What Gifts She Carried

  What Gifts She Carried:

  The Grave Winner Book 2

  Lindsey R. Loucks

  © Copyright Lindsey R. Loucks 2014, 2015.

  All rights reserved

  Editor: Rebecca Hamilton

  Cover Art: Aliaksei Skreidzeleu / bigstockphoto.com

  Cover Design: Rebecca Hamilton

  Ebooks/Books are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real.

  Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  What Gifts She Carried (The Grave Winner, #2)

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20 | Day One

  Chapter 21 | Day Two

  Chapter 22 | Day Three

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Books in The Grave Winner Trilogy:

  The Grave Winner

  What Gifts She Carried

  The Trinity Bleeds

  Dedication

  To G.M.:

  You set free my strongest gift.

  Chapter 1

  A muddy pinwheel spun into a watery grave, vanishing through the drain, a swirling, bitter reminder of my escape from death. But like it did with everyone, death would eventually catch up with me.

  Just not anytime soon, I hoped.

  I closed my eyes under the cascade of heat and shuddered, but I couldn’t get away from the mud. It splattered down on top of me, crushing me, burying me alive. I snapped my eyes open and sucked in water instead of air.

  Jo pounded on the bathroom door. “Leigh?”

  “Fine,” I said between chokes and sputters. “I’m fine.”

  A few deep breaths later, I still wasn’t fine. Every blink flashed a different horror. Sorceressi. Jo possessed. Hands punching through graves. Mom coming back. Ica reaching down into the grave for me. Clawing up and away from my own end.

  My body craved sleep, but I wouldn’t be able to close my eyes. Not with those memories digging into my brain.

  I turned off the water and grabbed a towel, which still carried the flowery smell of Mom’s favorite fabric softener. I pressed it into my face as if the scent could somehow erase everything I’d been through recently. But it couldn’t. All it managed to do was sting my eyes and tie a knot in my throat.

  Her death hurt worse than the bruises on my shoulders and arms. Cuts crisscrossed over them, some much deeper than others. I’d gritted my teeth when the water had hit the one in the middle of my back.

  I peered closer at my face. An ash gray color had settled into my pores, as if the night’s horrors had sucked the life from my skin. With dark shadows hanging under my eyes in half-moons, I looked as though I’d aged thirty years in the last twenty-four hours.

  Everything felt as if it had happened to someone else. None of it could be real. People weren’t supposed to be buried alive. Moms couldn’t come back from the dead. None of that was supposed to happen. A thick fog draped over my brain, clouding out bits and pieces of my memories. I welcomed it, even though I knew I would never forget.

  Once I covered all my injuries with bandages and fresh clothes, I opened the door. Steam rolled out and drifted to the ceiling, and cool air breathed a chill across my skin.

  Jo sat next to the door with her back against the wall, blinking up at me with tired brown eyes. Normal eyes. Not Sorceressi blue. Her I’m Sleepy shirt summed it up for both of us.

  She reached a hand for me. “You were in there a long time.”

  “Yeah.” I took her wrist and helped her up. “I had mud in places you wouldn’t believe.”

  I still did. No amount of scrubbing could get the dirt jammed under my fingernails.

  Jo exhaled a clipped and tired chuckle. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  She wound her arm around mine and tiptoed into the living room, probably afraid she would contaminate Mom’s ivory carpet if she walked any other way.

  Not like I could blame her for not wanting to mess things up, though. When I’d unlocked the front door of my house, I raced to the bathroom before I could ooze mud all over.

  Mom’s brown seed pods curled over the glass on top of the piano next to her smiling picture. Somehow, while I was being buried alive, I’d used the same kind of seed pod to turn Ica Reynolds from Wichita’s Channel Thirteen news into a tree. Shaking my head, I plucked the pods from the glass and stuffed them in the waistband of my sweatpants. I would have to file the whole tree transformation thing away for later processing. It seemed like too much work to have to fight through the layers of fog in my head to make sense of anything.

  Images from the TV flickered across Callum’s blank stare. He’d been quiet the whole way home from the graveyard. He sat slouched into the couch cushions, thick forearms crossed over his chest, as if he was trying to hold himself together. I didn’t want to imagine what he might be seeing instead of baseball highlights. A replay of his night would end with his burying Mom again.

  “Ready?” he asked without even glancing at us.

  “Yeah,” I said and squeezed Jo’s hand. “Go home and go to bed. You don’t have to come with us.”

  She shook her head, eyes droopy but still brown. “I’m never leaving you.”

  My throat twisted at the promise in her voice. “Love you,” I somehow choked out.

  Jo smiled. “Love you more.”

  Callum switched off the TV. “I’m glad you two got all that worked out. Do you know how much trouble we’re going to be in, Weed? It’s past one o’clock in the morning. On a school night.”

  “Oh, shit.” I lunged for my mucked-up combat boots on the rug by the front door. Dad would kill me. He was probably waiting up at the motel, worried about both me and our nightmare yard that had somehow turned normal again. I’d told him I was working on a research project about pirates with Callum before I’d bolted out of there. I was so busy trying to survive the night, I hadn’t bothered to call.

