The Between - Sample Chapter
The Between
L J Cohen (author)
LYDIA GLANCED AT HER PHONE and jumped down from the edge of the sink in the girl’s bathroom. Ten more minutes before the late bus. She could risk leaving now. Cracking open the door, she looked up and down the hallway for any sign of Clive. So far, so good. She’d kept her backpack and jacket with her all day so all she had to do was escape outside without being seen. Then she’d have the whole weekend without him following her around. The way he seemed to know where she’d be at any given time was more than a little creepy. It wasn’t right. He wasn’t right. Lydia couldn’t figure out what Clive wanted, but whenever he looked at her she felt unsteady, like the ground was tilting under her feet.
For once she’d timed it perfectly—the halls were empty. Shouldering her pack, Lydia sprinted down the stairs to the side exit where she could see the bus loading zone and had a clear view of anyone coming in or out of the building. A few other students and several of her teachers passed by as if she were invisible. If only she were invisible, then Clive wouldn’t be her problem.
She waited until everyone else boarded before jogging across the field to the bus. There were a few other kids she knew, but no one spoke to her. It had been a long week and Lydia didn’t want to talk to anyone, either. As they pulled away from school, she let her breath out in a long sigh, shoved her backpack under an empty seat, and slumped against the window. With Monday off, she had three days to work on her college essays and get her his-tory paper finished. Three whole days without having to dodge her personal stalker. “Thank God it’s Friday” had never seemed more appropriate.
“May I?” a deep voice asked, full of exaggerated politeness.
She jerked her head up, heart pounding. It couldn’t be. Clive was standing, leaning over her seat, staring at her with his odd emerald eyes. He shouldn’t even be here—as far as she knew, he didn’t live anywhere near her side of town. As usual, no one even glanced her way. She wondered if anyone would react if she screamed. If Clive tried to touch her, she sure as hell would. He sat down beside her and she inched closer to the window.
“It’s the glamour,” he said.
All that effort avoiding him for nothing. How did he even get on the bus? Lydia was sure he hadn’t boarded before her and she was the last one on. Maybe he would just go away if she closed her eyes.
“That’s why they don’t really notice you.”
Lydia could hear the perfect smile in his voice. Ever since he came to school in September, most of the girls and even some of the guys had practically drooled over him. But no one else seemed to catch the odd things he said to her. Not the kids who orbited around “Planet Clive,” not the teachers, who somehow never called on him or collected his homework. Not the guidance counselor, who didn’t seem to register her complaints about him. No one.
“But it’s thinning,” he said.
At least her stop was next. Then she could go home and pretend there wasn’t anyone named Clive Barrow following her around at school. And in seven months, she would graduate, then head off to college. With any luck, she would never, ever see him again.
“Once it’s gone altogether, you won’t be safe here anymore. Even Oberon couldn’t keep you hidden forever.”
She opened her eyes. He was staring at her, smiling. Oberon. Shakespeare. He was talking nonsense again. And she was pretty sure he was mocking her, too. They just finished read-ing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in English class. “Taking the in-character exercise pretty seriously, aren’t you?” Lydia said, irritation making her sarcastic.
“Where do you think he stole his ideas from?”
“Who?” she asked, before pressing her lips closed. She shouldn’t have opened her mouth. The last thing she wanted was to encourage him. In a few minutes, she would be home. Surely he wouldn’t follow her there.
“Shakespeare.” Clive shook his head, his straight, black hair falling to frame his oval face. “Never mind.”
“What’s wrong with you? Just leave me alone,” she said, tugging her backpack free from under the seat in front of her. The bus groaned as it turned the corner of her street. Lydia glared at Clive, but he didn’t budge, effectively trapping her there.
“Excuse me,” she said, not even trying to mirror his formal tone. Her mom’s Subaru was parked in the driveway.
Good. She stood up and shouldered her bag, cursing as the bus ac-celerated past her house. Freaking driver wasn’t going to stop. Again. “Hey, that’s my stop!” she called. He slammed on the brakes and the bus squealed to a halt. The door hissed open.
