And, as far as I could tell, nothing blew up in a storm of purple lightning.
A RUMBLING KIND OF sigh escaped through Dad’s gritted teeth. “What’s the name of the girl who broke our screen door?”
“Megan. She hates me with a fierce passion, and she’s a mega-bitch.”
“Leigh,” he snapped.
I adjusted my large floppy hat and long sleeves to see that they hid everything for the hundredth time since he’d arrived home. “She threw a rock at the door. See?” I said, nodding my head at the rock I’d picked up on my way back. “I’ll pay for it.”
He stalked down the hallway while he yanked at his tie. “She should pay for it.”
Darby, who’d stood frozen during the entire conversation, stared at me with wide eyes. “It happened to you, too, didn’t it?”
I didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what she meant. She’d been electrocuted, too, judging from the fear in her eyes. I hated with a passion that we’d both used dark magic, but it just might help me survive tomorrow.
“I have some reading to do,” I said with a sigh.
I LAY IN A SUNFLOWER field again. Mom’s voice called from far away, searching for me, but I couldn’t answer for some reason. Fluffy clouds passed over a bright blue sky to lull me to sleep even though I felt wide awake. The pointed leaves of the yellow flowers kept snagging at my skin and scraped sharp barbs up my arms so hard, blood trickled warm trails down my wrists. Mom’s voice grew louder, as though she was just feet away, her voice panicked.
I blinked my eyes open and stared into darkness. The sunflowers faded, but the pain didn’t. I reached up a hand, but nothing hovered above me, even though I knew I’d slept under Darby’s bed again. Carpet fibers stabbed into my back still, so I must’ve wormed my way out during the night.
Curling my fingers into the floor, I made to stand, and my arms peeled away from the floor with a sticky wet sound. I paused, wondering what I could’ve done that had made both my arms and legs sting so much, and then fumbled for the lamp on Darby’s nightstand.
Everything seemed to drip red as soon as my eyes adjusted to the light. My fingertips spotted blood all over the cover of Before Merlin’s Beard on the nightstand. It streaked down my arms in streams from fresh cuts that crisscrossed my skin. It rushed tendrils across my bare feet and pooled dark puddles on the carpet.
I cried out and stumbled backward. What had I done? And why was Darby’s bed empty? Only broken sticks and crayons lay where she should be inside the tangled covers. I turned and grasped the doorknob, but my bloody hand slicked over it and it took several tries to open the door.
A sliver of moonlight sliced onto the carpet down the hall in the living room. Something crouched just out of its reach. A vague form, staring. I felt it in the prickle at the back of my neck. No. No, wait. That was just part of the piano bench with its curled legs underneath and piles of music stacked on top. But then it moved.
I slapped both hands over my mouth to keep from screaming. Something was in the house. In here with Darby and Dad and me. And I couldn’t see a thing. The light in Darby’s room couldn’t reach that far and the hallway light switch was at the other end. My breaths came in panicked pants. When I pressed myself against the wall, picture frames above my head rattled.
The shadowy thing shifted again, coming closer, just as the slant of moonlight faded to gray in a passing cloud. The gloom at the other end of the hallway deepened to nothing but a stirring darkness. I strained my eyes to see what was slowly creeping toward me. I couldn’t even make out a shape, whether dead dog-like or giant spider. My insides screamed at me to run, but my body had gone rigid.
Tram wouldn’t run. I couldn’t either.
I forced the fingers over my mouth apart. “Who’s. There?” I tried to whisper, but gasps split the words into half-moans.
“It was you,” another whispered voice said, soft but full of accusation. “Why?” The moon gleamed through the living room window again and shone on a pale skinny leg with a purple ruffled nightgown skimming the knee.
“Darby? Why are you out here? What’s going on?” I started toward her but the rush of questions spun my head. Was she bleeding, too?
“I plugged all the holes,” she whispered, and a desperate sob drooped her head so her hair hung limp over her shoulders. “All of them.”
