The Devouring Gray(69)

She leaned against the nearest tree trunk to regain her balance.

“Hey.” Isaac appeared in her field of vision, the concern clear on his face. “Are you okay?” he asked, at the same time that Harper called, “We need to get out of here.”

A surge of power washed through her as another bolt of lightning split the sky. Violet opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out.

She tried to move an arm, a leg, a finger, panic welling up inside her as she realized that her body wasn’t responding.

She couldn’t call for help or move or scream. Pain shot through her skull as her head swiveled itself toward the clouds that hung above the trees, flickering between the blackness of night and the pale, static clouds of the Gray, and her lips tugged themselves outward into a smile.

“Yes,” said something that was not her at all. “Let’s go.”

And then Violet’s mind went blank.



The forest was surprisingly quiet. Justin had started his patrol expecting the worst, considering the events of the past few weeks. But although the wind and hail were annoying, they were all his group had encountered.

Justin looked around at the rest of his group, pushing down the thought that Augusta had deliberately given them the safest route in the entire forest. Mitzi Carlisle had actually pulled out her phone to text, scowling as raindrops dotted her screen, while her brother Seth was absently tugging at the strings on his hoodie.

“This is boring,” Seth said.

Mitzi nodded in agreement.

“That’s a good thing,” said Justin, even though he wasn’t so sure he believed that. “Mitzi, can you please take this seriously?”

“I’ll take it seriously when I have something to fight,” she said, but she slid her phone back in her pocket.

If Isaac had been there, he would’ve said something about Mitzi’s priorities, or perhaps suggested she fight him instead. But he wasn’t. So their patrol group moved toward the heart of the storm in silence.

As the wind around them grew fiercer, hail raining down on their heads, Mitzi and Seth readied themselves for battle, their flesh stretching and morphing into stone from the shoulder down. They grinned and bumped reddish-brown fists, wiggling their stone fingers at one another in a silly but endearing handshake.

Being around them took Justin back to earlier that afternoon.

To Harper.

The memory had to be handled carefully. Justin knew it would leave him raw and blistered if he let it kindle inside him for too long, and yet he couldn’t stop replaying that moment over and over again. He would forget his own name before he forgot the feeling of her blade pressed against his throat, the fury in her eyes.

She didn’t want him near her anymore, that much was clear. And yet Justin could no longer deny that despite what his mother had done to Harper, despite the years he’d spent trying to pretend otherwise, his feelings for her hadn’t gone away.

There was no good way for him to talk about this, not with Isaac, not with May. Yet keeping it inside left him with a hot, sick feeling brewing in his stomach, like he’d sat in the sun for too long.

“That’s not normal, is it?” Mitzi asked Seth, and Justin was pulled back to the world around him. Seth shook his head, his fists returning to flesh and blood.

“What’s going on?” Seth asked Justin, who realized only then why the Carlisle siblings looked so concerned.

The hail was starting to slow around them, the wind moving from almost a gale to a light, whispering breeze in the span of a few seconds. The forest loomed out of the darkness, each tree trunk sharply defined against the night.

Unease stirred in Justin’s gut. There was something expectant about this sudden stop, like water receding from a stretch of sand in the moments before a tsunami crashed in.

“I don’t know,” said Justin, shining his flashlight at the woods around them. But there was no sign of the Gray. The world had gone completely still.

Which was when a series of loud, piercing screams rang out up ahead.

Justin’s throat closed in on itself as he recognized the high, shrill wail of a child.

It could be some kind of trick. But he was not going to leave a defenseless kid in the forest on one of the most dangerous nights of the year.

“Go!” he snapped, and they sprinted toward the sound, crashing through the underbrush. In their haste to reach whoever was screaming, they made more noise than a herd of stampeding elephants, but Justin didn’t care. They burst out into a clearing near the meadow and then froze.

A few feet away from him stood Isaac and Harper, who was clutching a crying Nora to her chest. Isaac stood in front of Harper and Nora, his hands outstretched, his palms shimmering. Violet stood at the other side of the clearing, her arms spread wide. The trees behind her flickered between Four Paths and the Gray, moving from dark green to white and skeletal in the space of a single breath.

Justin was pretty sure he caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure or two standing behind Violet, but when he blinked, they were gone.

“Harper?” gasped Mitzi, hurrying over to her sister. Seth followed suit. “What are you doing out here?”

“Run,” Harper said, turning toward all of them. Her face was white with fear. “You have to go, now.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Violet. “Am I bad company?”

And Justin knew in that moment that something was terribly wrong.