She knew that art style, even though it was ink, not paint. She would have known it anywhere.
“Hetty Hawthorne drew this.” It wasn’t a question.
Ezra nodded grimly. “It depicts a sort of plague that the uncaged Beast appeared to unleash in its wake.”
May’s stomach lurched. “It isn’t free, though. It can’t be free.”
“No, it isn’t,” Ezra said quickly. “Things would be quite different if it was. But from what you’ve told me, Four Paths’ condition has declined significantly since I left town. The line between the Gray and our reality has grown thin. Four Paths may be heading toward a breaking point.”
“A breaking point?” May asked. “You mean like the Beast escaping?”
“Maybe. This rotting tree is just the beginning of what the original founders faced at the hands of the Beast. If it does escape, this corruption will eat this town whole. If we’re lucky, it’ll stop at Four Paths—but if we’re not, it’ll spread farther.”
“We have to stop this,” she whispered, shoving the tablet back into her father’s hands. “How can we stop this?”
Ezra tucked it into his coat once more. He was calmer than she could comprehend—but then, this was not his town. He was here because she’d asked him to be. She was here because she had no other choice.
“Do you remember when you were younger?” Ezra asked. “That ritual you did?”
The forest seemed to blur suddenly around May, the colors and the iridescence bleeding together, and she realized those were tears.
It had been real. Those memories—he knew it had happened, too. He knew.
Her voice, when she spoke, no longer sounded like it belonged to her. “Yes.”
The first time he’d cut her palms and asked her to give her blood to the tree, May threw up afterward. The second time, she cried. But the third time, she walked away feeling unbreakable.
The lines on her palms had long since faded away, but the memories hadn’t, nor had that strange, persistent itch on her hands. And when the hawthorn tree did not bow to Justin all those years later, she wondered in the back of her mind if it was because it knew her blood instead of his.
“I always told you that ritual would be important someday.” Ezra’s face was solemn.
May swallowed, her palms itching, the forest still dangerously woozy. “What did you do to me?”
“The Gray has been threatening to overpower the founders for a long time, May.” His voice was gentle. “I knew that if we wanted to have any chance of fighting the Beast, really fighting it, the founders needed to be stronger. I read about the original ritual the founders did for power. I thought it might tip the balance if a founder did it again, but Augusta refused. Said it was too risky.”
“But you did it anyway.”
He nodded. “Because you asked me to.”
May’s heart was beating so fast, it hurt. She wobbled, then swayed, her father’s hand steadying her and guiding her to a seat on the forest floor. It was true that she’d asked. She’d talked to him about her ritual—about how scared she was of failing it. About how she knew Justin would do well, but she wanted to prove herself, too.
What if we could guarantee that you would pass it? he’d asked her. And she’d jumped at that chance.
It was why she could not hate her father. Because he had given her the power she had always wanted. Because he had seen in her the things Augusta couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Because he’d been right.
“The ritual worked,” she murmured, thinking of all her futures laid out before her, of grabbing the one she wanted and yanking it into place. “I’m stronger than I should be.”
Ezra knelt beside her, and there was that smile again, big and wide and proud.
“That’s not true,” he said. “You’re as strong as you deserve to be.”
Gratitude surged through her. She grinned and turned to thank him—and saw, from her new vantage point, a pair of sneakers twitching behind the nearest tree.
“Dad,” she whispered, extending a shaking finger.
She didn’t remember standing, or moving, but she knew the moment she recognized the face of the person lying before her. It was a white boy in Justin’s grade—Henrik Dougan.
His face was ashen, his eyes open and staring blankly at the clouds above. She would have thought him dead if not for the way his body was twitching ever so slightly. May’s mind churned as she noted the pack of cigarettes spilled on the ground beside him. This was a popular smoking spot—but clearly, he’d been interrupted.
“Hey,” she said, bending toward him. “Are you all right?”
As if her words had awakened something inside Henrik, a shudder roared through him, starting in his neck and extending down his spine. He jerked, his limbs flailing wildly, and May saw them then: roots, writhing across the skin of his forearms, gray and slimy, wriggling like slugs as they burrowed beneath the flesh.
She recoiled, nausea rising in her throat.
“I was worried about this,” Ezra said grimly from beside her. “It’s spreading faster than I thought it would.”
“The corruption?” May rounded on him. “This is the corruption?”
He nodded, and May blanched.
She’d noticed how this disease could hurt the forest. Never had she thought of how it could hurt the people who lived in it, too—people she was supposed to be protecting.
Her stomach lurched, and she turned to her father, the last words she’d ever expected to finish this meeting with already falling from her lips.
“I have to call my mother.”
The sheriff’s station was deserted. Isaac’s spine prickled as he walked down the sterile main hallway, his footsteps muffled by the stained linoleum. Above him, the fluorescent lights hummed and buzzed, flickering slightly. A phone went off behind one of the identical metal doors, its bleating, plaintive ringtone cutting sharply through the silence. Nobody picked it up.
He knew where he was going—the clinic—but he wasn’t prepared for what was waiting behind the door. All he knew was that there had been some kind of accident. May and Violet had both contacted him about this, which meant it was clearly an emergency.
Juniper Saunders answered his knock on the clinic door, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, the skin around her dark eyes creased with worry.
“Good, you’re here,” she said. Behind her, he noticed Augusta Hawthorne. He’d thought they hated each other—or at least, that they couldn’t get along. If they were here together, something was really, truly wrong.
He pushed past her and gaped.
The smell hit him first, musky and unmistakably familiar: decay, the same thing he’d smelled during his botched ritual with Violet. The clinic was dark and claustrophobic, the only window shuttered, the fluorescents dimmed. Justin, May, Violet, and Harper sat grimly beside the far wall, staring intently at the boy lying in front of them, his forearms and thighs strapped down to the cot beneath him. Isaac crossed the room, his stomach twisting as he recognized Henrik. His classmate—one of the people he was supposed to be protecting.
Henrik’s thin T-shirt was soaked through with sweat, and his body twitched beneath the restraints in small, rhythmic shudders. The smell was nearly unbearable; Isaac pressed his sleeve against his mouth and nose in a desperate attempt to stop it. Henrik’s eyes were closed, and the veins on both his arms stood out starkly against his pale skin, gleaming iridescent in the dim light. The skin itself had gone gray around the veins and spread outward, new patterns etching ridges into his forearms and down to his wrists. They looked uncomfortably like tree bark.