Inbetween (Kissed by Death, #1) (25 page)

“Hey.” I touched her chin. “Wake up, okay? Wake up because…I need you. No good-byes. Not yet.”

She nodded. I kissed her once, then knelt with her beside her body, guiding her back into her flesh. Slowly, her soul melded with skin as each part of her gave in. She blinked two shimmering eyes at me and then they were gone too, replaced by warm, closed eyelids. I hovered over her body, holding her shimmering shoulders to keep her inside. After taking life for so long, giving it back was…beautiful. Once I was sure she was in, I pulled my hands away.

And then there was just Scout and I staring at her chest. Waiting. Praying.

“What if she doesn’t—”

“She will,” I snapped.

Her chest rose with a wheezy breath, then she coughed and I was drowning in relief. Scout laughed and slapped me on the back.

“She made it.” I rubbed my hands across my face and smiled.

A fireman sprinted up the hall and crashed through the bedroom door. Shouts echoed, muffled by smoke and sirens. Then Emma was in his arms, being carried away.

I was only dimly aware of Anaya. She knelt over Cash, a prayer on her lips, as his soul rose from his body. Anaya placed her palm over his chest and pressed him back into his flesh.

“Anaya!” Scout bellowed. “What in God’s name are you doing? Take him already.”

Anaya ignored him, tucking one of her braids behind her ear and tilting her head to study the unconscious boy. She smoothed the hair back from his head, something I’d never seen her do, and whispered another one of her prayers.

“Aren’t you going to take him?” I asked.

She shook her head and smiled. Touched the tip of his nose. “No. Not this time.”

To my amazement, Cash began to cough. His lungs began to fight for air. I glanced up at Anaya. She had the strangest look on her face. “What did you—”

“We have another one over here!” a fireman shouted, distracting me. By the time he scooped Cash into his arms, Anaya was gone.

I sighed, feeling sweet relief wash through me as I floated out onto the lawn. Emma was there, a bloody, frail body melting a hole into the melting snow. She didn’t stay there long, though. Within seconds, she was loaded onto a stretcher and shoved into the back of an ambulance.

Police cars and fire engines littered the street, casting a blue and red glow across the white snow. Rachel was lying on her own stretcher. Before I could see anything else, the world began to spin. I felt like a toy top, spinning so fast the world melted into a quiet blur, my existence fading right before my very eyes. Memories poured down like rain. Mom standing at the kitchen sink crying, Pop running the tractor through a swaying mass of golden wheat the color of Emma’s hair, the Inbetween sitting gray and empty, and Emma—always Emma—bright and full of life. The memories unraveled so quickly, I couldn’t hang onto them. They spun away like a ribbon into the distance until there was nothing else left. Only darkness.

Chapter 37

Finn

White. Everything was a beautiful, blinding white, no end and no beginning. I sat up, rubbing my eyes to clear my bleary vision.

“He’s up,” Anaya said from the corner of the room where she and Easton stood waiting.

“Anaya? What’s going on?”

“Good, you’re awake.” The timbre of the low voice behind me sent fear-induced shivers racing down my spine. I spun around on my heel, squinting as the blinding shimmer around Balthazar came into view. He smiled and my muscles coiled.

“You’re wondering what you’re doing here,” Balthazar said casually.

“No, I think it’s obvious.”

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked, walking the perimeter of the room we were in. A cloud of white mist gathered around his ankles, following him like fog over the lake on a cool spring morning.

I swallowed the fear lodged in my throat and cast a wary glance over at Anaya. “You’re the boss.”

“Do you regret it?” he asked, never turning to face me. His gaze had settled somewhere on the horizon.

“Which part?”

Balthazar laughed. The sound echoed from walls that I couldn’t see or feel.

“All of it.” He slid me a careful glance. “Do you regret taking away Maeve’s chance at humanity? Do you regret giving that chance to Emma?”

Those were questions I didn’t have to think about. Images of Emma limp and lifeless flashed across my mind. If Maeve was capable of such things, she didn’t deserve a chance at humanity because there was nothing human left inside her. Then again, if I’d never given Maeve a reason to hate me, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. I shook my head. “I…I don’t know.”

