The Devouring Gray(19)

There was a hardness in his expression Harper had never seen before. She hurried out from behind the tree, unease swelling in her chest. “Dad. It’s just me.”

Maurice’s face softened into puzzlement. The knife returned to his pocket so fast she wondered if she’d imagined it. “Harper. Why are you out here in the middle of the night?”

Harper swallowed, hard. She was overly conscious of her mother’s nightdress, her bare feet, the blade lying in the grass behind her. Her father’s bemusement always made her feel like a little girl again. “I could ask you the same question.”

Maurice chuckled. “I’m just coming back from patrol. A little jumpy.”

But there was a calendar of patrol times propped up on the kitchen counter. Harper knew it by heart—it hadn’t changed in months. “You patrol on Wednesdays and Saturdays,” she said, folding her good arm across the residual limb below her left elbow. “And we don’t go on the equinox schedule for another week and a half.”

“I suppose we don’t.” A stripe of moonlight cut across the bridge of her father’s nose. “And you weren’t just coming out here for a witching-hour stroll with one of the family swords.”

“No.” Harper’s father had taught her never to back down from a fight where the stakes were equal. And it was clear they both had something to hide. “I wasn’t.”

There was something assessing in Maurice Carlisle’s gaze. He shifted back and forth for a moment, his jaw working to one side. “Have you been training?”

He didn’t sound pitying, like she’d feared. He sounded almost…impressed.

So Harper nodded.

And she was rewarded by a grin—a real grin. “I should’ve known you’d never stop. You always loved blade-work.”

Harper jutted out her chin. “I still do.”

Maurice looked at her thoughtfully. “Yet you don’t have anything to fight.”

Harper had a brief, unbidden vision of holding a blade to Justin Hawthorne’s throat. “Not yet.”

“Listen.” Her father stepped toward her until his graying curls blocked out the moon, leaving him little more than a silhouette. The assessing tone in his voice was gone—whatever decision he’d been contemplating had been made. “Do you really want to know where I was tonight?”

She merely hadn’t wanted to be caught. But now it was too late for that, and it felt as if her father was seeing her, truly seeing her, for the first time in years.

More than anything, Harper wanted him to trust her. “Yes.”

“You must keep it a secret.”

Maurice’s eyes were veiled in shadow. Harper tried to meet them anyway. “Even from Mom?” she asked, a terrible suspicion stealing over her. “You’re not going to leave us—”

“No!” The horror in his voice was so palpable, Harper believed him instantly. “Nothing like that. It’s simply that this is a dangerous thing. And I think you might understand it in a way the rest of our family can’t, after…after everything you’ve been through.”

Harper couldn’t stop the hurt welling up inside of her. “Everything I’ve been through?” she whispered. “Just say it. I lost my hand. I don’t have powers.”

“And yet you’re still fighting.” Her father gently, almost lovingly, took her hand in his. “You’re out in the woods in the middle of the night, training. But what if you had something to fight for? Somewhere to actually use your sword?”

“That’s impossible.” Harper tried to keep her voice steady. Tried not to feel even the smallest shred of hope. “I failed my ritual. You do that in this town and you’re nothing—you said so yourself.”

“I know. But there are other ways to be powerful.”

Harper snorted. “Are you talking about putting me on patrol again? The Hawthornes would never allow that.”

A strange smile stole over her father’s face. “The sheriff and her family would never allow that, no,” he said. “But what if the Hawthornes didn’t have control of the town anymore?”

For Harper’s entire life, her father had bent to the Hawthornes’ will—Augusta’s grandmother, her father, and now Augusta herself. He made their sentinels. He patrolled. He trained his children to serve them.

And when the Hawthornes had decided Harper was useless to them, he had followed their lead.

But in that moment, in her father’s face, Harper saw that he was disillusioned with the Hawthornes, too. Just like her, Maurice Carlisle had a quiet, steady core of anger festering inside him.

“Are you talking about a rebellion?” she whispered.

“Rebellion’s such a messy word,” said Maurice, his smile widening. “I much prefer the term coup.”

The thought sent a thrill down Harper’s spine. There was just one problem. “Four Paths loves the Hawthornes.”

A grim look stole over her father’s face. “Not anymore. There was an incident last night. Deputy Anders was lost in the Gray.”

She remembered Anders. He’d been a good man—one of the few people in the sheriff’s office to even acknowledge her after her failed ritual.

And Harper had spent enough time wandering through that skeletal forest to know it was a horrible place to die.