Inbetween (Kissed by Death, #1) (3 page)

A shadow melted out of the flames, lurking in the corner of the hall. Hungry. Desperate. I slipped my arm around both of them. They were kids. They wouldn’t become one of them. I had to believe that.

I ruffled his hair and forced a smile. “How about a different question, pal.”

“Okay. Why doesn’t the fire feel hot?”

Half an hour, two souls delivered, and a
gazillion unanswerable questions later, I found myself spilling onto my hands and knees on Emma’s back lawn. The grass needles didn’t bother to bend under the weight of my palms. The sunrise, just a pale echo of summer, edged over the horizon and poured through my translucent body, refusing to acknowledge my existence with a shadow. Like I needed them to remind me that I didn’t belong here.

Easton loomed over me with something resembling sympathy in his eyes. “Nice landing.”

“Shouldn’t you be in Hell?”

“I could ask you the same.”

Pushing past him, I made my way toward Emma’s house. “Not today, Easton. Seriously, man. Just…not today, all right?”

“How long are you going to keep this up?” he asked. “She’s not a kid anymore, you know.”

“I know she’s not.” God, did I know it. My fingers tested the wall, dissolving through the brick of the house. I could feel Emma’s nearness all the way down to my toes.

“You should let her go,” he said. “I could understand it a few years ago, but now? Now it’s past time for you to move on, and we both know it.”

His words burned a path of rage through me, leaving charred remnants of dead nerve endings and hollow veins. “I do that and she’s as good as dead. It won’t take Maeve a week of tormenting her before she gets bored and kills her.”

“I know.” Easton looked resigned, as if he could accept the kind of life—or death—Emma would have without me here to protect her.

Of course he could. Death was his life. He reeked of Hell. Gambled with imps for fun. And he didn’t love her. He didn’t burn for her. He didn’t break nearly every rule in the book and risk his soul for her on a daily basis.

I did.

“And if I’m sent to collect her again? What then?” I looked at him, needing him to understand. “You think I could do that again? Let her die? Rip her soul from her screaming flesh?”

“Better her than you.”

“No!” I stepped into him, fuming. “
Not
better her than me. It’s my fault she’s in this position. Maeve never would’ve found her if it wasn’t for me. Hell, I’m the whole reason Maeve wants to destroy her. How am I supposed to walk away and let her suffer for a mistake I made?”

“It wasn’t your fault. You thought you were helping.” He shook his head. “Hell, you
were
helping. She’s alive, isn’t she? Sure, she’s got problems, but what seventeen-year-old kid doesn’t? Haven’t you ever read Judy Blume?”

I looked at Easton, his spiky sable hair blotting out the warm lavender sunrise. “
You’ve
read Judy Blume?”

“Screw you. You’re the one haunting a high school student.”

“I’m not
haunting
her. I’m protecting her.”

“Look, my point is she’s going to die someday, and there will be nothing you can do to stop it,” he said. “She’ll wrap her car around tree. She’ll get cancer. If she’s lucky, she’ll grow so old her body will forget to wake up one morning.”

“I realize that,” I gritted out. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll let Maeve make her life hell until that happens, let alone be the reason she dies.” The words held so much heat I could feel them scorching my mouth.

“This is—” Easton froze, whatever lecture he’d been prepared to deliver catching in his throat as he watched the kid from next door jog across the lawn. We watched him cast a careful look around, then tuck a leather sketchbook under his arm and shove Emma’s bedroom window open.

“Looks like you’ve got competition,” Easton said, watching him climb in. His scythe began to smoke on his hip. “I’ll bet he even has one of those fancy pulses, too.”

I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t letting him get under my skin that easily. “Cash is just her friend. Besides, pulses are overrated.”

“Yeah. Keep telling yourself that.” He winked at me, then dove into the swirling black pit of screams that had opened beneath him. A Hell reaper’s work was never done. And having that much darkness on his hands day in and day out didn’t seem to bother him. Easton had been born for this job the same way Anaya and all her light had been born for hers. I couldn’t think of anyone more fitting.

My scythe pulsed cold against my hip. I glanced up at Emma’s window and frowned. Sometimes I wondered what job I was born for, because it sure as hell didn’t feel like I was born for this.

Chapter 2

Emma

It was happening again. The dreams. The nightmares that felt more like memories than figments of my imagination. I pressed the pen to my journal and concentrated, trying to remember the fragments left behind. Flashes of a boy with soft green eyes. His lips in my hair. His hands on my waist. Panic and desire dueling in my veins like fire and ice. I’d been up for an hour already, and I could still hear his voice.

Please forgive me for this, pretty girl.

“Knock, knock.”

Cash’s voice wafted in with the breeze, stirring the sheer ivory curtains that hung over my blinds. I looked up from my journal to watch him climb through my window, his familiar sketchpad stashed under his arm. I snapped a mental picture and added it to the collage of memories that made up Cash and me.

