The Devouring Gray(71)

“Hello again, Violet,” she said calmly. “How are you?”

Violet frowned at her. “Fine, I guess. What happened?”

Augusta’s lips tugged up into something that would’ve been a smile on anyone else. On her it just looked like a fissure in a statue, like a sculptor’s hand had slipped.

“You got lost in the storm,” she said, striding toward the cot. “But don’t worry about it. You’re going to feel much better very soon.”

As the sheriff reached out to her, Violet realized, in a moment of horrible, piercing clarity, that it was the only time she’d ever seen Augusta Hawthorne without her gloves on.

It was the last thought she had time for before the sheriff’s hand caught her wrist, and then her mind was not her own anymore. Fingers peeled back her skull—harsh, cold, unwelcome, stabbing into her brain like knives as they rummaged through her thoughts.

Memories flashed across her eyes like images on a projector screen: She and Rosie lying on the floor in their art studio, laughing. The flat white clouds of the Gray. Isaac smiling at her, hail melting in his hair. And then the ground fell out from under her, and she was falling, her mind slipping out of her grasp as the world around her faded into blackness.





When Justin’s grandfather was still alive, his study had been a warm, welcoming room, with a fireplace and earth-toned rugs and windows that were always flung wide open. But when Augusta Hawthorne moved her things into the room, she bricked up the fireplace and kept the storm shutters permanently pulled over the windows. The plush leather chairs were replaced by stiff, hard-backed wooden seats that forced Justin to sit perfectly straight as he stared at the dour-faced photographs hanging behind his mother’s desk.

The Hawthornes were a gorgeous, dutiful, miserable bunch, even in black and white. Although their skin tones ranged from pale to dark brown, their hairstyles and outfits encompassing a dozen different trends, their faces all said the same thing: We know best. Justin wondered if his picture would be up on that wall someday, staring imperiously down at his descendants.

The way things were going, his mother was more likely to burn a picture of him than hang it anywhere.

It was the day after the equinox. Augusta had left Justin and May in her study while she finished conducting business at the sheriff’s station. Justin knew they were being forced to wait as punishment, yet he didn’t move from his seat.

“How could you tell her?” he asked May, who was sitting ramrod-straight in the chair beside him.

“How could you not?” she said. “The Beast was inside her, Justin. It opened up the Gray. It made her bring someone back from the dead. Something had to be done.”

The other patrol had converged on Violet for the same reason Justin’s had: They’d heard the screams. But after they’d figured out what they were looking at, May had cracked, confessing to their mother the second they returned to the sheriff’s station. Justin had been too shocked by her betrayal to do much more than feebly protest as she told her the whole story of the past few weeks, emphasizing that she’d been against deceiving their mother from the very beginning.

Justin tried not to think about that voice coming out of Violet’s body. The color leaching away from her fingers. “You knew what Mom would do to her.”

“What?” said May. “Fix her?”

An ugly chuckle bubbled up in Justin’s throat, but he choked it back. “Our mother doesn’t fix things,” he said. “She just takes away the parts of people’s lives that are inconvenient for her. You know that.”

Augusta hadn’t let him anywhere near Violet after she’d been taken to the station clinic. But Justin had seen his mother in action enough times by now to know what would happen next. Violet would wake up in a few hours with no memory of Four Paths as anything but a normal town. Her brain would fill in the gaps on its own.

She would forget she’d ever had powers—just like Harper had.

“Give it a few weeks,” said May, pressing a pale hand against his knee. “This will all matter a lot less, I promise you.”

“The Beast is still out there. The town is still turning on us.” Justin wondered why she couldn’t understand what she’d done. “What about that person Violet resurrected?”

“The only proof you have that they even exist is something Violet said. She probably lied about what she saw.”

Justin had always known his sister was good at ignoring the more unsavory parts of their world. But it hurt more than he’d thought possible to see her face turn sharp and dismissive.

“They killed Daria Saunders.”

“Or she had an accident.” May’s voice dripped with cold, patronizing disdain.

“You’re doing what Mom does. Pretending problems don’t exist.”

“At least I’m not trying to solve problems I can’t do anything about. Has it ever occurred to you that we’ve all made sacrifices to be where we are? That maybe, if it’s this hard for you, Four Paths doesn’t need your help?”

Justin saw in that moment that everything he’d done since he failed his ritual had been a useless, futile stand against the inevitable. He’d lost his family’s respect the day the hawthorn tree did not bow for him, and there was nothing he could do that would ever be enough to fix it.