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

  Dead. Oh no. What if Aneska and the Counselor hadn’t been tricked? Then Tram and Lily were next.

  I pinned my gaze on both of them, waiting, wishing, hoping.

  Tram took another step backward toward me.

  Lily stared blankly into the blood pool, its blood staining the dried red streaks on her white silk shirt black.

  The Counselor knelt next to his fallen daughter, pointlessly trying to shake life back into her, the hawthorn needles in his face bouncing with rage.

  “Aneska! Aneska!” he shouted.

  When he finally stopped to level his white eyes at me, I matched his fury with my own. If he hadn’t known what it felt like to lose someone close, he did now.

  Hurts, doesn’t it? I asked, but then I remembered he couldn’t hear me through my cage.

  “You.” He pushed to his feet and rounded the blood pool, his white hair flying behind him. “You did this. The traitor’s daughter killed one of mine.” He marched toward me, his empty, white eyes narrowed in murderous rage. “Let’s see how you like it.”

  Behind him, something sprang up next to Aneska’s body to bob on the blood pool’s surface. Something with crimson petals that had once been pink. Lily’s lily.

  Tram leaped back a final step, blocking me from the Counselor’s charge. Then he stood to his full height to face his father.

  “Get out of my way,” the Counselor hissed into Tram’s face.

  Leigh didn’t kill anyone, Tram said, his voice as lethal as I’d ever heard it.

  Beside the blood pit, Lily knelt with her flower perched in her hands. Blood vanished into the petals until they turned a deep pink, then she tucked it behind her ear.

  I killed your precious Aneska. Her gaze ticked to the Counselor. I killed my sister.

  The Counselor, his rage still aimed at Tram, froze. Before he could turn to face the only daughter he had left, a former cheerleader turned badass Trammeler Sorceress, a fist smashed into his thorny face.

  Tram’s fist. Holy shit.

  The man who had beat on the only person brave enough to capture Gretchen’s followers, his only son, had finally gotten a taste of his own medicine. Karma could be a real hero sometimes.

  The Counselor, whose head had swung to the side with the force of Tram’s punch, turned slowly toward Tram, and I could only imagine what he planned to do to his son then.

  That’s what I think of your immortality, Tram said and bent to unlock my cage with the ash key.

  Now, Leigh, Lily shouted once I was freed.

  I made the command, no questions asked. The purple energy clinging to the wall whizzed at the Counselor, at Aneska’s body, at that stupid bird flying around her head. I tried to shape it with my mind, mold it to my will so it wouldn’t accidentally zap Tram, Lily, or me, but it moved like a thick wall. A fast, thick wall about fifteen feet tall with dark purple currents streaking from one end to the other.

  Out of the way! I ordered just before it disintegrated the bird into an explosion of feathers on its reckless path across the room.

  Tram and Lily leaped for cover behind Tram’s fallen cage. The Counselor easily dodged it, too.

  The energy wave stayed there on the opposite wall, vibrating, waiting for more. And growing.

  Keeping one eye on it, I dragged myself up to dare the Counselor to make another move against any of us. His precious quest for immortality had abruptly ended. The Trinity blood he’d needed to end that quest had killed his daughter. I was still fuzzy on the how of it, but Lily’s lily definitely had something to do with it. I wanted to rub that fact in his prickly, demented face, so I charged toward him.

  But a shout from Lily paused my steps. Tram, watch out!

  Tram kneeled over Aneska’s body as if checking for a pulse that hadn’t been there for a long time, and behind him, a headless Sorceressi stood with her hand outstretched. One.

  What was she doing here? She’d been dead set on finding…

  Gretchen.

  A powerful gale swept through the room, stirring dirt around our heads, lifting waves from the blood pool to splash over Aneska’s arms.

  One snatched Tram by the hood of his green sweatshirt and blurred toward Lily before the three of them vanished. Gone.

  No. What did One want with them? She wouldn’t hurt them if they were Gretchen’s kids, would she?

  The Counselor towered over the room as he stood to full height, his white hair billowing around his shoulders with the wind that shouldn’t exist down here.