“Please tell me your mom’s already gone,” he grumbled as he pulled a chair up next to my bed. “The last thing I need is her running off to tell my dad I’m over here trying to get in your pants.”

“She’s at Spin class.” I looked at my alarm clock. It was too early for Cash to be awake, let alone at my house. “Trouble in paradise?”

He shrugged and pulled his pencil out from behind his ear, opening his sketchpad. “You could say that. What about you?” He nodded to the journal in my hands. “More dreams?”

I nodded and closed my eyes, trying to remember more of my dream. It was already fading. Damn it.

“Well, don’t let me bother you.” His lips quirked into a grin as he started to draw. His messy black spikes stood straight up on his head, flecks of red and gold paint glinting from the tips.

“What are you drawing?”

“You.” His wrist moved fluidly, his pencil scratching against the paper as he studied the curve of my face.

I groaned and stuffed my face in my hands. “Seriously, Cash. I just woke up.”

“Come on, it’s for class,” he said. “We’re supposed to sketch someone in a natural pose. Someone who doesn’t know we’re drawing them.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Seems a little stalkerish. Besides, I know you’re drawing me, so that sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?”

“So pretend you don’t know I’m here. Go back to whatever you were writing.”

Not possible. I couldn’t immerse myself in those kinds of memories while he was sitting here analyzing every one of my expressions. Cash knew me too well as it was. My horrible poker face was only going to make everything worse.

“Besides, the light is amazing in here right now. Don’t move. Don’t even blink. I swear, the way the sun is hitting you…” His inspiration must have stolen the rest of his words because he sank into a heavy silence, the hiss of his charcoal pencil speaking for him as it frantically worked at replicating my sleep-mussed state.

I peered around his sketchbook to see which T-shirt he was wearing today. This one said,
I’m only here because my flux capacitor is broken
. It was the same one he’d been wearing yesterday.

“You do realize kids in our generation are not going to get a reference to
Back to the Future
?” I asked.

“
You
just did,” he said without looking up.

“Only because you’ve forced me to sit through it like three hundred times.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t wear them for anyone else. I wear them for me.”

I sighed. So much for trying to distract him. “I never agreed to this, you know,” I said fruitlessly. I knew he’d get what he wanted, even if what he wanted was my humiliation served on a silver platter. Or in this case, a leather sketchpad.

“I’ll let you punch me if you let me finish,” he said.

“Not good enough. You have to buy me coffee and a chocolate croissant
and
let me punch you.”

“Hmm.” Another graceful arc of the pencil branded more of me onto the page. “That’s a pretty high price. Maybe we should make this a nude if I’m having to spring for croissants. Oh wait! I already did one of those last night.”

He grinned down at the paper and waggled his eyebrows. The tiny silver piercing embedded in his right brow caught the sunlight. I clutched my journal to my chest and threw a pillow at him.

“You are so gross.” I crawled out of bed to search for school clothes, then pulled open a drawer and grabbed a pair of jeans. “Who was it this time?”

He closed his sketchpad, tucked his pencil behind his ear, and wandered over to lean on my dresser. “Tinley. In my studio where my dad walked in, so as you can imagine, my house is a hostile environment right now.” Cash snatched the journal out of my hand. “Are you ever going to let me see what you write in here?”

“Give that back!”

“Nope.” He grinned. “I swear to God if I find hearts doodled around some guy’s name in here, I’m gonna throw up.”

I ripped it out of his hand and dropped it into the drawer. The only things in those journals were nightmares and disfigured memories of my dad. I didn’t care about boys and Cash knew it. I didn’t have the time, the patience, or the kind of emotional energy they demanded.

Cash peeked in another drawer and frowned. “Lace?” he said, distracted. “That’s…disturbing. I feel like I just walked in on my dad having sex or something. Since when do you wear sexy underwear?”

I slammed the drawer shut on his fingers. “Quit snooping through my stuff!”

He shook his hand. “It’s not like I haven’t seen it all before.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Cash walked over to the window and peeked out the blinds to see his house. “I like to do a monthly sweep of your room.”

Horror made the room spin. “You go through my stuff?”

“No, not really. But I should. Just to make sure nothing weird is going on with you. Which I wouldn’t have to do if you actually
talked
to me anymore.”

“You’re a real pain in the ass,” I said. “You know that, right?”

“So I hear.” He snapped the blinds shut and groaned. “Why hasn’t he left yet?”

I stuffed my books and camera into my bag. “Probably because he’s waiting to annihilate you.”

“Hey.” Cash leaned over and picked up the bobblehead zombie he got me for my birthday last year. “Nice way to treat Francisco.” He brushed it off and placed it back next to my lip gloss and the fancy perfume Mom gave me that I never wore.

