What Gifts She Carried

by Lindsey R. Loucks

  My hands trembled so hard, my fingers felt rubbery. But I was tired of being scared all the time, and I didn’t want to see pity in Tram’s eyes when he looked at me again. Anger surged through my clenched fists. It was just an empty old building anyway.

  The building appeared smaller as we neared it, as if it was crouched and ready to pounce. Someone’s motor growled to life somewhere behind it, making it seem like it came from inside the new glass door. Last time I’d been here, Ica had thrown a hammer through it to take me out.

  Tram saw me eyeing it as we stepped closer. “I had it replaced by a friend of a friend. I couldn’t have regular customers wandering in through a shattered door and seeing the state of the place.”

  “So how do we get in?”

  He pulled a key from his pocket, which gleamed in the headlights of a passing car. “Luckily I have one of these.”

  We waited until the car turned the corner, and then Tram zipped the key into the lock. When he pushed the door open, the bell above dinged. It was such a familiar sound, one that used to fill me with me with anticipation of what new flowery skirt Jo would find or if anything black or plaid jumped out of the crowded racks at me. I half expected to see the granny twins behind the counter doing their windshield wiper interpretive dance thing in greeting. They weren’t, of course. I looked to the left, a shiver racing up my back. But they weren’t there either, and they should’ve been because that was where they died in their spidery form.

  “Tram.” My voice sounded clipped and shaky. I leaned my back into his chest since I still hadn’t taken a step inside. “Where’s the giant spider that was here? The granny one.”

  He followed my gaze but shook his head. “There was no giant spider.”

  “Yes. Yes, there was. The Sorceressi killed it with hammers and shovels. It died right there. I saw it.”

  “I would have seen a giant spider even if it was dead, but I didn’t.” He nudged my elbow with his arm, which held the door open for both of us. “When I got here, there was nothing but a destroyed store.”

  So someone had moved the spider. Or it had moved itself. Maybe it was crawling around in the darkness right now, coming closer, to bite its oozing fangs into my head and tear it off. The thought scuttled over all my goose bumps at once.

  “The store is empty. I’ve been here multiple times a day to check. There’s a candle behind the counter that survived. I’ll go light it if you let me past,” Tram said.

  I slid to the side, and my boot slipped over the metal entry and splashed into a pond of water. Tram sloshed through with every step inside.

  The place didn’t smell right at all. Gone were the mothballs and wood and used clothes smell. Now, mildew and smoke thickened the air and made it hard to breathe. Black scorch marks trailed over the floor, walls, and ceiling. The rack of clothes on the other side of the open door offered crumbly bits of fabric in the skeletal shape of coats. Beyond that I couldn’t see, until a flicker of light bounced over Tram’s face.

  “You can come in now,” he said, his voice soft as the flame.

  With a deep breath of toxic air that would probably end my life five years sooner, I let the door fall closed behind me with a ding of the bell. “Whatever you have to show me better knock my socks off.”

  “Understood,” he said and rounded the checkout counter deeper into the store.

  The counter sagged low to the ground in the middle as if someone had karate chopped it, and the mangled bug rings I’d always hated scattered around the bottom. Tram’s candle leaped shadows over them, making them come alive with strange, jerky movements.

  I followed, the cold water seeping through my boots and numbing my feet, but I slowed as soon as I realized where he was headed. He opened a door on the back wall of the store. A steady drip leaked from the ceiling to the stone steps that plunged to the left and down into darkness.

  “You seriously want me to go down there?”

  Tram offered me a hand. “I seriously do.”

  “Nothing ever good happens in old, drippy basements. You know that, right?”

  “It’s just a basement. Nothing more.”

  I looked behind me, my lips twisted with doubt. A pile of belts lay underneath a rack on the soaked floor, coiled together like writhing snakes. A singed teddy bear on a nearby display eyed me with a lone blue button. It had an ax buried inside its stomach. I took the handle, and dropping the attached bear to the floor, I stepped on its head and tore the blade loose in a flurry of white cotton.

