For the thousandth time, I wished Leigh was here.
Everything that had buried Darby and I now buried most of Darby, but I had no idea if it would be enough to protect her. The dog pawed at the pile over her and knocked several boards and chunks of plaster and roof tiles off.
“Darby, don’t move or say anything until I tell you,” I warned, because that was who the dog appeared most interested in.
“Mrs. Baxton, please,” Cal pleaded, and his voice broke in half, tearing me up with it. “Go back to the graveyard.”
I risked a glance in his direction. He held both fists to his shaking head as if to keep himself together, his eyes screwed shut, while my second mother brushed past him into the room.
Her sunken cheeks and dark, gaping mouth emphasized her lifelessness so much, just looking at those parts of her stuck my lungs together. Her eyes glowed blue even though she wasn’t like One or Two at all, except for the Trammeler part of her.
A patch of long blonde hair, so much like Leigh’s and Darby’s, waved across her face from the outside air. Her fingers twitched at her sides, snagging the fabric of her dress, while a tender breeze ruffled the hem around her bony knees. Her dress, that one piece of hair, gave her movement when there shouldn’t be any, gave her life when there was none.
A sob welled in my throat, but we didn’t have time for tears. I focused on the dead dog standing on top of the debris that separated it from the little girl I didn’t understand, on the coming storm of evil dead people who were about to congregate on the Baxton’s front lawn.
“Cal,” I said, my tone as sharp as a barked military order. “Get over here and help me.”
The dog heaved a tortured kind of whispered whine while frantically scratching and nosing around the fallen ceiling. Chunks of it slid to the carpet like a rock-slide, and I shuddered to think what it might do if it unburied Darby. What did it want with her anyway?
Cal had backed across the room, knocking the backs of his knees against the foot of Darby’s bed, and slowly dragged his gaze away from Mrs. Baxton to the dog.
“It wants what’s underneath,” I whispered in case somehow the dog knew who I was talking about. Because stranger things had happened. I pointed at the growing hole in the wall, now stretched to half of Darby’s bedroom, and the gathering undead who were stepping onto the lawn, their bright blue eyes quivering cold fear through my insides. “And we’re about to have company.”
He took in the state of the dog, and his throat bobbed on a hard swallow. A sheen of sweat broke out all over his face as he opened his mouth. I thought he was going to be sick, but instead, he pushed out a low whistle.
The dog’s ears perked up, and he stared down his long nose at Cal.
He whistled again and backed along the bed toward Mrs. Baxton. The dog climbed down from the rubble to follow and, completely ignoring me, sideswiped the skinned half of his body across my patchwork dragon skirt. Slimy black ooze streaked down the yellow scales and slopped onto my flip-flops.
My stomach clenched, but no time to puke. Several undead were nearly standing on top of Darby and several more drifted across the lawn.
“Darby, out. Now,” I barked.
The ceiling chunks and boards immediately shifted, and I dragged Darby to the other side of the bed. The trees tore through the remaining part of the wall with a series of loud cracks and pops, shaking the house’s foundation with their force. Leaving nothing between us and the rest of the end of the world.
The escaped evil people now pressed into the room through the missing wall, all their gazes locked on me. They shrunk the room with the power that radiated off them, and suddenly I knew what Leigh must’ve felt when facing One and Two.
Terror, so complete and absolute, froze me from the inside out. I wanted to scream. Maybe I did. Sound faded from deadly quiet to blaring loud within seconds in my eardrums, and I may have heard someone behind me yell my name, but my whole existence had jackhammered and skidded across a dark road to somewhere I never wanted to go as long as I lived.
Time slowed, but my gaze drank in several horrors at once. A man with a gray beard with dismembered fingers knotted into it rounded the bed toward me. A woman with her mouth sewed shut wearing a long black dress seemed to be speaking to me over some kind of figure covered in white dust as tall as her chin. A figure I had pulled with me to the other side of the bed just seconds ago. Darby.
The woman coiled her fist at Darby and swung.