I gripped my bag, remembering the sound that had woken me up this morning. As if someone had knocked something over. “Sorry.”

“I’ll forgive you if you let me use your shower. I’d like to postpone my annihilation as long as possible, and want to smell good while doing it.” He crossed over to my closet. “Do you still have any of your dad’s old T-shirts around?”

I pulled Dad’s Stanford sweatshirt from the back of my closet, stopping to run my fingers over the faded letters. It had been his favorite. So many memories swirled inside my head of him in that sweatshirt. “No shower and I better get this back,” I said, tossing it to him. “And do you even realize what will happen if Mom comes home and finds you in our shower? I don’t need that kind of drama.”

I grabbed my clothes and headed for the hall. Cash followed me to the bathroom, where I slammed the door in his face. I heard what I guessed was his forehead thump against the door, and his muffled voice seeped through the wood. “Come on, Em. Don’t throw me to the sharks.”

I twisted on the hot water in the shower and spun around to grab my toothbrush. My hand froze, hovering above counter, shaking. On my mirror, the words
hello Allison
were written in smudged black eyeliner. I slapped my hand over my mouth to hold in my scream and stumbled back into the towel rack. Not again. I squeezed my eyes shut. Please not again.

Cash tapped on the door again. “Emma?”

I made my hands into a cup and breathed into them until my heart slowed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said as soon as I could get the words out. Desperate, I grabbed the hand towel off the rack behind me and scrubbed at the mirror. I was not going back to Brookhaven again. No way was I spending my senior year in a mental institution. The condensation from the shower made it easy work, but my white towel had black splotches all over it by the time I was finished. Cash couldn’t see this. Nobody could.

“She’s crying out for attention,”
the doctor had said to Mom like I wasn’t sitting right there.
“It’s not uncommon for a young person to lash out like this after a traumatic experience.”

Cash tapped on the other side of the door with the toe of his shoe. “Are you okay?”

Taking a deep breath, I stashed the towel in the hamper and opened the door. He stumbled into the foggy bathroom, a tangle of arms and legs, before catching himself on the doorframe.

“I’m fine. But I really need to get in the shower.” When he just stared at me I said, “We can hang out later, okay?”

I tried to close the door but Cash stuck his shoe in the doorway and pushed it open again.

“What’s going on, Em?” His chocolate-colored eyes searched my face. “Every time I see you, you’re writing in that stupid journal. You’ve been acting paranoid at school and you’re sleeping with your light on again. Don’t keep it all in like last time. Talk to me. I want to help.”

I stared at his chest for a long moment before I said anything.

“Nothing’s wrong.” I forced a smile. He didn’t look like he believed me. “Look, I just had a bad dream, okay? Everybody has them. I didn’t give you crap when you had that nightmare about the clowns and Justin Bieber.”

I expected him to laugh and defend himself by saying how drunk he’d been when he had that dream, but he didn’t. He wasn’t going to let this go.

“It’s not just the dream and you know it,” he said, his brows drawn together. “You’re pulling away again. I can feel it.”

I looked away, knowing he was right. Hating lying to him. “I said I’m fine. I’ve even been taking my pills. I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

“I want you to talk to me. I want you to stop feeding me the same bullshit you feed your mom. It doesn’t work on me, Em. I know you.”

How was I supposed to tell him I didn’t know dreams from reality anymore? That I felt like someone or something was watching me. That I could feel them like a rush of warmth constantly running across my skin.

The answer was: I couldn’t.

I closed my eyes, not wanting to look at him. “Cash, please.”

He made a frustrated sound. “Fine. Then hurry up and let’s get something to eat. You’ll feel better.”

I rolled my eyes. “You just want me to cook you something.”

“That, too.” He put his hands on the doorframe so I couldn’t shut him out. “Come on, Em. Don’t make me go back home yet.”

I sighed. Cash was like a stray dog. Mom fed him one peanut butter and jelly sandwich the day his mom left when we were six, and I hadn’t been able to get rid of him since. He’d always be that sad boy sitting on my front porch with jelly on his cheek to me. “I’ll bake you some scones after I get out of the shower, but Mom will ground me for an eternity if she finds you here. Sorry.”

He frowned and raked his fingers through his black spikes. “Fine.
If
I survive the wrath of Dad, then I’ll meet you out front in an hour. I’ll take you to get your stupid coffee.”

I waved him off but he stopped in the hall, his fingers tapping on the wall next to the last family picture we’d ever taken with my dad. “Who’s Allison?” he asked.

I froze. “What?”

“Allison,” he said. “You said it in your sleep the other night. You said, ’I’m not Allison.’”

Muffled memories that didn’t belong to me clouded my mind and bled into the corners of my vision like ink. I blinked them away, wanting to scrub myself clean of them.

“Who is she?”

I shook my head and touched the doorknob, ready to put an end to the conversation. “Honestly, I don’t know.”