town deserved to lose so many of its defenses. Before she had her powers, she had seen the stark reality of what it was like to live in Four Paths, to put your safety in other people’s hands.
Revenge on Justin’s family had seemed so simple. But Harper knew she could not just consider her own feelings about the Hawthornes anymore. She held the power she had always craved in her small palm; she could not justify misusing it. That would make her no better than her father. No better than Augusta.
“What would happen,” she asked quietly, “if all of those places were destroyed?”
Augusta froze. Her gloved hands twitched ever so slightly as she stared at the pile of stone leaves Harper had created.
“I don’t think any of us would like to find out,” she said finally. “That’s why it’s so important that you gain control of your powers. And when you do gain control, I hope for all of our sakes that you use your power wisely.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
May stared grimly at the leaf in her gloved hand, then held it up to the sunlight, squinting. The foliage around her blazed orange and crimson, a perfect Saturday morning in the heart of autumn, but May knew all that was a lie. Beneath their bark, any of these trees could be succumbing to the same disease that she had seen a few weeks ago in the forest, rotting them from the inside out.
“You see it,” she said, turning to her father. “Don’t you?”
Ezra nodded grimly as May’s stomach churned. The sunlight illuminated the exact places where the oak leaf’s natural rusty orange faded into splotchy gray, the oily sheen of its veins. Liquid dripped from the stem, gray and viscous, but May’s gloves shielded it from direct contact with her skin. It didn’t shield the smell from her nose, though.
They were standing in the clearing where the Church of the Four Deities had done their ritual. After their meeting outside of town, May had been able to use her extensive knowledge of Augusta’s schedule to successfully smuggle her father into Four Paths.
She was glad she had?—now she wasn’t the only witness to this slow-motion train wreck.
Iridescent veins spiderwebbed across the tree in front of her, gray bleeding out from them in patches. The layer of bark between the veins had thinned, glimmering with a fleshy sheen. May could see more veins sliding beneath it, moving toward the heart of the tree. She’d touched the bark with her glove and been disturbed by the way it felt?—even through the thin fabric, it was soft and warm, almost like human skin.
“These are the same symptoms I saw in the forest,” she said, releasing the leaf and letting it flutter to the ground. “And they’re getting worse.”
Beside her, Ezra studied the tree, his mouth set in a thin, worried line, and pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. He’d been antsy since she escorted him back into town. She didn’t blame him. If Augusta figured out he was here before May could prove she’d called him back for a good reason, she shuddered to think what would happen to both of them.
“You saw fog emanating from the tree before, correct?” he asked, turning toward her.
She nodded. “It looked like an opening, sort of. To the Gray. But I don’t see anything like that now.”
“Interesting.” Ezra walked around the tree, studying it carefully. “There are usually only two possibilities for the Gray opening: the Beast is nearby, or a Sullivan has opened a portal. These symptoms, however, are different. Finding their source requires a return to the beginning of everything?—to the founders themselves.”
May’s eyes widened. “You’ve heard of this before?”
“Maybe.” Ezra’s brow furrowed. “There’s very little information about what Four Paths was like before the founders locked the Beast in the Gray. But when it roamed wild, it supposedly caused havoc much like this.”
He pulled out a tablet from inside his jacket pocket and swiped through it. “After our conversation, I dug back into my research archives on this town,” he said, handing the screen to May. “This appears to line up with what we’re experiencing here.”
May stared at the screen, her mouth agape. It was a scan of a drawing, meticulously detailed and sharply rendered?—a tree with the center of the trunk carved out, liquid dripping from the edges of the hole. Veins just like the ones in front of them curved around the bark.
She knew that art style, even though it