The Devouring Gray

by Christine Lynn Herman

  “But, Isaac,” she said. “Look at us. We’re dangerous, too.”

  It was the first time she’d ever said his name aloud. She liked the way it sounded in her throat. She liked the way his eyes widened a little bit, like he’d noticed.

  Like he’d been listening.

  She swallowed, forged onward. “Being new here means I don’t know a lot. That ignorance almost got me killed. But it also means that I can look at this from the perspective of an outsider. The holidays, the ceremonies, the patrols. I can see how much this town has hurt us. Our ancestors bound our bloodlines to something awful, and they trapped us here with it. Is that really the life you want?”

  Isaac’s body had gone very still. “You can leave now, can’t you? You’re not trapped anymore.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  His gaze flickered to the broom in his hand, the overturned booths. “No. That’s not what I want.”

  Violet exhaled slowly. “Good. Because I’m going to find a way to kill that thing in the Gray. The thing inside my head. I could try and do it alone, but I need someone who knows what the Beast is really capable of. That’s you.”

  Again, he dodged her question. “Why not ask Harper?”

  Violet smiled ruefully. “Her memories are gone. Justin told me. And I need a second before I can face her again, knowing what I know.” She paused. “He loves her, doesn’t he?”

  The words rang out through the husk of the restaurant, louder than she’d intended. Something awful passed across Isaac’s face, and Violet knew she’d been right.

  But his expression told her something else, too. Knit together all the things she’d noticed about the way he’d treated Justin. And the knowledge of what he felt, who he felt it for, sent a rush of disappointment roiling through her stomach.

  Violet gave herself a moment to acknowledge why she would be upset at all. She let her own unsaid truth bloom, like a budding flower—and then she pushed it away.

  She would not let this bother her. She would not consider how much those feelings had informed her decision to approach Isaac at all.

  “You want to kill the Beast?” Isaac said hoarsely. “I’m in.”

  Violet nodded. But the rush of victory she should’ve felt was muted.

  She left the Diner and started down Main Street, following the gravel road until it was just her, gazing up at the reddish-gold leaves hanging above her head.

  Harper didn’t know where the piece of paper had come from. It tumbled out of her pocket as she shrugged her jacket off in her living room. She knelt down to inspect it as it fluttered down to the floor, like a bird that had left the nest too soon.

  When she unfolded it, the words scrawled across it made no sense.

  It was a cruel joke. It had to be.

  But as Harper moved through the rest of her evening, the words wouldn’t leave her head.

  They beat through her brain as she tucked Nora into bed and arranged each of her stuffed animals in the perfect position. As she nodded good night to a father who she couldn’t look in the eye anymore, who didn’t remember what he had done to her.

  It was only when she stood silently in the bathroom, draped in her lace nightgown, that she allowed herself to mentally unfold that paper.

  Do your ritual again.

  Harper stared into the mirror. Bandages swathed her neck like a premature Halloween costume. She remembered a story she had read as a child, about a girl who wore a red ribbon around her neck that kept her head in place, and shuddered.

  Violet and her mother had told Harper she could stay at the Saunders manor if she wanted, for as long as she liked, but Harper hadn’t made up her mind yet.

  The Carlisle cottage had always been her home, and she didn’t want to leave Brett and Nora to face it alone.

  Yet she could not deny that she no longer felt safe there.

  She tugged the bandages off and stared at the purpled finger marks that crisscrossed her neck.

  Three years ago, she had failed her ritual. The lake had deemed her too weak. The Gray had devoured her whole.

  There was no changing that.

  Do your ritual again.

  An uncontrollable urge rose up in her throat, to shout, to sing, to swing a blade.

  Do your ritual again.

  Harper opened the bathroom door and padded down the hallway. She hesitated at the doorway to her room, at Mitzi’s slack-jawed face illuminated by the moonlight streaming through their window, but the words didn’t feel like a joke anymore.

  They felt right.

  A moment later, she was at the back door.

