The Deck of Omens (The Devouring Gray #2) - Christine Lynn Herman Page 0,81

moment before he wrapped an arm around her waist and brought her closer to him. His shirt was wet and cold. She slid her hand beneath the clinging fabric, heat flooding through her as he braced one hand against her back and used the other to carefully brush her curls away from her neck. His lips moved down her jawline, lingering at the edges of her collarbone, and when he reached her shoulder, she gasped and dragged her nails down his spine.

He shuddered and pulled away for a moment, and she hesitated, locking eyes with him.

“Is that okay?” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you?—”

He gasped out a laugh. “Fuck. Yes. Do it again.”

Harper grinned and traced her nails down his back, a deep satisfaction stirring in her as he made a soft, eager noise and pulled her even closer to him.

The waves lapped around Harper, soaking her through, but she didn’t notice. She was lost in the curve of Justin’s shoulder, in his lips on the hollows of her throat, a different kind of drowning, where it felt as if any moment she spent coming up for air was wasted time.

And if this really was the beginning of the end, she thought, for Four Paths, for all of them, at least they had come together before it all broke apart.

It had taken less than twelve hours for the evacuation to be implemented throughout Four Paths. Technically it was optional, but Isaac had yet to see anybody protest. Although the founding families had quarantined the sites of the airborne corruption immediately, and no new buds had yet to open beyond the ritual sites, the clear and present danger could not be ignored.

The school had been shut down, houses shuttered and locked, stores temporarily closed. Isaac had woken up to a steady line of cars crawling down Main Street, all filled with people he’d known his entire life. It was surreal to watch them go. Surreal to think that after all these years of fighting back, Augusta had finally admitted that there was a problem the founders could not solve.

Or at least, a problem she wasn’t sure the founders could solve. Because they weren’t leaving. Not without a fight.

Which was how he found himself in the foyer of the Saunders manor, staring awkwardly around at the massive staircase that spiraled up to the second floor. Violet had crashed at the Pathways Inn with her mom the previous night, since the spire of the Saunders manor was compromised, and was supposed to be moving her stuff into the town hall that morning, but she hadn’t shown and she wasn’t responding to his texts. He couldn’t help but worry that the corruption had spread again, so he went looking for her. His unease only intensified when he found the front door unlocked.

“Hello?” he called out. Isaac did not like the Saunders manor. It reminded him too much of his old house?—a gloomy building filled with endless reminders of the dead. He eyed the taxidermy beside the coat rack?—an owl—and shuddered.

A noise disturbed the dusty silence?—a note, ringing out sharp and clear, and then a series of chords. Isaac followed the sound through the hallway and found an open doorway into an airy, spacious room that looked out on the woods behind the house. Violet was seated at the grand piano in the corner, lost in focus; her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted, her hair glowing like autumn leaves in the sunlight.

For a moment, he was annoyed. This was where her priorities were when the entire town was in danger? But as Isaac raised a hand to knock on the side of the door frame, the music stopped him, held him in place as surely as if his hands had been bound.

It was like nothing he had ever heard before. A melody that crept through the corners of the room and wound around him, building slowly, her fingers extending across the keys in a way that was clearly as natural to her as breathing.

The music settled around him like a fog, plaintive and melancholy, and Isaac forgot about everything but his own memories, rumbling beneath those minor chords. The rough stone of the altar pressing against his back. His power swirling around his hands, uncontrolled and utterly wild. There was grief, sharp and furious; there was hope and fear and something deeper undercutting them all, engulfing him as she played faster. As the tempo of the piece sped up, Violet bent