CHAPTER NINE

Henrik Dougan was the first to fall ill, but two more cases were reported over the next few days—people with roots burrowing beneath their skin, turning their bodies gray and iridescent. Their minds taken over by a monster.

News broke like a tidal wave across the town, sweeping every founder into its wake. Violet knew firsthand how possession by the Beast felt, and she expected nothing but hostility from the town once word of it got around. But that wasn’t what happened. She noticed it for the first time when Alina Storey stopped her in the hallway the day after Henrik was admitted to the clinic, her voice low. Violet technically knew who the girl was—she was the mayor’s daughter—but they’d barely spoken.

“Hey,” Alina said, a little breathlessly. “Is it true that the Sullivans are putting their blood feud behind them to try and help the people getting sick?”

Violet shrugged uncomfortably. Four Paths High School was so ordinary; it felt utterly surreal to get this kind of question here. It was pretty brazen, curious where she’d been expecting fear or even hatred. “Why don’t you ask Isaac yourself?”

“As if he’d talk about it to us,” Alina said, waving a dismissive hand in the air. “Everybody knows all of you are super secretive.”

“Then why ask me?”

“Because you’re new.”

“That doesn’t mean I’ll talk,” Violet said firmly, and she headed off. But it was far from the last question she got over the next few days. Her classmates wanted to know if Harper had her powers back. If she’d really helped defeat that “insurgency group” that Violet quickly realized was how Augusta had explained away the Church. And even when her classmates gave up on her answering them, they still watched her—not with mistrust, but with something closer to excitement.

Somehow, some way, the town expected her to protect them. Violet didn’t know how to tell them that it was only through her foolishness that they were in danger at all.

Nearly a week after Henrik had fallen ill, she stood in the clearing where she and Isaac had opened the Gray and stared hopelessly at the corrupted trees in front of her.

“It’s getting worse,” she said grimly to her patrol partners—Harper and May.

Beside her, Harper nodded in agreement. The smell was disgusting, but that was just the beginning of their problems. Iridescent gray liquid oozed steadily from the founders’ seal toward the trees around it. The trees looked terrible, veins spiraling around their bark and down their branches. The Carlisles had tried to block off the area with stone bells, but it had done nothing at all.

It was mid-October now, and the girls were dressed for true fall, Violet in a faux-leather jacket, Harper in an oversize green parka and a beanie pulled tight over her dark curls. May looked perfectly pulled together as per usual in a quilted pink vest and fluffy cream-colored earmuffs.

“That’s why we’re here,” she said, her voice high and crisp. “We need to keep track of its advancement.”

“I know why we’re here,” Violet said, more sharply than she’d intended. That was the guilt talking, but knowing why she was being harsh didn’t make her feel better. “You don’t have to treat us like infants just because we’re new to this patrol.”

“Well, you weren’t exactly the most willing patrol partners,” May said dryly. “No offense.”

Since the corruption had spread, Juniper and Augusta had made a patrol schedule together that was supposed to combine experienced and inexperienced founders and minimize danger by sending them out in larger groups. Which was how the three of them had wound up together.

Violet had no good reason to protest it. Technically, she knew she should feel good about this alliance—it had the potential to actually help solve this ever-mounting problem. But she’d already caused so much trouble with the Church and the Beast, and she hated the idea that, once again, everyone else would have to rally to fix something she had broken.

“We’re here, aren’t we?” Harper said as they picked their way through the clearing, staring more closely at the trees. Her hand was constantly hovering over the scabbard at her waist. Dusk had muted the world around them, brushing deep blues and purples over the trees in the final fading light of the sunset. “Not that I can really see much. Why is your mother so determined to do these patrols at night?”

“It’s easier to clean up messes in the dark,” May said, her voice strained. “It does mess with your sleep, though. I recommend bringing coffee next time—it’ll make the next day less horrible.”

Harper snorted. “Is that why Justin takes so many naps in class?”

May laughed, a sound that seemed utterly out of place in front of the decaying trees. “No, he’s just bored. And he knows there isn’t a teacher in this town who would dare to fail him. Well, knew, I guess.”

