Reporter
.
Just as quickly, he dismissed the thought. The man had none of the scruffiness of a journalist nor the camera-ready vacuousness of a television reporter.
The man continued, gently. “I’m sorry to see you here.” Will met the dark man’s eyes, and for a moment, saw his own pain reflected there, before the other man drew a breath, and his gaze became neutral, formal again, like a veil of gauze drawn over a wound.
“Your father was the best governor this state ever had. I expect you’ll be better.”
For a moment Will felt the heat of recognition in his chest at the man’s words. Hadn’t his whole life been guided by exactly that conviction?
I can be better than my father
.
Automatically his eyes warmed, his campaign smile lit his face. “I appreciate that.”
The man’s gaze was steady, and for a moment Will thought:
He knows what bullshit that is. It’s all so irrelevant, now
…
The man glanced up at the stained glass of the Christ — the look on his face was ambiguous, rueful.
“There is a way,” he said, his voice low, so low that Will frowned, not sure if he’d heard right.
“I’m sorry?”
But the man merely nodded courteously, almost a bow. “I wish you — the best.” He withdrew discreetly, moving out of the chapel with a whisper of doors. Will noted the heaviness about him, the effort with which he moved despite the elegant carriage, and wondered why he had ever thought the man was anything but what Will himself was: a desperate relative, come to bargain with a mythical God for a miracle.
He turned back to look at the stained glass Christ. His body sagged, his head dropped to his chest, as he whispered hoarsely:
“Please.”
TWO
It had been like fate, a fairy-tale curse, mythic in its construction. An impossibly beautiful day, glorious, the air crisp with fall and brilliant with sun; trees flaming with color in the Public Garden; dogs and seagulls and squirrels sharing the paths with inline skaters, lovers, parents with strollers; the whole Garden teeming with life.
The crowd that gathered that day in a circular green was hundreds more than Will’s campaign staff had even dared to hope. There was a happy, family,
American
aura to the event: an outdoor bandshell with a small stage festooned with red, white, and blue bunting; sweet-faced senior citizens standing behind long tables serving apple cider and Krispy Kreme; clowns handing out helium balloons to jostling children — all a bit of old-time, small-town U.S. of A, framed by a modern city skyline.
Brilliant camera flashes rippled through the crowd; reporters jostled and commented from the sidelines while Senator Flynn, Irish working-class hero, American political institution, longtime blood-brother of Will’s father, gave Will a glowing introduction: District Attorney Sullivan, ten years as a prosecutor, four on the City Council, fighter for right, defender of the weak, prince of the blood, soon to be king.
By Will’s side, always, the most beautiful woman in the world: darkly lovely, deeply mysterious, his wife Joanna; and between them, their daughter Sydney, a sparkling, imperious five-year-old, radiant and basking in the attention, yellow balloon bobbing above her from a ribbon tied around her tiny wrist.
And hovering in the wings, the kingmakers: politicos who had held court in the shadow of Will’s father, a powerful if uneasy alliance of Irish political aristocracy and blueblood patrons from his Brahmin mother’s circles, watching Will now with a predatory intensity. Will had known all too well what they were whispering:
“The very definition of shoo-in… the man can go all the way.”
And while he knew he stood there partly because of his name and pedigree, he also knew his name was the gift that would allow him to begin clean and stay clean, to do some good in the world without having to sell his soul for the chance.
Then the applause rose as the senator’s voice boomed through the park, and Will jogged out onto the platform and onto the national stage: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the next governor of Massachusetts — Will Sullivan.”
At home that night, the applause still rang in Will’s ears as the sun went down in fiery glory outside their Tudor mansion in the woods.
He remembered Joanna taking Sydney upstairs; the backward look she gave him: heart-stopping, full of promise.
And the phone had rung — Jerry, his campaign manager, rhapsodizing about national news coverage and polling points.
Then the moment Will had visualized over and over, that haunted his dreams: Sydney and Joanna singing together in the steamy bathroom, where Joanna bathed Sydney in the clawfoot tub, their faces shining, dewy with sweat. And then Sydney flinching in pain, pulling away from the sponge.
