The Devouring Gray

by Christine Lynn Herman

  “No, you won’t,” Juniper said softly. Her eyes were suddenly filled with the grief Violet had spent the past five months looking for. “But I might.”

  It wasn’t nearly enough to fix things between them. But Violet was too frightened and tired to argue. So when Juniper reached for her hand, Violet let her take it, and they stayed like that for a long time.

  The next morning, Juniper was already perfectly put together again. Already on her first conference call. As if the night before had never happened.

  Violet knew that trying to discuss it would only cause them both more pain.

  They would deal with this the only way they knew how: separately.

  She had spent hours that morning inspecting the palms of her hands, searching for any evidence that it had been her, not that body, who’d pushed Daria down the stairs.

  And if it had been the body, and if Violet had resurrected it—didn’t that leave her aunt’s blood on her hands either way?

  Those were not the kinds of thoughts that should be contemplated alone. Which was why she’d let Harper in.

  She’d known the moment she saw Justin, May, and Isaac that it had been a mistake.

  Violet didn’t want to hear them fight about the ways they’d hurt one another. She already knew how it would end: They’d all insist they actually cared about her, when really, they just cared about proving their family was better.

  She was done with their pettiness.

  She could grieve without their help.

  But now Isaac was standing in front of the ROSIE boxes, unbuttoning the top of his shirt.

  “I told you to get out,” Violet said, clutching her blankets close. “Not sure how you interpreted that as an invitation to strip.”

  “I used to have three brothers,” Isaac said evenly, pulling his collar to the side and displaying his neck. “Two uncles. My mom, my aunt, my cousins. But they’re all gone now, and the ones who are dead hurt me less than the ones who left.”

  “And the scar?” asked Violet. It shone gray and silvery in the dim light, like an extra shadow snaking across his throat.

  “I got this the day it happened.”

  “How?”

  She was waiting for him to stop talking. But he stepped closer instead.

  “Some Sullivans can break things. Some can put them back together. But there was no one left who wanted to fix me.”

  Violet lowered her blankets to her waist. She was mildly aware of the fact that she hadn’t bothered to look like a person today. But her baggy T-shirt and bare face didn’t seem to matter right now.

  “What were their names?” she said softly. “Your brothers?”

  Isaac curled a hand around her bedpost. “Caleb. Isaiah.” He hesitated. “Gabriel.”

  “Gabriel’s the one who left, isn’t he?”

  A quick, curt nod. “How did you know?”

  “You said the ones who left hurt you more. That name hurt you the most.”

  She had shoved the covers off now, her hands resting on her leggings as she met Isaac’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry about Daria,” he said softly. “And I’m sorry about your sister.”

  “You knew?”

  “I googled you.”

  “You could’ve just asked,” Violet muttered, although something like relief fluttered in her chest. Someone had seen that she was hurting and found an answer. Isaac knew that there had once been her and Rosie, that she was all alone now. “But if you’re going to talk about her, you should call her Rosie.”

  Isaac nodded. “If that’s what you want.”

  “I’m sorry about your family. About everything. It’s just—it’s not fair.” Violet’s voice broke on the last word. The tears collecting in the back of her throat were impossible to hold back now, and she realized to her horror that they were beginning to spill down her cheeks.

  She was crying now. In front of a boy she barely knew.

  A boy who had just told her about the worst moments of his life, for no reason other than to show her that she was not alone after all.

  A boy who was looking at her right now, not with pity or alarm, but with understanding.

  “You’re right,” he said, reaching a tentative hand forward and wiping the tears from her cheek. “It’s not fair. But you can’t bring them back.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Violet hoarsely, remembering the body, the tether she’d felt between them. “I’m pretty sure I could.”

  He jerked his hand away. “With your powers?”

  There was the alarm. The concern.

  Violet snorted and swiped at her tears herself. “Look, it’s my power, okay? Resurrecting things. So I thought that if I could get Rosie here, I could bring her back. But I wouldn’t do it. Not now. They aren’t alive like they once were, and I wouldn’t want her to be…to be anything like…”

  “Like your cat?” asked Isaac, while Orpheus, as if on cue, padded out from beneath the bed.

  Violet hesitated. But she had held so much inside her for so long.

  She was ready to talk now.

  “Tell the others they can stop eavesdropping—which I’m sure they are doing—and come back in,” she said. “Actually, wait. I want to see the Hawthornes first.”

  Isaac swung open the door, where Justin, May, and Harper were still standing, all doing a poor job of pretending they had not been listening.

  “You wanted to talk to us?” said Justin eagerly.

  Violet sighed. “It’s not a compliment. I have some questions for both of you.”

  She waved Isaac out, and Justin and May in, feeling strangely powerful.

  May flicked on the light switch as she passed it. “No offense,” she said. “It was just super depressing in here.”

  Violet raked a hand through her tangled hair. “That was kind of the point?”

  May shrugged. “Whenever Isaac gets too angsty, we show up and make him go outside. We’ll do the same for you if we have to.”

  Violet choked back a badly suppressed laugh.

  “Harper happened to mention, before you guys showed up, that you failed your ritual,” she said, looking at Justin. “Explain.”

