The Devouring Gray

by Christine Lynn Herman

  Isaac had gotten the job at the Diner after an incident at the grocery store led to an impressive amount of property damage. Everyone in town knew it was only his founder kid status and the Hawthornes’ influence that kept him there. Even the book in Isaac’s hand would’ve made a better waiter than he did.

  “Oh, you’re here. We need you out back before the dinner rush starts.” Pete Burnham strode out from the kitchen doors. His family owned the restaurant, but he was the only one who actually kept it running. Then Pete caught sight of Isaac’s apron. “Not again,” he said, sliding a hand across his bald head. “You know Ma Burnham embroiders those aprons by hand?”

  Isaac looked decidedly unimpressed by this revelation. “So buy her a sewing machine. Or tell her to get a better hobby.”

  “Don’t disrespect Ma.”

  “You’ve got a weird thing about your ma. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “I don’t have to take this from you, Sullivan.”

  The air around Isaac started to churn and shimmer, like a heat wave rising over asphalt. Across the Diner, Pete stepped back, toward the kitchen doors.

  Justin readied himself to intervene. Isaac usually listened to reason, or at least he did when the reasoning came from him. But before he could speak, the door to the restaurant creaked open, revealing a white girl Justin had never seen before.

  She was all sharp angles and knobby limbs, dark eyes and shoulder-length hair that shone jet-black. The rips in her high-waisted jeans showed off half her thighs.

  There was something almost feral about the way she was assessing the Diner. It made him uneasy. She barely spared a glance toward Isaac’s apron or Pete’s obvious distress as she marched up to the counter.

  “I assume one of you works here?” she said in their general direction.

  Pete sprang into action, jumping behind the counter and shooting her his best customer-service grin. “Pete Burnham,” he said. “Manager of this fine establishment.”

  “Lovely,” said the girl. She was one of the Saunderses. She had to be. New people didn’t just show up in Four Paths without a reason. “Then you can tell me if the Diner does takeout.”

  Pete nodded wildly, like a bobblehead. “Of course,” he said. “You made an excellent choice. We’ve got the best food in town.”

  “You don’t have much competition,” the girl noted dryly.

  “Yes, well,” said Pete. “Quality over quantity.”

  She ordered off the menu behind the counter, which Justin had never actually seen anyone look at before. Pete bolted into the kitchen—probably happy to get away from Isaac—promising to stand over the chef until the food was done.

  The girl stayed by the cash register, tapping her fingernails absently against the glass. Her collarbones protruded sharply beneath the straps of her tank top. A tangle of crystals hung around her neck, glimmering dully in the fluorescent lighting.

  If this girl was a Saunders, she could be the person on the card.

  Talking to her could be the first step in preventing the next death.

  Justin remembered his mother’s orders to keep his distance. But no crimson founders’ medallion was tangled in her necklaces or tied at her wrist. If Augusta got on his case about talking to her, he could just say it had been an honest mistake—he hadn’t known who she was.

  He glanced over at Isaac, who had slid into the nearest booth and opened his book. Isaac scanned the pages with an intensity that, while fake, indicated his complete lack of interest in the current situation. Which was strange, considering Four Paths hadn’t had a single newcomer since they were in second grade.

  But it meant Justin was on his own, at least as far as talking to strangers was concerned.

  “I’m Justin Hawthorne,” he said to her, trying to echo her snappy tone. The words sounded strange and forced coming out of his mouth, but he smiled anyway.

  “Violet Saunders,” she said reluctantly, after enough time had gone by for her to realize he was, in fact, talking to her. “Are you about to extol the wonders of the cuisine here, too?”

  “Pete runs the place,” said Justin, who wasn’t quite sure what extol meant. “He has to say that.”

  “So you’re saying the food here isn’t actually good?”

  “No! No, the food’s fine.”

  “Well, there’s something on the menu called a garbage plate,” said Violet. “So that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”

  “It’s an upstate thing!” said Justin, flustered. “It’s fine.”

  “Fine, or good? There’s a difference.”

  Justin frowned, unsure what he was supposed to say. Isaac smirked behind his book.

