Inbetween (Kissed by Death, #1) (2 page)

Pushing Maeve’s laughter out of my head, I focused on Allison. “Come on, pretty girl,” I said, fear thrumming in my chest. “You can do this. You
have
to do this.”

The gash bleeding through her blue jeans snagged on the broken window and she sobbed.

“Don’t stop. I know it hurts. But you can’t stop.” We were so close. Another few feet and she’d be free. I kept my eyes on her, trying to figure out a way to distract her from the pain. “You know, one time I broke my leg,” I blurted out.

She sniffled and looked up at me.

“I’d climbed this big tree on my dad’s farm. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, so when the branch broke, I knew I was in trouble. I had to walk all the way home on that leg just to get there before it got dark.”

“Why didn’t you wait for somebody to look for you?”

“Coyotes. All I could think about was how I used to hear them howling at night. Our neighbor used to find his cattle torn to shreds.”

She scooted a little farther out. “Didn’t it hurt?”

The car groaned and tilted underneath us. Allison gripped the seat, her eyes wide.

“It hurt like hell, but it was a lot better than ending up like the cattle.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and wiggled the rest of the way through the window, into the pine needles and dirt on the side of the road. She crawled forward a few more feet and collapsed. Her cheek pressed against the wet pavement as she fought to catch her breath.

A loud
crack
split the silence, and the car lurched forward, its weight breaking the tall bone of a tree. Within seconds, it rolled off the side and into the chasm below, a chewed-up red spot swallowed by the dark.

Maeve’s scream ripped through the mist that had started to fall, and in it, I heard her cry for revenge. I’d worry about that later. For now, I looked down at Allison.

I watched her breaths make foggy shapes as they puffed erratically into the night. Her lashes blinked away the tears that were running across her cheeks. No. This wasn’t Allison anymore.

“Emma,” I whispered as a beam of headlights curled around the bend in the road. “You need to flag down the car that’s coming around the corner. You’re going to have to get up.”

“My leg…” She looked up, tears in her eyes. “Why can’t you do it? Why aren’t you helping me?”

Guilt tied my insides into knots, making it hard to look at the girl reaching up for my help. I couldn’t give it to her no matter how badly I wanted to. Balthazar and his damned rules!

“I can’t. I’m so sorry.” I took a few steps back until she lowered her hand. “But you can do this. You’re tough. Remember?”

Her gaze swung to the lights glistening on the pavement and she pushed herself to her knees. I took my chance. I let myself fade. Dissolve into the mist around me that was calling me home.

I watched Emma wave her arms at the slowing car. She was safe. Alive. I closed my eyes, laughing with relief. I’d done it. I’d saved her. Except…

I looked up at the broken tree where Maeve had balanced only minutes ago. There was no way I could walk away now. Not when I’d led Maeve to her.

Damn it. This was bad on so many levels. I watched Emma collapse against the man from the car as he wrapped a jacket around her shivering shoulders. Warmth spread through my chest. Yeah…
bad
wasn’t a strong enough word. Disaster was more like it. And I didn’t care. She was worth it.

“I’ll keep you safe. I swear it.” I repeated the promise I’d made to her father, then closed my eyes and let the wind catch me and toss me into the night.

Chapter 1

Finn

Sometimes Emma made me feel so alive, I almost forgot I was dead.

Almost.

I sat on the floor across from her bed listening to her slow, steady breaths. I should have been more alert. I was supposed to be on watch. But it was so hard to concentrate on anything but her when I knew she was remembering.

Emma rolled over, pressing her face into the pillow. “Finn…”

I shut my eyes, trying to hold on to it. I wasn’t stupid enough to think she’d remember this when she woke up, but damn it if hearing my name slip through her lips didn’t sweep through me like wildfire. Scorching the places where blood used to run. Melting the hollow space where my heart used to beat.

I took a deep, unneeded breath and let the back of my head thump against her overstuffed bookcase. This was never going to get easier. Two years of watching her through the invisible barrier of Balthazar’s rules was really starting to suck. Especially when every time I blinked, another piece of Allison was breaking through the surface.

