The Devouring Gray(2)
For the first time in his life, there would be a real member of every founding family in Four Paths.
He would be a part of that. He would have a chance to change things, to help.
Justin believed this. He had to.
The Deck of Omens had told him so, and unlike the Hawthornes who used it, the Deck of Omens couldn’t lie.
Two Weeks Later
It was a single strand of turquoise hair that made Violet Saunders come undone. She was fiddling with her sheet music binder when she caught sight of it, sprouting like a seedling from the space between her seat and the cup holder.
Violet’s hands froze on the binder, clammy sweat collecting on the navy-blue plastic. She couldn’t concentrate on the highway rolling past the Porsche’s windows, or her fingerings for Schumann’s Abegg Variations, op. 1. Her enthusiasm for the piano piece was gone.
One by one, her fingers unpeeled themselves from the binder’s edge. Her left hand was creeping toward the hair like a pale, veiny tarantula when her mother silenced her Bluetooth headset.
“You okay?” she asked Violet. “You look queasy.”
Violet jerked back her hand. She cranked down the Schumann blasting through her earbuds, trying to hide her surprise—it was the first time her mother had spoken to her in over an hour. “I’m just a little carsick.”
Juniper Saunders considered this, tilting her head. The headset on her ear blinked, casting blue light onto her cartilage-piercing scars. They were the last lingering reminder of a version of Violet’s mother that was long extinct. “Let me know if you need to vomit,” she said. “I’ll pull over.”
Being the target of Juniper’s concern made Violet’s stomach clench. Her mother hadn’t said a thing when Violet quit her piano lessons. But then, she’d barely seemed to notice when Violet painted her bedroom dark red the morning of an open house, either; or after the funeral, when she’d hacked off every bit of hair below her collarbones in a sloppy bob. Yet somehow, Juniper had noticed her distress in the middle of a conference call.
It made no sense, but then, Violet’s mother had never made any sense to her at all.
“It’s not that bad.” Violet raked a nail across the edge of the binder. “The carsickness situation, I mean. I am decidedly pre-puke.”
Juniper’s headset blinked again. “Do you mind if I get back to this conference call, then? The London office is having a meltdown, and they need me to talk the developers down before things go nuclear.”
“Of course,” said Violet. “I can’t be responsible for that kind of damage.”
“I suggest curbing the attitude once we get to Four Paths.”
Violet slid the volume up until Schumann blasted through her earbuds again. She knew every phrase, every pause, every fingering—the recording was her playing, after all. “I guess that means I’ll have to get it all out in the car.”
Juniper rolled her eyes and started talking again, something about a bug in the software her company was developing. Violet tuned her out and sank down in her seat.
Four Paths. The place her mother had grown up, not that she ever talked about it. Juniper never talked about anything—why she’d been so insistent Violet and her sister have her last name, not their father’s; why she’d left town after high school and never come back. Not even when her parents died. Not even when her sister, an aunt Violet had never met, started to get sick.
The thought of sisters made Violet sink farther. There was no way they’d be driving back to Four Paths right now if her family hadn’t had a nuclear meltdown of its own.
A giant cargo truck roared up on the right side of the Porsche. Violet’s heartbeat rammed against the back of her throat as the truck’s massive container blocked her field of vision. She’d been out on the road countless times in the five months since Rosie’s accident, but trucks like this one still left a cocktail of nausea and fury brewing in her stomach.
She forced her gaze away from the offending vehicle, but then, of course, the hair was still there. Mocking her. Violet stopped her practice recording, put the music binder on her lap, and snatched the strand of turquoise out of its hiding spot.
It was heavier than Violet had expected. As she lifted the hair up, she realized this was because it had been tangled up with the clasp of a thin silver bracelet, which had been wedged between the cup holder and the edge of the car seat. Violet’s fingers moved over the filigree rose attached to the bracelet as Juniper continued barking orders into her headset.
The funny thing about grief was that once Violet got past the first few weeks, where she relearned how to sleep and eat and breathe, it was almost harder to function. There were protocols for handling funeral arrangements and overly caring neighbors and therapy. But nothing in all the empty platitudes and well-meaning advice told her what to do when you found your dead sister’s jewelry in a car, months after the rest of her things had been boxed away.
It wasn’t even a piece of jewelry Rosie had liked. In fact, Violet had a distinct memory of the way her sister’s lip had curled when she’d opened up the box at her sixteenth birthday party. It was a gift from a great-aunt on her father’s side of the family who hadn’t seen Rosie and Violet since they were little, who only had a cursory understanding of what teenagers were and how they functioned.