  “Well,” I said, testing its weight by giving the ax handle a dramatic twirl, “it can’t be any worse than up here.”

  Tram nodded, a grin splitting his mouth wide. “You catch on quick.”

  Chapter 7

  A shaky puff of cold blew from my lips as we stepped down into the dungeon. Black and green fuzz traced the cracks in the wall up to the crumbling ceiling. With each step down, visions of the whole building crashing down on top of our heads threatened to burst my heart out of my chest. I pushed those lovely thoughts away by focusing on how deep I could bury my fingernails into the ax handle.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Tram entered through a door on the left. “In here.”

  “What’s in the rest of the rooms?” I asked. There were two other doors in the cramped hallway, bordered off by a tangle of tree branches.

  “They’re locked.”

  “To keep the cute Trammelers out?” It was an inappropriate thing to say in such a creepy place, but I would say just about anything if it helped me forget where I was for a second.

  “They’re locked by my roots to sense anyone who’s here,” he said and turned, the candle’s flame catching the twinkle in his eye. “Are you flirting with me?”

  A slow burn inched to my cheeks. I smiled down at my boots and shrugged. “I’m surprised you know what flirting is, you being a tree and all.”

  He pinned me to the spot with his sharp gaze while he walked toward me. Tucking a finger under my chin, he tipped my face so his warm, sunshine-kissed breath breezed across my lips. “It might surprise you how much I do know.” He lifted an eyebrow, as though he dared me to think about that for a while. The slow burn turned into a rioting fire that danced over every part of my skin.

  “Besides, you’re part tree, too,” he tossed over his shoulder as he stepped into the unlocked room.

  Oh, yeah. You’d think I would remember something like that.

  Inside looked like a storeroom lined with dozens of thin shelves packed full of glass bottles and vases, old clocks, and knickknacks that reminded me of what Grandma sent me every year for Christmas. Large pieces of framed art slanted against recliners around the floor of the room. An ugly orange couch crowded the edge of another door.

  “Is this what’s in the other rooms, too? Just more junk?” I asked.

  Tram stepped to a countertop below the shelves and touched his candle to another one. “It’s more of the same.”

  “But your branches can’t sense spiders,” I reminded him. Because what if the granny twin spider was here?

  “Except spiders,” he agreed with a frown. “Do you want me to go check them? For your peace of mind?”

  “I don’t know what peace of mind is,” I said, “but yeah. Yeah, I do.”

  He nodded, not appearing to be bothered by my request at all, and left me alone in the room while he checked.

  I wandered to the end of the ugly couch toward the other door, the candlelight on the counter deepening the orange upholstery to a bloody red. The least I could do to help ease my list of fears was to inspect some of the building myself. After all, I had an ax. An ax and some superpowers. A deep breath and a flurry of heartbeats later, I pushed the door next to the couch open. An empty, tiny bathroom didn’t need to be added to my lengthy list.

  Just as I closed the door, Tram walked in.

  “All clear,” he announced and stepped toward me and the end of the couch. “Do you remember One and Two calling Gretchen’s triplet babies gi
fts? A few of these things were gifts for people’s dead relatives to bribe the Counselor so he wouldn’t convict them to the Core.”

  “Right,” I said with a nod. “Because the Counselor took Gretchen’s gifts, her babies, to the Core. She went psycho and started killing everyone who left regular gifts at graveyards because she felt the Counselor didn’t need anything else after what he took from her. I know this already, Tram.”

  He looked around, his expression thoughtful. “The Counselor doesn’t care about gifts, though. He’ll convict someone to the Core if he wants to. I think all this just helps people cope with their loss more than anything.”

  I wasn’t so sure digging in Mom’s grave to keep her there could be called coping, but maybe in some ways it was. I did get to talk to her, after all, and see her smiling face on her picture in her headstone. It didn’t make the sting any less painful, but nothing ever would. But in some small way, giving her gifts did make me feel like I was doing something for her, even though in reality it caused heaps of trouble for me.