  “Good, I guess.” It was the truth, although it was also true that if the Burnhams thought he was insulting the Diner, they’d take him out to the parking lot and slug him, Hawthorne or not. And Justin liked his nose better when it wasn’t broken. “You’re new here, right?”

  It was a basic thing to say. But he didn’t know what to tell her. She’d displayed no sign of recognizing his last name, so she definitely didn’t know about the founders. Which meant his mother had been right, and he had no idea how she was supposed to help him if she knew nothing about the Gray, or her family’s powers.

  “Is this town really small enough that you can tell instantly?” Violet moved her hand away from the counter. “Or do I just look like I don’t belong here?”

  Her arms shuttered across her tank top. That simple gesture, the way her body caved inward, made him think of Harper Carlisle.

  Thoughts of Harper were always followed by guilt. Justin shoved her image back down into the recesses of his brain, but it was too late to stem the shame that rose in his throat.

  “Are you just going to stare?” Violet said sharply.

  Justin realized with a stab of horror that his easy smile was gone. Harper did that to him—made him forget how to be a Hawthorne. Made him slip.

  “I wasn’t—” he started, but Pete emerged from the kitchen, holding a giant paper bag.

  “Here you are,” he said.

  “Thank you.” Violet grabbed the bag of food and paid faster than Justin had thought possible. She started toward the exit, then paused. Justin felt a brief flash of hope, but her eyes darted over to Isaac instead, who had arranged his book very carefully over his face. “You won’t like the way that ends.”

  The Beach Boys warbled behind her as she strode out the door.

  Isaac lowered the book. “That went well. I bet when you get home, you’ll find her waiting in your bed.”

  “Hey, I’m already down. No need to kick.” Justin leaned over the booth. “And why didn’t you talk to her? She’s a new founder. Seems like you’d care.”

  “Didn’t you get the sheriff’s lecture?” said Isaac. “Dead bloodline, no powers, leave them alone?”

  Maybe Justin should’ve been surprised that she’d talked to everyone else, but he wasn’t. Augusta was always thorough. “You listen to my mother less than I do.”

  Isaac shrugged. “Maybe I think she’s right.”

  That wasn’t it. Justin knew Isaac better than anyone—well, anyone who was still alive. The slight deepening in his voice meant he was lying. But there was no point in pushing, not with Pete hovering at the front of the restaurant.

  His eyes caught on the book Violet had commented on. Brave New World. Isaac loved books with the kind of sharp, pretentious titles that made Justin feel foolish.

  “You’ve read that one before, right?” he asked.

  Isaac nodded.

  “What happens at the end?”

  Isaac snorted, flipped the novel shut. “The last hope for humanity’s soul kills himself.”

  Justin shook his head. “Shit, man. Why would anyone want to read about that?”

  “And you wonder why she didn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Sullivan!” called Pete from the front of the restaurant. Justin could tell he hadn’t forgotten Isaac’s comment about his ma earlier. “A
re you planning on working at all this shift?”

  Isaac took an exaggerated look around the empty restaurant. “I’m keeping all the customers satisfied.”

  Pete frowned. “Just get a new apron and do your damn job. And yes, I will be docking the cost of that uniform from your paycheck.”

  Isaac slammed his book on the table, and for a second Justin was nervous again. But then he was walking to the back of the restaurant, and the air around him almost looked normal. With Isaac, almost normal was as good as it got.

  “He’s not usually such an asshole,” said Pete, after Isaac had disappeared through the swinging doors.

  “He always gets like this in the weeks before the anniversary.”

  “Ah. Right, then.” Pete was suddenly preoccupied with the cash register. “I’ll go easy on him.”

  The door to the kitchen banged open, revealing Isaac once more. He’d fetched a new apron.

  “If I have to work, so do you,” he said. “Stop complaining about me and go wash some dishes.”

  Justin glanced back toward the front door of the restaurant as it swung open, revealing the start of the dinner rush.

  “Actually, you can wash dishes,” he said. “I’ll take over server duty.”

