“We all give the Beast part of ourselves when we do our rituals,” he continued. “You do it with your mind. The Hawthornes and the Carlisles have their conduits—the lake, the tree. But us Sullivans, we give it our blood.”
Violet shuddered.
“I know,” said Isaac. “Anyway… I knew my ritual would hurt. But I thought it would be worth it. I wanted to heal people like Gabriel did—he’d go on patrols and come back with all these grand stories about how he saved people who came out of the Gray. I realize now, of course, that they were bullshit. People don’t come out of the Gray alive.”
On his fourteenth birthday, the day of his ritual, Isaac had woken up early. Eaten his favorite breakfast, although he’d only picked at it, too excited, too nervous, to do much more than that. Found it only a little odd the way his family treated him, with far more affection than usual.
“I realize now,” he continued, “that my mother tried to stop them. We went on a drive a few weeks before it happened—and we got off at this rest stop, right, and then my uncles were there, and we all acted like it was fine, oh, what a coincidence, but no. They knew she would try to run with me. And they were ready for it. So on my birthday, my mom was shut up in her room. They were guarding her.”
“What about your dad?” asked Violet.
Isaac shrugged. “Never knew him. None of us did. Lots of single parents in the Sullivan family—we’re sort of all raised together. I realize now that having an outsider parent involved makes it a whole lot harder when ritual day comes around. Anyway, dinner tasted a little funny that night. It wasn’t until I was moments away from passing out that I realized I’d been drugged.”
He had come to later in the night, chained to the altar in the woods behind the Sullivan house. His family gagged him. They chanted. There was a dagger, and Gabriel’s face, and his neck hurt more than he had ever thought possible.
That was how it was supposed to go: the other Sullivans’ rituals were mere precursors. They gave their blood to the earth, to the Beast. But to renew it, they needed to give it one of their own.
A sacrifice.
Isaac did not know why they had decided he would be the person from his generation to die. In the ensuing years, he had tormented himself trying to figure it out. Perhaps they had thought he was weak. Perhaps they had thought, out of all of them, he would simply be the easiest to kill.
They’d been wrong.
After they slit his throat, his mind slid into the Gray, and he heard the Beast’s voice all around him, urging him to find the thing inside him that snarled and clawed and chafed against his rib cage.
And he had unleashed it.
His power had roared to life, wild and free, sparking its way through the woods around him. His family had panicked, because he was not dead—and then something else happened. Something that sent everything utterly off the rails. His mother and Caleb, rushing into the clearing to save him.
His family turned on one another after that. When they were done, Isaiah and Caleb were dead, his mother was unconscious, and everyone else had fled. Everyone but Gabriel, who had chased him deep into the woods until Isaac collapsed from sheer exhaustion, certain he would never wake up again. Until Justin Hawthorne found him, and one nightmare ended and another one began.
He finished talking—the sun peeking through the trees now, his heart heavy in his throat.
When he looked at Violet again, there were tears in her eyes.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said hoarsely, and he didn’t know which of them started it, but a moment later his arm was wrapped around her back and he was shuddering, dry sobs wracking his body to its very core.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her velvet sleeve. “I hope this is okay—”
“It’s okay,” she said, her hand making small circles between his shoulder blades, and there was something in her voice that he hadn’t heard from another person in a long time—tenderness without a single strand of pity. “Do you remember what you told me? How what happened to my aunt Daria wasn’t my fault?”
Isaac pressed his forehead against her shoulder. “I remember.”
“Well, this isn’t your fault, either. I promise.”
And so they stayed like that for a long time, holding each other. Something solid, something real, in the midst of everything he had destroyed, until Isaac was finally ready to stand.
It happened at dawn again. May thought at first that it was the alcohol tugging her from her bed, disrupting her sleep. But it wasn’t. It was the hawthorn tree calling her, a cry of pain. A cry for help. A voice that twisted and screamed in the back of her head.
May didn’t remember sliding on a sweater and her platform sneakers, but she must have, because it was only moments later that she was outside.
Frozen stone branches reached up, as if pushing the rising sun into the sky. They tugged at her chest and pulled her forward, the same physical sensation she’d felt the night Harper had turned the tree to stone. A tear slid down her cheek. She lifted her hand to her face; it came away scarlet.
“Harper promised,” she whispered, rushing up to the tree and placing her palm against the stone that had once been bark. “Just hang on a little longer.”
The voice in her mind stirred again, stronger this time, hissing panic at the edges of her thoughts. A deep crack rang through the dawn, and May saw it then, rippling out from the place where her outstretched hand had touched it: The stone was splintering. A deep, nauseating dread rolled through her as a familiar stench washed out from the tree: decay.
Something terrible is coming, she thought, but she knew that wasn’t right. Because something terrible was already here, and it was just now getting ready to show itself.
The cracks in the tree snaked upward, stone flaking away like peeling skin. The patches they left behind were gray and oily, glimmering with a sickly glow that pulsated slowly in the night air. Iridescent liquid shot upward, oozing through the cracks and winding around the back of the tree like silver veins.
“No,” May gasped as the branches creaked to life, buds lowering like extending hands. “No.”
She braced her other hand against the trunk, as if she could put the tree 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.