The Devouring Gray

by Christine Lynn Herman

  Mrs. Moore and Mrs. Burnham melted away, gabbling hasty good-byes before Violet could ask them any more questions. Which, Violet sensed, was the last thing they wanted her to do.

  “Augusta Hawthorne,” the woman said, holding out a gloved hand roughly the size of Violet’s head.

  Violet shook it, expecting her fingers to be crushed, but the soft, cracked leather and the grip beneath it were surprisingly delicate. “Violet Saunders. I think I’ve met your son.”

  She would’ve noticed this woman’s resemblance to Justin even if she hadn’t revealed her last name. They had the same handsome, angular features, the same pinkish skin and thin blond hair, the same way of standing, as if they expected everyone else in the room to turn toward them. And maybe everyone did—at the very least, the party’s collective gaze seemed to be boring into Violet’s artificially distressed T-shirt.

  “Ah. Justin.” Something unreadable flickered across the woman’s face. “He tends to make an impression.”

  “I guess.”

  “I’m here to introduce myself.” Augusta flipped open her wallet. A silver shield glimmered inside with a circle of red glass embedded in the center—a badge. “As the sheriff of a small town, I like to tell everyone personally to contact me if there’s ever a problem.”

  “That’s admirable.” There was something in the woman’s voice that made Violet wonder what kind of problem she was referring to.

  But Juniper appeared at her side before the thought could fully blossom. “There you are,” her mother said to Augusta, sharp, obvious recognition splashed across her features. “I’m assuming this get-together was your idea?”

  So Juniper hadn’t planned this impromptu party. Violet felt a rush of satisfaction that her gut had been right—her mother didn’t like people that much.

  Augusta inclined her head. “It seemed the thing to do. I mentioned the idea to a few others, and they were all quite interested in catching up.”

  “Interested in nosing around my house, you mean,” said Juniper. “If you wanted to catch up, you had thirty years to call.”

  “And you had thirty years to visit.”

  Juniper’s gaze went as cold and glassy as the eyes of the deer head on the wall.

  “I heard you wound up in law enforcement.” Her voice held the same quiet viciousness Violet had heard her use on the phone with unruly investors. “You must love that.”

  “And I hear you went into…what was it, finance?”

  “Software development.”

  “Fascinating.”

  Those other women’s knowledge of Juniper had come from rumors rather than experience. But Augusta Hawthorne was different. There was a kind of tainted familiarity here that made Violet realize her mother hadn’t just left a town behind—she’d left a life. Daria was one of her casualties. The sheriff, it seemed, was another.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I leave you here,” Augusta said. “I’ve got to check on the dogs. They have a tendency to misbehave in unfamiliar places.”

  So the mastiffs belonged to her. Violet wasn’t surprised.

  “Of course,” said Juniper.

  As Augusta walked away, Violet turned toward her mother. “Who was she?”

  Juniper tugged uncomfortably on the lapel of her blazer. “My best friend.”

  Violet took a deep breath. “And who was Stephen?”

  Juniper went still. The country music seemed fainter somehow. Violet was suddenly conscious of how the dead in this room outnumbered the living: the deer head on the wall, the stuffed foxes in the corner, the nest of pinned-down birds rising between two couches.

  She knew before Juniper spoke that her mother would lie.

  “Maybe someone else in town?” said Juniper carefully. “It’s been a long time. I can’t remember everyone.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Violet had never seen her mother look so lost, or sound so shaken.

  “I’m not doing this here.”

  Violet gestured toward the doorway. “Good. This party sucks anyway.”

  The hallway was quieter. Juniper’s eyes darted down the corridors of reddish stone, her body relaxing only when she seemed certain they were alone at the foot of the staircase. “I suppose it was wishful thinking to hope this town had moved on.”

  “Moved on from what?”

  Her mother’s hand clutched her wineglass for dear life. “From Stephen,” she said. “My little brother.”

  The words sent a jolt down Violet’s spine. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. “You have a brother?”

