The result was a bob the bright crimson of a founders’ medallion. Of an open wound. Of a rose.
“I’m going to kill a monster,” Violet had whispered at her new reflection, letting the words echo through the bathroom, and in that moment, she could almost believe they were true.
Now, staring at Isaac, she felt a little foolish.
“I know,” Violet said tersely. The Halloween thing was another Church of the Four Deities holdover—nobody dressed up or trick-or-treated, since it wasn’t considered safe. “I just… wanted a change, okay?”
“Fair enough.” Isaac frowned into the darkness behind her. “Did you invite Harper?”
“I tried,” Violet said, the words sour in her mouth. “She’s not interested. The Hawthornes are a bigger problem than the Beast right now, as far as she’s concerned.”
Violet knew firsthand how dangerous the Beast was. Fighting it was bigger than all their petty disagreements—but she couldn’t force Harper to see that. Her friend had already been through enough.
“We could’ve used another founder’s help,” Isaac said. Violet nodded. She followed him up the stairs at the back of the foyer and to the locked door in the hallway behind it, one Isaac had somehow managed to get a key to. It led to the founders’ archives—the best store of information either of them had been able to find on the history of Four Paths. They’d been meeting here regularly since Isaac had agreed to help her try to kill the Beast.
Violet was grateful that she didn’t have to search for answers alone. But it was hard to keep her emotions toward Isaac contained at grateful. She hated that she’d wanted some kind of reaction from him—about the hair, about anything. When she’d first moved to Four Paths almost two months ago, Violet had mistaken Isaac’s basic human decency for romantic affection. She’d been too starved for human connection to know the difference between friendship and a crush. But she knew better now.
Isaac had a crush, all right, but it was a crush reserved entirely for Justin Hawthorne. And it didn’t matter that Violet could tell Justin didn’t feel the same way—that Justin and Harper were locked in their own messed-up story. It still hurt. Which made her feel pathetic and grumpy and annoyed with herself.
She flipped on the row of harsh fluorescent lights in the founders’ archives, blinking at the sudden brightness, and sighed at the familiar piles of papers that loomed in front of them. The portraits of the four founders on the wall across from her watched them intently, something like judgment in their gazes.
“Well, then,” she said. “Let’s go look at some more useless newspapers.”
“Wait.” Isaac gestured to the desks in the middle of the room where they’d centralized their research efforts. Violet looked over and saw a stack of materials she didn’t recognize—notebooks kind of like the one that had held Stephen Saunders’s journals, clearly well-worn and referenced. “I found something new I think you might be interested in.”
“What are those?” Violet asked, stepping toward the stack.
“They belonged to the other members of the Church of the Four Deities,” Isaac said. “Augusta confiscated them when she took their memories—it’s everything she could find about their resurrection of the cult. Meeting times, rituals, goings-on, et cetera.”
“And she gave them to you?”
“Nah. I stole them from the evidence lockers at the station.”
Violet’s heartbeat sped up. “Holy shit. These could actually be helpful.”
“Wow,” Isaac drawled. “That was, like, eighty percent of a compliment.”
Violet raised an eyebrow. “Maybe it’ll be a hundred percent of a compliment if the Church actually knew how to attack the Beast.”
“I break the law for you, and this is the thanks I get?”
“You work for Augusta,” Violet said, flipping the first notebook open. The symbol etched into the inside of the cover was all too familiar: a circle with four lines cut into it, extending nearly to the center. “You basically are the law.”
“I’m not the Hawthornes’ attack dog.” Isaac’s voice was low but vehement. “You know that, right?”
Violet glanced up at him. He was looking at her a shade too intensely, and she knew that although she’d been mostly teasing, it was important to him that she didn’t actually believe what she’d said.
“Yeah, I know.”
His jaw loosened, and he nodded once, brusquely. “Good.”
Something had been off about Isaac lately—a layer on top of other layers, a problem Violet told herself wasn’t hers to try to solve. Besides, if she didn’t ask questions, she could still maintain the illusion that she didn’t want to know how he’d gotten that scar on his neck—or what had really happened to his family.
“Anyway,” Isaac said, a little too quickly, “I already looked at the Church’s archives. You can read them all on your own time if you want, but the only interesting stuff is in here.”
He pulled a different notebook out of the stack and flipped it open, tapping on the name scrawled on the title page. Maurice Carlisle.
“This belonged to Harper’s dad.”
Isaac nodded. “I wasn’t sure how Harper would take it if she was here, honestly. Us rifling through his things. But you said you wanted to kill the Beast—and I don’t think we’re going to solve a mystery that’s plagued this town for a century and a half by playing nice.”
“I know we aren’t,” Violet said quietly. “I don’t care. It messed up my family. I want it dead.”
“So do I,” Isaac said.
“You read these notes already. And you must have found something, or you wouldn’t have bothered with all this.”
Isaac met her eyes, and she knew she was right.
“Here,” he said simply, flipping the notebook open to a bookmarked page. “It’s how the Church of the Four Deities planned the ritual they tried to do on your mom. The one to turn her into a vessel for the Beast.”
Violet looked down at the page. The words were scratched in messy handwriting.
The Beast has warned us that it cannot survive in corporeal form in Four Paths without a host. If cut off from the Gray for too long, it will wither and die.… We cannot allow this to happen. We must not seal the gate before the transfer of its soul is complete.
Her throat went dry. This was exactly what they’d been looking for: a weakness.
“So if we can draw the Beast out,” she said slowly, “the same way the Church did, but cut it off from the Gray…”
“It’ll die,” Isaac finished.
“How can we close the Gray, though?”
Isaac raised his hands in the air. “My power extends to the Gray, remember? Any portal it opens, I can disintegrate.”
Violet winced, remembering how much messing directly with the Gray had seemed to cost Isaac, but nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “But that doesn’t answer how we would lure it out, does it? We’d need somebody connected to it. Somebody—oh.”
Suddenly she was back on the night of that ritual again, staring at her mother’s lifeless body lying in the circle of bone. Watching Rosie appear in front of her, in her bedroom, in the Gray, in the spire.