The Devouring Gray(34)
“I haven’t forgotten everything,” said Daria acridly. “We’re the family of bones for a reason. Now let me knit in peace.”
Daria shooed Violet out of the room and shut the door before she had the chance to get out any more questions.
Violet stood in the hallway for a moment, her mind whirling. And then her hand tightened around the phone in her pocket.
Harper met Violet at the edge of the lake.
She was embarrassed by the way their last conversation had ended, certain she’d looked strange for rushing off like that. It was still hard for Harper to talk about Justin. That night, she’d avoided her father, unwilling to tell Maurice Carlisle that she had let him down, again.
But Violet had texted her the very next day, asking to hang out. Which meant she hadn’t ruined things after all. She’d left Brett and Nora with Seth in order to meet Violet solo—a risk, considering how irresponsible her little brother was, but one she was willing to take for this.
Harper waved Violet over when she caught sight of her dark hair through the trees. Although the forest was thick and fairly impassable along large stretches of the water, no branches extended more than a few feet across it—in fact, they twisted backward, some dramatically so, in order to avoid it.
The Beast had come from the lake when the founders settled in Four Paths. The forest remembered that.
So did the Carlisles.
“I didn’t realize the lake was this big,” said Violet, when she reached Harper at last. A long-ago thunderstorm had felled a tree at the edge of the lake, creating a natural bench of scarred, knotted wood. “Do people swim here?”
“Never.”
“Let me guess—there’s a creepy reason why?”
“You really are learning about Four Paths,” said Harper dryly.
Violet snorted and sat beside her on the log. She looked far more in control than the day before—and yet there was something hollow behind her perfectly applied makeup.
Harper noticed how she tapped her barely scuffed booties against the dirt.
How she picked at her crimson nail polish.
How she watched the trees around her, as if a threat lurked behind every branch.
She was trying so hard to keep herself together. But that only made it easier for Harper to see she was broken.
“Something’s wrong,” Harper said. It wasn’t a question.
To her credit, Violet didn’t treat it like one. “Yeah,” she said flatly, something like a laugh in her voice. “You could say that.”
“And you texted me because…”
“Because I think you might be able to help.” Violet fixed her with a careful, shrewd look. “The Carlisles are a founding family, right?”
Harper nodded slowly, unsure where this was going. She’d assumed Violet knew something about her heritage. But news of the Saunders girl joining the patrol roster surely would’ve made its way through town by now, and it hadn’t, not yet.
“So your family does rituals?”
Again, Harper nodded.
“Did you do one?”
Harper’s eyes fell on the crumbled stone forms of ancient guardians on the other side of the lake, their bodies forever poised at the edge of the gently lapping tide. Behind them, she could just make out the walls and roof of her father’s workshop. “I…don’t have much experience with rituals.”
“Because of your arm?” said Violet bluntly. “Because you’re clearly perfectly capable—”
“Not my arm.” It was oddly good to say the truth aloud, even though the words felt like a blade dragged across her tongue. “My ritual. I failed.”
Violet ripped off a strip of crimson polish so viciously, Harper was surprised she didn’t take the nail with it. “Wait. You can fail?”
“It happens.” It only took two words to describe the worst day of Harper’s life.
“Is that…?” Violet hesitated, but Harper could already see where her eyes were focused: on the residual limb of her left hand.
“Yes,” said Harper. “It’s how I lost my hand.”
Her family’s ritual was simple: Descend to the bottom of the lake and bring back a rock, the same way Thomas Carlisle had a hundred and fifty years ago. It had given Mitzi and Seth the power to turn their arms to stone. Given Maurice Carlisle his ability to craft the sentinels.
But when Harper had emerged from the lake, she had been in the Gray, not Four Paths. And her left hand, which had been clutching her precious handful of pebbles, had turned to reddish-brown stone from the elbow down—and immediately disintegrated.
In the months after she failed her ritual, she’d been terrified of the lake. Her dreams were filled with muddy water closing over her hand and feet, crushing her limbs to a pulp. But over the years, Harper’s fear had faded. Now she felt only the slightest twinge of unease at the end of her left arm as she gazed down at the water lapping a few feet below her legs, another echo of phantom pain. In fact, she’d chosen to meet Violet by the lake in order to remind herself that she had already faced the worst this town had to offer. And as she finished relaying her story to Violet, she was proud of the fact that her voice had hardly faltered at all.
“Holy shit.” Violet’s eyes were wide not with pity, as Harper had feared, but rather with something that looked a lot like respect. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”