Insanity (15 page)

“What are you?” I asked Levi, not expecting an answer. “A shade, like my grandfather?”

He sighed. “I’m not a shade. I died and went to the other side like he did, but all of me came back.”

If he hadn’t sounded so honest, if I hadn’t also seen the shade of a dead serial killer walking around and a tree with an eyeball and the ghosts of my grandmothers, I would have thought he was lying.

“You’re not, like, a vampire or anything, are you?” I looked up at him. “Undead, or some stupid crap like that?”

He shook his head. “Flesh and blood, and I like pizza better than burgers. Can’t really eat Slim Jims and peanuts, though. They remind me of the night I died.”

“How did it happen?” “I got murdered. The guy who killed me tried to burn my body, but my grandmother fetched my spirit back from the other
side and pulled me out.” He touched the tears under his eyes. “But I got scars here that look like blood, and now I can do stuff like Imogene can. We don’t know why.”

I thought about the way Levi had changed back at the hospital when he got mad. The weird stuff on the walls. The way he had healed me. The way my handcuffs had melted. Levi came back from the dead with way more than a few bloody teardrop scars.

“So.” I tried to focus. “You’re alive. And so is Forest, and so is your grandmother. Right?”

Levi nodded.

“Can you die again?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We can all die. Me and Forest and you, too. As for Imogene, I used to think she couldn’t die, but she’s ... fading. Getting weaker every day, so I think maybe she can die. I don’t think she’s strong enough to bring us back if we get killed. It’s because she’s getting weak that bad things are happening. She’s all that holds back the
really
crazy stuff trying to get out of Lincoln Psychiatric.”

“What is she?” I shut my eyes for a second, trying not to think about what could be crazier than the things I’d already seen. “Who gave her the job she’s doing?”

“Imogene’s actually my great-great-great-grandmother, or something like that.” Levi shrugged. “She took me in when my parents got killed in a car wreck. As for who set her to guarding Lincoln—God, I guess. Maybe the devil. I don’t know. She always tells me she was born doing what she does.”

“But you didn’t get your, um, abilities until after you ...”

“Died and got brought back. Yeah.” He looked sad for a few seconds, and it made me wonder what he’d been like before he got killed. “Imogene says that when you have skills, you’re supposed to use them.” He gestured in the direction of the hospital. “If you don’t do what you’re meant to do, then you got a good chance of ending up in a place like Lincoln.”

Something in his tone gave me a case of deep shivers, and I asked my next question quickly, before I could chicken out. “Are we going to die tonight, Levi?”

He thought for a time, then shrugged again. “Maybe. I don’t have psychic skills. You backing out?”

“No,” I told him, more sure than I had ever been before. “I’m in.”

“You okay?” Forest asked me a few minutes later, when she got back from wherever she’d gone.

I managed to nod, even though I didn’t want to. “I just need to know more about what’s going on. What’s that you said about a witch tree?” I asked Levi.

“I read about them in Imogene’s records,” Levi said. “She’s seen a couple. Sometimes folks do blood rituals, and they store up the bad energy in trees and call them vessels.”

“So, bad energy, bad tree?” I glanced at him, but it didn’t seem like he was planning to say anything else.

Levi didn’t say more, but when Forest looked at him, he said, “I think your grandfather’s even older than Imogene. Like, way
older. From back when people made sacrifices to trees all the time. His vessel must have liked children.”

I closed my eyes. “Like the evil tree in the
Sleepy Hollow
movie?”

“Yeah,” Levi said. “Like that.”

My brain flashed to that Tim Burton movie, to a scene with a writhing, screaming tree trunk full of skulls and blood. “Great.”

“I think your grandfather and his tree were waiting for your grandmother Betty to die,” Forest said. “They were afraid of her. So, now that she’s gone, the tree is—”

“Hungry.” I got to my feet and straightened to my full height. “So how do we kill it?”