Joanna’s surprise, her frown, as her fingers moved tentatively over her daughter’s stomach… her jolt as she felt the hard, alien bulge there…
While downstairs, Will listened to Jerry, knowing that nothing is certain, that the race had just begun, but for a moment allowing himself the dream…
…and Jerry’s words on the phone: “Nothing can stop us now…”
Then Joanna standing in the doorway, holding Sydney, dripping in a towel.
And Will dropping the phone.
And seeing that his life as he knew it was over, as he looked into the terror in Joanna’s eyes.
*
Keep reading for a preview of
THE SPACE BETWEEN
by Alexandra Sokoloff
1. Burning
The B Building is burning.
Anna Sullivan stands alone in the upstairs corridor, halfway between the Social Studies wing and the Math wing, her legs rooted to the floor, her heart racing in her chest. She can barely catch a breath through the smoke stinging her eyes and lungs. The wide dark halls of the school are thick with it, curling, wafting. Bluish, with an acid bite.
There is a creeping fear, undefined, but growing. And not just the usual school anxiety, either, the butterflies that always started the moment she stepped off the bus to cross the yard toward the prison gates of the high school. For one thing, she can’t seem to move.
What’s happening
?
A chemical fire
?
Those morons from Litwack’s 3rd period lab, trying to shut down the building
?
There’d been half a dozen false fire alarms since the beginning of the semester.
But why are the lights out
?
The only illumination is from the red EXIT signs above the side stairwell doors. The whole building is dark; there is only the drifting smoke, tinged red from the neon.
Alarm bells are ringing, but far, far away.
And why am I alone
?
Anna turns her head and looks around her for what oddly feels like the first time, blinking through the smoky gloom. The cavernous halls are empty, and there’s no one in the open classrooms, either.
There is the sound of sobbing, though, from somewhere, resonating faintly in the tomblike dark.
And softly, softly, screams.
Screams
?
???
Anna’s heart stops in her chest.
Panic breaks through her paralysis and she spins to stare down the center aisle of the classroom to the left of her, down the collapsing fiberglass curtain that serves as a wall between classrooms. What she sees turns her to ice.
Oh God oh my God
…
Blood is splashed across the maps from World War II battle campaigns, the
National Geographic
history charts, bright crimson against the sepia.
Male legs in khaki pants and reindeer socks stick out from under sweet Mr. Brooke’s desk. The legs are stiff and still. Anna thinks absurdly of the Wicked Witch of the East, how she ran screaming from the living room when she was five and first seeing
The Wizard of Oz
on TV and those black-and-white striped witch legs curled up and rolled under the house…
In her peripheral vision, a dark shadow runs suddenly past.
It is fast, so fast. Sinuous, snakelike. And it carries a long, thin…
Gun
?
Smoke, screaming, blood, a gun
…
Anna whips around, staring down the corridor, her heart racing. No sign of the shadow.
Where is it
? What
is it
?
Silence, stillness…
But it’s a heavy stillness, live.
She holds her breath, watching… and the shadow falls again across the wall.
It has two heads.
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod
Anna unfreezes and runs for the main staircase. It feels unbearably slow, like running through sand. Like running—
In a dream
The fire alarms start to shrill, piercing, pulsing beats.
Anna veers instinctively toward the EXIT doors of the side emergency stairs. Her stomach plunges and she stops in her tracks. Someone has twisted a bike chain around the release bars, locking them.
It’s real. It can’t be real. This can’t be happening
…
Anna bolts past the chained doors, heading toward the center stairwell of the building.
Her breath is coming faster, her legs moving even more maddeningly slowly. Her pulse pounds in her head, the sound distorted and visceral. She knows the shadow is behind her — she can hear a double breath.
Madness
…
She reaches the edge of the main staircase, grabs the rail to pull herself forward onto the stairs—
At the foot of the staircase, on the landing below, Tyler Marsh stands looking up at her, as real as she is, even now heart-stoppingly beautiful, perfect profile and long, dark silky hair falling into his eyes. The alarms pulse around them, vibrating through her body
.
Tyler
?
She takes a shaky step toward him.
“
Run
,” he says, without opening his mouth.
• • •
The clock alarm is bleating in shrill pulses, five a.m. blinking redly from the digital screen. The morning is pitch black, the wind outside scrapes the thorns of the orange tree across the window like some creature wanting in. Anna’s heart still pounds crazily in her chest, shaking the mattress. She reaches for the clock to silence it, then lies back, dazed and groggy. The dream is gone.
