That is not the same thing.
Adam didn’t reply. Once again Persephone was giving him advice that sounded good but was impossible to use in the real world. It was wisdom, not an actionable item.
You made your deal with Cabeswater, not with a demon. Even though they look the same and feel the same, they are not the same.
“They feel the same.”
They are not the same. The demon has no claim to you. You didn’t choose the demon. You chose Cabeswater.
“I don’t know what to do,” Adam said.
Yes, you do. You have to keep choosing it.
But Cabeswater was dying. Soon there might be no Cabeswater left to choose. Soon it might just be Adam’s mind, Adam’s body, and the demon. He didn’t say it out loud. It didn’t matter. In this place, his thoughts and his words were the same thing.
That does not make you a demon. You will be one of those gods without magic powers. What are they called?
“I don’t think there is a word.”
King. Probably. I am going to go now.
“Persephone, please – I —” miss you.
He was alone; she had gone. He was left, as always, with equal parts comfort and uncertainty. The feeling that he knew how to move forward; the doubt that he was capable of executing it. But this time, she’d come an awfully long way to give him his lesson. He didn’t know if she could see him any more now, but he didn’t want to let her down.
And the truth was that if he thought about the things that he loved about Cabeswater, it wasn’t difficult at all to tell the difference between the demon and it. They grew from the same soil, but they were nothing like each other.
These eyes and hands are mine, Adam thought.
And they were. He didn’t have to prove it. It was a fact as soon as he believed it.
He turned his head and rubbed the blindfold off his eyes.
He saw the end of the world.
The demon slowly worked at the fibres of the dreamer.
They were difficult things to unmake, dreamers. So much of a dreamer didn’t exist inside a physical body. So many complicated parts of them snarled in the stars and tangled in tree roots. So much of them fled down rivers and exploded through the air between raindrops.
This dreamer fought.
The demon was about unmaking and nothingness, and dreamers were about making and fullness. This dreamer was all of that to an extreme, a new king in his invented kingdom.
He fought.
The demon kept pulling him unconscious, and in those short bursts of blackness, the dreamer snatched at light, and when he swam back to consciousness, he thrust the dream into reality. He shaped them into flapping creatures and earthbound stars and flaming crowns and golden notes that sang by themselves and mint leaves scattered across the blood-streaked pavement and scraps of paper with jagged handwriting on them: Unguibus et rostro.
But he was dying.
Wanting to live, but accepting death to save others: that was courage. That was to be Gansey’s greatness.
“It has to happen now,” he said. “I have to do the sacrifice now.”
Now that the moment had come, there was a certain glory to it. He didn’t want to die, but at least he was doing it for these people, his found family. At least he was doing it for people who he knew were going to really live. At least he was not dying pointlessly, stung by wasps. At least this time it would matter.
This was where he was going to die: on a sloped field speckled with oak leaves. Black cattle grazed far up the hill, tails swishing as the rain fell in fitful spells. The grass was strikingly green for October, and the shock of colour against the fall-bright leaves made it look like a calendar photo. There was no one else around for miles. The only thing out of place was the flower-strewn river of blood across the winding road, and the young man dying in his car.
“But we’re nowhere near Cabeswater!” Blue said.
Ronan’s phone was ringing again: Declan, Declan, Declan. Everything was falling apart everywhere.
Ronan flickered briefly back into consciousness, his eyes awash with black, a rain of flickering pebbles scattering from his hand and skidding to a mucky stop on the bloody pavement. Terribly, the Orphan Girl was just watching blankly from the backseat, black slowly running from her closest ear. When she saw Gansey looking at her, she simply mouthed Kerah without any sound coming out.
“Are we on the ley line?” All that mattered was that they were on the line, so the sacrifice would count to kill the demon.
“Yes, but we’re nowhere near Cabeswater. You’ll just die.”