He shuddered and pulled away for a moment, and she hesitated, locking eyes with him.
“Is that okay?” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you—”
He gasped out a laugh. “Fuck. Yes. Do it again.”
Harper grinned and traced her nails down his back, a deep satisfaction stirring in her as he made a soft, eager noise and pulled her even closer to him.
The waves lapped around Harper, soaking her through, but she didn’t notice. She was lost in the curve of Justin’s shoulder, in his lips on the hollows of her throat, a different kind of drowning, where it felt as if any moment she spent coming up for air was wasted time.
And if this really was the beginning of the end, she thought, for Four Paths, for all of them, at least they had come together before it all broke apart.
It had taken less than twelve hours for the evacuation to be implemented throughout Four Paths. Technically it was optional, but Isaac had yet to see anybody protest. Although the founding families had quarantined the sites of the airborne corruption immediately, and no new buds had yet to open beyond the ritual sites, the clear and present danger could not be ignored.
The school had been shut down, houses shuttered and locked, stores temporarily closed. Isaac had woken up to a steady line of cars crawling down Main Street, all filled with people he’d known his entire life. It was surreal to watch them go. Surreal to think that after all these years of fighting back, Augusta had finally admitted that there was a problem the founders could not solve.
Or at least, a problem she wasn’t sure the founders could solve. Because they weren’t leaving. Not without a fight.
Which was how he found himself in the foyer of the Saunders manor, staring awkwardly around at the massive staircase that spiraled up to the second floor. Violet had crashed at the Pathways Inn with her mom the previous night, since the spire of the Saunders manor was compromised, and was supposed to be moving her stuff into the town hall that morning, but she hadn’t shown and she wasn’t responding to his texts. He couldn’t help but worry that the corruption had spread again, so he went looking for her. His unease only intensified when he found the front door unlocked.
“Hello?” he called out. Isaac did not like the Saunders manor. It reminded him too much of his old house—a gloomy building filled with endless reminders of the dead. He eyed the taxidermy beside the coat rack—an owl—and shuddered.
A noise disturbed the dusty silence—a note, ringing out sharp and clear, and then a series of chords. Isaac followed the sound through the hallway and found an open doorway into an airy, spacious room that looked out on the woods behind the house. Violet was seated at the grand piano in the corner, lost in focus; her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted, her hair glowing like autumn leaves in the sunlight.
For a moment, he was annoyed. This was where her priorities were when the entire town was in danger? But as Isaac raised a hand to knock on the side of the door frame, the music stopped him, held him in place as surely as if his hands had been bound.
It was like nothing he had ever heard before. A melody that crept through the corners of the room and wound around him, building slowly, her fingers extending across the keys in a way that was clearly as natural to her as breathing.
The music settled around him like a fog, plaintive and melancholy, and Isaac forgot about everything but his own memories, rumbling beneath those minor chords. The rough stone of the altar pressing against his back. His power swirling around his hands, uncontrolled and utterly wild. There was grief, sharp and furious; there was hope and fear and something deeper undercutting them all, engulfing him as she played faster. As the tempo of the piece sped up, Violet bent her head, her red hair falling across her face. And Isaac realized what he was feeling: Like this, his memories were an acknowledgment instead of an assault. A part of a bigger story instead of the entire book.
Isaac knew Violet played piano, that she was pretty good at it. But he hadn’t known that she could do this—take feelings he’d never been able to articulate, ones she could not possibly understand, and give them shape and form. The melody had reached into his chest and turned him inside out, and when the final chord faded away, Isaac realized he was dangerously close to tears.
He cleared his throat, his arm brushing against the doorway, and that noise must have been enough to rouse her from her trance.
Her eyes flew open—and immediately widened with horror.
“You.” She gasped. “How long have you been standing there?”
Isaac felt a rush of guilt. Now that the music was gone, he realized how strange this truly was. But it had felt wrong to stop her, and he hadn’t known how to walk away.
“Not long,” he said quickly, and then, in a weak attempt to change the subject: “What piece is that?”
Violet hesitated, a hand curling protectively around the side of the sheet music. “It’s… mine. I’m working on it.”
No wonder she had played with such passion, such fervor. No wonder she’d been angry with him for walking in on her.
“You wrote that?” He stepped forward hesitantly. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve been composing. I just have the first movement right now, and it’s pretty rough.…”
“It didn’t sound rough to me.”
She snorted. “Well, that just tells me you know nothing about classical piano.”
Isaac hesitated. Behind her, the forest stretched down the hill and into the distance, disappearing into the faint, smudgy horizon.
“It feels like… that,” he said, gesturing to the window. “Like the woods, like the corruption, like the rituals. Like you put this whole town into music.”
Violet froze on the piano bench, her dark eyes locked on his. He could not read the look in them at all. “I call it the Gray Sonata.”
“That’s perfect.” The words were soft, too soft, but she smiled at them, and that made him feel like he had gotten one tiny part of this whole interaction right.
“It’s how I deal with everything,” she said. “Rosie, Daria, this horrible cult town…”
“I wish I had a coping mechanism that good.”
“I’m not sure it’s very good,” Violet said dryly. “I’m still extremely sad.”
Isaac choked back a laugh. “Well, so am I. So it’s not as if I’ve got anywhere to go but up.”
Violet tipped her head to the side. “Do you ever worry that maybe you’re sad because it’s easy? Because you’re good at it?”
“Are you saying that I want to feel like this?” Isaac felt a sudden swell of hurt. “Why would I ever—”
“I wasn’t talking about you.” Violet’s voice had the same bite to it he’d heard the first time she’d spoken, when he’d seen the fire in her and thought that it was only a matter of time until Justin burned himself with it. “I was talking about me.”
He swallowed. “Oh. Sorry.” He’d been wrong about why Justin had tried so hard with her, when she’d first come to town. He’d been wrong about everything. He didn’t want to get this wrong, too; whatever this was.
“I don’t think either of us is sad because it’s easy,” he said slowly. “I think we’re sad because life has been kind of shitty to us, and people we love keep dying, and it would be more messed up if we weren’t sad sometimes.”