The birds were headed along the ley line, taking Gansey back towards Washington, D.C., and his childhood home. He had a sudden, terrible thought that that was precisely where they were leading him. Back to the Gansey home in Georgetown, where he learned that his ending was his beginning, and he finally accepted that he had to grow up to be just another Gansey with all that entailed.
“What did you say this was? I-66?” Henry asked, typing in his phone again as another sign flew by them proclaiming the fact of I-66.
“However do you drive?”
“I don’t. You do. Mile marker?”
“Eleven.”
Henry studied his phone, his face blue by its light. “Hey. Hey. Slow up. Cop in a mile.”
Gansey let the Fisker glide down to something closer to the speed limit. Sure enough, the dark paint of an unmarked police car glistened in the median a little less than a mile from when Henry had noted it. Henry saluted him as they drove by.
“Thank you for your service, RoboBee.”
Gansey let out a breathless laugh. “OK, now you – wait. Can RoboBee find us an exit?”
The ravens had been getting slightly further away from the interstate with each mile, and now it was becoming quite clear that they were diverging in a permanent way.
Henry tapped into his phone. “Two miles. Exit 23.”
Two miles in an ever-widening triangle would put a lot of space between the ravens and the car. “Can RoboBee keep up with the birds?”
“I’ll find out.”
So they barreled on ahead as the flock grew harder to see in the darkness and eventually disappeared. Gansey’s pulse raced. He had to trust Henry; Henry had to trust RoboBee. At the exit, Gansey sent the Fisker racing off the interstate. There was no sign of the ravens: only ordinary Virginia night all around them. He felt strange as he recognized where they were, near Delaplane, quite far from Henrietta now. This was a world of old money, horse farms, and politicians and tyre-company billionaires. It was not a place of archaic wild magic. By day it would reveal itself as a place of genteel loveliness, a place so long beloved and cultivated that it was impossible to imagine it running amok.
“Where now?” Gansey asked. They were driving into nowhere, into ordinariness, into a life Gansey had already lived.
Henry didn’t immediately reply, his head bowed over his phone. Gansey wanted to stomp the gas, but there was no point if they were going the wrong way.
“Henry.”
“Sorry sorry. Got it! Floor it, turn right when you can.”
Gansey did as directed with such efficiency that Henry placed a hand on the ceiling to brace himself.
“Yay,” said Henry. “Also, woo.”
And then, suddenly, there were the ravens again, the flock tumbling and remaking itself above the tree line, perfect black against the deep purple sky. Henry pounded the ceiling in silent triumph. The Fisker wheeled on to a broad, four-lane highway, empty in both directions. Gansey had only begun to accelerate again when the ravens swirled up in a tornado of birds, tossed aloft by an invisible updraught, changing course abruptly. The Fisker’s headlights found a real-estate sign at the end of a driveway.
“There. There!” Henry said. “Stop!”
He was right. The birds had peeled up the driveway. Gansey had already blown by it. He scanned ahead; there was no turnaround immediately in view. He would not lose the birds. He would not lose them. Rolling down his window, he craned his head out the window to be sure the night road behind him was still black, then backed up, the transmission whining in excitement.
“Aight,” said Henry.
The Fisker climbed the steep driveway. Gansey didn’t even pause as he considered that someone might be home. It was late, he was strange and memorable in this fancy car, and this was a private corner of an old-fashioned world. It didn’t matter. He would think of something to say to the home owners if it came to that. He would not leave the ravens. Not this time.
The headlights illuminated ill-kept grandeur: the oversized teeth of landscaping stones lining the driveway, grass growing between them; a four-board fence with a board hanging loose; asphalt cracked and spewing dead weeds.
The sensation of time slipping was even greater now. He had been here before. He had done this, or lived this life before.
“This place, man,” Henry said, craning his neck, trying to look. “It’s a museum.”
The driveway climbed until it rose above the tree line and reached the crest. There was a grand circle at the end of the drive, and behind that, a dark and looming house. No, not house. Gansey, who had grown up in a mansion, knew a mansion when he saw one. This one was far larger than his parents’ current home, adorned with columns and roof decks and porticoes and conservatories, a sprawling entity of brick and cream. Unlike his parents’ home, however, this mansion’s boxwoods were overgrown by weedy tall locust trees, and the ivy had crawled off the brick walls on to the stairs leading to the front door. The rosebushes had shot up uneven and ugly.