness his sister despised about him while she was just a few yards away. “It’s sort of like making scrambled eggs.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, food analogies are all I’ve got.” He ran a hand down his face. “I don’t know how I do it…but when I touch people it’s like I can see their memories. They’re linear, almost like flipping through a reel of film. With Chelsea I sort of just left a…smudge. She could probably remember bits and pieces if she really tried but they’re all scrambled now.”

  “Like eggs.”

  “I told you I don’t get it.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Whatever. I don’t need you and Adham on my back right now. I handled it. She doesn’t remember anything.”

  “Do you?” I asked.

  He slid the bowls of pasta into the serving window, a waitress flying by and picking them up.

  “Some. I remember waking up. I remember you almost getting sucked into that wind tunnel thing.” He faced me. “Is that where he was trying to take me?”

  “I think so.”

  “Shit.” He leaned over the counter. “I’m gonna have to go into hiding or something, aren’t I? I’m a fucking sitting duck out here.”

  “Stick close to Adham and—”

  “No.” The word clipped his teeth.

  “What’s your problem with him? In case you haven’t noticed…” Cole shot me an anxious look and I lowered my voice. “In case you haven’t noticed he’s the only thing standing between you and disappearing for good.”

  Cole hit one of the air vents, the other cooks taking their cue and slowly clearing out of the kitchen.

  He stared down at the glowing burners. “I’m just, I’m not like him, okay?”

  “Not like him how?”

  “I’m not…I don’t like him.”

  I realized that whatever powerful aversion Cole had to Adham was less about Adham’s existence and more about his gender. I could also tell that he was expecting me to give a shit but I just couldn’t muster it.

  Cole looked like he was about to unravel and I tried to choose my next words carefully. “I get it, Cole, I do, but you don’t really have a choice.”

  “Well, that’s not very fucking fair.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Do you want to stay alive or not? Because if the answer is yes then you’re going to have to be around him.”

  Cole bristled.

  “You don’t have to like him, you just have to let him stand within a hundred yards of you until we can figure all of this shit out.”

  “Figure it out,” he huffed. “Yeah, we’ll find the bad guys and then what? You don’t have a clue, do you?”

  I tried to pretend I was fuming but he was right. I didn’t know a goddamn thing, not until we tracked down Mr. Foil Head in Roswell and found out what exactly he knew.

  “I have a plan,” I said.

  Cole folded his arms. “A plan?”

  “Yes, but it’s one that requires you to sit within arm bumping distance of Adham for the next three hours.”

  “No way.”

  “Do you want to survive?”

  He looked away, jaw tight. “Fine.”

  “Good because we’re leaving right now.”

  I stormed out through the back door as Cole gathered his stuff. When I rounded the corner I slammed into Carlisle’s girlfriend, Cassie.

  “Are you kidding me?” She snatched her purse from the ground, beating off the dust.

  “Sorry…”

  It had been months since our awkward run-in at Moretti’s when I was still stuck in my wheelchair. Just the week before she’d come by my house to tell me she still had feelings for me. For some reason the memory made me angry and I waited for something biting to say but her face was blue and broken and I lost my train of thought.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  She spun, facing a storefront window. She grazed the bruise before scrambling in her purse and pulling out a small sponge.

  I took her wrist. “Who did that to you?”

  She snatched it back. “Who do you think?” She stared off down the road, trying to make her face as hard as possible. “We broke up. He got angry.�
��

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Not…I mean no, not yet.”

  “Cassie…”

  “Why the hell do you care anyway?”

  “I…because he’s a dick. And because he’s only getting worse. Something’s going on with him.”

  “You mean he’s lost his mind?” I waited for her to say more, maybe that she knew, that she’d seen what was inside him. But all she said was, “I heard he’s got it out for you.”

  “What else have you heard?”

  Her voice dropped and my stomach followed. “That you should be careful.”

  “What’s he planning?”

