They. Were not. Budging. When I glanced again at Jo’s watch, tears welled in my eyes. Three seconds.
A frustrated, monstrous hiss poured from deep inside me toward the hawthorns growing from our house. They exploded in a puff of woodchips and fell to the yard several feet away from the lilacs.
Two.
I dove after them as quick as I could through our sludge yard, scooped some up, and launched them at the lilacs with every ounce of strength I had left.
One.
The lilacs’ thick stems and petals caught them. The earth bucked both Darby and I off our feet, and we pitched sideways. Had I done it? Had I beat the sunrise? Or was this the Core holding its door open for good?
“The darkness…” Darby rasped, and it almost sounded like regular Darby protesting about what lurked inside Ica.
I pushed myself to my feet once again on the unsteady, rolling ground to see Darby baring her teeth up at a falling star. It hovered above her, a beacon of white light, small like an orb and one that I’d seen before. Was she talking about it? Because it was far from dark.
“So…dark…so…”
Something buckled the street with a loud series of explosions, everywhere like gunshots. I leaped to Darby’s side over the boiling, shaking ground to both shield her from whatever was happening and to hold her steady so Ica wouldn’t hurt her even worse than she already was.
“Let her go, Ica!” I shouted. “I’m the one you hate. Hurt me instead!”
Darby’s frail body thrashed against my grip, and between her and the trembling earth, it felt as if we were riding a massive, hellish rollercoaster that had no beginning and no end.
In the street, dark masses bloomed from the ground around the Sorceressi, silencing their growling moans, covering their glowing blue eyes in a thick mask made of bark. Big, beautiful ash trees, as alive as I was, covered the length of the street where Sorceressi once stood, a victorious flutter turning the stems of their enormous leaves. Roots lifted from their bases to gently catch the falling unmagical undead, who were now dead once again, and sweep them below ground where they could rest in eternal sleep.
“Too dark…killing…”
I snapped my gaze to Darby, whose wide eyes faded to normal blue then glowed once more. They aimed toward an old woman with milky white eyes kneeling over her feet. Mrs. Star, the lady from the library basement who had erased my tattoo and ridded me of spider poison, the owner of the star who had followed us home and now hung just above our heads. She’d wrenched one of Darby’s long sleeves up her arm, had somehow wrestled her bundle of hawthorn sticks away, and pointed their sharp thorns directly at Darby.
“Wait,” I shouted. “What are you doing?”
Mrs. Star coiled the sticks behind her head. “Gettin’ the darkness out a’ her.”
“Too dark! She’s killing me!” Darby shouted.
Mrs. Star brought the branches down toward the spider bites that marked Darby’s bare arm. At the back of my mind, I knew she was trying to help, just like she had helped me, but I threw out a hand to stop her anyway. A purple storm of lightning bolts shot out of my fingertips and laid the frail old woman out.
But not before she’d nicked the crease above Darby’s elbow. Darby screamed in Ica’s razored voice. Thick black spider venom lifted from Darby’s arm in a slow spiral toward the bright star hovering over her, the same as when Mrs. Star had emptied me of the ink from my three tattoo. Darby’s eyes flickered from normal to not in the span of seconds like a devil’s disco ball.
“It’s…everywhere! It’s…” A curl of smoke puffed from between Darby’s lips and evaporated into the air. Into nothingness. Gone.
I blinked, not quite sure I believed it had really happened. Or what had happened. Had Darby been talking about the darkness that had possessed her in the form of Ica? Or had that been Ica describing the darkness inside Darby?
Darby’s shoulders and arms relaxed. Her chest rose on a deep breath, and her eyes fluttered open to meet mine.
“What?” she asked, her voice irritated.
I had no words to answer her, so I looked for some kind of help in Mrs. Star. She stared down at Darby with unseeing eyes, but I knew she saw everything clearer than I did.
“Is it over?” I asked. “Did we win?”
