If the Beast had been the founders’ creation, then everything May knew about her family’s purpose was a complete lie. They weren’t heroes protecting their town—they were handling a mess they’d made, a mess that had cost countless people their lives.
She parked haphazardly in the driveway and rushed up the front steps, her only goal to make it to her bedroom without incident. It was a goal that was immediately thwarted by Justin emerging from the kitchen as soon as she slammed the front door.
“What happened?” he asked, his eyes widening. “Did the corruption get worse?”
May shook her head. The Hawthorne photographs on the walls of their front hallway glared at her, harsh and uncompromising. When she was a kid, she’d thought they all looked strong. Now she just thought they all looked miserable. Like they’d passed that down along with the ritual and the powers.
She was so tired of trying to handle this on her own.
“I have to show you something,” she whispered, pulling her phone out of her pocket. “Something bad.”
She explained what she, Violet, and Harper had dug up at the Carlisle house. Justin peered at the letter on her phone, his face paling as he took it all in.
“Do you think it’s true?” he asked her.
“I don’t know. Violet seemed pretty convinced, but it’s just one letter.”
“If this is true, then we’re frauds.”
“I know.”
“And our whole lives were for nothing.”
“I know.”
“Fuck!” The defeat in Justin’s eyes was like nothing May had ever seen before. “We’re not even good liars. We can’t even solve a problem our ancestors might have created.”
“That’s not true.”
Justin looked at her skeptically. “What?”
May hesitated. Her founder blood might just be blood on her hands. Her mother wouldn’t listen to her. And it was true that her father had told her not to do anything rash, but she could not shake what Violet had said, either.
She knew who she was. She knew what she could do. And she needed to prove that she had been given those powers for a reason; that this disease infecting the town would not be her undoing.
“Justin,” she said softly. “What if I told you there was something we could do about the corruption?”
The hawthorn tree was dying.
Silver-gray veins spread from the place where the stone bark had cracked, winding around the back of the trunk and up toward the branches. The stone was mostly crumbled away, and the bark beneath it was melting and morphing, gray and pulsating, with iridescent veins sinking deep beneath the surface of the tree and winding toward its heart. Buds hung from the trees, still closed, the smallest of mercies. The stench was overwhelming.
May could barely stand to look at it. This was so much worse than what Harper Carlisle had done. It was something far more insidious and dangerous, something that would swallow her whole world if she let it.
“You’re sure we have to do this here?”
May turned. She knew her brother’s expression, that tone of voice. Justin was afraid. Something stirred in her chest—a distant memory, clouded and foggy, of her brother standing in front of her, his face bearing that same expression. Behind them, drifting through the door, were the sounds of screams.
Don’t go downstairs, May, he’d said. Don’t.
“May?” Justin said softly, and she was back in the present, blinking. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Of course.” May lowered herself into the last clear patch of grass she could find. “Let’s hurry up, though. I don’t know how much time we have.”
She flipped open the wooden box and drew out the Deck of Omens. It was the only thing that felt right out here, a small tether to the world she wanted instead of the one she was living in.
“I need you to ask a question,” she said to Justin. “About what you want me to change. Do you think you can do that?”
“Sure.” Justin sat hesitantly beside her. “How can we fix this?”
The weight of the question surged through May’s soul. A pathway opened, as it always did—but it was different from any pathway she’d ever felt before. These roots were not the normal ones she encountered in a reading, the ones that twined around Four Paths. They felt deeper—a kind of familiarity that made May wonder if they were her own, even though that wasn’t possible. She couldn’t do a reading for herself.
The Deck of Omens grew warm in her hands immediately, and May sensed something at the other end of the tether, something like fear. And when the roots began to vanish, one by one, it felt like they were running away instead of choosing which ones would show the correct path forward.
She focused her mind the same way she had before, beneath the stone tree. She thought of the corruption, tangling its way around the town. She thought of her fear, of her parents, of the world she thought she’d understood transforming into something utterly unknowable. And she felt it again—easier this time. One path spiraling more brightly than the others. A future that was different.
She grabbed it. She pulled. And as she pulled, an image swirled around her: endless fog just like what she’d seen when she touched the tree. But this time, something was different. A person was lying on the ground beside her, screaming and clawing at their bloated body. Roots rippled beneath their skin, wriggling up their arms and past their neck as a cloudy whiteness spread across the pupils, bleaching all the life out of them. Their spine gave a jerk, and then their body let out a horrible, sickening crack, the torso and legs winding in opposite directions, as if a hand had lifted them up and twisted them in two.
May gasped for breath and found herself beneath the tree again, shuddering. It was just a vision. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t.
“What happened?” Justin was kneeling beside her, looking concerned.
May shook him off. “Nothing.”
There were bloody tears on her cheeks and three cards left in her hands. May found she had to work harder than usual to hold on to them. Stubbornly, she laid them on the ground, then stretched her hands out toward Justin’s.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “Let’s see what happens.”
His hands shook in hers, clammy and anxious. May pulled them away, dread coursing through her.
She flipped the first card over. It was blank.
“What?” The word bubbled out of her throat before she could think to hold it back. To pretend this was supposed to happen.
“What does that mean?” Justin asked from beside her.
May’s stomach churned. “I don’t know.”
Never in her life had she heard of the Deck of Omens showing its chosen wielder nothing.
She flipped over the second card, then the third, but they were blank too.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered as blood dripped onto her collar. “What are you trying to tell me? What do you want?”
And then, above her, she heard it. The branches of the hawthorn tree groaned and creaked in a sudden gust of wind, and May raised her head, gasping.
The buds above her had opened all at once, dozens of hands unfurling. Fog poured from them, faster than she could comprehend, darkening the sky around them.
The corruption had gone airborne.