“I don’t know.” Forest gave me an apologetic look as she held out a wooden handle toward me. “Levi and Imogene can’t even sense it, and when Imogene crossed your grandfather over before, the tree wasn’t there. It must have been hiding.”

My eyes fixed on the handle, and I took a shiny, brand-new ax from her. Still had a tag from the twenty-four-hour box store where she bought it. She had one, too, and so did Levi.

I guess this made it official. I was about to follow in my grandmother’s footsteps and add “deranged ax murderer” to the list of labels stamped on my soul. Without intending to, I shifted the ax in my grip and tested its heft and balance. It felt scarily natural.

My eyes drifted toward the Rec Hall and the entrance to the tunnels, and to the crisscrossed yellow police tape that reminded me of who and what I was. “So we try to chop up the witch tree. But what about my grandfather?”

“He might die when the tree does,” Levi said. “Or get weak. I’ll grab his spirit and cross it over.”

“You can do that?” I gripped the ax a little tighter. “Snatch a soul out of a living thing and make it die?”

“Eff Leer’s a shade, not a living thing,” Levi said. “Without the tree, we can bust him up for good and all.”

That felt like a hedge to me. I was pretty sure Levi could kill things by grabbing their soul or spirit or energy or whatever. No wonder my grandmothers didn’t want him to touch me. But that was stuff to worry about later, if I lived to worry about anything at all.

“Okay, then.” I raised my ax in front of me like a talisman and started walking toward the hole in the Rec Hall wall. “Let’s go finish this job.”

Chapter Eighteen

We tore away the police tape and walked into the tunnels together, Levi on the left, Forest in the middle, and me on the right. Dogs appeared from nowhere and fell in behind us.

It was dark, but Levi’s skin gave off a silvery light that glittered against the ax blades and lit our way. It was cold at first, then hot, then unnaturally hot, like we were walking straight into hell. The air smelled like bitter copper and dirt and wood.

My eyes darted all around the tunnels, searching for any movement or any hint of roots. Did they know we were coming?

The bricks on the tunnel walls seemed to stretch closer to us.

Down we went, silently, no jabbering about plans that would never work or strategies that wouldn’t help.

The space in the tunnel got smaller. Another few steps, and I bumped shoulders with Forest. Levi had to go in front, with Forest following and me bringing up the rear.

Rustling sounds echoed through the tunnel behind us, and I whipped around, ax raised, ready for anything. Goose-like
shadows tracked along the glowing brick walls, knifing forward, as quiet as the dogs. The hair on my arms prickled. I felt hunted.

“Darius,” Forest whispered, and I realized I wasn’t moving. I didn’t want to keep my back turned on those dogs, especially Cain. Something about them reminded me of the tree roots, like they were bloodthirsty, deadly extensions of something powerful, and weren’t to be trusted.

“Darius,” Forest said again, and I made myself turn toward her and Levi. The world went squishy and wavy, like it wasn’t solid anymore. My thorn pendant seemed to flare, then burned against my skin.

I touched the wood through the fabric of my shirt. “They know we’re here.”

Levi lifted his ax in a salute toward the darkness in the section of tunnel ahead of us. “And we know they’re here.”

That’s when the music started, rusty and creaky and teasing. “Pop Goes the Weasel,” slow-like and distorted and totally wrong.

The dogs behind me snarled. I snarled with them. Levi started walking again. Forest and I followed.

The brick floors and walls seemed even closer now. We were getting toward the end of the tunnel, where the chamber entrance would be, and I said so to Levi and Forest. Then I saw the snake shadows.

“Roots!” I yelled as one dropped out of the ceiling. It whipped around Forest’s neck, jerking tight, and she dropped her ax and grabbed for the root.

My heart skipped. I raised my own ax, but Levi moved so fast he was nothing but a black-and-silver blur. His ax whistled
through the hot air and cleaved the root in one blow. The part choking Forest went limp and fell away from her. The other half snapped back into the ceiling like a live wire, spraying blackish gore as it went. Droplets spattered across my face and arms, each one burning like boiling water.