  Harper traversed the slope of shadowy grass in her backyard, her white nightgown shining as she entered the forest. The nights were growing colder, but the rush of chilled air against her skin didn’t bother Harper—it just made her feel more alive. Her bare feet made no sound on the fallen leaves, and although she kept her gaze trained on the well-worn path ahead, she could have closed her eyes and walked there just the same.

  At the edge of the lake, she stared down at the darkened water, watching as it sucked in the moonlight instead of reflecting it. It wanted to suck her in, too. She could feel the pull of the lapping waves like a lodestone in her heart.

  Harper remembered the muddy water closing over her head. Her reddish-brown arm, lost at the bottom of the lake.

  She stepped into the water.

  Her bare toes sank into silt as wetness spread across the bottom of the nightgown. Crumbled bits of stone scraped the soles of her feet, but she didn’t stop, didn’t waver. The water was like crushed velvet against her skin, cool and welcoming. Soon the lake had reached her chin. Her hair floated around her head like strands of seaweed.

  Harper tilted her head back. Stars circled the moon, bright freckles orbiting a half-shut eye.

  She breathed in, closed her eyes, and submerged herself in the water.

  There was no light beneath the surface of the lake. The world around Harper felt like a womb, a dark embrace that urged her, improbably, to sink. She pulled her residual limb across her knees and let the current take her, driving her to the bottom of the lake.

  Stone scraped across her shoulder, and she tumbled out of her little ball. Her body splayed across the lake’s heart as she breathed out in a rush, air bubbles winding invisibly back to the surface.

  Her hand reached forward, fingers scrabbling in the earth, until they closed around a single stone.

  Her feet embedded themselves in the lake bed. She unwound upward, bit by bit, until she stood at the bottom of the lake. Her hair streamed around her shoulders and her waist, tangling with the lace of her nightgown. For the first time in years, Harper was utterly, completely calm.

  She was waiting.

  Something loosened in the back of her mind as the lake water rushed and roared around her, pushing open a door she hadn’t realized was there.

  And Harper remembered. She remembered everything.

  Her grip tightened around the stone as she kicked her legs back through the water. She hit the surface seconds later, sending rippling waves back toward the shore as she gulped a lungful of air.

  Harper tilted her head back to the winking moon and sang a long, low note of rage.

  A copper crown of leaves was nestled in Justin’s hair. Now that the trees had begun to change color, he couldn’t seem to return from an early morning run without taking a bit of the forest home with him. He picked them out of his hair as May’s voice rang through his bedroom door.

  “Come out,” she said. “Justin, please. I need to show you something important.”

  He ignored her. Yes, he’d come home. But it would be a long time before the things she’d said stopped resonating within him.

  He wondered if there would ever be a day when he didn’t believe them, just a little bit.

  There was a twinge of panic in May’s voice now. “Our mother’s already seen this. You need to look—now.”

  Justin was curious, despite himse
lf.

  But he was tired of protecting May when she’d shown, very clearly, that she didn’t care at all about protecting him. He had stopped being that person the moment he turned in his founders’ medallion.

  May’s voice had turned shriller than he’d heard in months; shriller even than it had been in their mother’s office. “At least open your window.”

  Against his better judgment, Justin slid the pane of frosted glass upward, sending the dark, sprawling form of the hawthorn tree into sharp focus.

  And gasped.

  Because the hawthorn tree, from root to tip, had turned to red-brown stone.

  Petrified branches spiraled from a lifeless trunk. Confused birds perched among frozen leaves that would never float softly to the ground, chirping in low, panicked voices.

  And as he stared at the evidence that Harper had gotten his note, that she’d believed him, that she’d listened, Justin couldn’t stop himself from grinning.

  Isaac Sullivan reached the edge of the ruins just before dawn.

  They were easy to find. All he had to do was let his muscle memory take over as he left the main road behind, winding through the trees, until he reached the remnants of what had once been his home.

