The Devouring Gray(20)

She shuddered. “Not him, too.”

Her father nodded solemnly. “I’m afraid so. And there will be more, soon. Things are getting more and more dangerous in Four Paths, and the Hawthornes have done nothing to stop it. So I’m taking matters into my own hands. That’s where I’ve been tonight.”

“Doing what, exactly?”

The moonlight shifted to the side of Maurice Carlisle’s face. Yet again, Harper watched him deliberate.

“Dad,” she said. “You promised to tell me.”

“Isn’t it enough to know that things are about to change?”

But it wasn’t enough.

Harper had spent the last three years waiting, quietly, for things to change.

She no longer trusted anyone else to slay her demons for her. And more importantly, if someone was going to take down the people who’d made her life a living hell, she wanted it to be her.

She had been ignored too many times.

“No,” she said. “Whatever you’re doing, I want in.”

“Harper. You don’t know what you’re asking—”

“I know enough.” Harper snatched her sword up and swung it in a fluid, perfect arc across her shoulder. Her father’s eyes widened. “What more can this town really do to me?”

Maurice Carlisle sighed, shaking his head, and Harper felt a surge of triumph. “Very well. I suppose…it would be useful if you’d get close to the new Saunders girl. She could be a valuable ally to our cause.”

Harper thought of the way Violet had looked at Justin back in the classroom. “The Hawthornes are already talking to her.”

“I know,” said Maurice. “But she knows nothing about her heritage. The Carlisles and the Saunderses were allies when I was a boy. She’ll need help soon. She should get that help from you.”

Warmth rushed through Harper’s chest as she realized that he’d called her a Carlisle. But that made her think of her siblings—the ones with actual power. “Wouldn’t Mitzi or Seth make a better ally?”

“Mitzi and Seth don’t know what the Hawthornes are capable of the way you do. Show the girl that there’s more to this town than that family.”

There was such visceral hatred in the way he finished his sentence, Harper didn’t doubt it for a moment. She wondered how he had hidden it for so long.

She wasn’t sure if she really could befriend Violet. But if it would help take the Hawthornes down, she was willing to try. “I’ll do it.”

Maurice nodded. “Consider this a test. If you pass, you can meet the others.”

“Others?” said Harper. “How many of you are there?”

Her father’s hand folded around the hilt of his knife. “Enough to change things.”



Violet had been missing all night, but Juniper hadn’t even noticed she was gone. She’d greeted her with nothing but a nod when Violet got out of a much-needed shower that morning, then shuffled off to her room.

Violet tried not to let that hurt sink in as she biked to school, her sore legs screaming with pain.

She didn’t want to explain to her mother where she’d been, anyway. There was no way to talk about what she’d just seen without sounding like she was losing it. And she didn’t trust Juniper not to treat her just like Daria if she told the truth.

Besides, there was a chance, even if it was a slim one, that it hadn’t been real at all.

But that delusion was scuttled within seconds of her arrival in homeroom. Things seemed off from the moment she stepped through the doorway. Everyone was silent except for an occasional murmur, and Justin Hawthorne was missing. Isaac looked completely lost without him. He wasn’t even reading a book, just staring blankly at his desk.

“Class, if I might have a moment.” Mrs. Langham’s nose and cheeks were slightly reddened, her voice hoarse. “As many of you already know, Deputy Frank Anders was taken from us last night in a tragic accident.”

More murmurs, more nods. Violet fought down the urge to vomit again.

That body had to have been Frank Anders. She’d seen the badge on its chest.

Which meant she’d been in those woods with him—and with whoever, or whatever, had killed him.

“I must remind you all that the forest can be a dangerous place,” continued Mrs. Langham, but Violet was no longer listening.

She lurched from her seat, her chair clattering to the floor behind her as she rushed out of homeroom. Her frantic footsteps reverberated through the empty hallways of Four Paths High School as she beelined for the front door. She’d never cut class in her life, had barely taken a sick day, but she could not sit in that room for one more second.

Violet stopped at the edge of the parking lot, leaving Four Paths High School behind her. A deep, impermeable wave of chestnut oaks rose far above her head, their shadows halting at the toes of her boots.

There was nowhere left to go but into the forest.

Violet blinked, and the trees were black and white. She blinked again, and Deputy Anders’s sightless eyes were staring into hers.

She whimpered and shut her eyes, but Rosie’s image was waiting behind them, half-transparent, branches curling toward them both.

“They’re not real,” she whispered. “They’re not.”

“What’s not real?”