Her voice faltered, and Violet thought about how much the town’s attitude had changed, not just toward Violet but toward Justin, too. The trust extended to her and the other founders, whether deserved or not, was deliberately being kept away from the town’s former golden boy. He was glared at, whispered about, sometimes even jeered at. Harper had told her that his birthday was coming up, something that had basically been a local holiday the year before and was now clearly a massive source of shame for him. Violet felt for him, for all of them.

To be a founder, it seemed, was to fit whatever role the rest of the town had decided you would play or be discarded completely.

“Ah, shit.” Violet turned and saw Harper shining her flashlight onto a bit of nearby tree trunk. Something was growing from the gleaming, fleshy bark: thin silver strands clumped together. “Is that hair?”

“I think so.” Violet’s stomach churned. She didn’t understand how she’d managed to do this, to unleash something that was twisted and disgusting even by Four Paths’ low standards.

“Oh, gross,” May mumbled from beside her, her face ashen.

“Something has to be causing this,” Harper said. “If the Gray keeps opening and infecting our world like this, in a way the Beast has never done before, there has to be a source point. Some event that started it.”

Violet shifted uncomfortably. She’d hated keeping this from Harper, and she knew that May had clear ties and allegiances that were more important than any bond between the two of them. Harper had been nothing but a good friend to her, and May had given Violet her memories back when she’d had no obligation to do so.

They deserved to know what was happening here before it went any further.

“Harper…” she started. “I have to tell you something. Oh, screw it, both of you. You should both know.”

Once she started talking, it was surprisingly easy to let the words spill out. About the ritual she and Isaac had done about a week and a half ago. How the corruption had clearly emerged from that, how it was her fault again that the entire town was in trouble.

“So I think it’s us,” she finished. “I think we started it, and I feel so useless, because my power can’t even help this time.”

And when she was done, May said the last thing she was expecting.

“You didn’t start the corruption,” she said softly.

Violet’s head spun. All she could manage was “What?”

“Maybe you spread it, that I don’t know,” May said. “But you didn’t start it. Justin and I found the corruption around two weeks ago. When Augusta came back to look at it with her deputies, she insisted it was gone, and she wouldn’t take it seriously. But now it’s back. Which means you couldn’t have summoned it.”

Her relief was immense, titanic; she did not know how to say thank you, and so she settled for a smile instead—one that faded as May’s story sank in.

“You didn’t tell us about it,” Harper said slowly.

May shrugged. “We weren’t really getting along at the time. It’s not as if Violet told us, either.”

“That’s true.” Violet stared at the trees, distress prickling in her chest as she realized that while this absolved her of culpability, it didn’t actually solve anything.

She stepped forward, eyeing the hair growing from the trees with disgust.

“Get back!” Harper’s voice rang out a moment too late as a branch fell from the drooping tree. Pain tore down Violet’s shoulder, throwing her off-balance. She could feel where the branch had gouged through her jacket, biting into her flesh.

Her body hit the ground a moment later with a thud that sent tremors running through her injured shoulder. Her wound throbbed; she could feel a root wriggling beneath the skin and dissolving. It was an awful feeling, like a tiny ball of fire extinguishing inside her arm.

“Are you okay?” Harper was there, kneeling beside her. May joined her a moment later.

Violet forced herself to catch her breath. “Yeah. It hurt my shoulder, though.”

May helped her to her feet. “We should look at the wound.”

Violet nodded, still feeling disoriented as she shrugged her arm out of her jacket. She didn’t think she was corrupted, but she could feel something different all the same.

A feeling was unfolding in the back of her mind, in the same place the Beast permanently resided. A tether, spinning out from her and… into the trees. Was this how the possession started? It hadn’t felt like this when she was dealing with Rosie’s apparition, but she felt a stab of panic anyway.

“You’re okay,” Harper said as May shone a flashlight on the wound. “The gray is already almost gone.”

“So we really are immune,” Violet murmured.

“I’m still disinfecting it, even if it looks fine.” May riffled around in her small white backpack and pulled out a first-aid kit, ignoring Violet’s protests and curses as she swabbed the wound with peroxide.

