The Devouring Gray

by Christine Lynn Herman

  “So you’re saying, what, none of you could leave until you did your rituals?”

  Justin shook his head. “Of course we could leave. I’m saying that if you don’t do your ritual when you’re supposed to, the town keeps you here until you either gain control of your powers…or, well…”

  He trailed off uncomfortably.

  Isaac finished his thought, the barest trace of a smile on his lips. “Or you die.”

  Violet had no time to dwell on this, because her mind chose that moment to put something together that she should’ve realized minutes ago.

  “Wait. My mother and my aunt must’ve done this ritual.” Her words rose on a wave of slow, cresting anger. “Juniper must know all of this. She must be lying about everything.”

  She choked back a pained laugh. Justin placed his hand over hers, but she jerked it away.

  “Actually, I don’t think your mother is lying,” May said delicately. “Just because founders can leave Four Paths for good doesn’t mean it’s easy. Our powers don’t even work outside the town.”

  Violet’s heart sank further. She had the means to bring Rosie back, and yet retrieving her sister had once again become border line impossible.

  It was an irony so cruel, May’s next words barely registered.

  “It’s our sworn duty to stay here, to honor our ancestors, to protect the town. The price of leaving could’ve been her knowledge of the town’s true nature.”

  Beside her, Justin nodded in affirmation, his eyes skating over Violet’s head.

  “This place can do that?” Violet said dubiously. She was still grappling with what she’d just learned. “Wipe someone’s memories?”

  “You have no idea what Four Paths is really capable of,” said May darkly.

  “Okay,” Violet said. “So assuming my mother doesn’t know, and since my aunt isn’t exactly a reliable source, tell me what my ritual is supposed to be. And then I’ll do it, and then I’ll be able to leave.”

  Justin frowned. “The Saunders family hasn’t really been a presence in this town since our mom was in high school. We barely know what kind of powers you have.”

  A strange laugh bubbled in Violet’s throat. “You don’t know what my ritual is. So you brought me here to tell me I’m trapped? That’s it? There’s nothing you can do?”

  “Just because we don’t know what you need to do to gain control of your powers doesn’t mean we can’t help you figure it out,” said Justin indignantly. “We’ve got resources. And we know how this town works.”

  Violet forced down her panic. This was not the time to get angry—this was the time to think. “So you said we could help each other. What’s in it for you if you help me?”

  The three of them exchanged a glance. “We’re sure you’ve noticed,” Justin said carefully, “that things are…tense in town right now. There are fewer founders than there have ever been, and our ranks are stretched thin trying to protect everyone. We need your help—especially with the equinox coming up.”

  “Equinox?” asked Violet.

  “When summer changes to fall, and winter changes to spring, the Gray is at its strongest,” said May. “Usually, we can keep it contained. But this year, things haven’t been going so well. And the fall equinox is a week and a half away.”

  “You saw Frank Anders’s body,” Isaac said bluntly. “More founders patrolling means fewer deaths. We’ll help you learn to control your powers, if you agree to use those powers to help us keep the town safe.”

  “It’s a great honor, you know,” added May. “You should be proud of your legacy.”

  But Violet wasn’t sure that was true.

  She’d always wanted to feel like she was part of a real family. Coming here had made her wonder if Juniper’s walls were finally falling. But all she’d seen of her mother’s legacy was pain and secrecy. And her father’s family was still as much of a mystery as it had ever been.

  Violet wanted to run back to Ossining.

  Was she really trapped here? Or did the Hawthornes just want her to believe that?

  “I need to know it’s true before I say yes,” she said, locking eyes with Justin. “That I’m really stuck in this town. That you were telling the truth. That I need to do my ritual to leave.”

  But it was May who responded. “I figured you might say that.” She rose from her seat and grabbed a wooden box from one of the shelves, lowering it carefully onto the table. Burned into the center of the wood was a symbol Violet had seen before: a circle with four lines crossing through it, almost touching. May added, “And I know exactly how to answer your questions.”

  The woodsy smell Violet had noticed in the reading room seemed to grow even stronger as she stared at the box. She turned her eyes on May, whose face had gone ashen, almost wraithlike, in the fading sunlight, shadows pooling like dark pits beneath her eyes.

  “What’s in the box?” Violet said hoarsely.

  May’s smile widened, revealing canine teeth that seemed a bit too pointed for someone so outwardly polished. “A family heirloom.”

  She flipped the box open, revealing a deck of cards the size of Violet’s palms. The outline of a bone-white eye was etched into the back of the top card.

  “Are those tarots?” Violet could’ve sworn the portrait on the wall behind May frowned at her as she spoke, but when she gave it a closer look, it was perfectly still. She shuddered and returned her gaze to May, who let out a disdainful sigh.

  “They are the Deck of Omens,” she said, drawing the cards out of the box and shuffling them easily in her thin, bony hands. Beside her, Justin gazed at the cards reverentially, while Isaac shrank away, as if he could vanish into the shadows. “Created by Hetty Hawthorne, the first great Seer. She used tarot as a template.” She jerked her head toward the shelf where the silver Fool lay. “But this deck is her own. There are four main suits. Branches, bones, daggers, and stones, each with nine number cards and two trumps, plus two wild cards.”