And everything stopped completely. The man with the finger beard, the rest of the Sorceressi, my heart, everything stopped.
Everyone stared at Darby, born again from a pile of broken ceiling, and covered head to toe in ceiling dust.
She lifted a hand to her mouth, and when it came away, blood smeared her wrist. The woman had hit her, had actually hit her, and spilled her Trammeler Sorceress blood.
Fury, as hot and thick as a peanut butter and pickle sandwich in hell, swamped my body. Before I could comprehend what I was doing so I could tell myself it wasn’t a good idea, I charged across the bed.
The other Sorceressi switched directions, too, away from me and toward Darby, whether out of hatred, curiosity, admiration, or a combination of all three, I didn’t know. Didn’t care, either. That bitch had just swung at my best friend’s baby sister.
I wrapped my arms around Darby’s torso in an attempt to drag her away so I could clobber the woman with a good old-fashioned ass-kicking. But Darby twisted out of my grip and landed on the bed on all fours.
Head dipped low, Darby’s back spasmed, and a trail of dark purple fire heaved out of her bloodied mouth. It streaked toward the woman, consuming her, then dropped her into a pile of black goo. A fiery livewire snapped across the carpet to the next heartbeat-challenged and the next, burning up all those inside the house within seconds of each other. It even spread to those still drifting in and those wandering the street.
Dead once again. Killed by a nine-year-old.
What had she done? Saved my life and hers, sure, but was that the best way to do it? With a calculated murderous spree? Maybe so. Maybe not. I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore, but it seemed like the Counselor’s way of doing things, sentencing Gretchen’s dark supporters to the Core, was a tad more humane than obliterating them into goo.
“Jo!” Cal called from somewhere inside the house.
I could argue the ethics of what had just happened for days, but what was done was done, and we needed to leave. When I snatched up Darby’s hand, she whipped her head around with a ferocious glare. A revolted shiver crashed through my bones at what I read in her face—not just wild, untamed power, but a thirst for more.
“We have to go,” I said, the words almost lost in my voice’s quiver.
She gripped my hand as she unfolded her legs from underneath her and stood. I didn’t know why that surprised me, but it did, maybe because she’d waved off my touch the whole day. It reminded me that she was still a little girl.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, nodding to the blood smudging the corner of her mouth.
She knuckled it away and shook her head, but her chin trembled. I didn’t know what to say as a variety of emotions warred inside me concerning her, so I didn’t say anything and turned toward the bedroom door.
But the emptiness of the room slowed my steps. Mrs. Baxton was gone. Relief swelled my chest, not for me, but for her. Mrs. Baxton seemed like a shell of her former self, but even so, I was glad she hadn’t been here to witness her youngest daughter morph into a killing machine. So, where was she?
“Jo!”
The urgency in Cal’s voice renewed my speed, and I pulled Darby after me into the hallway. I prayed to all the goddesses that he had enough sense to lock the front door. Anything could’ve snuck in through it while we battled what plowed through what was once Darby’s wall, and judging from the awful smell that still flooded the air, something dead was still in here with us.
The bathroom across the hall was closed, as was Leigh
’s dad’s room at the end. They hadn’t been when we’d arrived. I specifically remembered how dark the house looked, like night and all its horrors had worked its way under the paint. Down the hallway’s length, past the series of bloody flip-flop prints, everything stood quiet.
“Jo.”
The whisper rushed at my right ear, so close, the hairs at the back of my neck leaped to attention. The rest of me did, too, and I slapped a hand over my mouth to keep from screaming at Cal to never do that again.
He pulled me and Darby into Leigh’s bedroom then closed the door softly. I kept my back to all the reminders of her because, even in the darkness, I was too emotionally drained to handle it. But because Darby’s trees were a destructible force just like their maker, they were already cracking open the seams between her room and Leigh’s. A soft breeze filtered through and rustled the punk posters all over the walls. That single sound nearly undid me because it was so empty, so final.
“We need to get out of here,” Cal hissed.
