The Devouring Gray(41)

I’ve been practicing piano more and more to avoid everyone, but it isn’t working. So I walked through the woods for hours after school today, just to get out of the house. Maya Sullivan found me somehow—I guess I accidentally crossed into her family’s part of the forest. Dad hates it when we go into Sullivan territory.

Isaac stiffened. Violet paused. “Your mother?”

He nodded, eyes fixed on her. “Go on.”

But as Violet gazed down at the next few sentences, she hesitated. “It’s not exactly flattering. To you or the Hawthornes.”

Isaac shrugged with carefully manufactured nonchalance. “I know what people say about my family.”

So Violet continued.

He says their ritual is unnatural, their powers are wrong. June says it’s just his old prejudices bubbling up—the Sullivans and the Hawthornes have always been allies, just like us and the Carlisles. So Dad associates them with one another.

He never misses an opportunity to tell us that the Hawthorne family wants what we have.

The mayor. The best house. The strongest powers.

Violet spared a glance toward Isaac’s face, but it hadn’t moved.

She wondered if that was still true. She didn’t know.

Anyway, I don’t care what Dad says. I like Maya. She gave me a scone she’d swiped from home and told me not to worry about my birthday.

“Your family wouldn’t let you do it if they didn’t think you were ready,” she said.

“What if I don’t think I’m ready?” I asked.

Maya has this way of smiling that makes her look like she’s about to laugh or cry, she just can’t decide which. I couldn’t look at it, so I just stared down at the scone.

“No one ever does,” she told me, the scars on her shoulders tensing as she leaned back and stared up at the trees. “But we get through it.”

I hope she’s right.

April 12, 1984

I can’t believe I was so nervous about my ritual! I’m not allowed to share the details here, because even though this journal is well hidden, Dad would disown me if he knew I’d written it down. Let’s just say that it was sort of awesome.

I’m going on my first-ever patrol tonight! I don’t know if I’m like him or Daria or June yet, but I feel stronger. I can’t wait to find out what I can do.

“Are you kidding me?” Violet resisted the urge to fling the book across the room. There were no details about the ritual at all. How obnoxious. “I was so close…”

“You should keep reading,” said Isaac softly.

So Violet sighed and flipped to the next page.

It was dated a few months later.

She could tell within a few sentences that things were changing. Stephen sounded older. He sounded tired.

September 5, 1984

It’s been a long summer. The Gray usually quiets down after the spring equinox, but this year it’s been stronger than usual. It seems like every few days, the border in our territory acts up, and Dad and Uncle Hiram go into the forest. Now I’m expected to go with them.

I know what I am now. I raise the dead, like they do. But I don’t have a companion. Dad says not to rush it—it took him a month to find Agatha, who’d been hit by a car.

Easy for him to say. Companions are supposed to be a focal point for our power. Like flexing a muscle, working with them makes us grow stronger.

Except I can’t get stronger. And it’s all starting to get to me—Dad’s disappointment, the way the Gray tugs at my mind when I watch it unfurl at the edge of town.

I’ve started sleepwalking; at least, I think that’s what it is. I’ve woken up in the woods twice now.

Maybe that’s why things have gotten so mixed up in my mind.

I’ve known since I was little that we’d bound ourselves to the Beast so we could lock it away. But sometimes, late at night, I feel something creeping up in the back of my mind. A strange sense that what we’re doing is wrong.

Violet knew how that felt. Waking up in strange places, feeling strange things in the back of your skull.

“He was blacking out,” she said hoarsely.

Isaac leaned toward her, a single dark curl falling across his forehead. Violet felt a strange urge to brush it away. “Didn’t you say that was happening to you?”

She nodded, cleared her throat. Tried not to remember that, in less than a year from this entry, Stephen Saunders would be dead. “It happened again. Since we talked.”

“It can’t be a coincidence that he mentions it here.”

“I agree,” said Violet solemnly. “Let’s see what else he has to say.”

September 19, 1984

I feel it all the time now. Like there’s something that lives inside my brain, peering into my thoughts. Sometimes I feel emotions that I know aren’t mine—I’ll be sitting in the kitchen and be struck with this intense, burning rage. I don’t understand where it’s coming from. All I know is that it’s worse when I’m using my power, but Dad won’t let me stop.

The woods are getting more dangerous. Last month, two men leaving the bar were lured into the Gray. We only found one of their bodies. It was awful—bloated, with bone-white eyes. I haven’t been sleeping well since Dad forced me to look at it.

Uncle Hiram wants to take us kids out of the equinox patrol, but Sheriff Hawthorne insists that Four Paths needs all the help it can get.