The Deck of Omens (The Devouring Gray #2) - Christine Lynn Herman Page 0,60

back together with the sheer power of her will, and grasped for the roots in her mind, for the future.

This won’t happen. It won’t.

She screwed her eyes shut, gasping, and when she opened them, Four Paths was gone.

Fog floated around her, misting in her hair and condensing on her eyelashes. Her hands were still outstretched, but the hawthorn had disappeared. Instead, she was standing on top of the founders’ seal in the Gray.

The fog began to dissipate, revealing a canopy of intricately woven trees above her head. Something wrapped around her leg, and May realized that roots were spiraling below her feet, crawling over the seal and twining through her ankles. A voice echoed in her mind, tinny and hollow.

May knew she should have been terrified, and yet all around her was a powerful sense of calm, of familiarity. Roots wound across her wrists as if she was part of the forest itself, and when she opened her hands, her palms were bleeding, cut along her lifelines, the blood mixing with oily iridescence.

As soon as she saw the blood, the voice in her mind changed. It was a deep, clear sound that reverberated through the roots and branches embracing her.

Welcome home, Seven of Branches, it said, and then everything went black.

PART THREE

THE CRUSADER

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Since she’d arrived in Four Paths, Violet had felt as if she had been slowly trusting people to hold parts of her. Harper had seen her long-buried grief for her father; Justin had seen her loneliness; Juniper had seen her grief for Rosie.

But Isaac had seen all three of them, and now at last she knew why he had understood it all so well. Violet had no illusions about the tragedy that had lurked around the edges of her life like some specter she could not name, even before she had come to Four Paths and realized it was a real monster, not just a run of bad luck?—she knew it was not normal to have so little family left at seventeen. But Isaac’s loss was something else entirely. It was frighteningly large; grief not just for those who had died that night, but for everything he’d believed, everything he’d been.

They were in a place beyond blame now, a place beyond words. So she had held him and waited until he was ready to leave the woods. They did not let go of each other the whole walk home, but their clasped hands didn’t feel like a promise. They felt like a necessity, like the forest would swallow them whole if either of them let go.

The sun had risen by the time they reached the front door of his apartment in the town hall. Violet knew her mother would be furious that she hadn’t come home. She turned to go face her wrath, but Isaac made a soft, scared noise in the back of his throat and whispered, “Stay?”

So she did.

Isaac’s bedroom was cramped and cluttered. Books were strewn across the night table and the floor, mixed with clothes that spilled out of the small closet tucked into the corner. Isaac curled up on the twin mattress, eyes staring blankly across the room. Unsure of what else to do, Violet perched on the edge of his crumpled blue bedspread.

She sat on something strange and shifted to the side, frowning as she pulled out a copy of The Hobbit from beneath her. “How can you sleep with these in your bed?”

Isaac pulled his pillow aside, revealing a small library of paperbacks shoved beneath them. “I used to hide them here as a kid so I could read after lights-out. Now it’s just a habit, I guess. Like how you carry around your binder full of sheet music.”

Violet gaped at him. “You noticed that?”

“You spent the first few weeks of school staring at it instead of taking notes. There are, like, fifty people in our grade?—it was tough not to notice.”

Violet snorted. They fell silent for a moment, and she glanced around the rest of the room, trying to match up the pieces of Isaac that were here with the ones she’d already gathered. A few raggedy posters had been haphazardly tacked up on the walls, for the kind of indie bands Rosie had cheerfully called “sad-boy music,” and beside them was a blown-up cover of The Great Gatsby, the famous blue one with a face in the center, with the eyes crossed out and JUSTICE FOR ZELDA written at the bottom.

Getting to know someone was something she was

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