The Space Between (The Book of Phoenix) (42 page)

Chapter 38

  We slammed into our bodies, and Leni bolted from my lap and into the bedroom.

“You see? The only reason Jacey and then Micah died is because they waited too long,” she said in my head as she rushed back to the front of the camper and sat down to pull her cowboy boots on. As if the flossy top and short cut-offs with loose strings hanging from the edges weren’t sexy enough, the boots looked ridiculous but hot. “What? They’re easier to run in than sandals. Now what about my truck? We gotta go.”

As much as I loved “hearing” her voice, I didn’t like the word “run” or “go.” I hadn’t told her about her truck earlier, hoping to convince her to drop the idea of the mansion first. She moved about, stuffing a backpack with some clothes and necessities, including the journal.

“They were waiting on a part that was supposed to come in this morning,” I said. My eyes followed hers as she glanced at the clock on the mini-stove. How the hell was it nearly three o’clock in the afternoon already? We’d been out of our bodies for . . . four
hours
?

“It should be done by now?” she asked.

I let out a sigh. I couldn’t lie to her. “Yeah. Probably.”

“Then what are we waiting for? We’re losing daylight!”

She slung the bag over her shoulder and ran out of the camper, and I sprinted after her toward the truck stop. Damn. I didn’t know the girl could run so fast.

“We’ll leave the camper,” she mind-spoke as we ran. “We can’t let it slow us down. If we leave now, we can be to Tampa/St. Pete before dark, right?”

“Leni, wait!”

She stopped, but probably only because she had to since we’d reached the highway separating the RV park from the truck stop. Already. I’d never cleared that much distance so fast, even when I ran sprints. Leni’s legs were much shorter than mine. And neither of us were winded.

Several cars came from both directions, preventing us from crossing, so she turned to me.

“What?” she asked, her mental voice filled with impatience. “You got it all, right? You remember everything? We have to hurry up and get to the Gate.”

“We need to think this through. How do you know the mansion is the Gate?”

“It has to be. Why else would we be pulled to it?”

“Maybe the Dark side has their own way of getting to us. Maybe it’s their trap. It worked against Jacey and Micah.”

Her eyes darted around as she seemed to consider this, but then returned to me and she shook her head. “It
has
to be the Gate. Everything—your dreams, the drawings, the postcard—they’ve all been pointing us there. I feel it in my gut.” She looked up at me, locking her eyes on mine. “You know you do, too.”

I held her gaze like a vice. “I also still feel what they did to Jacey, and then to Micah. Quite clearly.”

Something flickered in her eyes, but she remained stoic. “They died because they took too long. No other reason. And we’ve Bonded more than they ever had, which means we’re stronger than them. The Shadowmen will know it, and they’ll be all over us any time now.” She turned back toward the highway and the last car about to pass us. “We’re supposed to follow our instinct, especially mine. We have to go, Jeric. We have to get there before dark. They seem to only attack at night.”

She sprinted across the highway.

“So let’s wait until morning, when we have plenty of daylight,” I said as I followed her. “In the meantime, we can try to remember more. Make sure we’re going in the right direction.”

She came to a stop again, now in the middle of the truck stop’s parking lot not far from where we’d been attacked the other night, turned to me, and placed her fists on her hips. I wished I
could
hear her thoughts right now, because I wasn’t sure if I was reaching her at all. Even after remembering all we had, the idea of going to Tampa and the mansion felt too dangerous. We didn’t know exactly how to get there, and it would certainly be swarming with Shadowmen once again. And those people, people Jacey and Micah had once trusted . . . Leni didn’t have to watch them kill her Twin Flame right in front of her eyes.

“We’re not sick,” I said. “Not like Jacey was. How much difference can one night make?”

She pressed her lips together, then pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. I thought I might have had her convinced.

Then a dark shadow fell over us. Dark as a storm cloud moving in front of the sun. The back of my neck prickled as we both looked up, but the sun blazed in a clear blue sky. We looked at each other again.

“A huge difference,” Leni said. She took off for the mechanic’s bay.

Her truck still sat on the lift. She talked with the mechanic, her hands moving animatedly, but I stayed outside, not wanting to rush him at all. I turned my back to the bay, staring across the highway, but not really seeing.
Just one more night
. That’s all I wanted. One more night to try to remember what the Keeper hadn’t had time to explain to us. Like how we’d run here in record time.

The dust hadn’t even settled to the ground by Leni’s camper yet, over two hundred yards away, and we’d even had to wait to cross the highway. And how could I possibly see all the way to Leni’s camper in the first place? How could we
mind-talk
to each other?

“He said it’ll be another hour or two,” Leni said when she returned to where I stood, outside the building. “Will we be able to get there before dark?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t as familiar with the West Coast of Florida as I was the East.

“We need to get to Tampa before nightfall.” Leni’s mouth moved, her gaze on someone behind me, probably the mechanic. After a pause, she nodded and began to pace. I didn’t know what that meant, but I was perfectly fine waiting here until it became too late. I leaned against the brick wall, lifted a foot against it to brace myself, and crossed my arms over my chest, enjoying the view of both sides of Leni as she continued pacing.