His white robe rustled with a breeze I couldn’t feel. Balthazar sighed. “I don’t regret any of it.”

Shock fizzled through me. Had I heard him right? I couldn’t have.

“The things she’s done are unforgivable. And God knows where Emma would be if you hadn’t dedicated yourself to her safety the past few years. She’s a good soul. That can’t be denied. She was not to blame for the transition that condemned her to the Shadow Land, as you well know.”

I did know. Unable to speak, I watched him pace, his eyes fixed on the horizon. The fact that he was seeing light in the darkest thing I’d ever done was enough to leave my head spinning. This didn’t happen. In a place this close to the Almighty, exceptions were never made.

I swallowed and gathered up the courage to stand beside him. A valley stretched out below us, gray with mist, every inch shimmering with a silver dust. The Inbetween. “What are you going to do to me?”

“We’ll get to that in a moment, but first, I have a confession to make.”

I raised a brow. “You do?”

He nodded. “I never should have made you a reaper. It was never your calling. And that day, when Allison’s name wasn’t drawn, I knew you’d push her through if I allowed you to get close enough. I let it happen.”

“What? W-why would you do that? Why let it happen just to punish me for it over and over?”

He sighed. “I needed her gone. I needed to rid you of the distraction so you could become what you were always meant to be.”

I narrowed my eyes. “And what, exactly, am I meant to be?”

He faced me, a look of pride pulling up the corners of his lips. “A guardian, of course. If your silly obsession with that girl has proven nothing else, it’s proven that you have the heart of a guardian. You were meant to protect. Not destroy.”

This had all been his plan. I didn’t know how to feel about any of this. “I…don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I have orders to offer you a position as a guardian, Finn.”

I couldn’t seem to form the appropriate reaction. I knew I should’ve dropped to my hands and knees to thank God for giving me an opportunity like this, but all I could see when I thought about that life was a world that didn’t include Emma.

“Do you dare deny me, when I’m offering you what your brother and sister over there only dream of?”

Easton spoke up from the edge of the room. “Take it, Finn. Don’t be stupid.”

“It’s not in your heart, is it?” Balthazar’s bright gaze swept over me thoughtfully. “No… there’s no room left in your heart for anything else, is there?”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, wondering what kind of consequences awaited me after turning this down. As far as I knew, no one had ever turned down an offer like this.

“You realize I can’t let you keep going on like this,” he said, sounding tired. “I can’t trust you to stay away from her. I can’t continue to allow you to break our laws for a mortal who means nothing in the grand scheme of things. So, what do we do?”

I watched a shadow twist on the horizon, feeling hopeless. “I don’t know.”

“What do you want, Finn?”

Without thinking, my lips desperately formed Emma’s name. “Emma. I want Emma. I want to be…alive.”

He took a deep breath, his eyes calculating as he circled me. “What would you give? An eternity of service perhaps?”

“What?”

“Would you take us up on our offer to make you a guardian?”

An eternity without Emma for a lifetime by her side? Thoughts overwhelmed me before I could fight them off, each one leaving me weaker than the last. Her laugh, rich and radiant like music in my ears, the feel of her skin moving beneath mine, the taste of her lips on my tongue.

“Yes.” I whispered before I lost control completely. I dropped to my knees, the pain of almost losing her still fresh in my chest. “I’d do anything.”

“Very well.” Something in his voice sounded so final it rattled me with a strange mixture of fear and hope. “There’s only one thing to be done, then.” He turned to face me, the light around him shimmering so brightly I had to shield my eyes with my hand. Fear rippled down my spine as a porthole appeared behind him.

“W-what’s happening?” I stuttered, unable to move. The light was swirling, pulling me in like a whirlpool. And Balthazar’s intense gaze drove me further against my will. The porthole flickered and moved until a thousand rainbow colors melded into a light so bright it burned.

“Balthazar?” I dug my heels into the ground, only to find there was no ground to save me. I was so close I could feel its heat on my face. Easton’s hand rested on my shoulder to guide me forward. He wouldn’t meet my gaze.

