She couldn’t do that again. Not willingly. Not when it had taken everything she had just to escape with her life.
“Absolutely not.” Violet slammed the book shut. “I refuse to be monster bait.”
“You just said you agreed that we couldn’t play nice,” Isaac said roughly. “And you already drove it out of your head once. I know you can do it again.”
“This is different,” Violet whispered, thinking of how the Beast had melted the flesh away from Rosie’s face, forced her to watch it decay. “I beat it that one time, yeah. But if it comes back, it’s not going to let me get away so easily. And we don’t even know if this will work. To risk everything like this—it’s reckless.”
“Maybe it is,” Isaac said. “But if you really want it dead, well, this might be our best chance.”
“I have to think about this.” Violet snatched up the journal and stuffed it in her bag. “Just give me a little time, okay?”
Isaac’s face softened. He made no move to get the book back from her, which Violet appreciated.
“All right. But know this: Nobody’s ever changed things in Four Paths by pulling a punch. They pay for every victory.”
Violet’s eyes strayed to the founders on the wall, all solemn, all beautiful, all dead.
“I know,” she said, and then she turned and strode out the door.
CHAPTER THREE
Most of Four Paths avoided the depths of the forest, especially at night. But it was the part of town May loved best. She tipped her head back and shook the tension out of her shoulders, listening to the birds chirping in the trees. A yellow moon hung above her head, a waxing gibbous surrounded by a sea of hazy stars.
“I think I just twisted an ankle,” grumbled a voice beside her. “This is totally going to mess with my race next week.”
The tension returned to May’s shoulders immediately. She moved her gaze away from the sky and toward the figure on her right—Justin Hawthorne, her older brother, Four Paths’ guilt-ridden golden boy and their mother’s undisputed favorite child.
“You’ll live,” she said tersely. “Stop complaining. You should feel lucky you’re back on the patrol schedule at all.”
“Yeah, on a trial basis,” said Justin.
May thought bitterly that a trial basis was more than Justin deserved considering all the shit he’d put their family through. He’d betrayed their mother and she’d still given him what he wanted.
Justin, it seemed, was impervious to true damage—he would spring right back up again no matter how many times you knocked him down, while May felt sometimes as if she would shatter into tiny pieces if she had to handle one more catastrophe.
“Let’s just concentrate on completing the route,” May said. He was ruining the way the forest made her feel at night, reminding her of everything she couldn’t be. “We need to be on alert. We don’t know when or how Dad is coming back.”
Mentioning their father was a cheap shot, but it did what May had intended—made Justin tense up, too.
“Are you totally sure you saw him returning?” he asked, not for the first time.
The Hawthorne family did not talk about Ezra Bishop. No one had ever specifically made the rule, but May had followed it anyway—it was an unspoken truth in a sea of other unspoken truths, and May had grown quite good at learning how to veer away from anything that might tip the delicate balance between herself, her mother, and Justin.
But there was no avoiding this. Not anymore. And deep down, May was grateful for it.
Augusta hated May’s father, so of course Justin did, too. But May missed him. He was the only person in her life who had ever chosen her over Justin. Who had ever made her feel special. She knew he wasn’t perfect—but neither was Augusta.
“I’m certain,” she said. “Mom’s pretending it isn’t happening. But it will. Those cards don’t lie.”
But they’d changed—changed for May. Justin didn’t know that, though. Nobody did. And although Augusta had reacted to the news of her ex-boyfriend returning to town about as well as she’d reacted to her ex-girlfriend returning to town—which is to say she’d firmly refused to talk about it—May knew that the future she had chosen would come to pass.
She trusted the cards. She trusted herself.
“I know,” Justin said quietly. “But he left so long ago. I thought maybe this time, he was finally gone for good.”
May remembered their father’s last day in town. It had begun with a fight, as most days did, but this time, when Augusta had told him to get out, he’d listened.
I’ll be back soon, he had told May, planting a kiss on her blond head. She’d clung to his waist, her head buried in the soft leather of his jacket, and wailed like a banshee when Augusta peeled her away. It was the last time she had cried in front of someone else.
Take me with you, she’d asked her father, and Augusta would never forgive her for it.
It had been seven years, long past soon, but May still held out hope for his return.
The birdsong had faded away now, and there was only the sound of their footsteps as they crunched through the underbrush.
“He promised he’d come back,” May said to Justin.
Justin shrugged, his broad shoulders silhouetted in the moonlight. What little she could make out of his face was frowning. “Yeah, well, he broke every other promise he ever made to us. Why would he have told the truth that time?”
The words flew out before she could stop them. “You’re not really one to talk about lies.”
Justin scowled in response. “Neither are you, May. Don’t think I’ve forgotten how you sold us out to Mom.”
“I didn’t sell you out,” May said. “I was worried about you. And I apologized for going too far.”
She had said some awful things to Justin. She felt bad about that. But she had been tired of tagging along while he dragged people into dangerous situations, and worried that his propensity for playing the hero would only end in tragedy. Isaac cared about Justin far too much to ever call him out, and Augusta indulged him too much to see the truth. May had been the only one to hold him accountable for his decisions—and in the end, it hadn’t even mattered.
Justin got to be the hero who helped save the day, and May’s hawthorn tree got turned to stone. It wasn’t fair.
“I know you said you were sorry,” Justin said. “But our mother has been taking peoples’ memories away for years, and you don’t seem to care about it at all.”
“That’s not true,” May whispered. “I care more than you know.”
She had cared enough to give Violet her memories back—but she wasn’t Justin. She couldn’t just go around flagrantly disregarding her mother’s rules and expecting to be welcomed back with open arms. Justin would never understand how hard she had to work to be treated half as well as he was on a bad day. Which was why she hadn’t told him about Violet.
Because he wouldn’t be impressed. Because he wouldn’t understand what a big deal it had been for her to act against Augusta at all.
Justin coughed, grimacing, and turned toward her, jolting her away from her rising fury.