Inbetween

Chapter 34

Finn

“Get up,” a familiar voice said above me.

Easton? I tried to pry my eyelids open, but they felt like they’d been melted together. They probably had. My palms found the warm wet stone beneath me. It felt sticky under my cheek. I wanted to get up. I wanted to get the hell out of this place but my limbs wouldn’t work. Pain burned under every inch of my skin. My skull. The dull echo of horrific memories pulsed behind my eyelids.

“Don’t be a pansy, Finn. It’s only been forty-eight hours. Get. Up.”

I swallowed and pushed, but the movement only ground my cheek further into the muck underneath me, which smelled like blood and ash. “Can’t.” My voice sounded like sandpaper. It felt like it, too, as it crawled its way up and out of my throat.

“Son of a—” Boots scraped along the stone in front of me and stopped. “Can somebody take care of this? This wasn’t the deal. I can’t do anything with him like this.”

After a few more seconds of agony, something started to happen. A tingling sensation started in my toes then blazed through my legs, my fingers. Something swelled in my chest, then raced up my neck until it burst like gold behind my eyelids. And then…nothing. A familiar numbness swept over me. No pain. No nothing.

I cracked an eye open and blinked at the black combat boots a few inches from my face.

“Time to get up,” Easton said. “Humpty Dumpty’s together again.”

He offered his hand to help me up, but I slapped it away and climbed to my knees. “What’s going on?” I swayed. “Is this…is this real?”

“You’re free,” Easton said. “Balthazar made his point.”

“Made his point?” I glared at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

I stood up and the room tilted off-balance, so I closed my eyes again. It was over? God….it was finally over. I patted down my body, making sure everything was as it should be. When I was sure I was still me, I turned and stomped out of the cave. No vines or flames blocked my escape. I shook my head, feeling sick inside.

Easton followed behind me. “Finn…wait.”

“Don’t.” I held up my hand and blindly hiked through the screams. “Just…don’t.”

“I was following orders. Besides, if you’d have stopped being such a dumbass, this wouldn’t have happened. But you’ll go right back up there and do it again, won’t you? And Balthazar will give you another waste of a chance.”

I stopped when we reached the iron gates and clenched my fists, feeling like I was about to snap in half. I couldn’t take anymore right now. I was too raw. “I can still feel the flesh melting off of my goddamned bones, and you’re going to give me crap about Emma right now? After you dragged me here?”

“I didn’t have a choice!” he shouted. “If you want to blame someone for this, look in a goddamned mirror.”

“Screw you.”

I didn’t wait for his reply. Instead I barreled out into the whirlwind of ash outside the gates. I closed my eyes, immersing myself in the fiery wind around me. When I opened them again I was standing in Scout’s uncle’s garage, vibrating with rage. And pain. And things I didn’t want to think about ever again. I knew it was my fault, damn it. I’d known going into it. But I was starting to think too much had built up between Easton and me. I wasn’t sure if we’d ever get back to the way we were before.

And that bothered me more than I wanted it to.

I took a deep breath and shuddered. If Scout wasn’t here, I didn’t know what I was going to do because it would be a cold day in Hell before I went back to that bar, and I needed his help before I could deal with the Emma situation. Clenching and unclenching my fists, I scanned the dusty garage. I still didn’t trust him after finding out what he was doing with the humans at that bar. I was still pissed.

But I wouldn’t be a hypocrite after what I’d done. And I’d have to get over it if I wanted his help.

“Why don’t you just punch the damn wall and get it over with?”

I spun around too quickly and silvery tendrils of vapor went in every direction.

“Hope you didn’t come for a fight. I’ve never been any good at fighting.” Scout fell back onto the dusty sofa, twirling a piece of a truck engine in his hand. “And if I’m being honest there’s no way I’d try to hit you. Not when you’re carrying around that crazy-ass scythe. You’ve had more experience with yours than I’ve had with mine. It wouldn’t be a fair fight and you know it.”

“I didn’t come for a fight.” I glanced from the red F-150 parked on the other side of the room, then nodded to the piece of metal in his hand. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged and a familiar grin caught both sides of his mouth. “But the old man won’t be able to start his truck without it.”

“Why do you still torture him? He is your family, you know.” Remembering all of the stupid stunts Scout had played on his uncle over the years, it was a wonder the old guy hadn’t had a heart attack by now.

“I’ll stop messing with him when he stops messing with me. One trick all those years ago and he still messes with the Ouija boards and crap. Like I’m some ghost of Christmas past that’s going to come back and tell him how to fix his screwed-up excuse for a life. Do you know how much the man spent on phone psychics last year? Enough to buy a freaking new car, that’s how much. The man’s a moron. And until he stops being a moron I’ll continue to screw with him.”