  Isaac paused at the place where the grass gave way to a crater of scorched earth. Three years ago, the Sullivan mansion had stood here, tall and proud and full of life.

  All that was left now was a crude foundation of charred brick and timber.

  As far as Isaac was concerned, it was an improvement.

  He took a moment to admire his handiwork, pushing down the impulse to mentally overlay the ruins with the house that had once been there—the stained-glass window above the doorway, the great stone pillars that held up the gables like a pair of hunched shoulders.

  Every time he came here, he left remembering less of the house it had once been and more of the pile of rubble it was now.

  It was why Isaac visited so often. It was why he’d destroyed the Sullivan mansion in the first place.

  He wanted to forget it.

  And because this was where he came to forget things, it was the right place—the perfect place—to get rid of everything that reminded him of Justin Hawthorne.

  He had brought the three most important traces of their friendship: This Side of Paradise, the only novel he and Justin both enjoyed; a pair of running sneakers Justin had given him, which he’d barely used; and a tiny silver figurine shaped like a tree, which Justin had stolen from the sheriff in a moment of anger and stashed in his apartment.

  Isaac destroyed the figurine first; his mind narrowing with concentration until the silver had smoldered into ash. Then he disintegrated the shoes.

  He hesitated over the book. Isaac didn’t like to hurt books. But when he flipped open the cover and saw Justin’s name written inside in his familiar chicken-scratch handwriting, the hurt coursing through him was enough to make his palms turn hot.

  His loyalty to Justin had deepened into an inability to put himself first. To say no. For a long time, he’d thought that was love.

  He’d been wrong.

  But knowing that didn’t make it hurt any less.

  He raised his hands in the air and let the remnants of the novel trickle to the ground, then dusted them clean.

  Through the cloud of soot he’d left behind in the air, a figure stirred on the other side of the crater.

  Isaac took in the figure’s large hands, made for closing into fists, the tattoos that ran from his wrists to his shoulders, and a face that had only grown sharper and crueler in the years since he had seen it last.

  The scar on Isaac’s neck began to pulse in time with his heartbeat as Gabriel Sullivan met his eyes.

  “Miss me, little brother?” he asked, the words echoing across the ruins, and Isaac knew, for the first time since his fourteenth birthday, what it was to be afraid.

  Acknowledgments

  I had the idea for this book when I was a college student abroad. I’d traveled to Europe hoping to find inspiration, only to realize that I needed to write about the upstate New York woods I’d left behind. I didn’t know then that it would change my life. I didn’t even know if I could write it. I just knew that I had fallen in love with Violet, Harper, Justin, Isaac, and May, and I had to tell their story.

  I’m so glad I did.

  But no book is ever created alone, and without all of the following people, The Devouring Gray would not be what it is today.

  To my agent, Kelly Sonnack, thank you for your tireless guidance and wisdom, your thoughtfulness, and your impeccable editorial insight. From the very beginning, you’ve understood The Devouring Gray on a level I’d only dreamed of—and you’ve understood me, too. I’m so lucky to have you in my corner, and so grateful for all you’ve done for me and my woods book.

  To my editors, Hannah Allaman and Emily Meehan—thank you for reading my book an uncountable number of times, and for understanding my vision for this duology from the very beginning. You are a total dream team, and I’ll forever be honored that you chose to go into the Gray with me. Hannah—thank you for loving these characters just as much as I do, for the Hamilton references, the mutual lack of chill, and the impressively fast e-mail responses.

  Thank you as well to the entire team at Hyperion, who’ve been so supportive through this whole process, especially Mary Ann Naples, Dina Sherman, Holly Nagel, Elke Villa, Andrew Sansone, Guy Cunningham, Patrice Caldwell, Cassie McGinty, Jody Corbett, Meredith Jones, and Tyler Nevins. Shea Centore, thank you for providing such incredible interior illustrations.

