That only made it even more determined to dive into my mouth. I grabbed the bar over my head with my other hand and thrashed my head back and forth so it couldn’t enter, but all that movement swung the bar with a frenzy of squeaks. It had to be hanging from something, like a chain or a rope.
Elbows flying, head shaking, feet kicking, I tried my best to fight off the bird whose sole mission seemed to be to distract me enough to let go. I moved my hands end-over-end in a mad effort to get away from it when my fingers brushed against the end of the bar and the beginning of another that rose up from the first one. This was a cage then. So who, if anyone, was inside?
I let go of the first bar in a blind, hopeful swipe for one right next to it, which I found. Now to pull myself up the vertical bars. Impossible since my upper arm muscles equaled the strength of soggy cardboard. Or so I thought before Trammeler, Sorceress, and Death’s power—the Trinity of magical gifts—flowed through my blood.
Wings fluttered against the insides of my mouth. Claws bit into my tongue. Dizziness from my thrashing head and the swinging cage made it hard to tell which direction was up or down. Still, I had come too far to give up.
I grabbed at the vertical bars, first one hand and then the other, and pulled. My arms burned with the effort, Trinity power or not, and the cage tilted crazily above me so that the vertical bars were nearly horizontal. Whatever held the cage in the air moaned and strained. If it snapped, I would plummet. And that damn bird would look on and cackle.
Somewhere far below, a door opened and closed, and the dead bird instantly dislodged itself from my mouth and winged away. Was that Aneska? Could she see me in the deep shadows way up high?
No, it wasn’t Aneska. I didn’t need to inhale for the chemical burn to scorch my nose and throat and lungs. It was the Counselor.
My arms trembled all the way to the shoulders, but I willed them still, willed the squeaking cage silent. I hung there and focused on what he might be doing, how long he would be in here, because my fingers began to slide off.
The stone bars were too smooth, not grainy enough to provide a good grip for more than a few minutes, and I was slipping. If the Counselor didn’t know I was in here with him, he would soon enough when I smashed apart at his feet.
I tried to adjust my hands but stopped at the slightest protest from the cage.
But soon the door clicked shut. To make me think he’d gone?
That little entrance had fed the urgency coursing inside me. I had to hurry. Another shaky pull up, and my fingers grazed a handle. Yes! I didn’t have time to wonder if this was a horrible idea, but I lifted the lever. Locked, but not for long. I freed an ash tree key from what was left of my waistband and stabbed blindly at the cage until I heard a click. A door crashed open into my shoulder, but I barely noticed. Whispers burst out of the open door in an urgent rush along with a pair of hands that pulled me up into it.
OhmyGod. Leigh? You found us?
It was Lily’s voice, though all I saw of her was her glowing blue eyes two feet from mine, and I never thought I would think this, but it was so good to hear her voice inside my head.
Are you all right? Where’s Tram?
Silence except the squeaky cage.
Lily, we have to hurry. Where’s Tram?
You’re dead, too, she said, her voice soft. Then that means…
I’m sorry, Lily. I did everything I could to stop it, but…
Even as I thought it, doubt niggled its way into my mind, and I wondered once again if I really did do everything I could to stop it.
But how could One, Ica, and her minions think that I could ever want this, here, right now, dead and inside a cage with Lily. Of course, I did everything to stop it, despite what the founding members of the Dead Crazy Society said. What was done was done, and I couldn’t change that. The only thing I had the power to change was the future.
I fisted my hands and put as much conviction and acceptance in the voice inside my head as I could. I’m Three. The Core is open. I’m sorry. But I’m going to do everything I can to make things right, and I need your help.
Okay, she said.
Her answer took me off guard because I guessed I expected some kind of protest or whining or complaining that she didn’t have the guts to help. Whatever horrors she had been through lately had changed her, like my own had changed me.
Good. Where’s Tram?
In the cage on the opposite side of the room. There’s a chain above mine, and if you pull it a certain way, it will lower us to the floor.
Do it.
