But my gaze landed on the bloody footprints staining the ivory carpet and leading right to me. If someone was in here with us, I might as well have painted a sign with arrows that read Sacrificial Virgin This Way.
Cal stepped toward the hallway, and my muscles clamped tight as I reluctantly followed.
“Cal.” I mouthed his name, pushing it out with barely a breath so it sounded less than a whisper, and pointed to another light switch on the hallway wall. Leave it off to be blinded by the shadows at the very end and try not to make our presence even more known? Or storm the house with all the lights blazing?
He flipped on the light.
Darby and Mr. Baxton’s doors were closed while the bathroom and Leigh’s room were open. We stopped at Darby’s room, our backs turned to the dark bathroom. A shiver ran across my shoulder blades, as if someone was peering around the flowery shower curtain, as if the darkness itself pressed in to snatch at us. I could’ve inched my hand inside the bathroom to turn the light on, but what could be lurking on the other side of the door we faced terrified me even more.
Cal turned Darby’s doorknob, and the door opened with a soft click. A woodsy scent that reminded me of the graveyard since that was where most of Krapper’s trees were located floated out, but the minute I snapped on the light, I realized how wrong I was.
A whole forest of thorny branches and leaves grew from underneath Darby’s bed. They twisted up through tiny holes in her purple mermaid blankets all the way up to the ceiling where they bent along the length of it to cover it from wall-to-wall. Some branches even snaked down the walls, still growing, with a creaking scrape as they scratched off the paint. Others heaved at the ceiling, and already, small gaps had appeared where they had pushed it apart from the walls.
And in the middle of the room over a large red stain on the carpet that tilt-a-whirled my stomach sat Darby. She faced away from us in a wooden desk chair, staring at the destruction around her.
I covered my mouth to trap my gasp. What on this green earth had happened in here? And what was Darby doing just sitting there like that? A sudden burst of anger flared through my veins. Leigh was dead, the Core had opened, and Darby was reacting to this news by shaking up a proverbial bag of cats.
“Darby,” I hissed and shot to her side. “What are you doing? Why did you leave us when we told you not to?”
She looked at me with tears streaking her cheeks. A puddle had even formed on the inside of her glasses, and the stone of doubt about her began to soften. After all, I wasn’t the only one who had lost Leigh.
“I needed my bracelet,” she said, her voice cracking while she fingered the strand of twigs now attached to her wrist.
I pushed my lips together because now wasn’t the time to give her a lecture on the proper way to ask permission. Even I struggled with that one sometimes. She was hurting, we were all hurting, and Leigh’s bracelet gave her some kind of comfort in this horror downpour.
“And this?” I asked, my gaze searching the leafy green walls and the moving ceiling.
“I started growing it two nights ago because Leigh…well…” She stared at the red stain under the toes of her shoes while she scratched her elbow. Her mouth opened and closed as if she couldn’t quite find the words to tell me what Leigh did to make her grow this monster tree. “It won’t stop growing.”
“I see that,” I said and reached for her fingers.
She jerked them back. Like her sister, her fierceness made her seem more solid somehow. Almost unbreakable, and that flooded my eyes because it wasn’t true. She needed comfort, but I wouldn’t force it on her.
“But, Darby.” I sniffed and reeled my hand back in. “We have bigger issues right now than an uncontrollable tree.”
“Dad will be so mad at me.”
I glanced at Cal for help on that subject. Where was Mr. Baxton?
Cal shook his head a fraction, sealing that topic for now, and I offered Darby a small smile to let her know it would be all right. A false promise, but I didn’t know what else to do.
Cal hesitantly placed a palm on one of the tree branches twisting its way down to the carpet. When I caught his eye again, he said, “Maybe Leigh can still feel—”
A long, low screech sounded from somewhere just outside.
Darby and I froze. Cal ducked his head into the hallway, his shoulder braced against the door.
A doorknob rattled. A key jiggled. Mr. Baxton?
