Inbetween

by Tara Fuller

  Emma snatched the bottle from her mother’s open palm, fingers trembling, and popped open the bottle. When she swallowed one, I wanted to pull the pill out of her throat. To tell her she wasn’t crazy. To tell her the truth. But that wasn’t an option. I was breaking enough rules just being here.

  “Please don’t be mad at me,” Rachel pleaded.

  Emma’s brows scrunched together and she chewed on her bottom lip. She looked so much like Allison when she was mad it made me ache.

  “You know what happened last time you got off your meds. Please don’t put either of us through that again.”

  Emma sighed. “I took it, didn’t I?”

  Rachel nodded and stared down into her coffee cup. “Right. Sorry.”

  Emma gathered up the bag of scones in her arms. “Have fun on your date.”

  She darted out the door before her mom had time to say anything else, and headed across the green stretch of lawn between her house and Cash’s studio, a little steel building next to his much-larger house. A steady stream of some kind of rock music that made my eyes twitch and my head hurt vibrated the metal walls. The door was propped open, and paint fumes drifted out into the open air.

  She shook her head and set the small paper sack of the pumpkin scones inside, then left without a word. He didn’t notice her. He usually didn’t when he was practically making love to one of canvases with a paintbrush.

  “This…” Easton appeared beside me cocooned in a cloud of smoke. “This might be the most boring thing I’ve ever experienced.”

  I sighed.

  “You seriously do this every day?” he asked. “Follow her around like this?”

  “Yes.” I climbed into Emma’s worn-out Jeep Wrangler and settled into the tiny bench seat behind her.

  He sank down beside me and grinned. “At least tell me you get to watch her shower?”

  “I thought I asked you to stop following me around.” Emma twisted the radio louder so I raised my voice. “Surely someone out there is in need of a lift to Hell.”

  “Nope.” Easton propped his feet up on the empty passenger seat in front of him. “I’m on a break.”

  “Lucky me.” I rolled my eyes. “How long are you going to do this?”

  He shrugged and studied the gray felt ceiling. “I’ve been at it for two years, so yeah. As long as it takes for you to see reason.”

  “Great.” I stared out the window at the cars passing by, the pine trees behind them melting into a bright green blur. A big truck with a Summerfield Peach Farm logo idled to a rumbling stop beside us at a traffic light, then surged forward again, taking part of me with it. I could almost feel the shuddering of the tractor beneath my thighs. Smell the bittersweet fragrance that a batch of ripe peaches lent to the breeze. When I closed my eyes, I could even see Pop. A crisp flannel shirt on Sunday morning. The white, crinkled laugh lines at the edges of his eyes. Proof that he did indeed smile. He always hated that the sun gave him away like that, like it made him look too soft.

  “Hellooooo. Earth to Finn!” Easton snapped his fingers in front of my face.

  I blinked away the memory then stuffed it back in its box, wondering how in the hell it had gotten out in the first place.

  Easton nodded to the empty front seat, then to Emma trudging across the parking lot littered with kids. A light spattering of rain was dusting the windows, making it hard to see her as she disappeared like a needle in a haystack of high school students. “I don’t want to worry you, but…” He hesitated. “I saw a redhead in the crowd with the kids. I know it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Maeve—” I hopped up and slid through the closed door, Easton right behind me. Cold metal sizzled through me, leaving a metallic-tasting tang on my tongue. As soon as the air hit me I felt it. Felt her.

  No way in hell was I letting Maeve get past me again. Not after how close she’d gotten this morning.

  “It might not have been her, Finn,” Easton continued. “It was probably just a kid with red hair.

  What do I know?”

  My skin prickled. My insides burned. “It’s her.”

  A clap of thunder pulsed through the sky. Before the mirror incident this morning, it had been a couple of weeks since Maeve last came sniffing around Emma, but I never let my guard down. This was no exception. I pressed into the crush of students just as my scythe began to burn cold at my hip.

  The pull blasted through me like ice. I doubled over and clutched my side.

  “Stop fighting it,” Easton called out behind me. “I can watch her if you want.”

