The Devouring Gray

by Christine Lynn Herman

  A flash of lightning jolted through the forest, sending the world around them into harsh illumination—and Harper froze.

  For a brief second, she could’ve sworn she’d seen the forms of two hooded figures only a few feet away.

  But no. That couldn’t be right. The Church of the Four Deities would have no business going into the forest on a night like this.

  She stared into the trees, but as far as she could tell, the figures were gone.

  A moment later, Isaac’s yell echoed through the wind. Harper whirled around to find him kneeling only a few feet away, beside a tiny figure curled up against a tree trunk.

  Only a few feet away—and yet, in this storm, Harper easily could’ve walked right past her.

  “Nora?” Harper rushed toward her, fresh panic engulfing her as she realized how still her sister was, the roots of the tree curled around her like grasping fingers. But her sister stirred immediately at the sound of her voice.

  “Harper!” she cried out, opening her arms. Harper dropped the sword on the ground and knelt, Nora’s tiny body shivering against Harper’s raincoat as they embraced.

  “Are you okay?” she whispered, planting a kiss on the crown of Nora’s auburn hair.

  Nora nodded, burying her face in Harper’s shoulder. “They said you’d come find me, but you took longer than they thought. I was scared.”

  Harper drew back, unease coiling through her. A twinge of phantom pain surged through her left arm. “They? Who said that?”

  “Dad did.” Nora’s words turned Harper’s stomach. She searched her sister’s freckled face for some sign that she was lying, but Nora’s cheeks were blotchy with fear, not deceit. “He told me to go to the town hall and wait, but I got lost in the woods.”

  Harper did her best to keep her voice even, not panicked. “And what, exactly, did he say?”

  “That he needed me to sit still until you and the new Saunders girl came to get me. He said he knew you’d get her, and they needed her to come out into the woods tonight.” She hiccuped, then added, “Harper, can we go home now?”

  “Of course we can,” said Harper absently, gathering Nora close to her, her eyes scanning the ground for her sword.

  She hadn’t imagined those hooded figures after all.

  Maurice Carlisle had used his own daughter as bait for Violet.

  Which meant they were all in danger—because if her father couldn’t be trusted to protect Nora, he certainly couldn’t be trusted to have any of their best interests in mind.

  “Violet?” called Harper, rising to her feet, Nora’s body curled against her arm. “We need to get out of here.”

  The forest was overwhelming, but not because of the weather.

  Violet had felt herself growing stronger from the moment she’d stepped outside. And the feeling had only increased the longer they’d spent in the woods; making her fingertips crackle like lightning bolts, her skin supercharged with energy.

  It was hard to focus on anything but how good it felt.

  This was strength.

  This was power.

  Violet watched Harper embracing her sister as if from a great distance. Her heart was skipping in her chest. Her hands were shaking.

  She leaned against the nearest tree trunk to regain her balance.

  “Hey.” Isaac appeared in her field of vision, the concern clear on his face. “Are you okay?” he asked, at the same time that Harper called, “We need to get out of here.”

  A surge of power washed through her as another bolt of lightning split the sky. Violet opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out.

  She tried to move an arm, a leg, a finger, panic welling up inside her as she realized that her body wasn’t responding.

  She couldn’t call for help or move or scream. Pain shot through her skull as her head swiveled itself toward the clouds that hung above the trees, flickering between the blackness of night and the pale, static clouds of the Gray, and her lips tugged themselves outward into a smile.

  “Yes,” said something that was not her at all. “Let’s go.”

  And then Violet’s mind went blank.

  The forest was surprisingly quiet. Justin had started his patrol expecting the worst, considering the events of the past few weeks. But although the wind and hail were annoying, they were all his group had encountered.

  Justin looked around at the rest of his group, pushing down the thought that Augusta had deliberately given them the safest route in the entire forest. Mitzi Carlisle had actually pulled out her phone to text, scowling as raindrops dotted her screen, while her brother Seth was absently tugging at the strings on his hoodie.

  “This is boring,” Seth said.

  Mitzi nodded in agreement.

  “That’s a good thing,” said Justin, even though he wasn’t so sure he believed that. “Mitzi, can you please take this seriously?”

  “I’ll take it seriously when I have something to fight,” she said, but she slid her phone back in her pocket.

  If Isaac had been there, he would’ve said something about Mitzi’s priorities, or perhaps suggested she fight him instead. But he wasn’t. So their patrol group moved toward the heart of the storm in silence.

  As the wind around them grew fiercer, hail raining down on their heads, Mitzi and Seth readied themselves for battle, their flesh stretching and morphing into stone from the shoulder down. They grinned and bumped reddish-brown fists, wiggling their stone fingers at one another in a silly but endearing handshake.

  Being around them took Justin back to earlier that afternoon.

  To Harper.

  The memory had to be handled carefully. Justin knew it would leave him raw and blistered if he let it kindle inside him for too long, and yet he couldn’t stop replaying that moment over and over again. He would forget his own name before he forgot the feeling of her blade pressed against his throat, the fury in her eyes.

  She didn’t want him near her anymore, that much was clear. And yet Justin could no longer deny that despite what his mother had done to Harper, despite the years he’d spent trying to pretend otherwise, his feelings for her hadn’t gone away.

