The Deck of Omens (The Devouring Gray #2) - Christine Lynn Herman Page 0,48
photos of the same person’s life, wondering why there were so many. Every other photo was a group picture or a formal portrait, but this was oddly modern, a clear expense for a family who had lived when cameras were still rare instead of something everyone carried in their pockets at all times.
There was no name beneath the photos of the girl, only captions?—first birthday, grade school graduation?—as she grew into a grinning young teenager with her hair tied back in a kerchief and a jumpsuit with the sleeves rolled up. First day of work on the war effort, that one read.
He hit the bottom of the page, and there it was: a formal portrait this time, where the girl stared straight into the camera, her mouth quirked into a small smile.
Sarah Sullivan, it said. March 2, 1930?—March 2, 1944.
And then beneath it, a single letter in scarlet ink that had been blotched and blotted by the ink: S.
S for sacrifice.
Blood roared in Isaac’s ears. His hands began to shake as the room around him went out of focus. Suddenly he was struggling and screaming, his wrists chafing against the chains, everything red with panic in the firelight. There was the glint of a dagger and no mercy in Gabriel’s eyes, nothing but grim determination. And there was the thought that had echoed in Isaac’s mind, clear as a siren:
You’re going to die here.
A week and a half after Isaac’s ritual, Gabriel left town?—the final Sullivan to go, save for one. That night, Isaac snuck out of the guest bedroom window and walked through the woods, retracing the steps he would’ve known with his eyes closed until he reached his family’s home. There were still bandages on his neck from his ritual. The wound throbbed as he walked, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
He’d walked through the Sullivan mansion room by room?—through the kitchen, up the stairs, down the hall, through his old bedroom. Until at last he had stood in the foyer once more, beneath the great stone archway. Gabriel’s medallion was tucked into his pocket. He’d come to after his ritual with it lying on the ground beside him, cracked in half. Isaac had ripped it off in the struggle. Now he looped it around his wrist. Because he had passed his ritual. Because he was a true Sullivan now.
Because he needed a reminder of exactly what that meant.
He still remembered how it had felt to press his hand against that great stone archway and call the power within him to life. The wall had quivered beneath him, and Isaac had reached deep inside himself, called on every ounce of pain and heartbreak. The way it had felt to watch his powers spiral out of control. The panic on his brothers’ faces, the way his family had turned on one another, his blood, dripping onto the leaves.
The sound the archway made when it tumbled to the ground was the sweetest thing Isaac had ever heard, and as the house fell around him, disintegrating into ash, he wished that he could burn his memories away as easily as he’d destroyed his home.
He wished for that again now, a thousand times over, but the memories would not retreat. Instead they swirled around him, begging for release, and it was all he could do to slam the photo album shut and shove it back in the box. He could not lose it in front of Gabriel and Violet. That would only prove he was just as out of control and irresponsible as he had been the night he destroyed his family.
“Hey,” Violet said from beside him, and he realized that his hands were trembling. “Are you all right?”
“Of course.” Isaac’s voice sounded strange even to him. “I’m fine.”
He wasn’t, but he forced himself to flip through the rest of the archives, eyes blankly scanning over every page. The world swam around him, blood rushing in his ears. His heartbeat was too fast and his brain was stuffed with cotton, filtering everything around him through a muffled, blurry lens.
He hadn’t hurt anyone, and that was what mattered.
You’re hurting yourself, said a voice that sounded suspiciously like Violet’s. He pushed it aside.
And so Isaac hovered just outside reality for hours, until the ruins were far away and he was back in his own apartment, staring blankly at the ceiling and wondering why he had forgotten how to breathe. Wondering if he would ever remember how to settle back into his own skin.