  “I don’t know. Something bad. You had sex with his girlfriend, so what do you expect?” Her voice trailed off. We both knew that wasn’t really the reason. She looked like she was about to say more but then she turned to walk away.

  “Cassie.”

  She stopped.

  “I’m not going to let him get away with this,” I said. “Any of it.”

  She pulled open the door to Moretti’s, her side-glance betraying that she didn’t believe a word I’d said, and then she disappeared inside.

  I thought Cole might have tried to make a run for it until he smudged a circle over the passenger window and peered inside. I raised a thumb to the backseat and he got in.

  “Thought you choked.”

  “I got held up.”

  We sped down the highway, Adham maneuvering the slick roads as if we were outrunning something instead of running towards it. We cut half an hour off our time but when we reached Roswell it was already dark.

  I looked back, Cole’s face lit up by the glow of his cell phone. “Are you sure you’re reading the GPS right?”

  “It says it’s right here.” He waved a hand. “Somewhere.”

  “We’ve driven up and down this road three times already,” Adham said.

  I rolled down my window. “I say we just pick one of these turnoffs and see where it leads.”

  Cole groaned. “There’s nothing out here, dude. Just a bunch of flat land until you get to those mountains in the distance.”

  “And I don’t think those are actual turnoffs,” Adham said. “They look more like trenches carved out by the rain.”

  “Well, do either of you have a better suggestion?” I asked. They were quiet. “Then gun it, will you?”

  Adham turned down the first break in the side of the road, the car jostling. The headlights poured straight into nothing, all of us trying to make out some kind of structure or silhouette, anything at all.

  “This is fucking creepy,” Cole said. “I told you there was nothing out here.”

  I looked back. “Yeah, well, your GPS says differently.”

  The tires tripped over something and I knocked into the side door. We slowed, Adham’s foot off the gas.

  He glanced at me. “Didn’t Felix say something about booby traps?”

  Spotlights blinded us—two white moons just in front of the car’s hood that seemed to come out of nowhere. Adham tried to reverse but there was something backed up against the tires. I threw my door open, the ground covered in cacti, blinking red lights tied around the bulbs.

  “Shit!” I punched the dash, my fists glowing.

  A smaller spotlight danced between the two larger ones, coming closer. A silhouette stepped in front of our headlights, stout and shaped like a rhinoceros. The spotlights dimmed, revealing a man holding a flashlight and a handgun.

  “You’re trespassing!” He shone his flashlight over my face, the light shifting to my glowing hands. I ducked down but it was too late. “Well…look what we have here.”

  Adham mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “Play along,” he hissed before stepping out of the car.

  The man’s eyes were wide behind his glasses, the thick goggle-like frames making him look like an incompetent fighter pilot from the forties. “Stay back,” he said, the gun shaking.

  Adham raised his hands, two shadows in the dark. He wasn’t exposing himself. “We need your help.”

  The man looked from Adham to me, confused. So was I.

  “My friend,” Adham said, “he needs your help. Something…something’s wrong with him. We heard about you on the Internet, that you were an expert on this kind of thing. Please.”

  Flattery. That was all it took. The man loosened his grip on the gun as I stepped out of the car, my glowing hands shaking, my face twisted in a fake sob.

  “Please…” I stammered as if the heat inside me was actually boiling. “It hurts.”

  The man rushed over, looking but not touching. His mouth fought between a grimace and a smile and I knew we had him. “Follow me.”

  It turned out Cole was right. There was nothing out here, only under. NightKnight1999 led us to a circular metal door that lay flat against the earth. He heaved it open, cement stairs leading straight down, the glow from a television bleeding onto the bottom steps. Adham descended first, but halfway in the hole, I looked back to see Cole shivering.

  “No way, man.”

  I grabbed his arm, dragging him behind me.

  The low ceiling stretched over an orange couch, a small kitchen table topped with portable burners, and a wooden three-tiered desk that housed computer screens and some other equipment I didn’t recognize. It smelled like Mexican food and dirty socks.

