“I think he’s getting used to me,” he said, scratching behind the cat’s ears. Animals did not particularly care for Isaac, but this one seemed to be different. Maybe the cat liked him because they were both supposed to be dead.
Violet’s voice sounded a little strained, almost like she was embarrassed. “Um. Yeah. Anyway—the corruption is particularly bad back there. I know we’re immune, but I still suggest we be careful.”
“How are your relief efforts going?” Gabriel asked. “Isaac, does your power help? Maybe you should do something about the yard.”
“Not as well as it should,” Isaac said, tensing. He was not in the mood for a demonstration, and he certainly wouldn’t be doing it in his backyard. The altar was back there. It was the only part of his home he hadn’t disintegrated, because he wasn’t ready to face it. Besides, if he disintegrated the trees, the corruption would simply creep back from the ashes like a cockroach that refused to be squashed.
“What about you?” Gabriel asked, turning to Violet. “Half the clinic is talking about how you can possess the trees.”
“I wish that’s what I could do,” Violet said, shaking her head. “I move branches and roots out of the way—like an override, not a command.”
“We’re all doing our best.” Isaac was not about to watch his friend be criticized when Gabriel couldn’t heal anybody, either. “That’s why we’re working together, right? To try to find a way to fix it, because our powers aren’t enough.”
“Right,” Violet agreed, nodding. “But why did you want us to meet you here?”
“Great question.” Gabriel swung his backpack off his shoulder and pulled out a shovel, tossing it onto the ground like a challenge. “The Sullivan archives are right under our feet. We’re here to dig for answers.”
“Sullivan archives?” Isaac echoed slowly. He’d never heard of such a thing.
“Our family history,” Gabriel said. “We kept all of our records in the cellar, in a place Mom and all our uncles called the archive room.”
“We have a cellar?”
“They wouldn’t have shown you,” Gabriel said. “I wasn’t even supposed to know about it.”
Isaac pushed down a thread of hurt and tried to focus on the positive here. The Sullivan archives. The thought was intoxicating. It was possible it held the kind of answers the town archives never had. It was possible they could find a way to face the impossible task that lay before them.
Or maybe he’d destroyed it when he’d torn the house down, just like he’d destroyed everything else.
Isaac pushed the thought away. “Why did you only just remember this now?” he asked Gabriel.
“Honestly? I just didn’t think it would be helpful. But May Hawthorne was in the clinic yesterday, talking about how she thinks the corruption isn’t new. She thinks it’s something old that the original founders had to deal with.”
“Where did she get that idea?” Violet asked.
“Probably her mother,” Isaac said. Augusta knew more about Four Paths than anyone, but it wasn’t information she liked to share. Maybe she’d decided to give some of it to May. “So you think, if the original founders had to deal with it, these archives might have some information on how?”
“Exactly.” Gabriel gestured at the ruins before them. They were in the rubble where the kitchen had once been, beside the fallen fridge. Bits of metal fixtures gleamed dully in the dirt around them. “We need to proceed carefully—I have no idea what your powers will do to the ground, Isaac—so for now, shovels only.”
It took twenty minutes before their shovels hit something metal. The three of them reached down to scrape the remaining dirt away, and there in the middle of the ground, tarnished but still intact, was a trapdoor.
It had been there this entire time, Isaac realized, whenever he skulked to the ruins to stare at them and wish things had gone some other way, whenever he’d asked himself questions about his family that he had no idea how to answer. But that was how it always was in Four Paths. Answers were buried somewhere. You just had to know where to look—and be ready to face the consequences of whatever you found.
Nerves stirred in his stomach. Maybe the cellar had caved in. Or maybe the truths hidden inside it would make Isaac wish he’d crushed it all to rubble. Either way, though, there was no turning back now.
“All right,” Gabriel said, reaching down and inspecting the padlock. “Still in pretty good shape. Either of you know how to pick locks?”
Violet shook her head. So did Isaac.
“Figures,” Gabriel muttered. His gaze met Isaac’s. “Do you think you can disintegrate this?”
Isaac shrugged, swallowing hard. “Only one way to find out. Stand back.”
He knelt, spread out his palms and pressed them to the cold, dirty metal of the door. And let go.
In the first few months after his ritual, controlling his power had been harder. Isaac had woken in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, his sheets turned to ash beneath his palms. By now, Isaac had mostly clawed his way to control, but it still wasn’t perfect. Handling his power was a war he could not win. He could only hope to lose as few battles as possible.
As his ability roared to life, eating a hole in the center of the door that immediately spread outward, he concentrated on keeping the bubble around his hands as small as possible. The power wanted more, like it always did; it begged to be unleashed on the rubble, on the room below—but he yanked it back.
“All right,” he said, breathing heavily as he gazed down at the hole he’d left behind. The daylight illuminated dusty stone steps. “Let’s go.”
Isaac’s first thought as he stepped into the founders’ archive room was that he had been here before. Stone walls and high ceilings, an echoing floor, and a series of drawers pushed into the walls reminded him uncomfortably of the mausoleum. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find that both places had the same architect. Gabriel handed them flashlights, and Isaac walked slowly through the room, holding his light above his head, eyes peeled for anything more dangerous than a cobweb.
“Isaac,” Violet murmured from beside him. “Look at this.”
Isaac turned. Her light illuminated a mosaic stretching along the far wall: a tree, of course, laden with green, leafy branches. Violet looked ethereal in the glow of the light bouncing off the artwork, as if the forest itself had birthed her and sent her to Four Paths, instead of a shiny car and a series of family tragedies.
She had shaken all of them up, Isaac realized. Given Harper her memories back, knocked May completely off-kilter, asked Justin to grow into the man he was attempting to be. Isaac was not sure exactly what she had done to him. But just a few months ago, he would never have been able to set boundaries with the Hawthornes. Would never have been able to handle Gabriel without combusting.
Violet’s brow furrowed, her gaze turning toward him, and Isaac looked hastily away, eyeing the artwork more intensely than was perhaps necessary. He was immediately drawn to the center of the tree trunk, where a real dagger had been set into the artwork, designed to look as if it were stabbing into the wood.
“This is pretty fancy for a cellar,” he said grimly.