In the pale light of her lamp, I could see the neat row of cookbooks, nestled together like a family, holding all of the secrets Emma created in the kitchen. They smelled like flour and sugar and home. The next orderly row was packed with the worn-out novels she loved, and a new photography book her mom bought her last year. The last shelf belonged to the books her father had written, held in place by gold-framed pictures of him smiling and alive. Emma had so many words inside her. I was surprised they didn’t fall out while she was sleeping. Thousands of words about mysteries and romance and life. Things I didn’t know anything about.

Things that Allison had known
everything
about.

She whimpered from under the covers and I looked up. What was she remembering this time? What piece of the Inbetween and her time with me was she fighting? There was so much I didn’t want her to remember. So much I
needed
her to remember. But that didn’t matter. I was here to protect her. That’s where it had to end.

I closed my eyes, trying to swallow my own crap lie. She mumbled something in her sleep and began to thrash under the sheets. I groaned and pushed myself up from my safe spot on the carpet, unable to sit there listening to her suffer anymore. I stopped a foot from the bed and knelt down.

“Shh…” I touched the edge of the mattress, forcing myself not to go any closer. “It’s going to be okay.” She was only a few inches away, but it felt like miles. Miles that left me wanting in so many ways that I ached. Hopefully my presence would be enough. There were times I swore she could feel me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” a gravelly voice chided.

I looked up from the edge of Emma’s bed just as Easton melted up from the polished hardwood floor beneath the window. Like an oil slick coming to life, he unfolded his long, shadowy legs until he was just an inkblot in front of the splash of lamplight on her wall. His violet eyes pinned me like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Which I kind of was.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“Yeah, looked like nothing.” He strolled across the room accompanied by a wave of sulfur and smoke, the black serpent tattoo on his neck glinting.

“Jesus, Easton.” I scrunched up my nose and climbed to my feet. “Don’t they have a shower somewhere between here and the afterlife?”

“Screw you. You didn’t just have to tow somebody’s grandpa to Hell.” He brushed something chalky and gray off his long coat, and a shudder worked its way down my spine. God only knows what—or who—it had belonged to. “Besides, I wasn’t the one about to feel up a sleeping human.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Save it.” He waved his hand dismissively. “We have work to do. I don’t have time for your useless obsession with the human today.”

“Will you please stop calling her that?”

“What?” Easton glanced up from Emma’s vanity, where he’d been inspecting the various lotions, tubes, and bottles like he was on some alien planet. Then again, Easton had been dead for something like four hundred years and spent most of his time in Hell, so her stuff probably was sort of alien to him.

“’The human.’ You make her sound like a freak. It’s not like we’re a different species, for God’s sake. We were humans too, or don’t you remember that far back?”

“
Were,
” he said, scowling at me over his shoulder. “Past tense.”

Easton’s clumsy fingers knocked over the bobblehead zombie on the vanity top and we both froze. Emma shot up from beneath the covers, gasping.

“Mom?” She shoved the tangled blond hair out of her face, her eyes trained on her rumpled reflection in the vanity mirror. “Was that you?”

“Not Mom. Just one of Hell’s reapers, at your service.” Easton leaned against the bookcase and grinned. “You’re right, Finn. This is fun.”

“Are you freaking insane?” I hissed.

He rolled his eyes. “Oh calm down, drama queen. It’s not like she can hear us.”

“You scared her.”

“Are you kidding? She’s scared of her own reflection. And that has nothing to do with me.”

No. But the fact that Emma’s life had been a horror movie waiting to happen these last two years had everything to do with me. I’d led a soul that hated my guts and was hell-bent on revenge right to her doorstep.

I turned my attention back to Emma. After she collected herself, she twisted her hair up into a messy ponytail and dug in her nightstand drawer for her journal.

“Dear diary…” Easton nodded at the journal. “What do you think she’s going to write?”

