The Devouring Gray(51)



He surged ahead, and she picked her way behind him. Twigs clutched at her sweatshirt and snagged in her hair; her sneakers stumbled across tree roots as she and Justin moved deeper into the woods. She had no idea how Justin was navigating, but a few minutes later, he paused in front of a thickly woven cluster of branches that looked identical to the rest of the forest and nodded.

“This is it,” he said, gesturing toward the branches. “Go on.”

Harper was skeptical, but the faint patter of footsteps and the distant glow of a flashlight beam to their right motivated her to pull the branches aside.

They bent easily beneath her hand, revealing a copse of trees that had grown so closely together, their roots and trunks were intertwined. A hollow of tightly woven branches knitted below her like an upturned hand.

Harper stepped inside the trees’ embrace, sliding into one of the natural seats between two trees’ bent trunks. Justin followed her a moment later, letting the branches spring into place after them as he sat down a few feet away from her. The hollow was barely big enough for both of them. Harper drew her knees against her chest, trying not to think about how easy it would be for their legs to brush.

“How did you know about this place?” she whispered, gaping at the patches of sky that shone above their cocoon of trees. The moon was nearly full. Its pale light, filtered through the canopy of leaves, gave everything a slight tint of green.

Justin shrugged. “Oh…you know. It’s just someplace I go sometimes.”

There was something cagey in his voice. She studied his face and realized there was a flush creeping up his cheeks, turned sallow by the moonlight.

He was embarrassed. Which meant either he’d never taken anyone here before, or…“Oh my god,” said Harper. “This isn’t where you take girls, is it?”

He ducked his head. It was all the answer she needed.

“Are you serious?” Harper scrambled to her feet, disgust roiling through her. “You took me to your weird forest sex den?”

She’d heard rumors about Justin’s extracurricular activities. She’d spent years trying to block them out. Now all she could think about was every other hand who’d pushed those branches aside. Every girl who’d sat where she was sitting.

Or maybe lain down where she was sitting. Which was not exactly a more comforting thought.

“It is not a sex den!” Justin stood up, still swaying, which made it even more obvious how little room there was in the hollow for two people. His arms were braced against the tree trunks mere inches from her splayed-out fingers; his face loomed above her, still flushed. “Look, I said I knew a place to hide, and I found one, okay?”

“I’d rather be at the police station than here.” Harper’s heart was hammering with equal parts humiliation and fury.

She never should’ve gone back for him. Justin wasn’t hers anymore. Never had been. That had never been more painfully apparent than it was right now.

The next words she said came from somewhere different. Somewhere mean. “I don’t even know why you were at the Saunders manor. Maybe Violet asked you to come help her. But you’re in no condition to help anyone.”

Justin let out a chuckle at that, but a painful one. An expression dawned on his face that Harper had seen back at her house.

Guilt.

“No, I’m not.” There was something hoarse and awful in his voice. “But I wouldn’t be able to help her sober, either.”

He held up his hand, and Harper forgot how to breathe.

Dangling between his fingers was a rough stone pendant, identical to the one pressed against Harper’s breastbone.

But founders didn’t wear stone—they wore glass after they completed their ritual, to prove they were strong enough to stand against the Gray on their own.

“I don’t understand,” she said softly. “Why do you have that?”

The corners of his mouth turned up, but it wasn’t a smile. The moonlight had turned him ashen around the edges, like something out of the Gray. “Because I need it. Just like you.”

And Harper understood.

Why he’d seemed so set on recruiting Violet. Why Mitzi had come home with stories of May leading patrols instead of Justin. Why he would be willing to turn against his mother.

She let out a strangled, frustrated whimper. “You failed your ritual.”

He released the pendant. It fell over the front of his T-shirt, a silent surrender. “I did.”

She believed him. The Hawthornes were proud enough to lie to the whole town rather than admit they’d failed. “You’re no better than I am,” she snarled, trembling.

Justin bowed his head. She saw him as he was now, a king without a crown. A sad little boy playing at a future he couldn’t have.

“I know,” he said. “But now I get it, okay? I’m trying.”

“No,” she said coldly. “You don’t get it.”

Because he still had everything. And she still had nothing. And no ritual was enough to change that.

She closed her hand around the dagger’s hilt in her pocket, fighting the urge to hold it to his throat.

There were other ways to hurt him. Better ways.

Harper closed the distance between them. “Look at me.”

He tilted his head down. The branches around them were reflected in his hazel eyes.

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