A trickle of red dribbled from her tree mouth and raced along the grooves in the dead bark to seep into the ground. That couldn’t be good. Why was she bleeding? I stepped toward her, curiosity driving my feet way more than any kind of pity. Wind howled through her branches as I came even closer.
“Shut up.”
I stood on tiptoe so I could see inside her mouth better, but I was still too vertically challenged to see anything other than bark and more bark. Maybe something had crawled inside there and died. Or maybe something had crawled inside there and she’d chomped down on it. Either way, she was drinking blood. Hopefully it wasn’t Trammeler blood since that was exactly what she needed to become Three.
My body stiffened. For several heartbeats, I just stood there staring at a spot below her mouth until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to know if something was inside the tree.
I twisted the ax around so I now held the blade and prodded the handle’s end into the hole. Out streamed more blood from the corners of her mouth. It sloshed around the inside, and when I pulled the handle out, red coated the last fourth of it.
Seeing so much blood inside her plunged a heavy weight inside my gut. This could not be good.
Using the ax wasn’t working though because I couldn’t feel what was inside. I stared down at my hands and tightened them into fists. This was going to suck so much, especially if she could bite down. If I had to choose which hand Tree Ica might take, I would choose the left one since I was right handed.
I flexed my fingers then crept my hand upward. At the same time, I leaned away as much as I could, convinced that this could be the worst idea ever. After a deep breath, I plunged my hand inside.
Warm, sticky liquid twirled my stomach. My eyes bulged as I watched for any sign that she might snap her mouth shut on my hand and readied the ax in my other hand if she did. Wind screeched while I probed with my fingers.
“I don’t like it either,” I groaned, fighting back the urge to throw up all over Ica’s trunk.
But there was nothing in there other than three knuckles full of blood. I jerked my hand back and splattered drops of red everywhere in my hurry to shake it off. So whose blood was it? Some kind of animal’s? Or a Trammeler’s? Did it belong to the same Trammeler Sorceress who’d been waking the dead?
I backed away, staring at the blood slicking my fingers, and turned to wipe it on anything but my shirt. But something snatched at my boots. I cried out and swung my arms for balance, but it was too late. I was falling. My feet were all tangled up with whatever had grabbed me.
Hands punching through graves. That was what caught my boots. Terror choked my lungs with a vicious burn. I twisted myself free and scrambled away.
But wait. Nothing moved. No rotted fingers curled up out of the ground. No skeletal heads aimed dead eyes at me while they dragged themselves out. The crazy knock of my heart and the swish of wind through the grass were the only things that moved.
I crouched there, frozen, on top of someone else’s grave for a few minutes just to be sure. So what had grabbed me? Or had I just tripped? I almost didn’t want to know but I looked behind me anyway.
A small gravestone that I hadn’t seen before jutted out of the ground. A baby cherub carrying a rattle in a chubby fist was carved into the granite, its face aimed down at the name below: Ryan Henderson.
Ryan and Sarah Henderson. Their graves were right next to each other, though one of them was still unoccupied. Where had Sarah been lately? And was this Ryan related to her somehow? There weren’t any dates on the gravestone to hint at when he’d died. As always, there were more questions than answers, and I was getting really tired of it.
When I shifted my weight back on my heels to stand, a flash of green up in the air plummeted my insides into the ground. Between the trunk of Tree Ica and the crook of a higher branch, a cluster of small buds bloomed. They looked familiar, with their curved banana-like casing and the bumps of seeds inside. From my angle in front of her, I would never have seen them. Now I did.
Ash tree keys. But they were green instead of the usual brown ones sprinkling my yard. And these were sprouting from a dead tree. A dead ash tree.
The only thing standing in the way of Ica becoming Three was that she had no Trammeler blood and she was trapped inside a dead tree. But now here she was, with blood leaking from her mouth and inside a tree that was coming back to life. Dread crept cold fingers around my heart. If someone brought Mr. Benjamin back to life, could that same someone bring Ica’s tree back to life?
