I shoved my boots against the wall and lunged us both to the right. Away from the falling car. Away, with maybe a sixteenth of a second to spare.
“Darby!” Relief threw my voice into a shout, but it came out more like a sob. “Are you okay?”
Instead of answering, a deep bone-cracking shudder quaked through her when she glanced upward.
“Oh, Leigh, get out of there!” Jo shouted from the opposite side of the hole.
I squeezed my eyes shut briefly to find the will to replace one horror for the next, then followed Darby’s gaze.
Pointed tips of worn snakeskin cowboy boots poked over the edge of the hole, and attached to them stood the dead guy I had climbed over in the police car. Only he wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t exactly a guy. He was a glowing-eyed monster with a large stomach swelling his camouflage I Hunt Birds for the Chicks t-shirt and an unhinged, sagging jaw that dipped lower and lower. Inside his gaping mouth, hundreds of long black tongues slapped against each other with sick, wet sounds as they wormed through the air. Sliced into their rolling tips, pairs of sharpened fangs glistened with drool.
Teeth inside all those tongues. It didn’t take a lot of braining to imagine what this thing intended to do since he had likely finished his cop appetizer and taken bites out of the main course. Still, disgust clenched my mouth on a nauseated groan. Darby whimpered.
Get him, I demanded of my roots, and the ones not holding me burst upward. Teeth snapped together into a whirlwind of writhing tongues. Wood chunks hailed down; I might as well have sent my roots into a wood chipper.
Tongues and teeth swayed closer, as if searching blindly for blood and bone. When something slimy licked over my ear, sweat broke out over my face. My legs and arms burned with the effort to balance both Darby and I against the wall, but I feared if we didn’t pretend we were statues, the man would make our ribs into toothpicks to clean all those teeth.
I reached inside myself to pull out my Sorceress power, and as soon as the electrical jolt crackled between my fingertips, I shot an arm up toward the monster with purple sparks flying.
At the same time, Darby’s back arched away from me as if she was about to be sick. Her shoulders bunched up to her ears, and dark purple flames spit from her mouth. They trailed a path up the rock wall and consumed the man who towered over us.
Hisses bellowed from the hundreds of teethed mouths that had been lit up with my lilac energy. But my power winked out with the destruction of Darby’s magic. Hers shriveled the lengths of the tongues into drooping black tar until the entire man puddled to the ground. Ooze slid over the edge of the crevice, and something about its thick gel-like consistency, about how it was dripping toward our heads, reminded me of the falling lava in the Core. I had stood next to Gretchen then, and now, I stood next to a dark stranger I didn’t want to be near anymore. The sweet, book-obsessed little sister I used to know would’ve never done this…this killing the dead so easily with hardly a second thought.
With an uncertain breath that puffed Darby’s hair over her shoulder, I ordered my roots up and away from the black sludge. As soon as my boots hit flat concrete, I whirled on her.
“What was that?”
“Helping,” she said, her voice shaky. “I’m a Trammeler Sorceress like you, remember?”
“No.” I shook my head and backed away. “Not like me.”
But right when I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. Maybe our powers hadn’t manifested the same, but we had both practiced dark magic. She had resurrected a number of animals in the attic, and I finished the job with Maria’s dead dog. Not to mention all the graves I might have emptied, including…Mom’s, even though I swore I didn’t do it. Darby and I had darkness lurking inside us, and it would grow and become stronger, darker even, the more we practiced it and the more people, living and dead, magical or otherwise, we killed. Like it or not.
Which meant we couldn’t kill all the escaped Sorceressi, or who knew what it would do to me? To us. There wasn’t enough time to travel the world to do that anyway. There had to be another way to stop them.
A gust of wind broke me from my thoughts, and I lifted my gaze to the red lightning zigzagging overhead. Maybe it was just me, and I hoped it wasn’t, but the sky seemed a shade lighter.
I turned to Jo across the hole, who dropped the hand covering her mouth into her lap, her eyes as wide as I’d ever seen them. She knelt several feet back, her long dragon-covered skirt tucked around her knees.
