Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
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
Chapter 21
Epilogue
About the Author
© Copyright Lindsey R. Loucks 2016.
Editor: Rebecca Hamilton
Cover Art: chaoss / bigstockphoto.com
Cover Design: Rebecca Hamilton
Formatting: Wyrding Ways Press
(Print) ISBN-13: 978-1522878230
(Print) ISBN-10: 1522878238
www.lindseyrloucks.com
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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.
DEDICATION
For you, the readers. Thank you.
Dad
My daughter was screaming—loud, terrified shrieks that sliced at my heart—and I had no idea why everyone pretended they didn’t hear it.
Sunlight streamed through my office window in a long rectangle over the cracked tile floor, and beyond it, my secretary sat outside the open door. Between the clicks of her red-painted fingernails over the computer keyboard, she stared at her lap. Unless she caught the mouse in the office I didn’t tell her about and was deciding what to name it while rubbing between its ears, she was likely texting. How many times had I told her to leave the texting for her breaks?
But not once did she glance up and ask, “Who is screaming?”
I gripped the edges of my desk so tight, white topped my knuckles. My insides shriveled with every cry into a trembling mess, and I thought I might be sick.
It had to be Leigh. It sounded just like her, but I had no idea where the screams were coming from. I’d searched the office and circled the building three times. She wasn’t here. The last time I saw her was this morning when she took my scientific logic and split it open. I had always believed science explained everything, but when Leigh brought the dead grass to life on the kitchen table, memories of all those arguments with Kassandra stormed back like a wintry, torrential rain.
The truth is right there in front of you. Why do you refuse to see it? she would say time and time again.
Because things like that don’t exist. Can’t exist. Yet when Leigh sat across from me at the kitchen table, her blue eyes so hauntingly similar to Kassandra’s, and pleaded with me to believe her, my resolve began to crumble.
No, that wasn’t right. Continued to crumble. When Kassandra was still with us, I could almost believe anything was possible because a woman like her, so strong and selfless, had chosen me to spend the rest of her life with. The rest of her too short life.
But in the end, even she couldn’t convince me. We once drove out to the middle of nowhere to a sunflower field, and she claimed she made the earth rumble.
There. See? I would show you more, but I’m afraid…someone will see.
I believe that’s called thunder, I’d told her and pointed to a growing collection of clouds in the east.
Her fingers curled at her sides, her nostrils flared, and I tried my best to keep the grin that threatened to stretch over my face hidden, or she would scratch my eyes out and serve them to me for dinner.
See that tree over there? she’d said without looking at it. Watch the branches.
And I did. Until Leigh started screaming. Kassandra and I leaped into action, searching for her, my mind buzzing with the kind of panic only a parent can feel when their child is in danger. It was only a scarecrow that had scared Leigh, but I would never forget that agonizing sense of alarm.
Which was exactly how I felt now. I didn’t know why, though, or how. Leigh should be at school, but because it had caught fire with her and Darby inside it, she wasn’t. She wasn’t at home either, even though I’d grounded her for the rest of her life. I had no idea where she was, which wouldn’t win me any father of the year awards, but my gut swamped me with the fact she was in trouble.
Pushing to my feet, I dialed her cell once again.
“Go away unless you’re Jo. Or Dad,” her voicemail answered, then a beep sounded.
“Leigh, I need to speak with you,” I said, and didn’t even attempt to keep the anxiety out of my words.
My secretary turned her head, listening, but I didn’t care. My whole family had always been fodder for her gossip hobby.
“Call me back on my cell as soon as you get this message.” I dropped the phone in its cradle with an unsteady hand and took my jacket from the back of the chair. “Charlotte, I’m leaving early.”
She swiveled around in her seat, hands in her lap to cover her phone, or her pet mouse, while her jaw hit the floor. “Early? But you never—”
“Something’s come up. Cancel the rest of the afternoon’s appointments.”
“O-okay.”
Outside, I hoped the screaming would blend in with the traffic noise and the road construction farther up the street, but it pounded between my ears like an amplified jackhammer. I had to find her, make her explain to me more of what she talked about that morning. Why had she dug up my grandad’s ring and wanted me to recite the words inscribed in it? What had it said again? You set free my strongest gift? I had no idea what that meant, but she had seemed so relieved after I’d said it.
And as soon as I did, a swell of memories had flooded my mind as if they had been gripped by an impenetrable dam: something long and dark weaving between the bars of my bed’s headboard, a shadow standing in my dad’s study, Grandad tucking the ring into my little fist with trembling hands.
“Too much power can corrupt Sorcerers, which is why I had to suppress your dad’s. Yours are hidden in that ring,” he’d said and glanced over his shoulder nervously, as if the army men lined up for battle on my dresser could hear him. “Repeat after me. Magic does not exist.”