  “I did,” said Justin quietly. “I’m sorry.”

  The truth was, Violet didn’t really care that Justin didn’t have powers. She understood why he would want to keep such a thing under wraps.

  But she could also see who this information was really hurting.

  “I don’t think I’m the one you owe an apology.”

  If Justin had looked annoyed beforehand, he looked alarmed now. “I know. It’s just…with Harper…it’s complicated.”

  Beside him, May picked at her nail polish, her coral-colored lips pursed with disapproval. “It’s a giant mess.”

  Violet wasn’t sure she wanted to wade into whatever star-crossed bullshit Harper and Justin were clearly going through, but she needed to know if she could trust the Hawthornes or not. “She said you both ignored her when she failed her ritual. Is that true?”

  Justin had been nothing but kind to her since she’d arrived in Four Paths. It was hard to match that image with the boy who’d given up on Harper the second she proved she wasn’t powerful, and harder still now that she knew Justin had no powers, either.

  “Our mother made us,” Justin said, his voice raw and hoarse. “She said there was no use in wasting our time on someone who couldn’t help protect the town. We were so young, and I thought she knew everything, and I was scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  May looked up from her nails, her blue eyes deadly serious. “You’ve never seen Augusta when she’s angry.”

  “My ritual wasn’t until last year,” added Justin. “So I didn’t know I was powerless for a long time. Most people still have no idea.”

  Violet listened as he went on. May shifted uncomfortably beside her when Justin told her about how he was being asked to leave Four Paths, about his desperate wish to stay.

  She knew the bitterness in hi
s voice like it was her own. How it felt to have a parent who was so far away from you, you had no idea who they really were. Who put themselves before their children, no matter how much they hurt their kids by doing so.

  Violet swallowed, hard. “So you’ve stopped trusting her.”

  Justin nodded. “I always thought she was right, but the older I get, the more I realize that my mom doesn’t always make the right call. I can’t fix what I did to Harper. But I hope I can help you.”

  “We both do,” said May quietly.

  Violet believed the earnestness she saw on both of their faces.

  “Thank you,” she said, surprised by how much she meant it. “Okay. Now I’m actually ready to talk to all of you.”

  Violet did her best to look intimidating as they filed into the room. “You can only stay if you promise to refrain from murdering one another while I talk.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Harper sighed, plopping onto the bed beside her.

  “Yeah, all right,” muttered Justin.

  Violet looked around at them—May examining her nails, Isaac leaning against the wall, Harper and Justin trying very hard to pretend they weren’t watching each other—and realized that she hadn’t felt this way since Rosie’s death.

  There were people who would show up for her, then stay, even when she was angry. Even when it was hard.

  “I think I did something,” she said. “Something terrible.”

  And then she told them. About the body she’d felt that strange connection with. What had happened to Daria.

  How powerless she felt. How scared.

  But when she was done, they didn’t just stare at her. And they didn’t leave.

  They started talking, all at once, their voices overlapping, yet all bursting with the same caring intensity.

  “I want to see this journal,” said May, tugging on the medallion around her neck. “You’re sure you have no idea where the other half of it is?”

  “You should tell us if you black out again,” said Harper softly, squeezing her hand as Orpheus pressed next to Violet’s other side, his yellow eyes glinting.

  “Or if you see any more signs of this resurrected body,” added Isaac, frowning. “Justin, do you think there’s anything about that in the patrol records?”

  “A body would be tough to find in Four Paths,” said Justin, and Violet remembered the mausoleum. Of course a town where people could raise the dead would have a way of dealing with that. “If there’s anything in the records about this, we’ll find it.”

  “We’ll figure this out,” said Harper, leaning against her shoulder.

  And Violet, despite everything, smiled back.

  The day of Justin’s next cross-country meet, the Friday before the equinox, dawned cloudy and hazy. Justin felt hazy himself as he walked to the starting line of his race, surrounded by a crowd of chattering runners. Tendrils of mist obscured the tops of the trees behind the athletic field, and for a moment the sight made him tense, reminded him of the Gray.

  The past few days had been quiet and routine, but Justin knew it was an illusory calm. A thousand different troubles were suspended in the air around him, like juggling pins falling in slow motion.

  They didn’t just need to find Violet’s ritual anymore. They needed to figure out what was going on with the body she had resurrected. There was a chance Augusta knew the truth, but Justin wasn’t sure how to ask her without giving away the fact that he was working with Violet.

  Then there was Harper. Who had spent the past few days doing a great job of acting like he didn’t exist.

  As if he didn’t have enough to worry about, tomorrow was Founders’ Day—and the equinox. One of the most dangerous nights of the year. He paced back and forth on the starting line of the track, trying not to think about how there was nothing he could do to help the town when the Gray was at its strongest.

  This meet was local, a rarity, and there were scouts attending again. They tried to talk to Justin beforehand, and he smiled and nodded at them until they left. They weren’t running a course through the woods today. The school had deemed it too dangerous.

  The night before, his mother had handed him a scholarship application that was already filled out.

  “It’s an opportunity,” she’d said. “Do you know how many people would kill to get out of this town?”

