“You’ve done plenty,” I croaked.
“Be...brave.” She squeezed my hands tight with a small nod. Then she lay her head down, and the light went out inside her eyes.
I gave her fingers a little shake, not wanting to damage her any further, not wanting to let her go. “M-Ms. Hansen? Please, Ms. Hansen, don’t go. Don’t—”
The ground disintegrated under my feet into a dark abyss. I snatched at scattered silver and gold statue heads, broken glass, pieces of tile and plaques, anything. Nothing supported my weight until I grabbed hold of a jagged bit of concrete that rimmed the hole two feet below the surface of the ground. My feet dangled into oblivion while I tried to pull myself up. Ms. Hansen’s limp arms dangled over the edge as though she was reaching for me, but she was too far away. Too far away.
“Release me or I’ll take her head off to see what’s inside just before I push her in with you.” Ica’s voice dragged thorns across my skin.
Darby sat above me to the side, arms and legs twitching, her feet dragging against the chasm wall, head bent to the side at the near-breaking point. Her eyes changed back to normal for the split-second it took for a tear to track down her face.
I reeled the roots back in, even the scorched ones around Ica. I didn’t have a choice. But I wouldn’t be able to hold on for much longer. I tried to pull myself up but couldn’t get a good grip. My fingers slipped. My heart beat a roar through my head. I bit my nails into the sharp ledge and kicked my legs for some kind of foothold. Pieces of stone and dirt bounced into the darkness below. The toe of my right boot finally found a pipe sticking out of the wall of the cavernous hole. But before I could draw a relieved breath, Darby opened her mouth once again.
“Show her,” she said just as Ica stepped to the edge beside her.
Darby drew up the sleeve of her right arm. A curved black tattoo had grown out of the spider bite there and inked over her forearm. Two.
A sob split through the quiet as sharp as the knife cutting into my heart. “You can’t have her!”
“Yes. She gave her gifts to the dead. She volunteered to be my Two. Sure, she had some prodding from me, but it still counts.”
Her drawing of Mom. Her drawing with her blood on it in the graveyard. She had given gifts. Had that been from Ica’s prodding, too?
“Did you take her Trammeler blood?” I asked.
“No. It was given to me.”
A bright white anger fumed through my veins. “By who? Your spidery great aunts? Darby would never go to the graveyard alone.”
The top of Darby’s tattoo curved onto her wrist, her bones there so thin and delicate, I could wrap my whole hand around them. I tore my gaze from Darby and aimed the deepest kind of hatred I’d ever felt toward this dead spider bitch.
“You don’t want her as your Two,” I shouted. “She’s only nine. She’s weak. You let her go, or I swear I’ll destroy you.”
“You’ll want to destroy me anyway, whether she’s Two or not. So what are you going to do now?”
“No,” I whispered, but it lost itself in Darby’s sharp gasps.
Black smoke hovered over her shoulder. She looked at me with normal Darby eyes, round and terrified behind her glasses. “Leigh, what’s happening? Where’s Dad?”
The horror in her eyes brought tears to mine. “It’s okay. It’ll be okay,” I said and wished the soothing note in my voice could ease the dread weighing on my shoulders.
That was a promise I’d given her, and I would do anything, anything, to keep it. My heart thundered. I closed my eyes while my insides tumbled to my feet like they were shrinking away from what that promise meant.
“Make me your Three,” I said.
Ica looked down at me with her empty eyes and twisted her open mouth into what might’ve been a smile. She bent to grasp my arm with a wintry touch, but it was a single whispered word that raced a shiver up my back.
A flash of blue light enveloped me, and it was done.
Chapter 19
Darby and I lay on her bed while I rocked her to sleep with my arms locked around her. My mind tried to process everything, but it was just a spiraling mess of puzzle pieces that didn’t fit together. How could any of this be happening? Darby was only nine. She should be devouring Before Merlin’s Beard books and even pining over stupid floppy-haired boy “singers”. Not raising dead things in the attic and sporting her first death tattoo.