I did repeat it back to him, and until Leigh asked that I read the inscription on the ring, I had believed it wholeheartedly.
I drove home, thinking, hoping, she would be there safe. She wasn’t. The next logical place was Jo’s. I shoved the jeep into reverse, a mix of a scowl and a sob constricting my face when I looked at the front of the house.
The screen door had been smashed, and according to Leigh, a girl from school had taken a rock to it. Slivers of glass that had escaped the broom winked in the sunlight around Kassandra’s lilacs and twinkled up the length of their thick and sturdy purple petals. I had never seen lilacs look so alive and strong, especially after our unfortunate yard virus that had turned everything into an ominous bad dream. I had assumed a considerate neighbor or someone fro
m the Kansas Department of Agriculture had re-planted fresh lilacs and rolled out new grass over our entire yard as a show of goodwill, but after what Leigh demonstrated this morning, I wasn’t so sure.
Was she capable of something like that? She had talked about Sorceresses and had claimed to be one herself. Darby, too.
And me.
This realization wrenched my whole world out from under my feet. I didn’t know anything anymore. It reminded me too much of the unstable feeling I had when Kassandra died. It was all I could do to keep myself standing, let alone my two little girls. With our new reality, we needed each other, now more than ever, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong. Leigh’s screams wouldn’t let me.
Blinking back tears, I drove to Jo’s, certain Leigh would be there. After all, this was her second home. Hope straightened my shoulders from the worried stoop they had been in all day.
But on the way up the sidewalk, the skin along my spine prickled. My sure steps slowed to a stand-still, and a deathly chill clenched my muscles around my bones. A powerful gust of wind rushed past and tossed stray leaves, flower petals, and small branches across the Monroe’s yard.
I shivered despite the spring sun that was only just starting its descent. I turned my head a fraction. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted as if someone was running an icy finger along my scalp. It felt as if someone was behind me, watching.
I had more important things to worry about than someone playing practical jokes, but the pinch of dread in my throat multiplied. Somehow being here, standing out in the open, felt wrong.
Slowly, I turned around, but no one stood behind me. I blew out a sharp breath as I took in everything familiar—the Monroe’s yard that was in need of a mow and a good weeding, my jeep in the driveway, a woman in her nightgown two houses away.
No. That wasn’t familiar at all. She was Ms. Boeing, the shut-in who hardly ever ventured out of her house unless it was to refill her plastic cups.
Around the single wispy tree in her yard, she had wedged fifty or more plastic cups into the dirt and filled them all with broken twigs. Now she paced back and forth in front of her tree, her yellowed nightgown flapping around her, while she swung her arms at the air in obvious frustration.
Standing on either side of the tree trunk were two elderly women I had never seen before. They knelt on the sparse grass, their movements perfectly synchronized, and plucked two dandelion puffs from the ground.
Ms. Boeing must know them from somewhere, and I had no reason to be spooked by a trio of old women.
I strode up to the Monroe’s front door and rang the bell, but another blast of wind deflated my insides. Leigh’s screams echoed in my head so loud, I covered my ears and slammed my eyes closed.
She was in trouble, more trouble than I might be able to help her with. I knew it in the marrow of my bones.
Her screams faded to a dull roar, as did the wind mere seconds later, though it felt like an eternity. I breathed hard, trying to still the shudders that kept quaking through me. I looked to my left again.
From bald stems in the two strangers’ hands, dandelion puffs drifted lazily in front of them. Big smiles stretched their mouths as they waved both their arms in front of them with exact, coordinated movements in some kind of strange greeting.
The Monroe’s front door finally opened. Callum stood just inside.
“Mr. Baxton, hey. Sorry, I was downstairs and didn’t…” His dark eyes tracked over my face. “Are you all right?”
“Leigh. Is she here?”
Normally when I mentioned her name in front of him, I didn’t miss the spark of sudden interest, like a faulty light that had been plugged in to a brand new outlet. Now, however, his face paled, and his throat bobbed on a hard swallow.
“She isn’t.”
“Do you know where she might be?”
A flash of red appeared behind him, and Jo wedged herself between her older brother and the doorframe. “Have you tried the graveyard, Mr. B.?”
I dropped my head in my hands with a heavy sigh. Of course she would be there. With her mother. Why didn’t I think of that sooner?
Callum stomped on Jo’s foot, and she let out a yelp.
“But they have a very strict rule about closing the graveyard early,” Jo said in a rush. “You have to be out of there before dark, like hours and hours before.”
“Yeah, I think they close at six,” Callum added.
I nodded, not really listening anymore, and blinked down at my black oxford shoes. A flower petal had lodged on the toe. A purple one. A lilac petal, but the Monroe’s didn’t have any lilacs growing in their yard.
Twigs were strewn around their front steps with thorns sticking out of the sides. Those were from the hawthorn tree, but the Monroe’s didn’t have a hawthorn in their yard, either.