The forest of trees on my street fluttered their green leafy canopy over what was trapped inside like a relieved exhale. I could feel the escaped Sorceressi’s power contained in the trunks and could almost breathe easy, too, if it weren’t for the growing worry creasing Mrs. Star’s face as she gazed down on Darby.
I followed her gaze and brushed Darby’s baby-soft cheek with my thumb as she caught her breath and blinked hardened, yet normal, eyes up at me.
“I fear it won’ ever be over, my child,” Mrs. Star finally said and turned to face the street. “Especially for you.”
Leigh
Three days later, Callum and I drove through the cleared streets of Krapper on our way to Heartland Cemetery. One by one and at a rapid speed, the new trees had vanished, quicker than their blossoming into existence. Poof. There and then gone. Lily and Tram were keeping busy convicting all the escapees back to the Core.
According to Callum, the hinge between the Trinity trees had been restored when I’d thrown the black sticks into the pregnant garden. The fallen gates had been magically erected, and the jagged chasm that had been the graveyard had sealed almost instantly.
Other than people’s trashed houses and the stain on their memories from that night, everything appeared to be back to normal. Rumors flew all over town about what happened, including an alien invasion, the zombie apocalypse, the Bible edition of the end of days, and a worldwide drug-induced hallucination caused by toxic mushrooms.
I steered clear of the blab food chain and focused my efforts on picking up the pieces. Callum and Mr. Monroe covered the front of our house with loose boards and a tarp while Dad talked to the insurance company for hours in an attempt to explain what happened with a bunch of half-truths. Meanwhile, Jo and I helped our Krapper neighbors clean up since I had no idea what Dad wanted to do with the enormous trees growing from inside Darby’s room.
We had been talking a lot, me and Dad, about Mom and the Counselor, about me and my Trammeler Sorceress future. He was trying to understand himself just as much as he was me, and I totally got what that was like. It couldn’t be easy finding out you were something other than what you thought, at any age.
And Darby… She was staying with her friend Maria during the cleanup. I couldn’t form words around everything that had happened with her because my thoughts were a jumbled mass of confusion. So, I stayed quiet, but the knot of doubts I held grew heavier every day.
“You’re quiet,” Callum said while stopped at a stop sign. “Should I be worried?”
“Probably.” My breath fogged the glass on the passenger window, and a small smile tilted my lips.
His car was still wrecked, but he drove it anyway. His plan was to work over the summer to pay it off, here in town, with me, then go to the local community college and play baseball there once the scratched retina in his eye healed. He wore a patch over it, all pirate-like, which meant every day was Talk Like a Pirate Day whenever we were together. And that was a lot.
He used to say I was the pirate to his parrot, but I was pretty sure we’d turned that around. A lot had turned around, including the taco cinnamon smell that used to fill his car. It now smelled like leather and shampoo. Not my favorite, but I could live with it. I could live with most anything.
He seemed happy with his decision to stay, and his happiness bloomed warmth through my chest every time I saw him smile, every time he touched me, kissed me. I was thrilled he’d chosen to stay, and sure, that might make me seem selfish, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Denying the truth wouldn’t change it, no matter how much I used to want to.
I gazed down at the ring he’d given me all those weeks ago, at the way the sun caught the silver engraved lilacs and somehow gave
them a purplish tint like the real thing. My still blackened knuckles rubbed against the leg of my skinny jeans, hidden from view in case thorns burst out of them.
My other hand was clasped with Callum’s on the space between our seats. Whatever he had seen that night after I left him with Mom, whatever he’d been through before trying to bury her once again, caused his hand to shake constantly unless I was holding it. Which I gladly did. I would spend a lifetime trying to find a way to thank him for all that he’d done for her.
“I’m just thinking about you and this town and my new job as a Trammeler Sorceress and…lots of other stuff,” I said.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said, stepping on the gas. “Let’s go back to the part where you were thinking about me. Were you thinking about how you should’ve gotten with me a long time ago? About how amazing I am?”
I snorted. “It’s a good thing your ego didn’t suffer any damage because I’m not sure you would be able to function without it.”
“But I’m right, aren’t I.” He said it like a statement, and his mouth curled into a slow grin that sped my pulse.