I tried not to holler from the searing pain, but I couldn’t help it. The sound came out like a squeal, and Forest cried out, too. Levi pointed his finger at me and mumbled something. My skin stopped burning, and I used my shirt to wipe the rest of the stuff off my face and arms as fast as I could.

Slithering, crackling noises filled the tunnel. “Pop Goes the Weasel” got louder as the monkey chased the weasel. I squinted into the darkness as the dogs behind me yipped and whined and the geese started honking and screeching and flapping, and Forest said something loud and pounced on her ax, and I saw why.

It wasn’t one root coming for us this time. It was dozens.

They burst out of the shadows like a snake army, writhing across the bricks to get at us. I swore and swung my ax at the nearest bit of gnarled wood as it tried to stab my ankle. The blade barely bit into the wood and jammed immediately.

From somewhere, my grandfather started laughing.

“Son of a—” I stomped my foot against the wiggling root and tried to pull the ax free, but it held tight. Cain pounced on my root and the other dogs jumped on others, snapping their teeth into the wood and shaking the roots like rabbits. Goose shadows covered the roots still attached to the walls, and Levi whirled by me, swinging his ax over his head in big, wide strokes.

Forest was having trouble like me, striking at roots and then
having to pry out the ax blade. The hounds helped, keeping the roots busy as we worked. Then I couldn’t hear anything but that stupid ice-cream truck song and barking and yelping and honking and chopping and disgusting spurting noises from the roots when we did manage to cut through them.

Levi and I never looked at each other, but our goals seemed to be the same—keep all that nasty wood off the girl, and keep walking. He took the front and I took the back, and Forest only had to worry about what got past us. Which was less and less as we got the hang of it.

My skin started burning again, but Levi made it stop with that fog from his fingers. I squinted so none of the goo could get at my eyeballs and chopped and pulled, chopped and pulled, chopped and pulled. Soon the burning in my shoulders had nothing to do with gore, and I started to laugh so crazily that my grandfather shut up.

“Bring it!” I shouted. “We can do this all day!”

Maybe we were cutting down the tree’s energy a little. Maybe we were killing it by inches. I didn’t care, just as long as I was hurting it, and through it, Eff Leer.

“Pop Goes the Weasel” cut off abruptly, and the roots that weren’t already confetti or dog food snapped against the brick walls as they withdrew.

I listened to my own heavy breathing in the sudden silence that followed. The tree’s blood glowed black all around us. My own blood raced from what felt like a victory, but Levi still had his ax raised, and so did Forest, and so did I. The air felt hotter
and smelled bitter. The earth under the bricks at our feet seemed to bubble and seethe, and sharp claws of fear dug at my chest.

My grandfather had been toying with us, as playful as ancient serial killers ever got.

Now he was pissed, and the corrupted earth under the control of the dark druid was reacting to his rage. The tunnel floor started to buckle.

“Move,” Levi yelled. “
Now!
”

Chapter Nineteen

I ran and jumped and fell as the earth tore itself to pieces all around me. Heat blasted out of glowing rents in the ground. Nowhere to go but straight ahead. Pain seared my feet, and I thought my shoes were melting. I hit my knees in a tooth-crunching thump, then scrambled toward the spot at the tunnel’s end where I remembered finding the basement the first time I came down this hole.

So hot. Hard to breathe. I didn’t know brick could turn to water—or was it blood? Molten blood. I was going to melt right into it or go up like a fizzling skin torch. The stink of burned hair crowded into my nose. Dogs howled and screamed. Geese screeched. I thought I heard Levi shouting, and Forest, too, but I couldn’t tell if they were ahead of me or behind me. Blazing curtains of heat turned everything orange and red.

When I couldn’t walk, I crawled.

Sweat poured down my face and stung my eyes but I kept crawling, banging the blade of the ax each time my right fist
smacked the bubbling earth. The ground was trying to suck me down. If it pulled me under, I’d get crushed, or my face and bones would turn to liquid. My heart pounded hard enough to burst.