But Justin hesitated, and May knew why.
“Don’t try to free me,” she whispered.
“May—”
“Don’t,” she repeated. “He’ll kill you. You need to go.”
Justin looked at her one last time—and bolted. May sighed with relief as he disappeared from view. She hoped he could get out of the Gray on his own.
“Now, then,” Richard said slowly. “Your end of the bargain. Or I could hunt him down and dispose of him right now, if you like.”
“That won’t be necessary,” May said. “You can release me. I won’t run—I give you my word.”
“You can’t run,” he said lazily, but he waved a hand and obliged. May rose on her own two feet and closed the remaining distance between herself and the bubbling liquid.
Up close, the smell was overpowering. May gagged, shuddering, as her eyes traced the patterns left in the iridescent liquid. She swore that if she looked closely enough she could see entire stories playing out, figures living and dying in an endless cycle, an entire world inside this cauldron in the rotting, dying remnants of her home. It was harder than May liked to wrench her focus away.
“Drink,” Richard said as the fumes made her eyes water, as the patterns swirled before her again and again. He dipped his own hands in the liquid and pulled them out, grinning, liquid pooling between his palms. “Go on.”
May reached inside the stump and scooped out a handful of liquid, warm and steaming in her fingers, then held it reluctantly to her mouth. The liquid poured down her throat, thick and viscous. She gagged, coughing—but it was too late. She could feel it coursing through her, hot and strange.
Her body convulsed, and the door at the back of her mind swung wide open. A voice swirled around her, but it was three voices, not one, and she saw visions of skulls and daggers and melting trees dancing around her, hazy and iridescent.
Come home, the voices whispered. Come home, Seven of Branches.
And then there was nothing.
PART FOUR
THE BEAST
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Harper’s sword had never looked better. It was polished and buffed to perfection, the steel gleaming in the glow of Isaac’s living room lamp.
“You really are always ready to fight, aren’t you?”
Harper looked up to see Isaac standing in his bedroom door, his arms crossed, his mouth a thin line of unease.
“What?” Harper smiled at him. “Scared?”
He rolled his eyes. “Just keep your weapons away from my books.”
Harper was well aware that polishing her weapons in the middle of Isaac Sullivan’s apartment intimidated him. It was why she had absolutely no intention of stopping.
Crashing here hadn’t exactly been her first choice, but she wasn’t emotionally prepared to stay with her siblings at the Carlisle cottage—or Justin at the Hawthorne house. So Harper had chosen to join Violet at the town hall instead, even though it meant she had to be on Isaac’s turf.
She had lost herself in the familiar rhythms of preparing for a fight when a knock sounded on the apartment door.
“Are you there?” Justin’s voice drifted through the room, ragged and upset. “Isaac, open up—”
Harper and Isaac both rushed for the door. The surprise on Justin’s face when he saw them standing beside each other was quickly eclipsed by distress. He looked awful, eyes red and puffy, panting and sweaty from a clear sprint over to the town hall.
And Harper didn’t understand how, but in that moment she and Isaac somehow knew exactly what to do. Isaac shut the door behind Justin and rushed for his first-aid kit, while Harper guided him to the couch.
“What happened?” Harper asked as Isaac emerged with a towel. Justin accepted it wordlessly, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He looked horrible, clammy and pale, his skin drained of color and his hair glimmering with iridescent bits of slime.
“Water?” he croaked.
“Already on it,” Isaac called from the kitchen. “Now tell us what the hell is going on.”
“It’s May.” Justin’s eyes locked on Harper’s, wide with panic. “She’s in terrible danger. We need to call Augusta—”
“Slow down.” Now that the spaces between them had been closed once, it felt far too easy to do it again. Her hand fit automatically into his, where he curled his fingers around hers so tightly that it was almost painful. “We’ll figure it out. Isaac?”
“My phone isn’t working,” he said. “Is yours?”
Harper spared a glance at hers, sitting screen-up on the table. “Huh. No service. Not even Wi-Fi.”
Not that that was much of a loss. Isaac called his Wi-Fi network the Sanctum, which had made Harper roll her eyes so hard it actually hurt a little bit.
“Same here,” Isaac said, reappearing in the living room with a mason jar full of ice water. His eyes flickered over their clasped hands, but he said nothing. “Do you think the corruption is messing with the signal?”
“I don’t know,” Harper said as Justin grabbed the water glass and drained it in a few quick swallows. “Justin, what’s going on with May?”
Justin’s brow furrowed. But before he could speak, the lamp beside them flickered. A second later, every light in the room went out, plunging them into pitch darkness.
“Shit!” Isaac swore, tripping over something and clattering into a wall. Harper sat stock-still, waiting impatiently for her eyes to adjust to the change in light. She could see something moving outside the window, shifting and slithering in the air. Smoke. The corruption had spread—again.
“Violet and her mom are supposed to be patrolling down there,” Harper breathed. “Justin, did you see them? Did you see anything weird?”
“I went in through the back,” Justin said hoarsely. “I wasn’t really looking.”
“Well, something’s wrong,” Isaac murmured from in front of the window. Harper joined him a moment later.
In the last vestiges of the fading twilight, she saw movement: saplings, their veins glowing silver in the night, weaving together in front of the founders’ seal in the center of the town square. A mushroom cloud of dark gray smoke rose from their unfurling branches. Violet stood before it, her arms outstretched, red hair blown back from her face with the force of the whipping wind. There was no sign of Juniper at all.
“She’s trying to hold it back.” There was something like awe in Isaac’s voice.
A great crack sounded through the sky above them. The clouds ripped open, dusk fading to off-white while the Gray poured through. Harper watched, horrified, as it cascaded out in a great wave, the trees at the edge of the town square transforming before her eyes from brown to gray. The world was warping far more quickly than she’d ever thought possible; with every breath, the fog rolled closer to them, creeping across the treetops like extending hands.
The founders’ seal was falling, and Violet was still out there. Harper saw no hesitation in her stance, even as Orpheus’s small form wound angrily around her ankles.
“She’s not going to run.” The words were heavy on Harper’s tongue as she turned to Isaac and Justin.