The stench of smoke is in her nose.
Shower in the cramped, dark bathroom to wash away the lingering, inexplicable smell of smoke, then way too long with the hair dryer, reluctant to shut off the warmth. Anna mostly avoids her own eyes in the mirror, but sometimes, with her thick, dark hair blowing around her, she is almost pretty.
Dressed in a sleeveless, shapeless black dress with sweater wrapped around her waist, she negotiates the tiny, but labyrinthinely cluttered living room by the light of the silent TV screen. Her father is passed out and snoring in the huge vile LaZBoy, empty beer bottles scattered at his feet.
Don’t think about it. Can’t think about it. Keep moving. Caffeine and go
.
Anna grabs a Diet Coke from the kitchen fridge, grabs her backpack from the hall, and plunges out the front door into the black-and-blue pre-dawn. The dark outside is moving, alive, trees bending sinuously in the dry wind, which is always strongest just before sunrise.
She runs, and makes it to the corner just in time to catch her bus.
Inside, she rides in rumbling darkness, alone with the bus driver and two Latina housekeepers, over potholed streets, under the towering silhouettes of palms and old-growth trees, through sleeping San Gorgonio.
San G. is a base town, or was until the base was shut down in the closures of the nineties, plunging the city into economic depression. The war in Iraq did not revive the base. The dying town sprawls in a semi-desert ringed by mountains, pocketed in a valley which traps heat and smog for the entirety of the summer, only somewhat relieved in fall by the winds Anna once read described as “those hot, dry Santa Anas that come through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” And bring asthma and arson and devastating wildfires, Anna knows all that.
Santa Anas make people crazy.
But
…
But. The winds also signal change and excitement, and sometimes even magic…
Like that fall in first grade when she’d brought an umbrella to school even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and walking home from school she opened the umbrella and the wind picked her up and she could fly, actually fly off the ground like Mary Poppins, flying.
And for one day, she was magical—
The memory gives way to another and she sits up on the cracked vinyl bus seat with a gasp.
Tyler.
I dreamed about Tyler Marsh last night.
Definitely. Definitely something about Tyler
.
She focuses, concentrating with all her mind, but the dream is elusive, just out of reach. Still, the feeling is so intimate it makes her stomach flutter and her cheeks warm.
I knew him. He knew me. There was something between us
.
But the dream hadn’t been good. That much she does remember.
Not good at all
.
Her chest tightens with anticipation and unease as the bus shudders to a stop in front of the high school.
*
Books By Alexandra Sokoloff
Thrillers
THE HARROWING
THE PRICE
THE UNSEEN
BOOK OF SHADOWS
THE SPACE BETWEEN
HUNTRESS MOON
BLOOD MOON
APOCALYPSE: YEAR ZERO (with Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, and Rhodi Hawk)
Paranormal
THE SHIFTERS (Book 2 of THE KEEPERS trilogy)
THE KEEPERS QUARTET (with Heather Graham and Harley Jane Kozak, 2013)
Nonfiction
SCREENWRITING TRICKS FOR AUTHORS
WRITING LOVE: Screenwriting Tricks For Authors II
Short fiction
THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN (in RAGE AGAINST THE NIGHT)
IN ATLANTIS (in THRILLER 3: LOVE IS MURDER)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexandra Sokoloff is the Thriller Award-winning and Bram Stoker, Anthony, and Black Quill Award-nominated author of the supernatural thrillers
The Harrowing, The Price, The Unseen, Book of Shadows, The Shifters
, and
The Space Between
, and the new, Thriller Award-nominated Huntress/FBI crime series. The
New York Times Book Review
has called her a "daughter of Mary Shelley," and her books "Some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre."
As a screenwriter she has sold original horror and thriller scripts and adapted novels for numerous Hollywood studios. She has also written two non-fiction workbooks:
Screenwriting Tricks for Authors
and
Writing Love
, based on her internationally acclaimed workshops and blog (www.ScreenwritingTricks.com). She writes erotic paranormal on the side, including
The Shifters
, Book 2 of
The Keepers
trilogy, and
Keeper of the Shadows
, from
The Keepers L.A
. In her spare time (!) she is an avid dancer.
http://screenwritingtricks.com
Contents
Table of Contents