He laughed and it suddenly felt like old times with Scout. When we’d sit in his garage and try to figure out a way to live like humans even though we were anything but. “Besides, it helps to pass the time in between my reaps. We don’t get as much action down here as you guys do up north.” When I didn’t respond, Scout set the engine part on the couch, and rested his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor like it held all of life’s answers. “I thought you hated me now,” he said more to the floor than to me.

“I don’t hate you. You just…” I stopped searching for the right thing to say. “You just screwed up, okay? You screwed up, and with Emma, I can’t afford those kinds of screwups.”

“I know.”

“I’m not going to say I get it. I’m not even going to say it’s okay, because it’s not. But I’ll get over it.”

“She got hurt, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, she got hurt.”

We both froze when his uncle stumbled into the garage and climbed into his truck, cursing as his foot slipped out from under him twice before he could make it in.

“He still drinking?” I asked.

Scout nodded. “Stupid old drunk. I’m doing the community a favor keeping him off the streets.”

The old man cranked the ignition and when all that resulted was a clicking sound, he erupted. A stream of obscenities bounced off his tongue so fast you could barely keep track. Scout looked tired as he watched his uncle dig under the hood and come out looking white.

“You’re in here, aren’t you?” the old man called, his eyes searching the garage, but only finding a floating brigade of dust particles illuminated by the sunshine spilling in through the one window that wasn’t covered with plastic.

“Oh, I’m here all right,” Scout grumbled and kicked an empty can across the room.

The old man jumped back two feet with a gasp. The can hit the toe of his shoe. “Damn it, Scout!

Stop with these games! I’m getting too old for this crap. I can’t believe your mama hasn’t come to drag your ass back to the afterlife yet.” He continued to mutter to himself as he let himself back into the house then slammed the door, knocking an old can of nails off his workbench and onto the floor.

Scout picked up the engine part and tossed it into a pile of junk in the corner of the room.

“Wouldn’t he just shit a brick if he knew I was the one to drag her ass to the afterlife?”

“You took your own mother?” I said. “Isn’t that a conflict of interest?”

“It’s not like I planned it. I was just covering for one of Heaven’s reapers that day and her hourglass ran out of sand.” He shrugged. “At least we got to say a proper good-bye that way. It wasn’t a big deal.”

I pressed my lips together into a hard line, trying not to torture myself with not knowing who had taken Mom and Pop. And Henry. It was too much to think about.

“Why did you stay?” I finally asked. It was the question I’d always wanted to ask him. The one I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer to.

“What do you mean?”

“After Balthazar hired you on. You requested this territory. Why in God’s name would you want to be in this place? Watching the people you knew die again and again.”

He smiled and looked out at a memory that I couldn’t see. A stream of sunlight spilled across the dusty space illuminating the pain beneath his smile. Pain that looked way too familiar for my liking.

“A girl, of course. Why the hell else would I stay here?”

“A girl? You put yourself through this kind of hell for a girl?” I asked, a little disbelief seeping out with my voice. Scout had never seemed like the romantic type.

He raised a brow. “Like you’re one to talk.”

“So what happened? Where is she now?”

He crossed the room and fiddled with something on his uncle’s workbench. If I knew Scout, he was just trying to hide his emotions from me. I let him.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Last time I checked in she was married, had two kids.” He glanced back at me and shrugged. “It has been twenty years, Finn.”

“Did she ever see you?”

“No. I didn’t want her to.” His voice turned gruff. “I stuck around for a few months after the funeral. To be honest I didn’t really know where else to go when I wasn’t rubbing elbows with the dead.” He chuckled, but it sounded bitter. “After I watched her cry herself to sleep every night for three months, listened to her talk to me in the dark while everyone else in the world was sleeping…I couldn’t take any more, so I left her alone.”

“She talked to you?”

He turned to face me. His eyes grim, years of pain finally being set free. “Of course she did. She could feel me. Even if they can’t see you, Finn…they know. They always know. Just like on some level, Emma knew way before you ever made a physical appearance.”

Scout took a step closer and knelt down in front of me.

“They can’t move on while we’re still around. You know that, right? Emma won’t ever move on as long as you’re there. Just like Sophie wouldn’t have if I hadn’t left when I did.” He finally plopped down onto the dusty concrete beneath us, looking whitewashed, exhausted. “Just because we’re stuck like this doesn’t mean they should be. They deserve more than that.”

“How did you let her go? How were you okay with her having a life with someone else?” I asked.

Scout rolled his eyes as he wrote a message to his uncle in the dust with his fingertip. I’m watching you. “You think I’m okay with it? No, man. I’m not okay with it. Watching her chase after kids that are half him, half her. Seeing her curl up next to him in bed at night, watching him touch her in all of the places that only I used to know.” He ground his teeth together and closed his eyes. “No…I’m not okay with it.”

