Violet stopped at the edge of the parking lot, leaving Four Paths High School behind her. A deep, impermeable wave of chestnut oaks rose far above her head, their shadows halting at the toes of her boots.
There was nowhere left to go but into the forest.
Violet blinked, and the trees were black and white. She blinked again, and Deputy Anders’s sightless eyes were staring into hers.
She whimpered and shut her eyes, but Rosie’s image was waiting behind them, half-transparent, branches curling toward them both.
“They’re not real,” she whispered. “They’re not.”
“What’s not real?”
The voice was soft and feathery and came from behind her.
Violet whipped around, her defenses rising. Last night had left her jumpy.
But the white girl standing behind Violet clearly hadn’t come to threaten her. She was small and finely sculpted, a porcelain doll with thick, winged eyeliner. Her left arm stopped at the elbow, and a tangle of dark, wiry curls hung down to her waist.
She had seen the girl in homeroom. Which meant, Violet realized, flushing slightly, she’d watched her meltdown. “Why did you follow me?”
The girl’s eyes, dark and doe-like, stirred with something that might’ve been pity. “You ran,” she said. “I think I know what you were running from.”
Violet scowled. “Maybe I was just bored.”
“Mrs. Langham told you someone had died, and it bored you?” The girl’s smile should’ve been reassuring, but it only made Violet realize her skin was stretched a little too tightly across her skull. “Somehow I doubt you’re that heartless.”
Violet took a deep, shuddering breath. “So maybe I was upset. I don’t like death, okay?”
“No one does,” said the girl. “But you just moved here. You didn’t even know him.”
“And you did,” said Violet, a trickle of unease rising in her stomach. “So why aren’t you mourning him?”
The girl stared straight into the woods behind Violet’s shoulder. The silhouettes of the trunks were reflected in her dark brown eyes.
“I am mourning him.” There was something distant in her voice, something hollow. “I know exactly how he died, Violet. Bones sticking out of his sides. White eyes. Gray skin. It’s just not the sort of thing I want to say out loud. Makes me sound like I’m losing it, you know?”
The palms of Violet’s hands went clammy with sweat, her throat contracting until she could barely breathe.
Whoever this girl was, she had seen that body, too.
“How could you possibly know that?” she choked out.
The girl took a step forward, the shadows of the trees engulfing her tiny form. “The same way I can tell you do. I’ve been to the Gray.”
Violet knew immediately what she was talking about. It was the perfect term to describe those colorless trees, that static sky.
“How do you know I’ve been to—that place?”
“Are you telling me you haven’t?”
“No,” she said, with a strange surge of relief. “I’m not. That forest. It’s…here. In this town.”
“Yes and no,” said the girl, which did not help Violet at all. “It’s certainly real. And it’s certainly in Four Paths. But it’s not here.” She waved her hand dismissively in the direction of the trees. “Most people don’t make it out, you know. You were lucky.”
“Doesn’t that mean you were lucky, too?”
The girl chuckled. “No, I wasn’t.” She stuck out her hand. Violet shook it. It was surprisingly callused. “Harper Carlisle.”
“Should I bother to introduce myself?”
Harper smiled—a real smile this time. “Nope. Everyone here knows who you are.”
Violet’s mind was bursting with questions, but the first one that toppled from her mouth surprised her. “What kind of animal can kill someone like that?”
Harper turned to face the woods again, her voice distant and dreamy. The trees had stopped rustling, like they were listening, too. “It’s not an animal.”
“Then what is it?”
Harper was still facing away from her when she spoke next. “I think the word most people would use is monster.”
A day ago, Violet would’ve rolled her eyes at this sentence and walked away.
But now she turned, so she could see Harper’s expression, and chose her next question very carefully. “What word would you use?”
The unflappable veneer she’d first seen on Harper’s face was gone. There was a raw pain etched into her features that Violet had only ever seen in her own mirror. “I’m not sure. I’m not in the business of naming things I’ve never seen for myself.”
“Why did you follow me out here, really?” The answer suddenly seemed very important.
Harper met her eyes. “Because no one should run out of class and have no one to follow them.”
But Violet could tell she was lying. “Try again.”
Harper scowled. “Fine. Because…I saw Justin Hawthorne talking to you yesterday. The Hawthornes wouldn’t be bothering with you unless they thought you were useful to them somehow. So I’m warning you now that everyone in this town is just a pawn to them. Nothing more. No matter how much they pretend otherwise.”
Violet remembered how the rest of the school had looked at Justin. How those adults had stared at his mother.
Their adoration couldn’t have been further from the cold fury in Harper’s words. And Violet could tell that the girl at least believed what she was saying—whether it was true or not.
“What did they do to you?” said Violet softly.
The chestnut oaks rustled above their heads as Harper twined her shaking fingers in her hair. “Let’s just say that when they were my friends, I still had a left hand.”
And then she turned and rushed away.
When Violet biked home that afternoon, she found Daria sitting on the front porch, knitting. Daria was always at her calmest in her ancient rocking chair, her crystal needles flashing away as she slowly unwound a ball of crimson yarn, usually with Orpheus the cat wrapping himself around her ankles. But this time, Juniper was sitting next to her in a chair dragged out from the kitchen, brandishing knitting needles of her own.
