The Devouring Gray

by Christine Lynn Herman

  If Justin left Four Paths, he’d get to go to real nightclubs someday. Sit in real bars, flirt with girls he hadn’t known since preschool, instead of dutifully avoiding eye contact with Seo-Jin and Britta and all the other girls he’d dated for a day, a week, a month. But if he didn’t know them, they wouldn’t know him. Before his ritual, Justin had relished the way any high school party’s focus shifted where he walked. He could step into whatever conversation he wanted and know he was welcome there.

  Any conversation, unless it included Harper Carlisle.

  Years away from her, and still, within seconds of talking to her earlier that week, he’d wanted to tell her the truth. About what he’d really done to her. About what had truly happened the night she’d vanished into the Gray.

  Harper had always been able to disarm him without trying, whether she was holding a sword or not. That hadn’t changed. It had cost him Violet Saunders, which meant it had cost him everything. But he deserved it.

  He hadn’t told May and Isaac that he’d been desperate enough to confront Harper in person. Justin was drunk enough to enjoy the taste of the cheap beer someone’s older sibling had bought, but he wasn’t drunk enough to admit that he had failed. He wasn’t sure he could ever be drunk enough to do that.

  He wove through the barn, high-fiving Cal Gonzalez and tapping his red cup against Suzette and her girlfriend Lia’s matching ones before tipping it up to his mouth.

  But all socializing made him realize was how little he deserved to be treated this way. The way his classmates stared at him, with respect he hadn’t earned…Fake. It was all fake.

  Justin couldn’t handle it anymore. He didn’t care that it was a Saturday night, or that he had appearances to keep up. He did a shot of terrible vodka with Marissa Czechowicz, then chased it with the rest of his beer. The force of the alcohol hit him hard after that, and he gulped and staggered away, trying to forget how Marissa had laughed at him when he grimaced at the shot.

  But there wasn’t enough cheap liquor in the world to wash away the guilt Justin felt when he thought of what he’d done to Harper.

  A flash of pastel pink appeared behind a hay bale, and Justin hurried over to May, the world spinning around him. His sister was usually alone at these parties—she liked it better that way.

  But this time, she was talking to a boy.

  A boy with dark, curly hair, a T-shirt that said PUBLIC SAFETY HAZARD, and a half-smoked cigarette held lazily in his left hand.

  Seth Carlisle.

  Justin couldn’t face a Carlisle right now. He was about to turn away when May caught his eye.

  “Hey!” she called out. “You should go check on Isaac. He was matching Henrik Dougan on shots, and you know…” She trailed off, then hiccuped. Seth chuckled at her, raising the cigarette to his mouth. “You know how that ends.”

  Justin wondered, vaguely, if she was trying to get rid of him. He didn’t like how closely she and Seth were standing. Or the way Seth was looking at her.

  But May knew the rules about founder hookups. And May would die before she broke a rule. Also, she had a point.

  Drunk Isaac had a tendency to disintegrate party decor he didn’t agree with. It was getting to the point where Justin was considering texting hosts in advance and warning them to hide their books by Isaac’s least favorite authors. Drunk Isaac would also sneak away with whoever caught his eye that night, girl or guy, which was partially why Justin had let him wander off in the first place. Isaac had only come out to him as bi a few months ago, and Justin wanted to be supportive—but knew how private his friend was about his love life. So he’d made a point of asking if Isaac needed a wingman, then backed off when Isaac had laughed and told him no.

  But Isaac only hooked up with people when he was in a good mood, and these past few weeks, he’d been nothing but preoccupied and grumpy. So, faced with the prospect of having to deal with a drunk, angry best friend, Justin left May and Seth and started across the barn.

  It wasn’t long before he caught sight of Henrik’s bulky form among a crowd in the far corner. Justin moved past a few couples stealing furtive kisses, the noise growing as he approached. He found Isaac leaning against the slatted wooden wall, slurring and shimmering and short-circuiting, a semicircle of people forming around him.