“Don’t forget what you’ve agreed to, Finn,” Balthazar said as I stepped into the portal. “I’ll see you at the end of your mortal life to collect.”

Chapter 38

Emma

I should be dead
. It was I could think. It was all I could feel. I didn’t remember everything from the fire, but I remembered enough. The re-stitched side of my neck pulsed with pain and I reached up to brush my fingers over it. I’d almost lost everything because of Maeve. My mother. My best friend. My life. There were too many things in this world I wanted to do now, and I wasn’t going to give any of it up without a fight.

I tried to recall the fire, two days and what felt like a hundred oxygen treatments ago, but smoke clouded my memories, making them fuzzy and weak. I did remember Finn. I would always remember Finn. Something ached in my chest at the thought that I might never see him again.

The steady beep of a monitor pulsed behind Cash’s head, and the smell of antiseptic and sickness hung in the air like a fine mist. When he made a groaning sound in the back of his throat, I raked my fingers through his hair and adjusted his blanket. His pierced eyebrow twitched.

“Stop messing with me. I’m fine,” he grumbled. His words had the sort of slip and swirl that only really good pain meds could provide. I leaned back and smiled when he opened his eyes. Muddy brown. The soft spaces underneath dark and bruised. Those telltale signs were all the proof I needed to know he hadn’t been sleeping. He turned over onto his side and stared past me. His gaze tracked something behind me I couldn’t see. “Are they letting me out yet?”

“Not yet,” I rasped, and covered my mouth to cough. “I think your dad’s trying to work something out, though. They said something about wanting to keep you one more night for observation.”

Cash’s eyes drifted over me like he was taking inventory. “You sound awful.” He sounded almost as bad as I did, but he sounded guilty, too. And he shouldn’t have. Not after what Finn and I did to him. After what he’d done for me. For Mom.

“I’m getting better.” I held up a duffel bag. “I brought you some clothes and a magazine.”

“Thanks.” He nodded. “I’m getting tired of these nurses staring at my ass.”

“Since when are you tired of anyone staring at your ass?”

Cash rewarded me with half of a grin. “Touché.”

The light from a pair of headlights in the parking lot collided with the blinds and sent shadows swimming across the wall. Cash flinched and closed his eyes. I could practically feel the fear radiating from him. I touched his leg and he flinched again.

“Hey…what’s wrong?” The words felt so inadequate I wanted to be sick. I squeezed his leg through the blanket. “Cash?”

“They’re everywhere,” he whispered.

“What?”

“
Them
.”

I followed his gaze to the walls around us. I didn’t see anything but pasty white walls and medical equipment, but whatever Cash could see was making him terrified enough for the both of us.

“What are they?” I asked, softly.

Cash grabbed my hand and stared at our intertwined fingers. “I believe you.”

“What?”

“Everything.” His fingers fell out of my hand and he turned away. “I believe everything.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat and closed my eyes. Focused on the blood rushing through my veins and the air in my lungs. I needed Finn. He’d know what to say. He’d know what was happening with Cash. He’d be able to make everything all right with just a look, a touch, a whisper in my ear. But I hadn’t seen him since the fire. I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again after what he did for us. Alone, I just felt useless and terrified of the world lurking around me that I couldn’t see.

“Emma,” my mom said from the doorway. “The police want to ask you a few more questions.”

“In a minute,” I said over my shoulder.

She nodded. “I’ll wait in the hall.”

“Cash, it’s going to be okay. Everything is going to go back to the way it was. I promise.”

“That’s crap and you know it.” He wouldn’t look at me and I wanted to make him. I wanted him to make me believe my own lie.

“It’s not—”

Cash looked at me and the words stuck to the insides of my mouth.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he said. “In a world that makes sense, we shouldn’t have made it out of that fire, Em.”

I bit my lip, not knowing what to say. I didn’t want to lie to him anymore. “You don’t know that.”

“We shouldn’t be alive.” Cash’s eyes darted across the ceiling. He clutched the covers and hunkered down into the sheets. “We should be dead…and
they
know it.”

I touched his leg. Anybody else would have thought he was crazy. But I knew better. My best friend had risked his life to save mine and now something was wrong. Something had gone inconceivably wrong in that house and I didn’t know how to help him. How to take it all away.

