Insanity (16 page)

Fire coated the brick walls on either side of me, biting at my arms. The light drove a solid curtain of bugs ahead of it. They swarmed over the tunnel’s end, then cooked with horrible hisses and crackles, pelting my face and shoulders as they died.

My arms and legs ached as I shoved myself forward, bashing into burning dirt and pieces of brick as I tried to find the spot, the place where the tunnel turned into an old rotten basement under the asylum. Fire blasted up from the earth in gouts and geysers. This was hell, and I was going to burn.

“Darius!” Forest called to me, but I didn’t stop.

“This way!” I hollered as I smashed my shoulder into more hot brick, hitting the tunnel’s wall like a rabid bull. Again. Again. The opening had to be here. Smoke made me choke and cough, and tears turned my vision yellow. I smashed the wall again and my skin tingled, and I pitched forward so hard the ax went flying as I smashed into wood and dirt, rolling three or four times until I hit something solid and cracked my jaw against—

A pair of legs.

Black tuxedo pants.

My chest caught fire. Not my skin—the thorn pendant. I grabbed it as I looked up. Through my wet, blurry vision, I saw my grandfather standing in the basement, bathed in red light from his witch tree.

He looked tall. His elbows and remaining wrist and fingers
looked huge at the joints, and that face—I wanted to look away from the ruin of it, but I didn’t dare. Behind him stood the tree, huge and vicious, with its bloody eye and big mouth and grabby branches covered in giant thorns and sick-smelling white flowers.

Smoke rose off my skin, drifting up to the place where the tree’s crown reached the basement’s rotten ceiling. Blisters covered my legs and forearms and cheeks, and I wanted to yell from the pain, and because I was down here in hell alone, Forest and Levi had probably already burned to death.

I wasn’t going to do any better than Grandma Betty did against these monsters. Worst of all, I had lied to my mother. I wouldn’t be coming back.

“Get up,” Eff Lear told me in a voice icy enough to put out a thousand fires. He kicked me hard in the back, driving out my breath. “Die on your feet like a man.”

I hauled myself away from him, jerking as my muscles screamed against that kick. I was crawling on hands and knees like a terrified baby, and I didn’t care. I kept right on crawling until I got to the ax I had dropped. I snatched it off the ground and stood, holding it in front of me in both hands. My breath wheezed out between my blistered lips, and I had to squint to see through the sweat and blood running into my eyes.

Eff Leer and the tree were about ten feet from me now—too far to swing at, too close to run away.

“Who did you bring with you tonight?” My grandfather scented the air and licked his lips. “I smell blood.”

I stood there with the ax, wishing I had the guts to start swinging.

My grandfather stretched out his one whole arm. The knobby fingers seemed skeletal, and they cast giant shadows on the far chamber wall.

Something cracked.

I jumped, almost dropping the ax, but locked my elbows to hold it still.

Levi walked past me, holding his weapon at his side.

My grandfather lowered his arm. “You think you can do what your grandmother couldn’t, boy?” He smiled without any humor at all. “Try it.”

Was he talking to Levi or me? Both of our grandmothers had tangled with him and lost.

And where was Forest?

My eyes darted right, then left. I didn’t want to give her away if she was hiding, but what if I let her burn in the tunnels? She had called out for me, and I kept crawling away. What kind of worthless piece of crap was I?

My skin was so singed I was sure it was peeling off me. Tears ran down my face, but I kept my ax raised. Cain and the dogs and geese that seemed to follow Levi were nowhere to be found.

“Efnisien Leer,” Levi said. His voice made the red light in the basement flicker. “You and that witch tree are done. Come peaceful, or come in pieces. Your call.”

Levi lifted his ax. From the side, his pale face seemed longer and more set, his expression all business. The red droplets under his eye sparkled like real blood.

The laugh that came out of my grandfather curdled my insides. His hand shot out, and Levi’s ax twitched. My own ax
tried to jump out of my grip, and I staggered sideways, trying to keep hold of it. The chamber rumbled, and the scratchy-scrabbling sound of thorny wood snaking across stone made me turn in circles, swinging out with my weapon in case roots were coming after me.

They weren’t.

They were circling the chamber walls, stacking themselves one on top of the other, thick and thorny and dense.