“What holes, Darby?” She had to be dreaming. Or maybe this was some kind of side effect of using dark magic. It made her sound almost...insane. My stomach churned at the thought. A bitter coppery taste burned over my tongue, but I swallowed it back down. “What’s wrong?”
“I plugged the holes with sticks and crayons to keep it from getting me,” she continued. “I made it come out and then grew the tree so it wouldn’t crawl back again.”
A deep tremble surged though my body. I thought I’d taken care of the things that were trying to get her. “To keep what from getting you?”
She just stood there, staring at the floor and balling up the hem of her nightgown in her fist to the rhythm of my blood dropping to the floor.
“What, Darby?” I took a step closer and held an arm out to her so she would come to me, but then snatched it back. She didn’t need to see me all bloody, but I needed to see her. The bathroom door was open a crack, so I slipped inside, found Dad’s bathrobe hanging on a hook, threw it around myself, and hurried out again.
But Darby had vanished from the hallway in that split second. The slice of moonlight slanted over bare carpet.
“Darby?” I whispered.
“You,” a voice said behind me.
I whirled around, my heart throwing itself against my ribcage.
Darby stood across the hall in her bedroom doorway, her face in shadows from the light behind her. “You were under the bed and poking holes into the mattress.”
“I...I slept under there to...to...” Do what? Hide from the nightmares? It was a stupid thing to do because real life was so much more terrifying than dreams ever were. “But I didn’t poke holes into your mattress.”
Without a word, Darby turned and stepped into her bedroom. I followed. And that’s when I noticed the thorny snarl of tree branches growing from underneath Darby’s bed. They grew so thick, they’d lifted the bed almost an extra foot off the ground. Sharp thorns stuck out from them. Hawhorn trees. Death’s trees.
“Y—you did this?” I asked and wrapped Dad’s bathrobe tighter around me, suddenly freezing.
“I had to,” she said as she stepped over the pools of my blood smearing the carpet like they weren’t even there. “It’s so numb, it doesn’t even itch. I didn’t tell you because you freaked out over one of them, but it was you who was eating me alive.”
“Darby—” But the rest died on my tongue when she folded her sheets back. Sticks and crayons had been pushed into the holes from one end of her mattress to the other. Hundreds of holes. I stared at them and shook my head, even as my fingers pushed at the robe’s fabric. But they stopped as soon as Darby turned her back and lifted her nightgown.
Bright red bumps spotted her pale skin from her neck to her heels. Spider bites.
Chapter 22
Day Three
“What’s all th—? What did you do to your hair? Why are you so scratched up? Is that a tattoo?” Dad blinked at me while he held his hands up as if he expected the answers to come crashing down from the ceiling. Hopefully they wouldn’t crush him.
He needed to know everything, or mostly everything, and I would prove it to him. Mom had said she couldn’t tell anyone about us, and I loved Mom like crazy, but maybe that kind of thinking had been part of why she was dead. Because she didn’t ask for enough help.
And God knows I needed all the help I could get. After what Darby had showed me, I didn’t even pretend to go back to sleep. Something else had been underneath Darby’s bed with me, something spidery, something that had raked my skin with deep gashes. That was the only explanation I could come up with, and I didn’t have more time to devote to thinki
ng about it because my time was almost up. Yet all those spider bites on Darby still funneled into my thoughts anyway.
I pointed to the kitchen table stacked high with a breakfast spread fit for a Sorcerer and his two Trammeler Sorceressi daughters. But my hands shook with each tremble that racked my body since the night before, so I hid them in my lap. My nerves were pulled tight as guitar strings; each one threatened to snap if I so much as plucked a finger into gooey pancake batter.
“I made breakfast for you and Darby. I dyed my hair, the cuts will heal, and yeah, it is a tattoo, but it’s only temporary.” Temporary after tonight since I had no intention of becoming anyone’s Three, but I couldn’t keep the wobble out of my voice. “Sit. Please.”