  But according to One and Two, my real gifts to the dead hadn’t been Callum’s ring or any of the other things I buried inside Mom’s grave. The real gift was my blood, which contained both Trammeler and Sorceress and was exactly what they were looking for since they were Trammeler Sorceressi, too. My death would’ve been known as the Trinity of gifts—Trammeler, Sorceress, Death—which would’ve taken place in the center of the Trinity trees—ash, oak, hawthorn—and would’ve freed Gretchen’s three Trinity babies, or gifts as she called them, from the Core. Gretchen’s triplets held the Trinity of gifts because, like me, she was both a Trammeler and a Sorceress and they were fathered by the Counselor of Death himself.

  What a weird love story that must’ve been.

  “Do you still hide people’s gifts at the graveyard under hawthorn leaves?” I asked.

  “Yes. Death’s tree hides things from the dead. It makes those things undetectable.”

  “Undetectable. Kind of like me when I was bit by a spider.”

  He nodded. “The spider also comes from the hawthorn. That’s why its legs look like thorns.”

  “Death’s tree is pretty sneaky.”

  “So is the Counselor.” Shadows darkened Tram’s face as he turned away from the candle and cleared his throat. “But I leave the gifts that were given where they are, hidden by hawthorn leaves, of course, for the benefit of the living.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” I said and held his gaze to make sure he knew I really meant it.

  He tore his eyes from mine, but not before I caught a bright tint in his cheeks that had nothing to do with the glow of the candle. “Most people know not to leave gifts in the first place anymore since Gretchen killed most everyone who did.”

  “You tried to warn me about that, but I just thought you were a lunatic.”

  Tram exhaled on a chuckle but tried to cover it with a cough. The Counselor’s bells tinkled anyway but ended abruptly on an upswing, almost like a question. “Well, now I know how well you listen.”

  I bit back a laugh. “Will you do that forever, hide people’s gifts at the graveyard, if they’re stupid enough to leave them, I mean? Even with all the dead Sorceressi locked up tight?”

  “It’s part of my job to make sure no one leaves anything for the dead, so yes.”

  “So, you said some of these things were stolen from people’s graves by Gretchen?” I looked around at what was mostly junk, at least to me, but for the people who left these items at graves, they probably held a lot more value. Like the picture frames, garden gloves, and sheet music I’d buried with Mom.

  “Yes, but that’s not all I wanted to show you.” Tram shook a finger in the air and marched across the room.

  Watching him made me smile since his sharp focus and determination kind of reminded me of a mad scientist, especially with that finger wag he just did. He reached into one of the vases and pulled out some folded papers.

  “It wasn’t that impressive couch you wanted to show me?” I asked, coming up behind him.

  “No. Look.” He unfolded the paper and smoothed it flat on the counter below the shelves, but a familiar black book with silver lettering prevented me from looking at anything else.

  It was the book. Resurrection: Dark Magic to Bring Back the Ones You Love.

  Flashes of the night before burst unwanted memories into my head. The graveyard. The sick, squishy sound of bones moving through the earth. Muddy hands twisting skyward from the ground. Rusty moans from fleshless faces.

  Mom.

  “Get that thing away from me!” The volume of my voice slashed chasms into the stone walls with every echo.

  Tram jumped. He must’ve read the horror that was surely written all over my face and seemed to piece everything together as his gaze trailed to what I couldn’t stop staring at. His hand shot out, and he flung the book into a far corner.

  “Leigh,” he said, breathless, as he took me by the shoulders. “You say the word, and we’ll leave. I’m sorry you had to see that. I should have moved it.”

  “It wasn’t the same,” I said, focusing on the strength in his sharp gaze. “It looked newer than the one we had at home.” It seemed important to tell him that, as if it would somehow make seeing that book less horrible. It didn’t, though. I squeezed my eyes shut to keep the book’s image behind the thick wall of fog, along with everything else I couldn’t handle. When I finally opened them again, I said, “I’m fine. Really.”