I pressed my mouth into the warmth of her hair to keep my lips from trembling. My own tattooed arm wrapped around her middle. As soon as Ica had vanished from the school, Darby had gone limp, and I finally scrambled out of the hole to her side.
“I was standing outside next to Dad and looking for you. And then I wasn’t,” she’d said with a frown puckering the space between her normal blue eyes while I walked her out of the school. “What happened?”
“You were sleepwalking. You fell asleep in Dad’s arms during graduation, and you must have wandered into the burning school to find me.” I’d adjusted the jacket I found in my locker around her shoulders so she couldn’t see her tattoo and wagged a finger at her face. “Never do that again.” But I didn’t have the energy to make it sound like I’d meant it.
“Sorry,” she’d said.
Dad sat in her desk chair now, watching us with bloodshot eyes while he stroked Darby’s ponytail. Any minute and her hair would turn red like the Sorceressi’s under his fingertips. She would kill every kind of plant life, including Mom’s lilacs, and in two days, my little sister would be buried alive then resurrected. Just the thought drove spikes of terror through my body. That couldn’t happen. Could. Not. Happen. I struggled for a breath but cut my fingernails into my palms to keep them from digging useless holes. The only hole I needed was the loop kind to take that tattoo away from her.
Dad wiped a hand across his face. “Things like that...a fire during graduation at your school. It’s not supposed to happen. Not to my babies.”
“I know, Dad,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
He leaned over to press a kiss to my cheek. “If anything would have happened to you two...”
“Nothing did,” I blurted.
“I still don’t understand how Darby got separated from me. Why would she go back into the school without telling me? She’s smarter than that.”
I screwed my eyes shut, but behind them, writhing dark shadows kept twisting inside Darby’s mouth like a poisonous viper. “I don’t know.”
“And why did it take so long for you to get out of the building? Surely you heard the alarm in the bathroom.”
“There was a lot of smoke. I couldn’t see,” I said, opening my eyes again and shifting my position on the bed. Darby’s crayons kept poking into my side and shoulder.
“I’m just glad it’s over and everyone is safe,” Dad said.
“Me, too.” How I wished that was true.
I had to try to fix this. Before Trammeler Sorceress blood drenched Darby’s silky blonde ponytail, before her two days were up, I had to fix this.
The sun’s last rays sliced across the carpet, and laying there in the near darkness, I knew what I had to do once the sun submerged itself into night.
ON QUIET FEET, I SLIPPED through my window and joined the night sounds with each rustling step forward through the grass. I took my bike from the side of the house, which I’d put there earlier so I wouldn’t wake everyone with the sound of the garage door, and set off at a turtle’s pace because I needed time to think this through. But I didn’t see any other way.
The weight of the ink on my arm propelled my feet onward, though. I had three days. Darby only had two. This had to be done tonight. I would have to deal with the consequences, but the sooner I did this, the more time I would have to deal with them.
Leaves rattled across the road behind me, alive or dead, I couldn’t tell. Everything appeared blackened, a reflection of the midnight sky, but I stuck to the middle of the street just in case. The thought of killing everything with my death touch aga
in burdened my body with heavy doses of sadness and hopelessness. I’d had enough of those feelings lately, and I had zero time to feel sorry for myself. I pedaled faster.
Vague shapes of a slide and swing set soon loomed up behind a chain link fence. I cut my handle bars to the right and followed the dirt path that swerved a maze through the fence to the inside. The empty swings rocked back and forth with every push of the wind. One of them was shorter than the other, its chains wrapped around the upper bar by a kid who lived for heights and adrenaline rushes and danger. I envied that kid so much.
I parked my bike next to the lower half of a teeter-totter then stood between it and the merry-go-round that turned in lazy circles.
Okay, this is it, Mom. If you don’t think this is a good idea, I guess speak now or forever hold your peace. Or you don’t have to speak. Just give me a sign that this is not the right thing to do. Maybe stop the merry-go-round from spinning if you think this is a crappy idea.