My breaths came in raspy groans. I tried to swallow, but the inside of my mouth tasted like desert. Even if someone or someones were helping her, no one would be able to help her become Three if she was chopped from the planet.
But then I remembered where I stood, inside the middle of the Trinity trees, the single most powerful place. Tram said the Trinity trees were immortal, so...
Oh, no. I stared up the length of Ica’s trunk and stepped to the side a few paces. My shoulder blades prickled with what I thought might be behind me. Mr. Benjamin’s grave.
Sarah had been evicted from hers by One and Two because it was the center of a Trinity. So, what if—what if when I turned Ica into a tree, I made another Trinity? A Trinity inside a Trinity. If that was true, Mr. Benjamin’s grave could be the center of this new Trinity. And now it was empty, waiting for a Trammeler Sorceress to be buried alive.
I willed it not to be true. The oak stood behind me to my right. I could picture its green canopy and the wind sliding over each of its leaves in soft whispers. The thorn tree would stand to my left near the chain link fence on the far side of the graveyard.
And in the middle? My heart rattled against my ribcage. I took the blade of the ax and stabbed through my shirt so I could breathe. Inhale. Exhale. I had all the air I needed here, out in the open. Now wasn’t the time to freak out. I turned around.
Panic stormed through me. Without even looking at the headstone, I knew it was Mr. Benjamin’s. Fresh-packed dirt lay flat over his grave, fresh and new-looking even though his headstone crumbled at the edges. Mrs. Rios had tried to make it look like no one had been evicted, but it couldn’t fool me.
Another Trinity grave had a vacancy.
Chapter 10
I plowed down the streets with no real sense of where I was going. One of my rubber handle bars lay in the middle of the road somewhere because I twisted it off, pretending it was a certain news reporter’s head. Head turned tree trunk.
I gripped my cell phone in my blood-spattered fist, waiting for Jo to text me back. Tram needed to know. Now.
When I cut through the video store parking lot, a gray car sliced off the road and through my path. Out jumped Callum, eyebrows bunched together, jaw dangling to his chest. “Oh my God, Leigh. Is that blood? Is that an ax sticking out of your backpack?”
I started to wheel around him. “Yeah. So?”
He gripped the metal between my handle bars and shoved his face in front of mine. “Are your eyes bleeding? What the hell happened?”
I screwed my eyes shut against the sudden pinpricks of tears but didn’t trust myself enough to speak without losing it. Exhaustion seemed to always make me teeter on the edge of sobbing, but I didn’t have time for that. Tears couldn’t solve my problems, anyway.
Callum’s gaze tracked over my face while some sort of understanding melted into his expression. “Get inside,” he said quietly. “I’ll take you to school.”
“I can’t go to school like this,” I mumbled, but I gave in anyway because I didn’t want to argue. He packed my bike into the trunk while I settled myself into his car. The cinnamon mixed with taco smell helped relax the worried fist inside my gut.
“I got blood all over your car,” I finally said when we were almost at school.
“So what’s new?” His mouth tipped into a smile as he looked over his shoulder then eased the car into another lane. “I’m going to have to start keeping a first aid kit in here with your name on it. Pl
ease don’t say that’s all your blood, though. Is it?”
I looked down at my clothes and arms, striped red and sticky. Strands of my hair were glued together in stiff clumps that stuck to my cheek. Somehow blood had worked itself through all the mud still wedged under my fingernails like some kind of backward and grisly nail polish.
“No,” I said, and while I stared down at my cell phone screen, mentally screaming at Jo to text me back, I told him everything. Ica’s tree coming back. The blood inside her mouth. The second Trinity. Everything.
“When I pieced it all together, I went off on Ica,” I said, shrugging.
Callum, who hadn’t said a word during my explanation, finally glanced at me, all the color washed from his face “Did you chop her up?”
“I might as well have been using a butter knife since the muscle mass in my arms equals the center of a Cheerio. If she’s already a Trinity tree, it wouldn’t make any difference anyway,” I said and threw my cell against the dash. “Where is your sister? I need to tell Tram.”
“Her meeting with the mayor was this morning.”
