What Gifts She Carried

by Lindsey R. Loucks

  “Which is why I’m not saying goodbye.” I rolled backward several feet away from them so they couldn’t touch me if they tried to say it. The lilacs they swallowed would shoot laser bolts at me if they did, or anyone else dark who dared get too close. I turned my handlebars so my bike faced the opposite direction and called over my shoulder, “I love you both.”

  “I...” Callum started to say something, but the rest drowned in the rush of wind past my ears when I shot down the street.

  By the time I made it to the graveyard, the sun had already started its gradual descent. If I could’ve ignored the constant flow of worry that threatened to pop from my constricting veins, the day would have seemed perfect. Birds, the normal, living kind, sang harmonies from every tree I rocketed past. The lightest touch of a breeze sighed through my clothes when I was forced to stop, cooling the sweat that poured off my skin, invigorating me to keep going. To never stop. To live.

  When I neared Heartland Cemetery’s metal gate, I slowed my speed. It was open, and several cars were parked in front of the row of clanking flagpoles that stood high and empty just inside the graveyard. Maybe all those people wouldn’t notice the scary girl creeping between the graves, oozing death from her feet, and then bringing it all back to life again. It was probably a good idea to stay away from them.

  Under the sign, I got off my bike and then just stood there, wondering if I could go through with this. But the sooner I went in, the sooner I could come back out and put this nightmare behind me. Even as I thought it, though, I knew it wasn’t true. If I did live through this, I couldn’t just ignore that I was a Trammeler Sorceress. Yeah, I would give anything to be a regular fifteen-year-old girl again, but I was pretty sure I’d moved far, far away from those days.

  A deep breath later, unshaky this time, and I was soon putting one foot in front of the other until I made it to Mom’s grave. The grass crinkled and darkened on either side of the rocky path as I went, but I quickly resurrected it. The small group of hunched over people on the other side of the graveyard didn’t pay any attention to me.

  Mom had left another note. It fluttered against the side of her headstone, looking naked without the cover of a Tram wreath. Gray water spots kind of warped it, as though it had been there for a while.

  I believe in you, it read.

  Her words lifted me a little. Even if I’d screwed up royally, she still thought I could do this.

  Thanks, Mom. I’ll sure try.

  I stuffed the note in my pocket for good luck. I needed all I could get.

  A pale, sad face caught my gaze from the clustered group. A little boy, maybe seven with a bowl-shaped haircut, stared at me. Even from this far away, I could see his eyes grow wider. He flashed an arm out and tugged at a woman’s sleeve.

  I glanced at the ground. Black ink dripped from my boots and spread death out in waves. Oh, crap.

  “Breakthetiesthatbindyoutodeath,” I said and then darted back to my bike against a nearby tree. I’d probably just caused some major psychological issues for that kid, similar to the kind Sarah had first caused me in this very same graveyard. I would have to make it up to him by putting extra lilac petals on whoever’s grave he stood next to.

  Because that was my brilliant plan—part of it, anyway. Since I didn’t want anything more to do with raising dead creatures, whether it be doing it myself, or someone else doing it, or seeing the recently raised, or anything, I would make it so no one dark could even get near the graves.

  The other part of my plan was to hide the dead and buried from the dead and living with leaves from the hawthorn tree. Hiding death from death with death’s tree. In a graveyard. It was either the most brilliant plan ever or the stupidest, but it was all I had. Judging from the deepening blue sky, I would soon find out if it worked.

  I started with the graves behind a grove of trees so no one could see me. Mom’s purple gardening gloves saved me from the prick of crisped lilac petals and curled hawthorn tree leaves. Once I was a safe distance away, I brought them back to life and moved on to the next grave to sprinkle more. Resurrecting plant life didn’t count as dark magic; I thought of it as saving the earth from my death touch.

  The only one I didn’t do was the Trinity grave. I sat on top of it when I finished and watched the sunset. Once the cemetery gates squealed closed by the old white-haired guy who didn’t even do a final sweep to make sure everyone had left, I was all alone with the vivid streaks of color painting the sky. Or so I thought.

