“In the car,” he answered.
Jo lunged away from me then, pushing and pulling on her fingers to pop them, and nervously glanced back at the car while her throat bobbed on a tough swallow. Callum squinted in that direction, too, his jaw pulsing and the wind pushing his hair in all directions. I tried to follow his gaze, but the headlights blinded me. There was something, probably a lot of things, they weren’t telling me.
“Well, why isn’t she coming out to see me?” I asked, skirting around them to the car.
Callum snatched at my wrist to stop me. “Don’t.” His voice broke on the plea and his face twisted on the kind of horrified sadness I knew all too well.
There was only one thing that could make him look that way, one thing he would try to protect me from seeing, even though I brought her back.
Mom. In the car. With Darby.
Rage constructed thick walls around me, so much like the grave that Mom should still be at peace in, that I backed away from Callum and Jo in case that rage became uncontrollable magic. A breathless moan pushed past my lips and blended in with the Sorceressi’s whispers around me as if we weren’t all that much different. I had done everything in my power to keep Mom safe, but according to my memories, I was the one who brought her back. No one needed to know that, not yet, and maybe not ever. Especially Jo and Callum.
“Let me see my sister,” I ground out.
With a nod, Callum stepped out of the headlights’ glow and toward the rear door of the car.
“She’s had her eyes closed the whole time,” Jo said, taking and squeezing my hand.
Her assurance melted off some of my self-loathing, and I squeezed back, thankful to have the continued support of my best friend forever, my constant light in the dark.
A smaller version of myself sprang toward me with a sobbed shout that bruised my already aching heart. I picked Darby up from the concrete to bury my tears into her soft cheeks, then quickly set her down again because she weighed more than a Sumo wrestler.
“Black sticks in pregnant gardens,” Darby said, blinking up at me and wiping her nose. “That’s how you close the Core.”
My mind spun around her words to try to make sense of them, but this reunion, though mostly happy, had wasted enough time.
“Come on,” I said and took Darby’s hand. “You can explain on the way to the graveyard.”
Callum gazed down the jagged hole snaking through the street toward Heartland Cemetery. “You’re sure?”
“That’s where D—” I glanced down at Darby, even though she probably already knew Dad was there. Was still there. He had to be because Sarah wouldn’t let me down.
Jo took my hand once again. “I’m coming with you.”
When I opened my mouth to protest, she jabbed her finger under my nose.
“You have no idea what it felt like when you died,” she warned, her voice so shaky and watery, I almost couldn’t understand her. “If Callum is the parrot to your pirate, I’m your undetachable steel hook. Just, you know, don’t pick your nose with me or anything.”
“Okay. Come with me.” I really must’ve done something right to deserve someone like Jo. “Callum…”
“I’ll keep her safe,” he said with a solemn nod, and I believed him. His promise was as much to Mom as it was to me, and his protectiveness of us both stirred the hope deep inside my heart. Hope that I could fix all this. Hope that I could find some way to thank him.
“Don’t stay out here,” I said, glancing around. “Take her inside the video store. There’s got to be an office or something you can hole up in. And take Jo’s bracelet.” I wriggled it off her wrist and tossed it at him.
“Take Elf, too,” Jo said.
At his nod, Jo, Darby, and I started toward the crack in the road that widened the farther we went.
“It’s good to have you back, Baxton,” Callum called, and the faint smile in his voice stopped me in my tracks.
I turned and grinned back at him for a fleeting second. The electrical sensation that buzzed between us fueled the hope I refused to let go of and sparked a burst of warm energy inside my chest. His belief in me had always been unwavering, so straight and sure, it made me want to never prove him wrong. Even though I already had. But never again.
“You want to go out on a date with me sometime?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He uncrossed his arms to reveal his trembling hand, as well as his heart. “I do.”
With my feet a little lighter, we set off once again.