Violet paused for a moment at the base of the porch, just trying to take it in.
“Are you…learning to knit?” The words came out a little stilted. Violet hadn’t really spoken to her mother since finding out about Stephen Saunders.
“Well, I’m trying to teach her,” said Daria reproachfully. “She can’t relax long enough to get any stitches in.”
Juniper gave Daria the same frown Violet had always given Rosie when her sister was bossing her around. The expression looked wrong on her mother’s face, too juvenile, too unpolished. “You always told me I never knew how to be patient.” Juniper was still wearing heels and dress slacks, like she would have back in Ossining, but her blouse was wrinkled, her hair tucked carelessly behind her ears.
“You never learned how to wait, June,” said Daria, although the words were more affectionate than biting. “There’s still time, though. The stones haven’t come for you just yet.”
She patted her on the shoulder as Juniper stared hopelessly at the tangled mess of red yarn wound between her needles.
“Stones, coming for me. Whatever you say.” She turned her gaze to Violet. “Can you keep an eye on her for a second? I need to shoot off a few e-mails.”
Violet nodded. A moment later, Juniper was gone, the knotted yarn left in her place.
Daria eyed her. “Can you knit?”
Violet leaned her bike against the railing. “No.”
“A pity,” said Daria. “You have clever hands.”
Violet flexed her fingers. “Piano.”
“Yes. You remind me of Stephen.” The ghost of a smile flitted across her face. “He was a musician, too.”
Violet decided to try to push her luck, despite what Juniper had said about upsetting Daria. The stairs creaked
beneath her boots as she climbed onto the porch. “You said he was a musician? What did he play?”
“The piano,” Daria said immediately. “It was why Juniper and Marcus wanted you to play. To honor him.”
Marcus Caulfield. Her father.
She hadn’t heard his name said aloud in a long time, and the words conjured up a sudden flash of memory—dark hair and a loud, raucous laugh, muscular arms lifting her up from the ground and wrapping her in a hug.
It flickered through her mind in the space of a heartbeat, leaving her aching for both halves of her family. She had never felt further from the dad she’d never really gotten the chance to know—and even though they were now in her mother’s hometown, she had never felt further from Juniper, either.
“I never knew that was why they enrolled me in piano lessons,” Violet said quietly.
Daria shrugged. “June’s never been good at explaining herself. But she wanted something of Stephen to live on, I think.”
“What happened to Stephen?” Violet asked. “Did it have anything to do with the Gray?”
Daria froze mid-stitch. “Come here,” she said, her voice creaking. Violet approached, slowly, her heart beating faster than was probably strictly necessary. Daria clasped her hand in hers. “Oh, Violet. You’re going to die with a hat on.”
Violet sighed, even as unease prickled in the back of her skull. She should’ve known the lucidity would only last for a moment—there were clearly no real answers here. “Well, then, I’ll just avoid headgear at all costs.”
Daria tugged her hand away. “You’ll forget one day. Everyone in Four Paths does.”
Violet stared darkly at her palm. A sudden breeze washed over them, a lovely break from the early September heat.
“Have you tried looking in the woods, little bone?” Daria’s voice was barely audible. “That’s the only part of this town that really matters.”
Violet jerked her head back toward her. “What?”
But the door was swinging open now, and Juniper was back, phone in hand. “It’s horrible out here.”
Violet barely heard her.
Have you tried looking in the woods, little bone?
Violet turned toward the trees.
She thought of the way Harper had talked about the forest that morning. The pain on her face.
There was so much here that she was only beginning to understand. But pretending it wasn’t happening would do nothing to help her figure it out.
“I’ll be out back.” Violet hurried back down the stairs and rounded the corner of the house to the backyard.
She pushed back thoughts of Rosie’s ghost and Deputy Anders’s corpse as she headed into the trees, the towering trunks the only witnesses to her meager act of bravery.
Everything looked utterly mundane: the chestnut trunks of the oak trees winding toward one another like old friends conversing, the birds chirping in the branches above them, the green-tinged sunlight. But unease still pulsed through Violet’s stomach.
Daylight didn’t mean bad things couldn’t happen.
She heard the insects buzzing before she saw them, a droning, heavy noise, like a whirring propeller. They hung in the air like a mushroom cloud over something limp and furry at the base of a tree, an unlucky raccoon or opossum.
Violet wrinkled her nose. She was turning away when she saw the bit of crimson yarn. It took a second for her head to process the scene, leaving her as stiff and still as the forest around her, unable to move forward, unable to look away.
What remained of Orpheus lay between two roots, baking slowly in the midafternoon sun. The animal’s eyes were mercifully closed, his head bent at an unnatural angle. The blood on his neck glistened.
Violet’s vision spun. She stumbled, braced a hand against the nearest trunk, and retched onto the grass. Nothing came up, but she was still shaking when she looked at the body again. Something flickered in her peripheral vision—had his tail twitched?
It seemed impossible, but she had to see if he was still alive. If there was any shot at saving him.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, forcing herself toward Orpheus. Her fingers brushed against the cat’s front leg as she fumbled for a pulse.