  “I can’t,” I gritted out, feeling bits and pieces of myself slip away like dust siphoned away by a gust of wind. I vaguely heard the school bell ring. Good. Even though it meant the shadows would get to the other soul before I would, I couldn’t leave Emma now. I had to see her go inside before I took this reap.

  I spotted Emma on the steps. Just a few more feet and she’d be through that door and safe. Well, safer than she’d be out here in the open. Maeve wouldn’t risk messing with her in a room full of people.

  But she wasn’t taking those vital steps. The crowded courtyard had already mostly cleared. Emma stalled, one hand on the door, lost in conversation with another girl.

  A giggle like glass echoed down from the rooftop.

  Easton cursed.

  High above where Emma stood, Maeve tiptoed along the gutter, balancing like a tightrope walker in a circus. She winked at me, then hopped on top of the giant metal bobcat sign that hung above the school entrance. I’m sure when they placed it there, they were thinking of team spirit and student morale. All I saw was a weapon with Maeve’s finger on the trigger.

  “Hey Finn!” Maeve hollered. Her bright red hair ruffled in the breeze, the sun glinting from the strands that had been blanched to a dull silver color. Her green cotton dress clung to her pale knees.

  Even from here, I could see the dark, hollow look settling into her eyes. The ashy color of her skin.

  The beginning of her transition into a shadow. “You think she’ll go splat? I want to find out.”

  Maeve reached down and pulled at one of the cables. Pop. The big bobcat groaned as it tilted off-balance. Like a ballet dancer, she leaped and twirled, then reached down again. Pop. Souls only got stronger with age. And it seemed Maeve was intent on showing me just how strong she’d gotten.

  “I’ve got to get Emma out of there.”

  Easton stilled. The grip that I hadn’t even realized he had on my arm tightened. “And how exactly are you going to do that?”

  The brunette girl talking to Emma waved and slipped through the glass doors. The last of the students vanished into the hallway.

  A loud snap cracked through the air and my heart lurched. The big metal mascot banner tumbled loose from the brick wall and I ripped my arm from Easton’s grasp.

  Maeve wasn’t just going to hurt Emma, she was going to kill her.

  All I could see, think, or feel was Emma. Sprinting up the steps, I sucked in a deep breath and filled my hollow lungs with air, forced the walls in my chest to hold it there. I willed my skin into existence without thought, only need. Emma looked up, horror registering on her face. I squeezed my eyes shut and barreled into her, knocking her over the railing, where we toppled onto a blanket of grass.

  With a deafening crash, the sign behind us skidded across the concrete steps, splintering into sparks and blades. I lay there for a few seconds, stunned by the feel of Emma’s solid warmth beneath me, the hectic swell of her lungs pumping against my chest. I was…touching her. Her sapphire-blue eyes stared back into mine. Our noses nearly touched. Her peppermint breath clung to my lips.

  “You can see me,” I said, breathless.

  “Of course I can see you.” Emma glanced over my shoulder, but she didn’t make a move. “Your face is practically touching my face. It would be kind of hard not to see you.”

  I could barely answer. The impossibility of what was happening drowned me. Did she remember me? God, please let her rem
ember me. I dug my fingers into the grass on either side of her face. “The sign…it fell.”

  “Yeah.” Emma gulped and wriggled beneath me. “I can see that.”

  She didn’t remember. I rolled off her, trying not to feel disappointed, just as Easton plowed through the bushes beside us like smoke. “Finn. I’m sorry man—” He looked back and forth between Emma and me and took a step back. “What did you do?”

  I scrambled farther away from Emma and her warmth, shaking. “I…I…I didn’t mean to.”

  “Do you think Balthazar is going to buy that?” Easton snapped. “Because I sure as hell don’t. Do you have any idea what this means for you?”

  I staggered to my feet, refusing to break eye contact with Emma. Of course I knew. I just didn’t care.