  The corner of Isaac’s mouth twitched. “I guess, if that makes it easier for you.”

  He vanished back into the kitchen, but not before Justin caught the unspoken gratitude in Isaac’s eyes. As he walked to the front of the restaurant, he felt the burn of his calves, already stiff and sore from post-practice fatigue. A full shift of running around with plates in both hands would leave him curled up in a ball by the end of the evening.

  But he made himself stand tall, walk normally, keep his smile straight. Because Isaac needed him, and Four Paths had expectations for him, and he’d be damned if he let anyone know how much he’d already disappointed them.

  Dinner was uncomfortable. Instead of eating with Violet and Juniper, Daria spooned herself a bowl of some leftover stew and sequestered herself in her bedroom. Her cat, Orpheus, a haughty-looking thing with yellow eyes and a bit of red yarn tied around one ear, stayed and hissed at them until Violet caved and tossed him some chicken.

  Violet wondered what it would be like to live alone for years, only to have your peaceful existence interrupted by people who claimed to be your family. It sounded frightening.

  “Does it hurt you?” she asked her mother. “To see her like this?”

  Juniper’s mouth twisted. “What do you think? She barely remembers me.” She rose from the table, gesturing at Violet’s scraps. “Here. I’ll throw that out.”

  Violet suppressed the urge to remind her mother that at least she still had a sister. She handed over her plate in silence, remembering the two white boys in the restaurant as she swallowed her final mouthful of chicken Parmesan.

  Justin, blond, pretty, predictably confident. And the reader, who had been so purposely aloof. There had been something expectant about the way they’d looked at her.

  Well, whatever they wanted, she wasn’t going to give it to them. She’d never been much for boyfriends, or girlfriends, for that matter. There had been crushes; she’d even come out to Rosie as bisexual a few years ago, she just hadn’t felt ready to date anyone yet. Her sister and the piano were all she’d needed, and her few distant friends had faded away after Rosie died, unsure of how to handle her grief. Starting at a new high school next week would’ve bothered her more if she’d had anyone from Ossining to miss.

  Violet realized with a quiet rush that it had been almost a full day since she’d played. Unloading the U-Haul had been a slow, laborious process, and by the time Violet left to grab dinner, she had barely managed to drag the relevant boxes to her new bedroom. The rest waited downstairs, flanking her like a row of cardboard sentinels as she strode through the foyer and into the room on the left, where she’d spotted the piano.

  Violet did not share the Saunders family’s apparent fondness for taxidermy. She averted her eyes from the glassy gazes of three mounted deer heads as she unfolded the top of the piano. A perfect set of ivory keys gaped at her like a smiling mouth—at last, something familiar.

  She stretched her hands across the keys, relief and exhilaration spreading through her. As long as she could play, she was home. It had been that way ever since her first piano lesson at age four, when she had to be dragged out of her piano teacher’s house, kicking and begging to plink away at the keys for just one second longer.

  She played an experimental scale. To her great surprise, the instrument was in tune—perhaps Daria played. The acoustics in the room were lovely, and soon Violet was running through Bach’s Prelude & Fugue no. 6 in D Minor.

  After Rosie’s funeral, her playing had become wildly inconsistent. Sometimes she had good days, but usually the music swam, unreachable, inside her head. She’d quit her piano lessons, but she practiced her audition program a few times a week anyway, trying to convince herself that things could still go back to normal. But it only took a few minutes of playing now for the sharp clarity that practicing her program had always brought her to fall away.

  She wasn’t going to music school. Not anymore.

  Her hands drifted across the keys, spiraling away from her program and improvising new phrases. Violet closed her eyes and let the melody go wherever it wanted.

  After a time, Violet became dimly aware of a new noise penetrating her bubble of music. Distracted, she lifted her hands from the keys. It was strangely hard to tear her fingers away from the piano.

  She opened her eyes.

  The room was pitch-black.

  Violet blinked, confused, as the noise rang out once more, a hollow, tinny sound. A pair of glowing eyes appeared in the darkness, and Violet scrabbled backward on the piano bench, grasping for her phone. She’d drawn in a breath to shriek when a familiar bit of red yarn emerged from beneath the bench.

