My breath came in shallow bursts. I clenched the earth over my grave as if to scratch the memory of how close I’d come to death from my brain.
“I need to see her.” Using Tram for support, I stood on shaky legs. Maybe someday I would stop trembling.
Tram and Callum flanked me while we walked out of the center of the Trinity trees in silence, and Tram steadied me with an arm secured around my waist. With Mom safe in her grave again, I finally had the nerve to look around. Dead bodies lay everywhere.
“Oh…no,” I said, my words shaking with my shudders.
Tram set his mouth in a thin line. “I’ll make everything right again.”
The rest of the graveyard looked like a warzone. Heavy smoke hugged the air above the dead trees, their branches and roots strewn about like dropped matchsticks. We stepped over deep cracks in the ground every few feet.
“This war was nothing compared to what would’ve happened if you became Three and the Core opened,” Tram said.
“Let’s not get close to that happening again.” Callum kicked a rock and it skittered down the path. “Ever.”
Tram looked over my head at him. “Agreed.”
The sirens drew closer.
Two shadows slinked toward us farther down the path, then the two figures came running. The moonlight caught Ms. Hansen’s and Mrs. Rios’s dirt and blood-streaked faces. My legs started to buckle with relief, but Tram kept me upright.
Mrs. Rios threw her arms around me. “It’s over. Everything can go back to normal.”
“Normal.” The word tasted strange on my lips, muddy and hopeful at the same time.
“I put up a wall of light to keep the police away for the time being,” Mrs. Rios said, releasing me to look at Tram.
“Leigh, your hair,” Ms. Hansen said through a mouthful of her own. “It’s blonde again.”
I felt for a strand and brought it under my gaze. She was right. Underneath the mud was my usual color. I squeezed that strand of hair and let relief rush through me.
“But just in case.” Her hand disappeared inside her jacket pocket and retrieved a pair of scissors. Then she snipped a lock of my hair.
“Hey.” My hand flew to my muddy head.
“What did you do that for?” Callum asked.
Ms. Hansen frowned at my lock of hair and slicked her fingers down it to remove some mud. “I read people’s past, present, and future through their hair.”
“Not all Sorceresses have dark powers,” Mrs. Rios said with a grim smile.
“Sorceresses?” Callum asked. “You two?” He didn’t sound all that surprised.
I wasn’t either, not after everything I’d seen.
“And not all of us side with Gretchen.” Ms. Hansen popped my locks into her mouth. Her eyebrows waved up and down, a mix of surprise and concern. “It must be the mud. I can’t read anything.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Nothing?”
“Nothing.” Ms. Hansen tucked my hair into her pocket. “I’ll give it a good rinse when I get home.”
Tram looked around him, his face somber. “We need to clean up, but I can’t do anything for the dead trees outside the Trinity.”
Callum pointed behind Mrs. Rios and Ms. Hansen. “Maybe she can.”
Sarah was coming up the path, a shovel gripped tightly in her hand. Her eyes sparked with something different. Victory maybe? They never left mine as she came closer. The patches of loose skin around her dark mouth fluttered in a sudden cool breeze. She walked around us and nudged Callum out of the way so she could stand next to me.
I took her hand with my free one, and her cold touch crept up my arm. Her whispers weaved through the lacy smoke curtain hanging in the air. I was so happy to be alive, I didn’t care I was breathing in her stench. She’d given me the keys to capture Ica. We’d both dug ourselves out of the same grave. Not many people had that in common.
“Can you bring this all back, Sarah?” I asked.
She thumped a hand over her chest like a heartbeat and shook her head. But someone had made her yard live again. I needed someone to do that with Mom’s lilacs. Their life might stop the tremors that kept skidding below my skin.
Tram took my other hand and squeezed, but even his strength couldn’t still my shaking. “You need to go home and rest. Callum, can you—”
“I’ll be in my car,” he said, his gaze on Tram’s hand in mine. Then he began down the path, his hands in his jeans pockets and head bent.
“We’ll see if we can find out who helped Sarah’s yard. Sarah? Come with me?” Ms. Hansen held her hand out to Sarah.
Sarah glanced at me then took it, and they drifted off.
Mrs. Rios looked from Tram to me with a smile. “I’m proud to know such warriors.” She smiled and followed Sarah and Ms. Hansen.
My gaze swept toward Callum, but night swallowed him. “My mom. I need to check on her.”
