The Devouring Gray(53)

“The one that makes you feel guilty for existing?”

Isaac nodded. “That’s the one. So she’s not just grieving her aunt.”

It fit. Her weirdness at the reading. Her despair when told she couldn’t leave town. The way she and Isaac had circled each other like two wolves searching for weak points, both wary, both haunted.

Justin refrained from commenting on the fact that Isaac had cared enough about Violet to look into the details. Anyone else, he’d tease him about. But there was no point mocking pain that recognized pain.

They reached the hill leading up to the Saunders manor, and Justin saw, with a flash of panic, that there was already a car in the driveway, idling beside the Porsche.

A silver pickup truck.

“Hey! Assholes!” May slammed the door of the car, then adjusted her headband, her pale cheeks flushed with annoyance. “You were going to talk to Violet without me?”

“I didn’t think you’d want to.” Justin hurried across the gravel, Isaac following close behind. “You haven’t exactly been welcoming toward her—”

“Yeah, because I don’t like lying to Mom,” said May, jabbing a pointy pink fingernail at him. “Violet texted me, too. It doesn’t matter that she blew us off before—something awful happened to her, and we owe her an apology.”

“You were about to go without us,” Isaac said mildly.

May frowned at him. “Not the point.”

“Actually, it kind of undermines your point.”

“Hey.” Justin stepped between them. “We’re all here now. Let’s just go inside.”

A moment later, they were standing in a solemn row on the front porch as Justin tugged on the brass door knocker.

Nothing happened. He was about to try again when a woman who looked oddly familiar opened the door. She cleared her throat, brushing back a lock of frizzy hair, and he realized why he knew her. There was an entire box of pictures and letters dedicated to her in the back of his mother’s closet—he’d snooped years ago, not that he had ever told her.

Juniper Saunders.

Augusta’s ex-girlfriend.

Justin didn’t really want to think about his mom’s love life more than was necessary. Augusta had explained to him and May a few years ago that she’d dated men and women, but after their dad, she’d lost interest in finding a partner.

“You two are what matters to me,” she’d said matter-of-factly, in a tone that was the closest Augusta ever came to being vulnerable. “I don’t need anyone else to be a family.”

His father, Ezra Bishop, had left when Justin was eight and May was seven. They hadn’t seen him since.

They didn’t want to.

Augusta had gotten rid of all evidence of him, but Justin still saw his face sometimes, his cruel features imprinted behind his eyelids when Justin was trying to sleep.

Four Paths had lost one of its monsters the day he left town.

“Hello,” he said to Juniper. “You must be Violet’s mom.”

“I am,” she said, and his first thought—that there was nothing of Violet in this woman at all—changed immediately. So this was where Violet had learned to turn each word into a challenge, how she’d learned to stand a little too straight, like she had something to prove. “Are you three friends of hers?”

She sounded skeptical about it. And she seemed awfully put together for someone whose sister had just passed away.

“Yes.” Justin knew full well that Violet would’ve vehemently protested this claim. “She wasn’t at school today, so we picked up her homework. Can we give it to her?”

Juniper’s eyes narrowed. “Violet already has a friend over. Can’t you just e-mail her any homework?”

Beside him, May went still, while Isaac scowled at the ground.

Any other friend of Violet’s had to be Harper. If Justin went upstairs, he’d have to face her.

But he’d come this far. And he’d already committed himself to apologizing. So he soldiered onward, turning on his last vestiges of persuasive charm. “It comes with instructions. From the teachers. We need to explain it in person.”

“Hmm. Well. When she kicks you out, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She swung the door open. “Her bedroom’s three doors to the right of the stairs.”

The Saunders manor was a dank, forbidding place, halls lined with moth-eaten red-and-gold carpets and a taxidermy collection that would rival a museum. There was an area at the foot of the stairs blocked off by caution tape—Justin tried not to look too closely at the dark stains on the wooden floor.

He was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to let people stay in a crime scene.

He was also pretty sure, having now met both Violet and her mother, that it would be very difficult to make them leave.

May gestured toward the chandelier as they headed up the stairs. “Do those remind you of bones?”

Justin inspected the swinging lamp. The ironwork did look kind of skeletal, especially in the dim, shifting light.

“I guess we’re not the only ones who like to show off our family trademark,” Justin said, keeping his voice low as Juniper disappeared into one of the downstairs rooms.

They reached the second-floor landing. A cat with a bit of red string tied around its ear prowled up to them.