“Oh, God.” I dropped my head against the window with a sigh. She’d called last night to tell me about an official recycling center meeting with the mayor in near hysterics. “I forgot. I was going to call her this morning to wish her luck.”
“It’s okay, Leigh,” Callum said as he turned into the parking lot. He stopped at the edge of the school, close to the grassy area that led to the football field, and cut the engine. “I’ll touch a tree. I’ll help you for as long as I’m...I’ll help you. Here. Put my jacket on so no one sees you.” He took it off and handed it to me in a wadded bundle with his trembling right hand.
I took his fingers instead and squeezed to still the shaking. The touch of his skin buzzed all the way up my arm, and soon the pressure of my hand over his stopped his tremor.
“Why are you always helping me?” I asked.
A wince rolled across his face as quick as a memory. “I’m the parrot to your pirate, remember?” he said and cleared his throat. “Let’s keep the bloody axe in the car. Mr. Mallory gets a little pissy about that kind of thing.”
I LOOKED LIKE A DROWNED rat in a red and black Krapper High sweat suit, but I supposed it was a massive improvement to my previous Texas Chainsaw Massacre look. My hair was still wet from my locker room shower that Mrs. Rios and Ms. Hansen had hastily escorted me to. It had hurt to see everyone’s faces fall while I connected the dots for them about the new Trinity and the green keys budding from Tree Ica. Tram’s shoulders had drooped with the weight I’d dropped on them, and I kept saying I was sorry, so sorry, even though I knew it wouldn’t help.
I sawed my teeth over my lip in the lunch line with my hands sandwiching my head so it wouldn’t explode. The lunch ladies paraded around the lunchroom banging wooden spoons against pans while singing off-key for the benefit of the seniors.
Unlike me, they seemed to enjoy it. They all sat at two long tables in the center of the cafeteria, pounding their fists or clapping along to the horrid song. This was their farewell lunch and their last day before graduation. Thankfully, Megan and Lily sat at that table rather than standing anywhere near me at the moment with their constant bouncing and gossiping and fakery. They would be thankful too, probably, since I kind of smelled like sweaty pennies even after my shower.
The lunch ladies finally ended their musical masterpiece and bowed to the audience, who gave them Lunachicks-worthy applause. All this noise would crack open my skull and spill brain juices all over the salad bar sneeze guard if this didn’t stop soon. I didn’t even know why I was in the lunch line. Habit must’ve put me there more than hunger. When was the last time I’d eaten anything? I couldn’t even remember.
When the lunch ladies resumed their posts behind the counter, the decibel level dropped some. The other students bobbed up and down in their seats like happy lilac blooms ready to burst into summer, even though the rest of them still had four more days of school. They were doing what I should be doing—planning little day trips with Jo during those lazy, sweltering days, soaking up the shade in her backyard, tossing our mostly eaten strawberries into Jo’s compost heap, and enjoying our freedom. My lack of Trammeler Sorceress know-how and the steady realization that things were still terribly wrong shackled my wrists. I didn’t know if I would ever feel free again.
Between the surges of laughter and the constant stir of movement in the cafeteria, a pair of deep brown eyes found mine. He’d washed most of the morning’s terror from his face, but the fear still lingered in his gaze. He seemed to be the only one who sat still in a sea of movement, the only one not smiling, the only one who noticed me. The rip in his t-shirt skimmed over his collar bone when he leaned his forearms on the table. He gave me a nod.
I didn’t know what it meant, but it felt like more than an acknowledgement. An ‘everything will be okay’ kind of nod? Or maybe even an ‘I believe in you’ kind. Whatever it meant, it shocked a flurry through my heart. I looked away as heat crept into my cheeks.
The lunch ladies must’ve saved up their cooking skills for today because one handed me a tray filled with a juicy-looking hamburger, potato salad, and a cupcake with a little plastic sign sticking out of it that read Happy Birthday. It wasn’t my birthday, but a quick glance around showed that it was everyone’s special day as far as the lunch ladies were concerned. Birthday, graduation—it was pretty much the same thing.