A feeling of sudden loss coursed through her. Violet felt drained, exhausted, as if she had run for miles. She snatched her hand away from the body.
He was dead. She didn’t need to look at him any longer to know that.
She was about to turn back toward the house, already wondering what she’d tell Juniper, when something soft brushed against a rip in her jeans.
Orpheus was head-butting her ankle, purring. Behind him, the insects dissipated into the foliage.
Violet let out a harsh, choked scream, stumbled backward on shaking legs. It couldn’t be. But the place where Orpheus’s body had been was empty.
She steeled herself. Then she knelt down, reached out a tentative hand, and waited for Orpheus to pad toward her again.
His fur was soft and gentle against her fingers as she stroked his head. He certainly felt real, albeit friendlier than usual. He nosed against her palm, purring, and the tension building in Violet’s chest decreased a little. Maybe this had been a terrifying hallucination.
Just like Rosie.
Her brain was simply playing tricks on her, conflating Daria’s warning with her strange night in the forest.
She was about to stand up when her fingers touched something sticky on the cat’s neck. Violet pulled back her hand, staring at the blood coating the tips of her fingers.
“You’re dead.” Violet backed away from Orpheus. Her voice was toneless and shrill, a spurt of air being released from a balloon. Something spun between them—a sense of connection, a tether, as if, when she touched him, she’d left a piece of herself behind. “Holy shit. You’re dead.”
A familiar blond form appeared in her peripheral vision, standing at the end of the clearing, his face ashen.
“No,” said Justin Hawthorne softly. “He was dead. He’s not now. Thanks to you.”
Violet staggered back another step, still light-headed. “I don’t understand.”
His brow furrowed. “Violet…”
And then the world behind him opened like a yawning mouth. Violet recoiled as stiff white clouds devoured the blue sky. Dread coursed through her, a heavy, leaden thing that weighted down her limbs. A high, tinny noise hissed through Violet’s ears, a voice snarling out words she couldn’t understand. But as soon as she had registered it, it was gone.
Her breath hitched in her lungs again as she realized she was back in that colorless, awful place Harper had called the Gray.
And this time, she had taken Justin Hawthorne with her.
Justin had spent most of the day trying to slip away from the Hawthorne house. His mother had put him and May to work assuaging the doubts of the townspeople. But when she left for the sheriff’s office in the afternoon, Justin had seized his chance to take matters into his own hands.
He hadn’t expected to find Violet using powers—powers that could bring something back from the dead, proving that Augusta’s insistence that the Saunderses were an irrelevant bloodline was a blatant lie. And he certainly hadn’t expected both of them to fall into the Gray.
May’s reading had been accurate about one thing, at least: Something was seriously out of balance.
Not that it mattered to him anymore, because he was definitely about to die.
Terror clawed at his throat as the dense green forest melted away, replaced by the same lifeless woods he’d seen on his ritual day. He and Violet now stood at the start of a road with buildings stretching along either side. They were flimsy-looking structures made of brick and logs, all rendered in perfect gray scale. Some of the bricks sagged; a log roof had a clumsily patched hole in the center; smoke was frozen halfway out of a chimney.
“Why are we here?” Violet’s voice was sharp and accusatory, echoing oddly through the dead space of the Gray. “Did you do this?”
; “Of course not!” It felt odd to mouth the words, then hear them. Justin tried to keep his focus on everything he knew about the Gray.
But most of what he knew amounted to the simple fact that if you went in, you probably weren’t coming out.
“Then why?” she whispered, her shoulders caving inward, her jaw tightening.
He spread his arms out wide. “I don’t know.”
“How do we get out?” Violet said, panic tightening across her face. Behind her, the gray-and-white brick of the nearest house went in and out of focus, like a choppy Wi-Fi signal.
Justin’s limbs were tensed and ready to run, but there was nothing to run from. And nowhere to go. “I don’t know that either,” he said, trying to sound calm. “Most people who wind up in the Gray…”
“They die like Frank Anders, don’t they?” Violet’s voice was grim. She swiped her hair out of her face, leaving a smear of the cat’s blood across her forehead.
Justin swallowed his surprise. She clearly knew far more than Augusta had claimed she did. “Yes.”
A hollow, tinny noise rushed through his skull; a soft whistle that might’ve been a laugh. He whipped around on instinct, shuddering, but there was nothing there.
“Did you hear that, too?” Violet whispered.
He nodded.
“We need to get out of here.” She gestured toward something at the edge of the trees; a place where the Gray was starting to shimmer.
As the shimmering began to shape itself into a vaguely humanoid form, Justin remembered the bodies.
The bleached eyes. The bite marks on their limbs. The agony on their bloated faces.
Terror thrummed through him, so tangible that he could almost reach out and touch it. This was it—the death he’d escaped after his ritual. It had finally come to claim him.
But the form that appeared at the edge of the trees was not the Beast.
It was Isaac, arms outstretched, hands shimmering with energy. There was a jagged rip in the Gray starting at his fingertips, a hole in the world. Behind him stretched the waving branches of Four Paths’ chestnut oaks.
The Devouring Gray Page 7
