The Devouring Gray(10)
It felt like Violet had only been playing the piano for ten minutes, maybe twenty, but her phone said she’d been sitting in the music room for almost four hours. She’d gotten carried away with her playing before, but never like this.
Violet rose from the bench and hurried to the door.
That discomfort still lingered when she reached her bedroom. It was much bigger than her room in Ossining, the walls reddish-brown stone, the bed a large four-poster thing that looked like something out of a museum. Also, there was more creepy taxidermy. Violet carted out a crow and a deer head and dumped them in the room next door, fighting a strange urge to apologize to them.
She swung open the door to her bedroom, and her eyes lit on the pyramid of boxes stacked beside the far wall, each marked ROSIE in big black letters.
The night before Juniper packed up Rosie’s bedroom for the move, Violet set foot inside it for the first time since the accident. She combed through the bookshelves, the dresser, the closet, and exorcised her sister’s secrets: the half-drunk whiskey bottle beneath the mattress, the lingerie stuffed in her T-shirt drawer, the love notes from Elise tucked into her jacket. She spent an hour turning Rosie from the person she had been into the person her mother had wanted her to be, and when she was done, she’d curled up in her own bed, a hollow, ashy taste in her mouth.
The boxes were the result of that packing, a colorful but tasteful portrait of a girl who’d been artistic, but charmingly so, more Monet than Van Gogh. Violet turned her eyes away from the boxes to the painting that hung above them.
It was one of Rosie’s portfolio pieces, an abstract meant to represent Violet, bits of paint all blurred and pushed together in dizzying patterns that spun and whirled if you looked at them from the right angles. She’d done four canvases, one for each member of the Saunders family, even though their father was long dead, and they’d gotten her into her top three art schools. Soul paintings, she’d called them, and although Violet had teased Rosie about her New Age proclivities, she couldn’t deny the name felt right.
Maybe the rest of Rosie’s things were a lie, but Violet’s soul painting wasn’t. Violet stepped toward it, her discomfort fading away as she stared at the familiar canvas.
She touched her fingertips to it, then drew the curtains across her bedroom window. The black outlines of the trees gleamed in the moonlight, zigzagging along the side of the house like a row of broken teeth.
Harper Carlisle moved through a fluid series of parries and ripostes, her bare toes pressing into the dirt as she upped the pace of her footwork. She pictured the monster in the Gray—thin, skeletal, faceless—and lunged. The yellowing lace of her nightgown bunched around her knees as she drove her blade through the imaginary creature’s chest.
She didn’t know what the Beast looked like. No one alive did.
Harper knew what it sounded like, though. Hardly a day went by where she wasn’t haunted by the memory of its hollow, tinny voice inside her head.
It was almost dawn now, but she’d been up since three, practicing her swordplay behind her family’s cottage. Stone animals nestled in the dying grass around her, a reddish-brown audience. These statues were the closest thing the Carlisles had to family heirlooms. Some were sentinels, carved from the rock excavated from the family lake and serving as crude vessels for the Carlisles’ eyes and ears—but others, like the deer, had been real animals once, before a Carlisle turned them to stone guardians that could bend to their will with a mere touch.
It had been a long time since Four Paths had seen a Carlisle that powerful.
“I win,” Harper said softly, just as the phone she’d nestled between the dormant deer guardian’s ears began to sound with her morning alarm. She kept the sword with her as she headed back inside, even though she had to use her residual limb to jimmy the doorknob open. Losing her left hand had changed the way she fought, altered her balance and footwork, the way she lunged across the grass. But it hadn’t changed how confident Harper felt when she was holding a sword.
It was far less daunting to think about the first day of school with a blade in her hand.
Harper wiped her feet off and moved soundlessly through her house, stopping only to reluctantly slot the sword back into its place of honor above the mantel. Maybe waking up this early to practice was excessive, but there were eight members of her family. All were nosy, including the baby. And none of them knew she’d kept training after the accident.
Harper was willing to take drastic measures to keep it that way. It wasn’t like she’d slept much since the day she’d lost her left hand.
The day she’d slipped into the Gray.
Three years later, and Harper still dreamed of the lake closing over her head. Of resurfacing somewhere new, where her breath couldn’t fill her lungs and her arm crumbled into stone on the riverbank. It was a forest, or at least it looked like one, but the trees were skeletal and twisted, bowed beneath an unmoving sky that shone like splintered steel.
There was no color in the Gray. No color except the sharp crimson shine of her blood.
Harper shook the memories away, shuddering, and went on with her morning.
By the time her parents’ alarm went off at six, Harper had dressed, given up on her waist-length dark curls, and perfected her eyeliner. She spent the next half hour wrangling Brett and Nora out of bed and getting them ready for school, all while trying not to trip over the cord of Mitzi’s hair straightener.