  “You ruined everything—you and your inability to do as you’re told.” Each word sharpened into the next until the final one was a shout.

  You’re right. I curled my hands into fists. And this is me making it right.

  “You infected my children with your rebelliousness.” He stalked toward me, his outrage beating against the constant wind that tried to push him back.

  The gusts pressed me sideways, howling and screaming, and I fought to stay upright. But no way would I show an ounce of fear toward the approaching Counselor. He needed to be stopped, once and for all.

  The howls and screams continued even when the wind suddenly calmed.

  And there, just a few feet to my left, stood the darkest Sorceress who ever lived.

  Gretchen.

  Leigh

  Red hair, so much like mine, hung in thin strands to her ankles. Her pale skin had such a translucence to it, dark veins webbed everywhere just underneath. Protruding from them in two-inch needles were thorns. Hawthorns. As if she’d stabbed herself with them like the Counselor. Or as if they had sprouted from inside her.

  The picture of her that used to hang in Whaty-Whats always made me think someone as beautiful as her could never have darkness inside her that made her kill so violently. Not while carrying her triplet babies, Trinity gifts as she called them, who had been ripped away from her, both in reality and in the picture. Not with that secret, content smile on her mouth. But now, wickedness rolled off her in waves, and I steeled my spine so I wouldn’t back away even though I really, really wanted to.

  She pointed her bright-blue spider-webbed eyes at the Counselor, and they were filled with such hatred that a shiver crawled up my back.

  Static buzzed inside my head, along with a gravelly voice that no longer sounded human. Treyvin. So good to see you again.

  The Counselor gazed at her, his face too pinned with hawthorn needles to decipher his expression. “Gretchen, my love. It’s been too long.”

  Yes. Yes, it has. She glanced at Aneska, her daughter, dead in the blood pool, and her fingers slowly formed fists.

  A horrible realization struck then, lifting every hair on my body. One hadn’t appeared in this room to separate Tram and Lily from me or to hurt them in some way. She came to take them to someplace safe, someplace away from their parents. Because this would not end well for either Gretchen or the Counselor, and my feet were planted right in the middle of it.

  “You’ll be happy to know my little experiment still didn’t work,” the Counselor said, and he sounded conversational and not at all worried to be stuck in the same room as Gretchen.

  Her gaze, so cold and ruthless, cut to him again. She squeezed her fists so tight her arms shook.

  I inched a single step backward because things were about to get ugly, more than they already were. There had to be a way out of here, some way to disappear, to let these two sort out their relationship issues without a third wheel. Besides, something still needed to be done about all the escaped prisoners. While these two played an angry game of catch-up, who knew what was happening on the surface of the earth?

  But Aneska had solidified the door I’d entered this room through into stone, and unless I tapped my heels together three times and wished my way out, I was stuck.

  Gretchen’s hard gaze took in the inverted gift room. You bled my Trinity gifts for your silly little experiment, didn’t you?

  “Yes, but you never understood that all I’ve ever done has been for you, Gretchen. All
those wasted years of experimenting on children that weren’t even mine…those were your years you could have been queen. We could have ruled over the entire planet together. Forever.”

  Gretchen stayed silent, and somehow that was even worse than her inhuman voice inside my head.

  “I love you, Gretchen,” the Counselor said. “It’s impossible to fall out of love with your kind. Even the very first Counselor couldn’t fall out of love with a Sorceress. But Trammelers, a traitor Trammeler in our case, always get in the way.”

  Pretty sure the Counselor and Gretchen had relationship issues long before my mom entered the picture, but whatever.

  You are a Trammeler, too, Gretchen said. A Trammeler Sorcerer gone too dark that you’ve become something else entirely. Death himself.

  I crept another foot backward. Both of them seemed so intent on the other and who would bring down the ceiling first that neither of them noticed. Gretchen hadn’t even acknowledged me as her Three or that I was even in the same room with her. Fine with me.