  The school doors flung open. Students and faculty spilled out into the courtyard, their shouts echoing off the concrete building. Emma held my gaze for one last heart-stopping moment, then turned her attention to a teacher calling her name. Before she could look back, I let the air take hold of my skin until I faded into nothing.

  “Emma!” A teacher with short gray curls stepped over a twisted hunk of metal that used to be the bobcat’s snout. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” She rubbed her knee and pushed herself up. “I wouldn’t be if it—” She looked back to where I’d been standing and her brows pulled together.

  “You wouldn’t be if what?” The teacher pushed up her glasses and looked right through where I was standing, invisible.

  “Nothing.” Emma touched her head, her face suddenly far too pale. “I think I hit my head or something.”

  The crowd swallowed her, taking her away from me. In the distance a fire engine’s siren started to wail. Easton scowled and opened his mouth to rip me apart, but the words stayed stuck there. He grabbed his scythe. “He knows,” he finally choked out.

  I could already feel Balthazar’s pull like fire eating its way through me cell by cell, overriding the call of the dead I’d ignored to save Emma.

  Two strikes against me in a matter of a minute. I was so screwed.

  Easton gave in to the call, and without a word disappeared.

  I held on a little longer and drifted toward the crowd. A fireman carrying a medic bag led Emma to a bench in the courtyard and checked her vital signs, while she warily looked into the crowd. She plucked a few blades of grass out of her hair and brushed her blue sweater off, her hands shaking.

  I’d touched her.

  She’d seen me. Talked to me.

  But she hadn’t remembered. I should have been thankful for that. If she ever remembered who I really was, what I’d done to her, to us… She’d hate me.

  I braced my hands on my knees, unable to look away from her. My world was spinning. And it wasn’t the hell I knew I was about to pay with Balthazar. It wasn’t even the energy I’d spent touching her. It was knowing that everything had just changed. It was knowing there was no way I could go an eternity without that again. Balthazar’s call turned to spikes in my skull, blocking my thoughts.

  I would have given anything to have one more moment with her. To let her know I was there. That I’d always be there. But instead, I gave in to the wind. As usual, I belonged to death.

  Chapter 4

  Finn The Inbetween. I couldn’t make myself take another step closer. I’d spent too much time avoiding this place. Avoiding the memory of Allison and how badly I’d wanted her. Avoiding how that wanting had blinded me to the consequences of our relationship and doomed us both. Choosing to drop the souls off at the gates was easier than facing the memories that hid behind every shadow inside. Balthazar made sure I had plenty of reminders without this. But of course, that was my punishment. Every reap was connected to something I’d done, and I hated it. God only knew how much longer he was going to keep this up. After today…I had a feeling it wasn’t ever going to end.

  A gatekeeper in a gray hooded cloak raised a brow at me. “Are you coming in or not?”

  I nodded and stepped through the gates, looking out over the frozen horizon. Neither day nor night, light nor dark. Just a blanket of charcoal mist that I couldn’t feel on my face, and a bouquet of stars butting against the glass floor beneath my feet. The swaying mass of silver wheat that always sat off in the distance tapered off into the rolling hills, where it was swallowed by shadows. There wasn’t a single weeping willow, skyscraper, shipwreck, or double-decker bus, but their opaque shadows haunted the colorless terrain like ghosts of a land long forgotten.

  Somewhere in the distance, the rush of waves washed over a shore that I’d never been able to find.

  Back when she’d only been Allison to me, Emma and I looked for hours once. Even after I’d been called away to a reap, Allison scoured the endless miles of nothing searching for the ghost of an ocean that didn’t exist. I’d found her later lying on the glass floor staring up at a long, twisted shadow that rippled with far-away screams.

  “I can’t remember what this is,” she whispered, sounding so small and lost. “I should know what it is, right?”

  “It’s a roller coaster,” I told her, “or the shadow of one, anyway.”

  She just nodded, the quiet madness swirling in the depths of her ocean-blue eyes. “And I’m…”

  I knelt down beside her and brushed the white-blond hair away from her neck. “You’re Allison.” I said. “You’re my Allison.”