  Oh, shit.

  I jammed my feet into my boots and grabbed the doorknob. But my next breath didn’t reach my lungs. A giant spider crawled across the door. Right in front of my face.

  Jo sighed. “What do you care, Cal? You’re always—”

  I cried out and stumbled backward over my untied bootlaces.

  Callum shot to my side. “Leigh, what’s wrong?”

  I pointed, since saying the word made it real. My hand shook with the force of my heartbeat.

  The Sorceressi were back. They’d escaped. They were coming for me. I stepped farther from the door and darted my gaze everywhere around the room.

  Callum stepped toward the spider, but not too close. “It’s just a daddy
long legs.”

  “Are you sure?” My skin prickled, and I raked my fingernails down my arms in case any spiders crawled there.

  Jo gave a muffled cry. Tears leaked over the hand covering her mouth. Her other hand grabbed both of mine before I scraped my skin off.

  “It’s not them. I saw them as spiders too at Whaty-Whats, remember?” Callum touched my arm. “Trust me, Leigh. It’s just a normal spider.” His long fingers rubbed warmth into my skin. “Trust me,” he said again.

  The quiet strength in his touch fueled my brain. I relaxed some and nodded. “Kill it anyway.”

  Jo grabbed Callum’s shoulder, and they exchanged a look. It seemed as if they were having a silent conversation with their matching dark eyes.

  Callum nodded. “I’ll get rid of it.”

  I scowled at Jo.

  Jo glared right back, her cheeks striped with tears. “It has the same right to be here as we do. Do you want me to give you lecture number 101?”

  I breathed deep. “And if it was one of them?”

  “Then I’d smash that bitch up,” Jo said with a small smile, and she dropped to tie my boots for me.

  I knelt and plucked dried mud bits from the carpet while Callum brushed the spider onto a newspaper and flung it outside.

  “Ready?” he asked as he stepped into his sneakers.

  “Yeah.” I leaped to the door so I wouldn’t get any more mud on the carpet and scanned the walls and floor for more spiders. Just in case. But I didn’t see any.

  Outside, Mom’s lilacs shimmied in the night breeze. My presence didn’t kill them the way it had killed everything a few hours ago. Relief swelled through my chest for the twentieth time that night.

  Jo directed me to the backseat with her so Callum could be the escort driver and so she didn’t have to leave my side. The three of us kept silent during the ride to the motel.

  I rested my cheek on the head rest and tried not to imagine Dad’s pissed off face. How was I supposed to tell him the truth?

  Sorry I couldn’t be home earlier, Dad, but I was buried alive by two Sorceressi who wanted to break another dark Sorceress out of the prison inside the earth, and a dead Trammeler Sorceress is the only one with enough power to do that. A Trammeler is a tree person/bounty hunter, in case you didn’t know, and, oh yeah, I’m a Trammeler Sorceress.

  Right. He would flip the switch on the electroshock treatment himself.

  The drone of the motor and the soft splashes of the tires through puddles pulled at my eyelids, so I lowered my window to let the smell of recent rain brush across my face. I wanted to be alert for when Dad killed me.

  Keeping my focus on him and his impending wrath held all other thoughts at bay. Better to look ahead than at the horror under my brain fog.

  The air snaked Jo’s brassy red hair across her face, and the streetlights paled her skin. She caught my stare and smiled. I linked my arm with hers and sighed. It might take me forever to trust that she was back to being normal Jo.

  Callum’s gaze locked on the road ahead. I felt the need to say something to him but my mind moved too slowly to come up with anything that sounded right. A ‘Thanks for burying my mom’ didn’t feel even close to enough.

  Soon, his headlights swept through the parking lot and stuck on the wall of the motel, our home away from home by order of the Kansas Department of Agriculture until they knew why our yard turned black. They’d get quite the surprise in the morning when they saw it had healed itself.

  The bright lights outside the second floor rooms stained shadows all over a lone figure on the walkway above, a skinny one with a book and a pen light.

  I chewed the inside of my cheek. “This could be worse than the Sorceressi.”

  Callum shook his head then looked the other way.

  “Surely one of your superpowers is mind control.” Jo frowned, as if she didn’t believe that either. “But if not, good luck.”

  “You, too,” I said and ducked out of the car.

  Jo slammed the door behind me, which made me jump a little, then waved. They backed out and rode off, leaving me all alone. Well, almost all alone.

  I watched them go for a second, but the shadow above lanced the top of my head like only an angry dad’s stare could.

  The puddles in the cracked pavement rippled with the moon’s reflection, and I hopped over them on my way up the iron staircase. Time to face the music, or in this case, really loud shouting. Every step upward vibrated doom, doom, doom. I gave it the middle finger for the friendly reminder and rounded the corner.

  As soon as I reached the top step, the shadow unplugged the pen light from his mouth and shined it in my face. I turned my head away from the spots dotting my vision and took my final steps toward him.