Crickets sang the chorus to the song only they knew, punctuated by the occasional whine of the merry-go-round and the creak of the swings. A wispy cloud threaded over the moon.
I guess I’ll take that as a go ahead then. I swallowed, the few nerves I had left pulling tight. Wish me luck. And bring on the roots.
The ground pitched and rocked. I tumbled to one knee and threw my hands over the dirt as though I could somehow coax it to chill. A dark hole yawned open inches from my fingertips. Roots shot out and arced through the air in front of the moon, like some bizarre fireworks display, and I waved my arms at them to get some kind of control. They plowed into the ground again, forming a new, wider hole a few feet from the other one. The first one wasn’t good enough for them, I guessed.
With a sigh and a wish for a fatter moon so I could see, I swung my boots into the hole and dropped, but not before I told my roots to catch me. They seemed to sense my anxiety because they wriggled around my fingertips and brushed against my sides as they lowered me down.
“I’m the only Trammeler left other than Darby,” I said, just as much to them as to myself. I needed that reminder to carry myself forward. My fingers scraped the walls and snagged groaning roots as I reached blindly in front of me. My eyes felt as if they would burst from my head, searching for just a hint of light.
Finally, a yellow glow shone down a tunnel to my right. A pudgy man leaned against the dirt wall and pointed a rubber hose at the root wall in front of him.
This was it. I took a breath.
“Herman,” I yelled. “You have to help me!”
He let out a small yelp when he saw me charging him. The rubber hose now aimed at me, and I skidded to a stop, breathless.
“Please. You have to come with me. There’s too many spiders out there.” My arms prickled with a creepy-crawly sensation, as though what I had just said was true.
His grip on the hose tightened. I wished he would aim it somewhere else. “Where are they?”
“Right outside. The roots will lead you out. I’ll be right behind you.”
He slid a glance at the cage in front of him. “What about One and Two? Our Trammeler gave me orders...”
“Never mind them. I’m the Trammeler now, and I’m ordering you to help me by killing those spiders.” The volume of my voice sent showers of dirt raining onto both of us. My breaths hitched, but I held my trembling fear in my fists and stabbed it to death with my fingernails.
Sweat beaded all over his face. He ticked his gaze between me and the cage.
“I’ll watch them until you get back. Just please go,” I ordered.
He nodded slowly, as if he still wasn’t quite sure he could trust me.
“Just follow my roots and they’ll lead you to them,” I said, lowering my voice to try to give it more urgency, to push him out in a hurry.
With one last nod, he marched past. “I’ll leave the lantern there for you.”
I silently thanked him while his flashlight bounced around the corner. No way did I want to be down here in the dark with the Sorceressi alone. No way did I want to be down here alone with them period.
Blowing the air from my lungs to take a deeper, calming breath, I stepped toward the cage. The light from the lantern twisted shadows up the length of the root wall but couldn’t penetrate the inside of the cell. Only the blue glow of One’s eyes near the floor lit up the immediate area around them. Her body stood next to her head, facing me, waiting, as if she knew I would come.
“No matter how much you want to,” I started, my voice quaking as much as my insides, “you can’t kill Ica.”
Her eyes pierced mine, but she gave no indication she’d heard me. Maybe she didn’t understand what was happening. I yanked up my sleeve to show her my three tattoo.
“I’ve been chosen. Again. And so has my little sister Darby,” I said. Voicing it constricted my throat. I hooked my fingers over the maze of roots covering the cage for support so I didn’t fall over. “She can’t be Two, do you hear me?”
One’s wrists twitched against her gray scraps. Behind her, two faint pinpricks of blue stared from the corner of the cage. Two, or who had been Two before Darby took her place.
“One,” I said, stepping closer to the cage. “She can’t be Two. She’s a kid, kind of like Gretchen’s kids. We don’t want her to be taken away from her family like Gretchen’s kids were.” We. I’d just said we. I’d just lumped myself in with her as if we were cut from the same paper. But how different were we really? “I’ll say it again.” I pulled an ash key from the waistband of my pants and fit it inside a hole that kind of resembled a lock. When I twisted it, the door sprang open. “I’ll be your Three, but Darby won’t be Two. Got it?”