No escape now.

“Levi,” I said, but he didn’t answer.

Two of the roots shot toward the back of the chamber. I heard shouts and screams coming from far away but getting closer fast, and then the roots whipped back into view.

Oh God. No.

Everything inside me withered.

Trina and Jessie.

Roots twisted around them, holding them as they hit at the wood and yelled and tried to jerk themselves free.

They must have come after me when I left the hospital and gotten to the tunnels, and now—

No, no, no!

“Levi!” When I turned back to him, he and my grandfather were circling each other. Levi struck with a quick swing of his ax.

My grandfather dodged away from the blow. “You don’t have the bitch’s power, boy. Give it up.”

Levi swung again.

My grandfather sniffed like he was smelling the blood he was about to spill, and his eyes widened. He stopped circling Levi and
backed toward the tree. His head swiveled left and right. “You found a new one,” he murmured. “A
young
one. Where is she?”

He spun toward the corner of the chamber, toward the entrance, and I realized Forest had to be hiding right about in that very spot.

Levi bared his teeth and lunged, brandishing the ax in a wild blur.

My grandfather stumbled.

Branches tore away from the walls to help him, and I charged the roots holding Trina and Jessie. When my blade struck wood, it was like hitting solid stone. Sparks flared. My wrists wrenched as the hilt tore out of my grip. My ax skittered across the rotten floor toward Levi and my grandfather.

Trina let out a scream that shredded my heart.

“Coming, baby.” I jumped for the ax. A branch caught it before I ever got near, and in a whirl of leaves and rotten white flowers, the ax came barreling toward my face. I dodged sideways and smacked into the tree’s thorny base, just below its eyeball.

Its mouth opened. Moss-wrapped teeth ripped across my gut and snagged the waist of my jeans, jerking me off my feet.

The tree held me there in its mouth, upside down and kicking and hollering. Every part of me felt torn in half. Then I saw Trina and Jessie get lifted off the floor, too. They dangled from the roots about fifteen feet away from me, limp like dolls. Their faces had gone slack, mouths open, eyes shut.

Terror froze my pain and my blisters and my brain, and I couldn’t think at all.

The branches dropped my ax and grabbed my legs, wadding me up so the witch tree could eat me. I kicked harder. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my grandfather smash Levi in the face with his knobby fist and drop him like a prizefighter.

Then the tree turned me, and all I saw were wooden teeth and thorns and that big, nasty bloodshot eyeball rolling and rolling. I screamed and punched bark with one fist. It was going to eat me, and then it would eat Jessie and Trina. I couldn’t stop it.

I grabbed the thorn pendant and tore it off my neck. It was just a thorn, burning and black like the tree itself. I couldn’t stop it, but I could hurt the tree and give the others a chance.

I smashed the curved tip forward, ripping into the fleshy eyeball.

The thorn exploded in my palm. Gore blew out of the eye like a hot storm of acid, gushing into my face and chest and throwing me backward, turning everything to fire and misery and darkness. It kept coming, everything in that tree, hot blood spewing like a fountain that might never run dry.

The branches dropped me, and I smashed to the floor as the tree bellowed and shrieked. The whole chamber rocked. The floor shuddered and collapsed. I smelled burning wood and skin and hair—my skin, my hair. I screamed with the tree, rolling around but still burning to death anyway. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t think of anything but Trina and Jessie, and Levi and Forest. I listened for their screams, but all I could hear was the inferno, then my grandfather’s raging shout and the sound of his footsteps as he came for me.

“What did you do?” he growled. Then, louder and completely unhinged, “What have you done?”

His fingers dug into my cooking throat, and I knew he was choking me. He was killing me. I was dead, already in darkness, and—

“He’s not yours.” My grandma Betty’s voice whispered through the universe. For two seconds, I felt her. For another two, I smelled her, all powdery and soft like when I hugged her. “He’ll never be yours.”

My grandfather snarled.

Something whistled through the air. There was a wet crunch, followed by a thunk. I didn’t have to be able to see to know my grandfather had finally lost what was left of his head.

“That’s better,” Grandma Leslie said. “You been working on your aim, Betty?”