“Some night this is turning out to be,” she said to the man’s puddle, then ticked her watery gaze to mine. “Huh?”
My heart cracked at how every day those words sounded, as if she was grasping onto a tiny bit of normalcy and lifting the mood for a happy ending like only she could. With Jo, there was no dark. Only light, and I loved her even more for that.
“I’m coming across to get you, okay?” I told her.
Her mouth screwed up into a question, but before it left her mouth, I sent my roots across the chasm to hug her tight and carry her safely back to me. If Darby hadn’t leaped onto the police car, we could have all travelled safely across by root at the start.
Jo’s touch pirouetted over the bark as she held on tight, and when she stood at my side where she belonged, I squeezed her hand.
“You good?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Her head bounced on an overly-enthusiastic nod I didn’t buy for a second. When was the last time she blinked? “But forget stealing Cal’s car. Your tree taxi is way cooler.”
Sighing, I took Darby’s hand maybe a little too roughly and marched us forward to Heartland Cemetery, but my next footstep sloshed into a puddle. I glanced down at my boots, and red fluid lapped against the sides of them in thick waves.
Not the puddle that used to be a teeth-tongued monster. It was blood. Blood from the Trinity trees when the Core had opened.
“That smell,” Jo groaned.
The wind pushed the coppery stink and the guy’s death sludge right at us, so we sped our pace to get through it faster. Our feet slapped against the ground and sprayed a fine mist up past the tops of my boots and over our clasped hands. This wasn’t exactly my first Carrie audition, but Jo made small disgusted sounds while Darby stared straight ahead with cool indifference.
The closer we drew to the graveyard, the tighter my insides coiled. Sagging, empty flagpoles jangled in the wind behind the bent and twisted gates. Blood painted the entire parking lot crimson and crawled bloody fingers underneath Dad’s overturned jeep at the far end.
“Dad!” I yelled on the off chance he had found his way back to it. Even though I hated to do it, I released myself from Jo and Darby. “Stay here,” I told them and sprinted toward Dad’s jeep.
My steps splashed through at least two inches of blood since that was about how high my combat boot heels were. My untied bootlaces dragged through it and winged it up my arms and face with every step, even dotted my lips, so I swiped my wrist across my face to peer inside a shattered window.
Empty, except glass shards that burned red in a flash of red lightning.
“Dad!”
Somewhere nearby, a deep voice called out something unintelligible.
Maybe Dad. Maybe not. Either way, he was still here. He had to be.
I threw a glance over my shoulder at Jo and Darby, who were looking at something over their shoulders deeper into the night.
“Do you see anything?” I called.
They shook their heads slowly, and Jo crossed her arms against a tremble. Sorceressi had probably lurked after us, but we didn’t have time to sit and wait for them to progress past the point of creepy stalkers.
“Come to the jeep,” I said.
They trudged through the river of blood toward me while I searched the darkness behind them. No glowing blue eyes. Nothing. At least not yet, but with Darby and Jo with me, my insides wobbled in triple-time. I needed to get Dad, figure out a way to close the Core, and get us out of here before the sky lightened anymore. Easy-peasy. Yeah,
right.
The iron gate at the front of the cemetery had bent inward and lay nearly flat. On the other side of it stretched black emptiness, as if the graveyard had collapsed under the weight of the Trinity trees’ blood, and the earth had sucked it all away like some kind of planet-made black hole.
And I would need to cross that void to get to where I’d left Dad.
“Get back,” I ordered, then curled my hand at the ground to summon my roots.
Chunks of concrete bit at my legs, and blood splashed when the roots tore through. They waved through the air over our heads in a wild display of groaning and stretching bark then zipped toward Dad’s jeep. When they wrapped themselves around the top half of it, I powered a gentle calm toward them to dissolve their manic energy, and they tipped the jeep back onto all four tires again with hardly a bounce.
I opened the driver’s side door, unlocked the rest, and with a wave of my hand to the backseat, said, “After you.”
