The Devouring Gray

by Christine Lynn Herman

  “I guess…” Justin continued. “I’m here to tell you that I think something bad is coming for us. My family probably deserves it. But the rest of this town doesn’t. So stay out of the woods, okay?”

  And suddenly, Harper saw a path forward.

  For years, she’d seen her life as a certain kind of story. The tale of a girl who’d wanted nothing more than love and power and family. The test of valor she’d failed. The wicked, villainous Hawthornes who’d sentenced her to a lonely, miserable existence, using their charm to cover the ugliness beneath.

  Her father had offered her an easy ending to that story. One that made them both heroes.

  But as Harper looked at Justin Hawthorne, she knew in her gut that none of it was true.

  She thought about heroes, and villains, and legends, and monsters. And decided that whoever told the story was more powerful than all of them.

  Harper would never let someone else tell her story again.

  Maybe Violet couldn’t remember what had been done to her. But Harper still wanted to save her.

  “I’m not sure your family are the only ones in this town who are up to no good,” she said slowly, hardly able to believe the words were coming out of her mouth. “Justin…there’s something I have to tell you.”

  Violet stared down at the piano keys below her outstretched hands and sighed. All day, she had felt off. She’d thought practicing would snap her back into focus, but dread bloomed in her stomach each time her hands touched the keys. Something about the instrument just felt wrong.

  It didn’t help that Orpheus was pacing behind her, mewling piteously, the noise ringing through the house like a revving motor. Violet was pretty sure the cat missed his owner. But Aunt Daria was gone now.

  Orpheus mewled again, and another noise rose behind her now, the steady, careful thrum of footsteps.

  Violet turned around, confused. Her mother wasn’t home.

  But it wasn’t Juniper. Instead, there was a tall blond girl with sleek, straight hair and unnervingly symmetrical features standing in the center of the music room.

  There was something hard at the edges of her pleasant smile, something gaunt and hollow in her cheeks, that sent unease stirring in Violet’s chest. She was looking at her the way Harper had that morning—like they shared a secret, even though Violet had never met her.

  A name surfaced within her, although she wasn’t sure how she knew it.

  “You’re May, aren’t you?” she said. The girl nodded. “What are you doing here?”

  May shrugged, her shoulders draped in a flowy, cream-colored top. “You invited me. I knocked first. The door was unlocked, so I let myself in.” She gestured toward the piano. “You’re very good.”

  “Not as good as I used to be.” Violet frowned. “I don’t remember inviting you over.”

  Although there was a lot she couldn’t remember. Her life after Rosie had descended into a blurred fog, and things only got murkier when she struggled to recall her first few weeks in Four Paths.

  Thankfully, May looked utterly unfazed by her disorientation. “We’re doing a local-history project together,” she said, pulling out a wooden box from her shoulder bag. “You told me to come over after school. So we could finish our research?”

  Violet did have a hazy recollection of doing research on the town. Of a room with dented metal filing cabinets, with portraits on the walls. It seemed like it had been important.

  “Of course,” said Violet. “Right. We’re researching, uh…”

  “These, actually.” May opened the box and withdrew an oversize deck of cards. “The Deck of Omens. They’re local folklore. A tarot variant created in this town.” Her lips quirked up into that hard-edged smile again. “I’m here to read your cards. For the project. What is with you today?”

  Again, Violet felt a rush of unease. “I don’t know. Just having an off day, I guess.”

  “Well, we can always do this later this week, if you don’t feel up to it.”

  But May was already here, and Violet couldn’t think of a good reason to say no. “It’s fine,” she said. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  May insisted they both sit on the floor. Violet had always considered herself the sort of person who didn’t follow others without asking questions first, but she was too tired to protest. The strangeness she had felt all day had intensified the moment she’d seen May; when she blinked, she swore she saw tendrils of something moving behind her eyes, almost like unfurling branches.

