The Trinity Bleeds (The Grave Winner Book 3) Page 16

  But what were the Sorceressi waiting for? They just stood there as if waiting to be captured. So I didn’t waste a second.

  My gaze locked on Dad and the Sorceressi, I marched toward Sarah and knelt next to her. My fingers brushed hers in my blind search for the ash tree key, and her frigid skin iced up my arm, a reminder that she was truly dead. For real this time, and that fact cut deep.

  The slightest movement shimmied down the Sorceressi’s long, black robes. I froze and threw a questioning look toward Dad. Had I imagined it, or had he seen it, too? He gave a small shake of his head, and I had no idea what that meant.

  As soon as my thumb, already bloodied from the night, connected to one of the bumps on the ash key, the Sorceressi pressed in closer to Dad.

  “Leigh,” he shouted, but I could hardly see him around their enormous billowing robes.

  They flashed their withered hands underneath Dad’s dangling, once-shiny accountant shoes. One pushed. The other pulled, and bark snapped in half. Jagged wooden teeth formed at the base of the tree trunk that supported him until the tree, along with Dad, angled toward a thicker, larger tree right next to it. If the tree fell, it would crush him against that tree. The lilacs I’d talked him into eating wouldn’t save him from that kind of death.

  Hot venom churned through my veins, and I snapped the ash key into two. I whipped the pieces toward the two Sorceressi, and a shockwave jolted through the ribbons that attached the key pieces to Dad and the tree. They unfurled from around Dad and enveloped the Sorceressi into two columns of ribbon that spiraled around them from head to toe. Two dead trees that hadn’t been there seconds before shuddered in the wind, their thick branches shaped like the ends of a robe swirling up to the moon.

  Dad, now free, released his grip from the branches of the slanting tree just before it smashed into the second. He dropped onto solid ground, his eyes pinned to mine.

  “You’re alive?” he whispered, and the words hitched into a sob. “But…I saw you…”

  Dead. He saw me open the Core with One and Ica. What I wouldn’t give to wipe that from his memory for good. He’d been through too much already. I bit my molars so hard I expected to hear a snap.

  Jo’s frightened shrieks continued, sweeping my arms and legs with goosebumps. Her screams meant she was still alive, but I needed to destroy whatever lurked on the plank back to her and Darby. And fast.

  “Dad?” I said, and my voice broke apart, too, at what he must be feeling. Loss. Terror. Disappointment. I never wanted him to feel any of those things. “I need you to stay here.”

  “Where else am I going to go?” Dad said, but the wind whipped the words sideways so I almost missed them.

  That one statement from him, so empty of everything I thought he might be feeling, melted a chunk of icy fear that had gripped my chest the moment Lily brought me back to life. Nothing would ever be the same now, but if Dad still loved me, still believed in me, then nothing else really mattered.

  Still, my heart broke that I couldn’t squeeze him to me and cry into his shoulder like I so desperately wanted to. Instead, I whirled to face the unknown.

  Back on my plank made of roots, I lunged ahead over the opening to the Core, completely blind and feeling my way forward, back to Darby and Jo and whatever waited ahead. Tears threatened, but I wouldn’t let them come. Determination to make all of this right fueled everything inside me now. I would win, my way, once and for all, and who or whatever stepped in my way would regret it for the rest of their undead or otherwise lives.

  I sped my pace, searching in the dark for anything resembling movement, led by my roots and the sound of terror. The juddering thud of footsteps had stopped. Maybe the person following me fell off. Maybe they turned back. Maybe…

  My neck slammed into an arctic grip. Papery skin grazed my earlobes, wrapped underneath my jaw, and squeezed. My boots left the plank and dangled over the black void. Panic erupted through my legs, and I kicked with every ounce of strength I had. None of the blows connected. With anything.

  Around an impossibly long black robe, bright blue slits opened slowly at eye level. They stared at me with a focused evil that raked chills down my back. If I could’ve drawn another breath, my screams would’ve joined Jo’s.

  I should’ve known there was another one, that there were three members in the Black Robe Club.

  Get it, I ordered my roots, and somehow they heard me over the rattling bells inside my skull.

