The Deck of Omens (The Devouring Gray #2) - Christine Lynn Herman Page 0,11

seeping into her very pores. And in her mind, that smoke unfurled over and over again, reaching for her.

Isaac Sullivan pressed a hand against the vault in his family’s mausoleum that he should have been buried in, the plaque still engraved with his full name, and sighed.

Then he flipped it off.

He didn’t particularly enjoy visiting his grave?—it was always an unpleasant experience, best done with a stolen six-pack and a friend. But today it had felt necessary, even though he was stone-cold sober and was currently not speaking to the only friend he would have wanted to take here.

“This fucking family,” he muttered, the sound of his footsteps echoing off the mausoleum’s marble floors as he paced down the row of vaults. “This fucking town.”

Most of Four Paths’ dead were buried deep underground, their ashes stored in forgotten passageways in the catacombs beneath the town hall. But the founders each had their own wing in the mausoleum’s main building. It was red-brown stone and polished marble, dozens of urns tucked away in neat rows of vaults.

Isaac’s eyes strayed to the biggest plaque, the one at the top of the room, engraved with the Sullivans’ signature dagger.

Richard Sullivan was buried here. His founder. His ancestor.

Isaac had never met him, but it didn’t matter?—he hated him. For making a deal he didn’t understand with a monster he’d never properly seen. For trapping his descendants in a town where people died in awful ways and leaving them to stop it. For giving Isaac the powers that had led to the urns slotted neatly beside his own empty grave.

Guilt churned in his throat and made his eyes water, but Isaac forced himself to look at the plaques on either side of his. Caleb’s and Isaiah’s. It was the least he could do, considering the fact that two of his older brothers were dead because of him.

Grieving them was a harsh, strange thing, a double-edged knife that caught Isaac unawares each time he thought, perhaps, he’d begun to heal. It had only stopped hurting as much once he stopped trying to stanch the flow of his agony, once he accepted that his grief would always be an open wound.

But then a voice rang out from behind him and gouged it all open again.

“This fucking family, indeed,” said Gabriel. “Shit, I hate this place.”

Isaac turned around, trying to push down the steady pulse of panic in his chest as he stared at the only brother he had left. Gabriel had towered over Isaac when he’d left four years ago, but a growth spurt had evened the gap between them. They were about the same height now, although Isaac was lanky where Gabriel was broad-shouldered and muscular. Tattoos spilled out from beneath his brother’s sleeves and across his forearms, covering the scars Isaac knew lurked beneath them. Isaac studied the ink on the hand closest to him: a skull with a dagger stabbed through the eye socket.

His own scar, a line drawn across his neck, began to throb beneath his high-necked sweater. A souvenir from the last time he and Gabriel had been together.

“You wanted me to meet you here,” he said softly, the words echoing off the marble walls. “We didn’t have to do this in front of the dead.”

“You’re wrong,” Gabriel said evenly. “This is a family affair.”

“Is that why you’re here?” Isaac asked angrily. “To make me join them?”

Gabriel sighed. “I’m not going to kill you.”

“I find that very difficult to believe.”

Looking at Gabriel was like glimpsing a portal to the past. It had happened the first time Isaac had seen his brother a week ago, too, at the Sullivan ruins. Isaac hadn’t said a word. His strength to speak had been gone, replaced by the sharp, insistent press of fear. He’d bolted instead, the scenery blurring with a memory he’d pushed down a long time ago, the memory of his fourteenth birthday, the night his family had taken him into the woods behind their home and tried to slit his throat.

He’d run that day, too, staggering through the trees. Crimson had followed in his wake, falling in dark, uneven splotches on the yellow leaves.

Follow the blood, he had grown up hearing. Follow the blood, and you will find the Sullivans.

And at last, too late, he had understood why.

He’d lived through that day somehow. And for the past few years, he’d convinced himself he was safe. But now Isaac understood just how wrong he’d been. He’d agreed to meet with Gabriel because he was