What sounded like the front door swung open, and in drifted the stink of dead cow and sour milk.
My insides plummeted to my flip-flops, and I slapped a hand over my mouth to keep from gagging. Someone was here alright. Someone who was already dead. Not Mr. Baxton. Ohmygoddesses, was it Mr. Baxton?
Cal leaped back inside, closed the door and locked it oh so quietly, and flicked off the light. Between the slats in the shades and moving, growing branches, only slivers of streetlight could cut into the room, but it was enough to see Cal slipping toward the window.
“That’s not Dad, is it?” Darby whispered with a tremble in her voice.
“Get up,” I breathed into her ear. “And stay here.”
Her wooden chair creaked slightly when I picked it up and walked it across the room to wedge it underneath the doorknob. My heart thrashed against my chest because the streetlight didn’t spread this far and I didn’t want to knock the legs of the chair into something. Quiet as a held breath, I rested the chair where it needed to go to block someone’s entrance, even with the door locked.
Because my bloody footprints would lead them right here.
“The tree’s in the way of the window,” Cal whispered from across the room.
Which meant we were trapped. I searched the darkness for Darby, my growing panic tripling the blood chasing through my skull.
“Darby,” I said, my voice hardly a whisper.
“Here,” she said from over by her desk.
I slashed at the darkness with my fingers on the way toward her, as if I could rip away this horrible reality and put us inside a new, rainbow-brightened one. When I felt warm fabric hanging from a bony arm, I whispered, “Can you teleport out of here?”
She shook her head and murmured, “Not through walls yet.”
Crap.
“But Jo, hawthorn trees hide things from the dead,” Darby said softly. “The book said so. We’ll be safe in here.”
Well, that may have been true, but they only protected the inside of Darby’s room, and my bloodied footprints in the hallway couldn’t hide us from anyone.
What kind of dead person had a key to Leigh’s house? Unless they used the one inside the fake rock next to the second loose board in their back fence, but no one—
I blinked. No one but the Baxtons and the Monroes knew about that.
My insides shriveled with a bone-quaking shudder. From down the hallway, piano notes scattered in a broken, horrific tune. I wanted to throw my hands over my ears. Darby’s, too. A single, wobbly exhale told me she knew exactly who was out there butchering the keys. Her mom, back from the dead and home again. It had to be her. A result of the Core opening? Didn’t matter.
“Cal,” I hissed, “we need that window open.”
He grunted as a branch snapped. “I’m trying.”
“I know this song,” Darby whimpered.
It did kind of sound familiar, but my mind raced too quickly to pinpoint it. We had to get out of here, if not by Darby’s window, then another one. We could zip across the hall and escape out another room, anything but stay here another second. Darby already seemed a little unhinged, and Cal still suffered from post-traumatic stress from burying Mrs. Baxton the second time.
Something banged into a wall down the hallway, and a flurry of whispers rose above the eerie, fragmented piano music. Had that been the front door? Oh, goddesses, had Mrs. Baxton left it open?
I pushed my lips together to quiet my loud breaths, hurried toward the door, and lifted the chair from underneath the doorknob. “Darby, Cal, acr
oss the hall. Now.”
“Blitzkrieg Bop,” Darby said and tears strangled her voice. “That’s my mom playing that song.”
The whispering grew louder with the accompaniment of the piano. Someone was coming, but if we hurried, we could just make it across the hall, lock the door, and jump out the window.
“We’re going,” I hissed and unlocked the door.
Over my shoulder, a pale flash of skin charged.
“Mom!” Darby shouted.
I swung myself back to clothesline her before she could make her escape and covered her mouth with my palm. She fought and kicked to get away, and I wanted to soothe her, to explain to her why I refused to let her run to her mom, but I couldn’t.
My voice lodged in my throat. My gaze stuck to the two shadowed poles underneath the crack in Darby’s door.
Someone stood just outside, led there by my bloody footprints. Agitated whispers penetrated my veins with needling cold. The fractured song played on.
And the door smashed open.