  “Sit.” The man motioned to the couch that was only enough room for two.

  “That’s okay…” Adham said.

  “I don’t want to burn anything,” I threw in.

  His stare was too tense and I could tell he wanted to be closer, drool already sticking to the creases of his mouth. “My name’s Oswald Grimly but I’m sure you already knew that.” It was obvious this guy wasn’t modest but I figured that could work in our favor. “Now, explain to me again what exactly happened to your friend here.”

  “You tell us,” Adham said.

  I decided it was a good idea for Adham to take the lead. He had the patience for it. If it were up to me I’d hold a flame to Oswald’s eyeballs until he told us everything we wanted to know.

  “I need details,” Oswald said. “If this is what I think it is then…”

  “What do you think it is?” Adham asked.

  Oswald came closer, examining me. I held up my hands, palms facing him as a current of fire danced over each one.

  “How well-versed are you in ancient South American folklore?”

  “Not very,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed.

  I could tell this guy was the long-winded type and we didn’t have time for fireside ghost stories.

  “What about El Dorado?” he asked.

  “Like the city?” Adham said.

  Oswald raised a finger. “Not a city. Don’t worry it’s a very common misconception, one that dates back hundreds of years. We can blame the Chibeha tribe for that one. Literally hundreds of men lost their lives searching for the City of Gold only to starve to death halfway through the Colombian mountains.”

  “So, if it’s not a city, then what is it?” I asked.

  His smile widened, a little crooked, a little wicked. “You.” He stared at my hands again, as if speaking directly to the source of light. “El Dorado actually translates as The Gilded One. Archeologists just recently decided to acknowledge the distinction but it doesn’t matter now. The story of El Dorado as a city is too ingrained into the global culture. In fact, not even the ancient Chibchas were following the correct legend.”

  “What legend?” I found the wall, leaned against it.

  “There are many versions of the story but they all derive from the Chibchas’ belief that the Sun god they worshipped somehow created or gave birth to a being entirely made of gold. Or flames, depending on how literal you like your interpretations.”

  “So The Gilded One is made of fire,” Adham said.

  Oswald nodded. “Just like your friend here.”

  “But you said even their myth wasn’t totally
accurate,” I added.

  “Correct. The true story, the story that was forgotten over time, is that the Sun god created The Gilded One for the sole purpose of protecting The Children of The Moon. These children were born with special abilities to manipulate things as they slept, usually by way of dreams. You see, being that the children navigated the night, it was impossible for the sun to look after them. Not only that, but things that are born in and from darkness have a tendency to...well...become darkness themselves. The children needed to be protected but they also needed to be controlled.”

  “So where does the story get screwed up?” Cole asked.

  I wracked my brain, replaying Bryn’s origin story of the girl whose father had ripped her into pieces and buried her alive. The Rogues had said they had no idea where we’d come from or why, but even with this new version of the story, things still weren’t adding up.

  “I’m getting there,” Oswald said. “In the beginning there was one particular child of the moon who gave into that very darkness and every time she slept a part of the world was destroyed. She was the daughter of the highest Chief and when he saw what she’d done and what she was capable of he decided to destroy her. But it wasn’t easy. There were ceremonies involved, bloodlettings and enchantments—gruesome and horrifying stuff, let me tell you. And after all of that he took her body and buried her half alive.”

  My knees gave out just as I found the couch. Even though I knew Bryn’s origin story it still crippled me. The thought of someone doing something so horrible out of fear made me sick.

  “In the time after her death a lake formed over her burial ground. That’s when the story changed and the Chibchas turned the girl into a goddess who’d apparently drowned herself in order to avoid some kind of punishment at the hands of her father. Eventually they started worshipping her the same way they worshipped their Sun god and during ceremonies the Chief would smear gold paint all over his body before dunking himself in the water.”

  “They turned it into a gimmick,” I said, light radiating from my fingertips.

  “And not a very elaborate one,” Oswald said.

  “Makes it sound like some kind of joke.”