The Devouring Gray

by Christine Lynn Herman

  Or maybe lain down where she was sitting. Which was not exactly a more comforting thought.

  “It is not a sex den!” Justin stood up, still swaying, which made it even more obvious how little room there was in the hollow for two people. His arms were braced against the tree trunks mere inches from her splayed-out fingers; his face loomed above her, still flushed. “Look, I said I knew a place to hide, and I found one, okay?”

  “I’d rather be at the police station than here.” Harper’s heart was hammering with equal parts humiliation and fury.

  She never should’ve gone back for him. Justin wasn’t hers anymore. Never had been. That had never been more painfully apparent than it was right now.

  The next words she said came from somewhere different. Somewhere mean. “I don’t even know why you were at the Saunders manor. Maybe Violet asked you to come help her. But you’re in no condition to help anyone.”

  Justin let out a chuckle at that, but a painful one. An expression dawned on his face that Harper had seen back at her house.

  Guilt.

  “No, I’m not.” There was something hoarse and awful in his voice. “But I wouldn’t be able to help her sober, either.”

  He held up his hand, and Harper forgot how to breathe.

  Dangling between his fingers was a rough stone pendant, identical to the one pressed against Harper’s breastbone.

  But founders didn’t wear stone—they wore glass after they completed their ritual, to prove they were strong enough to stand against the Gray on their own.

  “I don’t understand,” she said softly. “Why do you have that?”

  The corners of his mouth turned up, but it wasn’t a smile. The moonlight had turned him ashen around the edges, like something out of the Gray. “Because I need it. Just like you.”

  And Harper understood.

  Why he’d seemed so set on recruiting Violet. Why Mitzi had come home with stories of May leading patrols instead of Justin. Why he would be willing to turn against his mother.

  She let out a strangled, frustrated whimper. “You failed your ritual.”

  He released the pendant. It fell over the front of his T-shirt, a silent surrender. “I did.”

  She believed him. The Hawthornes were proud enough to lie to the whole town rather than admit they’d failed. “You’re no better than I am,” she snarled, trembling.

  Justin bowed his head. She saw him as he was now, a king without a crown. A sad little boy playing at a future he couldn’t have.

  “I know,” he said. “But now I get it, okay? I’m trying.”

  “No,” she said coldly. “You don’t get it.”

  Because he still had everything. And she still had nothing. And no ritual was enough to change that.

  She closed her hand around the dagger’s hilt in her pocket, fighting the urge to hold it to his throat.

  There were other ways to hurt him. Better ways.

  Harper closed the distance between them. “Look at me.”

  He tilted his head down. The branches around them were reflected in his hazel eyes.

  She stood on her tiptoes until her face was alongside his, and still he did not move, even when the tip of her upturned nose brushed the side of his ear.

  Mere moments ago, being this close to him would’ve left her dizzy. But now her shortness of breath was born of rage, not lust.

  “It never stops hurting,” Harper whispered. “And you know what? You deserve it.”

  Then she turned, pushed the branches aside, and walked back into the forest.

  She tried to go back to the Saunders manor first, but the deputies were still swarming outside with no sign of a letup. So she texted Violet an apology and walked back to the Carlisle cottage, her fury growing with every step.

  The Hawthornes had condemned her and forgiven him, because it was convenient for the town to believe that Justin was strong and she was weak.

  And for that, they deserved to fall.

  All her doubts were gone now.

  In their place was the sharp, perfect certainty that she would have her revenge.

  Violet didn’t come to school on Monday.

  Justin texted her a few times, but she never responded. Saturday night was a half-blurred mess inside his head that had left him and most of the senior class battling vicious hangovers.

  He remembered the crowd’s suppressed fury before he’d left the party.

  He remembered Violet’s frantic texts to him and May.

  And he remembered Harper.

  Justin hadn’t realized how close he was to cracking. All it had taken was alcohol and the latent guilt his classmates had stirred up to send his secrets spilling from his lips.

  He could still feel the brush of her lips on his ear, the rush of warmth that had shot through him right before her words left him gutted and defenseless, alone in the forest with nothing but his guilt.

  He did not remember going home, but somehow, he’d woken up in his own bed, a headache the size of a galaxy spiraling through his skull.

  For the first time in his life, Justin Hawthorne wished he remembered less.

  He had been a fool on all counts. Blowing his second chance with Violet by being so drunk. Making Harper hate him even more by telling her the truth. He’d wanted her to know she wasn’t alone in her suffering. But Justin saw now that too much time had passed for him to heal things between them. All he had done was gouge open the scar of what they’d had before and let the wound fester.

  May was furious with him, of course. But it was Isaac’s reaction that caught Justin off guard. His cold, disdainful anger was a palpable presence the day after the party, leaving Justin confused and hurt in equal measure. What was it to Isaac if Justin saw fit to tell the truth about his ritual?

  He was determined to find Harper and properly, soberly apologize. But over the past few years, she had made herself invisible. She didn’t eat in the cafeteria or hang out in the courtyard at break times.

  He had done this to her. Turned her cowed and small, a stranger in her own hometown.