  The way they were sitting, the image of May’s fingers effortlessly shuffling the Deck of Omens, seemed oddly familiar. She wondered, dully, if they had done this before, but she surely would’ve remembered that.

  There was some kind of optical illusion happening with the cards. Violet knew May was just cleverly shuffling them, but she could’ve sworn the deck was getting smaller.

  That the slim bits of wood were disappearing, one by one.

  When there were only a few cards left—where had the rest gone?—May raised her eyes to Violet’s.

  “We’re supposed to hold hands now,” said May, the edge of her lip curling. “Weird, I know. But it’s an old superstition.”

  Again, Violet had the sense that they had done this before. “I’m not sure—”

  But May’s hands were already wrapped around hers. Her palms were cold and clammy, her fingers surprisingly strong, and as Violet struggled against her grip, something cracked open in the back of her brain.

  It was as if roots were burrowing into her skull, small, deliberate tendrils that changed everything they touched, making each memory brighter and clearer. Like restoring the colors in a faded landscape painting. Violet gasped from the force of it, the truth unfurling, May’s mind snapping every tether that had been placed on hers. She jerked back involuntarily, breaking away from May’s grasp, as the events of the past few weeks rushed back into her mind.

  For a moment, it was all she could do to stare at the girl across from her, shuddering. But soon her racing thoughts crystallized into a harsh, furious truth.

  “Your mother,” she hissed, the words echoing through the music room.

  May nodded, her pale face dead serious. “So you can remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re angry.”

  “Of course I’m angry. What the hell did you expect?”

  This was why the Hawthornes had lied to their mother. Why the town seemed so transfixed by them—because they never knew when their golden family had messed up.

  No wonder Juniper couldn’t remember anything about Four Paths. No wonder Harper’s history with the Hawthornes was so muddled.

  It was Augusta. It was all Augusta.

  How many others had suffered the way she had? How much had the town forgotten?

  “So she’s been taking people’s memories away,” Violet said, her voice pulsating with fury. “But you can give them back. And you haven’t.”

  The shadows pooling in the hollow of May’s throat deepened as she ducked her head. “I only did my ritual six months ago,” she said softly. “I wasn’t even sure this would work. You’re the first one I’ve ever tried this on.”

  “Well, now you know it does work,” said Violet. “So you should just—”

  “No!” It was the loudest Violet had ever heard May speak. Her entire body radiated panic. Her eyes were wide, one hand extended toward Violet, imploring, pleading. “I can’t. And if you tell anyone what I did, I’ll deny it.”

  “Why?” Violet said softly. She was still angry, but May Hawthorne, despite her fear, despite everything, had just saved her from forgetting. And Violet didn’t want to spook her now.

  May gulped. “My mother will be furious if she finds out I’ve helped you. She’d never forgive me.”

  “Then why did you help me?”

  Violet waited impatiently as May fidgeted, her eyes flicking back and forth. The girl raised a hand to her head, letting a ray of late afternoon sunlight dance across her skin. Her sm
all gold earring was a tiny leaf.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. Violet heard the truth in her voice as surely as she saw it on her face. “It just wasn’t right. What Mom did to you.” Tears pooled in the corners of her eyes, but May rose to her feet before Violet could be sure she hadn’t imagined them. May cleared her throat.

  “I should go,” she said, clutching the Deck of Omens to her chest. “I can’t stop you, but please. Don’t tell anyone.”

  And then she was hurrying toward the door, her sandals clicking softly against the wooden floorboards.

  Violet scrambled to her feet. “Wait!”

  She was certain May wasn’t going to listen. But she did, coming to a halt a hairbreadth before the exit.

  Violet wasn’t sure if she was angry with May or not. If there even was a right thing to say.

  She settled for a hoarse “Thank you.”

  May’s head inclined swiftly into a birdlike nod. The front door of the Saunders manor slammed shut a few moments later, leaving Violet standing, shell-shocked, in the golden remnants of the afternoon sunlight.