  “As the Counselor of Death, I have power. But immortality…that’s the ultimate power, and it could have been yours long ago.” The Counselor looked to his side at what was left of Aneska, but his empty eyes held no remorse. “It’s not too late to try ag—”

  The Counselor’s body flew to the side, over Aneska and the blood pool toward the opposite wall, but before he smashed against it, he transformed into about fifty black birds. They winged upward, over Gretchen’s head, and disappeared in the blackness high above.

  Then silence.

  Gretchen seemed to have lost interest in him because she stared at Aneska’s body. It would be normal for her to feel grief, expected even, but the venom in her eyes was just the same as when she glared at the Counselor. It made me wonder if her darkness had corrupted her ability to feel anything other than hatred, if even a little of her former smiling self in the picture that used to hang in Whaty-Whats existed, or if her time locked in the Core had blackened her heart. Did she want anything else except revenge on the man who took first one Trinity gift and then the other two? Could she still feel anything else?

  Stone scraped against stone, and heat scorched the air above our heads.

  Gretchen! I warned, even though I didn’t know exactly what was happening. Even though she didn’t deserve my warning even if I did know.

  Something hissed, but it didn’t sound human. Then thick, orange liquid poured from above, a giant vat of it in a wide bubbly stream. Lava. I’d seen enough pictures in science books to know it anywhere, and since it was a thousand degrees or something, I didn’t stand a chance, heartbeat or not. I scrambled for some kind of cover in an empty, doorless room.

  Gretchen lifted an arm to point at the lava falling straight for our heads.

  I froze, even though everything inside me screamed to run, and let it sink in that I was now a part of this battle between them. In fact, I had been for several weeks now ever since I first gave gifts to the dead.

  The Counselor’s birds circled lower overhead as if to see what would happen to us, and I genuinely wanted to know that, too. They flew together in a perfect V formation, then dove for a landing a safe distance away from the plummeting liquid fire. The air blurred around them until they morphed into the Counselor of Death standing across the blood pool from us.

  Lava fell faster and faster, but Gretchen never wavered. She kept pointing. Something was happening to her other hand fisted at her side. It looked as if the black veins under the thorns had expanded to color her fingers and knuckles into inky darkness, the same color that would mark her footsteps topside, but the Counselor didn’t seem to notice.

  “You loved me once upon a time,” he said. “You could love me again as my queen.”

  Stray drops oozed from the crushing wave overhead and crackled when they hit the ground. A yard away, the bars of Tram’s stone cage tilted and crushed in on itself, then seeped fat orangish-black fingers across the dirt floor toward my boots. The falling heat sizzled down my scalp before the actual lava reached us, and I bunched my shoulders to my ears, afraid I would meet the same fate as the cage.

  But as soon as the lava neared the tip of Gretchen’s finger, black ice froze its descent. It cracked up the long, orange stream in long wavy spikes, smoothing the boiling bubbles with loud pops, up and up at least fifty feet toward the dark ceiling. It looked like someone’s twisted, yet beautiful, idea of a jagged slide growing out of her fingertip in a fine point.

  She lowered her hand as she faced the Counselor and shot out her blackened hand at him. The Counselor’s spiny face, hands, everything that was visible, turned inside-out, a skeleton combined with glistening red muscles, for a second before he flicked whatever magic she had flung at him away.

  “Stop. Listen to me,” he said, and he sounded like he was scolding a kid for walking across his immaculate lawn.

  Gretchen cut her cold gaze to me. Static filled my head once again, followed by her growl. He’s the one who killed your mother and made it look like a car accident.

  Her individual words slammed into me, but I didn’t stumble backward until the full meaning landed one final blow. My throat worked on a scream or a swallow even though I couldn’t do either.

  What? I asked, but I never in a million years wanted her to repeat it.

  Was she lying? After everything Mom did for her, hiding two of her real babies, replacing them with two others to trick the Counselor, keeping the real ones close to watch over them. Surely she wouldn’t lie about the woman, my mom, who prevented the Counselor from bleeding her precious Trinity gifts for his disgusting quest for immortality before now. Which meant Gretchen was telling the truth, and somehow that was even worse.

