The Devouring Gray(87)

Maggots writhed behind her sister’s empty eye sockets as her withered mouth cracked open into a grin—or perhaps it was just a silent scream.

“You’re not real,” Violet whimpered, shutting her eyes, but she could feel Rosie’s dead hands in hers.

Smell the sweet, musky scent of decay.

Violet gagged and gripped harder. Knives seared at the back of her skull as the Beast’s voice—its real voice—echoed through her, hissing in an unfamiliar language.

It went against her every instinct to pull the Beast into her mind. But she pushed her panic away, tugging its presence toward her and forcing herself not to retreat. Cold hands grasped her mind, and Violet let out an involuntary shudder as her toes, her feet, her ankles went numb.

Tears forced her eyes open, dripping in viscous lines down her cheeks that were too thick to be water. Gray ran up the inside of her wrists, racing toward her shoulders, her chest, her heart. Violet felt as if she were sinking into a treacly black lake. She was holding her breath, but soon, she’d have to open her mouth and take in a lungful of molasses.

It was inside her. Wrestling control away from her body the way it had on the equinox.

Violet couldn’t remember why she’d thought she could beat it. Why she’d let it in. But it didn’t matter anymore, none of it did.

All that was left was to surrender. It would be so easy to surrender.

And as Violet stared out at the bleak, colorless world of the Gray, the last vestiges of her consciousness slipping away, she saw Rosie.

At first, she thought this was another cruel trick of the Beast’s. But Rosie’s eyes were brown and glowing, with gold liner at their corners. And she wasn’t wearing the clothes she’d had on the night she died. Instead, she wore the dress she’d bought for prom, a flowing black thing that struck the perfect balance between edgy and classy, with a chunky gold statement necklace.

She’d never gotten to show it off anywhere besides a dressing room.

“Damn straight I’d choose to spend eternity in this.” Rosie frowned at her. “I can feel your judgment. Figures you’d lose control of your motor functions before you surrender your attitude.”

“Rosie?” Violet wasn’t sure if she was talking or thinking. But this wasn’t the Not-Rosie the Beast had shown her. This Rosie felt like her sister the same way her paintings did. “Are you real?”

Even the Gray began to flicker as the Beast burrowed into her mind. The edges of her vision were blurring black.

“Real or not, you know what I’d say,” said Rosie. “I love you, but I don’t want any company. Not for a long time.”

“I love you, too,” Violet whispered.

Rosie gave her a grin that was tinged with sadness. “I’m sorry I left you.”

And then she was gone, and there was only blackness.

Something inside Violet had cracked the day Rosie died. There was an abscess in her chest, a gaping hole in the back of her skull.

A place for evil things to slip right in.

Her grief had let the Beast inside her head. But Violet’s grief was also her anchor to herself.

And she could use that grief to drive out the Beast.

Violet let the months of pain and sorrow rush through her as she clawed back her mind. This was hurt it would never understand. This was hurt made from love. And as she immersed herself in grief, embraced it, the parts of her that had been so lost and broken, so long her enemy, were now her savior.

“You’re not coming back,” she said, to Rosie, and to herself, the girl she’d been before. She was different now, broken and remade. There would always be sorrow buried within her. But that was okay—that was part of who she was. And as the Beast’s grip over her mind snapped like a bone breaking in two, Violet knew it would never leave her head, either. Not completely.

That was the price the Saunders family had paid for power.

Violet opened her eyes.

The Gray was gone, and she was back in the clearing, surrounded by woods, noise rushing through the circle of bones.

Color spread back across her skin, chasing the Gray past her wrists, past her fingertips—which were curled, unconsciously, around her sister’s silver bracelet.

Stephen Saunders still stood at the edge of the circle. It might’ve been her imagination, but his rotted eye sockets seemed to gleam with fear.

She breathed in deep. The cool night air filled her lungs with the smell of earth, the smell of the woods.

Then she strode across the circle, her feet crunching across animal bones, until she and Stephen were inches apart, nose to skull.

The tether she’d felt earlier spun between them, a horrible, queasy thing.

Violet remembered the boy in the journals. He hadn’t deserved to end up like this, a heap of ruined clothes and eroding bones, held together by her magic.

He deserved peace.

She reached her hand up, mimicking his movements from before, and touched a bloodstained finger to his rotting cheek.

“We both know you’re not supposed to be here,” she whispered. “I hope it’s not so bad, where you’re going. Maybe I’ll see you there one day.”

She harnessed the same part of herself that had clawed her mind back from the Beast’s hold. Power surged within her, wild and wonderful and, at last, truly hers.

Something on that decayed face twitched with what might’ve been relief. And as the tether between them snapped, Stephen Saunders collapsed beneath her hand.