Jo shoveled broken glass from the seat as she clambered in, and Darby threw a backward glance at my roots sewing my new reality through the night sky.
“Yours don’t have thorns,” she said, and it was as if she was pointing out an everyday observation.
“No, they don’t.” I shivered at the memory of what grew under her bed, about her scary bad idea of poking a pregnant lady named Garden with sticks, about the dark purple flames leaping from her mouth. Her power didn’t turn dark; it must’ve started that way. But no way would my little sister end up as twisted and thorny as Gretchen and the Counselor. “Stay here. Scream if you need me, loud and…a lot.”
“Pretty sure that won’t be a problem,” Jo said from all the way across the backseat. She’d folded herself against the opposite door so she could face both Darby and whatever might be skulking behind us.
“I’ll be right back,” I said and started to close the door.
Jo’s eyes widened even more. “Horror movies, Leigh. Look into them. That was probably the worst thing you could’ve said.”
“Right.” I searched for something else to say that would put their minds at ease, but slammed the door shut instead. It was probably safe to assume we’d moved past the whole mind-at-ease thing a long time ago, anyway.
Before I turned to the non-graveyard, I scanned the small strip of buckled parking lot and across the blood-splashed street at the neighborhood houses for any sign of life, death, or anything in between. Leaving Darby and Jo behind, even if it was just for a little bit, solidified all my worries into heavy stones that dragged me back to them.
A big breath later, I dropped those proverbial stones and piled them up in a protective fortress around the car. Time to get Dad.
I swept my roots over the downed gate and over the void in a tight weaved pattern wide enough for me to plant both boots on at the same time. Walking over the fallen gate was the easy part, but at the edge of the chasm, I paused. Warning lights flared in time with my thrashing heartbeat, a reminder that I wasn’t fond of heights, especially ones that dropped for…miles? Weeks? Especially ones I’d already dropped through while dead.
“Dad!” I yelled. My voice bounced in a rolling echo, and another voice joined it. It was hard to pinpoint from where exactly, though.
Luckily, my phone still had power. I shined its glow around the dark void, on its edges and down around the horizontal stripes of dirt that grew richer in color the deeper they went.
When I emptied my lungs of one breath, I inhaled another and stepped out onto the self-made wooden plank. I refused to look down or up, and I desperately wanted to close my eyes so I wouldn’t see anything at all. Of course, I didn’t because then the darkness would consume me.
Another step and another. Some of my roots branched off of each other and brushed gently against my arms as if guiding me forward, reassuring me they would catch me if I fell. Always good to know, but sweat still rivered down my sides.
I strained my ears for any kind of noise from the direction of Dad’s jeep, but above this hell pit, the wind raged. It was growing in strength, too, and even if it didn’t carry me off my plank, I wasn’t so sure I would be able to hear Darby and Jo if they needed my help.
Still, I kept going.
“Dad!” I yelled, shining my phone around.
“Leigh?” A faint voice, deep and harsh with exhaustion. Somewhere ahead and to the right.
I blinked, in case I imagined it. But, no, it had sounded as real as the hope pumping through my heart. A smile broke over my mouth as tears filled my eyes. I wanted to call out to him again, but so many emotions held my throat tight. My phone’s beam made shaky, sideways infinity symbols in my trembling hand while I scanned the top of the hole, the sides, down into the depths for any sign of Dad.
A faint vibration on my plank whirled me around in the direction I had just come.
“Dad?”
An answering moan came from somewhere behind me.
A shadow loomed at the other end of the plank, on the plank, moving toward me. No glowing blue eyes. Human then, or a dead corpse of a human. Too tall to be Darby. Jo? She was much too smart to follow me out here. Besides, this person didn’t have a skirt billowing around their ankles. Just a shadow. Coming quick.
I turned around again, the hairs at the back of my neck lifting toward my approaching company. Maybe the sharp wind would throw that person—thing?—over the side.
Dad’s voice had sounded like it was a little to the right of where I lead my roots, so I curved them just a little, my phone trained straight ahead.
