The Devouring Gray(15)

“Looks like you’re the upset one to me,” said Daria.

“So if Stephen was your brother—”

“Another time.” Juniper’s voice was firm and steady again. She hurried back to the living room, downing her entire glass of wine on the way.

Violet didn’t chase her. She didn’t feel stable enough to move just yet. She was too overwhelmed, filled to the brim with a new, awful understanding of her mother.

“Stay out of the woods, little bone,” Daria said reproachfully from the top of the stairs. “I can see those branches reaching for you.”

But Violet could barely hear her.

Juniper’s brother had died, so she had run away. And she’d kept running, cutting Violet off from her father’s family after he died, then yanking them away from Ossining after they’d lost Rosie. She didn’t care who she left behind. She didn’t care about the damage she did along the way.

Violet stumbled to her room, her head throbbing. She curled up on her bed and cried all the tears Juniper wouldn’t, for the father and sister she had lost and the uncle she would never know. When she was done, the noise from downstairs had faded away.

She wiped her face with her comforter, then padded resolutely to the music room.

Violet needed the piano. It was the only thing that could possibly clear the dullness from her mind, ease the aching in her chest.

This time, she didn’t even try to play her audition program. Her fingers flew freely across the keys, the pain she couldn’t verbalize emerging in the chords that echoed off the cavernous walls of the music room. This was her life without Rosie, these great bursts of sound with no audience. And Violet knew in that moment that she would do anything—anything—to have her sister back for just one more moment.

She closed her eyes, trying to push the longing away, push the pain out. When she opened them, the piano was gone.

In its place was a sky full of still, gray clouds that shone like blunted steel.





Violet lay faceup on the ground, her arms and legs splayed out like a discarded toy.

Above her was an endless expanse of dark, ashy trunks and naked branches that spiraled toward an unmoving sky. Everything was colorless and completely still. The world felt two-dimensional, like the set of a play, a forest of cardboard and painted plywood.

Pain shot through Violet’s spine as she sat up—every part of her was sore; her bare feet, her callused palms. Her arms were caked with dirt from the tips of her fingers to her elbows.

She didn’t know where she was. Why she hurt. How she’d gotten here.

Fear flooded through Violet’s chest as she struggled to her feet, but it didn’t overwhelm her.

Until she saw the body.

The limbs were grotesquely twisted, splinters of bone poking through at the joints. The skin was bloated and gray. A perfect semicircle of puncture marks glistened on its torso—a bite mark, maybe, although Violet couldn’t picture an animal with jaws that wide. Something clear and oily oozed through where the skin had broken.

The only sign that it had been a person at all was a silver shield pinned to its chest.

Violet met the corpse’s sightless eyes, bleached completely white, and realized its tongue was bitten in two.

She sucked in the biggest breath she could and screamed—or at least, she tried to.

The noise ripped itself out of Violet’s throat, but there was no cry of raw terror, just her wheezing silently in the woods—and then the scream rang out, seconds too late, high and shrill and horrified.

Violet did the only thing that made sense anymore. She bolted.

She ran until the trees and the ground and the static sky all blurred together, her breath heaving in her lungs, her footsteps ringing out a second too late across the forest floor. When she couldn’t take another step, she doubled over and emptied her stomach.

And when she stood up, shaking, the last thing she was prepared for was her sister standing in front of the nearest tree.

Violet’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

Rosie wore the outfit she had died in—ripped jeans, a paint-splattered tank top, and a crimson bomber jacket that clashed horribly with her blue hair. She was the only thing in this strange gray world with any color at all, resplendent in the weak light of the off-white sky.

“Rosie?” Violet whispered, woozy with joy and shock. “Where am I? What is this?” But as she started toward her sister, Rosie’s body flickered around the edges, then went transparent enough for Violet to see the outline of the misshapen branches behind her.

She wasn’t real.

And the crushing knowledge that of course Rosie wasn’t really here, she couldn’t be here, hurt her more than the sight of the body had.

Rosie took a step back, the branches weaving and pulsating above her head. Violet had spent her life trailing after her sister. She wanted to follow her.

But there was something that made Violet pause. The way Rosie was standing—her legs and arms crooked just slightly wrong, as if she were trying to be a person, but didn’t know how.

A tinny, hollow sound whistled through the forest, almost like a voice.

It was coming from the trees.

The branches behind Rosie were reaching forward. Reaching for her, every twig pulsating with unnatural life. Violet backed away, panic rising in her throat again. A branch brushed against her arm, and the motion shocked something in her, the wrongness of it all, this dull, devouring gray.