A third burst of wind zipped the petals off the ground and pushed a long line of them into the neighbor’s yard. The twigs skittered through the grass and skipped off to join them. Meanwhile, Leigh’s magnified screams bludgeoned the inside of my head.
My knees buckled, and I almost went down, but Jo and Callum swept to my side to haul me back up
“Mr. B., what’s wrong?” Jo asked, voice thick with concern.
Callum locked my elbow around his neck, taking the brunt of my weight. “Do you need to come inside?”
Ms. Boeing was shaking her head now and pulling at her hair. The two strangers dropped their empty dandelion stems at the exact same time, and the wind stopped dead.
They’d blown on them the same time the wind had kicked up. I was sure of it. It didn’t make any sense, but neither did Leigh’s constant screams. But why were they blowing away all the twigs and flower petals out of the Monroe’s yard and into the next?
“Mr. B., please. Is something wrong?” Jo asked, and the rims of her eyes had reddened as if she was about to cry. “You can tell us, even if it seems…impossible.”
“I’m just not feeling myself today, that’s all,” I said. “You’re good kids. Leigh’s lucky to have you.”
Jo bit down on her bottom lip while tears streamed her face. What did she know that I didn’t? And how long had she known? If I hadn’t been distracted by my own grief, I could have realized this sooner.
“Leigh’s in trouble, isn’t she?” The words came out helpless, resigned.
Her friends stood there, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, their expressions matching what I already knew.
Callum gripped his sister’s shoulder and aimed a grim look at me. “Whatever you need, we’ll help.”
Jo wiped her face. “She told us not to, Cal.”
“Whatever you need,” Callum said again, his voice stern.
Just then, Mrs. Gonzalez’s car pulled into my driveway up the street with two ponytailed passengers in the backseat. Without Leigh home to watch her, she would be all alone, and given that I feared for one daughter’s safety already, alone wasn’t going to happen.
“Can you watch Darby?” I asked. “Just for a little while so I can find Leigh.”
Jo nodded. “I have a Bobby Fever bookmark for her anyway.”
I sighed my relief. “I’ll be right back with her.”
“We’ll have a peanut butter and pickle sandwich waiting when she gets here,” Jo said and disappeared behind the closing door.
I trotted to the house, glancing over my shoulder at the situation with Ms. Boehing on my way. She was frantically waving at the elderly women who were stepping into her house. Pleading with them to stop? I didn’t know because I couldn’t hear a thing over Leigh’s screams.
I picked up my pace and fixed a serene smile on my mouth as Darby dragged her backpack out of the car. There was no need to worry her about Leigh, but every scream inside my head urged me to hurry.
“Hi, pumpkin,” I said, shouldering her backpack. “Thank you, Mrs. Gonzalez.”
“Dad?” She scrunched up her nose so her glasses climbed past her eyebrows. “You’re home early
.”
“I am.” I waved as Mrs. Gonzalez backed out of the driveway, then moved to take Darby’s hand. She shook me off. “Jo and Callum are going to watch you for a little bit, okay? Let’s go.”
“They are? But where are you going?”
“To run some errands.”
“Why can’t I come with you?”
“Because…” I turned, realizing she was no longer next to me.
She stood in the middle of the street, arms crossed, and heels dug in, likely until I answered her. Her mother’s stubborn streak had branched into two equally persistent daughters who would likely test my patience even after I was dead.
“It’s Leigh, isn’t it?” she asked.
I rubbed my chin and looked at the house, thankful, yet frustrated I had a daughter who was smart enough to see right through her old dad.
A couple hawthorn twigs lay scattered below the front window, and across the driveway in the neighbor’s yard, a number of lilac petals held to the blades of grass among many more twigs. But, like the Monroe’s, we didn’t have a hawthorn tree, and Kassandra’s lilacs looked as hearty as ever. Besides, there was hardly a breeze on this side of the street.
Except when the two women had blown on their dandelion fluffs. Which meant what exactly? That the Monroes and I had twigs and petals in our yards, and the women puffed them away? But why? Did Leigh have something to do with it?
“Dad?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, pumpkin, because I don’t know myself.” I knew absolutely nothing, and that added extra weight to the anxious stone in the pit of my stomach. “Jo has something for you, though, and she said something about peanut butter and pickles.”
She grimaced. “I would rather eat spider eggs,” she said, but finally she picked up her feet and followed.
I resisted the urge to sweep her into my arms and sprint across the street, but just barely. The sun had dropped lower in the sky. Instead of feeling a slight relief from the spring heat, cold sweat doused the back of my shirt and beaded all over my face.
As we climbed the Monroe’s porch steps, I glanced at Ms. Boehing’s house. Now, no one stood in the yard.
The Trinity Bleeds (The Grave Winner Book 3) Page 1