  Every word Juniper said was clipped and careful, the same way they’d been at Rosie’s funeral. “Had. He died a few months before I finished high school.”

  “You never told me.” Violet couldn’t keep the accusation out of her voice. “Is this why you left town?”

  Juniper took a deep, shuddering breath. “Yes. Stephen is why I left.”

  “Gossiping?” Daria crouched on the second-floor landing like a spider, her eyes gleaming brownish-yellow in the light of the dusty chandelier above their heads.

  “I can’t talk about this in front of Daria.” Juniper’s voice slipped, revealing the slightest tinge of panic. “It’ll just upset her.”

  “Looks like you’re the upset one to me,” said Daria.

  “So if Stephen was your brother—”

  “Another time.” Juniper’s voice was firm and steady again. She hurried back to the living room, downing her entire glass of wine on the way.

  Violet didn’t chase her. She didn’t feel stable enough to move just yet. She was too overwhelmed, filled to the brim with a new, awful understanding of her mother.

  “Stay out of the woods, little bone,” Daria said reproachfully from the top of the stairs. “I can see those branches reaching for you.”

  But Violet could barely hear her.

  Juniper’s brother had died, so she had run away. And she’d kept running, cutting Violet off from her father’s family after he died, then yanking them away from Ossining after they’d lost Rosie. She didn’t care who she left behind. She didn’t care about the damage she did along the way.

  Violet stumbled to her room, her head throbbing. She curled up on her bed and cried all the tears Juniper wouldn’t, for the father and sister she had lost and the uncle she would never know. When she was done, the noise from downstairs had faded away.

  She wiped her face with her comforter, then padded resolutely to the music room.

  Violet needed the piano. It was the only thing that could possibly clear the dullness from her mind, ease the aching in her chest.

  This time, she didn’t even try to play her audition program. Her fingers flew freely across the keys, the pain she couldn’t verbalize emerging in the chords that echoed off the cavernous walls of the music room. This was her life without Rosie, these great bursts of sound with no audience. And Violet knew in that moment that she would do anything—anything—to have her sister back for just one more moment.

  She closed her eyes, trying to push the longing away, push the pain out. When she opened them, the piano was gone.

  In its place was a sky full of still, gray clouds that shone like blunted steel.

  Violet lay faceup on the ground, her arms and legs splayed out like a discarded toy.

  Above her was an endless expanse of dark, ashy trunks and naked branches that spiraled toward an unmoving sky. Everything was colorless and completely still. The world felt two-dimensional, like the set of a play, a forest of cardboard and painted plywood.

  Pain shot through Violet’s spine as she sat up—every part of her was sore; her bare feet, her callused palms. Her arms were caked with dirt from the tips of her fingers to her elbows.

  She didn’t know where she was. Why she hurt. How she’d gotten here.

  Fear flooded through Violet’s chest as she struggled to her feet, but it didn’t overwhelm her.

  Until she saw the body.

  Th
e limbs were grotesquely twisted, splinters of bone poking through at the joints. The skin was bloated and gray. A perfect semicircle of puncture marks glistened on its torso—a bite mark, maybe, although Violet couldn’t picture an animal with jaws that wide. Something clear and oily oozed through where the skin had broken.

  The only sign that it had been a person at all was a silver shield pinned to its chest.

  Violet met the corpse’s sightless eyes, bleached completely white, and realized its tongue was bitten in two.

  She sucked in the biggest breath she could and screamed—or at least, she tried to.

  The noise ripped itself out of Violet’s throat, but there was no cry of raw terror, just her wheezing silently in the woods—and then the scream rang out, seconds too late, high and shrill and horrified.

  Violet did the only thing that made sense anymore. She bolted.

  She ran until the trees and the ground and the static sky all blurred together, her breath heaving in her lungs, her footsteps ringing out a second too late across the forest floor. When she couldn’t take another step, she doubled over and emptied her stomach.

  And when she stood up, shaking, the last thing she was prepared for was her sister standing in front of the nearest tree.