Clive stood up and swept his arm in a bow that should have seemed weird and awkward in the confined space of the bus, but somehow didn’t. “After you,” he said.
Lydia pushed past him into the aisle, trying not to think of what she’d do if he followed her. Yell? Call the police?
Run? She smiled. There weren’t a lot of kids who could outpace her when she poured it on. “Whatever,” she said.
As she turned toward the front of the bus, a shadow fell over it, darkening the afternoon to instant dusk. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
“Thorn pierce it,” Clive said, his voice a low growl.
She glanced back at him, not sure why the strange things he said bothered her, why she couldn’t just ignore him. He was staring out the widow, his face chalk white. Something had ruffled his perfect composure. Lydia followed the line of his gaze to her house. Her brother Marco’s bike was leaning on the railing of the front porch, his muddy soccer cleats draped over the handlebars, as usual. One of her neighbors was walking a yapping Corgi. The sky that had been threatening rain all day let loose with a spray of fat droplets. It was all utterly ordinary. So why was her pulse pounding in time to the beat of the rain on the roof of the bus?
The door closed. They lurched forward. “You idiot, you made me miss my stop,” she said, reaching out to shove him in the chest. He muttered something under his breath.
A flare of lightning turned the other kids on the bus into distant silhouettes. Lydia squeezed her eyes shut against the searing brightness. Thunder roared like a freight train, rattling windows and leaving her ears ringing.
She had never seen a storm hit so hard or so fast. Tornadoes weren’t common around here, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t happen, right?
The hair on her arms fanned out and a wave of pressure thrummed against her chest. The bus skidded to a stop, throwing Lydia against the edge of a seat. Its high back caught her in the stomach, leaving her gasping for breath.
Screams and shouts competed with the eerie harmonics of the wailing horn, making her skin crawl. She blinked, trying to clear the afterimages from the lightning strike. Her ears still buzzed. The bus was complete chaos. Kids were scrambling to get to their feet, climb-ing over scattered backpacks and one another, shoving their way toward the door.
It all seemed so far away. Lydia stared out the windshield, her mouth falling open, as a tor-rent of water rushed down the street. Flashes of lightning pierced the dark sky. Pain burned like a stitch in her side, making it hard to breathe. She had to get out. She had to run. Lydia shivered, pushing her way through her panicked classmates to the front of the bus.
The driver was slumped over the wheel, blood running from his forehead. Outside, a huge maple tree lay across the road. It was a miracle they hadn’t hit it.
“Come on!” Clive said. “They’re looking for you.”
“What? Who?” Lydia shuddered, his words like the cold rain lashing the bus. She reached for the door release.
“Not that way, you fool!” he shouted. “Look!” Clive pivoted her shoulders around toward the windshield.
The next flare burned a nightmare into her memory. The darkness outside was moving, like a sky full of insects. Each lightning strike erased huge swaths of wriggling blackness. As she watched, more of the swarm poured in to fill the gaps and ate their way closer to the bus. Her arms broke out in goose bumps. She couldn’t look away.
“What the hell is that?” The sounds around her faded and all Lydia could hear was a low vibration from outside, pressing against the skin of the bus.
“Darklings. Let’s go,” Clive said.
“I don’t understand!”
He grabbed her wrist. “Come on, Lydia.”
“Let go of me,” she said, pulling away and cradling her hand.
“I can’t let them find you.”
The kids around her were crying or shouting, but it was as if she were in a sound-proof bubble. Only Clive’s voice and the buzzing darkness felt real. Some part of her recognized this sense of floating as shock. Like the time she fell out of the apple tree and fractured her arm when she was six. She remembered the thump of her body hitting the ground, and the snap of bone, like a tree branch breaking. The pain had been a distant thing. Lydia frowned and took a deep breath. Something was happening here. Something important. She took an uncertain step toward the bus driver, trying to shake off the numbness. “What about him? We have to call 9-1-1.”
“It’s you they’re after. We have to get you away from here. Now move!” She had never heard that note of panic in Clive’s smooth voice before.
