The night horror’s head jerked up as a car slid by the Camaro. It was a sexy, messy, stylish slide, and the car performing it was a white Mitsubishi. The car spun round so the driver’s side was illuminated by the Pig’s headlights.
The night horror clambered down the windshield. Crouching on the hood, it hissed at the newcomer.
The driver’s side window of the Mitsubishi slid down. Behind it was Kavinsky, his expression impossible to determine behind his white sunglasses. He leaned to get something from beneath his seat, and then he pointed it at the night horror. It took a moment for Ronan to realize what it was. It was a small, imaginary-looking gun, shiny as chrome.
Ronan dove down beneath the dash, curled small as he could.
Outside of the car, Kavinsky fired the gun. At the first shot, the bird man’s hiss stopped abruptly. At the second, its weight slumped audibly against the hood. It didn’t move after that, but Kavinsky fired four more times, until splatter appeared on the upper few inches of the Camaro’s windshield.
There was no sound except for the sly growl of the Mitsubishi’s engine. Ronan slowly sat up.
Kavinsky still leaned out his window, chrome gun hanging casually from his hand. He seemed to be enjoying himself, or at least seemed to be untroubled.
Ronan had to keep reminding himself he was awake. Not because he didn’t feel awake, but because everything that had just happened felt so acutely like something he would dream. He opened the door — it seemed pointless to stay where he was, as the Camaro was clearly headed nowhere — and got out.
Standing on the asphalt, he stared at the dead night horror draped over the front of the ruined Camaro, and then he stared at Kavinsky.
“Try to keep up, Lynch,” Kavinsky said. He withdrew into the car, and for a moment, Ronan was worried that he was leaving. Kavinsky was no ally, but he was human, and he was alive, and he had just saved Ronan’s life, and that was something. But Kavinsky was just returning the gun to wherever he’d got it from and backing the Mitsubishi farther onto the shoulder.
He rejoined Ronan beside the Camaro, shoes crunching on grains of glass.
“Well, that’s fucked,” Kavinsky said approvingly.
And it was. The smooth line Ronan had run his hand along only hours before was now torqued, the metal hugged around the telephone pole. One of the wheels had come free and lay in the ditch several feet away. Even the smell in the air was disaster: chemicals spilling and substances melting.
Ronan scraped a hand over the back of his head. He felt like his heart was collapsing inside him. Each wall came down individually, crushing the one before it. “He’s going to kill me. Goddamn it. He’s going to kill me.”
Kavinsky pointed to the night horror. “No, that was going to kill you, man. Gansey’ll forgive you, man. He doesn’t want to sleep alone.”
All at once, Ronan was done. He seized the straps of Kavinsky’s tank top and shoved him. “Enough, already! This isn’t your fucking Mitsu. I can’t go out and buy another one tomorrow morning.”
With a knowing look, Kavinsky unhooked Ronan’s fingers. He watched as Ronan pushed off, pacing, hands behind his head, eyes darting down the road to see if any other cars were coming. But there was no fixing this, no matter how Ronan looked at it.
“Look, Lynch,” Kavinsky said. “It’s simple. Wrap your tiny Celtic brain around this concept. What did your mom do when your goldfish died?”
Ronan stopped pacing. “I told you. It’s not your rice rocket. I can get him another, but it won’t be the same. He doesn’t want another one. He wants this one.”
“I’m going to be fucking patient with you,” Kavinsky said, “because you’ve had a head injury. You’re not listening to the words I say.”
Ronan threw a hand toward the Pig. “This is not a goldfish.”
“You people are such drama queens. I’m going to pop the trunk and you’re going to scrape that thing into it. And then we’re going to take a field trip to concept-land.”
Ronan stared at him mistrustfully.
“Look, you’re having a life-changing experience here. Get in the car before I need to get high again.”
Ronan had nowhere else to go. He got in the car.