  There was no good way for him to talk about this, not with Isaac, not with May. Yet keeping it inside left him with a hot, sick feeling brewing in his stomach, like he’d sat in the sun for too long.

  “That’s not normal, is it?” Mitzi asked Seth, and Justin was pulled back to the world around him. Seth shook his head, his fists returning to flesh and blood.

  “What’s going on?” Seth asked Justin, who realized only then why the Carlisle siblings looked so concerned.

  The hail was starting to slow around them, the wind moving from almost a gale to a light, whispering breeze in the span of a few seconds. The forest loomed out of the darkness, each tree trunk sharply defined against the night.

  Unease stirred in Justin’s gut. There was something expectant about this sudden stop, like water receding from a stretch of sand in the moments before a tsunami crashed in.

  “I don’t know,” said Justin, shining his flashlight at the woods around them. But there was no sign of the Gray. The world had gone completely still.

  Which was when a series of loud, piercing screams rang out up ahead.

  Justin’s throat closed in on itself as he recognized the high, shrill wail of a child.

  It could be some kind of trick. But he was not going to leave a defenseless kid in the forest on one of the most dangerous nights of the year.

  “Go!” he snapped, and they sprinted toward the sound, crashing through the underbrush. In their haste to reach whoever was screaming, they made more noise than a herd of stampeding elephants, but Justin didn’t care. They burst out into a clearing near the meadow and then froze.

  A few feet away from him stood Isaac and Harper, who was clutching a crying Nora to her chest. Isaac stood in front of Harper and Nora, his hands outstretched, his palms shimmering. Violet stood at the other side of the clearing, her arms spread wide. The tre
es behind her flickered between Four Paths and the Gray, moving from dark green to white and skeletal in the space of a single breath.

  Justin was pretty sure he caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure or two standing behind Violet, but when he blinked, they were gone.

  “Harper?” gasped Mitzi, hurrying over to her sister. Seth followed suit. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Run,” Harper said, turning toward all of them. Her face was white with fear. “You have to go, now.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Violet. “Am I bad company?”

  And Justin knew in that moment that something was terribly wrong.

  Her voice was still Violet’s voice, raspy and a little sweet, but there was something off about the way she was enunciating. It was too crisp, too formal. And the way her arms were spread apart in the air…the flashes of Gray were opening up with every flicker of her fingertips.

  “Justin,” said Isaac, his voice low and measured. “Use your team to get Harper and her sister out of here. I can handle this.”

  “What’s happening?” said Justin. “Why is she acting like this?”

  Across the clearing, Violet yawned.

  “Little Hawthorne boy, charging straight into trouble,” she said. There was nothing playful in these words—just cold, calculated malice. “It was foolish, letting her out of the house on an equinox. But then, you’ve always been foolish.”

  It hit him then. That this was not Violet at all. There was something else inside her. Something that wanted to get out.

  “You’re…it, aren’t you?” he said hoarsely.

  “It’s been so long since I had access to a living, breathing human,” said the Beast, stretching out a hand and wiggling each finger with mechanical precision. Justin could see in the beam of his flashlight that each digit was slowly losing its color, the fingernails turning from crimson to gray. “These are strong. I suppose a lifetime of piano will do that to you.”

  It flicked Violet’s fingers to the side, and the Gray ripped through the forest, an opening that gaped behind her like a wide, gruesome mouth.

  Justin couldn’t help it: He felt the call of the trees behind him. Felt an unmistakable desire to give himself to the Gray, let it claim him…

  Which was when Isaac charged straight for it, his hands shimmering, engulfing Violet with his kaleidoscopic light as they clamped around her wrists.

  The thing inside her let out a horrific snarl, arched Violet’s spine as it bucked away from the attack. But Isaac didn’t flinch. His power burned bright and steady, a beacon against the line of ridged, sunken trees that were splayed out behind Violet’s body.

  Justin watched, his heart rattling in his throat, as the Gray shrank away, dissolving at the edges. The moment it winked out of existence, Violet crumpled toward the ground, unconscious.

  Isaac fell with her, still gripping one wrist, the other arm reaching deftly around her before she hit the dirt. His arms shook as he lowered her the rest of the way to the ground.

  Isaac was strong but not invincible. Justin could see the exhaustion setting in as he rested Violet’s head on the dirt.

  And then something else flared in Isaac’s gaze—panic, his chin jutting toward something behind Justin’s shoulder.

  Isaac always seemed to notice things a second before Justin did. So he turned.

  The first thing he saw was May, unruffled by the hail, her pale face nearly translucent with horror. But his eyes only lingered there a second. Because standing beside her was his mother, her face a mask of cold, twisted fury.

  There was a swathe of light shining in Violet’s eyes. She blinked them open and realized that she’d fallen asleep on her side, her head tilting directly toward the sunlight streaming in through her window.

  But there were safety blinds on her window.

  And this was not her room. No, this was a sterile white space that reminded her of a hospital, and she was lying on a cot, still wearing the clothes she’d had on the night before. She could remember that much, at least. Isaac had been in her room, and then Harper had asked them for help. There had been trees and hail and the sense that she was strong, so strong….