“You think?” I choked out.
“But I’m not leaving Mrs. Baxton here alone. Not…no. I won’t.”
Even in the dark, I could see the tortured slouch of his shoulders and his trembling hands as he covered his injured eye.
“What are we supposed to do with her?”
“Bury her. Again.”
“Cal, we can’t…”
I glanced at Darby, wishing I could see her better in the dark, and at the same, wishing I couldn’t. How could we bury someone who wasn’t exactly dead without killing them?
“Leigh wouldn’t want us to leave her here,” Cal said. “She needs to be put to rest. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again, but we need to leave.”
His devotion to helping Leigh’s mom filled me with a sense of sisterly love that didn’t happen too often. But I doubted he’d thought this through. Still, we couldn’t stay here.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“In her bedroom.”
“Where should we take her?”
“The graveyard,” Darby piped in. “My dad’s there, remember? He’ll know what to do.”
If he was still alive. If there was still a graveyard to go to.
Darby’s trees moaned and stretched and tore the crack wider along Leigh’s wall. If we waited too much longer, the entire front of the house would be gone.
“Fine,” I said, wiggling my fingers out to Cal. “Give me your keys.”
“What? No.”
“You can’t drive with one eye. Gimme.”
“I still have both eyes.” But he gave in and handed me his keys from his jeans pocket.
Leigh’s wall was steadily being pulled back like a stage curtain dipped in liquid nitrogen, and behind the steady hail of debris, more pairs of glowing blue eyes loomed.
My heartbeat nailed crushing blows against my ribcage at the thought of going out there with them. But if Darby loaned me the bracelet Leigh made her, maybe, just maybe, I could get back here with the car and all my body parts still intact. It was supposed to hide me from dead things; hopefully it worked better than the lilacs I’d swallowed that had shriveled up and died.
Darby tightened her grip on my hand. “I can come with you.”
“No,” I said a little too sharply. “No,” I said again, my voice softer that time. “You’re bleeding, and Cal needs your eyes in case…” In case I didn’t come back, but I couldn’t let myself finish that thought aloud. “Can I borrow your bracelet, though?”
A few seconds later, she slipped it on my wrist. “It will protect you. Leigh said so.”
I sure hoped Leigh was right.
Darby’s trees continued their demolition, and almost half of Leigh’s wall was already gone. Blue eyes seemed to float along the street, their owners’ shadows hidden by the night, but it probably wouldn’t take them long to find all sorts of merriment at the Baxton household.
Cal took Darby’s hand from mine then slipped the door open. “We’ll wait in the hallway with this door closed. Go.”
As soon as the door clicked shut behind them, I faced Leigh’s room with imaginary blinders and swept toward the hole in the wall and the escaped evil that prowled behind it. I didn’t have time to gather some of Leigh’s courage she may have dropped on the carpet. I didn’t have time to be afraid.
Earth was in shambles, and just like I always did, I had to try to save it.
Jo
I crawled through a gap in the tree branches, but a particularly cruel branch twisted into my back and scraped up my spine. Stumbling to my knees in a puddle of black ooze, I pushed my lips together so I wouldn’t hiss in pain or revulsion.
The sting at being skinned alive brought tears to my eyes and blurred the world into a carnival ride with blue lights. Oh, how I wished that was what I walked toward. Once I shoved myself to my feet, I swiped at my face, and reality shifted back into all its nightmarish glory.
I checked to see that the bracelet was still fastened to my wrist. It was, but I didn’t dare touch it for fear I would disrupt its power and it would stop working.
So far, so good. None of the heartbeat-challenged shambling up and down the street seemed to notice me, but when their blue gazes swept past mine, my chest turned to ice and my steps faltered.
I skirted around them, giving them as wide a berth as I could so I didn’t have to brush up against the grayish skin sloughing off their bones. The edges of Cal’s keys stabbed into my palm, but I didn’t dare loosen my grip.