She lifted to her feet and fussed with the squeaky chain above our heads. I looked in the direction where I thought Tram’s cage would be as if I could see it, as if I could see him.
What would he do when he saw me dead, when he knew the Core had opened because of me? Would he hate me? I didn’t think I could stand even the slightest bit of disappointment because he had done so much and tried so hard to save me. And me, here, would likely feel like a stab to his unbeating heart.
You’re pushing all your thoughts toward him, but he can’t hear you, Lily thought.
Huh?
The cages. No magic gets into them or out of them unless the door opens. Believe me, I tried.
I nodded even though she couldn’t see me. Tram had built his underground cages for magical prisoners in much the same way: no magic in, no magic out, unless the door was open. Unless I opened the door myself to free One like I did to save Darby from being Two.
The rest of those thoughts and feelings on that particular subject were swallowed inside a hidden trapdoor in my mind so Lily wouldn’t hear them. No one but me needed to sort that out, and these days, it was awfully crowded inside my own head.
Chains clinked and clanged until finally the cage began to lower, loudly with the slide of metal on stone.
Is there a way to do this quieter? I asked.
I’m going as fast as I can.
So, no, and meanwhile, the Counselor or Aneska could enter at any time, triggered by the noise of our escape.
I gripped the edge of the cage through the open door and stared down into a black abyss, eyes straining for the orange-ish light at the bottom. We moved slowly, or at least it felt like it, and we still had to free Tram. Not to mention the cataclysmic mess on the topside of Earth.
Urgency raced through my veins where blood once did, and it chased a power I’d only seen glimpses of. Now, it sizzled to my fingertips and begged to be released.
A purple ribbon of electricity buzzed between my hands, and I stared at it, awed. I didn’t think I could do magic in here. If I could inhale, I guessed it would smell like lilacs, and at that moment, that was all I wanted—to smell lilacs one more time.
The pulsing streak engulfed the bottom of the cage I held to and zipped up the bars to the top. The entire cage became enflamed in purple light, beating back the magic dark, and lit up Lily in the corner with the chain.
She gaped at me, and even though I knew she was dead, seeing her like that, like me, crushed my soul. Her blonde waves, her glowing blue eyes, her drooping mouth, the blood staining her silk shirt from Callum’s party. She should have graduated days ago with her senior class and celebrated leaving me behind in Krapper High School’s lunch line. She shouldn’t be here in this cage, and neither should I.
Don’t worry about me, Lily said. Focus it.
I blinked, breaking myself from my own spell, and fixated on the power rolling out of me. She was right. Focusing on escape and not what could’ve been was priority number one.
Lily gasped out a Whoa when the powered-up chain slid from her fingers. It clattered against the top of the bars, faster and faster, while the end wound in a tight coil in the center of the cage. My power was pulling us down, and fast.
We plummeted out of the darkness and into the orange light, and before I could reel it all back in, we slammed to the stone floor. The landing shocked rattling waves through my bones and spilled both of us out of the cage.
Lily?
No.
Okay.
I wasn’t sure what question I hadn’t asked yet that she’d just answered, but she jumped to her feet before I did.
Now Tram, she said and jerked her head at the opposite wall we’d just fallen down.
But the purple radiance had faded from the bars of the cage. Somewhere between the final seconds of the fall and a couple cracked molars, I’d lost my power.
It’s not lost. It’s in you. All you have to do is pull it from inside yourself like you did before.
What are you doing? I asked, my inner voice tight. Training me? Right now?
Instead of answering, she pulled a delicate silver chain tipped with a pink metal leaf from around her neck. It shimmered and danced in the light of the room as she turned it for me to see the inscription on the back. But I already knew what it said because I was the one who slipped it in her pocket at Callum’s party. Armed with a message from Mom, I had found two necklaces like that inside my baby book. They were tokens used to suppress, or hide, Lily’s Trammeler power and Tram’s Sorcerer power from their dad.