  The green paint on the walls and doors had peeled and crumbled to the walkway like little piles of broken dragon scales. My boots crunched over them. Welcome to Krapper’s finest and friendliest Crumbly Motel.

  “Why didn’t you call?” Dad asked in a low voice. He sounded as tired as I felt. And way pissed.

  “I’m sorry.” I blocked the light with my hand and tried to look him in the face. “I lost track of time.”

  “Were you really working on a school project?”

  The truth was loony-bin crazy, and I’d already lied before. Might as well play it up. “Yes, I was. And we finished the pirate project. The pirates have sailed on to loot and pillage their hearts out. I’m really sorry I’m late, Dad.”

  He stood, his book tucked under his elbow, the pen light still aimed at my eyes. “Do you have any idea—”

  A loud thud came from inside the motel room. Both our heads whipped toward the door.

  My heartbeat skipped. Too many bizarre things had happened. Too many weird sounds would haunt me forever, and this one didn’t feel right at all. I lunged for the doorknob, but it was locked.

  “Darby?” I shouted and pounded on the door.

  “Leigh, quiet down. I’ve got the key.” Dad pulled the card from his pocket and stuck it in the slot.

  When the light flashed green, I tore through the door. I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the dim overhead light before I saw her. Directly across from us. Outside on the balcony. Leaning over the railing so far I could barely see her upper half.

  Her purple mermaid nightgown fluttered around her legs. A sudden sharp breeze tossed the hair around her shoulders and unsteadied her grip on the rail for half a second. That half second shot me across the room.

  Once I reached the balcony door, I grabbed her foot and pulled. “Darby, what are you—?” Something trickled from my nose. I brushed it away, and blood smeared my hand.

  A pinprick of dread punctured the small amount of hope I clung to. Hope that all the nightmares in my life could be done. That hope left me deflated when Darby turned around.

  Blood seeped from her nose, too. Her hands were covered with it. Terror blazed bright behind her glasses.

  “You’re...you’re bleeding,” she said.

  “You are, too.”

  The hairs along my arms lifted. Both of us had nose bleeds and both of us were Trammeler Sorceressi. One and Two had warned me not to waste my precious blood, but now it flowed down both our fronts for everyone to see. For what? I swallowed. So we could be hunted down? With the balcony and front doors still open, I felt very exposed.

  “What are you doing out here, Darby?”

  Blood settled above the curve of her upper lip. “I—I thought I heard something.”

  Dad, hovering in the doorway, raked his hands through his hair. “What on Earth is going on with you girls?” He took Darby by the shoulder and guided her to the bathroom. “Leigh, get the doors, and then let’s get you both cleaned up.”

  I reached for the handle while holding a sleeve up to my nose. As I slid the door closed, a small, bloody handprint smudged the streetlights behind it. Darby’s. She was bleeding more than me.

  A slow but steady doom, doom, doom of footsteps echoed up the stairs outsid
e the still open front door. Someone was coming. And with them came the stink of nasty meat floating in a sewer. Even with all the blood gushing a river out my nose, I could still smell it.

  Death. Coming closer.

  Chapter 2

  An arctic chill raced up my back.

  “Did a cattle truck just drive by?” Dad asked from inside the bathroom. Just to the right of the gaping door. “Have you closed the door yet, Leigh?”

  I followed my leaping heart and crept toward their voices. The stink weakened my knees the closer I got. I’d smelled it too much lately.

  Doom, doom, doom.

  Was it Sarah? Because she was the only dead person who hadn’t been captured or buried again. If she showed up here, then she must have something important to tell me. But the dread lowering over me, thick as night, told me it couldn’t be her. I rushed for the door.

  A black bird glided up to the metal railing outside on the walkway. Its neck looked near broken, making its head tilt to the side and swing back and forth whenever it moved. It stared with orange eyes. Blood continued to drip from my nose, blooming a red rose all over my white sleeve.

  Whispered words laced through every step up the stairs, words I couldn’t understand, growing louder. More frantic. It had to be Sarah. Had to be.

  But what if it wasn’t?

  Doom, doom.

  My lungs couldn’t fill fast enough. The smell, the whispers—all of it forced the air from the room. I’d been through too much. I couldn’t do this again. Not here in a crumbly motel with the waning members of my family in the bathroom, completely unaware of what was happening. Of what I was. Of what Darby and I were.

  I flitted a trembling hand to the bottom hem of my shirt and glared at the bird on the railing. Once my fingertips found a weak spot in the thin cotton, I tore through it, just as I tore through my grave. Air rushed down my throat, only catching on the shivers that shook through my body and my dry swallows.

  I hugged the doorframe and risked a quick look outside at the stairs. Because what if it was Sarah?

  Nothing except the reeking death smell climbed them. A soft breeze tussled the weeds that had nudged through concrete in the parking lot. A police car rumbled past on the highway. Maybe my mind had twisted the sounds of wind and traffic into whispers. Maybe a cattle truck really had driven past. Maybe my night of horrors had earned me a free ride on the crazy train.