  They zipped toward the thing, looping and twirling around nothing but a shadow.

  Sputters choked their way out of my mouth. I clawed and kicked at empty air, tore at the hand holding my throat, but there was nothing there. It was like it was all an illusion. But the world fading in and out, the white light that glowed at the back of my mind, then darkened to night again, the involuntary ticking inside my throat, proved otherwise.

  I could sense my roots’ frustration while they attacked the shadow. Bark scraped across my skin in a spiraled path around my torso and tried to yank me away from the thing, but the Sorceressi’s grip only tightened around my throat.

  My fingers scrambled for an ash tree key in what was left of my waistband, but they came up empty. Had they all fallen out?

  I couldn’t be beat yet again. I refused to let this thing kill me and drop my lifeless body back inside the Core only to have to save my friends and family all over again. We weren’t doing this. I. Would. Win.

  My will to live lashed out in a kicking, punching mess of limbs, and something jarred loose inside my right boot. Something sharp and bumpy.

  The warning alarms inside my head changed into a tornado siren wail. Darkness tunneled down a narrow passageway toward a white glow filled with a dozen smaller orbs of light the color of lilacs. I could almost smell them, almost touch their earlobe-soft petals. So close. Almost.

  A spasm jerked through my body with a final burst of adrenaline, then my arms fell slack to my sides. They hung so close to the gap in my boot where an ash tree key had slipped, the gap that existed because I could never keep my laces tied.

  So close. Almost.

  Thoughts scattered like the lilac orbs inside my head, but I held on to one. Boot.

  My roots scraped down both legs in their frenzied rush to help save me, and one dove down into the gap. It retrieved the key and brought it to my hand, and on that short path, it had gathered plenty of my leaking blood.

  Silky ribbon shot out of the key, wound around my wrist, and flashed toward the thing. The power of it yanked my shoulder muscles with blinding pain, but the pressure around my neck eased. I drew in a sharp breath and listened to the crackling, snapping sounds of a tree taking shape right in front of my nose.

  I slipped the ribbon from my wrist and collapsed against the trunk, breathing deep. But Jo’s screams, closer this time, shortened my recovery time and drove me forward again.

  My roots guided me across the hell hole while I filled my lungs with as much as oxygen as they could hold on the way to the next battle. And the next. Because it would never end, would it? Not unless I could figure out how to close the Core. I still had zero idea how to do that, and night was rushing into day with a lighter strip of blue on the horizon.

  How much time did I have left now? If I stopped to look, it would slow me down. Tram had given me his job because he believed in me, but what if that decision turned out to be a mistake that cost millions of lives?

  But even though the weight on my shoulders threatened to buckle my knees like matchsticks, no way would I give up. My heart, including everyone I held close to it, were what kept me going. Always.

  As soon as I stepped over the downed gate of Heartland Cemetery, Jo’s shrieks stopped. She was in a crab pose two feet away in a river of blood up past her wrists. Darby stood in front of her, chin tucked to her chest as she glared in the same direction.

  I followed their gazes to Dad’s jeep, now smashed and dented on all sides, like it had been wrecked a hundred times while parked. And out from beh
ind it came an enormous, hairy, segmented leg. A familiar body along with seven more legs trailed after the first. Ica’s great aunts, the granny twins from what used to be Whaty-Whats, in giant spider form.

  When all six of its eyes narrowed in on me, an enraged squeal rushed from between its fangs, and it charged.

  With a roll of my eyes, I sent two orders to my roots—one to bring Dad safely across the hell pit and the other to take care of this furry devil once and for all. Turning my back on it, I hauled Jo to her feet and took Darby’s hand. I didn’t bother to turn around at the sound of Dad’s jeep whooshing up in the air or the explosion of glass and metal when it finally landed again or the dying moan of a crushed arachnid.

  Because I was so done with spiders.

  Leigh

  5:50 am.

  Only about fifteen minutes until sunrise, and I wasn’t any closer to figuring out how to close the Core. I watched the seconds tick by on Jo’s monkey watch she’d loaned me, feeling completely helpless. Time had once again joined ranks with the rest of my enemies.

