Inbetween (Kissed by Death, #1) (10 page)

Chapter 10

Finn

I pressed my palms against the brick wall outside Emma’s room and tried to muster up the courage to do what I’d decided to do back on the beach. If only a wall was all that separated us. Sometimes it felt more like an ocean of lava. Especially when there were things inside me, ripping me apart, needing to be let free. And damn it, I wanted to let it all free. I wanted to walk in there and tell her things that had been locked up in me for the last two years.

I leaned my forehead against the brick. No. I couldn’t think like that. Thoughts like that were going to get me in trouble. Again.

The energy of another reaper sparked against my skin. I spun around. Along the side of the house, a glow sliced through the shadows. Anaya. A streak of moonlight caught her hair and tangled with her braids, making them shine.

I half expected her to blow around the house with the force of an atom bomb, ready to rip into me for being here. But she didn’t. She wasn’t even watching me. She was watching…Cash.

He waved to the car that had just dropped him off and stumbled around the house, tripping through the shadows. Anaya’s eyes followed him, almost longingly, until he climbed through his bedroom window and closed the blinds.

I stepped out of the shadows. “Anaya?”

She jerked her gaze from Cash’s window and blinked, as if she was waking up from a dream. “What?”

“Everything okay?” I asked hesitantly, watching the way her eyes flitted to Cash’s house again.

“Y-yes.” She sounded flustered. “Why wouldn’t it be? I was just…”

I waited, hoping with everything in me that I was wrong about what I’d just seen.

She scowled at me. “Don’t give me that look, Finn. You’re the one lurking around the human girl’s house in the middle of the night.”

“I’d hardly call it lurking.”

“Then what
are
you doing here?” She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not stupid. You’re up to something.”

I glanced back at Emma’s house. At the flickering glow from the candles in her window. “I’m trying to remind myself why it’s a bad idea to go in there and talk to her. Why it’s a bad idea to go in there and do
more
than talk to her.”

“I’m not going to stand here and lecture you. I’m not Easton, and you don’t need a babysitter. You already know why it’s a bad idea.”

I knew it was a bad idea. But now that I’d gotten a taste of what touching and talking to Emma felt like, I didn’t know how much longer I could do this. Stay away from her. Pretend everything inside me wasn’t burning with the need for her to really know me. I closed my eyes, feeling the weight of my decision warm all of the hollow places inside. When I opened my eyes again, Anaya was shaking her head.

“You’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you?”

“Probably, but you were never here.” I said. “And if you were never here, then I didn’t see you looking at Cash like you wanted to doodle his name in your diary.”

“I wasn’t—”

I raised a brow and she stopped. She looked over her shoulder at Cash’s house and bit her lip. “His name is Cash?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I don’t have to tell you why it’s a bad idea. Right?”

Anaya glanced down to the scythe beginning to glitter and glow in her leather belt. She wrapped her fingers around it and nodded. “Right.”

“Anaya? Tell me you’ll watch out for her. If something ever happens…if I’m ever not there and you are, just don’t leave her alone.”

Her lips lifted into a small smile. “You know I will.”

“Thank you.”

I waited for the burst of light to consume Anaya and deposit her on the other side before I sprinted across the yard. Emma had seen me in the woods. Talked to me like I was real. Maybe I could make this work. She didn’t have to know everything. Just enough. I stopped myself a breath away from her bedroom wall.

It’s now or never, Finn.

I exhaled and slipped through the cold brick until the warmth of Emma’s room surrounded me. I don’t know what I’d been expecting to find, but Emma huddled over a little plastic board on her bed wasn’t it. And the hope in her eyes… It was hope that she wasn’t crazy. Hope that the little board in front of her could prove it. She deserved so much more than this. She
was
so much more than this. She was determined and loyal and beautiful and everything I wanted to be. She took care of the people around her. She took care of me once. She took care of me when she should have hated me.

I sat down on the bed across from her and balled my fingers into fists. I hated this. Hated that she was resorting to something so ridiculous because of what I had done. What I had caused. That what I’d done had hurt her this badly.

Emma pulled her long blond hair over her shoulder and took a deep breath. Two of her fingers rested on top of the pointer. “Is there someone here?” she asked, eyes closed. “Please. Please talk to me if you’re here.”

Screw Balthazar and his threats. If I didn’t go corporeal, he’d never know.

