“Holy shit,” he said. “Do you smell that?”
May breathed in deeply. She knew the smell of Four Paths’ woods well—earth and oak. This time of year it was often tinged with the slight scent of dying leaves.
But May held a hand up to her mouth as a wave of decay washed over her, frowning. Dead leaves didn’t smell like this. Perhaps there was some kind of rotting animal—but no. This was more than that. It was the kind of smell that felt like a tangible thing, like the very air around her was somehow diseased.
“Yeah, I smell it,” May said, pulling her flashlight out of her pocket and shining it on the thicket of branches in front of them. Again she noticed how silent it was, but this time she felt a twinge of unease. She should’ve picked up on the strangeness of that ages ago, but she’d been too busy arguing with Justin. “Something’s wrong.”
“You think the Gray got someone new?” Justin asked grimly. They both had their flashlights out now. May scanned the clearing around them for any sign of the smell, but there was nothing strange about the nearby forest.
May shook her head. “The bodies… they don’t smell like anything.”
May was deeply disturbed by the corpses that the Gray spat out, but at least she knew what they looked like. She didn’t know what this was.
She held up her hand, noted the direction the wind was blowing, and pointed into the trees. “It’s coming from over there.”
“Great.” Justin crashed forward through the underbrush with all the subtlety of a steamroller.
“Hey!” May yelled after him, reluctantly following in his wake. “You are literally that dude in the first five minutes of a horror movie right now. I hope you know that.”
“We’re on patrol,” Justin said cheerfully from in front of her. “It’s our job to walk into trouble.”
May vehemently disagreed with that. Anomalies in the woods were meant to be mapped—she whipped out her phone and placed a pin at their location—and reported to Augusta. But this was classic Justin, breaking the rules, knowing there would always be someone there to catch him if he fell. If the Beast didn’t kill him, maybe she would.
The ground sloped upward into a small hill. May paused for a brief rest while Justin, always in better shape than her, surged ahead. She was searching her backpack for a water bottle when she heard her name.
“May…” Justin’s voice floated through the trees. “I found it.”
His tone was too somber to warrant a snippy I told you this would be disturbing.
“All right. I’m coming.” May clambered uphill and ducked beneath a low-hanging branch, pinching her nose in a futile attempt to block out the smell of decay.
She found Justin standing stiffly in the center of a small clearing, the shaky beam of his flashlight trained on the tree in front of him.
There was something horribly wrong with it. Part of the bark had faded from brown to a dark gray, and rivulets of liquid dripped down the trunk, leaving a slick, oily sheen behind them. The smell that wafted from it was nearly unbearable. May’s eyes stung; she tried to blink her tears away, coughing.
May raised her flashlight, shuddering as she traced the spread of gray toward its branches.
“What do you think is happening here?” Justin asked, his voice muffled by the hand he’d clapped over his mouth and nose.
“I don’t know,” May said. She had been in the Gray just once, the time she had saved Justin from the Beast after he’d failed his ritual. Something about this tree reminded her of the forest she’d seen there, pulsating and alien, branches twisted toward her like clawing hands. But it wasn’t the same—although it was damaged, the bark that remained was still unmistakably normal, still part of Four Paths.
She took a picture of it on her phone, then lowered her flashlight to the ground.
Iridescent liquid pooled on the ground below, soaking into the soil. May watched, alarmed, as it slid toward them. She’d never heard of anything like this before, yet it looked oddly familiar.
“We should move,” she said, grabbing Justin’s arm and yanking him back. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to touch it.”
For once he didn’t protest, his expression nervous. “Yeah. Wait—what’s that?”
He gestured at the tree, and May swung her phone flashlight forward, a terrible sense of déjà vu washing over her.
She didn’t know why it had taken this long for her to recognize it. But now, as she saw the half-melted trunk, harshly illuminated, and watched a tendril of gray emerge, she remembered sitting beneath the hawthorn tree just a few days ago, shuddering at that exact image. Before she could even fully process what it might mean, the gray dissipated, vanishing into the air like a puff of smoke. She shone her flashlight on the tree, on the iridescent trails of liquid still creeping toward them, but all signs of it were gone.
“Shit,” she whispered, her grip tightening on Justin’s arm. She had seen this coming for them, but that didn’t tell her what it was—or how to stop it.
“You saw that too.” His voice was raw. “The Gray. You saw it, right?”
May nodded, nausea churning in her stomach. “Let’s get out of here. Mom needs to know about this.”
They hurried back through the forest, their earlier argument forgotten. Long after the smell faded away, May still felt the touch of decay against her skin, as if rot were seeping into her very pores. And in her mind, that smoke unfurled over and over again, reaching for her.
Isaac Sullivan pressed a hand against the vault in his family’s mausoleum that he should have been buried in, the plaque still engraved with his full name, and sighed.
Then he flipped it off.
He didn’t particularly enjoy visiting his grave—it was always an unpleasant experience, best done with a stolen six-pack and a friend. But today it had felt necessary, even though he was stone-cold sober and was currently not speaking to the only friend he would have wanted to take here.
“This fucking family,” he muttered, the sound of his footsteps echoing off the mausoleum’s marble floors as he paced down the row of vaults. “This fucking town.”
Most of Four Paths’ dead were buried deep underground, their ashes stored in forgotten passageways in the catacombs beneath the town hall. But the founders each had their own wing in the mausoleum’s main building. It was red-brown stone and polished marble, dozens of urns tucked away in neat rows of vaults.
Isaac’s eyes strayed to the biggest plaque, the one at the top of the room, engraved with the Sullivans’ signature dagger.
Richard Sullivan was buried here. His founder. His ancestor.
Isaac had never met him, but it didn’t matter—he hated him. For making a deal he didn’t understand with a monster he’d never properly seen. For trapping his descendants in a town where people died in awful ways and leaving them to stop it. For giving Isaac the powers that had led to the urns slotted neatly beside his own empty grave.
Guilt churned in his throat and made his eyes water, but Isaac forced himself to look at the plaques on either side of his. Caleb’s and Isaiah’s. It was the least he could do, considering the fact that two of his older brothers were dead because of him.