  Maybe it was the obvious wobble in my voice or the goose bumps pebbling my skin under Tram’s thumbs, but I didn’t think he believed me. The lines in his puckered forehead cut too deep.

  “You say the word,” he said again.

  At my nod, he turned back to the counter with a hand cupped tightly around my waist. “These are all the locations for Trinity graves. It’s not often that the ash, oak, and hawthorn grow together in a graveyard with a grave in the exact center, but it happens more than you might think.”

  What he pointed to was a faded world map singed black on the corners and ends. Circled in green were a few places all across the world, but only three places were circled in red, including Krapper, Kansas.

  “One, Gretchen’s sister, died at a graveyard here,” Tram said, pointing to another town circled in red in Canada named Timmins. “Two died here.” He pointed to the third, Cody, Wyoming. “And here’s our Trinity grave.”

  I didn’t have to look to see where that one was. Tram pointed to each spot on the map until it made a pattern—a triangle. Isosceles, if I remembered right, and tipped on its side.

  “So those places, those are hinges to the door to the Core,” I said. “Why those places?”

  “The Trinities in Cody, Wyoming, and Timmins bled after the Sorceresses were resurrected, and that’s how I knew they were true hinges, but...” Tram rested both hands on the top of the map, as though if he pressed hard enough the real Core would never break open. “Did you always live here?”

  “We moved from Arizona six years ago. Dad found a good job as an accountant and...”

  Oh, God. Mom. Soon after we moved to Krapper, she went all tight-lipped on Dad except at night when she thought I was asleep. She wanted to go back, but every time Dad would ask why, she could never give a reason. She knew. Mom must’ve found out there was a Trinity in the graveyard here, but she couldn’t do anything about it other than to solve the problem herself. That must be why she became Tram’s anonymous Trammeler to get rid of the threat that hung over her daughters’ lives.

  “One and Two weren’t from Canada or Wyoming either. It’s almost like Gretchen pulled them there somehow because of what they are.”

  “Tram, how long did my mom work for you?”

  “The first time I knew she existed, she left a note on a little white card back when I lived in Wyoming a few months ago.”

  I gave a harsh gasp and leaned against the table for support. It wasn’t that it surprised me or anything, but just hearing him say that as
sured me it was her. Even in death, she couldn’t stop writing notes or looking out for me. I pressed my knuckles to my mouth and breathed through them to keep the sting from my eyes, but it didn’t do any good.

  “What did that first note say?” I asked.

  “‘Go to Kansas when you’re of age.’ I didn’t know another Trammeler existed, but I figured I would trust someone with more experience than me to know where the danger was. It turned out I was right.”

  “But how did she know you existed?”

  “Maybe she knew my foster parents somehow.”

  “Did they know what you were?”

  “They knew everything even though neither of them had a magical bone in their bodies. They homeschooled me so I could teach myself how to be a Trammeler. They moved to the country just outside Cody, Wyoming when I accidentally destroyed our house while I was practicing with my roots and branches just so I would have more space. They helped me seal off the graveyard that Two had been buried in when I was nine. They called me son when my real parents didn’t want me,” he said, and his Adam’s apple bounced with his swallow. “They did everything for me.”

  I rested a dirt-smudged hand on his pristinely clean sweatshirt. “You miss them.”

  His jaw tightened. “My duty is here.”

  “Your duty is to that stupid Counselor. What if you just quit? He’s too distracted to notice, anyway.”

  “I can’t quit being a Trammeler. It’s who I am,” he said, coming closer. His penetrating look raised every hair on my body. “It’s who you are, too.”

  A faint ding upstairs wrenched our chins toward the ceiling. The floor above our heads creaked.

  “Oh, no,” I whispered. “I didn’t lock the door.”

  “It’s just Mrs. Rios. Wait here. There are more things I want to show you.” He took a candle and the map with him on the way out the door. “Oh, and this is why you had to come here to see the map.” As soon as he stepped out into the hallway, the map caught fire by itself. He leaped back inside the room, waving the flames out, and handed it back to me.