I laid my fingers beside hers and moved the pointer to the word
yes
.

Chapter 11

Emma

I froze, afraid to move my fingers. Afraid to breathe. My eyes stayed glued to the word under the wooden pointer.

Yes.

“Oh my God.” I jerked my hand away from the board and clutched it to my chest. My heart thumped until I could feel it in my palm like a pulse. I didn’t know what to do next. All I knew about Ouija boards was what I’d seen on lame YouTube videos, and that didn’t seem like much help to me now that someone—or something—was actually answering.

“Who are you?” I finally asked. When I realized my hands were still clasped to my chest, I dropped one down to the pointer, but it slid out from under my fingertips before I could touch it. “F,” I whispered, saying the letters out loud. “I. N.”

The pointer paused then slid around in a circle before coming back to N.

In that moment, the board was the only object that existed in the world. The mountains around my house could have come crashing down. The stars could have fallen from the sky. I don’t think I would have noticed any of it. This was one of those moments when everything changed. The kind of moment when reality becomes something else. When it didn’t move anymore, I looked around the room, expecting to find something. Finding nothing.

“Finn,” I breathed. “Your name is Finn?”

The pointer slid to
yes
and I sat up on my knees, my breaths rushing in and out of my lungs. That name…

“Say it again.”

I laughed at the shadow of a boy with green eyes and pressed my hands against his chest. “What?”

“My name. The way you say it…you say it like it matters. Like it still means something.”

I kissed the corner of his mouth and whispered, “Finn.”

I blinked the vision away. My heart thudded painfully in my chest. The green eyes, that voice…
Oh God
. I couldn’t catch my breath. It was him. He was the one at the school. In the forest. In my head. My dreams. I stared at the board.
Finn
.

“Can I see you?” I bit my lip, not letting myself think about what I was really asking for. I just knew I wanted it. Everything inside me wanted it. “Like I saw you earlier tonight?”

Nothing happened. No sparks of magic. No phantom light transforming into the boy I’d seen with jungle-green eyes. The pointer didn’t even budge. Disappointment twisted in my chest. This couldn’t be it. This couldn’t be all there was. I needed answers. I needed to know why he was here. I needed way too much for this to be it.

That memory was still inside me. His lips, his hands, the way I felt like I was going to explode if he kept touching me.
Finn
. What the hell did this mean? Was it even real? Or did I just want it so badly that my screwed-up brain had created it all?

“Finn?” I called in a shaky voice, staring at the pointer, willing it to move. Willing it to prove I wasn’t as crazy as the doctors thought.

It didn’t.

So I was crazy, then. I squeezed my hands into fists so hard my nails left little crescent imprints in my palm, pushed myself off the bed, and stomped down the hall into the kitchen. Pills. I needed pills. I flipped on the light and one of the bulbs popped and went out, turning the kitchen a shade dimmer. I grabbed the little orange pill bottle off the counter. I’d already taken one today, but clearly I needed more clarity. I needed to get this memory…no. This
hallucination
out of my head.

“Don’t take those,” the now-familiar voice said.

I squeezed the cap until my fingers went numb and turned around. He was there, standing in my kitchen like he belonged there. Like he’d always been there.

Finn looked at the bottle in my hands. “You’re not crazy, Emma. You don’t need those.”

The pill bottle clattered to the tile floor. I jumped back, heart thundering in my chest, lungs eating up all of the air around me until I felt dizzy. It all clicked together. The guy in my dreams, the guy who had saved my life twice…he was here. Standing in front of me. How was this even possible?

“What are you?” I closed my eyes and pictured the agonized look on his face just before he’d dissolved and disappeared into the night like a ghost.

“I’m not…alive.”

A breath shuddered out of me and I opened my eyes, half-expecting him to be gone. But he still stood by the gray granite counter looking uncertain. Looking like a dream. “What does that mean?”

“It means I’m dead. I’m a soul.”

Dead
. The word floated around in my head, not feeling real. Dead was what my dad was. Dead was a cold, rotting body in the ground. I looked at Finn. At the warm color of his lips. The worried look in his vibrant green eyes. I couldn’t make the word fit with him.

Finn took a step closer. I backed away, but he followed.

“I’m not lying,” he whispered.