  She wasn’t sure what to do next. She wanted to call Justin and Isaac and yell at them for lying to her. But May had been so scared.

  She didn’t want to betray her trust. But she needed answers. Which meant she’d just have to find them herself.

  There had to be something she had missed, about the blackouts, about her ritual.

  She hurried to her room and spent the next few minutes in a frenzy of activity, collecting all the evidence she could find. The photo of Stephen, Daria, and Juniper. The pictures on her phone of the poem she’d seen in the Hawthornes’ study. And finally, Stephen Saunders’s journal—the half she’d been able to find, anyway.

  As Violet gazed down at her hoard of clues, wondering how she could tie them all together, something soft and furry rubbed against her ankles.

  “I guess you count as evidence, too,” she said, stroking Orpheus between the ears. The cat let out his chain-saw mewl and bumped his head against something half-buried beneath a cardigan on the floor.

  Violet’s heartbeat quickened as she recognized the smooth brown cylinder Daria had shoved into her hands.

  “Maybe someone killed her because she knew something after all,” she said softly, tugging the cylinder out from beneath the cardigan and rising to her feet. She unscrewed the top, but before she could pull out the blueprints, her eyes caught on the wood grain on the side of the case.

  The dark wood was uneven, faded. Violet held it up to the nearest lamp and squinted, grinning as her eyes made out a barely visible circle carved into the wood. A circle with four lines cutting through the edges, a slice of wood that was just the tiniest bit raised above the rest of the cylinder.

  She pressed her thumb into the center of the founders’ symbol, and it moved inward with a slight click. What she’d thought was one cylinder was actually two.

  Violet upended the case and dumped the smaller cylinder out into her hand. There was a lone sheet of paper rolled up inside the outer layer of wood.

  It was another page of blueprints: this one depicting a single room. The founders’ symbol was scrawled in one corner of the page in blotched, faded ink, and beneath it was one word: spire.

  “Of course there’s a creepy attic,” Violet said to Orpheus as she gazed up at the thin square of stone embedded in the ceiling above her head. “Because our family couldn’t just keep their secrets in a closet or something, like normal people.”

  There were three spires on the roof of the Saunders manor, but Violet had known immediately which one the blueprints were referring to.

  It was the one in the center of the house, directly above the foyer. The one she’d seen slicing through the trees when she’d been trapped in the horrific embrace of the Gray—the only spire that had been part of the house a hundred and fifty years ago.

  And sure enough, here it was: a bit of reddish-brown stone that didn’t fit the rest of the ceiling.

  A trapdoor.

  Violet stood on a chair to investigate it further. Juniper had claimed she was going to the nearest coffee shop to work, so Violet had no qualms about making noise as she tried to figure out how to open the door. It seemed to be spring-loaded somehow—she could feel a mechanism behind it, but it was jammed. Violet wedged her fingers into the edge of the stone and pushed until it gave way, groaning on rusted metal hinges as it slid to the side.

  In its place was a bit of slatted metal that Violet realized was the underside of a ladder, meant to be folded out. But it was secured to the ceiling by a combination lock. Violet tugged on the lock, frowning. It looked dirty, but it didn’t look centuries old. She recognized the brand from her gym locker in middle school.

  While the padlock itself was secure, the bolt it had been fastened around was almost rusted through. She yanked on the edge of the lock again, but it didn’t give. So she fetched the hammer from the ancient tool kit inside the hall closet and slammed it down as hard as she could until the oxidized metal gave way.

  The combination lock crashed to the floor, sending orange residue fluttering across her black jeans, but the trapdoor was hers to open. Violet tucked the hammer into the back pocket of her pants, in case she needed to hit something else. She wedged her fingers beneath the metal corners of the ladder and tugged.

  The ladder unfolded with a squeal that made Violet wish she could cover her ears. She unfolded it as far down as it would go, coughing on the rush of musty air that had come with it.