  “Wild cards?”

  The shadows of the branches behind May’s back seemed to draw a little closer to her as she smirked. “They show up when they feel like it. Now, my power is tied to the roots of this town. These cards use me as a conduit to answer any questions you might have. They can tell you anything—about your past, your present, your future.”

  “Okay, but if the cards said something you didn’t like, couldn’t you just lie to me?”

  May chuckled mirthlessly. “No. I can’t. It’s a covenant you make with the deck—it will tell you the truth, but you’re honor bound to pass that on. If you lie…” Her face darkened. “They stop talking.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Isaac softly, from across the table. He was eyeing the deck like it would burn him if he touched it.

  May shot him an acrid glare. “Maybe you would if you’d ever let me read your cards.”

  Justin frowned at them. “Both of you. Focus.”

  May cleared her throat. “Right, then. Violet, this is your chance. Ask a question.”

  Violet straightened up, her mind whirling with the possibilities. “Can I ask what my ritual is?”

  “You have to ask a question that directly pertains to you,” said May. “You didn’t create the ritual, so no.”

  Violet frowned. There was still so little she knew, so much she wanted to know. This question had to be phrased right.

  “Is it true that I can’t really leave town?” Violet said slowly. “And how can I figure out how to do my ritual?”

  “I said one question,” grumbled May, but she was already shuffling.

  To Violet’s astonishment, the cards were vanishing between her hands, one by one.

  There were only three cards left when May finished. She laid them out on the table and let out a somewhat huffy sigh.

  “We have to hold hands now,” she said, looking rather uncomfortable. “All our powers need skin-to-skin contact to work.”

  So Violet reluctantly slid her hand into May’s clammy grasp and Isaac’
s fingers. Physical contact made Violet severely uncomfortable—she’d barely touched anyone since Rosie’s death. Both their palms were strong and callused, but May’s grip felt perfunctory while Isaac’s was surprisingly gentle.

  But the sensation she felt a moment later was a hundred times worse than holding someone’s hand: like fingers reaching inside her skull.

  “What the hell?” she gasped, yanking her hands away. “What is that?”

  “I probably should’ve warned you,” May said. “It’s a Hawthorne thing. We get inside your head.”

  “Yes, you should’ve warned me!” Violet glared at her. “I don’t want you reading my mind.”

  “It’s not mind reading,” said May crossly, although she at least had the grace to look ashamed. “I don’t really see anything important. It’s how I connect you to the cards. They link together the things you’ve done and the most likely outcome of your question. It just feels a little strange, is all.”

  “A little strange?”

  May shrugged. “Do you want answers or not?”

  Violet scowled at her, but she’d come this far. So she grasped May’s hand again and spent the next thirty seconds in agonized, shuddering silence.

  “All right,” May said at last. “That’s enough.”

  Violet pulled her hands away and balled them up in her lap, sagging with relief. Her only consolation for what she’d just let May do was that the girl looked just as pleased as Violet was that they were no longer touching.

  “All right,” she said. “Here we go.”

  She turned over the Deck of Omens. Violet let out a startled sound as she saw the card in the center.

  It was like peering into another world, a world she wished she didn’t recognize. Swirls of paint rendered a person, mostly in shadow, standing in the center of a clearing ringed with thin gray trees. A single shaft of light shone onto the figure’s hand, but instead of flesh and blood, the artist had chosen to paint only bones. An outline of a bone with the number five inside it was etched into the top right corner.

  “I see you recognize your card.” May rested the tip of her pale pink fingernail against the painted wood. “The Five of Bones.”

  “I’m not one of the trumps?” said Violet.

  “You wouldn’t want to be,” May and Justin chorused.

  “It’s not unusual to have an avatar of yourself represented in a reading like this,” May continued. “Now, on your right, we’ve got the Wolf.” The art on this card depicted an animal with fur that looked black at first glance, but had a thousand tiny iridescent colors glimmering just beneath the surface. Whoever had painted the Deck of Omens had been ridiculously talented. Violet could’ve sworn the wild, searching eye of the creature was locked on hers. “The Wolf doesn’t mean a literal wild animal. It represents an unpredictable source of power—yours. However, what gets interesting is when we take a look at your question in conjunction with this.” May’s hand moved across to the third card, the Eight of Bones. Two skulls were nestled nose to nose on a bed of loamy earth. One was polished and pristine, the other horribly disfigured, with cracks all down the head and a jawbone that had been snapped in two.

  “There’s a science to these cards,” she said. “The four suits were created to represent each of the founding families of Four Paths. The branch suit represents us, the Hawthornes. The daggers are the Sullivans, the stones are the Carlisles…” May’s voice grew more hesitant when she talked about the Carlisles, but she kept on speaking. “And the bones are, of course, you. So that’s why this is so odd. This card must represent someone in your family, but it’s answering your question. This is what’s trapped you in this town, what’s stopping you from completing your ritual. Or perhaps the reason why you’re even stuck in this predicament at all. The answers you’re looking for lie with them.”

  Violet’s heart pressed painfully against her rib cage, her fingers sliding automatically over the rose at her wrist.

