What Lies Between ✔

Fury and Fire

43.

Kairos

I wanted to leave them so they'd be safe, so that I could run back and help Lidia. Even so, I didn't think I could leave them now, not when the Seekers had seen their faces.

How could I have done this to them all? I knew what kind of threat I posed to their lives, and yet I planted my feet in their home, refusing to be moved even by Ben's urgencies.

It didn't stop with them either. Every inhale of breath I took, my heart screamed. Thorne! Watching everything he thought I was crumble before him. His disappointment nearly crushed me.

"We're friends, or don't you remember?"

In those moments, all I could do was remember. Running through Purgatory, our laughter the only sound that filled the whole entire realm, his laughter the only happiness that filled my entire heart. Before I met Lidia, Before I found the Compendium, before I was Kairos. The weight of that loss was as real to me as the weight of Zuri's body strewn across my lap. When I chose to break out of Purgatory, I had chosen to break everything. I could never get what had been back again, and that was something I would have to live with. Thorne and I, whatever it was we were to each other, was changed now.

When we reached the hotel, Adrian pulled around the back, opting to avoid the spectacle we would surely cause if we all marched in all our bloody glory through the lobby doors. Adrian had a key-card that accessed the back entrance, "But I'll have to distract Frank, the door-man, back there. He'll be suspicious if he sees... all this."

"Rightfully so," Berit muttered. I noticed his cheeks were tear stained, and a lump lodged into my throat.

"I look like I've been to a party, so it'll be quite easy to persuade him that's why I look like this. You all sneak up through the stair well. It'll be a bit of a climb, but we can't risk the elevator, someone might see and think the worst." That we killed Zuri. That wasn't so far off from the truth.

"Alright, come on," Justice said.

Ben got out and went to help Justice carry Zuri, but Justice stopped him with a look of askance that had Ben taking a step back in order to to allow him the room of taking her out of the car himself. I hopped out, Berit following after me. He walked passed me without a glance, and the lonely feeling of being a Between came back to me vivdly. A tight feeling clenched at my stomach, a sensation filled with anxiety. I wrapped my arms around myself and walked around to where Ben was waiting for me. We exchanged dark looks, then started after the group who had their backs turned to us.

Adrian told us to stay around the corner, handing a small stick to Kanoa. He slid the key-card through the reader, and a couple of beeps later, opened the door. Frank, I took it, was on him in a minute, like Adrian had anticipated, heaving a mock groan of surprise at Adrian's state. It did look like he had been at some sort of rave with his hair messy, face pale, vomit on his shirt.

"Wouldn't want your father seeing you looking like this in the tabloids, eh?" He gave a good-natured laugh. Adrian's smile in return was visibly strained, but Frank must have chalked that up to a head full of hang-over. "You get into a fight or something? Looks like some blood on your shirt there," Franks voice drifted away down the hall of the entrance, and Adrian followed, waving a hand back to us. Kanoa wedged the stick between the door, and we waited until Adrian's voice, already as smooth as silk, faded further before we scurried through.

The back hall was way too echoey for my nerves, as though our every move was a thunderous announcement of where we were hiding. As we came up to the corner of the ajointing hall, I spotted people at one end, waitresses and waiters dressed sharply, rushing this way and that, talking in strenuous unison it seemed. "The stairs are over that way," Berit whispered, pointing to the arrow aimed at the other end of the hall. We walked swiftly, the busy people not taking notice of us at all, and sprinted up the stairs, all but Justice taking them two at a time.