“I have to go talk to the cops, but I’ll be back later. Promise.”

Cash didn’t look at me. Just nodded into the pillow and closed his eyes.

When I stepped into the fluorescent-lit hall, my chest twisted. Two detectives wearing suits were speaking to my mom in hushed voices and writing in their annoying little notepads. They both looked up when I walked in. The one with salt-and-pepper hair smiled and stuck out his hand.

“Hi, Emma. I’m Detective Monroe. You mind if we ask you a few questions about the fire?”

I tugged on a strand of hair coming loose from my ponytail. “I already told the cops everything when I woke up yesterday.”

He nodded and looked at his partner. “Right, but you were still in pretty bad shape then. Thought you might remember some more now.”

I took a deep breath and nodded. This was such a waste of time. I followed Detective Monroe into the waiting room and sat down in a faded dove-blue chair.

“So, the intruder,” he started. “What exactly do you remember about them?”

“Red hair. Sort of hazel-colored eyes.” I wrapped my arms around myself and looked away. Just thinking about Maeve made me sick.

“Okay. You said she was a woman, right?”

I nodded.

“How old?”

“A little younger than me, I think.” At one time, anyway.

He scribbled in his pad then tapped on his knee with his pencil. “So, not the same person who attacked you at the theater? Correct?”

I finally met his gaze. “What?”

He flipped through his notepad. “You said that was a
man
who attacked you there. But this was a woman?”

“Umm…” I tucked my hair behind me ear. “Yeah. That’s correct.”

“That’s pretty odd, don’t you think?”

He had no idea just how
odd
this all was. “I guess. Why?”

“I need to ask you something, Emma.” He waited for me to look at him. “Does your mom have a drinking problem? Does she treat you badly?”

“What? No!” I sat up in my chair. “Of course not. What the hell does that have to do with some cracked-out guy attacking me in a theater bathroom?”

Detective Monroe slipped his notepad back into his pocket. “Okay. Just calm down. With the extent of your injuries and the fact that your mother had been drinking, not to mention that we don’t have one witness who saw this woman or the man, I have to ask. I’m just trying to help you.”

Help me? I wanted to laugh. His badge wasn’t going to do me a bit of good. Not against something he probably didn’t even believe in.

“You can help me by leaving us alone.”

I got up, expecting him to stop me, but he didn’t. Instead he sighed and said, “You know where to find me if you change your mind.”

…

Parker drove us back to his house from the hospital in silence. After my conversation with the cops, I didn’t really feel like talking to him about any of it. The more people I had to lie to, the more complicated this was going to get. So I went with silence, which was broken up by the occasion cough from me or my mom. We finally pulled into a gravel driveway that led to a sleepy white house set back in the trees. Through the big picture window in front, I could see a few lights on in the house.

“Do you have kids?” I asked.

Parker shook his head and ducked out of the car to open my door. “Nope. It’ll just be us.”

An hour later, after we’d eaten pizza that Parker had ordered, he showed me to the guest room. I almost fainted when I spotted the black and white print of me at Lone Pine Lake hanging from the wall. I traced the shimmer next to me and my heart fluttered painfully at the thought of Finn. I wondered if he’d ever come back.

“I can’t believe you saved this,” I whispered. Parker leaned on the wall next to me and looked at the picture.

“Sorry I wasn’t able to get your books.” He slid a box over to me with the toe of his boot that was full of secondhand paperbacks. “I picked these up today. I think there are even a couple of your dad’s in there. Your mom said you liked to read. Maybe we can rebuild your collection.”

I stared down at the books, images of Dad flashing through my mind, and my vision blurred with tears. “Thank you.”

“Okay, well, I’ll let you get settled. Good night.” Parker turned and left me in the room full of unfamiliar furniture. It smelled like fresh paint. Mom lingered in the doorway, watching me after Parker had gone.

“So how long are we staying here?” I picked up a paperback and pretended to read the blurb on the back. When she didn’t answer I tossed the book back in the box and looked at her. “Earth to Mom!”

She blinked like she’d been somewhere else and smiled.