Our steps crunched over gravel, the only sound in an eerily quiet night. Even the red lightning crackling through the sky kept silent without any echoing booms to chase after the boiling clouds. The farther we walked past the video store and down the split road, the dimmer the Sorceressi’s blue eyes grew. They weren’t following us. Yet.
Up ahead, blue lights swirled from the top of another police car that jutted at an angle from inside the concrete. Around it, a large hole had formed from one end of the street to the other. We crept toward the car, but since the graveyard was on the other side, we were going to have to eventually cross over somehow. We didn’t have time to find an alternate route.
I led the way forward with Darby’s hand gripped tight in mine. Jo trailed several feet behind us, rubbing her bare wrist, while casting worried frowns at Darby. What was that about?
One question at a time.
“Okay, Darby, spill it. Tell me about the whole black sticks in pregnant gardens thing, and don’t leave anything out.”
She took off her glasses while we walked and rubbed them on the dusty hem of her Reading Is Oxygen t-shirt. “In The Sorceress’s Trinity book, at the end of the chapter called All You Have Is Bleak, it said if the Core opens, black sticks in pregnant gardens. That’s it.”
“It didn’t say what or where this garden is?” I asked.
“No,” she said and hooked her glasses over her collar.
“What are you doing? Put those back on.”
She shrugged. “I can see just fine. But it was almost like a page had been ripped from that chapter because it made me think I missed something.”
I looked at her sharply, but she shook her head.
“The pages were all there. I checked.”
Well, this didn’t help us at all. If Darby didn’t understand it, I wouldn’t waste my time to plunk myself down in the middle of the apocalypse and try to decipher it.
“Maybe it’s not a literal garden,” Jo said. “Maybe it’s a figurative garden, like one that’s pregnant with ideas, you know?”
“No,” I said, pulling Darby to a stop. It seemed the only way across the jagged hole in the road to the graveyard was to leap over it. At the edge, an abyss crowded with nothing but darkness met the toes of my boots. Now wasn’t the time to test if I was really immortal or not just for shits and giggles. “I don’t.”
“Maybe someone’s name is Garden and she’s pregnant, and we have to poke her with black sticks,” Darby said.
I looked down at my little sister. “What a weird thing to say.”
Jo glanced at her, too, her troubled frown digging into my uncertainty. What was she not telling me?
And where had my innocent little sister gone? It made me wonder at the ways her newfound Sorceress powers had manifested inside her. Without her glasses shielding her vivid blue eyes, her nose, cheekbones, and chin appeared sharper, making her look older. Her blonde hair gusted behind her shoulders, free from its usual ponytail. The contrast between her flowy hair and the hard angles in her face projected her growing power in fierce waves.
Give her a few more inches in height, and she would look just like me, with the same darkness inside of her. But I was afraid her darkness was much blacker than mine, thornier, too. Like the hawthorn tree she’d sprouted up under her bed to trap me when I’d been feeding on her Trammeler blood to give it to Ica. Hawthorn. Death’s tree. The Counselor’s tree.
Both the Counselor and Gretchen were Trammeler Sorceressi, but their overu
se of dark magic had turned them into something else entirely. Could that happen to Darby? Would it happen to me?
I rubbed my black punching knuckles down my side, holding my breath in case growing thorns snagged on my scraps of clothing. Darby and I had both practiced dark magic. What if the dark festered inside us until we were both just as thorny as the Counselor and Gretchen? By that point, the power will have consumed us, and we might not even recognize our former selves. Just like I didn’t recognize the person in my own memories resurrecting the dead or biting my own sister until she was numb.
When Darby sliced her gaze to mine, a shudder rolled down my back, and I looked away.
I really shouldn’t have.
The next instant, she shook out of my grip and had placed one foot on the hood of the sunken police car.
“Darby, don’t,” Jo shouted.
My warning fell out in a sharp gasp.
“This is the only way across, right?” Darby said. “So, let’s cross.”