“Why don’t you keep telling yourself that.” I rolled my eyes even though he couldn’t see it through my sunglasses.
“Oh, I will.” He laughed as he flicked on his turn signal at the intersection that led to the graveyard. “But you want to know what I was thinking?”
“Hmm.”
As we went past the video store, I craned my neck to see sunlight gleaming on a new pair of double glass doors. Because it was something I thought Tram would do, I called the manager and offered to replace them since my power had accidentally smashed through them, knowing full-well I only had a dollar and forty-seven cents to my name. But as soon as the owner found out who she was speaking to, she said not to worry about it.
“Our Trammeler saved the world. Thank you,” she’d said and hung up on me.
Okay then.
“I was thinking that you’re sitting in my car, with me, and we’re not fighting or running for our lives. Weird, huh?” He pinned me with a look from his soulful brown eye that promised me a forever with him.
A forever I vowed to take.
My cheeks heated under his scorching gaze. “Eye on the road, dude. And the day is still young. There’s plenty of time for screaming and maiming and general mayhem.”
“Good.” He rubbed his thumb over my knuckles, the knuckles that weren’t marked by the Counselor’s thorns, each slide of his fingers powering my need to never let him go. “I was starting to lose hope.”
Not like I thought there would be, but there wasn’t any sign of Dad’s sad jeep or the smashed spider underneath it in the parking lot when we pulled in to the graveyard parking lot. Maybe they’d both fallen into the earth before the Core had closed back up. For now, Dad was driving a car he’d borrowed from a friend to and from work. He’d said he didn’t care about the jeep, didn’t even seem mad about it. Just beyond happy to have me back and that he couldn’t hear me screaming inside his head anymore. That made two of us.
On the open gate in front of us, a painted, glittery sign read THANK YOU, OUR TRAMMELER SORCERESS! Streamers and balloons flapped in the wind from the gate’s corners and tangled around and between the bars in impossible knots, and I had to wonder if that was what was keeping it anchored there.
“What’s all this?” I asked, pointing, even though it reeked of my very best friend.
She had no doubt bought every bottle of glitter in Krapper. Happy dust, she called it. I called it an addiction, but who was I to judge?
Callum lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “You really have to ask?”
We stepped out of the car, and I quickly adjusted my sunglasses to ward off the daylight. Following my first escape from the Trinity grave, I developed a severe sun allergy. Now, the sun physically exhausted me. I preferred to play in the dark with all my vampire friends, of which I had none, and that was something else that gave me self-analysis paralysis. It was too scary to think about.
I circled the hood, already missing the warmth of Callum’s hand. His trembling fingers stilled the second I took them in mine, and his resulting grin triggered an equally large one that hurt my cheeks. All this goofy smiling probably made me look like a dumbass, but I didn’t care. Life, being alive, being me, was good, and I so desperately wanted to keep it that way.
“So you didn’t have any part in this?” I asked.
“A little.” The wind fanned his bed-head even more as he slid closer, so close, my skin heated, and not from his warm cinnamon breath on my forehead either. With a slow finger, he grazed my blowing hair up past my jaw and behind my ear, leaving me breathless. “I kept you distracted.”
“Pretty sure it was the other way around,” I said, or tried to, since I couldn’t seem to get enough air.
His buzz touch melted everything else away until it was just his playful dark eye searching mine, filling my vision until I stood on tiptoe to mold my lips and tongue with his. My whole body rioted every time we kissed, a frenzied live Lunachicks concert, or what I imagined one to be like since I’d never been, mixed with the heavy bass beat of my heart. Exhilarating and with zero ringing bells, thank God, courtesy of Tram.
I pulled away at the thought of him, grasping at the tear in the neck of Callum’s t-shirt to steady myself, not because I felt guilty about kissing Callum while thinking about Tram, but because all kinds of guilt weighed on my shoulders.
Tram would never have this, any of it, and despite his strict sense of honor, that really sucked. Lily had given up everything, too, proving once again how much I’d underestimated her.