I folded my arms across my chest. “Not my business.”

He walked over to her bed and plopped down beside her. The mattress didn’t creak or groan under his weight. The blankets didn’t shift. He peeked over her shoulder at the book. A long tendril of honey-colored hair came loose from Emma’s ponytail and fell across her eye. She tucked it behind her ear, but Easton blew on it so that it fell right back down. She swept it out of her face, looking frustrated, and Easton chuckled.

“Will you stop?” I said, feeling uncomfortable with how close he was to her. “This is so screwed up it’s not even funny.”

He raised a dark brow. “Oh? And what you’re doing isn’t?”

We could have gone back and forth like that for hours, but the call came. It always did. It started in my bones—a cold so cutting that it sliced through me like a machete. Easton’s jaw clenched, his muscles taut and ready. He slowly closed his hand around the handle of his scythe, which burned black and softly smoked at his side. I flexed my fingers as the icy ribbons of death worked their way through each one of my limbs.

“Can you take this one for me?” I asked. “You’re already going to be there, and I just got back—”

“No,” Easton said. “Hell no. I have my own job to do. I can’t keep covering for your sorry ass. Besides, do you have any idea how close you are to being caught? Don’t push your luck, Finn. Just keep your nose down, collect your souls, and thank the Almighty that you don’t have my job.”

“I’m taking a risk every time I leave her. You know that.”

“For the love of God. She’ll be fine, Finn. It’s just one reap.”

“How do you know she’ll be fine?”

He shrugged. “I don’t. But that’s the difference between you and me. I don’t care.”

With that, he vanished, consumed in a flash by the keening wails of the damned. The screams beckoned. Clawed at me from the inside out.

Rule One as a reaper: Death doesn’t wait for anyone.

And it sure as hell wasn’t waiting for me now.

…

By the time I seeped into form next to Easton, the pull was twining around my wrists, tugging, clouding every one of my thoughts. I shook my head and stared up at the lemon-yellow house engulfed in an angry tangle of flames that glowed in the dim predawn light. A few bikes and a shiny swing set slick with dew littered the lawn. A minivan sat devoid of life in the drive. I craned my neck to read the sticker on the bumper.
My child is an honor student at Rosewood Elementary.

Seriously? Honor students and a minivan mom? I couldn’t help but wonder what tragic scenario I was going to face this time as part of Balthazar’s grand attempt to teach me a lesson.

“How many of these is he going to send me on?” I pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes and prayed for a different outcome than the one I felt hissing in my lifeless bones. “I get it, Balthazar.”

Easton grunted. “Do you really? Where’d we just come from, Finn?”

“Good morning, boys.” A voice, smooth as molasses, spoke up from behind us. We didn’t have to turn around to know it was the final part of our region’s trio. Anaya skipped over to my side.

“How many do you think are in there?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

I trailed after Anaya, Easton behind me, always the shade of gray between the dark and the light. Anaya stepped through a curtain of flames, but I stalled in the doorway. Something in my chest tightened. My throat closed up and a memory cemented my feet to the floor.

Flames lapped at the control board. Consumed the cockpit. Licked my skin with an orange serpent tongue. Water and panic all around me, and I couldn’t drown. No. I was going to char. I was going to melt. I was going to burn.

“Let’s go.” Easton nudged me through the doorway. “I’m already getting another call, and I can’t be in two places at once.”

I forced myself to move through the house. Windows popped and shattered. The roof crackled like tinder on a campfire. Black billowing smoke consumed every inch of the 1,600-square-foot slice of soot-coated suburbia.

“Watch your step. This one’s mine.” Easton stared down at a man who had collapsed in the empty hall.

“Let me guess.” I stepped over the man in plain white boxers and looked at Easton. “He’s a liar? Did he take something that never should have belonged to him in the first place?” I scowled at the ceiling and threw my hands up in the air. “Come on, Balthazar. Deliver your little message so I can get on with my freaking day.”