  I blinked away the memory when the throng of reapers gathering became too loud to ignore. A nervous energy bounced through the crowd like sparks—to be expected when the reapers from Heaven, the Inbetween, and Hell congregated in one place. I could feel those sparks in my chest, driving fear into my jittery limbs. We didn’t get called in for a meeting like this too often, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out this one was for me.

  I stayed on the outskirts of the crowd, avoiding the stares and whispers that spread like a virus as I moved toward the gathering square. I wasn’t just a reaper to them. To them I was the outcast who had broken an age-old rule and fallen in love with a charge, defied Balthazar in an unforgivable way, and gotten away with it. To them I’d spit in the face of God.

  And now I’d done it again. They just didn’t know it yet.

  I searched for a safe, familiar face. Easton or Anaya, preferably, but at that point, I would have settled for Scout, a reaper who’d been recruited twenty years ago or so. Which meant he was still new.

  And stupid. His assigned territory bled into ours, so we crossed paths from time to time. He was the closest thing I had to a friend outside of Easton and Anaya, and while Scout might have been a lot of things, judgmental wasn’t one of them.

  Unable to locate the three of them, I was forced to face the reality of my situation. Balthazar was standing on the steps to the Great Hall, the only real building in the Inbetween, though none of us ever went in it. Shiny marble steps led up to the reflective structure, its walls like mirrors, so that it practically disappeared into the nothingness around it. Reapers milled around the dry stone fountain in the center of the meeting square, casting questioning glances my way. Balthazar pressed his lips together and narrowed his gaze on me.

  That look said I was screwed.

  “Ten minutes, people!” Balthazar’s voice crashed through the crowd like a wave, echoing in myriad languages so there’d be no misunderstanding his message. “Get seated or I lose my patience. I don’t think any of you want to find out what that’s like.”

  Reapers scattered in a panic to find a place to sit. I shoved my hands in my pockets and hightailed it over to where I spotted Easton sitting down.

  “Hey,” I said, taking the seat beside him. He folded his arms across his chest and stared at the gold lectern at the top of the steps that awaited Balthazar’s arrival. “You still pissed at me?”

  “He warned you, Finn. He told you what would happen if you interfered in her life again.”

  “I told you, I didn’t mean to,” I whispered. “It…it just happened.”
r />   “You’re an even bigger moron than I thought if you think he’s going to buy that.”

  A dark gray fog rolled in, erecting walls of darkness around us, sealing us in. Not that we needed the reminder that we weren’t allowed to mix with the souls. My little stunt with Allison had taken care of that.

  I sank lower in my chair, hating that the reapers around us looked like they were about to witness an execution. Mine. “What do you want from me, Easton?”

  His eyes, two violet slits, crushed me with their stare. “I want you to stop being too ignorant to worry about anything but that stupid human.”

  “Don’t call her stupid.”

  “Fine,” he hissed, leaning forward so that I couldn’t escape the scent of brimstone and death wafting between us. “You’re stupid. You’re stupid and an asshole.”

  “What is your problem?” A few reapers with white jackets and eerily golden eyes raised their brows at us, so I lowered my voice. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  “Nothing to do with me? Who do you think he’ll get to haul you off to Hell when he’s done giving you second chances?”

  I could only stare at him. Maybe it was because I was still a half-put-together puzzle without Emma. Maybe I was still high from touching her. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t find the words to make any of this okay between us.

  “You’re my friend.” His voice broke, something I’d never witnessed in over seventy years of reaping with Easton. “My best friend, you selfish bastard. And you’re just going to…” He shook his head and pressed his lips together. “If you had any idea what Hell really was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  I scrubbed my hands over my face, and looked through my fingers at Easton’s black combat boots. I tried to imagine what he was telling me. The only Hell I’d ever known was living without Emma for fifteen years, not knowing what kind of life I’d sent her to. Was she happy? Was she safe? Was there someone who loved her as much as I did? I went so long without knowing. I finally spoke into the hollow of my palms, hoping Easton could hear me because I wasn’t ready to look at him. “I’m sorry.”