“He doesn’t know if he can get the truck done on time,” she finally said after a few minutes of this.

“We can always go in the morning,” I suggested once again, but with perfect timing, the sun disappeared for another brief moment. Asshole Shadowmen.

An old, beat-up blue Mazda stopped in front of us, and Bethany’s red head stuck out the window.

“I was going into the gas station when I heard you say you need to get to Tampa,” her lips said. “I was about to take off for Orlando and can give you a ride. It’s not that far out of the way.”

Leni and I exchanged a glance, and I was relieved to see her answer in her eyes.

She gave Bethany a look as though disgusted by the girl, even after her admission, and waved her off.

I lifted my eyebrows. “Thought I proved you have no reason to be jealous.”

She rolled her eyes at me. “It’s not always about you, Jeric. If the Shadowmen are watching us like I feel they are, and they get the slightest indication the girl means anything to us, they’ll go after her whether she’s physically with us or not. Just like they did Bex. I’d rather keep them focused on us.”

She returned to her pacing. The sun continued to beat down on us. I hated northern Florida weather. As humid as anywhere on the East Coast, hotter than Hell, literally, and no breeze off the sea because there wasn’t one close enough. Sweat rolled down my back.

Leni’s head snapped toward the mechanic’s bay, and she stopped pacing. After a moment, her face slackened, and I thought she was going to burst into tears. But just as quickly, determination turned her expression to stone, and she stalked off for the convenience store part of the truck stop.

“We
will
get there,” she said.

I followed her around the corner, but stopped at the glass front, keeping an eye on her as she went inside. She spoke to one of the cashiers and then another. I followed along the front as she went farther on to the diner, and then talked to a guy who was rising from his booth.

He looked like a stereotypical over-the-road truck driver—big and burly, dark hair with a receding hairline, mustache and beard. He wore the standard sleeveless flannel shirt exposing some ink and baggy Wranglers with black work boots. At least when he eyed Leni, he didn’t look like he wanted to eat her like the other men in the restaurant did. All of their heads had turned when she walked in, causing me to scowl. But even as Leni led the guy outside, he wasn’t watching her ass.

“Let’s go,” she said in my head. “He’s going to Tampa to pick up a trailer and said he’ll take us.”

“Are you nuts?” I kept their pace as we walked toward the doors, them inside and me still out. “You really do want to get us killed, don’t you?”

“Look at the book in his hand,” she said, her eyes flickering toward me.

I noticed the black book as they pushed through the doors, and I silently chuckled. “The Bible? And you think that makes him trustworthy? You think that means we can just jump in his truck and hit the highway with him behind the wheel and in total control, and not have to worry at all?”

“No, but it helps. We have to go, Jeric. Besides, if something happens, I’m sure you can take him on.” She slipped me a small smile as she grabbed my hand. I dragged my feet as we followed the guy to his truck.

Unlike the last dude, he didn’t have a problem at all when I climbed in before Leni to sit in the middle, keeping my body between his and hers in the cab that had no trailer attached to it. As we merged onto I-75, I pulled Leni’s hand in between both of mine. All I could think was,
This is nuts. Fucking. Nuts.

“His name is T.J., he’s married, second wife, two kids with one on the way,” Leni told me after an hour or so. They must have been talking, but I hadn’t noticed, too focused on the passing pine trees and mentally prepping myself for what we were headed into. “He’d been in an accident a few years ago and nearly died. Had his moment with Jesus and was born again.”

“Leni,” I said, and although we were mind-talking, it sounded like it came through gritted teeth as I clenched my jaw, “do you really think I give a shit?”

She frowned. “Sorry. It was distracting me from the nerves.”

She turned away from me and toward the window, but didn’t pull her hand out of mine, so I gave it a squeeze in apology, and she returned it. A shadow crossed over the highway, and several miles down the road, another. Leni gnawed on her lip, her eyes constantly on the sky as were mine. As the sun began lowering to our right, her leg started bouncing up and down.

Finally came the signs for the Tampa and St. Petersburg exits.

“He said he can take us wherever we need to go,” Leni said once we pulled off the highway. “I’m having him take us as close as possible. The less we’re out in the open, the better.”

I nodded.

She placed a hand on my leg. “And stop fidgeting. He’s getting concerned by our nervousness.”

I hadn’t realized my leg had been bouncing along with hers. Or that I’d been chewing on my fingernails. I dropped my hand into my lap and clasped hers again. Our wrists pressed together and now when the flame marks met, they were obviously wings. The marks had grown sometime since yesterday—since our re-Bonding?—showing what looked like would become a phoenix. We both marveled at the image, then Leni gave my hand another squeeze.