Finally, I spotted him. His arms splayed out against the twisted branches of an ash tree about ten feet off the ground. His head hung against his shoulder limply, as if he was asleep or watching something unfold in front of him. The tree’s roots looked as if they’d been sawed in half when the ground had fallen away, but somehow it still stood tough enough to hold his weight. Which made me love that tree almost as much as the guy hanging from it.
I opened my mouth to call out to him again, but several whispers carried on the wind, and I snapped it shut again. We weren’t alone.
Since whatever was here with us had probably already seen my phone’s light, I kept it on and crept forward on my root plank. The closer I drew, the more shadows took shape on the ground next to Dad’s tree. Two deep-hooded figures kneeling over a third. No glowing blue eyes, but a darker shade of black that blended all three of them into the night.
Three of them. Of course three. But was one of them Sarah? I didn’t see her anywhere.
Behind me, my roots jumped with approaching footsteps. With nothing underneath to support them, every single step quivered up through the soles of my boots and shook my whole world. One wrongly placed toe, and that would be it for me. I was a floating pendulum in an enormous clock ticking down to sunrise, a reminder that I didn’t have time for more fights with more stupid Sorceressi.
Instead of playing tiptoe, I sped my jerking roots toward him and shouted, “Dad! Who else is here?”
He said something but the words bounced in another direction, and I couldn’t make it out. But his shoulders straightened some, and he craned his neck as if to see me.
I hurried faster so I could see him, too. Almost there.
The shadows in front of the tree trunk lurched to either side of him. Human-shaped and staring up at him.
The vibrations strengthened with the steady thud of footsteps behind me that rattled my bones but didn’t reach my ears over the rushing wind. The plank I’d weaved together jumped and scraped along the abyss wall, shaking loose dirt all over it, which rolled underneath my sliding boots and threatened to send me over.
I flashed out my hands to steady myself against something, anything, to scramble off the plank and get to Dad. My cell, my only source of light, jarred itself loose from my fingers and nosedived into hell. My fingers grasped at empty air, trying to save it, myself, the whole damned world, when piercing shrieks scattered into the wind.
Darby. Jo. Oh, God.
Leigh
My heart stuttered, but I couldn’t risk looking out over the hell hole for what could be wrong with Darby and Jo, for what was creeping up behind me, for what might already be reaching a hand out to push me over the side.
The screams continued. Wait, not screams. Scream. Jo’s scream, not Darby’s, which somehow was even worse.
I gritted my teeth against the shrieking wind, my best friend’s cries for help, the thing behind me that jumped my roots so hard, they cracked my teeth together. Finally my fingers curled around one of the roots on the tree Dad hung from, and I swung mine around to platform onto the dead grass.
My crunchy footsteps didn’t zip a pair of blue eyes in my direction. The shadows flanking Dad didn’t even move, and neither did the crumpled form in front of the tree. The headless form wearing a gray KU sweatshirt that swallowed her skeletal frame.
Sarah. It was her, but my possession no longer reanimated her. Purple energy no longer lit the flesh and bone where her head used to be. Because I didn’t have Death’s power running through me anymore? Didn’t matter.
All that mattered was clenched in her tight, pale fist—a curved ash tree key, and arcing up from it was a black silk ribbon that tied Dad to safe higher ground in the tree. I didn’t get a chance to be specific with how I wanted her to save Dad before I was swept into the Core, but this way was as good as any. Even in death, that girl had proved to be my hero again and again.
Dad was alive and unhurt and probably way pissed, but still. Rips and dirt ruined his white button-up shirt, exhaustion shaded around his eyes, but he was here with me, and that was what I wanted.
His glassy eyes ticked from the shadows flanking him to me as if he couldn’t quite believe anything he was seeing. Even though I never, ever wanted him to, he had seen me undead, and the range of emotions that played across his face at seeing me un-undead broke my heart. I would try to make it up to him for the rest of my life.
The Trinity Bleeds (The Grave Winner Book 3) Page 15