Leigh
When Tram’s gaze collided with mine, I felt—rather than heard—his soul crumpling inside. His shoulders sagged, and his head drooped against one of the bars. I had to look away because I couldn’t see him staring at the face of defeat, the face who had given it to him.
The Counselor circled us, staring us all down like lowly dogs, and stopped at the edge of the blood pit in the center of the three channels, his hands clasped in front of him. He surveyed the room, as if congratulating himself on its crazy twisted design, and announced, “You’re a little late.”
His voice bounced around the stone walls and made my lifeless insides jump. Not that it had been a long time since I’d heard someone actually speak, but it seemed so much louder outside my head, as if he was shouting into a megaphone. The ruler of the Core, while just as dead as the rest of us, pumped himself full of chemicals and stuck himself with hawthorn needles to appear…not even close to an actual human. The chemicals dripped white from where the needles pierced his skin, the same color of his shirt under his black suit, the same color as his hair that fell over his shoulders.
Too late for what? I thought at him.
From the corner of my eye, Tram gave me a sharp look, and I could guess his warning. To keep my attitude in check, to behave myself—but when had that ever done me any good? When had it done him any good? Even when Tram did his duties, the Counselor still got all fist-happy and beat him bloody.
“I’ve already bled my true children, all three of them, and that Trinity of blood is right here.” He glanced over his shoulder, his all-white eyes boring into mine. “All I have to do is drink it, and immortality will be mine.”
What’s stopping you then? My purple energy still pulsed along the entire length of the wall to the right, but like the Counselor, I pretended not to notice it.
“Nothing. The Core is open, thanks to you, and once I drink, I will pick off the rest of humanity that those who escaped here didn’t kill, and leave my duties as Counselor behind.” He smiled, leaking more white fluid down his pale, papery skin. “I’ll be free of the Core. Forever.”
I flexed my fingers, and each time I did, the wall of energy waved in perfect synchronization, as if it was waiting for a cue from me.
Alone, I said.
“Alone?” The Counselor flicked his gaze up toward where Lily’s cage had hung. Instead of pure darkness hovering above, orange light now shined through a chink in the wall.
I was no expert on bloodletting rooms, but had I kicked the wall in during my bird-wrestling high wire maneuver?
He frowned. “I don’t know what you mean.”
You said you’re going to walk the earth forever. Are you sure you’re good enough company for yourself for that long?
The thin skin around his mouth stretched into a sneer or a grin. It was hard to tell. “You’re so much like that traitor mother of yours. Sarcastic, full of yourself, and dead.”
I refused to let his words affect me since that was exactly what he wanted. And yet here I am, preventing you from taking that drink.
You’re not preventing him from anything.
I turned at the sound of a new voice inside my head, and both Aneska and her dead bird glared knives through me from the open doorway. A few blonde stands of hair, so much like Lily’s and Tram’s, curled down the thin strap of a tattered white dress. With a flick of her wrist, the doorway behind her solidified into stone wall. The bird bobbed its head as they neared, as if it wanted to continue using me as a pin cushion for its needle-sharp beak.
The Counselor held out his hands, palms up, and said, “Son, daughters, come.”
Lily rose to her feet, her gaze still stuck on the stone floor, and Tram hefted himself upright using the bars of the cage for support. It seemed as though their strength had been sapped along with their will to fight, because they both went willingly toward the Counselor’s outstretched hands while he pulled their invisible marionette strings. What I wouldn’t do for some scissors.
“It is time to drink, my children.” He gestured for Aneska, Tram, and Lily to kneel with him around the blood pit. “Join me in the first drink of the rest of your long, long lives.”
What? I demanded. Them, too?
Did Tram and Lily really want that? To serve their dad for all eternity? From their stony, mind-controlled expressions, I had no idea, but I knew deep down that Tram could never want such a thing. He despised the Counselor even though he obeyed him, but that was just the kind of guy Tram was. He was loyal to a fault, a brave warrior, and he wasn’t even in the same league as his crazy dad.