She looked from the driver to the writhing shadow outside. As she watched, she knew whatever the darkness was, it saw her. Her mouth dried and she couldn’t swallow. Some-thing deep inside her was being slowly unwound like a spool of thread.
“Lydia!’
She couldn’t move. He grabbed her arm again. There was a tug near her heart. She gasped, her free hand grappling for what was tearing at her chest. “No, stop!” she cried. The pres-sure built and built until Lydia was sure she was being turned inside out. Just when she thought she would collapse, there was an abrupt snap like a rubber band recoiling, and she lurched backward into an open seat, her lungs burning.
“Shut your eyes,” Clive warned.
“What was that?” she whispered. “What are you doing to me?”
“We don’t have time for this,” he snapped. Still holding onto her wrist, he pulled her to her feet and flung himself toward the emergency exit window. Lydia was too shocked to flinch.
Rainbow-colored ripples moved through the glass, slowly liquefying it. She tried to yank free, but his long fingers clamped down like the jaws of an animal. He dragged her along with him through the spreading waves of what had once been a dingy bus window. She could still read the placard below the window frame—in case of emergency, push glass out. There was no glass left to push. They were swimming through air as dense as sea water. Warmth and color lapped at her skin.
This couldn’t be happening.
Craning her neck, she tried to look back the way they’d come. The inside of the bus was a swirl of colors and far away, as if she were seeing it through the wrong end of a kaleido-scope. People moved in a jerky, freeze-frame kind of motion. A vibration like the low twang of a bass string shivered through her bones. Lydia clawed at Clive, struggling to break away.
“I told you to close your eyes!” He pulled sharply and she wheeled around him, a skater at the end of the line in crack the whip. He shoved her farther into the strangely thick air, his body blocking her view of the bus. The painful buzzing eased. She fell, rolling to a stop on solid ground.
“It’s okay,” he said, breathing hard as if he’d been running. “You’re safe now.”
Safe? He had to be kidding. She pressed her hand against her chest, expecting to find a bruise or cut.
Something. There was no pain under her probing fingers. What just hap-pened on the bus? Where was the bus? She looked back the way they had come. The rain-bow window constricted like a pupil in bright sunlight. Where the hell was home? Lydia scrambled to her feet, her heart pounding in the sudden absence of pressure and sound.
“Really, it’s all right,” Clive said. “They can’t follow you here.”
“What was that? What did you do to me?” Keeping watch on Clive, she backed away slowly. Lydia blinked, her eyes tearing under a harsh, blue-white sky that reminded her of the gla-ciers they had studied in science. The rain had stopped. They were standing in a clearing filled with clashing shades of green. Trees jutted out at impossible angles. The horizon was much too close. She tried to swallow, but her throat was too tight.
“I’ve brought you Between,” he said.
“Between? Between what?” The thunderstorm was gone, but so was her house, her neighbor and the dog and the bus. “This is crazy.” Fear squeezed Lydia’s chest. It was hard to breathe. She closed her eyes. I’m dull. Boring.
Nothing interesting ever happens to me. When she opened them again, she was still in a strangely flat landscape.
The perspective was all wrong. She tried to fix her eyes on the trees and grass nearby. Leaves the shape of butterfly wings flapped in the light breeze and the grass looked more like seaweed than any lawn Lydia had ever mowed. But at least they stayed in focus. If she looked even slightly to the right or left, the edges of the landscape moved away from her.
“Try to keep your head still,” Clive said.
She whirled around to face him. The world warped in the blurred lines of a movie camera panning too quickly.
Lydia gagged, falling to her knees, fighting to keep down the rem-nants of school lunch. Saliva flooded her mouth and she swallowed reflexively, staring at a single frond of the odd grass. Rainbows swirled in the drop of water on its tip.
“Are you all right?’ Clive asked.
“Fine,” she said through gritted teeth. Damned if she was going to lose her cookies while he stood there. Her stomach stopped trying to turn itself inside out and she got up slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on the horizon.
“Between what?” she repeated.
“Between Faerie and the Mortal world,” Clive said. “A way station of sorts. A place to catch our breath.”
