The Trinity Bleeds (The Grave Winner Book 3) Read online

  “Hello?” I said, and that time all my voice parts worked.

  An odd quiet fell over the store, and the prickle up my scalp confirmed I wasn’t alone. If whatever lurked in here with me wanted a face-to-face, it would have to make an appointment.

  I skated and slipped my way over the movie cases scattered around the fallen displays toward the double glass doors. At the same time, a girl, a stranger, approached from the other side. Her black scraps of clothing smeared with grime barely covered her, and the laces of her combat boots dragged along the floor. Blonde hair—not chosen Three red—breezed over her shoulders in long waves, but it was the eyes that made my heart stutter. Bright blue, not glowing, but…alive. If I didn’t know any better, I would swear I was looking at Mom when she was still with us, but in reality, it was my reflection.

  I was a mirror-image of her in almost every way, mixed with a healthy dose of Dad’s Sorceressy lineage. We even shared a lack of tattoos now since my pale but dingy arm had been emptied of a black Three. We also had death and resurrection in common now, a fact that would drag me down into a deep dark place inside my own head, and I didn’t have time to sort that out right then. Or the fact that she had been murdered by the Counselor.

  “Tick-tock, Leigh.”

  I whipped around and smothered my yelp to keep my heart from flying out of my mouth.

  “Who’s there?” I called, my voice more ferocious than I felt.

  There was a sound like static, like a lost television signal, then a voice that sounded like a stick dragging over gravel. “At night, what is done cannot be undone, yet one last gift to the dead can restore the semblance of breath.”

  The voice sounded so impossibly close, but I didn’t see any—.

  Gretchen. It was her. Had she escaped or… Or was she still inside my head? Because I drank her blood like some rabid vampire?

  “Once the sun rises,” she continued, “the Core won’t close.”

  I fumbled in my pants pocket and let out a part moan, part choke, part crazed laugh that I still had my phone and it still worked. 4:53 am, it read. Which meant I had roughly an hour and fifteen minutes to figure out a way to close the Core.

  Tram had said I had limited space under my roots for the escaped prisoners. If I was maxed out, where the hell was I going to put the thousands of others if the Core wouldn’t close?

  I spun around and shoved at the door, but it must have been locked from the outside. No amount of kicking, pushing, hitting did any good. It was as if it had been blocked off somehow. To keep something out? Or to keep something in?

  A reflection of a moving shadow spun me back around again. No, not a shadow. Smoke, black and oily, billowed from the direction of the hole I’d climbed out of near the back of the store. Unease, identical to what I felt on the bridge in the Core, crawled through my insides as it drifted upward and darkened the florescent lights.

  Black smoke. Ica. I knew it as well as I knew my own name, and suddenly I didn’t think she was as dead, crushed to pieces by a stone tree, as I’d thought.

  I lunged through the darkness for something, anything to smash the glass in the doors.

  But something arctic and slick and not quite solid wound around my wrists and the ankles of my boots and yanked. My head smashed against the corner of something metal. Stars pulsed inside my head, then went dark when my whole body was dragged across the store and sucked into the hole. My stomach flipped end-over-end at the sickening free-fall. Dirt and rocks knifed into my skin as my speed multiplied.

  Back to the Core. Back to death.

  Tick-tock.

  Jo

  I screamed. My breaths came so quick, my throat felt scraped raw. It made me feel like I was going to throw up. So did what had smashed the door in and now stood in Darby’s bedroom.

  The hallway light slanted inward, as if to highlight every gruesome detail. A pole of a man with silvery hair and an old-fashioned suit stared with glowing blue eyes. Three eyes with one in the middle of his forehead. His grayish skin had peeled away from his lips so there wasn’t anything left but rotten teeth inside a gaping, blackened mouth. An undead Sorcerer, I guessed, like One and Two. An escaped prisoner from the Core. Whispers and a smell like a burning plastic factory barged into the room just before he did.

  He flicked his gaze to me first, then Cal, and as soon as he did, my bloodied feet left the carpet. All of me left the carpet until I hovered above it at least six inches. Terror slammed my pulse into my ears.

