the unpleasant truths of the secrets the founders had kept from their own flesh and blood. But Harper’s horror only grew as Justin described who Ezra really was, the true nature of May’s power, and the impossible decision that he’d forced upon her, with Justin’s life on the line. After he was done, the room was silent for a long, unpleasant moment, until at last Isaac spoke.
“So you really believe he’s Richard Sullivan?”
“I really do,” Justin said grimly. “He used powers in a way I’ve never seen anyone do before.”
“But what does that mean for you and May?” Violet asked.
Justin shrugged. “I’ve always known my dad was a scumbag. Now I just know he’s an even bigger scumbag.”
Isaac spoke then. “Do you think Augusta?—”
“No.” Justin looked haunted. “I don’t think she did. Two founders make a dud, remember?” He gestured toward himself. “May only got the powers because he did something to her?—bound her to the Beast the same way he bound himself.”
“Shit,” Isaac breathed.
Harper shuddered, thinking of Ezra Bishop?—a Sullivan. The Sullivan. Of May in his clutches. May was tough, she knew that, but Harper had no idea what was happening to her, what unleashing the corruption on the town at this magnitude had done to her. Harper understood exactly how that kind of betrayal felt. The way it turned you inside out, made you into someone new, someone worse.
“So we’re safe for as long as May can hold out against him,” she said. “He can’t finish this without her.”
“May’s strong,” Isaac pointed out.
“We all are,” Harper said. “But that’s not the point. We shouldn’t have to be.”
She wanted a world where girls did not need to grow a spine of steel just to survive. Where they could be as soft and silly as they wanted. Where they could walk into a room full of new people and see endless possibilities instead of potential threats.
“No, we shouldn’t,” Violet said. “But we’re cut off from everyone else, and we’re the only four people with some idea of what’s going on. That means we’re the only ones who have a real chance of stopping Richard Sullivan before he gets even more powerful.”
“How do we do that?” Isaac asked.
Violet twisted a lock of crimson hair around her finger, shadows flickering across her face in the candlelight. “The story Juniper told me was missing a piece. The founders’ ritual to stop the corruption didn’t fail because they did it wrong. It failed because Richard murdered them. Which means if we finish the job the founders tried to do, we can fix this.”
“But how can we figure out what the founders did?” Isaac asked.
And then came a soft, gentle voice from the last person Harper expected.
“I have an idea,” Justin said.
May woke up with the taste of guilt and bile in her mouth. Everything hurt; her limbs and torso ached in a way that felt soul-deep, as if she’d been ripped apart and sewn crudely back together.
She didn’t want to open her eyes. She was too frightened of what she would see: the corrupted trees in the Gray, Justin’s veins bulging out in his neck, the bubbling cauldron she’d been forced to drink from, or?—worst of all?—her father’s sick, smiling face.
But when she finally forced herself to look, she was no longer in the Gray.
Instead, she was lying in the same place she’d seen at Justin’s birthday party: fog drifting around her, branches knitting together above her head. Roots spiraled below her body like a bed, and through it all thumped a heartbeat, slow and steady, one May knew as well as her own. She rolled over and braced her hands against the roots, realizing as she sat up that she recognized where she was. Beneath the roots was the smooth gray stone of the founders’ seal, but she was no longer here with her father, and that horrible cauldron of a tree stump was gone. Instead, she was alone in the center of another vision.
She should have been terrified. And yet on some bone-deep level she felt safe. No harm would come to her from this place. The only thing she had to fear was Ezra?—no, Richard.
“What’s going on?” she murmured, the words echoing through the drifting mist. And then came the last thing she expected: a response.
You asked for help, said a voice inside her mind, a little tinny and unfocused around the edges, like a radio with bad reception. I’m afraid I could not protect you from Richard, but?—The words cut