  Black sticks in pregnant gardens. Black sticks in pregnant gardens. What could it mean?

  We rode in Callum’s car while Jo drove carefully through Krapper without any real destination.

  Sorceressi packed the streets, their glowing blue eyes intent on what to level next. Many houses lay in ruins, some roads were impassable because of downed power lines and ripped-up concrete, but worst of all were the still-alive humans. Those who hadn’t been caught in some kind of magical spell that froze them in mid-sprint zipped past us in cars. They were horrified. They were running even though there was nowhere to run to.

  All because of me. The guilt was enough to bury me all over again, and I only had a single shot at any kind of redemption.

  5:51 am.

  “What’s happened here?” Dad kept asking in a lost kind of voice.

  “Do you know anything about black sticks in pregnant gardens?” I asked him. “Did Mom ever mention it?”

  He shook his head, but I couldn’t be sure he’d even heard me, so I didn’t press him. It was a lot to take in, so I squeezed his hand to remind him that, despite everything, we still had each other. He crushed mine back, then held it in both of his with a watery glaze in his eyes that were aimed at the black dots on the tips of my knuckles. I covered them and rubbed them raw until I was sure no thorns had gouged through when I wasn’t looking.

  Darby sat on the other side of him, her eyes closed as if in one of Jo’s meditative trances. I was glad she wasn’t seeing our town in this state, but her silence made me wish I was wearing more clothes to poke holes into. Then again, I didn’t want her help at figuring out this puzzle if all she could offer was stabbing pregnant women with sticks.

  5:52 am. Thirteen minutes.

  Sticks, sticks. Really skinny people? Burnt people, maybe, or as in the color of their skin? God, it sure would help if someone had an actual detailed explanation for what I was supposed to do since closing the Core was kind of an enormous deal. But the only Sorceress I knew other than Darby and I was Mrs. Rios, but she was in the hospital, nearly dead from…me. Not me.

  Ugh, I didn’t know anything anymore!

  I shook my head at the brightening sky through the windshield, at the tiny breaks in the clouds that revealed winking stars, as if they knew a secret and I didn’t. One of them, it seemed, was following us, but I didn’t have time to count all the brain cells that had obviously abandoned ship to make me hallucinate moving stars.

  Black sticks. Black sticks. There was something I was missing, and it was right there. But all my doubts and fears and overwhelming sense of duty were blurring my brain. Just like the spiders had, but no, they weren’t in my head. I ruled my insides now.

  Black. Sticks.

  Down the road we travelled, gnarled tree branches in blackened yards twisted over our heads like taloned claws swooping in, evidence of the escaped Sorceressi. All the streets we drove down had been turned into the color of night. The color of darkness.

  Black.

  Where did the darkness come from that seeped from the Sorceressi’s feet? Not just any old tree. Death’s tree. The Counselor’s tree. The hawthorn. Black sticks.

  Yes.

  “Stop the car.” My voice cut through the deafening silence, and everyone jumped. A sudden lightness expanded in my chest. “I need a hawthorn tree.”

  Darby cracked open an eye. “We have one at the house.” Red lightning snaked across her face, etching a sharp tattoo across her face that faded after my next blink.

  I stared at her to be sure it was gone, my fingers flying once again to rub my knuckles.

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Remember?”

  How could I forget the thorn trees she’d started under her bed to keep me out from underneath it? To keep me—the spiders, I mean—from crawling through her mattress to suck out her Trammeler blood and give it to Ica.

  Eleven minutes.

  I dug my palms into my eyes to forget that memory that wasn’t even mine. “Jo,” I growled. “My house. And step on it.”

  Black sticks were hawthorn sticks. That had to be right. And pregnant gardens? Pregnant. Important. Important to me? Because there was only one garden important to me, and that was Mom’s lilac bushes on both sides of our porch.

  I gripped the back of Jo’s head rest and pushed as if that would help speed us along. She didn’t need much help with that, though. The windshield wipers were left on to clear the black ooze left behind after flattening any Sorceressi who dared get in her way. She careened around corners, throwing us first against one side of the car and then the other toward home.