I stared at his chest so I wouldn’t have to look at his face. It didn’t move. It. Didn’t. Move. The only breaths I could hear were my own. Fear started a slow, steady burn in my chest. My heart felt like it was in my throat, raw and achy. A few minutes ago, all I wanted was this. Now I didn’t know how to feel. God…I couldn’t…I couldn’t…

I took a deep breath and threw open the cabinets in front of me. Then I grabbed a mixing bowl and plopped it onto the counter along with my favorite muffin tin. I needed something to do with my hands. Something to do with my mind, because I felt very close to losing it.

“Say something,” Finn said behind me. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

I spun around, keeping my back pressed against the counter.

“I…” I bit my lip and exhaled a shaky breath. “I don’t know what to think. I don’t even know where to start.”

He hooked his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans, dragging them lower around his waist. “How about you tell me what you want to know, and I’ll talk.”

Before I could form a question, another memory knocked the breath out of me and clouded my thoughts.

The sky looked cold. A dull pewter color that blended with the swaying silver wheat surrounding me. Finn stepped over me, blocking the sky. He hooked his thumbs into his jeans and grinned down at me.

My stomach fluttered and my knees forgot to support me. I sagged against the counter. “I know you. I want to know how I know you.”

Finn grabbed the back of his neck and groaned. “Can we talk about something else first? Anything else.”

“Are you doing this?” I gripped the wire whisk in my hand so tight my palms felt numb. “Are you showing me these things? The dreams?”

I waited for him to tell me what a wackjob I was. That I was imagining things. God, I actually
wanted
him to tell me I was crazy. Because nobody was going to believe the alternative. The alternative would mean I’d spent a summer in a psych ward for nothing.

“I’m not showing you anything,” he said. “I’m just a soul, Emma. I don’t have the ability to make you see things.”

Then it was all real. I didn’t know what to say. I had so many questions, but I couldn’t stop my head from spinning. I pulled flour and sugar out of the cupboard and set them on the counter so I wouldn’t have to look at him. I couldn’t think straight when I was looking at him.

Finn pulled out a stool and sat. His gaze swept over the mess cluttering the counter. “What are you doing?”

“Making blueberry muffins,” I said. It sounded normal. I needed normal.

“Now?” His brow arched.

I tucked my hair behind my ear and felt my cheeks heat. “I…I bake when I’m nervous. It helps calm me down. Helps me think.”

His lips lifted into a small smile. “My mom used to do that when she couldn’t sleep. We’d wake up and find enough pies to feed a small country. She’d stay up all night baking and only keep one for us. She always gave the rest away.”

“You said she used to.” I chewed on my bottom lip and played with the whisk handle. “Why doesn’t she now?”

Finn’s gaze dropped to the cluttered counter but I could tell he was seeing something else. Something I couldn’t see. He finally broke the silence and said, “She died.”

“I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know what to be more sorry about. The fact that his mom was dead, or that he was. It was too crazy to even think about.

“Don’t be. Everybody dies,” he said, a hard edge to his voice. He watched me measure out flour and dump it in the bowl, my hands shaking so hard that most of it ended up on the counter instead. “Am I making you nervous?”

“Yes.” I set down the flour. “But maybe I wouldn’t be so nervous if you would stop sitting there like this is normal. Because it’s not. This…this is so monumentally
not normal
.”

Finn nodded, his eyes consuming me with every blink. The fan I’d set up in the kitchen earlier rotated, blowing a few strands of hair into my face, where they caught on my eyelashes. I couldn’t help but notice that Finn’s hair didn’t budge.

Unable to process the image, I pulled the mixing bowl against my stomach and started dumping in the rest of the ingredients. At least it was something to keep my mind off how completely unhinged I felt. Something to take my mind off the fact that I was standing here having a conversation with a ghost. If that’s even what he was. I watched the flecks of flour and blueberry swirl and fade into the batter. If only life was as simple as this.

Finn was standing beside me. I whirled around and my breath caught in my throat. I hadn’t even heard him get up. “What are you doing?” I said, my voice shaking almost as much as my knees.

“I thought you wanted answers.”

I closed my eyes letting the low timber of his voice melt me. “I do.”

“Then touch me.”

“That’s okay.” I pressed into the counter behind me, cursing myself for backing myself into a corner. “You say you’re dead. I believe you.”

Finn’s gaze shifted to my mouth then back up to my eyes. “Touch me anyway.”