Some of the undead banged open peoples’ front doors with flicks of their wrists and crashed inside them, only to be met with piercing screams. Others wandered the street in packs, as if they were fueling their collective magic to unleash it on anyone who tried to stop them. Some of their eyes didn’t glow blue, like Sarah, as if they had been kicked out of their graves, too, when the Core opened. Had that happened before or after Mr. Baxton had gone there?
I swallowed as waves of goosebumps rolled up and down my skin.
Terrified whimpers punctuated the night, whether human or animal, I didn’t know. Behind me, Darby’s trees moaned as they twisted higher, seeming to give more of a voice to the undead than their swirling whispers.
Just a couple houses to go. A neighbor’s front porch light glinted off Cal’s window, and I quickened my pace. Almost there.
I risked a glance behind me at Leigh’s house and immediately wished I hadn’t. Dead people swarmed across the lawn toward the massive hole that left the house half open. Tree limbs writhed and swayed above the roof, twisting toward the moon like splayed and broken fingers.
Faster. Faster.
I zipped the key in the car door’s lock and threw the door open in one long squawk. Blue eyes shifted in my direction, but they moved right on past. Once I settled myself into the seat and slammed the door behind me, I allowed myself one tiny exhale of relief.
But it ended with a sharp gasp. Just like most of the other houses, mine was surrounded. I’d been so focused on getting to Cal’s car, I hadn’t noticed before. The undead surrounded the front door and punched at the windows.
A painful spasm tightened my chest. Elf.
The backs of my eyes burned. An awful cry tore from my throat as I jammed the key in the ignition and cranked it. There wasn’t time. I had to get to Cal, Darby, and Mrs. Baxton.
I slammed on the gas and yanked the wheel to the left at the same time. The car plowed over the dead on the way to the Baxtons, bumping the tires up and down in wild lurches, spinning my stomach, but I didn’t care. They weren’t supposed to be here. The natural order of the earth said so, and despite being alive once upon time, they were far from natural. Some of their kind had taken my best friend from me—maybe my cat, too—and I would be damned if I sat by and let them take anything else. So fuck them.
Plus, twenty points for knocking their shoes off, if anyone was keeping score.
I pressed my foot against the gas pedal with gritted teeth. Some undead splattered into black goo all over
the windshield when I hit them, and I flicked the wiper lever to thunderstorm speed to get it off. Others rolled under the tires to study the road a little more closely. I swerved around those whose eyes didn’t glow, though. No, not them, because they didn’t deserve any of this.
Cal’s car bounced over the curb and onto Leigh’s yard, and without easing up on the gas, I crashed the car into her open bedroom and the undead shambling about inside. Her bed shot across the floor and slammed into her dresser, which tilted it against the opposite wall and effectively pinned a few undead scum. The others exploded into tar all over the hood.
Leigh’s bedroom door was still closed. I’d made it in time. Thank the goddesses for small miracles.
I punched the horn in case Cal hadn’t heard me barrel into the house. The door cracked open, and a brown eye that matched both of mine peered through.
“You wrecked my car?” he asked.
The door opened wider, and he pushed Darby through with his hand covering her eyes. He led Mrs. Baxton in his other hand and settled her in the front seat next to me.
The air contracted inside the car with her pungent odor, and my stomach threatened to raise a white flag as I pushed the button to lower all the windows. She stared straight ahead, looking as lost as ever, and I wondered if a small part of who she used to be still existed somewhere deep inside her. Just because her soul was gone didn’t mean it hadn’t made a lasting impression. And Sarah, over time, had been a big help to Leigh. Would a completely soulless person do that? Or was it because she hadn’t been tainted with dark magic? Still, even though I loved her like my own, it creeped me the hell out sitting next to Leigh’s dead mom.
She didn’t have her seatbelt on, though, and because I’d earned at least five hundred points in just a half-block, she was going to need it. I held my breath and leaned over her, slowly in case I freaked her out as much as she did me.
Which reminded me of something else.
The Trinity Bleeds (The Grave Winner Book 3) Page 12