Ronan hurtled into the dream. When he landed, elbows scuffing blood on the dirt, Kavinsky was already there, sunk down in the briars, covering his face. The trees Ronan knew so well were attacking him, claws of branches. Something about Kavinsky was the wrong color, or something, in comparison to the woods around him. It was as if the dream painted him a usurper.
“Guess our secret place is the same,” Kavinsky said. He grinned. His face was striated with fine scratches from the thorns.
Ronan replied, “Not such a thief tonight.”
“Some nights,” Kavinsky said, all teeth, “you just take it. Consent is overrated.”
The branches shook over them both. Thunder grumbled and smashed, close and real, real, real.
“You don’t have to do this,” Ronan said.
“There isn’t anything else, man.”
“There’s reality.”
Kavinsky laughed the word. “Reality! Reality’s what other people dream for you.”
“Reality’s where other people are,” Ronan replied. He stretched out his arms. “What’s here, K? Nothing! No one!”
“Just us.”
There was a heavy understanding in that statement, amplified by the dream. I know what you are, Kavinsky had said.
“That’s not enough,” Ronan replied.
“Don’t say Dick Gansey, man. Do not say it. He is never going to be with you. And don’t tell me you don’t swing that way, man. I’m in your head.”
“That’s not what Gansey is to me,” Ronan said.
“You didn’t say you don’t swing that way.”
Ronan was silent. Thunder growled under his feet. “No, I didn’t.”
“That makes it worse, man. You really are just his lapdog.”
There wasn’t even a tiny part of Ronan that was stung by this statement. When Ronan thought of Gansey, he thought of moving into Monmouth Manufacturing, of nights spent in companionable insomnia, of a summer searching for a king, of Gansey asking the Gray Man for his life. Brothers.
Ronan said, “Life isn’t just sex and drugs and cars.”
Kavinsky stood up. The thorns whipped at his legs, sinking into his cargo pants. His heavy-lidded eyes held Ronan’s, and Ronan thought of all of the times he had looked through the window of his BMW and seen Kavinsky looking back. The illicit thrill of it. The certainty that Kavinsky didn’t let anyone tell him who he was.
Kavinsky said, “Mine is.”
He looked to the woods. Holding out his hand, he snapped his fingers, just as he had to queue the first firework.
The forest screamed.
Or whatever Kavinsky had manifested had screamed. The sound tore Ronan to his spine. There was a sound like someone clapping their hand over your ear. A beat of air. Whatever was coming was huge.
The trees shimmered and wept, sagged and flickered. The already sapped ley line guttered and blackened. There was nothing left. Kavinsky was taking it all to create his dream beast.
“You don’t have to do this,” Ronan said again.
It was a ball of fire. An explosion in flight. It was a dragon and a bonfire and an inferno and teeth. It was the destruction of the Mitsubishi made into a living creature.
As it descended, it opened its maw wide and screamed at Ronan. It wasn’t the sound Ronan had heard before. It was the roaring hiss of a fire dampened with water. Sparks rained onto Ronan’s shoulders.
He could feel how it hated him. How it hated Kavinsky, too. How it hated the world.
It was so hungry.
Kavinsky looked at Ronan, his eyes dead. “Try to keep up, Lynch.”
Then both he and the dragon vanished.
He’d woken up, and taken it with him.
Hurry.
If Adam and Persephone had not already been at the final energy fray point, they wouldn’t have found it. Because as they stood there in the dark, staring at the great, flat, man-made lake, the ley line went dead inside Adam.
Kavinsky, Adam thought immediately. He knew it in the way that a dropped body knew it was falling. Both intellectually and physically. The same way he’d been so certain, earlier, that Ronan was the reason for their urgency.
And here it was.
Ronan needed the ley line. He needed it now. There was no more time.
But the ley line was dead and Cabeswater had no voice inside Adam. All he had was this flat black mirror of a lake and a car full of stones and a bag of cards that no longer said anything to him.
“What do we do?” he asked Persephone. Fireworks whined distantly, as threatening as bombs.
“Well, I don’t know.”
He threw a hand toward the cards. “You’re psychic! Can’t you look at the cards? They don’t mean anything to me without the ley line!”
Thunder boomed overhead; lightning darted from cloud to cloud. The ley line didn’t even flutter beneath Adam. Kavinsky had just dreamt something huge, and Ronan had nothing to work with.
Persephone said, “Are you the Magician or aren’t you?”
“I’m not!” Adam replied immediately. There was nothing inside him. The line was dead, and so was everything other inside him. “Cabeswater makes me that way.”
Persephone’s eyes mirrored the motionless water beside them. “Your power, Adam, isn’t about other people. It isn’t about other things.”
Adam had never been powerful in his life.
“Being the Magician isn’t about being powerful when you have things and useless when you don’t,” Persephone said. “The Magician sees what is out there and finds connections. The Magician can make anything magical.”
He wished fervently for the line to sputter to life beneath him. If he could grab even a hint of it, he might be able to gather clues for how to fix this last section. But there was nothing in the ley line. Nothing.
“Now,” Persephone said, and her voice was very small and soft. “Are you the Magician? Or aren’t you?”
Adam closed his eyes.
Connections.
His mind darted to the stones, the lake, the thunderheads. Lightning.
He thought, bizarrely, of the Camaro. Needing the battery just to get them home.
In indiget homo battery.
Yes.
He opened his eyes.
“I need the stone from the car,” he said. “The one from the garden.”
Hurry.