The Devouring Gray(49)

“Sorry!” she gasped, drawing her phone out of her sweatshirt pocket.

But the number on the screen was Violet’s.

Maurice Carlisle glanced down at her phone. “It’s the Saunders girl,” he said, signaling to everyone else to stay quiet. “Take it.”

Harper accepted the call, then held the phone up to her ear. Her mouth was dry with sudden nerves. “Hello?”

“Harper—please.” Violet’s voice was so ragged, so broken, Harper barely recognized it. “It’s an emergency. Something’s happened, something—” Her words were cut off by a choked sob. “Can you come over? Right now?”

Harper paused, her eyes frozen on her father.

“Go to her,” hissed Maurice Carlisle. “We trust you, Harper.”

“Of course,” said Harper, even though something felt wrong about all this, something she was too stressed and overwhelmed to fully think about. “I’ll be right there.”



It wasn’t the noise that woke Violet up. It was the ache in her head, a dizziness that spread through her dreams and yanked her back into reality.

She was nauseous. She was sore, as if she’d run a dozen miles. She felt like part of her mind was missing.

And she was standing. At the edge of the second-floor landing in the Saunders manor, the chandelier looming above her, the reddish stone stairs, cloaked in shadow, extending below her, starting just inches away from her bare feet.

Violet curled her fingers around the wrought-iron banister, shivering at the cool metal against her fingers. Moonlight danced across the feathers of a taxidermy falcon mounted on the landing wall. It lingered in the nooks and crannies of the chandelier, making the ivory carvings look as if they were actual bones.

Violet studied the stairs again, shuddering. Two more steps, and she would’ve tumbled down. She had never sleepwalked in her life, and now she was showing up in strange places in the middle of the night.

That couldn’t be accidental. She’d have to text Harper about this in the morning.

Violet was about to turn around and head back to bed when she heard Orpheus meowing. The cat padded around the corner of the landing, yellow eyes glowing in the darkness.

“What is it?” Violet’s voice echoed from the edge of the landing, filling the wide emptiness of the house even though she’d tried to whisper. “Do undead cats still like to be let outside?”

Orpheus meowed again. He butted his head against her bare ankle, then descended gracefully onto the first stair. This time, his low, guttural mewls sounded oddly frantic. He leaped down two more stairs and turned, his tail waving from side to side.

Violet felt that tug at her insides again, the same one she’d felt back in her bedroom earlier that day. It reminded her of May’s powers this time. Like there was something nosing at the edge of her skull.

Something telling her to look more closely at the bottom of the stairs.

Her eyes could make out something now; a figure standing in the foyer. Too broad in the shoulders to be Juniper. Too tall to be Daria.

Panic flooded through her chest. She reached, slowly and carefully, toward the light switch at the top of the stairs. “Who’s there?”

The figure made for the door at the same time as her fingers flicked the switch. The chandelier flooded to life, reflecting off the crystals, sending refracting tendrils of light across the foyer.

Her eyes found the intruder.

Its face was mummified flesh clinging to a half-rotted skull, its body dressed in torn-up rags.

It didn’t walk—it shuffled.

A sharp hiss of panic went through Violet’s chest, followed by a sudden tug of exhaustion, a sensation she recognized as her energy being sucked away.

It was a body.

And Violet understood in that moment that the nausea that had awoken her was the connection between them, like the one between her and Orpheus, but stronger.

Which meant it was a body she’d brought back to life.

But when? And how? And who?

She started forward—but the front door was already slamming behind it.

And she could see, now that the lights were on, that it had left something in its wake.

There was a heap of crimson at the bottom of the stairs. A tangle of graying curls and red yarn, and more red, red everywhere, spreading slowly beneath Aunt Daria’s motionless body, speckled across her lifeless, slack-jawed face.

Violet didn’t remember descending the stairs.

All she remembered was pressing her fingers to Daria’s neck and feeling the faintest possible thrumming of a pulse.

Her fingers smeared blood across her phone as she fumbled for 911, then dialed Harper’s number, then—desperate—Justin’s, and Isaac’s, and May’s.

And finally, hunched beside her aunt’s motionless body, she allowed herself to cry.





The Saunders manor shone like a beacon from half a mile away. The lights flaring in the upstairs windows cut harshly through the forest, making it easy for Harper to keep the house in sight as she navigated the woods. Maurice Carlisle’s words ran through her mind with every step: Go to her. We trust you, Harper.

It had been a long time since someone had shown any faith in her at all; and now, in the space of just a few days, she’d gained the respect of Violet Saunders—and her own father.

She was not about to let either of them down.