“Are you still upset about the cops questioning you?” I asked. “I told you everything was fine. I gave them a description of the girl who did this.” A description of a girl they’d never find, considering she was dead.

She shook her head. “I’m upset that there is obviously some person out there intent on hurting you and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. If I hadn’t been drinking, none of this would have happened. You could’ve
died
.”

“But I didn’t.” I eased down onto the unfamiliar bed and patted the spot beside me.

Mom flashed me a tight smile and took a deep breath, settling down next to me. “Are you okay with this? Staying here? I know I should have asked you.” Mom twisted to face me, waiting for my approval. “We can stay in a hotel if you want.”

I thought about Dad. About his smile and the way he always smelled like pine needles and coffee. The sound of his laptop soothing me to sleep at night. Parker wasn’t Dad. He wasn’t ever going to be Dad. But maybe if he made her happy, I could try. “Are you happy with him?’

She smiled. “Very.”

Dad would want this
. The thought had been in my head all along, but I didn’t want to hear it. I’d been too selfish. I couldn’t be that way anymore. I didn’t want to be that girl. I smiled. “Then I’m okay with this.”

Mom beamed back at me and kissed my cheek. “He doesn’t have a lot of stuff to bake with here, but he did pick up some of those blueberry muffins you like from the bakery in town for breakfast.”

“Tell him thanks for me.”

She smiled and shut my door behind her on the way out. Once she was gone, I sighed and turned to grab the bag of new clothes my mom had picked up for me, but it wasn’t there.
Crap
. Left them in the car.

I listened to the sound of cold rain beat on the roof like a drum, contemplating sleeping in my clothes rather than brave the rain outside. My need for comfort eventually won and I slid quietly through the house and out the front door.

I grabbed the bag and used it to shield myself from the icy rain and hurried back onto the porch. The rain had melted most of the snow, making a muddy, half-frozen mess of the rustic landscape. I reached for the front door—

“Emma?”

My breath caught in my throat and my heart thudded against my ribs. I turned around and found Finn standing in the rain. He didn’t move and neither could I.

“Emma…I…I…” He couldn’t finish. His teeth were chattering.

The sound of his voice sent panic flaring through me to the point of pain. I stumbled off the porch and into the rain, not caring about the ache in my leg or the stinging in my neck, or that the heavy droplets were practically freezing in my hair.

“Finn?” When I got closer enough, I stilled, paralyzed by disbelief. He was soaked. Rain dripped down his face, and his hands were clenched into shaking fists at his sides. I reached out and gasped when my fingers gripped a handful of his soaked T-shirt.

“Oh my God, Finn!” I grabbed him, not understanding, not thinking, only moving. I pulled him into the house behind me and prayed that Mom and Parker would stay in his bedroom as I dragged a strange boy through his living room.

Once we were in the safety of my room, I quietly shut and locked the door behind us, keeping my back pressed to the wood. I couldn’t stop staring at him. Something told me that I should help the half-frozen boy in front of me, but I couldn’t move. Finn couldn’t be wet. He couldn’t be freezing. Not my Finn.

He stared back, convulsions racking his frame, and smiled despite the pain showing in his face. “It hurts.”

I slid away from the door and hesitated before grabbing his hands. They were freezing. I held them, perplexed by their solid fleshy feel. He felt like…me. “What hurts?”

“The cold. Everything.”

I stripped his T-shirt over his head and tossed it to the floor. I wanted to ask how this was possible, but I couldn’t. My hopes were already up, and I couldn’t handle the disappointment that would smother me when he told me it was only temporary. So instead I kept moving, ridding him of his wet clothes. I unzipped his jeans and tugged them down over his hips, leaving him standing wide-eyed in only a pair of boxers.

I left him to start the bath, filling it with hot water, and hesitating to watch the steam roll off the top as I gathered my thoughts. When I came back, Finn grabbed me by the shoulders and ran his gloriously solid hands down my arms. Hands that had every part of me memorized before they’d ever even touched me. “How is this even possible? I don’t understand.”

He reached up to touch my face, his fingers trembling as they cupped my cheeks. “Emma, I’m a-a-a-live,” he finally stuttered, then collapsed at my feet.