The Deck of Omens (The Devouring Gray #2) - Christine Lynn Herman Page 0,32
bending toward him. “Are you all right?”
As if her words had awakened something inside Henrik, a shudder roared through him, starting in his neck and extending down his spine. He jerked, his limbs flailing wildly, and May saw them then: roots, writhing across the skin of his forearms, gray and slimy, wriggling like slugs as they burrowed beneath the flesh.
She recoiled, nausea rising in her throat.
“I was worried about this,” Ezra said grimly from beside her. “It’s spreading faster than I thought it would.”
“The corruption?” May rounded on him. “This is the corruption?”
He nodded, and May blanched.
She’d noticed how this disease could hurt the forest. Never had she thought of how it could hurt the people who lived in it, too?—people she was supposed to be protecting.
Her stomach lurched, and she turned to her father, the last words she’d ever expected to finish this meeting with already falling from her lips.
“I have to call my mother.”
The sheriff’s station was deserted. Isaac’s spine prickled as he walked down the sterile main hallway, his footsteps muffled by the stained linoleum. Above him, the fluorescent lights hummed and buzzed, flickering slightly. A phone went off behind one of the identical metal doors, its bleating, plaintive ringtone cutting sharply through the silence. Nobody picked it up.
He knew where he was going?—the clinic—but he wasn’t prepared for what was waiting behind the door. All he knew was that there had been some kind of accident. May and Violet had both contacted him about this, which meant it was clearly an emergency.
Juniper Saunders answered his knock on the clinic door, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, the skin around her dark eyes creased with worry.
“Good, you’re here,” she said. Behind her, he noticed Augusta Hawthorne. He’d thought they hated each other?—or at least, that they couldn’t get along. If they were here together, something was really, truly wrong.
He pushed past her and gaped.
The smell hit him first, musky and unmistakably familiar: decay, the same thing he’d smelled during his botched ritual with Violet. The clinic was dark and claustrophobic, the only window shuttered, the fluorescents dimmed. Justin, May, Violet, and Harper sat grimly beside the far wall, staring intently at the boy lying in front of them, his forearms and thighs strapped down to the cot beneath him. Isaac crossed the room, his stomach twisting as he recognized Henrik. His classmate?—one of the people he was supposed to be protecting.
Henrik’s thin T-shirt was soaked through with sweat, and his body twitched beneath the restraints in small, rhythmic shudders. The smell was nearly unbearable; Isaac pressed his sleeve against his mouth and nose in a desperate attempt to stop it. Henrik’s eyes were closed, and the veins on both his arms stood out starkly against his pale skin, gleaming iridescent in the dim light. The skin itself had gone gray around the veins and spread outward, new patterns etching ridges into his forearms and down to his wrists. They looked uncomfortably like tree bark.
Isaac had never seen the Gray do something like this before. The bodies it left behind were always dead and always twisted nearly in half. They smelled like nothing, and their eyes were bleach-white. It had been that way for as long as he could remember.
“What happened to him?” he whispered.
“May found him on patrol.” Justin’s voice was hoarse. Isaac knew that things were still strange between them, especially in light of what had happened at lunch the other day, but in that moment he didn’t really care. “Mom evacuated the station before she brought him back. She didn’t want anyone else to see this.”
“But he’s not dead,” Isaac said slowly, avoiding the word yet.
“No, he isn’t,” May said sharply. “It looks worse than it is?—his vitals are pretty normal. But he seems to be in and out of consciousness.”
Isaac’s stomach churned. “Why would the Gray leave him alive?”
Something squirmed beneath the skin at Henrik’s neck, drawing Isaac’s focus. He watched, horrified, as it crawled up toward his jaw; a moment later, Henrik’s breathing changed, becoming rough and labored. A small moan escaped his parted lips. Isaac knew what it was: a root. Just like the one that had tried to burrow into his cheek.
“Where did you find him?” he asked May, even though deep down he already knew the answer.
“The clearing where the Church did their ritual,” she said.
Isaac stumbled, bile rising in his throat. Justin was at his side a moment later, steadying him.