“That hurt almost as much as the corruption did,” Violet said, scowling as she shrugged her coat back on.

“Don’t be a baby,” May shot back.

“Hey!” Harper’s voice was alarmed. Violet turned her flashlight beam and saw that the branches above them were moving again, coiling and uncoiling above their heads. That tether unfurled in her mind once more—a tugging, a connection. Just like the one she felt from Orpheus. “We need to get out of here.”

“Wait,” Violet whispered. She had an idea. A terrible idea. She grabbed that tether in her mind and yanked on it.

“Stop,” she said slowly, extending her hands.

The effect was immediate. The branches around them began to slow. Violet could feel them in her mind, strings that she could coil around her hands and yank in whatever direction she wanted.

“Stop,” she murmured again, pulling them taut. And just like that, the branches did as she had asked. She knew this wasn’t the same kind of control she had over Orpheus, but when she was right here, when she was focused—they would listen to her, at least a little bit.

Not possession, then. Not possession at all.

“How did you do that?” Harper’s voice was about an octave too high.

Violet’s words came out shaky. “I have no idea.”

“Your power raises and bonds with the dead.” May’s voice rang through the clearing, laced with a new respect. “I suppose that’s extended to the trees, somehow—perhaps the way the corruption is changing them has turned them into something you can control.”

“It isn’t perfect,” Violet said slowly. She could already feel the tethers unwinding; grasping for a new connection wasn’t working. “We still need to go—I won’t be able to hold them for too long.”

“But you can train it,” Harper said. “You can use this to help us. We’re both weapons now, Violet.”

The truth of those words coursed through Violet as they retreated back into the night.

Four Paths might be dying. But Violet had seen death before, let it engulf her, let it transform her. And she was ready to use everything she’d learned to keep that death from spreading any further.

She didn’t know if any of them could be the hero Four Paths seemed to want so desperately, now that they knew it could not be Justin Hawthorne. But at least she could do something to slow the spread of the corruption.

At least it wasn’t her fault.

May sat on a bench, her stomach churning. She’d just come from the clinic, where the three victims of the corruption lay still and suffering on their cots. The nurses who normally staffed it were back, but Gabriel Sullivan had stayed, too, monitoring their vitals with his powers alongside the nurses who did the same with their machines.

They weren’t getting worse, at least. After the disease’s initial infection, it seemed to slow down, keeping its victims’ bodies trapped in torment without destroying them. But they weren’t getting better, either. Their minds were not their own—instead, they were in thrall to the Beast, flat eyes tracking her every move and hissing whispers following her around the room.

For now, Four Paths actually seemed to trust the founders—the ones with powers, anyway. Gabriel returning to town and assisting with the clinic was helping stave off questions, but it wouldn’t last forever. May knew they weren’t beating back the corruption fast enough. Violet’s powers had helped a little bit, but May’s initial rush of hope that she could be a serious asset was mostly quashed. She could not reverse the corruption, only override the trees’ instincts to attack for small, precious allotments of time, while Harper couldn’t get control of her abilities at all. Isaac had been trying to disintegrate the damage, but it was growing faster than he could destroy it.

This corruption was a match that would light the pile of tinder her family had built, and if they could not stop it, soon enough they would all burn. Which was why she was so anxious to talk to her father about how they might put an end to it.

Ezra Bishop had been off on a research trip for the last few days, gathering his old study materials from his office in Syracuse and transporting them to the motel room he’d booked in Four Paths. Now that he was back in town, he and May had arranged to meet again.

She was hoping that he’d found something in his research materials that could help them, because May herself was at a loss. Usually it was enough to work through ideas in her own mind, but this problem felt bigger than her. She was starting to understand that this was part of why she’d contacted her father: because, as much as she hated to admit it, she was lonely.