The leaf was stabbing me in the heart when the Counselor took me to the Core, Lily thought. When he was dragging us here, I took it out and read the inscription ‘You set free my strongest gift’ and my brand new Trammeler power shook hands with my Sorceress power. We’ve all gotten to know each other while I was locked inside. Her eyes narrowed at the fallen cage. But I don’t know how you pulled purple electricity out of your fingers.
That makes two of us.
But no way was I going to scale another wall and monkey around Tram’s cage.
I stared at my fingertips and willed something to happen besides chipped black nail polish and grime forever jammed beneath them. Both times I’d created the lilac electricity, I’d felt urgency, a threat of some kind. Well, now I could just pick one from a thousand. Lucky me.
A faint zip connected my index fingers, and Lily moved aside to reveal a pulley system on the wall hidden behind Tram’s blood channel.
Come on, Mom. I need this to work.
The energy pulsed to life, seeming to writhe and beg to leap from my hands, and I directed it toward the pulley with a simple command. Go.
And wow, did it go. It shot toward the chains and lit the whole wall behind them with a purple vibration that shuddered the ground.
Calm, I shouted because the last thing we needed was a Core cave-in.
The pulley spun, the chain heaved lower, and soon another cage dropped from the ceiling, this time with a much gentler landing.
I took steps toward it but stopped because a curly blond head squeezed my still heart. His hair hung in his face, but without the usual luster the sun gave each strand, it looked as lifeless as he was. I had never seen him with his eyes closed, and I never wanted to again. He was a fierce Trammeler, a Trammeler Sorcerer, always sharp and on-the-job, and seeing him any differently was a harsh reminder of all that I’d done to destroy everything he’d worked so hard to accomplish.
But there was no time to try to unravel everything I wanted to say to him. I unlocked the cage with my ash tree key, and as soon as it swung open with a drawn out squeak, his eyes popped open. They glowed blue, just like mine and his sister Lily’s, but they pointed at the door directly behind us.
Footsteps. Right outside.
I tensed. It was too late to run and hide, and there was nowhere to run to.
I’m sorry, I whispered to Tram because I didn’t know if I would get the chance again.
His gaze ticked to me.
The door clicked open, and a chemical burn rolled through that assaulted my nose, my eyes, even my mouth. I didn’t need to draw breath to smell him or look over my shoulder to be sure.
The Counselor was here.
Jo
When Elf wasn’t licking the polka-dots off his stomach, he darted from room to room with his tail bushed out and his teeth bared like some kind of whacked out furry ninja. It was unnerving, to say the least, because animals have super-sonic instincts. He must’ve known something awful was going to happen, which confirmed everything I knew to be true.
Between his weird behavior and the thick blanket of night covering the windows, I was freaking out. What if my best friend didn’t win the war she’d waged against the freaky Sorceresses who wanted her dead? What if it was because of Sorceresses and not humans’ total disrespect for our sacred planet that would destroy it? Tonight. We could all cross that rainbow bridge in the sky sooner than we’d thought. The very idea of death scratched the inside of my skin with frozen fingernails and crawled it into a constant goosebumpy shiver.
I wasn’t ready to die, and I definitely wasn’t ready for Leigh to, either. We were like two parts of the same person, like old souls who were destined to be friends in every single lifetime, like the perfect harmony. And I might lose her. Cal would, too, and I knew he sensed it because he’d opened and shut the refrigerator door about a thousand times in the last hour without retrieving anything. Callum, the guy who eats everything.
“We have to do something.” I kept my voice low so Darby wouldn’t hear while I stared after Elf.
Callum shut the door of the refrigerator with a sigh. “Like what?”
“Don’t we have a tranquilizer gun in the garage?”
“For Elf?”
“No. For…” I glanced over at Darby who sat at the dining room table hunched over a mammoth book, then tossed my hand out like I was rolling dice on our future.
“I have no idea what that means, Weed.”
“Them,” I whispered.