And Lily… Once upon a time, I thought she worshiped a demon hound cheerleader named Megan, but now I knew who and what she was. Like me, she was a Trammeler Sorceress who hadn’t explored her true potential since half of it had been hidden from her for her whole life. I couldn’t see her on the same page as the Counselor, either.
But if the Trinity blood did work, would they all live again like normal? Would they be able to soak in the sunshine and smile and laugh like they used to?
I looked to Tram who, when alive, had always looked as if he’d been dipped in sunlight. It had bounced in his curls, glimmered in those green eyes. That was where he belonged. Outside with the trees and the open sky. Not here in the Core. If the Trinity blood could give him that, give him life, then yes, I wanted him to drink it.
All of them submerged their hands into the pit, cupping the blood so it trickled through their fingers. All of them except the Counselor. He looked on, a smug smile stretching his white lips. Why wasn’t he drinking?
Tram, something—
Lily cut her gaze to me from her kneeled position across the pit for half a second. Was she trying to tell me something without using our undead psychic link? So she was aware of her surroundings, yet she still brought her hands to her mouth. To drink. To be the Counselor’s guinea pig while he looked on to see if it worked. Or to see if it boiled them from the inside out. Would the blood kill them, for good this time?
Lily, Tram, stop. Don’t do this, I begged.
I started toward them, but Tram’s empty cube-shaped cage barreled toward me end-over-end and flipped over my head, trapping me. The door banged shut before I could flash a hand out to stop it.
No magic in. No magic out. I glanced at the wall of purplish light through the stone bars of my jail, cursing myself for not flinging the pulsing energy at the Counselor when I had the chance. This room was like a cage, but I had torn a hole in it to allow my magic to work. Maybe I could do the same to my jail cell. I squeezed the stone bars while I watched what happened between them.
Lily and Tram’s palms were almost to their lips. Blood dribbled over their wrists and down their fronts, but they didn’t seem to notice.
Why are you doing this? I asked the Counselor. Have someone else test it.
“Who, you?” He chuckled. “Don’t be so selfish. Drink, my children.”
Aneska tipped her head back and pou
red the blood in her hand into her gaping mouth. Tram and Lily did, too.
My stomach sank to my knees, but I couldn’t look away. I had to know what it did to them, if it would kill what was already dead or if it would make them live again.
The Trinity children pushed to their feet, blood streaming down their chins to streak their clothes, and stared at their feet in obedience. The Counselor rose, too, and gazed at each of them in turn.
I fisted my hands around the bars and squeezed, once, twice, marking the seconds while I waited for something to happen. Their glowing blue eyes to fade to normal green, their grayish skin to brighten, anything.
I almost hoped it would work. Not for the Counselor’s sake—because screw him—but for Tram and Lily who deserved to live again. At the same time, though, I didn’t want it to work in order to save what was left of humanity from the Counselor. If there was anything left to save.
A sudden spasm swept through Aneska’s torso, and she lurched forward to the edge of the blood pool. She grabbed at her neck as if she was choking while the Counselor rushed to her side.
“Aneska, my child, what is it? Do you feel it?” he asked.
She clutched at her throat, her bright blue eyes wide, and that same image reminded me of Lily with a bird down her throat before the Counselor killed her. I flicked my gaze to Lily while she backed away from the pool and wiped her chin with her hand, her expression empty.
What the hell was happening?
Tram backed toward me with an ash tree key tucked inside the bloodied fist behind his back. Had he and Lily somehow tricked Aneska and the Counselor?
I so wished I had the ability to shriek gleefully about that possibility, but the idea froze when Aneska whirled around. Her open mouth sagged down the rest of her face and slid everything else off, too.
The blue light in Aneska’s eyes blinked out when they puddled down her cheeks. Her pale skin liquefied and dribbled down her dress until there was nothing left but bone. She pitched forward face-first into the blood pool, her body completely still.
The Trinity Bleeds (The Grave Winner Book 3) Page 7