“Faerie.” She shook her head and instantly regretted it. Colors dripped and ran in this strange tie-dye place. “This isn’t happening.”
“We’ll just rest here a minute and I’ll take you the rest of the way. King Oberon . . . ”
Lydia took a step back and Clive cocked his head, his eyebrows coming together over bright green eyes.
“Oberon. Faerie,” she said. The words sounded silly on her tongue. Lydia took deep breaths though her mouth.
Her stomach settled.
“Is it so hard to believe? Have you not always wondered why you felt out of step? Why it was so easy to stay unnoticed?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Lydia had never run with the popular crowd, but that didn’t mean she was some kind of freak like Clive.
He met her gaze with his, wide and unblinking, like a cat’s.
“I told you. On the bus. The glamour. Oberon sent me to bring you to safety.”
The intensity of his stare made her want to disappear. It was like being trapped by a spot-light on a bare stage.
She narrowed her eyes and squared her shoulders, lifting her chin. “Oberon.” He was clearly insane, but she couldn’t figure out why she’d be trapped in his de-lusion. That’s what this had to be. A minute ago, there was some kind of freak storm. Did the bus crash? Maybe she’d hit her head. She felt through her hair, but nothing hurt. There was no bump, no blood. Not a concussion, then.
“Lydia, there’s nothing wrong with you.”
The strangeness started with Clive, so it had to end with him, too. She had to humor him, find out as much as she could, figure this out. “So you’re a Faerie,” she said. A Faerie. This was crazy. She swallowed a laugh. That wasn’t something you said every day in high school, at least not without getting the crap kicked out of you.
“Fae,” Clive said. “We are the Fae. Where we live is Faerie.”
“We?” Lydia took another step back.
Clive nodded. “Oberon hid you in the Mortal world when you were a babe, but you are one of us. The Fae.”
“Right. You and me. We.” It made as much sense as the wigged-out world around them, or the rabbit hole they fell through to get here, or Clive being practically invisible to all the teachers at school. Lydia looked down at her ordinary jeans and t-shirt and laughed until she started coughing.
“You don’t believe me. Look around you.”
She raised her head to meet his eyes. They certainly weren’t in Kansas anymore. She put her hands to her mouth to stop another bout of uncontrollable laughter. “You’ve obviously made some kind of mistake. I’m Lydia Hawthorne. I live back there.” She waved her hand behind her. “What the hell did you do with my house? My family?”
“They are not.”
“What?”
“Not your family.”
“Right,” Lydia said, stepping farther away from him. The more distance, the better. “It’s been real and you’re definitely different. Faerie, Fae, whatever, but I need to go home now.” It was time to fall out of whatever storybook she had fallen into.
“You can’t go back. The darklings are still hunting for you.”
If nothing else about this was real, the seething blackness and the bus crash definitely were. “Darklings. What are they?”
“Trackers.”
“What, like Faerie ninjas?” She said it to make a joke, but Clive didn’t laugh.
“More akin to hunting hounds.”
“Why are they after us? Who sent them?”
“Titania. And you, not us. They search for you,” Clive said.
“Titania. Oberon. You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Lydia, Titania set the darklings after you. They won’t stop. Not ever. Not until they bind you and take you to Shadow.”
What the hell was Shadow? Whatever it was, it didn’t sound good. “No. You’re not making any sense.” A wave of dizziness almost took her to her knees. Lydia rubbed her hand in small circles over her heart. She felt bruised.
Something happened on the bus. Something about that swarm of darkness.
“I swear, I’ll explain it all to you when we get to Faerie.”
“Everything was fine. Until you showed up. You’ve done something.” He must have drugged her, but how? She should have told her parents about him. She should have called the po-lice when she had the chance. How was she going to get out of here?
A flicker of annoyance distorted his perfectly symmetrical features. “Lydia, we cannot delay here much longer.”
She wasn’t going anywhere with him, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. If she kept him talking long enough, maybe whatever was causing this would wear off. “Why? Aside from the vomit-inducing scenery, this place has the distinct advantage of lack of bus crash and killer bugs.” It was all wrong. She shouldn’t be here. The thought of home tugged at her as if she were a needle in a compass.