“She means the magical beings inside the Core,” Darby said without looking up from her book. It was the same book Ms. Hansen, the dearly departed school librarian, had given to Leigh so she could learn about her Sorceress skills. I sure hoped the know-how Darby gained from it came in handy tonight, more so than it had for Ms. Hansen.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean,” I said.
Cal leaned against the refrigerator. “We made a promise we would stay here and not try to help Leigh.”
“And you already broke it when you told her dad where she was,” I hissed.
Mr. B. hadn’t come back, either. It was near dark, it was getting late, he hadn’t come back, and what if we had to adopt Darby? I pressed my palms together to extend my vital life force with some deep breathing so I wouldn’t freak the hell out any more than I already was.
“What if we don’t have a choice?” I asked. “It’s not like we know what’s going to happen because we’ve done this before, you know.”
He nodded at the window above the kitchen sink. “As long as we stay inside, we’re protected. Leigh made sure of that.”
“Yeah, I know.” I, too, looked at the window and at my reflection framed by the darkening sky behind it. Worry pinched my face, and because I had no idea what to do with my hands in stressful situations, they fussed and fidgeted with the soap dispenser by the sink, my dragon patchwork skirt, the Badass Recycler t-shirt Miguel made me, pretty much everything within touching distance. “But what if it gets windy and the hawthorn sticks and lilac petals blow away? This is Kansas, after all.”
“I don’t hear any wind.” Cal settled his hand on the refrigerator door again and quirked an eyebrow. “Do you?”
“No.” It was strangely still outside. Quiet, too. Even the skinny branches on the top of the tree in the front yard didn’t budge, which was strange since a family of robins had moved in, and it usually sounded like brothers and sisters squabbling over who got control of the remote. I knew a thing or ninety about those kinds of arguments. So, like Elf, had they sensed something, too, and took off? “What if—”
“If you even think about finishing that next ‘What if’, I’m getting the duct tape,” Cal warned. He would, too, and he would have a ridiculously good time strapping me to a chair with my mouth taped
shut until just before Mom and Dad got home and he bribed me to keep quiet.
I sighed toward the stacks of dirty dishes in the sink that smelled vaguely of moldy cheese, the worry eating me up inside too much to argue.
“Hey.” Cal’s reflection appeared over my shoulder. “I can get the catnip from downstairs if you want.”
“No more catnip,” I said, shaking my head. “I just want my best friend back.”
Cal’s jaw ticked, and I knew he was thinking pretty much the same thing. He loved Leigh just as much as I did, even though it took him long enough to admit it, because he told her just that morning he loved her. My brother, who had the emotional equivalence of a fruit bat, had told Leigh he loved her somewhere between our discussion of Bobby Fever bookmarks for Darby and the last of our tearful goodbyes. It had happened so fast, and I wasn’t sure Leigh heard him when she rode off on her bike, but Callum acted as if it was the most normal thing to say to someone. Which, I supposed if you were in love, it would be.
Maybe Miguel would tell me he loved me someday, but of course, we would both need to survive for him to do that. He had hawthorn branches and lilac petals sprinkled around his house, too, so as long as he did what I said always and forever, he would be fine.
And so would we. I just wished the porcupine head-banging in my gut agreed.
Cal’s reflection, half a head taller than me, squeezed my shoulder, and the kind of comfort that could only come from an older brother calmed me a little. Sometimes he was good for something.
“Hey,” he said and jerked his chin toward Darby who turned another page, completely absorbed. “Why couldn’t you have been more like her growing up, huh?”
I jabbed him in the ribs hard enough to make him groan while claws scrambled across the carpet somewhere unseen. A gray streak leaped onto the dining room table, knocked Darby’s book to the floor, and jumped down to scurry right for us.
“Elf!” Darby shrieked.
Cal dodged to the refrigerator to get out of the way of the ninja terror. Just inside the front door, Elf stopped to whip out a leg Flashdance-style and licked the polka-dots on his belly. Three of them. Then, with the fur along his spine pointed straight up, he charged downstairs.
The Trinity Bleeds (The Grave Winner Book 3) Page 5