The Space Between

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

THIS BOOK IS FOR MY FAMILY—

each and every one of you.

The Space Between

 

RAZORBILL

 

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
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Copyright © 2011 Brenna Yovanoff

All rights reserved

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

 

ISBN : 978-1-101-55891-1

 

 

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PART ONE

HELL

O
nce, my mother told a whole host of angels that she’d rather die than go back to a man she didn’t love.

This was a long time ago, before famine or war or the combustion engine. Before my father fell from grace and killed a thousand divine messengers on the way down. Back then, my mother was young and wild. She had another life.

God made Adam out of dirt, complete with a soul, and a heart in his chest, and that was the first man. There was a garden filled with beasts, where Adam lived alone.

Then, because it wasn’t good for man to be alone, God made Lilith. And that was the first mistake. She came to Adam across a meadow delirious with flowers and he was in love.

She didn’t love him back.

He didn’t see the darkness in her. He was young and thought that she could change. My father says that’s just what happens when you’re young, but I still think Adam should have known. He should have seen it in her eyes, seen the truth in her jagged fingernails. He should have known you can’t change a girl with iron teeth.

They lived together in the Garden, and Adam was happy. Lilith, though, was meant for fiercer places. When Adam tried to tame her, she fought him. She wasn’t made to be told how to behave or what to do. When she left, she did it calmly. She simply stood up and walked away. She belonged in the wilds, outside the Garden, and so she stayed, night after night, hovering on a black beach beside a sea like polished glass.

There was no reason to go back to Adam. She didn’t miss him. She thought she could leave behind their entire life together, and that was her mistake.

My brother was born on a bed of black stones, under a blood-red moon. Our mother named him Ohbrin, a name of mysteries, in a language only she knew. He was like her in almost every way, with her sleek black hair and gray eyes, but he laughed sometimes and smiled up at her. She knew she wasn’t meant to raise a child, and she took him back to show Adam a son whose smile was so like his own.

But in the Garden, things had changed. Adam sat beneath a strange, spreading tree and there was a strange woman beside him, heavy and round, made from a piece of Adam’s own body, so she could never stand up and wander away.

When Lilith showed him the baby in her arms, he took one look and turned away. He said he didn’t want him. Didn’t want his own child.

Before, when Lilith left, she’d been stony and remote. Now, she trembled, outraged that a man could refuse his son. She spit in Adam’s face and cursed the day she ever saw him. It was the day she’d been born.

Then she took Obie and left, pelting away through the dark.

In the dark is where she met my father.

CHAPTER ONE

I
’m watching
North by Northwest
when the picture goes out on the TV. It’s at the part where Thornhill is being chased by the airplane and the scene is very tense. Then the sound cuts off abruptly and Cary Grant dissolves into a sea of tiny dots.

My mother’s silhouette appears in the glass, dim and faceless. When she speaks, her voice comes from far away, distorted by the hiss of static. “I need you to come up here.”

She vanishes again before I can answer and the picture doesn’t come back. I know I should go up and see what she wants, but just for now, I don’t move.