The Devouring Gray(46)

“Yeah!” called someone else. “Where’s the Sullivan we’ve all heard so much about?”

“I bet you’re not even that powerful. Your family probably made up all those rumors to scare us.”

“Yeah, if you’re so powerful, how come Hap Whitley’s dead?”

“What about Vanessa? And Carl?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be stopping shit like that from happening?”

Justin could feel the crowd swelling. He needed to do something.

“Enough,” Justin said, but the kid ignored him.

“Or what?” the boy said to Isaac. “You’ll carve one of us up like your family carved up each other—”

“ENOUGH,” Justin roared. One step put him in front of the kid’s face. He swiped the barn cat out of his arms, handed it to Henrik, and yanked on the boy’s collar until they were inches apart. “Get the hell out of this party.”

“But it’s not even your party,” whimpered the kid.

Justin wasn’t the type to threaten people. But he couldn’t let this escalate any further.

“The Hawthornes don’t forget an insult.” He let the crowd hear the truth in every word, see it on his face. “Neither do the Sullivans. Do you really want to be on the founders’ bad side?”

Justin released the boy. He ran off, and as the crowd around them dissipated, demoralized by the lack of a fight, Justin turned to Isaac.

“The cat,” Isaac said, looking around frantically. “Is it okay?”

“It’s fine,” said Justin, glancing over his shoulder—the cat was snuggled against a drunk Henrik’s chest, who was cooing soft endearments at it.

“Good,” Isaac said weakly. “Fuck, I hate that you had to threaten them.”

“Me too,” said Justin. His mother and May relished the reaction their name got from the rest of the town, but the way Justin had used it tonight made him nauseous. So did the expressions on the faces in the crowd he’d seen just now. The Hawthornes were losing the town, they were losing everything, and it would only get worse once they realized he didn’t have powers, either.

He’d already lost Violet’s help. He’d been so colossally foolish to even try to get it.

The last place in the world he wanted to be was a crowded party. The barn swam around him, intoxication blurring his vision. The temporary clarity defending Isaac had given him was gone.

“C’mon, man.” Justin swung Isaac’s arm around his shoulders. “Let’s get you out of here.”

“It would’ve been so easy,” said Isaac as they moved toward the barn door. “If I’d touched that boy, I could’ve made him just…go.”

“Don’t think about it.”

“I could’ve.”

“But you didn’t.”

They were almost at the door when Isaac looked at him, his eyes as lifeless as two snuffed-out candles. Justin had the sudden worry that Isaac could see the thoughts swimming in his brain, every gory detail of his insecurities and failures laid out for his perusal.

Isaac’s hand, which had been hanging limply over Justin’s shoulder, closed around his wrist.

“You always do that.” Isaac’s words didn’t sound slurred anymore. “Show up when I need you. How do you do that?”

Isaac’s jaw tensed, his face mottled and distorted by the Christmas lights, and Justin felt a rush of embarrassment he didn’t quite understand. Isaac never wanted anyone to see him like this. It felt wrong to watch him with all his defenses down.

And then he caught a flash of pink again, and he shrugged off Isaac’s arm, the moment gone, ready to tell May it was time to go home.

But May had a message for him, too.

“Thank goodness I found you,” she said, holding up her phone. Her pale face was taut with worry. “Violet texted us, all of us. Something’s wrong.”





Harper’s guilt over her conversation with Justin Hawthorne had lingered right up until the moment she told her father what she’d done.

She had barged into Maurice Carlisle’s workshop to tell him about Violet. It was at the back of the statue garden, inside what had once been the barn. Over the past century and a half, Carlisles had used the workshop to create an entirely different sort of livestock—one made of animated stone.

Harper could tell her father was displeased from the furrows on his aging face when she opened the workshop doors. His workshop was almost always off-limits, even to the other Carlisles.

“Violet Saunders was recruited by the Hawthornes,” she said in a rush. “But she left them—for us. I just met with her by the lake.”

Harper felt a rush of satisfaction as the furrows in her father’s face smoothed away, leaving a proud grin in their wake.

“I knew you were a fighter,” said Maurice Carlisle, clapping her on the shoulder. His hand left fragments of crumbled stone on her shirt, but Harper didn’t care. She was too busy blinking away tears at the raw pride in his voice.

Justin had deserved every bit of her ire. And she genuinely did want to help Violet.

There was no reason to feel guilty. None at all.

“Does this mean I get to meet the others?” she asked.

Maurice leaned against the door, those coarse brows knitting together across his forehead. Behind him, bells of all shapes and sizes hung from the ceiling, barely visible in the dim light of the workshop. Harper’s father had always claimed he worked better in darkness. He said that stone sculpted better when it was felt instead of seen, so it could show him what it wanted to be.