“You’re thinking about him again, aren’t you?” he asked it softly, concerned, and not at all judgey.
When I explained how I came back from the dead, I didn’t think I could make it any clearer that I—scratch that, no one—would be standing here with as much peace as we could muster if it wasn’t for Tram and Lily. Callum knew that better than anyone.
“Not just him,” I said.
Callum nodded at our twined hands. “I wish I knew what to say to make all this easier for you.”
“Me, too,” I said, following the direction of his gaze and knowing if I let him go, some of the same demons that tormented me would continue to shake through him. So, I couldn’t let them. “Now prepare to be happy dust-bombed.”
On our way down the rocky white path into the graveyard, small wreaths of dandelions, feathers, leaves, and sticks decorated the tops of all the headstones. Not just hawthorn sticks, either—used to hide gifts from dead Sorceressi—but all kinds. These were gifts for the dead, a celebration of remembrance, and we didn’t have to be afraid of giving them anymore.
When we came upon Jo and Miguel decorating Mom’s grave, my chin wobbled, and a rush of emotions pulled at my throat. Larger wreaths, a number of colorful flower bouquets, and even a couple balloons on strings attached to heavy rocks rested at the base of her headstone.
Jo did a double-take when she saw me and slapped a hand over her mouth while she took in my expression. With another hand thrown over the first for good measure, she charged at me, then threw her arms around my neck.
“Do you like it?” she asked, her voice muffled and just as watery as the cheek pressed to mine.
I couldn’t speak. I just held her tighter and nodded.
“I hope your mom likes happy dust, because I sprinkled some over her.”
A choked laugh fell out of my mouth, and I nodded again. Maybe someday I would actually be able to speak, but for now, nods and tears were about all I could manage.
Jo pulled away, wiping a frilly sleeve across her face, and said, “Come see Sarah’s grave.”
Another nod while I swiped at my face, too. She skipped ahead with Miguel in tow, but I stayed back with Callum and Mom.
The sun lit the picture embedded in her headstone, and it almost seemed as if she was staring at me through that Fourth of July memory and into the present. Her smile was bigger, her blu
e eyes brighter, and she seemed happy. Maybe even proud, but also at peace, as she should be.
My gaze tracked the ground underneath the flowers automatically for a little white card, but I wasn’t all that surprised when I didn’t see one. I hoped she had moved on after her spirit had witnessed me piecing the world back together again, after I’d avenged her murder, but a small part of me also hoped she would continue to leave notes. Her guidance, just her thinking of me, made me feel less lonely without her.
I clasped Callum’s trembling hand again in my own and said, “Thank you.”
He stared off into the distance, worlds away except for the tick in his jaw like an unwanted recollection beating into his head. Someday that haunted look on his face would break free, but for now, all I could do was be there for him. He obviously needed to make sense of everything he had done for Mom, and his being here at the graveyard showed progress. For me, too.
I tugged him to follow up the path toward the center of the Trinity, the place where it had all begun. Less than seventy-two hours ago, I had been in the same place Sarah was now, six feet under a mound of dirt. Terrified of death, of the unknown.
But instead of allowing fear to quake through my bones at the reminder, a quiet kind of resolve filled my lungs along with my next breath. I died and came back, and though the future still held the unknown, I had accepted my fate as a Trammeler Sorceress. Death was no longer something to be feared, whether the Counselor’s personification of it or not. I’d been dead, defeated it, but hadn’t bought the t-shirt.
“What do you think?” Jo asked, flapping her arm wings around her head.
At the base of Sarah’s headstone, a wreath and bouquet leaned against a simple wooden plaque that read Hero.
“It’s perfect.” I couldn’t think of another word that fit Sarah better.
If it wasn’t for her, I would’ve lost so much more than my life. The night after she saved Dad, I went back for her, and armed with a shovel and her head that had rolled to the far fence to keep me company, I buried her myself. Hers was the only deadly presence I could handle, and I missed it. I missed her.
The Trinity Bleeds (The Grave Winner Book 3) Page 17