She just stood there while the light from the lantern tried to seep through the open gate. The hinges creaked while the door beat open against the dirt wall.
Seconds passed. We stared at each other, waiting for the other to move. Finally, One flashed an arm out to scoop up her head from the floor. Her eyes stared up at me, gluing me to the ground, while she came forward to fill the doorway with a cold and dark presence. The lantern cracked behind me, and the light blinked out. Only her eyes, icy stars hovering in the dark, let me know she was still here.
She moved closer. Her whispers started up again as soon as she stepped past the cage door. The rotten meat drowned in sewer stink, which somehow had been contained inside her cell, swung outward with the force of a wrecking ball.
The back of my boots dug into the opposite wall, as far away from her as I could get. “Don’t kill Ica,” I begged.
A blast of glacial air pressed me against the wall and then roared to the right. I ran after her, flailing in the dark, grasping at the dirt walls until I smacked into one. Dirt sprayed down on top of me, splattering my clothes with an all too familiar sound. I bit back a scream that morphed into a muffled sob.
I forced myself to stop, focus, breathe. Inhale. I took a step forward. Exhale. The roots guided my feet forward with protesting cracks and pops. Only a small amount of dirt dusted over me as I followed my roots through the tunnels. They would lead me through the dark; I just had to trust them.
As soon as the ground sloped upward, I ran as fast as I could out of the hole. Gasping, I climbed out. Between the smell still disorienting my brain and the clouded moon, I couldn’t immediately see. But I could hear the accusation in one whispered word:
“Leigh.”
I turned to see Herman. He had his back to the merry-go-round, rubber hose pointed at an advancing One.
“No! Leave him alone!” I leaped to my feet and dodged in front of her.
“You d-didn’t, did you? You didn’t set her free, did you?”
I ground my teeth together and planted myself in front of One. She kept coming with her head in her hands.
“You did. You tricked me. There aren’t any spiders out here,” he said, and disbelief squeaked his voice.
“Ica chose my little sister as Two, Herman. I had to do something.”
“Bu
t we had them captured. Our Trammeler worked tirelessly to imprison them. He would never agree to this. Why would you ruin everything he—”
One’s head zipped over my shoulder toward Herman. I turned in time to see it explode into thousands of spiders. Herman screamed. I shrank back.
Spiders crawled all over him, and he was wasting the spray by hosing the whole playground down. I yanked the hose from his hands and sprayed and crushed all at the same time. He panted and shook himself like some crazed dog.
When nothing else skittered about, I asked, “Were you bitten?”
But he just lay there on the ground, huffing, pudgy face gleaming with sweat, while tracking something behind me. I turned. A black fog crept toward the three of us outside the chain link fence.
Ica. She was here. And she would not be happy.
A dread thick as the smoke barreling toward us took the place of my next few breaths. I choked under the pressure. What if this didn’t work? If Ica or One killed the other, then Darby would still be Two. But how could I prevent them from tearing each other apart?
I glanced down at my tattoo. Freeing One hadn’t changed it any. Not like I expected it to. But where was One’s tattoo? What did hers say?
She had her back to me, facing Ica’s approach with skeletal fingers splayed like claws at her sides. Dark smoke twisted past her pale arms and legs and hovered above the dead playground grass. In front of her, an emaciated figure crept from the shadows and stared with unseeing eyes. Ica’s tattoo was still the same—a one. But they couldn’t both be One. Could they?
Ica’s lolling black mouth peeled back into a grin that raced shivers over my back.
“Herman,” I whispered. “Run.”
He did. I still carried his half-empty canister of spider poison, but I didn’t think it would help me much. It landed on the ground with a soft crunch.
I dared take a step toward them. And another. Each one roared the blood through my veins faster. My fingers itched to hold an ash tree key so I could turn them both into trees, but I couldn’t risk it. Not now, anyway. Not when they both gripped Darby’s life in their bony hands.
What Gifts She Carried Page 19