  It was still sitting on his night table.

  If he performed well today, it could make the difference between him getting a scholarship or not. A scholarship he still wasn’t sure he wanted.

  “Runners, line up!”

  The rest of the athletes shifted aside automatically as Justin approached the starting line, letting him through, buzzing in his wake. He was a Hawthorne, after all, and that meant running well, and keeping his head down, and pretending everything was absolutely fine.

  He sighed and shifted his focus onto the track. Which was when a pink blur darted out from the crowd of spectators and sank her perfectly manicured fingernails into his arm.

  “Justin!” said May, pulling him away from the mass of people.

  “What?” Justin gaped at her. Behind them, the other runners buzzed with confusion.

  “Justin,” she said again. The hand on his arm was shaking. He reached forward with his own fingers, grasped her wrist, tried to steady her. “It’s Isaac.”

  She tugged him away from the track, onto the grass, toward the waiting embrace of the trees.

  Behind her, Justin saw the flash of a starting gun being raised in the air. He could stay here, and maybe earn his ticket out of town. Or go help Isaac.

  It wasn’t a choice at all.

  He turned away from the track as the sound of the starting gun fired into the air, away from the runners that burst past them, away from Coach Lowell’s startled, accusatory gaze.

  This was his town. His birthright. His best friend. And he was not leaving—he was not going anywhere. “What happened?”

  “He lost control at work. Someone’s already called Mom. You have to calm him down before she gets there.”

  A cluster of taut, anxious faces was gathered outside the Diner. Justin heard their panicked murmurs rising above the growl of the engine as May pulled the silver pickup truck into the parking lot, skidding across two spots in her haste to park. Justin had the door open before she’d even shifted the truck out of drive.

  He forced himself to even out his pace as he walked up to the crowd, to turn his expression into something neutral and mildly concerned. Half of fixing this was making it seem like an inconvenience. If he acted annoyed instead of panicked, people would follow his example.

  Justin tried to catch a glimpse inside the Diner, but the interior of the restaurant was dark, its plate-glass windows spiderwebbed with cracks.

  “I was expecting the sheriff.” Blood trickled from a laceration on Ma Burnham’s cheek, and her round face was ashen. But none of that scared him as much as the anger in her voice, or the distaste in her eyes.

  She was looking at him the way Harper did. Like he’d failed her, and there was nothing he could do to fix it.

  “My mother will be here soon.” A sprinkle of rain dotted Justin’s shoulders, his neck, but he hardly noticed. He had to make this right. “Tell me what happened.” He swallowed. “Please.”

  “As if your family cares about us.” The voice belonged to one of the people who’d collected around Ma Burnham. The crowd parted, and Justin swore, internally, as the boy who’d baited Isaac the night before stepped forward.

  Justin still couldn’t remember his name, but there was something familiar about the gap in his teeth, the way his hair fell across his bushy eyebrows.

  “Of course I care about you,” he said. “I’m here because I want to keep you safe.”

  “My brother died on your family’s watch,” said the kid. Justin’s heart sank as he realized where he recognized those features from: Hap Whitley’s pictures in the Four Paths Gazette. “And I know you’re not here because you’re worried a
bout us. You’re worried about him.”

  He jerked a thumb at the shattered windows, and around him, the crowd murmured with agreement. Justin had always loved the way he could command a group’s attention. But for the first time in his life, he didn’t want it.

  Because Hap Whitley’s brother was right. The reason he’d missed a track meet to come here wasn’t because he was scared for the town. It was because he was scared for Isaac.

  Justin stepped back from the crowd, his heart thudding in his chest.

  And realized that May had stepped forward to stand beside him.

  “Of course we’re concerned for Isaac,” she said, addressing not just the kid, but the entire crowd. “He’s our friend. But we don’t take our family name lightly. You’re Brian, right? Brian Whitley?”

  The kid nodded.

  “I’m sorry about your brother.” May’s voice was a shade too polished and formal, like she’d been practicing for a presentation, and her hands were braced on either side of her corduroy skirt. But she sounded more confident as she spoke, and the crowd, Justin realized, was listening to every word. “I promise you, we grieve for every person we lose. But if you don’t let Ma Burnham explain what’s going on in there, more people could get hurt. Do you want that?”

  Brian hesitated. “I guess not.”

  “Thank you,” said May, almost gently, and then she turned to Ma Burnham. “Tell us everything.”

  “It was Brian,” said Ma Burnham, stabbing a finger in the boy’s direction. “He said something or other about the Sullivans, I can’t recall what, exactly, but it sent Isaac into a terrible rage, and then there was just glass everywhere and people screaming.”

  “I see,” said Justin. He’d known it would be something about Isaac’s family. It always came back to his family. “Is everyone out?”

  Mrs. Burnham shook her head, blood leaking onto her chin. Justin bit back a curse.

  “My boys won’t leave,” she said. “I tried to warn them, but they said he had to answer for what he did.”

  “Your boys should’ve listened to you,” he said, hoping desperately that they still had all their limbs, turning back to give the crowd a reassuring smile.

  “Sorry for the inconvenience, everyone,” added May. “But I promise, this will all be fine.”