  “No, see, I can do it!” Isaac insisted as Justin pushed his way through the crowd, muttering excuse mes as he jostled shoulders and stepped on feet. Justin reached the front of the circle as the empty whiskey bottle in Isaac’s hands disintegrated into ash. Henrik roared with approval and clapped Isaac on the shoulder. Isaac jolted forward, then stumbled, chuckling, back to the wall.

  “Hey.” Justin crossed the circle and stood between the other boys. Adrenaline cut through his intoxication—he had to take care of Isaac. That was more important than his self-pity. “You all right?”

  “’Course I’m all right.” Isaac frowned at him. “Best I’ve ever been.”

  “Want a swig?” boomed Henrik, holding up another bottle.

  Justin shook his head, his stomach churning. The Dougans made their own whiskey. How, no one was quite sure, but everyone knew a few sips were strong enough to kill a goat. Judging by the way Isaac was swaying, he’d had at least enough to kill an elephant.

  “Do it again!” called the crowd.

  Henrik held out a bale of hay. “Think you can do that?”

  Isaac snorted. “Easy.” A second later, ash was dripping onto Henrik’s size-fifteen shoes. But the crowd barely clapped this time. The looks on their faces were clear—they were no longer impressed.

  Justin’s mother had once warned him about showing off, back before his ritual day. Our powers aren’t cheap, silly tricks, Augusta had said. They are life and death. Never forget that.

  “That all you got?” said a kid who Justin vaguely recognized as someone’s younger sibling. He couldn’t have been older than fourteen, but he stood at the front of the crowd with a gap-toothed smirk. Writhing in his arms was a panicked barn cat, a scrawny orange thing doing its best to sink its claws into the boy’s neck. “If you’re really as powerful as people say, why don’t you get rid of this?”

  “Hey,” said Justin, but Isaac had already taken a wobbling step toward the boy, distress leaking through the intoxicated expression on his face.

  “I won’t hurt something that doesn’t deserve it. I’m…honorable.”

  The last word was barely decipherable. Justin was fairly certain this was the drunkest Isaac had ever been.

  “Really?” said the boy. “’Cause that’s not what they say about your family.”

  Isaac’s hands began to tremble, the twin medallions on his wrists glowing dully in the dim light.

  And Justin saw something he’d never seen before on the faces of the people watching them. Disgust.

  He wondered if it was just the alcohol that had allowed them to be so bold. But no, this felt different. Like the alcohol was merely allowing them to show something that had been festering for a long time.

  “Yeah!” called someone else. “Where’s the Sullivan we’ve all heard so much about?”

  “I bet you’re not even that powerful. Your family probably made up all those rumors to scare us.”

  “Yeah, if you’re so powerful, how come Hap Whitley’s dead?”

  “What about Vanessa? And Carl?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be stopping shit like that from happening?”

  Justin could feel the crowd swelling. He needed to do something.

  “Enough,” Justin said, but the kid ignored him.

  “Or what?” the boy said to Isaac. “You’ll carve one of us up like your family carved up each other—”

  “ENOUGH,” Justin roared. One step put him in front of the kid’s face. He swiped the barn cat out of his arms, handed it to Henrik, and yanked on the boy’s collar until they were inches apart. “Get the hell out of this party.”

  “But it’s not even your party,” whimpered the kid.

  Ju
stin wasn’t the type to threaten people. But he couldn’t let this escalate any further.

  “The Hawthornes don’t forget an insult.” He let the crowd hear the truth in every word, see it on his face. “Neither do the Sullivans. Do you really want to be on the founders’ bad side?”

  Justin released the boy. He ran off, and as the crowd around them dissipated, demoralized by the lack of a fight, Justin turned to Isaac.

  “The cat,” Isaac said, looking around frantically. “Is it okay?”

  “It’s fine,” said Justin, glancing over his shoulder—the cat was snuggled against a drunk Henrik’s chest, who was cooing soft endearments at it.

