The Deck of Omens (The Devouring Gray #2) - Christine Lynn Herman Page 0,47

grow into the man he was attempting to be. Isaac was not sure exactly what she had done to him. But just a few months ago, he would never have been able to set boundaries with the Hawthornes. Would never have been able to handle Gabriel without combusting.

Violet’s brow furrowed, her gaze turning toward him, and Isaac looked hastily away, eyeing the artwork more intensely than was perhaps necessary. He was immediately drawn to the center of the tree trunk, where a real dagger had been set into the artwork, designed to look as if it were stabbing into the wood.

“This is pretty fancy for a cellar,” he said grimly.

Violet nodded, a smile flickering across her face. “I thought the same thing when I found my family’s secret attic.”

Isaac shook his head. “Why do we even have the town archives if every family decided to hide their good shit away?”

“Because Four Paths has a secrecy problem?”

“A secrecy problem and no other issues at all,” Isaac drawled, feeling gratified when Violet laughed.

From across the room, Gabriel beckoned them forward. He stood beneath the drawers themselves. As Isaac came closer, he saw another dagger set into the wall above them.

“Hopefully the contents are still okay,” Violet said.

This close, Isaac could see that the drawers were labeled with tiny plaques, starting from 1990–2010 and going all the way back to 1840. He reached for the oldest drawer and tugged on it, but it wouldn’t give. The tiny keyhole beneath the plaque was locked. Isaac sighed in frustration.

Beside him, Violet looked thoughtful. “Do you think you can burn through it?”

“It’s worth a shot.”

Isaac placed his palm against the stone, but as his power surged through him, concentrated on the door, something stopped him?—hitting him like a blow to his sternum. He doubled over, gasping with pain.

“Shit,” he wheezed.

“You all right?” Violet asked.

Isaac nodded, wincing. “Just… not doing that again.”

“Fair enough,” Violet said, starting forward. “I guess we just have to try them all.”

The three of them set about tugging on the drawers. Isaac felt more foolish with every handle he pulled, and he was just about to give up when one opened?—the drawer labeled 1920–1945. Inside were a bunch of neatly slotted file folders crammed with books and papers. Not perfect, Isaac knew, but it was a start. They each grabbed a folder and crouched on the floor.

Isaac’s was full of photographs. Dozens of them, slotted neatly into an album, scrawled handwriting below telling a story he’d never dreamed of being able to access.

The photos were faded and blurry, sepia-toned and grim, with unsmiling Sullivans facing out of each and every one. Below was a date and a name, and sometimes, a tantalizing bit of information. Several looked like army photos; from their death dates, Isaac ascertained that the draft had reached Four Paths during World War II the same way it had reached everyone else in the USA.

Otto Sullivan, he read, healer and combat medic, 1910–1944, marked missing during D-Day.

“Hey, did you know about this?” he said softly, in Gabriel’s general direction. “That we had a healer who became a doctor?”

Gabriel nodded without looking at him, buried in his own folder. “That’s part of why I wanted to do it, you know? We don’t just destroy things. We can make them better.”

“You can,” Isaac corrected him, staring at his own hands.

He could not deny that it had been so much easier to sort through the archives with Violet, looking for the Saunders history, than it was to look for his own. So much simpler when it wasn’t pictures of your family, when you weren’t the one learning about everything you had destroyed.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Violet stiffen.

“What?” he asked, turning. “Did you find something?”

She stared down at a yellowed letter and shook her head. “No.”

Violet was lying. Isaac could see the unease in her stiffened shoulder blades, the same sharp-jawed defenses as Juniper Saunders sliding across her face. But as her gaze flicked between him and Gabriel, he understood. She wasn’t lying to him.

“All right,” he said slowly, returning to the archives. Later, they would talk this out. Later he would figure out what it was, exactly, that Violet did not want his brother to see.

He flipped to a page in the photo album?—and frowned.

It began with a black-and-white baby photo. An adorable infant in a frilly outfit, then a solemn toddler, sitting on her mother’s lap, a bow in her hair, her thumb shoved in her mouth. He traced the