  She tried to gaze up into the spire, but whatever awaited her was cloaked in a deep, impenetrable blackness. Violet turned on her phone flashlight and raised a cautious hand up into the attic. But there was nothing menacing on the sloped stone ceilings, and the opening was too narrow to see much of the walls. So in the end, she tucked her phone away and climbed the ladder, her heart pounding a little too quickly in her chest.

  She had never been more conscious of the fact that, if something went wrong, there would be nobody coming to save her. Justin, Isaac, and Harper thought her memories were gone. May had told her to keep her secret. Her mother couldn’t remember anything. And Rosie…Rosie was dead.

  The inside of the spire was bigger than Violet thought it would be, larger than her walk-in closet back in Ossining, with perfectly circular walls and a ceiling that tapered upward into a point. Black velvet curtains disguised most of the wall. Violet caught a glimpse of a frame behind them, a window. She strode toward it, but before she could draw the curtain away, a dark shape sank its teeth into her ankle.

  Violet stumbled back, yelping with surprise. But it was only Orpheus. As Violet gazed down at his hissing form, she saw that a panel of stone had been ripped out of the floor, replaced by a perfect circle of wood lined with white paint.

  Violet tried to step around Orpheus’s furry body, but he darted in front of her once more. Her companion’s tail rose into the air, the tip twitching as his glowing yellow eyes met hers.

  Violet had seen enough horror movies to know that when an animal tried to tell you something, it was probably wise to listen. Besides, she could feel something pulsing deep inside of her as she gazed at the dusty bit of wood—the same thing she’d felt on the equinox.

  “Don’t go inside the circle.” Violet stepped away from the line of white paint. “Got it.”

  There wasn’t much in the rest of the room, just a single shelving unit full of odd bits and pieces: the dull edge of a stone sword; a small, chipped bell; an empty, ornate wooden box that reminded her of the one May had kept her cards in.

  She’d started to surrender her hopes of finding anything useful when something on the bottom shelf caught her eye.

  A sheaf of college-lined pages sticking out of the top of a leather-bound book.

  Violet pulled the book off the shelf and flipped it open. The papers had been crammed hastily inside a book of poetry.

  She knew from the moment she saw the handwriting what she had found.

 
“Jackpot,” Violet whispered.

  Here, at last, were the missing pages of Stephen Saunders’s journal.

  The Carlisle lake stretched before Harper like an open mouth.

  Justin, standing next to her, looked slightly ill. He had been visibly uneasy about their plan since Harper had proposed it to him, but she wouldn’t let that stop her. Nothing would stop her now.

  “It looks like it’s sucking in the daylight,” he said quietly, gazing down at the silt-clogged water.

  Harper looked from the lake into his ashen face. It was true that the sunlight seemed dimmer here, cloaking the stone animals behind them in shadow.

  It had barely been two weeks since the last time they’d talked here, and yet everything was different.

  He’d lied to her about his powers.

  She’d lied to him about the Church.

  But back in the music room, she had told him the truth. That she was part of a new faction of the Church of the Four Deities that was actively plotting to take his family down. That she was pretty sure they’d had something to do with what had happened to Violet.

  That she needed his help.

  Justin had taken it very well—almost too well, but Harper didn’t have time to worry about why he’d reacted with understanding instead of anger.

  At least everything was out in the open, now that they’d both confessed. The power balance between them finally felt equal.

  And the plan they’d made had led them here after school, ready to get some answers. Ready to figure out what was truly going on in this town.

  Harper stared at the shed behind the statue garden and readied herself for what she had promised to do.

  Mitzi and Seth were out of the house. Harper’s mother had taken baby Olly for the day, visiting her sister a few towns over, while Justin had agreed to babysit Brett and Nora, claiming he was amazing with children.

  An opportunity to catch Harper’s father alone like this wouldn’t come again for a long time.

  “I’m ready,” she told Justin.