Something like cool lips brushed across my cheek, first one pair, then another. Then Grandma Leslie said, “Wake up, Levi. Take care of my grandson like you promised—and take care of my girl Forest, too.”

Way off in the distance, bells started ringing.

Cool air circled around my fried skin and the rips in my belly, easing the pain, as dogs barked and geese honked and a tree screamed. I thought I saw Levi and Cain dragging something black and glittery into a dark hole so deep it had to lead right out of this world.

A few seconds later, the pain got so bad I truly lost my mind.

Levi—

Forest, we’ve got to get them out of here—

Nothing.

Puking.

Screaming.

Heal him. I’ll help you.

Levi grunted with pain and Forest apologized, and then the world smelled like flowers and grass and lakes after a fresh rain, and I died, and then I didn’t, and—

Now his eyes.

I can’t. Even Imogene couldn’t pull that off anymore. She’s too old.

You have to try.

Fine. But only the right one. There’s nothing left of the other.

Good enough.

And I woke up seeing two worlds instead of one.

Chapter Twenty

“You ain’t Stevie Wonder, but you’ll do.” Imogene patted my hand as I stood in front of a mirror in the Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital records room, way up in the bell tower that used to scare me to death. I was checking out the pair of shades she and Levi and Forest had made for me, with a little help from Trina and Jessie. They were glasses like a lot of blind folks wore.

The right side of my face was smooth and perfect, and so was that eye, so even though the lens on that side had a dark coloring, it was just tinted glass, and I could see fine and normal—I could see the world I grew up in, with none of the extra stuff.

The left side of my face was covered with pinkish-white scars, and in the two months since we chopped up a tree in the basement under Lincoln, Levi had gone to work on the edges of the damaged skin, coloring and shaping like a real-world tattoo artist, only better. The scars blended into something like a tribal sun. As for the eye on that side, it was weird. All white and seemingly blind, but it wasn’t. It saw things. The glasses turned down the volume
on the light and colors that threatened to explode my brain whenever I focused too much on what my bad eye tried to show me.

I lifted the glasses and stared at myself and Imogene in the mirror, and then at Levi, Forest, Jessie, Trina, and Mama. In the reflection, my normal eye gazed back at me, and so did my white eye. Without the glasses, I could see Levi’s mix of light and darkness, and the unbelievable yellow glow that surrounded Forest. Imogene had a glow like that, too, only hers seemed thinner and weaker.

Mama had an aura, a soft bunch of white flickers. Jessie, he looked steel-blue and steady. I always knew Jessie was a good guy, but now I could actually see it. He didn’t have any scars from the battle below the nuthouse, but he had cut his crazy hair and shaved, and then signed up for karate and weight training. Forest said maybe he was going soft in the head and starting to believe he could turn into a ninja. That would be a stretch, with his worn-out jeans, Lincoln Psychiatric sweatshirt, and that bunch of stubbly red hair sticking out on both sides of his head.

Trina slipped up next to me, staring into the mirror as she took my hand. She had on jeans and a pink sweater. Her aura was different—bright silver, with a sparkly kind of lightning at the edges, especially in the corners of her beautiful eyes.

“I like the glasses,” Trina said, so I put them back on, and she squeezed my hand. No scars on her, either—not on her skin, and not on her soul or emotions, either. She was still in school and planned to finish, but she was changing her major to social work and planning to take her first externship at Lincoln so she could stay close.

I hadn’t sensed Grandma Betty at all since I saw her ghost at Lincoln, but I hoped she’d approve. Forest had gone looking for Grandma Leslie a few times, too, but had no luck. I thought they were both gone on to the other side to stay this time, and it made me sad, but happy, too. Maybe they were resting now, or gone to heaven, or to whatever kind of life we live next. Wherever they were, I hoped they were finally and completely at peace.

We all kept standing there, Trina and Jessie and Imogene and Forest and Levi and Mama and me. Seven of us, staring in a mirror and wondering if we really understood all that had happened, and all that was about to happen.

“Well?” Mama asked. “You people figured it out yet?”

“It was the thorn,” Levi said. “Betty must have taken it from the witch tree the first time she fought with it. When Darius stabbed the tree’s eye, he poisoned it with the only thing strong enough to hurt it—a piece of itself.”