Inbetween - Book 1 of the Guardian series

Chapter 1- The end of Amelia.

I lay there dying. Bottom of a cliff. In a bridesmaid dress.

It wasn't how I'd pictured it.

Truthfully, I had no way I had pictured it, but this wasn't it. I had spent more time picturing my life than my death, how it would go, the wedding I'd never get to have, the children, the places I'd see, the career that I worked passionately to reach the top in, and then one day to have grandchildren. I'd prove that there were paranormal things in the world. I'd see a UFO. I'd meet an alien. I'd spend my life with Dylan.

I was in agony and yet I laughed at the absurdity of my dreams, laughed as much as my lungs would let me, staring up at the twinkling stars as if I'd never seen them before. Beautiful. Air hissed through the gaping hole in my neck, where it was trying to work for my lungs, but the blood bubbling out and flooding the thirsty sand around me was a little too fast, a little too much.

To say the life flashed before my eyes would be wrong. I relived only one factor of it- the only part of my life that had ever mattered to me- and the reason for where I lay dying now.

Dylan.

We used to spent every summer together as kids. We met when we were both eight. My parents had bought a caravan park when I was seven and decided to run it together. It was located right  right on the coastline of Australia in a place called Walkerville, in Victoria, and it was the most magical place a child could have come to. The coastlines were wild, there were fossils in the stones, and the bush all over the place. I was instantly in love. I went wild in this place. 

The first year they came to stay Dylan ignored the beach and came up to me, hands shaking, freckles on his nose and blonde hair half across his eyes, holding out a little green plastic cup full of jelly beans.

"D- Do you want to be friends?" Dylan asked, his accent all American Southern, though at the time all I could think was that he was some really far away exotic place.  Like Canada! I thought he was so cool. 

Dylan's parents worked nearby every summer co-running a 'Sailing Cruise' business with some other adults nearby. It took people out for a weekend or a week to swim with the dolphins that loved this area, took them on sailing ships, and they'd even bought an old fashioned ship for longer trips to see the whales. At the time all I cared about was that his parents co-owned some huge ships with some big sales and sometimes we even got to ride on them. 

From that moment on, jelly beans shared, we became best friends, charging up and down the caravan park on our bikes like we owned it, rushing up to the lookout above the camping ground so we could watch the ocean, creating 'gangs' of kids that rode up and down with torches on their bikes to 'hunt dragons and sea monsters' all summer long. Other kids came and went and we hung out between. No one else got as close as the two of us. 

The first time their parents took us on their boat when they had a spare place, on an overnight cruise out, was when we both first saw something unusual. The adults were asleep downstairs and we'd gotten up to watch the stars and eat marshmallows together. Just like it was the most natural thing in the world, a woman swam to the surface, her skin grey, her tail long and silvery. She was talking with a dolphin and either didn't see us or didn't care if we saw her. She spoke like she was singing, this musical tone that we didn't understand, and it wasn't all word-like sounds. 

We didn't want to go to sleep because we were afraid that we'd think it was a dream. Dylan and myself sat there all night on the deck, looking out for her, and we saw her every now and then until the sun rose and she vanished, her grey tail glinting and reflecting the early morning light as she dove away to wherever she came from.

That was what addicted us to searching for the paranormal. We'd seen a mermaid, we were sure of it, and we wanted to find more. So we used to go exploring along the wild coastline of Australia's southern coasts together, day or night, like wild creatures. Played games about seeing angels, demons, Tasmanian tigers, about great big wolves, fairies, we used to pretend to see mermaids, pretended that the seals came to the beach just for us. These games were so real to us that sometimes we did see them. It frightened us sometimes, when we were kids, just how real our games could become. We'd get scared and run home, hand in hand, running like the wild animals we felt were chasing us. Then we'd go home and our mums would laugh at us and we'd be given cocoa and a snuggle and the fears would go away again.