  My body turned to face the tree branch-covered window as if I was trapped in an invisible current. I swam my arms around to grab hold of something, at Cal floating beside me, to fight against the scrawny old dead man, but with my back now turned to him, I had no idea what he might do.

  “Darby?” I whispered, but I couldn’t twist around to find her. I craned my neck to see her, but froze when a wintry touch stroked my arm. My stomach rolled at the feel of dead skin scratching against mine, and I wrenched my arm away.

  “Get away from her, you asshole,” Cal shouted, and spit flew from his mouth as if he’d gone rabid. The muscles in his arms and neck had tightened into ridged cords, and his mouth curled in a fierce scowl.

  I had never seen him so mad.

  His outburst gained the attention of the dead man, who walked toward Cal with unhurried steps. What did this guy want? Why not just kill us and get it over with?

  I darted my gaze around the near-dark room, looking for a glint of Darby’s glasses so I would know she was safe. Unless she’d dodged out of the room? Oh, goddesses, had she gone to see her dead mom play the piano in the living room?

  The contorted notes of Blitzkrieg Bop continued to play as Mrs. Baxton hunted and pecked at the keys. This would be the song I heard as I died, my last song, and despite my respect for the Ramones, that really pissed me off. Like Darby, I preferred Bobby Fever, though I would never admit that to Leigh.

  The man looked Cal in the eye, and Cal stared right back with clenched fists at his sides. The man lifted a gnarled hand with large gray bumps protruding from his knuckles toward my brother as if in preparation for some kind of offering. At the same time, a loud clock began to tick from everywhere and nowhere all at once. But the only thing Cal gave him was a ball of phlegm that stuck to the side of the man’s face.

  I screwed my eyes shut in revulsion, wanting desperately to unsee that, but worry for Cal popped them back open again. Just in time to see the bumps on the man’s hands blink. Like eyes. Like bulbous eyes underneath the skin of his knuckles.

  The man brought his hand closer to Cal, unfazed by his spitting talents, seeming to wait for something. As if the man expected Cal to drop his eyeballs in his palm. As if that was exactly what the man wanted him to do.

  Air lodged in my lungs as I stared in horror. What could this man want with Cal’s eyes? No way would he give them to this man, and no way would I let him. I tried to hiss out a warning because I wasn’t sure Cal was smart enough to have figured this man out yet, but I couldn’t get enough breath behind it.

  “You touch me or anyone in this house, I’ll kill you,” Cal warned. His jaw twitched as the man pushed his hand right under his nose, and the clock ticked louder.

  Mrs. Baxton continued to ring in the apocalypse with an out-of-tune piano.

  The growing trees in Darby’s bedroom heaved against the walls and ceiling with a low groan, and somewhere outside, someone screamed for help.

  Out of the corner of my eyes, something moved underneath the window. Where just a sliver of light angled through the branches, pale skin glinted, and a trace of relief coursed through the pins and needles stabbing into my toes from floating above the floor.

  Darby’s head peered from behind the cover of her bed, watching the window, then me, with her finger held to her lips for me to keep quiet. She didn’t have to worry. Pretty sure I hadn’t drawn a breath for the last ten minutes.

  I hoped she had something hidden inside that pretty scary head of hers to get rid of this
guy, otherwise this would not end well. If she did, what was she waiting for? For the timer to stop and the buzzer to ding, announcing that Cal’s fresh-baked eyeballs were cooked to perfection and ready to be knuckle food?

  My heart knocked against my chest, my own inner countdown to the great unknown. Then, a timer really did buzz, making both Cal and I flinch. The old man slowly lowered his deformed hand, watching as it swung back to his side. His other hand, the normal one closest to me, formed sharp claws with his fingers and strangled the ball of worry inside my gut.

  “Cal,” I shouted, and at the same time, the man lunged forward at Cal’s face.

  Cal screamed in agony.

  A wall of fiery heat rushed across Darby’s bed toward the man. Dark purple flames licked up his back, up the collar of his suit. The man threw back his head in a hiss and flung Cal away from him. Cal dropped to the floor on his knees and buckled over while clutching his face.