  The growing stink and the waves of creeping death turned me into a statue. I sat up, my heart booming between my ears. This was happening now? It wasn’t even completely dark yet, but I still readied my roots just under the ground below my fists.

  Footsteps crunched toward me. Whispers churned through the dying leaves that crackled to the ground. In the growing darkness, a paper-white face moved out of the shadows with a mouth yawning open to reveal more black gloom. Chunks of blonde hair moved around a head in a strange kind of twirling dance with the wind.

  Sarah. Wearing a KU sweatshirt and baggy jeans. And carrying a shovel.

  A grin snuck across my face as she swept past me with hardly a glance in my direction. She walked with purpose toward her son’s grave and stared down at it, the intensity of her incomprehensible whispers speaking volumes. I turned my back on her to let her have some privacy while I tried to wipe the inappropriate smile from my face. Even though she’d probably just killed all the lilac petals and thorn leaves on her warpath here, the fact that she’d come made me feel like I was so much less alone.

  “You didn’t have to come tonight,” I whispered over my shoulder.

  She glanced at me and nodded while her hands tightened around the shovel. I supposed that was for lobbing off more of One’s body parts. Her hatred toward the ones who brought her back was pretty hardcore. That made her a total badass in my book.

  “Can you hold down the fort for me? I’ll be right back,” I said and climbed to my feet, not really expecting an answer.

  Sarah sat to the side of her son’s grave so that she faced the Trinity one, and I followed her dark path to heal everything she’d just killed. After I finished, we just sat there, together, two dead girls in a graveyard at night, waiting.

  We didn’t have to wait long.

  Chapter 24

  They appeared at the same time, one between the oak and the ash, the other between the ash and the hawthorn, both kneeling on the ground. Sarah and I shot to our feet. I pulled the roots of my ash tree up with me so they wormed just under the surface of the earth.

  A cold sweat dripped down my back. My muscles seized up and locked my feet to the ground. This was it. Ready or not.

  Their hands hovered over the ground in front of them, fingers curled like hooks. Smoke wafted from Ica’s body, so thick it almost shrouded her in a black veil. Some of it drifted out and away, giving the night darker stripes, and glided to where One’s head used to be. Their whispers mingled with Sarah’s, swirling around in dizzying circles. The multiplied smell bound my tongue with the taste of rot.

  Fighting off a gag, I fished for the nail in my pocket and an ash tree key in the back of my waistband. My hand shook as I dragged the nail across my wrist in a new cut, quick in case I pissed them both off for wasting my precious blood, and a thin red line oozed up. I touched my arm to the key and aimed it at One.

  Inhale. Exhale. Steady. Go.

  A flash of black spun silk around my hand then darted out toward her, almost taking a couple of my fingers with it. At the same time, my roots plowed waves under the ground on a direct path toward Ica with a loud rumbling noise.

  “Break the ties that bind you to death,” I said, and two purple zigzagging livewires clotheslined both One and Ica’s feet the moment I brought the lilacs back to life. They stumbled backward.

  But One flicked her wrist, and the black ribbon-like spiral that had almost reached her hung in the air, frozen. Ica pitched forward at the tremble beneath the ground but po
sted her feet underneath her. The roots tore up from the ground as I slicked another ash tree key with blood and pointed it at her.

  Get One, I ordered, and more roots shot toward her. They burst out of the ground like splayed fingers, barring her between them.

  The others dipped underneath Ica’s feet then tore up behind her in a low arc over her head. The black flash I’d sent streaking toward her surrounded the roots and cocooned her. Pops and cracks erupted through the night as the black flash squeezed the roots together into a long and bumpy tree trunk. The roots sprouted out from the top like branches. And trapped inside all of it was Ica.

  One to go. But One twitched her thumb, and the black spiral that hung frozen just feet from her whisked backward and sawed off my climbing roots before they reached her. They fell useless to the ground like broken fingers.

  The spiral didn’t stop, though. It rushed straight at Sarah, a long strip of black ribbon and both ends flapping with its speed.