Anaya exchanged a weary glance with Easton, then stepped over the lifeless body and into a bedroom where a woman lay awaiting her reaping.

Easton knelt down and touched the man’s temple. “He had an affair.”

I stopped halfway down the hall and turned around, confused. “What?”

“He had an affair with another woman.” He stood up and looked at the ceiling, then down to the beam lying on top of the man. “He was trying to save his wife when he died. Like saving her would make up for what he did.”

Easton gave me a pointed look, and I groaned. Was this ever going to end? Was a death ever going to be just a death again? Knowing Balthazar and his obsessive need to get a damn point across, probably not.

I kept moving until a tug in my chest urged me toward a half-open bedroom door. Pink paper lanterns adorned the ceiling, waiting for the fire to consume them and turn them to ash. A little girl lay huddled under a yellow comforter waiting for me to do the same to her. A shadow lurked by her bed, waiting, hoping I’d be a no-show so the soul would go into limbo. Its smokelike fingers swirled around her tiny, trembling frame.

I glanced back at the fire creeping around the doorframe, licking at the walls, melting away the posy-pink wallpaper in an all-too-familiar dance. I couldn’t waste any more time. I slid my scythe out of its holster and speared her flesh, gifting her with the mercy of death before the flames could get to her.

I watched her twitch and jerk until her soul quietly peeled away from her skin, leaving a too-small shell behind. The shadow hissed at me and seeped between the floorboards.

“Who are you?” her shimmering soul asked. She fidgeted nervously, her huge hazel eyes confused, accusing. “Are you an angel?”

It never got easier with kids. “Sort of.”

“Where are your wings if you’re an angel?”

A paper lantern lit up just above our heads.

“I said sort of, didn’t I?” I fought past the smoke shrouding my vision to the hall where the next pull was coming from, and forced some patience into my voice. “Where’s your brother’s room?”

She trailed after me into the burning hall and I thanked the Almighty that Anaya and Easton had already finished with her parents.

“How did you know I have a brother?”

“I just know.” I pushed into a bedroom with a
Keep Out
sign tacked to the front. Flames rolled out of the doorway and the heat sealed up the words in my throat. I shoved my hand behind me.

“Stay here.”

“But—”

“I said stay here. Got it?” No way was I letting her see the charred remains of her brother. If I couldn’t give her the life she deserved, couldn’t give her Heaven, then damn it I’d at least spare her this memory.

She swallowed, not realizing the human function no longer applied to her, and nodded. When I emerged with her brother in tow, her eyes lit up. “Geez, Simon. I thought you were dead or something.”

I grabbed both of their hands. “All right, guys. Let’s go.”

The little girl pulled her hand away, folded her arms across her chest, and frowned up at me. “We’re not supposed to go with strangers.”

Ignoring the inferno around us, I crouched down and stuck my hand out, folding her tiny vapor fingers into mine. “I’m Finn. I’m eighteen”—sort of—“and I like fishing and baseball. My favorite color is blue. My mom makes,
hands down
, the best peach cobbler you’ve ever tasted. Oh, and I used to fly airplanes.”

She tentatively shook my hand. “What else?”

“Well…I’m afraid of spiders. Like pee-my-pants afraid of spiders. Even the little ones.”

She exchanged a look with her brother.

I groaned. “Come on, guys. Even my best friend doesn’t know some of this stuff. What else do you want here?”

“You really flew an airplane before?” the boy asked, speculative.

“Yep.”

He shrugged. “I like him.”

The little girl finally smiled. “Then I guess it’s okay.”

“Where are we going?” The little boy looked up at me with an anxious expression.

How to explain? I never knew what to say to kids to make them understand. I could have told him the truth, cold and simple like an instruction manual. They hadn’t lived long enough to become who they were meant to be. Hadn’t reached their potential. So I would take them to the Inbetween where they’d put in their time. Grow into a soul worthy of either Heaven, or a coveted second chance at life. And if they didn’t grow into either of those…