The Devouring Gray(29)

“I said one question,” grumbled May, but she was already shuffling.

To Violet’s astonishment, the cards were vanishing between her hands, one by one.

There were only three cards left when May finished. She laid them out on the table and let out a somewhat huffy sigh.

“We have to hold hands now,” she said, looking rather uncomfortable. “All our powers need skin-to-skin contact to work.”

So Violet reluctantly slid her hand into May’s clammy grasp and Isaac’s fingers. Physical contact made Violet severely uncomfortable—she’d barely touched anyone since Rosie’s death. Both their palms were strong and callused, but May’s grip felt perfunctory while Isaac’s was surprisingly gentle.

But the sensation she felt a moment later was a hundred times worse than holding someone’s hand: like fingers reaching inside her skull.

“What the hell?” she gasped, yanking her hands away. “What is that?”

“I probably should’ve warned you,” May said. “It’s a Hawthorne thing. We get inside your head.”

“Yes, you should’ve warned me!” Violet glared at her. “I don’t want you reading my mind.”

“It’s not mind reading,” said May crossly, although she at least had the grace to look ashamed. “I don’t really see anything important. It’s how I connect you to the cards. They link together the things you’ve done and the most likely outcome of your question. It just feels a little strange, is all.”

“A little strange?”

May shrugged. “Do you want answers or not?”

Violet scowled at her, but she’d come this far. So she grasped May’s hand again and spent the next thirty seconds in agonized, shuddering silence.

“All right,” May said at last. “That’s enough.”

Violet pulled her hands away and balled them up in her lap, sagging with relief. Her only consolation for what she’d just let May do was that the girl looked just as pleased as Violet was that they were no longer touching.

“All right,” she said. “Here we go.”

She turned over the Deck of Omens. Violet let out a startled sound as she saw the card in the center.

It was like peering into another world, a world she wished she didn’t recognize. Swirls of paint rendered a person, mostly in shadow, standing in the center of a clearing ringed with thin gray trees. A single shaft of light shone onto the figure’s hand, but instead of flesh and blood, the artist had chosen to paint only bones. An outline of a bone with the number five inside it was etched into the top right corner.

“I see you recognize your card.” May rested the tip of her pale pink fingernail against the painted wood. “The Five of Bones.”

“I’m not one of the trumps?” said Violet.

“You wouldn’t want to be,” May and Justin chorused.

“It’s not unusual to have an avatar of yourself represented in a reading like this,” May continued. “Now, on your right, we’ve got the Wolf.” The art on this card depicted an animal with fur that looked black at first glance, but had a thousand tiny iridescent colors glimmering just beneath the surface. Whoever had painted the Deck of Omens had been ridiculously talented. Violet could’ve sworn the wild, searching eye of the creature was locked on hers. “The Wolf doesn’t mean a literal wild animal. It represents an unpredictable source of power—yours. However, what gets interesting is when we take a look at your question in conjunction with this.” May’s hand moved across to the third card, the Eight of Bones. Two skulls were nestled nose to nose on a bed of loamy earth. One was polished and pristine, the other horribly disfigured, with cracks all down the head and a jawbone that had been snapped in two.

“There’s a science to these cards,” she said. “The four suits were created to represent each of the founding families of Four Paths. The branch suit represents us, the Hawthornes. The daggers are the Sullivans, the stones are the Carlisles…” May’s voice grew more hesitant when she talked about the Carlisles, but she kept on speaking. “And the bones are, of course, you. So that’s why this is so odd. This card must represent someone in your family, but it’s answering your question. This is what’s trapped you in this town, what’s stopping you from completing your ritual. Or perhaps the reason why you’re even stuck in this predicament at all. The answers you’re looking for lie with them.”

Violet’s heart pressed painfully against her rib cage, her fingers sliding automatically over the rose at her wrist.

She couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, and all of them were watching her now, Isaac most of all.

“You know who this card is talking about,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

Violet flinched away from him, as if she had been struck—but no, that would hurt less. Because there were no words for this that weren’t followed by tears, and she would not cry here, not in front of them. Let them think her cold or callous, let them think she was a liar, let them think that she was anything but weak.

“Shit,” May said in her high, shrill voice from across the table. Violet yanked her gaze back toward her.

Redness bloomed in the corner of May’s eye, spreading across her sclera. Violet watched, horrified, as she blinked, sending a crimson tear down her cheek.