  “What happened?” she whispered.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said a voice from the other side of the room. “You blacked out again.”

  Violet scrambled back on the cot, as if that would somehow dispel the turquoise-haired figure standing on the other side of the room. A rush of light-headedness coursed through her as she took in her sister’s ripped jeans, her paint-splattered tank top, her sardonic smile.

  “You’re a concussion symptom,” she said, struggling to keep the hysteria out of her voice as Rosie moved closer. “Just a hallucination my brain made up, because it has a terrible sense of humor.”

  “Are you sure?” Rosie’s shadow trailed across the floor behind her like a cape, the ends writhing and twisting. “Maybe you’re finally starting to get what you want.”

  A noise rang out from behind the door, not a knock but a thump, as if something had been slammed against it. Violet realized, dimly, that there were voices emanating from the hallway outside.

  “I’ll see you soon,” said Rosie, glancing from the door to Violet, who was still huddled on the cot. Her tone was almost soothing, but there was a calculated undertone to it that sent Violet’s stomach sparking with unease. “Don’t be frightened, little sis. Don’t you miss me?”

  She vanished, and now Violet could hear the voices more distinctly, as if they’d been muffled before.

  “Don’t,” someone was yelling. “I swear, I can explain—”

  “I don’t want to hear it.” This voice was low and cool. “You’re staying outside.”

  The door was open and shut in a single second, and then there was only Augusta Hawthorne, the silver shield on her turtleneck gleaming in the morning sunlight.

  Violet could put it together now: She was in the police station. She just didn’t know why.

  “Hello again, Violet,” she said calmly. “How are you?”

  Violet frowned at her. “Fine, I guess. What happened?”

  Augusta’s lips tugged up into something that would’ve been a smile on anyone else. On her it just looked like a fissure in a statue, like a sculptor’s hand had slipped.

  “You got lost in the storm,” she said, striding toward the cot. “But don’t worry about it. You’re going to feel much better very soon.”

  As the sheriff reached out to her, Violet realized, in a moment of horrible, piercing clarity, that it was the only time she’d ever seen Augusta Hawthorne without her gloves on.

  It was the last thought she had time for before the sheriff’s hand caught her wrist, and then her mind was not her own anymore. Fingers peeled back her skull—harsh, cold, unwelcome, stabbing into her brain like knives as they rummaged through her thoughts.

  Memories flashed across her eyes like images on a projector screen: She and Rosie lying on the floor in their art studio, laughing. The flat white clouds of the Gray. Isaac smiling at her, hail melting in his hair. And then the ground fell out from under her, and she was falling, her mind slipping out of her grasp as the world around her faded into blackness.

  When Justin’s grandfather was still alive, his study had been a warm, welcoming room, with a fireplace and earth-toned rugs and windows that were always flung wide open. But when Augusta Hawthorne moved her things into the room, she bricked up the fireplace and kept the storm shutters permanently pulled over the windows. The plush leather chairs were replaced by stiff, hard-backed wooden seats that forced Justin to sit perfectly straight as he stared at the dour-faced photographs hanging behind his mother’s desk.

  The Hawthornes were a gorgeous, dutiful, miserable bunch, even in black and white. Although their skin tones ranged from pale to dark brown, their hairstyles and outfits encompassing a dozen different trends, their faces all said the same thing: We know best. Justin wondered if his picture would be up on that wall someday, staring imperiously dow
n at his descendants.

  The way things were going, his mother was more likely to burn a picture of him than hang it anywhere.

  It was the day after the equinox. Augusta had left Justin and May in her study while she finished conducting business at the sheriff’s station. Justin knew they were being forced to wait as punishment, yet he didn’t move from his seat.

  “How could you tell her?” he asked May, who was sitting ramrod-straight in the chair beside him.

  “How could you not?” she said. “The Beast was inside her, Justin. It opened up the Gray. It made her bring someone back from the dead. Something had to be done.”

  The other patrol had converged on Violet for the same reason Justin’s had: They’d heard the screams. But after they’d figured out what they were looking at, May had cracked, confessing to their mother the second they returned to the sheriff’s station. Justin had been too shocked by her betrayal to do much more than feebly protest as she told her the whole story of the past few weeks, emphasizing that she’d been against deceiving their mother from the very beginning.

  Justin tried not to think about that voice coming out of Violet’s body. The color leaching away from her fingers. “You knew what Mom would do to her.”

  “What?” said May. “Fix her?”

  An ugly chuckle bubbled up in Justin’s throat, but he choked it back. “Our mother doesn’t fix things,” he said. “She just takes away the parts of people’s lives that are inconvenient for her. You know that.”

  Augusta hadn’t let him anywhere near Violet after she’d been taken to the station clinic. But Justin had seen his mother in action enough times by now to know what would happen next. Violet would wake up in a few hours with no memory of Four Paths as anything but a normal town. Her brain would fill in the gaps on its own.

  She would forget she’d ever had powers—just like Harper had.

  “Give it a few weeks,” said May, pressing a pale hand against his knee. “This will all matter a lot less, I promise you.”