  “Cal,” I shouted over the roaring fire, but I could barely hear myself.

  The man jerked backward with his arms raised as the fire engulfed him. The blaze reached higher toward his silver hair and his third eye. What little flesh he had left slid down his face in stringy clumps.

  The burning plastic factory dead man stink fused with cooked skin watered my eyes, and I wanted to look away. I wanted my feet to touch ground again so I could go help my brother. I wanted Leigh to come and rescue all of us from this rotten hellhole she’d once called home. But I couldn’t. She couldn’t.

  Finally, thankfully, both the Sorcerer and the fire burst into a pile of black sludge that rained onto the carpet. I plummeted to the floor. Inside the puddle of Sorcerer goo. Of course, it had to splatter across my mouth. Of course it did.

  Beyond disgusted, I wiped my face clean with the back of my hand, then grabbed Cal’s shoulders and angled him toward the hallway light. His right eye looked raw and red on the inside, and half-moon marks like fingernails circled the skin around it. He could barely open it.

  “Can you see?” I asked, my voice tense.

  He nodded, but when I released him, he covered his eye and winced. His jaw pulsed like he wanted to rip something apart with his bare hands, and all I could think about was his baseball scholarship. It was stupid, given the state of chaos we were in, but still. I knew how much he loved the sport since he’d reminded me every day by refusing to change the channel from twenty-four hour baseball highlights.

  “That fucker,” I said, but then the site of Darby’s purple mermaid blanket on her bed reminded me where we were. “Sorry, D—.” I leaped to my feet, my gaze tracking the singe mark across the bed and toward the little girl standing behind it. “You did this?”

  Her face was as pale as I had ever seen it. Trembles racked through her little body, and an ache spread through my chest for her. I had no doubt she was confused, but the power inside her seemed violently darker compared to Leigh’s.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I had to wait until he attacked so he’d be distracted. Are you okay, Callum?”

  He lifted himself to his feet and gazed at her with his one good eye. Maybe she didn’t see it in him, but I did—suspicion. Did she really have to wait, or did she come up with that excuse out of morbid curiosity? To see what the Sorcerer would do all the way to the eye-gouging end. Either way, he still had two eyes, and we needed to remember that.

  “I’m fine, Big D,” he said, forcing a smile. “My eye thanks you.”

  “We thank you, too, Darby.” I couldn’t help the note of doubt that crept into my voice, but I tried to cover it with an encouraging nod.

  “We need to get out of here,” Cal said. “Go see if the window’s clear across the hall, Jo.”

  On painful, bloodied tiptoes, I crept toward the door, but turned back, listening. It wasn’t just Darby that coiled my knot of worry tighter. Something had changed, but I couldn’t place exactly what. Police sirens wailed outside, the walls and ceiling groaned with the straining tree branches. But something was missing.

  A creak sounded in the hallway, and right away, I knew what had changed. The piano. Mrs. Baxton had stopped playing.

  Another creak, closer this time.

  Was that her, coming to see what us crazy kids were up to? My second mother who had assured me I could be whoever I wanted despite the rigid box Krapper insisted on stuffing me in?

  She’d been outside watering her lilacs while Leigh had gone inside to go to the bathroom or whatever. Miles beyond depressed, I broke the news that the high school had shot down my plan to start a recycling revolution there. If it wasn’t on the state tests and couldn’t improve the school’s athletic department in the short term, then according to Principal Mallory, saving the planet in the long term was a useless endeavor. After that, Mr. Mallory had his very own voodoo doll named after him.

  “Aim higher, then,” Mrs. Baxton had told me. “Take it to the city government.”

  In that instant, she became my hero. When she died, I wasn’t just mourning the loss of my best friend’s mom. I was mourning my own personal kick in the butt I needed to start a petition for a recycling center.

  All of Leigh’s fears about seeing her mom back from the dead must’ve transferred to me, because I knew I wouldn’t be the same person afterward. After all, it had changed Cal the night he’d buried her the second time.