She must have been giving him directions as we went because we always turned as soon as the pull in my gut changed. We crossed to Saint Petersburg, then headed south. The tug grew stronger, and if I had my geography right, we’d be crossing water soon. Signs for the Sunshine Skyway Bridge started popping up, but before we reached the turn for it, Leni had the driver pull off. We turned onto a road lined with condos, water on the other side of them, in an area that felt uncomfortably familiar. The setting sun cast long shadows across the road from the taller buildings that blocked the waning daylight. My neck prickled with the feeling of being watched from the darker shadows. I wondered again if there were any way to convince Leni this was absolutely the worst possible thing we could be doing.

She stiffened next to me and screamed. In my head and apparently out loud as her mouth dropped open and she stared out the windshield. Her face drained of all color. Barely in time, I looked out the window to see what had her so terrified. A figure stood in the middle of the road with dark clothes on but a face white as chalk glowing in the darkness and eyes black as ink.

Our bodies flew forward against the seatbelts when T.J. stood on the brake, and my stomach launched into my throat. We jerked backward against the seats at the same time we hit the guy. Except . . . we didn’t really hit him. He wasn’t really a guy. A thousand or two tiny birds flew up into the sky.

The driver slammed the gears into park and climbed out his side, and Leni and I climbed out ours. T.J. rushed toward the front of the cab, but Leni and I both looked up. Shadows streaked against the darkening sky.

“We have to leave him,” Leni said. “We gotta go.”

As much as I’d rather stay in the truck until it left Tampa again, I agreed. We couldn’t bring T.J. into this. He had a wife and kids. A baby on the way.

We took off running down the dark street, both of us pulled in the same direction. Whether it was to a place of refuge or to our deaths, I still wasn’t sure. I glanced over my shoulder once to find T.J. staring after us, his arms in the air with exasperation.

We ran through a condo parking lot, across a green space, and into another parking lot. Shadows hovered on the other side, so Leni cut through a small area between two condo buildings. Three men—Shadowmen—stood in our path, one slightly in front of the others as if they were in formation. With nowhere to go, we picked up our speed and ran for them. At the last second, Leni veered off to the left but didn’t slow as she approached the stucco building. Instead, she ran several steps up the side of it, flipped in an arch over the heads of the Shadowmen and landed against the side of the opposite building and slightly past the obstacles. She dropped gracefully to the ground and waited on me as if she’d done this a million times.

I plowed right into them like a bowling ball into pins and launched into a fight. Knowing Leni was safely beyond them, I focused on my punches and kicks. A fist to the Adam’s apple. Another through a couple of ribs. A foot to a temple and another into a groin. In no time, they’d all fallen and then disappeared.

We continued our run, zigzagging through parking lots and access streets, following our guts as everything around us darkened more. We entered the parking lot of a closed, rundown hotel at the edge of the water, and I felt them on the back of my neck before they ambushed us.

Several dropped from the sky, surrounding us. Eight. Now ten. Now a dozen. We both fought, and I couldn’t have been prouder of Leni as she swung and kicked and flipped over their heads. She was stronger and faster than I’d ever imagined. So was I. We knocked out some, but as soon as they disappeared, more came to replace them.

I should have known.

I
did
know. And I’d let her charge forward anyway. Just as I always did, in every life we’d ever shared together. She was the fire, the light for our paths. I was her protector, meant to lead alongside her but never in front of her, or I’d lose my way. But damn if she didn’t get us into some really fucked-up situations.

“We’ll never fight our way through this,” she said in my mind as she dropped to a crouch and swung her leg out, knocking a Shadowman to the ground. “There has to be another way.”

I inhaled a deep breath and pushed out as I slammed the butt of my hand into a nose. “I’ll keep them occupied if you want to jump ahead and scope the area.”

I knew she could do it. She’d done so hundreds of times before. She could spring over their heads and be running down the street beyond them before they even noticed she was gone. The know-how was there, if she could get her current body to cooperate. The way she’d been performing tonight so far, I was sure this wouldn’t be a problem.

She nodded up toward the top of the mid-rise hotel building as a hand reached for her throat. She karate-chopped it away and bent her knees, ready to jump.

But more bodies fell into our circle.

And not Shadowmen.

“Looks like you can use some help,” a male voice thundered through my head. The shock distracted me long enough to receive a punch to the jaw. The dark-haired guy who’d dropped in retaliated with a blow to the Shadowman’s throat, knocking him unconscious. He disappeared before hitting the ground.

I didn’t trust this guy, or the girl who had come with him, despite what he’d just done. I didn’t like how I could hear him or her. I didn’t like how they were better fighters than both Leni and me—I was a former champion so this said a lot. Like, “They could easily kill us.” He stood about my height and size, but she was a bit of nothing, maybe five-three and a hundred pounds, and although Leni and I still fought, these two took out all but three Shadowmen in a matter of a few seconds. I swung at one remaining in front of me, and it disintegrated into black powder.

“Why do they do that?” I growled with frustration.

“They’re the Lakari,” the guy said. “Enyxa’s death spirits. They can only take so much damage before they can’t hold their physical forms anymore.”