Even In Darkness (Between) Read Online Free PDF

shook his head. “Nae, I hadn’t the appetite for it earlier. You?”
    I told him about the pub where Mom and I had stopped to eat, then mentioned the newscast we’d seen. “It was weird. When the guy mentioned that his mom had met a transporter before she was brought back to life, I wondered if maybe you’d met her,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.
    Aiden got a strange, intense look on his face. “Ye said that others have been taken suddenly, without warning?”
    “Yeah, they think it might be a virus or something. Why?” The way he straightened up and dropped my hand was starting to freak me out. “What’s the matter?”
    “Did they say when the deaths started?”
    I shook my head, running back through the newscast in my mind. “Um, I don’t know… I think she said earlier this morning.”
    Aiden squeezed his eyes shut tight like he’d hit his thumb with a hammer and was straining to keep from swearing. It was only after I heard his whispered “Amen” that I realized he was praying.
    “Aiden?” I asked, trying to keep the panic that was starting to swirl inside me from taking hold.
    He moved to close the door to the kitchen and leaned against it with a heavy sigh.
    “Don’t you see? I was afraid this might happen,” he said.
    “See what? What are you talking about?”
    “The hell transporter. She got what she came for. A child.”
    “What? How do you know that? And besides, even if she did…” The words ‘get pregnant’ stuck in my throat, so I skipped over them. “It would be nine months before the baby was even born. It just happened last night, for crying out loud! And how could the baby have anything to do with these deaths? You’re not making any sense. They can’t be related.”
    “When you died and met me in B etween, how long were you there? How many days?”
    I shrugged, feeling defensive. “I don’t know. Five days, a week, something like that.”
    “Right. And when you came back, how long had you been gone?”
    We both knew the answer to that question. I was revived at the scene of the accident. It was as if I’d never died at all, as though hardly any time had passed.
    “So what? That doesn’t prove anything.” I was being belligerent, I knew, but I didn’t like where this was going and denial seemed the safest route.
    “Time is not the same there as it is here,” he said. “A day can be like a thousand years, and a thousand years like a day. The child could be fully grown this very moment.”
    The fish and chips I’d eaten earlier congealed into a hard lump in my belly.
    “But even if that were true,” I held up one hand to ward off his protest, “I don’t see how that has anything to do with the newscast, with the deaths.”
    “When Mona held us at gunpoint in that warehouse, she said that the offspring of a heaven transporter and a hell transporter would rule the realm in Between and that the master of hell had already laid claim to the child. What do you suppose she meant by that?”
    Mention of that horrific day when I thought we were both going to die brought a flurry of emotions to the surface. I stuffed them down as best I could, but my voice wobbled when I answered. “I don’t know.”
    “Nor do I. But I’ve a sense that none of it is for the good. If my suspicions are correct and the babe was indeed born, he’ll be naught but a pawn in the devil’s plan to wreak havoc on Earth and the Between realm as well.”
    “So what does that mean? Is he going to open up some kind of portal and send leagues of demons out here to kill us all? Would a transporter baby even give him that kind of power?” My mind whirled with possibilities of what that could entail.
    “I don’t know. She said the babe would rule the realm in Between, not this one.”
    “But you think he’s killing people here on Earth. How could he do that?”
    “Perhaps his power extends only those who bear the stamp of the other world, those who’ve been before.”
    I gasped out