The Deck of Omens (The Devouring Gray #2) - Christine Lynn Herman Page 0,58

than him, who’d made a game out of stealing the book he’d always carried and forcing him to chase them around the playground.

“They thought it was funny,” he explained, “because I was a Sullivan, and we were known for getting into fights, but I never did.” Instead, he’d been the baby brother?—scrawny and quiet, barely participating in class, always reading, always listening. “Anyway, when they stole the book, they’d always rough me up before they gave it back. Eventually, Isaiah figured out what was going on. Gabriel is five years older than me?—Isaiah was seven years older, so he’d done his ritual, and he was pissed. He asked me to point out the bullies, and one day, after school, he pinned down their ringleader and threatened him. He made me watch.”

Isaac paused, remembering the fear on the boy’s face as Isaiah pinned him to the ground, his knee in the boy’s back, and placed his hand on the nape of his neck. He’d never seen such raw, powerless terror before, and it made him sick inside to think of it even now.

“He didn’t hurt him,” he said. “But he terrified him, until he, um… he pissed himself. I begged Isaiah to stop?—but he didn’t listen.”

And later, when they’d been home, Isaiah had gripped him by the shoulders and stared at him with wide, wild eyes. “He said, ‘Pain is power,’” Isaac went on. “‘You have to show the world that you can hurt it more than it can hurt you. That’s the only way we survive.’”

“That’s a terrible philosophy,” said Violet.

“Yeah,” said Isaac softly. “But it’s kind of tough to unpack that when you’re eight and your family is your whole world.”

“Fair,” said Violet. “So what happened next?”

Isaac didn’t want to look at her for this part. He stared hopelessly at the destruction he’d wrought instead, dimly lit by Violet’s phone flashlight. Charred stumps and piles of ash; the smell of burning, the smell of destruction. “I grew up. And everything changed.”

Isaac hadn’t known much about his family’s ritual. They kept that a secret for as long as they could. But he had seen the scars: The lines that rose above his mother’s shirts and lanced across her shoulders. The cuts across Gabriel’s arms that he had taken great pains to tattoo over. They snaked down calves and across collarbones, in a slightly different place on all his aunts and uncles, but still scars, still there.

“We all give the Beast part of ourselves when we do our rituals,” he continued. “You do it with your mind. The Hawthornes and the Carlisles have their conduits?—the lake, the tree. But us Sullivans, we give it our blood.”

Violet shuddered.

“I know,” said Isaac. “Anyway… I knew my ritual would hurt. But I thought it would be worth it. I wanted to heal people like Gabriel did?—he’d go on patrols and come back with all these grand stories about how he saved people who came out of the Gray. I realize now, of course, that they were bullshit. People don’t come out of the Gray alive.”

On his fourteenth birthday, the day of his ritual, Isaac had woken up early. Eaten his favorite breakfast, although he’d only picked at it, too excited, too nervous, to do much more than that. Found it only a little odd the way his family treated him, with far more affection than usual.

“I realize now,” he continued, “that my mother tried to stop them. We went on a drive a few weeks before it happened?—and we got off at this rest stop, right, and then my uncles were there, and we all acted like it was fine, oh, what a coincidence, but no. They knew she would try to run with me. And they were ready for it. So on my birthday, my mom was shut up in her room. They were guarding her.”

“What about your dad?” asked Violet.

Isaac shrugged. “Never knew him. None of us did. Lots of single parents in the Sullivan family?—we’re sort of all raised together. I realize now that having an outsider parent involved makes it a whole lot harder when ritual day comes around. Anyway, dinner tasted a little funny that night. It wasn’t until I was moments away from passing out that I realized I’d been drugged.”

He had come to later in the night, chained to the altar in the woods behind the Sullivan house. His family gagged him. They chanted. There was a dagger, and Gabriel’s face, and his neck hurt more than