The Deck of Omens (The Devouring Gray #2) - Christine Lynn Herman Page 0,94
standing beside her now. May felt a slight rush of wooziness as she turned to look at him. “This stump contains the closest thing Four Paths has to the glue that binds it together. It’s the place the founders did their ritual to create the Gray and bind the beast. It will allow you to strengthen your own bond.”
“How?”
“By drinking from it.”
“You’ve got to be joking.” May’s stomach churned. “I am not drinking that.”
“It will strengthen your bond,” Ezra said calmly. “Desperate times call for?—”
“No.” May stared at him. He looked far too natural here. The voice screamed in her mind again, louder this time, and she could not tell anymore if it was hers or something else’s. All she knew was that both her brain and the voice were saying the same thing: Run. “What do you want, Dad? What do you really want?”
“Would you truly like to know?”
May nodded, unease coursing through her. Something was wrong here. Something was very wrong.
Ezra reached forward and grabbed her hand in his, and suddenly, violently, they were somewhere else.
May knew immediately that it was a memory. She was inside Ezra’s head somehow, the same way Augusta could sort through people’s memories and pluck out the ones that displeased her. But how could he have founder powers? It simply wasn’t possible.
Ezra’s head turned, and May’s heart stopped.
She was sitting in the center of Four Paths, but it was not the Four Paths she lived in now. Nor was it the one she’d seen in the Gray?—not exactly, anyway. The buildings were old and barely buildings at all, the same dirt road branching out where Main Street was now, the same trees covering the lot where there would one day be a mausoleum. But everything was in color, from the green, verdant leaves on the chestnut oaks to the deep blue sky above her head. She lowered her chin—Ezra’s chin?—and saw that he was sitting on the founders’ seal, still made of stone. It was the only piece of all of this that remained unchanged.
“It is time,” said a voice beside her, high and oddly familiar. “The power doesn’t belong to us?—we have to give it back.”
She turned and saw a woman. The face was sharp and clever, angular and wild, with blond hair parted in the center and pulled back in elaborate, looping braids. May knew immediately that this memory was far older than humanly possible. There was the dress the woman wore, with closely fitted sleeves and a row of buttons that traced from the high neckline down to the gathered waist?—something out of a history textbook. And there was also the matter of that face, because May recognized it.
It was Hetty Hawthorne’s face.
She was staring at a founder.
May’s shock only multiplied as she turned her head and realized that Hetty was not alone.
She had spent her entire life trying to live up to these people’s legacy, and here were Hetty, Thomas Carlisle, and Lydia Saunders, all of them sitting on the town seal, in the same places the founder descendants now sat during the Founders’ Day ceremony every year.
It didn’t make sense that Ezra could show her this. It didn’t make any sense at all.
“You’re right that we have to end this,” Ezra’s voice said in the memory. May felt him pull the blade from his coat pocket. “But not the way you think we do.”
He lunged ahead, a woman screamed, and suddenly time skipped forward. The founders’ bodies lay at her feet?—Ezra’s feet—sprawled limply on the ground. There was blood, so much blood, dripping down the four lines that crossed toward the center of the seal. May had never seen so much in one place. And she had never seen blood change like this, foaming and steaming, slowly fading to gray.
Silvery veins began to spread from the center of the seal, cutting across the ground. And then the founders’ bodies began to change, too. May watched them twist and writhe, their eyes turning bleach-white, their skin bloating and graying. Their bodies began to disintegrate into iridescent liquid, and then gray spread across the whole world, draining it of all color.
This will never be yours, hissed a voice, tinny and furious.
“No,” Ezra’s voice snarled. He reached out a bloodstained hand. “Where are you? Where have you gone?”
The scene faded out, then, and she was back in the Gray.
May stared at her father, her stomach churning, and said the last three words she ever would have dreamed of.