He opened them again and sat back on his elbows, nodding to the message in the sand. “But I keep busy. And she loves him. Knowing that she was able to love somebody again, that she found some kind of happiness. Knowing I was strong enough to give that to her. It makes it easier.”

I stared at my empty hands. Hands that had held Emma a little more than forty-eight hours ago without feeling her. Hands that would never hold her again once this was finished. This had to work.

Because I was done torturing her. I was done torturing us both. Scout was right. She deserved more than me. More than I could give her.

The inside of my chest fractured, tore, and ached. Now that I’d come to terms with the decision, I felt hollow. For twenty-seven years, she had consumed every thought. My heart. My soul. She was my purpose. And now…who the hell was I supposed to be if I wasn’t this? Was there even anything left inside me if I wasn’t loving her? In that moment, it didn’t feel like it.

Scout cocked his head to the side, watching me. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“But you said—” He didn’t let me finish, making an irritated sound in the back of his throat. “Screw what I said. I am the most miserable creature in existence. Emma’s different and we both know it.”

She was. And staring into Scout’s empty eyes, I saw my future. He was strong, cut from steel…and facing an eternity of loneliness. Scout was giving me an out that I would’ve taken forty-eight hours ago, but I refused to do this to her anymore. I was going to take care of Maeve once and for all, and then I’d do what Easton and Anaya had always wanted me to do.

Walk away.

“I think,” I said slowly. “If you can find time to stop screwing around with the living, you can help me.”

He sat up, smiling, and rubbed his hands together. “You need my incredibly talented and genius-like mind, of course. Where do we start?”

I blinked. “That easy?”

“Well, I do sort of owe you. What are we doing?”

“We need to find a way to get rid of Maeve. And I mean for good.”

Emotions unfolded across his face. Shock dissolved into contemplation. “You mean—”

“Gone. Whatever that means. I couldn’t care less. But preferably Hell if we can get Easton on board. I don’t know, though. We’re not on the best terms right now.”

Scout stood up and started pacing, the wheels in his head that had already achieved the impossible beginning to spin. “Don’t worry about Easton.”

I nodded, glad I didn’t have to ask.

“It’s possible. I’ve thought about it before, but it would mean going to extremes, and unless you could get her right where you wanted her, it would never work,” he explained, setting me up for disappointment, if I had to guess. There was no way Maeve would ever trust either of us enough to get her to play along.

“How?”

Scout leaned against the door and looked me over, then shrugged as if it were obvious. “We have to kill her.”

I rolled my eyes. “She’s already dead, boy genius.”

“Not when she’s in a host body, she’s not.”

Disbelief rippled through me as each of his words sunk in. He was right. But that also meant-“But you’d have to kill the host for that to work, and even then, there’s no way to guarantee she wouldn’t get away.”

“Not if there were a soul there to guide the original one back into its body and another to take her to Hell,” he countered with a smile. “And I’m guessing with all of the nasty tricks Maeve’s been up to, Easton would be the one sent to collect. We’d just be speeding the process up a bit.”

He had no idea just how willing Easton would be to take Maeve out of this picture. Because if Maeve was no longer a threat, there would be no reason for me to be with Emma anymore. And as much as it hurt, I was finally ready to make that compromise.

Hope surged through me. God, this could happen. This could actually work. And he was right. With everything Maeve had done, she’d sealed her fate. There would be no white light waiting for her when she exited the body. No Inbetween, no Heaven. The only thing waiting for her was a one-way ticket to Hell and Easton’s smiling face to take her there. And when he came for someone, he never left empty-handed.

Scout interrupted my thoughts. “It would take two of us for sure.”

“Us?”

“I’m bored as hell. You don’t think I’d let you go it alone, do you? Besides, you need me.” He went to dig in the junk pile, retrieving the unknown car part, then put it back where it belonged under the hood.

“Finn.”

We both looked up at the sound of Easton’s voice. I gritted my teeth. “I haven’t been out long enough to screw up.”

Scout punched me in the arm. “Way to piss off the missing piece to our puzzle.”

Easton ignored Scout. “That’s not what this is about.”

I studied the panicked look in his violet eyes and shot up. “What’s happened?”

“It’s…it’s Emma.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You followed her?”

He groaned and shoved his scythe in its holster. “Fine. Yes. I watched her and Cash sit in her room like awkward little kids while you were in Hell. I’m not as big of an asshole as you think.”

I raised a brow.

“Something bad’s going to happen,” he said. “I just came from there. It’s Maeve. She’s there, and there’s no talking her down this time.”

I didn’t need to hear anymore. Fear pierced my chest. Throbbed in my ribs. I looked at Easton and he nodded. In a flash I was gone.