  She couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, and all of them were watching her now, Isaac most of all.

  “You know who this card is talking about,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  Violet flinched away from him, as if she had been struck—but no, that would hurt less. Because there were no words for this that weren’t followed by tears, and she would not cry here, not in front of them. Let them think her cold or callous, let them think she was a liar, let them think that she was anything but weak.

  “Shit,” May said in her high, shrill voice from across the table. Violet yanked her gaze back toward her.

  Redness bloomed in the corner of May’s eye, spreading across her sclera. Violet watched, horrified, as she blinked, sending a crimson tear down her cheek.

  “Are you all right?” she whispered.

  “Don’t look at me,” May snarled at her, wiping the blood away with a shaking fist. “Look at the cards.”

  So Violet looked down.

  At the fourth card that had appeared in the center of the table.

  A crown with four spires had been painted onto a dark background. Each spire was made from the material of a suit: a mass of entwined branches, a bleached, whittled bone, a gleaming blade, and a jagged bit of stone. Each point of the crown was soaked in blood, and beneath it was a pair of cruel yellow eyes.

  Written beneath them, in letters so splotched and shaky that Violet could barely read them, were two words: the Beast.

  She knew without asking that this was the monster in the Gray. And she realized then that she believed in it, believed unquestionably, to her core, that there was something horrible gazing out at her from inside that bit of wood. The skeletal outlines of trees swam in her mind as she stumbled back from the table, her coffee sloshing onto the floor.

  Beside her, Isaac was already moving—toward Justin, who sat still, too still, mere inches away from the card. The expression on his face reminded her of how he’d looked in the Gray: like the light behind his eyes had flickered out.

  Isaac clasped Justin’s shoulder at the same time that May snatched the cards up from the table.

  The moment May slammed the lid down on the box, it felt as if all the air had rushed back into the reading room. Isaac slowly withdrew his hand from Justin’s shoulder. The concern on his face as he watched Justin was so palpable, so tender, that Violet had to avert her eyes. No one had ever looked at her like that.

  “Okay,” Violet said, wiping her coffee-stained hand off on her jeans. “Does someone want to explain what the fuck that was?”

  May’s bloody fingers were clenched around the box tightly enough to turn her knuckles white. Two more streaks of blood had joined the first on her face, crimson lines that marred the porcelain skin of her cheek. “Proof that you need to do your ritual,” she said. “Because if you don’t get your powers under control, you’ll keep summoning that.”

  Violet’s throat went dry. “You’re saying that card showing up was my fault?”

  “It was your reading,” said May.

  “You’ll figure it out,” Justin said hoarsely. His tan skin was still a bit washed out, sweat beaded across his temples. But he looked better than he had mere seconds ago. “We can help. And then we’ll be able to make it so that monster can never kill anyone again.”

  “Well,” Violet said, “I guess I don’t have a choice.”

  Across the room, Isaac let out a deep, guttural chuckle. “Welcome to Four Paths,” he said. “Nobody would ever stay here if they had a choice.”

  Justin couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t known the truth about Four Paths. Some of his first memories were of his grandfather, the sheriff before Augusta. He’d been a big man, big enough to rock both Justin and May to sleep as he sang the “Founders’ Lullaby.”

  Little children, led astray,

  Wandered through the woods one day.

  Stumbled right into the Gray,

  Never to return.

  In that place where nightmares dwell,

  Only four have lived to tell.r />
  That is why we have to stay:

  Branches and stones, daggers and bones,

  They locked the Beast away.

  The familiar words of the song rang through Justin’s head as he and May walked through the woods on their way to check in for that night’s patrol.

  Memories of Justin’s grandfather reminded him of the man he would never become, even if he did remain in Four Paths. These were the woods where he had learned to run, where he’d learned to kiss—among other things—where he had sought shelter when his family was too much to handle. But while the woods were the same, Justin wasn’t.

  Now he could barely glance at each impossibly tall trunk without thinking of the Gray opening behind it. He did not belong in this moon-dappled forest, breathing in the good, clean smells of wood and earth. He should have died on his ritual day, beneath those clouds the color of dulled steel, lost forever in that endless expanse of bowed, ashen trees. If not for May, he would have.

  “You look grim,” said his sister, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her pink satin bomber jacket. Although it wasn’t even mid-September, the air was starting to grow chillier. “I thought you’d be happy. You cracked the ice queen.”

  “Violet’s not an ice queen,” said Justin, wincing at the soreness in his calves from that evening’s run. After talking to Violet, he had desperately needed to blow off some steam. “And I didn’t crack her. The Gray did that.”

  Justin had been looking for an ally when he’d sought her out. Instead, he’d found a problem he wasn’t sure he could solve.

  “She doesn’t actually care about protecting Four Paths,” Isaac had said matter-of-factly a few hours ago, after Violet had gone home. “She just wants to get the fuck out of here.”

  “So you don’t think we should help her?” Justin had asked him.

  Isaac twisted the cracked medallion on his wrist. “I didn’t say that.”

  “She raises the dead,” May said now. “Could be…interesting, seeing how she does on a patrol.”