  “Oh.” She let out a tumble of pent-up air. “It’s just you.”

  The cat gave his odd mewl again, which sounded like a miniature chain saw, and pressed himself against the piano bench. Then he bit her on the ankle.

  Violet cursed at him and drew her legs onto the piano bench. She finally found her phone on the music stand. But as the screen flickered to life, she froze.

  It felt like Violet had only been playing the piano for ten minutes, maybe twenty, but her phone said she’d been sitting in the music room for almost four hours. She’d gotten carried away with her playing before, but never like this.

  Violet rose from the bench and hurried to the door.

  That discomfort still lingered when she reached her bedroom. It was much bigger than her room in Ossining, the walls reddish-brown stone, the bed a large four-poster thing that looked like something out of a museum. Also, there was more creepy taxidermy. Violet carted out a crow and a deer head and dumped them in the room next door, fighting a strange urge to apologize to them.

  She swung open the door to her bedroom, and her eyes lit on the pyramid of boxes stacked beside the far wall, each marked ROSIE in big black letters.

  The night before Juniper packed up Rosie’s bedroom for the move, Violet set foot inside it for the first time since the accident. She combed through the bookshelves, the dresser, the closet, and exorcised her sister’s secrets: the half-drunk whiskey bottle beneath the mattress, the lingerie stuffed in her T-shirt drawer, the love notes from Elise tucked into her jacket. She spent an hour turning Rosie from the person she had been into the person her mother had wanted her to be, and when she was done, she’d curled up in her own bed, a hollow, ashy taste in her mouth.

  The boxes were the result of that packing, a colorful but tasteful portrait of a girl who’d been artistic, but charmingly so, more Monet than Van Gogh. Violet turned her eyes away from the boxes to the painting that hung above them.

  It was one of Rosie’s portfolio pieces, an abstract meant to represent Violet, bits of paint all blurred and pushed together in dizzying patterns that spun and whi
rled if you looked at them from the right angles. She’d done four canvases, one for each member of the Saunders family, even though their father was long dead, and they’d gotten her into her top three art schools. Soul paintings, she’d called them, and although Violet had teased Rosie about her New Age proclivities, she couldn’t deny the name felt right.

  Maybe the rest of Rosie’s things were a lie, but Violet’s soul painting wasn’t. Violet stepped toward it, her discomfort fading away as she stared at the familiar canvas.

  She touched her fingertips to it, then drew the curtains across her bedroom window. The black outlines of the trees gleamed in the moonlight, zigzagging along the side of the house like a row of broken teeth.

  Harper Carlisle moved through a fluid series of parries and ripostes, her bare toes pressing into the dirt as she upped the pace of her footwork. She pictured the monster in the Gray—thin, skeletal, faceless—and lunged. The yellowing lace of her nightgown bunched around her knees as she drove her blade through the imaginary creature’s chest.

  She didn’t know what the Beast looked like. No one alive did.

  Harper knew what it sounded like, though. Hardly a day went by where she wasn’t haunted by the memory of its hollow, tinny voice inside her head.

  It was almost dawn now, but she’d been up since three, practicing her swordplay behind her family’s cottage. Stone animals nestled in the dying grass around her, a reddish-brown audience. These statues were the closest thing the Carlisles had to family heirlooms. Some were sentinels, carved from the rock excavated from the family lake and serving as crude vessels for the Carlisles’ eyes and ears—but others, like the deer, had been real animals once, before a Carlisle turned them to stone guardians that could bend to their will with a mere touch.

  It had been a long time since Four Paths had seen a Carlisle that powerful.

  “I win,” Harper said softly, just as the phone she’d nestled between the dormant deer guardian’s ears began to sound with her morning alarm. She kept the sword with her as she headed back inside, even though she had to use her residual limb to jimmy the doorknob open. Losing her left hand had changed the way she fought, altered her balance and footwork, the way she lunged across the grass. But it hadn’t changed how confident Harper felt when she was holding a sword.