She’d had friends who weren’t founders when she was younger, but they had all faded out the older she became, the more she realized how different her life would have to be from theirs. Yet even among the other founders, May knew she was the odd one out. Seth and Mitzi Carlisle kept to themselves, insular and careful, while Violet and Harper had found each other almost instantly. They’d only been friends for a few months, but their bond seemed inevitable and unbreakable in a way May had never felt in her own life. And although Justin and Isaac had made her feel included for a little while, she’d soon understood that she was merely tagging along, always a step behind, never their first priority.

Ezra was the only person who’d ever put May first. Who’d seen what she was capable of. Who actually listened to her. Which was why she was waiting for him behind the library while her mother was holding a deputy meeting at the sheriff’s station.

He appeared, eyes crinkled as he gazed into the sun. The disquiet in May’s chest shrank to a dull murmur as he adjusted his glasses and peered at her.

“I’ve found something,” he said matter-of-factly, not bothering with greetings. “It’s not ideal. Destruction looms.”

“You sound like an ancient prophet or something,” May said, frowning at him.

Ezra’s face tightened for a moment, but the expression was gone before May could ask about it, replaced by a gentle chuckle. “I’m a college professor, May. Forgive my occasional grandiosity.”

“It’s fine,” May said. “But what discovery is this?”

“I need to show you,” Ezra said, twisting his hands together. “Are you up for a walk in the forest?”

“Of course.”

“Splendid.”

“Where are we going?” May asked as she rose to her feet.

“The Sullivan ruins,” Ezra answered mildly as they walked into the woods together. May hadn’t been there in years, since the house had mysteriously collapsed in the dead of night. Nobody said anything, but everybody knew it was Isaac. “The family’s small now, I’ve heard, but also quite powerful. Especially the youngest boy.”

“Isaac’s powerful, sure, but it tortures him.” The words came out harsh, but May didn’t care. Even here, she couldn’t get away from the other founders. “He hates what he can do.”

“That’s a price often paid for strength,” Ezra said. “I believe it takes an exceptionally sound mind to manage the burden the Beast places upon you when you draw on its power.”

“It’s not a burden,” May said sharply. “It’s an honor.”

“You can be honest, May. I watched your mother struggle for years. I know that your powers can be both at once.”

May hesitated. “Maybe sometimes they feel like a burden. But it’s a burden I’m happy to carry, as long as I can help keep Four Paths safe.”

“Of course,” Ezra said as they stepped deeper into the trees. They were in a part of the forest that the corruption had yet to really touch, but even without the familiar smell and sights of the disease, May was still on edge.

Soon, they’d reached the edge of the Sullivan ruins. Nobody was foolish enough to venture here—a few had come to gawk in the early days after its destruction, but Isaac had made sure they were too frightened to ever return. Ezra didn’t know about any of this, of course, so he led them toward what had once been the backyard with no hesitation.

“Here it is,” he said grimly, as the familiar smell of decay washed over them. He grabbed a bandanna from inside his coat and tied it around the lower half of his face. May was glad to see he was protecting himself—the corruption couldn’t hurt her, but it could hurt him.

“I heard reports of strange smoke trails rising over the trees and came to investigate. This is what I found.” His voice was muffled through the fabric.

May’s heart stuttered in her chest as she struggled to process the sight in front of her. Cracked in half and sloped diagonally along the ground was a red-brown slab of stone, far away from the rest of the ruins. Twining around it were roots, dozens of them, iridescent veins shining. She knew where they were: at the Sullivans’ ritual site. But the altar, an ugly reminder of that family’s history, did not distress her nearly as much as the trees that loomed around it.

Hair hung from their branches in matted gray clumps, like the corrupted trees she’d seen on patrol with Harper and Violet. But there was something new about these. Something descended from the branches, buds made of strange gray petals that each folded inward to a glimmering, iridescent point. They were large and ungainly, each one at least six inches long, and the petals were long and skinny, twined together in a way that felt grotesquely familiar.

May stepped closer, nausea welling up in her as she realized what they reminded her of: human hands, the five fingers elongated and fused together. Her eyes roamed across the clearing, counting—there were nearly a dozen.

“What are they?” she whispered, turning around.