  He deserved her disdain, her disgust. He had walked away from her—she had earned the right to do the same to him.

  But he couldn’t spend the rest of the day chewing on his guilt.

  So when classes let out, instead of heading to the locker room for track practice, he walked through the parking lot, avoiding the parking spot where May was fiddling with the keys to their shared truck.

  Isaac caught up to him as he hit the main road, scratching absently at the dark stubble on his chin.

  “You’re going to see Violet,” Isaac said as they turned onto the well-worn footpath beside the gravel.

  “I am,” said Justin, steeling himself for an argument. They’d learned earlier that morning that Daria Saunders was dead. It was why Violet hadn’t come to school. Why she hadn’t been answering his texts. She had reached out to Justin in her hour of need, and although he’d tried to help her, he’d failed. He knew her silence meant she was angry with him. But he wanted to apologize in person. Wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to grieve alone. “How did you—”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “What?”

  There were three things in the world Isaac cared about: his books, Justin, and May, in that order. Justin couldn’t figure out how going with him to talk to Violet would benefit any of those things.

  But then, there was a lot he couldn’t figure out about Isaac lately. At least his anger at Justin seemed less present than it had that morning, even if there was something overly emphatic about the way he was walking, steel-toed work boots stamping out deep prints in the dirt.

  “All founder kids grow up with baggage.” The branches behind Isaac’s head were crooked, reaching toward them like broken limbs that had healed wrong. Justin couldn’t tell if it was an optical illusion, or if something had happened to this part of the forest. “Kind of hard not to when our ancestors gave us the lifetime gig of guarding a monster prison. But for
some of us, there’s a level of loss you just haven’t experienced.”

  Justin held back a retort. He didn’t want to get into a pissing contest with Isaac about which of them had been through worse.

  Mostly because he knew he’d lose.

  “And you’re saying Violet has experienced this, now that she’s lost her aunt?”

  Isaac gave him a sharp look that seemed to suggest he was even less intelligent than he felt. “I did some googling. She had a sister. Rose Saunders, age eighteen, car accident, on her way back from prom-dress shopping. I saw her picture—they have the same glare.”

  “The one that makes you feel guilty for existing?”

  Isaac nodded. “That’s the one. So she’s not just grieving her aunt.”

  It fit. Her weirdness at the reading. Her despair when told she couldn’t leave town. The way she and Isaac had circled each other like two wolves searching for weak points, both wary, both haunted.

  Justin refrained from commenting on the fact that Isaac had cared enough about Violet to look into the details. Anyone else, he’d tease him about. But there was no point mocking pain that recognized pain.

  They reached the hill leading up to the Saunders manor, and Justin saw, with a flash of panic, that there was already a car in the driveway, idling beside the Porsche.

  A silver pickup truck.

  “Hey! Assholes!” May slammed the door of the car, then adjusted her headband, her pale cheeks flushed with annoyance. “You were going to talk to Violet without me?”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to.” Justin hurried across the gravel, Isaac following close behind. “You haven’t exactly been welcoming toward her—”

  “Yeah, because I don’t like lying to Mom,” said May, jabbing a pointy pink fingernail at him. “Violet texted me, too. It doesn’t matter that she blew us off before—something awful happened to her, and we owe her an apology.”

  “You were about to go without us,” Isaac said mildly.

  May frowned at him. “Not the point.”

  “Actually, it kind of undermines your point.”

  “Hey.” Justin stepped between them. “We’re all here now. Let’s just go inside.”

  A moment later, they were standing in a solemn row on the front porch as Justin tugged on the brass door knocker.

  Nothing happened. He was about to try again when a woman who looked oddly familiar opened the door. She cleared her throat, brushing back a lock of frizzy hair, and he realized why he knew her. There was an entire box of pictures and letters dedicated to her in the back of his mother’s closet—he’d snooped years ago, not that he had ever told her.

  Juniper Saunders.

  Augusta’s ex-girlfriend.

  Justin didn’t really want to think about his mom’s love life more than was necessary. Augusta had explained to him and May a few years ago that she’d dated men and women, but after their dad, she’d lost interest in finding a partner.

  “You two are what matters to me,” she’d said matter-of-factly, in a tone that was the closest Augusta ever came to being vulnerable. “I don’t need anyone else to be a family.”

  His father, Ezra Bishop, had left when Justin was eight and May was seven. They hadn’t seen him since.

  They didn’t want to.

  Augusta had gotten rid of all evidence of him, but Justin still saw his face sometimes, his cruel features imprinted behind his eyelids when Justin was trying to sleep.

  Four Paths had lost one of its monsters the day he left town.

  “Hello,” he said to Juniper. “You must be Violet’s mom.”

  “I am,” she said, and his first thought—that there was nothing of Violet in this woman at all—changed immediately. So this was where Violet had learned to turn each word into a challenge, how she’d learned to stand a little too straight, like she had something to prove. “Are you three friends of hers?”

  She sounded skeptical about it. And she seemed awfully put together for someone whose sister had just passed away.

  “Yes.” Justin knew full well that Violet would’ve vehemently protested this claim. “She wasn’t at school today, so we picked up her homework. Can we give it to her?”