  “Move,” I shouted and pushed her away at the last second.

  The black ribbon hit a tree several yards behind us and exploded new darkened bark up and down it.

  When I turned back toward One, she’d vanished. Chest heaving, I took hold of Sarah’s icy hand to make sure she wasn’t a tree and was all right. Or to make sure I was. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  “Where did she go?” I wondered aloud.

  We stood there waiting while I listened to the sound of my raspy breaths. Black smoke crept from the cracks of Ica’s new root-covered tree. I swallowed its bitter taste and my heart back down my throat. Every direction I looked showed nothing but night and smoke. The dark grew so thick that it threatened to swallow the moon. And then I would be fighting blind.

  Sarah’s bony shoulder knocked against mine. By the time I turned to see why, she no longer carried her shovel. One did. She stood right next to Sarah over the Trinity grave, a full head shorter than both of us, and buried the blade where Sarah’s met her neck.

  The force slammed me backward with a sharp gasp.

  “No!” I shouted.

  A black necklace dripped from the gash in Sarah’s skin. She gave a grizzly, jerky kind of pirouette so that her gaze aimed down at her son’s headstone. Tears pooled in her blue eyes as she tipped toward it. Her severed head slid down her neck with a wet, sucking sound before it landed at my feet with a thud. Her body followed, and I somehow managed to jump out of the way.

  I stared down at her head while my brain tried to catch up. Sarah was dead. Again. Lilacs couldn’t save her from a shovel, but she was with her son and where she belonged. Yet I couldn’t help the seething rage that forked through my veins.

  A guttural battle cry tore from my throat. I lunged for the shovel in One’s hands because I was going to scoop gaping holes from her ugly, rotted skin. She held fast, so I shot out a boot to kick her hard in the stomach. Her grip loosened. So did the grimy scraps covering her. They slid away enough to see the one tattoo etched in ink on the front of her shoulder.

  I wrenched the shovel away and gave the tip of the blade a proper introduction to that same shoulder, again and again. It didn’t help the anger boiling under the surface of my skin. It didn’t change what she’d done. It didn’t do anything to capture her but I. Could. Not. Stop. This woman, Gabriella, Gretchen’s sister, had ruined my life the second she and Two had laid their glowing blue eyes on me.

  “I don’t want any of this,” I growled and stabbed her again.

  A black line darkened her shoulder where the blade had cut deep through her skin, but she just stood there, taking it, while her whispers joined with Ica’s to become one whispered shout.

  A fireball exploded Ica’s new tree apart. It rocked both of us to the ground, and the shovel skidded behind me over the rocky path.

  Ica rose from the burning matchsticks and stormed toward me with the speed of a freight train. Before I had time to react, she stood just to my left and curled a finger toward her chin. As if she was beckoning me to come forward even though I was right here.

  Something in my head shifted with an awful ache. My gut clamped in on itself deep inside, and I pressed my hands to my middle to keep myself from coming apart at the seams. What was happening?

  “What did you do to me?” I groaned.

  I fought to stand, but a terrible pain stitched itself up into my throat. Like something walking. Like lots of somethings walking across my insides. Not walking. Crawling. I turned my head to puke but nothing came out. Not until I felt little legs scamper across my tongue.

  Spiders. Tons of them. They landed on the ground in a huge, writhing pile. Some were thrown up. Others crawled out on their own.

  When I couldn’t heave anymore, I threw myself away from them with huge panting breaths. My flesh scurried to the ends of my bones and back again. They’d been inside me. All of them. What had they been doing in there?

  They scuttled into two heaping piles of wriggling legs and shiny black bodies, growing, multiplying, until they stood almost as tall as One. Flashes of skin and grayish hair appeared between the pulsing masses. Each of the spiders drew themselves in until there weren’t any left, and the granny twins stood in front of me. They stared with steely gray eyes that crinkled in the corners. Wicked grins stretched up to their ears. They seemed almost triumphant, as if they knew all sorts of dirty secrets. As if they knew my secrets from being inside me.

