The Devouring Gray(30)

“Are you all right?” she whispered.

“Don’t look at me,” May snarled at her, wiping the blood away with a shaking fist. “Look at the cards.”

So Violet looked down.

At the fourth card that had appeared in the center of the table.

A crown with four spires had been painted onto a dark background. Each spire was made from the material of a suit: a mass of entwined branches, a bleached, whittled bone, a gleaming blade, and a jagged bit of stone. Each point of the crown was soaked in blood, and beneath it was a pair of cruel yellow eyes.

Written beneath them, in letters so splotched and shaky that Violet could barely read them, were two words: the Beast.

She knew without asking that this was the monster in the Gray. And she realized then that she believed in it, believed unquestionably, to her core, that there was something horrible gazing out at her from inside that bit of wood. The skeletal outlines of trees swam in her mind as she stumbled back from the table, her coffee sloshing onto the floor.

Beside her, Isaac was already moving—toward Justin, who sat still, too still, mere inches away from the card. The expression on his face reminded her of how he’d looked in the Gray: like the light behind his eyes had flickered out.

Isaac clasped Justin’s shoulder at the same time that May snatched the cards up from the table.

The moment May slammed the lid down on the box, it felt as if all the air had rushed back into the reading room. Isaac slowly withdrew his hand from Justin’s shoulder. The concern on his face as he watched Justin was so palpable, so tender, that Violet had to avert her eyes. No one had ever looked at her like that.

“Okay,” Violet said, wiping her coffee-stained hand off on her jeans. “Does someone want to explain what the fuck that was?”

May’s bloody fingers were clenched around the box tightly enough to turn her knuckles white. Two more streaks of blood had joined the first on her face, crimson lines that marred the porcelain skin of her cheek. “Proof that you need to do your ritual,” she said. “Because if you don’t get your powers under control, you’ll keep summoning that.”

Violet’s throat went dry. “You’re saying that card showing up was my fault?”

“It was your reading,” said May.

“You’ll figure it out,” Justin said hoarsely. His tan skin was still a bit washed out, sweat beaded across his temples. But he looked better than he had mere seconds ago. “We can help. And then we’ll be able to make it so that monster can never kill anyone again.”

“Well,” Violet said, “I guess I don’t have a choice.”

Across the room, Isaac let out a deep, guttural chuckle. “Welcome to Four Paths,” he said. “Nobody would ever stay here if they had a choice.”





Justin couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t known the truth about Four Paths. Some of his first memories were of his grandfather, the sheriff before Augusta. He’d been a big man, big enough to rock both Justin and May to sleep as he sang the “Founders’ Lullaby.”

Little children, led astray,

Wandered through the woods one day.

Stumbled right into the Gray,

Never to return.

In that place where nightmares dwell,

Only four have lived to tell.

That is why we have to stay:

Branches and stones, daggers and bones,

They locked the Beast away.

The familiar words of the song rang through Justin’s head as he and May walked through the woods on their way to check in for that night’s patrol.

Memories of Justin’s grandfather reminded him of the man he would never become, even if he did remain in Four Paths. These were the woods where he had learned to run, where he’d learned to kiss—among other things—where he had sought shelter when his family was too much to handle. But while the woods were the same, Justin wasn’t.

Now he could barely glance at each impossibly tall trunk without thinking of the Gray opening behind it. He did not belong in this moon-dappled forest, breathing in the good, clean smells of wood and earth. He should have died on his ritual day, beneath those clouds the color of dulled steel, lost forever in that endless expanse of bowed, ashen trees. If not for May, he would have.

“You look grim,” said his sister, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her pink satin bomber jacket. Although it wasn’t even mid-September, the air was starting to grow chillier. “I thought you’d be happy. You cracked the ice queen.”

“Violet’s not an ice queen,” said Justin, wincing at the soreness in his calves from that evening’s run. After talking to Violet, he had desperately needed to blow off some steam. “And I didn’t crack her. The Gray did that.”

Justin had been looking for an ally when he’d sought her out. Instead, he’d found a problem he wasn’t sure he could solve.

“She doesn’t actually care about protecting Four Paths,” Isaac had said matter-of-factly a few hours ago, after Violet had gone home. “She just wants to get the fuck out of here.”

“So you don’t think we should help her?” Justin had asked him.

Isaac twisted the cracked medallion on his wrist. “I didn’t say that.”

“She raises the dead,” May said now. “Could be…interesting, seeing how she does on a patrol.”