The car’s tires barely settled on narrow, uneven ledges just inside the hole. Under Darby’s weight, one of the front tires shuddered and groaned against the chasm wall. One more shift and it could tumble into nothingness, carrying Darby with it.
I started forward to help her, to catch her, but she moved too quickly.
Another foot up, and metal squealed against concrete. She jumped onto the windshield and grabbed hold of the bar on top of the car with the rotating lights to propel her up over the trunk.
The car lurched forward into a cloud of dust. Metal screeched and ripped and whined, but she had almost pulled herself up to the trunk. The trunk that was now plummeting.
Panic shredded through my chest. “Darby!”
The car stopped falling, but the sudden stop unhinged Darby’s grip on the trunk. Her terrified gaze pinned to mine before her body disappeared behind the car. Before she fell.
I blinked at the spot she’d been just seconds ago. Darby. Not here. Gone, like Mom. A high-pitched wail started from the pit of my soul and drove me to my knees.
Jo dropped next to me, saying words I couldn’t understand because my sister... Oh, God, my sister.
Jo sandwiched my head between her hands and shook me until one word filtered through my panicked haze. “Listen.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to focus on sound, tried to calm the rush of horror through my veins, because Jo needed me to listen.
My name. It came from the hole that had taken my sister. My name. Darby was still alive. Relief burned the backs of my eyes and twisted up my throat.
“Where are you?” I croaked.
A muffled voice answered, but it sounded as if she said, “Underneath.”
I almost willed my roots up from the ground to help, but their vibrations might release the car right on top of her. There had to be another way. I couldn’t climb over the car like she had because the car now jutted straight up instead of at an angle, and there were no hand or foot holds to climb it.
I wrenched at the handle on the back door, but the closeness of the door to the ground only allowed it to scrape open a few inches.
Enough for a leg to slump out.
A body. A large man’s body, and not the good kind of man if he’d been sitting in the back of a police car. The nasty stink rolling from the car and his gaping jaw verified his Sorceressi status, but was he dead, for good this time, or just knocked out from whatever had happened here?
“Just…” I swallowed and tried again. “Just hang on, Darby.”
Like she would let go. But what had made her think climbing all over a car crashed into the middle of a street would ever be a good idea? She had more sense than that. Except the times that she didn’t.
The guy lay sprawled against the mesh cage separating the front from the backseat. A large hole in the mesh between his legs matched the diamond pattern engraved on his forehead in a bloody tattoo. A car wreck, probably, but where was the cop?
To reach the other side of the car where Darby had fallen, I would have to slide over him and hope that whatever kept the car from disappearing into the hole forever could hold one more person’s weight. Just one. That was all I asked.
“Stay here,” I told Jo, and slithered in through the open door.
Leigh
Face-to-face with a dead man in the back of a police car. Not quite how I thought I would spend my night, but pretty close.
A squicky feeling shivered to the insides of my boots as I reached a hand past his nose to the handle on the opposite door. I had been close to dead people before, but never full-body contact from his snakeskin cowboy boots all the way up to his XXXL camouflage I Hunt Birds for the Chicks shirt, and I would be perfectly okay if I never did this again.
But if he was dead, what had happened to the cop? Hopefully not the same thing that had almost happened to Darby. That wouldn’t happen to Darby.
Something shiny on the floorboard next to the dead guy’s head made me pause for a half-second. A police badge. With a bite taken out of the bottom.
I snapped my gaze to the man’s face, waiting, watching for the slightest twitch, for his glowing blue eyes to open and meet mine. A backseat brawl would shift the car too much, and this Sorceressi definitely had the advantage of surprise since he was so good at acting dead. Unless he wasn’t acting, in which case, I had one less thing to worry about.
“Just be dead,” I muttered under my breath because actual breathing made me taste his rot.
When he didn’t move, I reached for the door handle. It folded in, but nothing clicked or budged. I slowly pushed up to my knees, careful not to rock the car, into a pose that would provide better leverage but would win me the reputation that would make all mothers hide their sons and even their sons forever. With a little more force, the door squawked open as much as the road would let it.