  “Good,” Isaac said weakly. “Fuck, I hate that you had to threaten them.”

  “Me too,” said Justin. His mother and May relished the reaction their name got from the rest of the town, but the way Justin had used it tonight made him nauseous. So did the expressions on the faces in the crowd he’d seen just now. The Hawthornes were losing the town, they were losing everything, and it would only get worse once they realized he didn’t have powers, either.

  He’d already lost Violet’s help. He’d been so colossally foolish to even try to get it.

  The last place in the world he wanted to be was a crowded party. The barn swam around him, intoxication blurring his vision. The temporary clarity defending Isaac had given him was gone.

  “C’mon, man.” Justin swung Isaac’s arm around his shoulders. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  “It would’ve been so easy,” said Isaac as they moved toward the barn door. “If I’d touched that boy, I could’ve made him just…go.”

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “I could’ve.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  They were almost at the door when Isaac looked at him, his eyes as lifeless as two snuffed-out candles. Justin had the sudden worry that Isaac could see the thoughts swimming in his brain, every gory detail of his insecurities and failures laid out for his perusal.

  Isaac’s hand, which had been hanging limply over Justin’s shoulder, closed around his wrist.

  “You always do that.” Isaac’s words didn’t sound slurred anymore. “Show up when I need you. How do you do that?”

  Isaac’s jaw tensed, his face mottled and distorted by the Christmas lights, and Justin felt a rush of embarrassment he didn’t quite understand. Isaac never wanted anyone to see him like this. It felt wrong to watch him with all his defenses down.

  And then he caught a flash of pink again, and he shrugged off Isaac’s arm, the moment gone, ready to tell May it was time to go home.

  But May had a message for him, too.

  “Thank goodness I found you,” she said, holding up her phone. Her pale face was taut with worry. “Violet texted us, all of us. Something’s wrong.”

  Harper’s guilt over her conversation with Justin Hawthorne had lingered right up until the moment she told her father what she’d done.

  She had barged into Maurice Carlisle’s workshop to tell him about Violet. It was at the back of the statue garden, inside what had once been the barn. Over the past century and a half, Carlisles had used the workshop to create an entirely different sort of livestock—one made of animated stone.

  Harper could tell her father was displeased from the furrows on his aging face when she opened the workshop doors. His workshop was almost always off-limits, even to the other Carlisles.

  “Violet Saunders was recruited by the Hawthornes,” she said in a rush. “But she left them—for us. I just met with her by the lake.”

  Harper felt a rush of satisfaction as the furrows in her father’s face smoothed away, leaving a proud grin in their wake.

  “I knew you were a fighter,” said Maurice Carlisle, clapping her on the shoulder. His hand left fragments of crumbled stone on her shirt, but Harper didn’t care. She was too busy blinking away tears at the raw pride in his voice.

  Justin had deserved every bit of her ire. And she genuinely did want to help Violet.

  There was no reason to feel guilty. None at all.

  “Does this mean I get to meet the others?” she asked.

  Maurice leaned against the door, those coarse brows knitting together across his forehead. Behind him, bells of all shapes and sizes hung from the ceiling, barely visible in the dim light of the workshop. Harper’s father had always claimed he worked better in darkness. He said that stone sculpted better when it was felt instead of seen, so it could show him what it wanted to be.

  “You know what?” he said. “You’ve earned it.”

  Which was how, a few days later, Harper found herself sneaking out of her bedroom after an evening spent helping her mother watch Brett and Nora. Mitzi and Seth were at some party she hadn’t been invited to, so her mother had needed the help. Harper felt a pang of guilt for deceiving her as she made her way to the workshop, even though they weren’t close.

  But when her father smiled and presented her with a sleek silver dagger, the hilt ornately carved from red-brown stone, Harper found her regrets fading.

  Maurice Carlisle hadn’t let Seth or Mitzi in on this secret. He hadn’t even told her mother.

  But he was telling her. That meant something.

