With a great sigh, she stepped back. Gansey touched her bloody forehead with care and then looked at Henry’s knuckles, which had somehow got abraded in the scuffle.
Adam’s hands had stopped jerking as the demon realized that they were well secured. His head rested miserably on Ronan’s shoulder, everything shaking, standing only because Ronan did not allow him to sink. The fresh horror of it kept rising in him. The permanence of it, the corruption of Adam Parrish, the deadness of Glendower.
The Orphan Girl crept in close. She carefully undid the dirty watch on her wrist, and then she fastened it on one of Adam’s, loosely, above where he was tied. Then she kissed his arm.
“Thank you,” he said, dully. Then, to Gansey, in a low voice, “I might as well be the sacrifice. I’m ruined.”
“No,” Blue, Gansey and Ronan said at once.
“Let’s not get carried away just because you just tried to kill someone,” Henry clarified. He sucked on his bloody knuckles.
Adam finally lifted his head. “Then you better cover my eyes.”
Gansey looked puzzled. “What?”
“Because,” Adam said bitterly, “otherwise they’ll betray you.”
Depending on where you began the story, it was about Seondeok.
She had not meant to be an international art dealer and small-time crime boss. It had begun as a mere desire for something more, and then a slow realization that something more was never going to be reachable on her current path. She was married to a clever man she’d met in Hong Kong, and she had several bright children who mostly took after him except for the one, and she had seen how her life would play out.
Then she had gone mad.
It hadn’t been a long madness. A year, perhaps, of fits and visions and being found prowling through the streets. And when she had come out the other side, she had discovered that she had a psychic’s eyes and a shaman’s touch and that she was going to make a career of it. She’d renamed herself Seondeok and the legend had been born.
She handled wonder every day.
The robotic bee was the moment she realized she was on a fated path. Henry, her middle son, shone brightly, but he never seemed able to direct that light outside of himself. And so when Niall Lynch offered to find her a bauble, a token, a magical toy, that would help him, she was listening. The beautiful bee struck her the moment she saw it. Of course he had also shown it to Laumonier and to Greenmantle and to Valquez and to Mackey and to Xi, but that was to be expected because he was a scoundrel and could not help himself. But when he had met Henry, he had let Seondeok have it for nearly nothing, and she would not forget that.
Of course, it had been a gift and a penalty, since later, Laumonier had kidnapped Henry for it.
She would have revenge for that.
She didn’t regret it. She couldn’t make herself regret it, even when it threatened her children. This was a fated path, and she felt right on it, even when it was hard.
When she found herself next to the Gray Man, Greenmantle’s old hired muscle, in an off-campus Aglionby Academy lot, and discovered that the blood on his shoes was Laumonier’s, she was instantly interested in what he had to say.
“A brave new way of doing business,” the Gray Man said in a low voice, as the parking lot was quickly beginning to fill up with a small but potent number of forbidding-looking people. It was not that they looked dangerous, necessarily. Just odd in a way that suggested they didn’t look at the world at all like you did. They were a very different group than the people who had come to the school the night before. Technically both gatherings had a lot to do with politics. “An ethical way. There are no armed guards outside of furniture stores to prevent people from bludgeoning employees and carrying out sofas. That is the business I want.”
“That will not be an easy goal,” Seondeok said, her voice also low. She kept her eyes on the cars pulling up, and also on her phone. She knew that Henry had been told to stay away, and she trusted him to keep his head down, but she also didn’t trust Laumonier in the slightest. There was no point tempting them by showing that Henry – and by extension, his bee – were within close proximity. “The people have got used to carrying sofas, and one does not like to stop stealing sofas when others haven’t yet agreed to.”
“Persuasion might be required at the beginning,” the Gray Man admitted.
“You are talking years.”
“I am committed,” he replied. “So long as I can get a decent number of people who are interested in that vision. People I like.”
Here was Laumonier, finally, one of them on the phone. His face suggested he was trying to contact the third one, but the third one was not in a condition to answer. The Gray Man would discuss this with them after the sale had happened. In a persuasive way aided with some truly fantastic weapons that he had found on the Lynch farm.
Seondeok said, “I am not people you like.”