  Finally, the tires shrieked to a stop in the driveway. A lump swelled in my throat at what had once been my house. It looked like a giant razor had scraped half of the front clean off, and giant hawthorns had sprouted through the roof. In their now deadened state, they leaned in the direction of the howling wind, their black, deformed branches a stark contrast to the bright oranges and yellows striping the sky behind them.

  Three minutes.

  Before Dad went into an all-out meltdown, I ordered him, Jo, and Darby inside the still intact front door, into the garage, and to lock the door.

  I practically fell out of the car in my rush, but Darby had somehow already beaten me outside. She stood inside what had once been the wall to her bedroom and reached for one of her hawthorns.

  “Darby, inside. Now,” I barked.

  Sludge on the crunchy grass sucked at my boots, almost like blood but thicker, blacker, and it slowed my sprint to a lumbering waddle.

  “No. I’m helping.”

  No time to argue. Like I always did, I would protect her. I glanced behind me at the Sorceressi who were trudging closer then nodded toward Dad and Jo. The front door clicked locked behind them.

  A tangle of what might’ve been some of my dirty laundry rolled by, smeared with the sludgy substance and confettied with bits of dead grass. I ripped through my punk girl band posters with the red mohawks and nose rings that skated across the top of the lawn, but I slammed into a brick wall of uncertainty.

  Would this even work? Did I need to bring Mom’s dead lilacs back to life first? Because the last time I neared them, they electrocuted me. They repelled dark magic, and because I had practiced it by bringing a dog, and maybe a whole graveyard of people, back from the dead, I’d been swimming in dark magic. If I brought them back to life, would me or Darby even be able to get near enough to place the hawthorn sticks next to the lilacs?

  Only one way to find out. With one last heave of my boots through the sludged-up yard, I dropped to my knees and cradled a brittle petal in my palm. Darby’s fists were full of branches, so I took a deep breath and said, “Break the ties that bind you to death.”

  All the black stems unfurled and straightened as if in one perfectly choreographed dance routine. The petals unfolded and relaxed into normal flower shape, brightening in color from their tips to the middle. Not quite fully alive t
o zap me, but not dead either, a tiny window of time to end this for good.

  “Drop them, Darby.”

  Her shadow fell over me as she shuffled closer through the muck at a snail’s pace, her outstretched arms piled with hawthorn sticks. Instead of throwing daylight on her, the rising sun surrounded her with a thick gloom that blocked out all light.

  “Now, Da—”

  An electrical spark flashed behind my back, and a rushing livewire slammed into my shoulder. It knocked me into the air and dropped me onto the sidewalk with a crushing blow to the side of my head. Darkness threaded fingers over my eyes, but purple energy streaks popped the overwhelming scent of lilacs under my nose like smelling salts. I shook off the darkness the best I could because I couldn’t black out. Not now. I wouldn’t.

  But a long, twisted shadow writhed and floated all across the yard and between the cracks of the branches Darby still carried. Had I jarred something loose when I’d cracked my head on the concrete? No. Because Darby’s gaze followed its movement, too, and that fact rattled jagged chunks of glass around my chest. Something was here with us, and I was pretty sure I knew who.

  Hissing in pain, I wrenched my wrist with Jo’s monkey watch from its weird angle underneath me. Two minutes until sunrise.

  A warning clawed to get past my lips, but the electrical lilacs had already stolen all my air.

  The black shadow climbed up Darby’s chest and sifted into her mouth before I could haul myself to my feet. Darby threw her head back, her possessed blue eyes almost as bright as the coming sun.

  With a guttural sob, I launched myself at her, at Ica, and tried to unhinge her fingers from around the sticks.

  “Let her go,” I shouted into Darby’s face.

  Behind her, a fiery yellow lit the sky. I maybe had seconds left.

  “Time’s up.” Ica’s voice clattered from Darby’s mouth with a sound like sandpaper against a dead tree.

  “Not yet, it’s not,” I said through gritted teeth and yanked and pulled at the sticks clutched in Darby’s hands.