  Everyone stood tall around me while I lay helpless and weak on the ground. I was surrounded by four powerful women who wanted me to be Three. I couldn’t be. I wouldn’t be. They wouldn’t make me their grave winner.

  I hoisted myself up so I could look them all in the eye. “What did you do to me?”

  “Nothing you didn’t want,” the twins said together.

  “I never wanted any of this.” My voice cut craters in the night with every echo that bounced over the trees and gravestones.

  “Sleeping under a bed to reenact your burial, embracing the dark...and not to mention what you’ve been doing to your clothes,” the twins continued.

  “What does any of that have to do with you? I didn’t embrace anything,” I shouted.

  One of Ica’s hands shot out and tore off the strips of my shirt and pants I’d ripped up. I looked down and gasped. Black scraps of clothes now covered me, eerily similar to the scraps One and Ica wore.

  I shook my head. “You made me do it.”

  “We didn’t make you do anything. We just had a front row seat. And things always got really interesting when you thought you were asleep.”

  “When I thought I was?” I asked. Darby’s spider bites barged bright red into my mind. They did that, not me. They hurt her. “You possessed me, didn’t you?”

  “No. All we did was help hide your memories behind a fog so you’d continue helping us. You must want Three’s power more than anything. You’re so hungry for it that you ripped through your sister’s mattress and ordered us to tunnel through and steal some of her Trammeler blood.”

  “You’re lying!”

  But even as I yelled the words, the sudden thought of clawing my fingers into the underneath of Darby’s mattress flashed through my mind. But I would never do that. There was no way I could believe anything they said. All of them played a dangerous game, and all of them were cheaters. Well, I was done playing.

  Get every single one of them, I told my tree.

  The ground buckled between us. Roots burst out and coiled around each of their bodies like bark-colored boa constrictors.

  Take them down.

  But it wasn’t the roots who obeyed. Jagged, purple energy shot out of one of my palms and into the other to form a buzzing electrical line between my hands. The power tickled my fingertips. All I could do was stare at it, at all the blinding hues of purple that made a humming noise as they zipped past each other. Above the stink of three dead people, I thought I smelled the familiar scent of lilacs. It didn’t hurt me though. A mix of a crazed laugh and a gasp fell out my mouth.

&nb
sp; Instinct told me to throw it at the Sorceressi. So I did. The bright purple lightning bolt took them all down with a loud drone spiked with high-voltage static. It lit up the night sky brighter than the moon ever could.

  More and more roots shot out to latch onto their legs and drag them into the hole yawning open in the ground. The cloud of purple electricity hanging over them seemed to push them down while the roots pulled.

  I was beating them. With my combined Trammeler and Sorceress powers, I was winning. They could feed me all the lies they wanted, but they couldn’t have me. I couldn’t let that sliver of hope pierce my concentration, though. I glanced at the palm the purple energy had originated from, and just as bright, sharp tendrils twisted around my fingers once more, someone belted out a hiss.

  Out of the corner of my eye, something large and dark loomed just over my shoulder. A swirling ball of midnight and smoke as large as me.

  I lunged to the side and aimed my glowing fingertips at it. A bolt of brilliant purple, razor-sharp teeth bulleted out of my hand and toward the ball. It crackled once it hit, lighting up its center with a dazzling storm of electricity, and then fizzled out into nothingness. The ball spun over the four Sorceressi, whose fingers clawed at the hole they’d almost disappeared into. Once it touched the light that surrounded them, it lapped that up, too, with a series of bursts and sparks, until the near-dark blinded me again.

  All of it happened so fast, my brain could barely catch up. Which was why I didn’t immediately hear my name in a shout from near the gate.

  A deep voice. A male voice.

  I whirled around. “Tram?”

  But no. He was dead. No matter how much I wished for him to come help me, he couldn’t. I was on my own. So who was that?

  An icy cold breath blew past my cheek, and I froze. A frigid hand fisted through my hair then tossed me into the air. My shoulder hit the ground first with an agonizing jolt, and the rest of me slid behind until I came to a stop. I sucked in a mouthful of air only to let it out in a loud groan.