  Amanda Foody—you came into my life when I was ready to give up on this book and showed me how to save it. You’re my first line of defense, the other half of my brain, my greatest champion, and my most honest critic, and sometimes I truly believe you can read my mind. Thank you for always knowing exactly how to help me, for being one of the few people this introvert never needs a break from, for the countless late-night epiphanies and brainstorming sessions and eternal inside jokes. I’m in awe of your talent, your work ethic, and your impeccable sense of style, and there’s no one else I’d rather have by my side during every step of my publication journey. I don’t have words for how much you mean to me, so “best friend” will have to do.

  I wouldn’t be writing these acknowledgments at all without my incredible critique group, whose feedback, encouragement, and friendship mean the world to me. Thank you to Kat Cho, Katy Rose Pool, Claribel Ortega, and Joan He, 2019 debuts extraordinaire—I’m honored to have my first book releasing the same year as all of yours. Thank you to Amanda Haas for being the world’s best listener and my honorary big sister, Ella Dyson, Janella Angeles, and Erin Bay for your early beta reads, Meg Kohlmann for demanding more romance, Mara Fitzgerald, my dead sea buddy, Axie Oh, Akshaya Raman, Tara Sim, Melody Simpson, Maddy Colis, Ashley Burdin, and Alexis Castellanos. I’ve learned so much from every single one of you, and I’m so proud to be in the presence of all your collective talent. Best. Cult. Ever.

  Rory Power, my tree sister, thanks for the groundbreaking realization that publishing is just Dance Moms for grown-ups. Emily Duncan, my goth queen, thanks for the hours-long character talks and sequel solidarity. Thank you both for letting me burst into your lives like the Kool-Aid Man, for writing two of my favorite books, for seeing the best and worst of me and loving me anyway, for embracing my sharp edges even when I couldn’t, and, of course, for dealing with all the possum GIFs. Your writing has changed me for the better—and so has your friendship.

  Thank you to Claire Wenzel, undisputed empress of graphic design and out-of-context-quote humor, to Swati Teerdhala and Isabel Sterling, debut sisters and givers of excellent advice, to Deeba Zargarpur and the 6:00 a.m. bus ride that changed my life, to Paige Cober, my fellow murder girl, and to Nicole Deal—your art never fails to make my day. Thank you to Claire Legrand for being a friend and a role model, and never judging me for long, emotional texts. Kati Gardner, I am so grateful for your insight and feed
back.

  Laura Lashley, Anna Birch, Emily Neal, and Rachel Griffin, thank you for being my lifelines from Pitch Wars 2016 onward. Thank you to Sierra Elmore for all the midnight cat pictures, and for reminding me no book is complete without accompanying memes.

  Shelby, Ian, and Sam, thanks for being the kind of friends who are worth coming out of my writer cave for.

  Brigid, you’re the Kelly to my Holly, and don’t you forget it. Thank you for understanding me both on and off the page.

  Thank you to my parents, who encouraged me to be a storyteller, who moved all forty boxes of my childhood books around the world for eighteen years. I am so grateful for all of your support.

  Thank you, Grandma Barbara and Grandpa Mark, who always listened to my stories. Thank you, Nanny and Poppy, who let me write most of the second draft of this book in your dining room while feeding me world-class Italian food.

  Nova, you are a cat and therefore you cannot read (as far as I know), but I’m putting you in my acknowledgments anyway. Thanks for walking across my keyboard, biting my toes at 4:00 a.m., and keeping me humble.

  Lastly, Trevor—thank you for loving me exactly as I am, for reading many years of first drafts, and for listening to me talk about fictional teenagers for hours on end. You are far too good of a person to ever become one of my book characters.

  Born in New York City but raised in Japan and Hong Kong, CHRISTINE LYNN HERMAN subscribes to the firm philosophy that home is where her books are. She returned to the United States to study at the University of Rochester, where she received the Dean’s Prize in fiction and an Honors English degree. Currently, Christine and her books reside in a Brooklyn apartment, along with her partner, many plants, and their extremely spoiled cat. She can be found talking about her writing @christineexists or at christinelynnherman.com.