  Harper knew the woods fairly well, although she’d stopped using them after dark when news of the deaths began to filter through Four Paths every couple of months. Most of the town had done the same.

  The Beast had almost killed her three years ago. She didn’t want it to come back for seconds.

  But there was nothing amiss in the woods. The only noises Harper heard were the soft rustle of the leaves and the occasional chirping of sparrows in the trees. It was a perfect late-summer night in upstate New York, just cold enough for Harper’s favorite light jacket, with the sleeve tied off at the elbow.

  But she kept her hand on the hilt of her new dagger, just in case.

  They stopped behind the row of buildings on Main Street, a few feet away from the back lot behind the library.

  “Here,” said Maurice, producing a rough burlap robe from somewhere within his coat. “Put this on.”

  The cloth had the same color and rough consistency as a potato sack. Harper wrinkled her nose, but she pulled it over her head, wincing at the whiff of mildew. She took an extra minute to tie the left sleeve in a knot just after the end of her arm.

  Harper didn’t mind that it drew others’ attention to her missing hand. If she could live with half a left arm, other people could certainly handle looking at it.

  “Why the robes?” she asked, careful to keep her voice down. The sheriff’s office was only a turn off Main Street away.

  Maurice Carlisle finished pulling his own hood over his forehead. When he turned to her, she could no longer see his face—the darkness and the robe had left it utterly in shadow. “They’re tradition,” he said simply. “In these humble clothes, we are all equal: founder or not. Now come. We must be absolutely silent for this next part.”

  Harper had never heard of such a tradition, for any part of the town. But she trailed behind her father without protest as he walked across the empty lot, trying to make as little noise as possible.

  If she questioned this, he could still make her go home. And she wanted so badly to know what was going on. To be on the inside, for once, after those years of lingering painfully outside of everything.

  So she stayed silent when he drew a key out of his coat and deftly unlocked the library’s back door. And she stayed silent when he pulled her inside into total darkness—until something was shoved over her head, and two hands yanked her upper arms behind her back.

  “Dad!” Her panic was muffled by the fabric over her head. Whoever had grabbed her hadn’t fumbled for a wrist that wasn’t there—they’d known it was her. Phantom pain coursed through her left arm, making her shudder. “What is this?”

  “No need to fret, Miss Carlisle,” said a smooth voice she didn’t recognize. “No one here means you harm. We merely want to make su
re of where your loyalties lie before we allow you to glimpse our secrets.”

  “It’s standard procedure, Harper,” added her father’s voice. The sound of it soothed her wildly ratcheting heartbeat, although it didn’t entirely dispel her panic. She was led up what felt like a flight of stairs, then made to sit. They let her arms go free then, but she was too frightened to move. Harper could hear enough rustles and murmurs to know she was far from alone.

  “Now, Miss Carlisle,” said the first voice. “We understand you’ve been tasked by your father with befriending Violet Saunders.”

  Harper pushed down questions like who are you and how dare you. She trusted her father. She had to trust that this was all going to be fine. “Yes.”

  “A task he says you’ve completed beyond our expectations.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to share with us how you’ve managed to win over a girl you barely know?”

  Harper wasn’t really sure how she’d managed to gain Violet’s attention. But she didn’t think that would go over so well right now. She scrambled for another answer, a real one. “We’re not that different, really,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “And I think she could tell that I was telling her the truth about wanting to help her. While the Hawthornes…” She hesitated.

  It didn’t feel safe to insult them so publicly, when she had no idea who she was talking to. Her feelings weren’t popular ones.

  “Do go on,” said the voice. “And know that no one here will protest if you share some less than pleasant thoughts about your fellow founders.”

  “Right.” Harper bit her lip, suddenly glad no one could see her face. “Well. The Hawthornes had already made her feel uneasy. She seemed to understand they weren’t telling her everything.”

  “I see.” Was that her imagination or did the voice sound impressed? “Close your eyes, Miss Carlisle.”