  Murder. Had the Counselor killed my mom because she was a so-called traitor to him?

  “All that magic,” he said, and I couldn’t tell from his expressionless, too-tight skin if he was confirming or denying it. “She was trying so hard to stop your followers, Gretchen, that when she found them at that despicable used-clothing store, it was a dead giveaway.” He rounded the blood pool with slow, sure steps to sift his fingers through what remained of Gretchen’s red hair. “She unleashed her magic on them, instead of hiding it like she had since she faked her own death. And for what? All to save your Three there from becoming Three. It’s sweet justice how much her plan failed. No Trammeler of mine ever defects, ever tries to trick me, and gets away with it.”

  So, it was true. Rage, sharp and vicious, mounted like stacks of storm clouds.

  A sound like rolling thunder boomed through the room. Gretchen shrieked inside my head moments after, but I couldn’t see her anymore. The Core was tilting, and the ground that had once been under my feet smashed into the back of my head.

  The Counselor towered over me, an ugly grin slanting his protruding thorns. “She begged for her life like a coward.” He leaned down as if he was about to share some big secret. “Care to take a wager that you’ll do the same?”

  Sure. I sailed my fist into his prickly face, then without missing a beat, I snatched his hand and pulled. Let’s shake on it.

  With gravity on my side, he toppled in a heap next to me.

  I lunged to my feet and flung my purple energy wall at him. It swept right toward him, even ducked below the razor sharp tip of Gretchen’s ice slide, but before it knocked into him, the energy blinked out.

  He closed his eyes and mouthed, “One, two, three.” On the other side of him, the energy blinked back into existence and rippled in slow-motion through mid-air.

  Again, I ordered, but it wouldn’t listen to me. Or couldn’t move fast enough to respond. It was as if it had been paused.

  The Counselor’s all-white eyes snapped open and aimed over my shoulder at the solid wall where the door used to be. A loud crackling roar bounced around the gift room, and I whirled around in time to see Gretchen, pressed face-first to the rock wall, break the chains that held her twenty feet high. Chains that were courtesy of the Counselor, prob
ably.

  I would hate him, too, if he strung me up like that. I hated him anyway, so much so that I hadn’t noticed the thorns jutting from my knuckles when I’d punched him. Seeing them, on me, made me want to plow my fists into him until there was nothing left.

  Gretchen fell in a blur and landed in a crouch, her murderous gaze pinned to him. Her back arched, like Elf’s when he was about to spring, her mouth opened wider, and a streak of black fire shot toward me.

  Toward him because I jumped out of the way. A series of sharp cracks above my head made me move even faster. Gretchen’s ice slide would break apart if she used more fire magic. Unless that was her intent.

  But apparently I didn’t move fast enough.

  The Counselor had dodged Gretchen’s fire, too, and almost stood on top of me. Both his hands flashed inside his dark suit, and they reappeared covered with something black, sand-like, and…moving.

  Spiders?

  If I could bottle my luck, I would have an empty, useless bottle to smash over my own head.

  His mouth curled in a sneer, and he shot the spiders at both of us. They spiraled through the air toward our heads faster than I had ever seen anything move.

  They landed on my face with a painful jolt that sent shockwaves down to my toes. They scurried across my skin, each movement lurching strong electrical pulses through my lifeless nerve endings, toward my closed eyelids. It felt as if they were reanimating every skin cell with a ten thousand volt zap.

  I dropped to my knees in agony and screwed my eyes shut tight. My eyes were too close to my brain, and a cooked one wouldn’t get me out of here any faster. I tried to scrape the spiders off my face, but that just made them jolt harder, faster, more.

  A pained shout echoed in my head, a mix of mine and Gretchen’s, and then a sickening ripping sound followed by a wet splat.

  Footsteps clipped toward us. Since I was blinded and unable to focus on much of anything except the pain, the Counselor had the obvious advantage. But whatever he had planned couldn’t be as bad as the pain was now, and I refused to let someone I hated almost as much as Gretchen kill me.