  Violet’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

  Rosie wore the outfit she had died in—ripped jeans, a paint-splattered tank top, and a crimson bomber jacket that clashed horribly with her blue hair. She was the only thing in this strange gray world with any color at all, resplendent in the weak light of the off-white sky.

  “Rosie?” Violet whispered, woozy with joy and shock. “Where am I? What is this?” But as she started toward her sister, Rosie’s body flickered around the edges, then went transparent enough for Violet to see the outline of the misshapen branches behind her.

  She wasn’t real.

  And the crushing knowledge that of course Rosie wasn’t really here, she couldn’t be here, hurt her more than the sight of the body had.

  Rosie took a step back, the branches weaving and pulsating above her head. Violet had spent her life trailing after her sister. She wanted to follow her.

  But there was something that made Violet pause. The way Rosie was standing—her legs and arms crooked just slightly wrong, as if she were trying to be a person, but didn’t know how.

  A tinny, hollow sound whistled through the forest, almost like a voice.

  It was coming from the trees.

  The branches behind Rosie were reaching forward. Reaching for her, every twig pulsating with unnatural life. Violet backed away, panic rising in her throat again. A branch brushed against her arm, and the motion shocked something in her, the wrongness of it all, this dull, devouring gray.

  She would not let this be the place she died.

  She turned again, ready to run, but she’d scarcely taken a step when a great cacophony of sound erupted, the rich, eerie pealing of a thousand bells. And as Violet jolted backward, shocked at the sudden burst of noise, color rushed into the world in a swirl of brown and green and blue.

  All around her were lush, healthy chestnut oaks, their branches weighed down by leaves tinged orange around the edges. Above her head, the three familiar spires of the Saunders house rose over the trees, backlit by the thin, rosy light of dawn.

  The first thing Violet did was cry, really cry, great sobs of relief as her lungs flooded with proper breath.

  Maybe she had sleepwalked, and all of this had just been a nightmare. The body, the trees, Rosie—it couldn’t have been real.

  But when Violet looked at her left hand, a single gray twig was still clenched between her fingers.

  The Hawthorne mastiffs began to bark at dawn.

  Henry and Brutus were too well trained to make a sound unless there was trouble. And Justin’s mother had been out on patrol the night before.

  Justin took the stairs two at a time, his backpack forgotten on his bed, and reached the front door just as Augusta Hawthorne swung it open.

  Her cheek was bruised, her knuckles scraped raw. The founders’ medallion pinned to her sheriff’s badge was caked with dirt.

  But the thing that truly frightened him was the panic flitting behind her neutral expression. Because his mother didn’t show fear the same way May didn’t admit to making mistakes.

  “What happened?” Justin’s voice was hoarse. Behind them, the dogs let out a series of mournful howls.

  His mother’s face tightened. “Reading room. Now. I’m getting your sister.”

  She disappeared before he could say anything else. Or mention that it was a school day, although the thought of attending school had vanished the moment she walked in the door.

  There was only one reason Augusta Hawthorne was summoning her children to the reading room.

  She wanted to see the future.

  May and Augusta were waiting for him at the scarred wooden table—the only piece of furniture in the reading room, older than everything on the Hawthorne grounds except the tree that had given them their name. Justin slid into his usual seat across from the window, where the indistinct shapes of branches pressed against the side of the house.

  “Are you ready?” said Augusta. Above her head was a portrait of Hetty Hawthorne, one of the founding members of Four Paths and the matriarch of their bloodline. Her face was a testament to the consistency of the Hawthorne gene pool—a blunt, blond, severe attractiveness pulled together by a smile that was just a well-disguised smirk. Hetty had painted it herself, just like she’d painted the Deck of Omens a century and a half ago. Justin was fairly certain he’d once seen the portrait tuck a loose strand of hair behind its ear.

  “I can read your cards, but I’d prefer an explanation first. It will make my process easier.” The only clue that May was anxious was the slight tremors in her fingers as her hands folded around the Deck of Omens. Not every Hawthorne could read the future, but their power was tied into predicting and influencing the roots and branches that knotted the town together, the same way the Carlisles worked with stone and the Sullivans could hurt or heal with a single touch. Each family protected Four Paths in a different way.