  I glanced at him over my shoulder, and he stood statue-still, arms locked at his sides, staring in the direction of the hallway with his one good eye. A deep tremble shook his right hand, and he didn’t even try to hide it. He knew she was coming, too.

  Still behind her bed, Darby watched the doorway through a haze of ceiling dust that drifted down in front of her. I expected her face to mirror mine, what could only be a holy kind of terror, but her expression had emptied of everything. She simply waited to see her mom again, neither hopeful nor petrified, and that rattled me to the center of my life force.

  Another creak in the hallway. The bottom hem of a grimy, polka-dot dress waved into view, followed by a bare foot with peeling gray skin.

  Tears swam across my eyes. We should’ve ran across the hall when we had the chance, because now the only way out was through her. Through Leigh’s mom, who now looked more like Leigh than ever.

  Cal swallowed a shaky groan.

  Something snapped overhead.

  I dragged my eyes away from the horror appearing in the doorway. The ceiling tilted under the pressure of the flourishing trees, popping out large chunks of wood and plaster right over Darby’s head. What shoots up must come crashing down, and I didn’t even think.

  I dove across the room, skidded over Darby’s bed, and tackled her to the floor underneath my body and piles of falling ceiling. It collapsed onto my back and head. Stray nails and splintered wood speared my flesh. Pain exploded up and down my body, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. That was probably the adrenaline buzzing through my veins, but still. I was alive, and I knew it would be ten thousand times worse if I let anything happen to Leigh’s kid sister. Creepy or not, no living creature deserved to be crushed by its own house.

  Darby’s breath warmed my arm, and wetness trickled under her soft cheek. Her tears or mine, I didn’t know.

  “Jo, you…you all right?” Cal wheezed, and my heart cracked open at what he’d witnessed in the doorway, at what he was still witnessing.

  Was Mrs. Baxton in the room with us now? I had to get us out of here and fast.

  “Just a few more holes here and there,” I said, and hoped he could hear me under the pile of rubble.

  I blinked the plaster from my eyes and peered out between a crack in the debris and out a gaping hole in Darby’s wall that looked out into the night. Branches spread it open wider and wormed their way out into the open air.

  Into a way out. Ask and ye shall find, but it wasn’t quite that simple. Blue lights flashed up and down the street amid the sirens.

  Wait. Those weren’t police car lights. Those were eyes, Sorcerer a
nd Sorceress eyes, floating in skeletal bodies up and down the street and across people’s yards. Hundreds of them, crawling the roads to wreak their own special kind of havoc.

  “I’m great, really,” I whispered for the assurance of anyone listening, including myself. “Everything’s great.”

  A shadow loomed closer to the widening hole in the wall. A juddering, quivering one with a body shape that didn’t mimic a human’s. It had too many limbs and a shorter stature, and for one micro-second, I thought it might be Elf here to rescue us. But the toxic stink radiating from it smelled nothing like my cat’s sweet fur.

  The thing—dog?—had its nose pressed to the ground as it walked, quaking with each unsteady step, until it must’ve caught a whiff of a dead lady dog in heat. It raised its head and turned slowly so the light from the windows across the street caught the ripped flesh down one whole side of its body.

  Bile scorched the back of my throat. Dogs had come back to life, too? Innocent animals should have no part in this disaster.

  Darby whimpered. “Get off of me, Jo.”

  At the sound of her voice, the dog’s only ear snapped to attention, and it turned its head to the tiny hole in the ceiling wreckage I peered through. Its greenish reflective eyes narrowed. Whispered growls swirled out of its sagging mouth. It sat back on its haunches, hackles raised, while strings of black drool dripped from its rotten fangs.

  Then, it lunged.

  Jo

  “No!” I bolted upright to my feet, out from under the fallen ceiling, away from Darby, and clapped my hands once to distract the dog.

  It sounded like a gunshot in the night, and through the widening hole in the wall, a hundred pairs of glowing blue eyes fastened on the Baxton house.

  What a giant herpes zoo tonight had become.

  Tree branches had stretched the hole in the wall to the width of about three of me while they twirled up into the rancid night, free at last. Soon, there wouldn’t be any walls blockading us from the escaped heartbeat-challenged on the street.