Several hours into the party, Gansey and Adam found themselves in the north-wing hallway between the back kitchen stairs and Gansey’s old room. Vigorous conversation still murmured up through the floor. Adam wasn’t sure of Gansey’s situation, but he was aware that he himself was drunk. At least, his mouth tasted of champagne and the world seemed blunted and dark. He had not been drunk before. His father had done all of that for him.
They stood side by side on a lush purple Persian runner beside a docile Queen Anne side table covered with hunt-themed knickknacks. Dim gold versions of Adam and Gansey stood in a crazed black mirror hung on the wall. In the reflection, the ordinarily assured line of Gansey’s mouth was twisted into something troubled. He tore the knot of his tie to a rakish angle.
“Can you believe,” he asked tragically, “that I grew up in a place like this?”
Adam did not tell Gansey that he usually couldn’t forget.
“I wish we could go back tomorrow,” Gansey said. “I wish we could drive back and see if Cabeswater appeared.”
When he said the word Cabeswater, Adam’s neck spasmed, like a sly finger plucked a taut, anxious ligament. Another image tried to work its way through — a blink, and he’d see a man in the corner of his eye, standing behind his shoulder, looking at him in the mirror. Sad eyes and a bowler hat. Why not? Adam thought angrily. Why the hell not? “Rex Corvus. I’m never drinking again.”
“You’re not drunk,” said Gansey. “It was ginger ale. Mostly. Look at our faces in there. We’re older than we used to be.”
“When?”
“Just a minute ago. We’re getting older all the time. Adam — Adam, is this what you want? This?” He made an elegant, dismissive gesture toward the lower floor, pushing it all away from himself.
Adam said, “I want to get out of Henrietta.”
He knew it was cruel to say, even if it was the truth. Because of course Gansey would say — “I don’t.”
“I know you don’t. Look, it’s not like I’m trying to …” He was going to say leave you behind, but that was too much, even with the champagne lapping shores.
Gansey laughed terribly. “I’m a fish who’s forgotten how to breathe in water.”
But Adam was thinking about the suppressed truth: The two of them were on perpendicular paths, not parallel ones, and eventually, they’d have to go different ways. By college, probably. If not college, then after. A tension was building in him, like the one that sometimes haunted him late at night, where he wanted to save Gansey, or be Gansey.
Gansey turned to him; his breath was all mint leaves and champagne, him and them. He asked, “Why did you go to Cabeswater without me, Adam?”
Here it was, finally.
The truth was a complicated thing. Adam shrugged.
“No,” said Gansey. “Not that.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“How about the truth?”
“I don’t know what the truth is.”
“I just don’t believe that,” Gansey said. He was starting to use the voice. The Richard Gansey III voice. “You don’t do something without knowing why.”
“That whole deal might work on Ronan,” Adam replied. “But it doesn’t work on me.”
The Gansey in the mirror laughed humorlessly. “Ronan never took my car. He didn’t lie to me.”
“Oh, come on. I didn’t lie. Something had to be done, or Whelk would’ve had control of the line right now.” Adam cast a hand out in the direction of the stairs, back toward the party, toward the singing Latin. “He would be the one hearing that. I did the right thing.”
“That wasn’t the question. The question is: that night. You had to walk right by me to go. It’s like you’re so keen on being Adam Parrish, army of one.”
He was Adam Parrish, army of one. Gansey, raised by these adoring courtiers, would never be able to understand that.
Adam’s voice was heating. “What do you want me to say, Gansey?”
“Just tell me why. I’ve defended you to Blue and Ronan for weeks now.”
The idea of his behavior being a topic of conversation infuriated Adam. “If the others have a problem with me, they can take it up with me.”
“Damn it, Adam. That’s not the point, either. The point is — just tell me it’s not going to happen again.”
“What’s ‘it’? Someone doing something you didn’t ask for? If you wanted someone you could control, you picked the wrong person.”
There was a pause, full of the distant ringing of silverware and glasses. Someone laughed, high and delighted.
Gansey just sighed.