Tram wrapped an arm around me, hugging me close, but it did nothing for the chill sweeping through my bones. Under our feet, the rocks shifted and crunched together as we wound our way up the path. A comfortable, normal sound that belonged in a graveyard.
We stopped in front of Mom’s grave. Her blanket of earth was tucked around her in a tight burrito, just like how she used to tuck Darby and me into bed. I crumbled to the ground and stared at her picture in the headstone.
Mom, where do I begin?
I smoothed the fresh footprints over her grave like they were wrinkles in a blanket.
There’s no need to wake up again, okay?
My hand waved through the mud, a gentle caress goodnight.
So, I’m a Trammeler Sorceress. You didn’t think to tell me?
Maybe she had been trying to tell me something. I looked around for a small white card at the base of her headstone but didn’t see anything. The last one I’d found had read Don’t go t— W— and the rest of it was completely smeared.
I blinked. Oh. Crap. Don’t go to Whaty-Whats. Also known as What Gifts She Carried.
Were those cards from you, Mom? Were you trying to warn me?
A tangled mass of questions buzzed around my head. Was my mom, the Anonymous Trammeler and a Sorceress, communicating with me through her grave? The handwriting had seemed hurried and messy, similar to Mom’s, but I hadn’t allowed myself to make the connection.
“Tram, is my mom inside the Core?” I asked.
He knelt and put his arm around me, his gaze aimed at her picture, too. “No. I never put her below my roots.”
I nodded, thankful for his answer. “What happens to Trammelers and Sorceressi when they die, and they don’t go to the Core?”
“It depends on what they believe in.”
“I think it was her leaving messages for me.”
Her grin inside the picture seemed genuine, but it looked out of place on someone so mysterious and full of secrets. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that. My true feelings about all this must be buried underneath the layers of mud covering my body.
“If the dead feel they left too early, their spirits will stay for a while,” he said, squeezing my shoulder. “Maybe she’s trying to protect you.”
I sighed, a deep exhausted one, and let my head droop.
Please stay put and rest.
I glanced over my shoulder where Callum had disappeared into the darkness.
“Hey.” Tram touched my cheek so I would meet his eyes, then he looked in the same direction I had been. “Are you all right?”
Confusion cast an unexpected stone into my stomach, sending a fresh wave of shudders through my body. No, I wasn’t all right. But my brain was too wasted to pinpoint every reason why right then.
Thumbing the smudge between Tram’s eyebrows, I said, “See you tomorrow?”
The curves of his mouth stretched into a smile. “You know how to find me.”
“Leigh!”
I turned.
Jo shot through the night toward me. Her extra-large I’m Sleepy t-shirt swelled around her, adding f
ake bulk to her skinny frame. Happiness glowed in her eyes rather than Sorceressi blue.
I jumped up and ran toward my best friend, metal and magnet together at last.
Jo, Callum, and I stood rooted in place outside my house. Long, green blades of grass curled over our feet. Buds on top of thick stems scattered the yard and looked up at the night sky, waiting to say hello to the sun. And on either side of the front porch, Mom’s purple lilacs shimmied in a light breeze.
“Wow,” Jo said.
Callum nodded. “This is…an improvement.”
I was too used up to speak or to wipe away the tears, but I couldn’t look away and didn’t want to. Ever.
The only things that crunched under my feet were all the ash tree keys sprinkled around my lawn, not the nightmare grass that had been here before. Death didn’t seep from my feet anymore.
But what exactly had cured my yard? And who had folded the tarps and put them on the porch in a tidy pile? I took a deep breath and tried to make sense of everything, but that seemed so complicated. How could I wrap my brain around all this?
I was a Trammeler Sorceress, but not a dead one, thank God. So what was I supposed to do with that information? Tell Dad and Darby? Because if I was a Trammeler Sorceress, Darby was one, too.
This was all too much to handle. Especially right now, when all I really wanted to do was kiss every one of Mom’s lilacs, take a long, hot shower, and sleep twenty four hours straight.
I started up the sidewalk and bent in front of the lilacs. They wriggled happily. Nearby crickets cranked the volume on their nightly song. I hovered a fingertip over one of the delicate purple petals so I wouldn’t dirty it and smiled.
No more burying things, Mom. It’s time I dug up the truth about my gifts.
THE END OF BOOK ONE
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What Gifts She Carried
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.
Hopefully not anytime soon.
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
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 ju
st 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.
The Grave Winner Page 21