I wormed the rest of the way over the dead guy, trying my best not to knee him in the mesh-tattooed face, and up through the door at a painstakingly slow crawl. I feared one wrong hand or foot position could plunge all three of us to our deaths, so I tried to think skinny thoughts.
Once my feet finally hit pavement, I dropped to my knees at the edge of the hole and reached for Darby. She hung about three feet down, the back tires on the car crowding her little fingers on the same ledge. And too far away from my fingertips.
“Darby, you’re going to have to swing yourself up to take my hand,” I told her.
She stared up at her hands, a worried wrinkle digging into her forehead and sweat dotting her upper lip. “I don’t like heights,” she said in a small voice.
Then why had she turned superhero and thought she could leap police cars in a single bound? Were her new powers going straight to her ego?
“Me, either.” I leaned over the edge even farther.
She squeezed her eyes closed. “I could vanish and reappear, but I’m too scared.”
“You don’t need magic,” I said, gritting my teeth. “You have me.”
She looked at me then, and fierce determination set her jaw and swung through her legs. Using that momentum, she flashed an arm out. I caught it at her wrist, and the extra weight threw my shoulder against the car.
Metal and rock groaned together and tick-tick-ticked, faster like my rocketing heartbeat.
Panic-fueled adrenaline flooded my body when the force of the hit almost jolted her from my grip, but I locked up my muscles and dug in my heels to keep her bony wrist locked inside my fingers.
But the car was moving. Not just moving, but rocking side-to-side as if it was wriggling to be free. Or as if something was wriggling to be free. But if it did wriggle free, the car would crush her.
“Leigh! Watch out!” Jo shouted from the other side.
But I refused to lift my gaze from Darby or the spasming car, not even for a second since that was all it could take to lose her. My muscles burning, I hefted her to the upper ledge so she could grab hold and snatched at the back of her shirt to help pull her up. “Climb, Dar-A
H!”
Something took a chomp out of my right shoulder, as in a literal bite that seared pain all the way down to my grip around Darby.
Her eyes widened to the size of plates as she took in whatever was making me its dinner. “Behind you!”
“I don’t care! Climb.”
But why would she when something bitey lurked up here with me? The back of her t-shirt tore with the force of my fingers as I hauled. Her shoes scrabbled up the rock wall but slipped back down again.
She needed more traction or boots like mine. I should be the one climbing up.
Another bite struck against the back of my neck. Another between my shoulder blades knocked me flat and skidded me across the pavement.
My fingers slipped. My everything slipped. Over the ledge. Past Darby’s upturned face. Her fingertips curled into mine, but it wasn’t enough for me or for her. She was slipping, too.
Terrified screams bounded down the hole after me, including one final shriek of metal on rock. The car plummeted, falling straight into Darby and then into oblivion.
With me.
Leigh
Go!
Time braked to an almost standstill while that word slanted through my horrified, tumbling mind directly to my roots. Hallelujah that they knew what that vague order meant. They punched through the concrete walls in all directions, flinging pebbles into my bare skin and eyes, and snatched me from my freefall.
Tick.
Darby stopped her fall on the same ledge that had caught her before three feet down from the surface.
Tick.
Other roots snaked up the wall toward the falling car, but its weight crushed them into a slow explosion of splinters.
Tick.
The car’s front bumper was inches away from Darby’s head.
Tock. Now, centimeters.
My mouth opened on a throat-tearing scream that would rival my baby sister’s. My muscles threatened to lock up with fright, but my mind plowed through it, the only thing not moving in slow motion.
Clinging to one of my roots, I kicked through the air to swing Tarzan-style straight into the wall below Darby. My eyes now level with the middle of her back, I kept my focus there, on how tiny she felt as I circled my arm around her waist, instead of how cold her skin was, on how the headlight beams closed in on each individual wave in her hair.
The Trinity Bleeds (The Grave Winner Book 3) Page 14