Ms. Hansen stood with shoulders stooped behind two freshmen sitting at the ancient computers in the library, directing them with a finger to create a works cited page. Her gray hair striped over the thin line of her mouth and tucked itself inside. She waved but she didn’t smile. It had been a tough morning for all of us.
Jo looked up from a book at our table with bits of pink frosting speckling her lips. “Places to go, people to see, and trees to kill,” she said in a low voice. “But I still don’t know how to do it. Poison can sometimes take years.”
“Callum filled you in?” I asked, sitting beside her.
She flipped a few pages and hunkered down over the table, almost nose-to-nose with the print. Concentration etched a permanent V on her forehead. “He called just as I was leaving the mayor’s.”
It bothered me to see Jo researching tree murder when she’d spent so much of her life trying to save them. I slid the book out from under her gaze and snapped it closed. “How did the meeting go?”
“Leigh, what are you doing?” A note of desperation pitched her voice higher. Her wide, expressive eyes pleaded with mine. “What if Ica comes back?”
“Then Tram and I will deal with it. You shouldn’t be learning about killing a living thing no matter who or what it is. Do I need to give you lecture 101?” I handed her one of my napkins.
She took the hint and rubbed it over her mouth. “But then what if something else goes wrong? What if something happens to you?” She buried her head in her hands, not quite hiding the tears that gathered in the corners of her eyes. “No offense, Leigh, but I hate your new job as a teenage mutant Trammeler Sorceress.”
“Hey,” I said, touching her shoulder firm enough so she would look at me through the spaces between her fingers. “I know you do. I’m not exactly comfortable with it either, and it makes me sick to watch you get upset about it.” I swallowed the bitter taste of what our conversations had become. Where did our rebellious, fun times in the library go? “Let’s talk about something else.” Since now wasn’t the time to tell her I burned down our favorite store, anyway. I plucked the happy birthday sign out of my cupcake and handed it to her. “I want you to have a very happy birthday and tell me all about your meeting.”
That got a tiny smile out of her. “It went really well.”
“Spill it.”
“He said he’s impressed with my devotion and wished that more young people were just like me. He said our little town is woefully behind the times and should have had a recycling center ten years ago.” She turned her head and
smiled into her shrug. “I’m to go in front of the city council next week with my proposal.”
I slapped the table hard enough to make both our trays jump. “So awesome. And is he going to endorse you for president of the universe after we get a recycling center?”
“No, but he did say he’d write me a killer letter of recommendation when I graduate.” Her eyes brightened with her grin. She bounced in her chair so much, I barely even noticed when her hand shot out and stole my cupcake. It was unwrapped and in her mouth in seconds. A muffled squeal came out with a spray of crumbs. “No bad fo a Kwappa resi’ent, huh?”
“Not bad at all, Jo. I’m proud of you.”
She swallowed and then smiled. “Thanks. I’m proud of me, too. Miguel says he’s going to make me a t-shirt that says Badass Recycler on the front.”
“He better,” I said.
“Well, I couldn’t have done it without my best friend,” she said and scooted her crumby mess into a pile. “I have something else to tell you. That was the good news, but this is...”
I leaned back in my chair, eyeing her closely. “Bad news?”
“It depends on how you look at it. It’s about Cal,” she said with a sigh.
“What?” I fiddled with a sesame seed on my bun, not at all sure I wanted to know bad news about Callum. He hadn’t done anything stupid like get back with Megan, had he? But why should I care if he had?
“Graduation’s on Saturday, and my parents are having a party for him tomorrow night. You’re invited, of course.”
“Okay.” Another party. I’d ended up being dragged across the graveyard by two dead Sorceressi at the last party I went to. That kind of partied me out, but for Jo, maybe I would go to this one. Maybe. “That’s the bad news?”
“No.” She winced then spilled the rest out in a rush. “He’s leaving Sunday morning for college because his new coach wants him to help with some kind of summer camp, so he’s leaving. For good, and I should’ve told you this days ago, but the Sorceressi were counting down the days until your death, and I was all possessed and it just didn’t seem like a good time.”
What Gifts She Carried Page 10