The Devouring Gray(18)

Augusta let out a snarl of frustration as she stood, her head nearly brushing the ceiling of the reading room. Justin braced himself for a verbal assault, but her words, when they came, were quiet. “The Saunders family used to run this town. We have done a better job of protecting it than they ever did. I intend to keep it that way.”

Her exit was accompanied by the howls of the mastiffs waiting for their mistress to return.

Justin stared at the Eight of Bones, realizing for the first time that there were bits of flesh still clinging to the cracked skull. He wondered what had driven Hetty Hawthorne to paint such gruesome, vivid images. Then he turned to May, who had wrapped her arms around her knees.

“We’ve known Deputy Anders our whole lives.” The vein in her forehead bulged out against her skin, like a root snaking across her skull. “Now he’s just…gone.”

“Yeah, and that’s why Mom’s angry. It’s not really about you.”

May ducked her head. “I know.”

“You did the right thing. Telling her the truth.” Justin wasn’t sure he meant that. But May needed to hear it.

“Did I?” The dim lights of the reading room enhanced May’s features until she looked the way she sounded: delicate and thin, like a crystal bowl balancing on the edge of a mantelpiece. “All I do is give bad news, Justin. People die or hurt each other or disappear.”

“You know there’s more to it than that,” said Justin. “The cards are tricky. They don’t always tell you everything.”

“They tell me enough.” May stared resolutely forward. “Sometimes I hate it. The knowing, the responsibility.” And then she spoke the words Justin knew she’d been holding in since her own ritual, three months earlier: “You wouldn’t understand.”

The second his sister touched the tree that day, its branches had sprung to life. The hawthorn’s gnarled trunk bent low. And Justin had watched, choking back tears, as the forest in front of them began to kneel as well, until he could see the lake behind the Carlisle cottage glittering through its bowed branches.

If Justin’s ritual had been the worst day of his life, May’s was a close second.

“Guess not,” Justin said dully. “Tell me again how hard it is to be powerful.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” said Justin, and then, because his lack of powers was the last thing he wanted to talk about, he added, “The Saunders family. May, if there’s any chance they could help us keep things from getting any worse—”

May’s face went solemn. “I know.” She paused. “But Mother said to stay away from them. And Mother always has her reasons.”

Justin thought of the fear on Augusta’s face. What she’d said. How she’d stared at the Eight of Bones with a mixture of dread and resignation, as if she’d known, all along, that the Saunders family was undeniably intertwined with their futures.

As if she would do anything to convince herself otherwise.

Which meant that, if there was any chance of Violet Saunders being a useful ally to the Hawthornes, Justin would have to seek her out himself.





Harper had been moving through the strength-building exercises she’d adapted for her training when she heard it—a snatch of song, a low, deep voice drifting through the trees.

She knew that voice, that tune. Her father hummed it in his workshop while he carved stone excavated from the lake into sentinels.

Once, every house in town had boasted protective guardians on their doorsteps: statues that moved at their master’s command. The Carlisles had been in charge of protecting the rest of Four Paths with these guardians every fall and spring equinox, the nights of the year when the Gray was strongest and the founders were the weakest. When the line between reality and nightmare blurred.

But Harper’s grandmother had been the last Carlisle who could control a guardian. So the sentinels Maurice Carlisle carved in his workshop hung above the town’s doorways instead. They were weak replacements—only able to sound an alarm when danger came, not come to life and stop it.

The family was a shade of what they could’ve been, what they once were.

“Little children, led astray, wandered through the woods one day…” Footsteps stomped across the nearby underbrush. Harper’s father was a Carlisle through and through, solid and steady, and he did nothing quietly, not even walking.

Harper’s first instinct was to panic. She’d hidden her training for a reason; she didn’t need her father’s pity. A burning sensation surged through her left arm, sharp and sudden—although she knew her left hand was gone, she still felt phantom pain in it sometimes, especially when she was stressed or frightened. Harper shuddered, grabbed her blade, and dove behind the nearest tree.

Her father’s voice was closer now. “Stumbled right into the Gray, never to return…”

Her pulse increased as he appeared at the edge of the clearing. She shifted closer to the tree, the burning in her arm growing more intense—and gasped as she lost her balance, her blade clattering to her feet.

The noise cut through the quiet of the night like a gunshot, stopping her father’s song midline.

“Who’s there?” Maurice Carlisle slid a hand into his pocket. The sharp silver edge of a dagger winked in his fist when it emerged.