“Some sort of growth,” Ezra said, his voice muffled through the bandanna. He gestured to the tree closest to the altar. May watched, horrified, as a wisp of gray smoke leaked out of the tip and dissipated into the air, iridescent flecks swirling in the autumn sunshine.

“It’s spreading the corruption,” she gasped.

Ezra nodded grimly. “I believe so. While doing my research, I discovered more oblique references to the corruption we’re dealing with now. It would seem that what the founders trapped in the Gray was not just the Beast—it was the powers it possessed when it was roaming Four Paths, and those powers are leaking outward through the Gray and into town, hurting us.”

“But they don’t hurt the founders,” May said.

“I’ve noticed that, and I have a theory. I believe it’s because you are, essentially, already corrupted.”

May raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“It’s the equivalent of a vaccination,” Ezra said. “You’ve already been exposed to the pathogen in a contained environment when you completed your ritual with the Beast. The rest of the town, however, has not, and therefore they remain highly susceptible.”

“But what about a founder who failed their ritual?” she asked slowly, thinking of Justin.

Ezra hesitated. “If they were still exposed to it and survived… that theoretically means they could still be immune.”

May thought about this. Direct contact with the Beast leading to a later immunity would include Justin, but she was still a little concerned about the possibility of contamination.

“Either way, you don’t have immunity,” May said. “So be careful, okay?”

“Don’t worry,” Ezra said, gesturing to his gloves, his steel-toed boots, the bandanna. May realized that he had as little skin exposed as possible without wearing a hazmat suit. “It spreads through direct contact—for now.”

“For now?”

“These growths concern me,” Ezra said frankly. “The corruption comes from the Gray, so when it opens, it emerges in its raw form, which seems to dissipate fairly quickly on its own. But when it finds a host to infect, it clings to it, festering and growing, turning its victims into vessels for the Beast. That’s how it spreads: Hosts come into direct contact with other hosts, which allows you to monitor and halt the spread with relative ease as we search for a cure. But these growths seem as though they emit a constant stream of raw corruption—as if they’ve taken it from the Gray and channeled it into Four Paths. They’re still dissipating fairly quickly, but if they spread, it will be immeasurably more difficult to stop the corruption. People will potentially be infected simply by getting too close and breathing it in.”

May struggled to let the true magnitude of this sink in. If these buds bloomed, it would be impossible to stop the corruption from spreading more quickly. All their containment efforts would be for nothing. The thought made her want to rip each of the buds off with her bare hands and stomp on them, but she couldn’t do something that rash. Maybe all that would do was release it earlier.

“You’re familiar with the other founders’ powers, yes?” Ezra asked. May nodded. “I believe a team-up of the Saunders girl, the Carlisle who can petrify things, and the Sullivan destruction is our best chance to stop this. Their powers are uniquely suited to this situation.”

A flash of jealousy hit May. She was almost as useless as Justin when faced with such practical, easily applicable powers.

But they can’t do what you can, a voice whispered in the back of May’s mind.

Her powers were her responsibility. Her birthright. Her gift. What good was that gift if she could not use that to protect anyone?

“Their powers aren’t the only ones that might be able to help here,” May said slowly.

Ezra turned toward her. “Oh?”

May took a deep breath. “You know a lot about the Hawthornes. Do you… Do you know anything about a Hawthorne who could change the future?”

Ezra’s face transformed, and he stepped toward her.

“May,” he said softly, “do you have something to tell me?”

There was no going back if she told him the truth. He would be the only person in the world who knew what she had done. What she was capable of.

But he deserved to know. So May banished her last bit of doubt, and as the words spilled from her, a plan formed in her mind. She’d changed the future to get her father back. Maybe she could change it again—to make sure they defeated the corruption.

“Do you think it’s possible?” she asked him.

“Potentially. But you’ll have to talk to someone who knows more than I do about your family’s powers.” He looked at her pointedly.

May’s stomach churned. “Do I have to?”

“I would do it myself, but I sincerely doubt our meeting would be productive.”

“Don’t,” May said hastily. “It’s fine. I’ll do it.”

Beside her, one of the buds began to twitch, like a hand about to unfurl. May swallowed down her nausea and left the clearing behind.