  Juniper’s eyes narrowed. “Violet already has a friend over. Can’t you just e-mail her any homework?”

  Beside him, May went still, while Isaac scowled at the ground.

  Any other friend of Violet’s had to be Harper. If Justin went upstairs, he’d have to face her.

  But he’d come this far. And he’d already committed himself to apologizing. So he soldiered onward, turning on his last vestiges of persuasive charm. “It comes with instructions. From the teachers. We need to explain it in person.”

  “Hmm. Well. When she kicks you out, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She swung the door open. “Her bedroom’s three doors to the right of the stairs.”

  The Saunders manor was a dank, forbidding place, halls lined with moth-eaten red-and-gold carpets and a taxidermy collection that would rival a museum. There was an area at the foot of the stairs blocked off by caution tape—Justin tried not to look too closely at the dark stains on the wooden floor.

  He was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to let people stay in a crime scene.

  He was also pretty sure, having now met both Violet and her mother, that it would be very difficult to make them leave.

  May gestured toward the chandelier as they headed up the stairs. “Do those remind you of bones?”

  Justin inspected the swinging lamp. The ironwork did look kind of skeletal, especially in the dim, shifting light.

  “I guess we’re not the only ones who like to show off our family trademark,” Justin said, keeping his voice low as Juniper disappeared into one of the downstairs rooms.

  They reached the second-floor landing. A cat with a bit of red string tied around its ear prowled up to them.

  Justin realized, his chest tightening, that this was the same animal he’d watched Violet resurrect days earlier.

  It moved like a cat. It meowed like a cat.

  But when he reached down to pet it, its body was far too cold for something living. He jerked his hand away, his heart thudding in his chest.

  Here was evidence that what Violet could do was real, and powerful, and deeply, deeply strange.

  Justin tried knocking on the bedroom door, but when there was no response, Isaac finally lost his patience and tugged the door open.

  Violet’s room was dark and shuttered, curtains pulled tightly across the windows, save for the light spilling in through the doorway. That slice of hallway light illuminated a pile of boxes on the far wall of Violet’s room, each marked with the word ROSIE.

  Harper’s eyes widened as she took them in from her perch on the edge of the bed, but before she could open her mouth, Violet’s voice rang out.

  “Get out!” The covers stirred, then parted, revealing Violet’s rumpled dark hair and her pale, indignant face. “Oh my god, you’re all here? Who the fuck let you in?”

  “Your mother,” said Isaac. “Lovely woman. You inherited her charm.”

  “We’re sorry to hear what happened to your aunt.” Justin could tell from the pain blooming on her face that his words had been a mistake.

  “I asked you to come here last night.” Violet drew her comforter around her shoulders, like a cape. “None of you listened. So why the hell would I want you here now?”

  “You let Harper in,” said Isaac.

  Harper glared at him. “Yeah, because I actually feel bad.”

  “You think we don’t?” said May.

  “Enough.” Violet’s voice was ragged and furious. “All of you. Leave. Even you, Harper. Go argue somewhere else.”

  Harper was visibly distressed, but she nodded, sliding off the bed. “I understand.”

  The look she shot Justin as she elbowed past him made him glad she wasn’t saying whatever she was thinking.

  It would probably be awful.

  It would probably be true.
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  Justin took a hesitant step back as Harper slammed the door behind her. Isaac had been right: This type of pain was beyond him.

  He did not know what to say. He did not know how to help her. And Justin suddenly wanted nothing more than to bolt, away from Harper, down the stairs, and out of that horrible, empty house.

  But Isaac’s hand landed on his shoulder before he could move.

  “Hey,” he said. “I got this one.”

  Before Justin could say anything in response, Isaac pushed open the door to Violet’s bedroom and stepped inside.

  Violet’s life had been a numb, quiet haze since the bottom of the stairs, since the resurrected body.

  She could only remember it in flashes—Daria’s body being loaded into the ambulance. The EMTs shaking their heads as they spoke to Juniper, her mother’s face crumpling like a discarded piece of paper.

  Daria’s blood on her hands, dried into a coppery-brown residue.

  Augusta Hawthorne’s face slackening with relief when she saw Juniper standing by the staircase.

  And finally, she and Juniper, the most alone they had ever been, sitting beside each other at the end of her bed. Orpheus was curled up at their feet, his yellow eyes staring mournfully at the door.

  Her mother looked smaller than Violet had ever seen her, draped in a giant terry-cloth robe, feet shoved hastily into a pair of beat-up sneakers. Violet watched her twist a bit of red yarn around her fingers. She must’ve kept it after the ambulance took Daria away. Just like the bracelet clasped around Violet’s wrist.

  “You know,” Juniper said, “I came back here because of you.”

  Violet looked at her mother’s face. Without the makeup, she looked younger. More like the girl Violet had seen in the photograph. “Why?”

  “Watching you…after everything…it reminded me how much losing Stephen hurt. It made me realize how much I’d regret it if I never got to see Daria again.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t live with that.”

  Violet flinched. “After everything? You mean after Rosie died, Mom. You can say it. I won’t break.”