  Or at least, they were supposed to. Lately, Justin wasn’t sure they were protecting Four Paths at all.

  Augusta sighed but nodded in acquiescence. “Early this morning, I was alerted that there had been a disturbance at the border. I was skeptical, but I investigated the matter personally. The deputy was correct; however, we were unprepared for the consequences.”

  “Consequences?” Justin couldn’t stop the question.

  There it was again; that flicker of fear across his mother’s face, even though her words were perfectly steady. “Deputy Anders is dead.”

  The reading room went blurry and Justin’s insides froze as he fought a sudden, overwhelming wave of guilt.

  Just last week, Anders had warned him to be careful. He thought of the man’s broad shoulders, his wispy mustache, the holster at his hip.

  The gun never had a chance of saving him. But if Justin had powers, maybe he would’ve.

  Justin’s ritual day was still frozen into his memory. How his palm had burned as he sliced the knife across it, then pressed it to the heart of the hawthorn tree, blood dripping down the bark.

  How he’d waited. How each excruciating second had passed as he hoped desperately for something to happen, while May and his mother shifted uneasily behind him.

  But when Justin finally felt the tree spring to life, heard its deep, glorious heartbeat, it did not bend in submission the way he’d believed it would. Instead a great dullness had spread through him. The air had split and the Gray had rushed around him—the static sky, the dark, pulsating trees—and he had felt so helpless, so small.

  A choking panic had seized him, and he’d dropped to his knees, a tinny, hollow voice hissing in his ears. He hadn’t understood the words, but being close enough to hear the Beast’s voice meant he was already dead.

  Yet he’d been too petrified to fight bac
k.

  That was what the Beast did to people who didn’t have powers—it made them see and hear whatever it wanted. It made them believe, long before it killed them, that they were better off dead.

  It was May who had saved him. May who’d pulled him back to Four Paths before the monster in the Gray devoured him, just as it had devoured every other Hawthorne who was unworthy of power.

  So Justin had lived, more or less.

  And now, because he was powerless to protect the town as the Gray grew stronger, four innocent people were dead.

  Across the table, May’s voice had gone as soft and quiet as footsteps over grass. “I’m so sorry.”

  Augusta shrugged. “Don’t apologize to me, May. I’m not the dead one.” There was a moment of sharp, stunned silence, like the aftermath of a slap—or a scream. “Now, if you could continue with the reading?”

  May cleared her throat, sniffling. “Of course, Mother. Please, ask us your question.”

  “Who or what is causing this strengthening of the Gray?” asked Augusta carefully. “And how do we eliminate them?”

  People weren’t supposed to ask two questions, but Augusta always did. As soon as she was done speaking, May began to shuffle the cards. They vanished one by one as May’s power took hold, until only four remained.

  She laid them out on the table, each all-seeing eye facing a different direction. Augusta never took her gloves off, so May was forced to close her hand around her mother’s wrist—skin-on-skin contact was part of the reading. Augusta’s other glove slid into Justin’s hand; a second later, May’s slightly clammy palm rested against his. They sat like that for nearly thirty seconds before May broke the circle.

  “They’re ready.” She flipped each card over. The shadows of her fingers darted across the table like lines of ink seeping into the wood—and then they froze, hovering over the final card.

  It was another Saunders card. The Eight of Bones this time. Two skulls nestled nose to nose; one hopelessly cracked, one smooth and whole.

  “Isn’t that interesting,” Augusta said, her voice dangerously soft. “Tell us what you see, May.”

  When May spoke, there was a slight tremor in her voice. “There is something fundamentally wrong in Four Paths.” She pointed to the first card—the Scales of Balance. Hetty Hawthorne had painted a great wooden frame with two cups hanging from each end. A man and a woman sat inside each one, legs crossed, eyes closed. “You asked how we can stop the Gray from growing stronger. This is part of your answer. It means there’s been an unbalancing in this town—something big.”