Inbetween

Chapter 25

Emma

“Finn?” I whispered as soon as I pushed through the swinging door to the bathroom. The silence that answered me stung like lemon juice in an open wound. I braced my hands on chipped tile counter.

Where could he possibly have gone?

Something dark like a shadow flashed behind me in the mirror, then disappeared.

“Finn?” I whispered. He didn’t answer. Nobody did. I walked over and grabbed the door handle, but the big metal door wouldn’t budge. A thread of fear seeped into my abdomen, tying into knots. The lights flickered and buzzed. Cold slithered over my skin and I shuddered.

I wasn’t alone.

I spun around and pressed my back against the cold metal, lifted my camera, and snapped a picture of the open air in front of me. A dark-colored orb, nothing like Finn’s, filled the far corner of the room.

Something hit the door behind me and I screamed. It sounded like a battering ram and had enough force to make my bones rattle. Shaking, I located the one window in the room, the only way out. My only chance.

I ran for the window, my body bracing for the pain that was going to come with barreling through a glass window. Something hard slammed into me and I flew back across the room. My back slammed into the wall and I choked the breath back into my lungs. I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the ache in my back, and snapped another picture to see how close she was. Before I could get the display to show, the strap around my neck snapped and the camera flew out of my hands, smashing into the wall beside me.

Behind me the grimy bathroom stalls shuddered with what sounded like thunder. One of the stall doors flew open, slamming into the wall, knocking over a trash can. Toilet paper unraveled into a pile on the floor, then slowly rose and began to swirl around me. A cyclone of filth.

“Stop!” I screamed, running for the door again. I beat on it until my fists turned red and throbbed.

“Let me out! Somebody let me out!” Fear ripped the words out of me like razor blades.

One by one, the stall doors flew off their hinges and into the big wall-length mirror above the sinks.

Glass shattered and flew through the room like shrapnel. Finn was right—she wasn’t going to stop until she got what she wanted. But he was wrong about her wanting to hurt me.

She wanted me dead.

The tissue fell into limp heaps and the lights flickered again. I squeezed my hands into fists. This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not in a filthy theater bathroom.

The lights dimmed, then flared back to life. When the last stall door flew off its hinges, I didn’t see it coming. Pain burst like darkness behind my eyelids and I crumpled to the floor. My hand reached for something, anything, to grab onto. Blood trickled into my eye and I managed to swipe it away with the back of my wrist. “Please don’t do this…”

The lights stopped flickering and the room went silent and still. Could she be listening to me?

Trembling, I pushed myself up. “I’m not going to pretend to know anything about what happens after you die, but I do believe there is something better out there. I have to believe it. Just like I have to believe there’s something like that out there for you. Maybe Finn can help you find it?”

Nothing happened. I let out a shaky breath and tried not to cry. She’d heard me. Listened, even. Finn was wrong. I could still do something-A long shard of glass dragged itself across the tile floor, the scraping sound enough to make me feel sick to my stomach. One by one, the larger pieces of broken mirror rose into the air. Something dark flashed in the surfaces. The glass sliced through the air and I screamed, pressing myself against the floor to avoid being hit. Pain pulsed, burning hot from my neck to my shoulder. A piece had gotten to me. I could feel it lodged in my neck.

Silence spread through the room, thick like darkness, and then…the lights flickered again. I started to climb to my knees, but something knocked me back. My head hit the floor and the room spun in circles above me. This was it. She was going to win. I couldn’t do anything about it.

And then I felt it—the icy sensation I’d associated with Maeve, slithering over my skin like it was looking for a way in. Something heavy and cold pressed me into the floor, pushing the breath out of my lungs. Frantic, my soul pushed back, clinging to my skin as it forced her away. This wouldn’t be my end. I was not losing my life to some crazed poltergeist bitch.

“Help! Somebody help!” I screamed until my throat felt raw. “Cash! Finn?” Someone, please find me, I pleaded silently as I crawled to the door, one hand clutching the wound on my neck. Sticky liquid seeped between my fingers, churning my stomach. I didn’t have to look to know it was blood.

The way the room was spinning and turning dark around the edges was enough to tell me that.

The window blew out like it had been hit with a wrecking ball. I tried to crawl away but white-hot pain bit into my calf, the fiery sensation of metal grating against bone. I closed my eyes, praying for anything that would make the pain stop. Make it go away, I prayed through the pounding in my head.

Steady as a drum, it pounded louder, louder, louder, until a final burst drowned the sound out with shouts and screams.

“Emma. Oh my God, Emma, what happened?” Cash’s breath was warm on my face, his hands replacing mine around the wound on my neck.

I screamed. The sound choked off into a strange gurgle as he slid the piece of broken mirror out of my skin. Everything was blurry even behind my closed lids, a gray catacomb of never-ending fuzziness pulling me deeper into an ocean of forgetting. I fought it, concentrating on the feel of Cash’s fingers on my face. I needed to talk. I needed air. I needed…

“Finn,” I whispered, and then everything went black.