The Deck of Omens (The Devouring Gray #2) - Christine Lynn Herman Page 0,55

Harper pulled her jacket around her shoulders and huddled closer to the fire, shivering. She’d thought not drinking much would help her handle this, but it wasn’t about the alcohol. The problem was her and Justin.

She wanted to run her fingers through his soft blond hair?—then close her hand into a fist and push him down to his knees. She wanted her lips on his throat in the same place she would put a blade. She wanted him to look at her the way he had when they had fought at the festival, with awe and fear and want, a want that matched hers. Neither of them knew exactly what to do about this wanting?—and yet neither could bear to let it fade away.

She hadn’t cried since she’d left home, but suddenly it was all too much: her father, the corruption, her siblings. Harper tucked her knees up to her forehead, her residual limb aching, and let the tears come.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Isaac could not remember the last time he’d been drunk like this. He’d started after he got home from the archives, with the dusty bottle of whiskey under the sink that he and Justin had paid a college student to buy for them. Just a shot to stop his hands from shaking and dull the knife’s edge of his memory. But one shot had turned into three had turned into cradling the bottle like a baby while blaring music from his phone in a pitiful attempt to stop thinking.

The dagger at his throat. Gabriel’s ambivalent stare. Blood dripping down his neck as he staggered through the woods, unable to scream for help.

The whiskey turned into a red Solo cup, the apartment turned into the forest, and finally Isaac reached a sort of intoxicated equilibrium. He floated outside his body still, but it was almost peaceful, as if he were watching himself play Monster in the Gray and down far too many Justin Shots from behind a movie screen. He was the eye of a storm of his own making.

He’d come to the Hawthorne house with May and Violet, but he’d lost them somehow on the way back. The clearing was close, he knew it was, if only he could find it. Unfortunately, all the trees looked the same at night and the world around him had started spinning a little while ago, blurring in and out of focus. Isaac knew he couldn’t be lost. He’d lived in this shithole his entire life. Even wasted out of his mind, the forest was as familiar to him as his own bedroom.

The smell of charred flesh. Hot, thick panic in his chest. Gabriel’s eyes like dark coals burning in the night?—

A hand clamped down on his shoulder and Isaac whirled, heat buzzing in his palms.

Justin’s blond hair shone ashen in the moonlight. Isaac blinked, trying to focus. Justin was speaking, he realized, but the words were fading in and out, disappearing beneath the shrill, distant sound of screaming.

He knew those noises weren’t real. He knew because they were Isaiah’s and Caleb’s screams from the night they’d died, forever echoing in his memory.

“What?” he croaked.

Justin’s grip tightened. “I said, are you all right?”

Isaac’s palms fizzled. His Solo cup was half-melted, plastic and alcohol oozing between his fingers. He opened his hand and let it fall into the dead leaves.

“Yeah.” The word did not feel like it was coming out of his mouth. “Just drunk.”

“I’ve seen you drunk,” Justin said, an urgency in his voice that Isaac had spent so many years latching on to as a form of affection. “This is different.”

“Fine,” Isaac drawled. “I’m really drunk.”

“Isaac,” Justin said softly. “You’re shaking.”

Justin’s hand burned on Isaac’s shoulder. Isaac’s stomach twisted painfully. He wanted nothing more than to lean into his grip and tell his friend what was happening to him. It would be so easy to implode and let Justin put him back together. It had been that way ever since the first time Isaac had come to after his ritual, his wrists and ankles still manacled. Justin had been sitting next to him, two fingers pressed to his neck, his eyes wide open with shock.

“What happened?” he’d whispered, and Isaac had closed his eyes and pretended not to hear the question.

After his ritual, Isaac drew attention like a beacon wherever he went. But when Justin was there, the tone of that attention changed. And as the town grew used to seeing them together, Isaac grew used to it, too. Justin was always there