He did, but his gaze remained glued on me. “Leigh, when is the last time you slept?”
The simple question made me tear up. After I’d tucked Darby into my bed last night, I’d read my eyes ragged to search for a way to become a grave loser to the point where they felt as though I’d propped them open with broken popsicle sticks.
“I’ll get you some coffee,” I said, and got myself another can of carbonated breakfast while I was at it.
Darby wandered in, twisting her fists into her eyes, her tangled hair spiked up on one side. “I smell...bacon.” She dive-bombed into the plate of crispy pig, now much more alert, but still unable to meet my gaze.
I didn’t think she believed any of my promises that I had nothing to do with her spider bites. She wouldn’t even let me put something on them last night. How could she not tell me? How could I not notice all of them? But if spiders had eaten her so much she felt numb and didn’t itch, how was I supposed to know?
“Eat up before it gets cold,” I said, and sat to watch them. The sweet and salty combination of pancake batter and bacon grease turned my stomach, but everything looked cooked to perfection. After a few more practice sessions, I might be as good as Mom. If I survived the night.
When Dad sat back in his seat with a groan, his plate practically licked clean, I pushed a square of folded wax paper past the syrup bottle toward him.
“What’s this?” Dad asked.
“Dead lilacs and a blade of dead grass,” I said.
Darby gasped, and I shot her a warning look so she would keep her mouth shut. Her hand paused mid-air on its way to the bacon plate. I took one for her and stuffed it into her mouth so that the ends sagged down, giving her a little bacon handlebar mustache. Now she couldn’t say anything even though her expression questioned everything.
“Dad, I’d like you to do something for me, even if it seems silly. Okay?” I said.
“What am I doing?”
I took the ring from under the rim of my plate that I’d found in great-grandpa’s box in the attic and scooted it toward Dad. “Read the words inscribed, please.”
He picked it up, studying it, and then frowned. “Is this my granddad’s ring?”
I nodded.
“‘You set free my strongest gift,’” he read.
“Good,” I breathed. Even though he’d unsuppressed his Sorcerer power, he knew just as much as I did about it. “Then take the grass out of the wax paper, but just the grass.”
“Leigh, I need to get ready for work. How long is this going to take?” he asked, but he took out the grass.
“Almost done. Now watch the grass. Are you watching?”
He posted his hands on the table and leaned forward with exaggerated movements. “I’m watching. What’s it going to do?”
“Break the ties that bind you to death,” I said.
The blackened blade of grass unfurled and stretched to a thick, bright green strip.
Dad jerked his hands back with a gasp. “How did you do that? A magic trick?”
“Not a trick. A spell. Darby can do it, too. Magic exists, Dad, especially in our family. Your grandpa was a real Sorcerer.” I gripped the edge of the table for strength and looked him in the eye. “Which makes you a Sorcerer, too.”
“And me?” Darby whispered. She looked down at her empty plate, her bony shoulders rising and falling with her growing realization. “Merlin’s real?”
I smoothed a hand over her wild hair so she would look at me. “Except you’re a Trammeler Sorceress. You got the Trammeler part from Mom. A Trammeler is a tree person who hunts down bad Sorceressi.”
“A Trammeler Sorceress,” Darby said, as if she was testing out the feel of the words.
The grass blackened and shriveled again with a crackling sound. Dad and Darby stared at it, eyes wide.
“Why did it do that?” Darby asked.
“Because of me.” I stood and carefully pushed in my chair. I’d explain the hard parts on the way out the door so I wouldn’t do what I wanted to do, which was cling to them for an eternity. “Two other bad Sorceressi—I call them that to cut the ‘s’ abuse—want me dead, but I won’t let them have me. And I won’t let them hurt you two, either.”
“This is quite a story you’re telling,” Dad said, scooting away from the table.