“Time. Time moves differently here, Lydia.”
“I don’t need this.” She shook her head and started to walk away. It didn’t matter where.
“Lydia.”
She turned back, despite her unease. Clive stared at her with his peculiar eyes. They were as weird as the rest of this place. She couldn’t exactly fix their color. One moment they were brilliant green, the next emerald flecked with gold.
“Okay. So say this is real and not some hallucination.” She glared at him, daring him to con-tradict her. “Once we’re sure the darklings are gone, you could get us home, right?”
He stood silently.
“Clive?”
“Actually, no,” he said.
“No?”
“No.”
Lydia fought a rising panic that threatened to close her throat. “You mean you can’t or you won’t?”
“I am bound to Oberon and his will,” he said. “He is waiting for you.”
He could keep on waiting, as far as Lydia was concerned. “I didn’t ask you to drag me here,” she said, feeling a familiar twitch in her shoulders and a building pressure bubbling up in her chest. Anger. Anger was good.
“So I should have left you to the darklings?” He smiled as he shook his head. “I can see the Bright magic in you, Lydia. It makes you as Fae as I, whatever you believe. And you belong in Faerie.”
“Right,” she said. It was better not to argue with him, but she’d be damned if she was going to let him make any decisions for her. “I’m going back now.” She grabbed her cell phone. Its reflection sent rainbows skittering across the rippling landscape. The plastic cover was cool and smooth and real in her hand.
“I doubt your phone works here,” Clive said.
Lydia scowled at him, more annoyed than scared. “Okay, then.” She flipped up the phone’s cover and the picture of her cat was missing, replaced with an out of area message. “Great, well that’s just great,” she muttered.
“I told you,” Clive said.
Lydia set her jaw, refusing to give in to panic. It was easier just to go with the dream logic of her bizarro day. She slipped the phone in her pocket.
Clive stood with the patience of a tree, watching and waiting, close enough to her that she caught the scent of wood smoke and pine needles rising from him.
The air was wrong, the trees were wrong. Clive was most definitely wrong. This morning, it was early fall. She began to sweat under her jacket and not only from the heat. Rainbow-tinged leaves rustled without any hint of a breeze. Something told Lydia the trees were laughing at her. She took a step backward. “You’re crazy. This is crazy.” She could hear her voice rise in pitch, like a distant siren.
“When you are ready, I will take you into Faerie.”
He was wild. Elemental. He crackled with the energy of a lightning bolt. Her heart raced as if she were running.
The landscape looked the same in every direction. Empty aquamarine sky and tangled trees. Not even a single bird flew overhead. The silence smothered her. There was nowhere she could go.
She thrust her hands in her pockets to keep them from shaking. Her right hand brushed her house keys. They were a link out of this strangeness. The fob was shaped like a decora-tive cat with pointed ears. She slipped her fingers into the cat’s eyes with the ears pointing outward like they had taught her in self-defense class and the comfortable coolness of the metal eased the tightness in her chest.
Clive reached for her. Lydia was suddenly certain that if he touched her again, something in his insanity would spread like a virus and she would never find her way back into her normal life. “Don’t,” she warned.
“It will be fine. I swear it.” He took a step forward.
Lydia’s heart sped up even faster. She whipped out the key fob and jabbed it at him, catch-ing his right forearm with the tip of one of the sharp ears. He jerked his arm back and cra-dled it against his body, hissing in pain.
Clouds boiled overhead. A thin scream that seemed to rise from the air around them tore the clearing’s peace. Clive was silent, his eyes narrowed, his face sculpted into an expression of fury. The fob had cut a neat line through his sleeve and into the flesh beneath.
Blood welled up from the cut, a wet stain against the dark material. Her hands shook. The key chain fell to the ground, burning a patch of brown in the grass.
He stared at her, the thin, green ring of his eye nearly swallowed by the black. He staggered back to a tree trunk and slid to the ground.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her body shaking with cold as if she’d been plunged in a winter lake. She hadn’t really meant to hurt him, not like this.
His face was gray. “What have you done?”
The sky went dark.
