The Devouring Gray(23)
Violet wrinkled her nose. She was turning away when she saw the bit of crimson yarn. It took a second for her head to process the scene, leaving her as stiff and still as the forest around her, unable to move forward, unable to look away.
What remained of Orpheus lay between two roots, baking slowly in the midafternoon sun. The animal’s eyes were mercifully closed, his head bent at an unnatural angle. The blood on his neck glistened.
Violet’s vision spun. She stumbled, braced a hand against the nearest trunk, and retched onto the grass. Nothing came up, but she was still shaking when she looked at the body again. Something flickered in her peripheral vision—had his tail twitched?
It seemed impossible, but she had to see if he was still alive. If there was any shot at saving him.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, forcing herself toward Orpheus. Her fingers brushed against the cat’s front leg as she fumbled for a pulse.
A feeling of sudden loss coursed through her. Violet felt drained, exhausted, as if she had run for miles. She snatched her hand away from the body.
He was dead. She didn’t need to look at him any longer to know that.
She was about to turn back toward the house, already wondering what she’d tell Juniper, when something soft brushed against a rip in her jeans.
Orpheus was head-butting her ankle, purring. Behind him, the insects dissipated into the foliage.
Violet let out a harsh, choked scream, stumbled backward on shaking legs. It couldn’t be. But the place where Orpheus’s body had been was empty.
She steeled herself. Then she knelt down, reached out a tentative hand, and waited for Orpheus to pad toward her again.
His fur was soft and gentle against her fingers as she stroked his head. He certainly felt real, albeit friendlier than usual. He nosed against her palm, purring, and the tension building in Violet’s chest decreased a little. Maybe this had been a terrifying hallucination.
Just like Rosie.
Her brain was simply playing tricks on her, conflating Daria’s warning with her strange night in the forest.
She was about to stand up when her fingers touched something sticky on the cat’s neck. Violet pulled back her hand, staring at the blood coating the tips of her fingers.
“You’re dead.” Violet backed away from Orpheus. Her voice was toneless and shrill, a spurt of air being released from a balloon. Something spun between them—a sense of connection, a tether, as if, when she touched him, she’d left a piece of herself behind. “Holy shit. You’re dead.”
A familiar blond form appeared in her peripheral vision, standing at the end of the clearing, his face ashen.
“No,” said Justin Hawthorne softly. “He was dead. He’s not now. Thanks to you.”
Violet staggered back another step, still light-headed. “I don’t understand.”
His brow furrowed. “Violet…”
And then the world behind him opened like a yawning mouth. Violet recoiled as stiff white clouds devoured the blue sky. Dread coursed through her, a heavy, leaden thing that weighted down her limbs. A high, tinny noise hissed through Violet’s ears, a voice snarling out words she couldn’t understand. But as soon as she had registered it, it was gone.
Her breath hitched in her lungs again as she realized she was back in that colorless, awful place Harper had called the Gray.
And this time, she had taken Justin Hawthorne with her.
Justin had spent most of the day trying to slip away from the Hawthorne house. His mother had put him and May to work assuaging the doubts of the townspeople. But when she left for the sheriff’s office in the afternoon, Justin had seized his chance to take matters into his own hands.
He hadn’t expected to find Violet using powers—powers that could bring something back from the dead, proving that Augusta’s insistence that the Saunderses were an irrelevant bloodline was a blatant lie. And he certainly hadn’t expected both of them to fall into the Gray.
May’s reading had been accurate about one thing, at least: Something was seriously out of balance.
Not that it mattered to him anymore, because he was definitely about to die.
Terror clawed at his throat as the dense green forest melted away, replaced by the same lifeless woods he’d seen on his ritual day. He and Violet now stood at the start of a road with buildings stretching along either side. They were flimsy-looking structures made of brick and logs, all rendered in perfect gray scale. Some of the bricks sagged; a log roof had a clumsily patched hole in the center; smoke was frozen halfway out of a chimney.
“Why are we here?” Violet’s voice was sharp and accusatory, echoing oddly through the dead space of the Gray. “Did you do this?”
“Of course not!” It felt odd to mouth the words, then hear them. Justin tried to keep his focus on everything he knew about the Gray.
But most of what he knew amounted to the simple fact that if you went in, you probably weren’t coming out.
“Then why?” she whispered, her shoulders caving inward, her jaw tightening.
He spread his arms out wide. “I don’t know.”
“How do we get out?” Violet said, panic tightening across her face. Behind her, the gray-and-white brick of the nearest house went in and out of focus, like a choppy Wi-Fi signal.
Justin’s limbs were tensed and ready to run, but there was nothing to run from. And nowhere to go. “I don’t know that either,” he said, trying to sound calm. “Most people who wind up in the Gray…”