“I wish it was a story, but you know it’s true. People coming back from the dead, that blade of grass, the bells you heard every time you kissed Mom—it sounds like it’s make-believe, except it all really happened. Please, Dad,” I begged. “You can think about it later, but you have to do one more very important thing for me.” I pointed to the dead lilacs, my heart thundering. If he didn’t do this, One and Ica could use him to get to me. “All you have to do is put those in your mouth.”
Dad wiped a hand down his face, shaking his head, and then looked at me for a long moment with the saddest expression I’d ever seen on him. “Leigh...”
“Please,” I begged.
“Why?”
“Because you love me,” I choked out.
That seemed to be enough of a reason. When he cupped the wax paper around his mouth and tilted his head back, I said the words from part of the resurrection spell, “Break the ties that bind you to death.”
Darby whimpered and scooted her chair away from the table.
The blade of grass came back to life again, too. With the live lilacs inside him now, dark magic wouldn’t touch him. As long as I kept repeating the words from the spell throughout the day, Sarah’s lilacs would come back to life, as well. I hoped.
“Swallow,” I said as I backed away so I wouldn’t kill anything or be zapped by the lilacs again.
He did with a swig of coffee, eyeing me over the rim of his cup. “Is that all?”
“No.” I stepped onto the tiles by the back door and bent to pick up my boots, never taking my eyes off either of them for fear they’d vanish before I said goodbye. “I put two books on your desk, Darby. You both have to read them, okay? And on top of it is a bracelet for you, Darby, and you have to wear it all the time.” I’d weaved it together like Tram’s wreath from the hawthorn leaves Jo and Callum had collected yesterday. She would be hidden from anything dead that way.
She nodded.
“Promise me,” I demanded, my voice rough from fighting back tears.
“I promise,” she said, her face solemn.
Shouldering my backpack, I pulled open the door and let the rush of air dry my face a little.
Dad blinked up from the grass while he thumbed the empty fold of wax paper. “But you can’t go anywhere. You’re grounded, remember?” His voice was soft, almost pleading, not mad like he should have been. Did that mean he believed me?
The thought threw up a wall in front of my face, one that I had to tear down before I could breathe again, and that first breath burned all the way down to my aching soul. Because it might be too late for his belief in me to do any good.
“I know. I’ll come back.” That was a promise. “I love you,” I said, and then I walked out.
Chapter 23
Jo and Callum walked up the middle of the street toward me, their faces pale even behind my tinted sunglasses. I’d been riding in circles around the neighborhood, trying not to kill anything, until I wound up at m
y house again.
“I’ve been texting you for hours. Where have you been?” Jo’s voice was gentle, not scolding. I could tell from the look in her eyes she knew something was wrong, more wrong than it already was.
Callum shrugged off the backpack he carried. His eyebrows knit together while he tried to read my face, so I attempted to make my expression as blank as possible. I’d already wasted enough precious time lost in my own thoughts to explain Darby and her bites to them.
“Here’s the lilac petals wrapped in wax paper like you asked. We saved some of them and the hawthorn leaves to put around your house.”
“And your house?” I asked, taking the bag from him.
“Already done,” Jo said.
“And the lilacs, did you swallow—?”
When they both nodded, I stepped back.
“What else do you need us to do?” Jo whispered.
“Bobby Fever,” I blurted.
Jo scratched at her cheek with her lips twisted to the side. “You want us to...do him?”
Callum elbowed her in the ribs, his mouth curved down in a scowl.
“A Bobby Fever bookmark. I promised Darby I would get her one, but I never...” I turned my lone rubber handlebar around and around while I tried to find my voice again.
“We’ll take care of it,” Callum said, and I had no doubt they would.
“I didn’t know Darby had such killer taste in music,” Jo said while she swiped at her wet cheeks.
“Oh, please,” I said, but it sounded more like a sob.
“You’ll live. I just know it,” Jo said. She nudged my front tire with the toe of her sandal. A gentle breeze drifted her skirt between the spokes of the wheel, and I wished she would be caught up in it so I would be forced to take her with me. But of course I couldn’t.
Callum nodded, his eyes never leaving mine. “You did it before.”
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