One of the great things about Blue Sargent was that she never really gave up hope. He would have told her this, but he knew it would only upset her more. He said, “I can’t watch Ronan die, Blue. And Adam – and Matthew – and all this? We don’t have anything else. You already saw my spirit. You already know what we chose!”
Blue closed her eyes, and two tears ran out of them. She did not cry noisily, or in a way that asked him to say anything different. She was a hopeful creature, but she was also a sensible creature.
“Untie me,” Adam said from the backseat. “If you’re going to do it now, for God’s sake, untie me.” His blindfold was off and he was looking at Gansey, his eyes his own instead of the demon’s. His chest was moving fast. If there was any other way, Gansey knew Adam would have told him.
“Is it safe?” Gansey asked.
“Safe as life,” Adam replied. “Untie me.”
Henry had been waiting for something to do – he clearly did not know how to process this without having a task – so he leapt to untie Adam. Shaking his reddened wrists free of the ribbon, Adam first touched the top of the Orphan Girl’s head and whispered, “It’s going to be all right.” And then he climbed out of the car and stood before Gansey. What could they possibly say?
Gansey bumped fists with Adam and they nodded at each other. It was stupid, inadequate.
Ronan clawed briefly back to consciousness; flowers spilled out of the car in shades of blue Gansey had never seen. Ronan was frozen in place, as he always was after a dream, and black slowly oozed out of one of his nostrils.
Gansey had never understood really what it meant for Ronan to have to live with his nightmares.
He understood it now.
There was no time.
“Thanks for everything, Henry,” Gansey said. “You’re a prince among men.”
Henry’s face was blank.
Blue said, “I hate this.”
It was right, though. Gansey felt the feeling of time slipping – one last time. The sense of having done this before. He gently laid the backs of his hands on her cheeks. He whispered, “It’ll be OK. I’m ready. Blue, kiss me.”
The rain spattered about them, kicking up splashes of red-black, making the petals around them twitch. Dream things from Ronan’s newly healed imagination piled around their feet. In the rain, everything smelled of these mountains in fall: oak leaves and hay fields, ozone and dirt turned over. It was beautiful here, and Gansey loved it. It had taken a long time, but he’d ended up where he wanted after all.
Blue kissed him.
He had dreamt of it often enough, and here it was, willed into life. In another world, it would just be this: a girl softly pressing her lips to a boy’s. But in this one, Gansey felt the effects of it at once. Blue, a mirror, an amplifier, a strange half-tree soul with ley line magic running through her. And Gansey, restored once by the ley line’s power, given a ley line heart, another kind of mirror. And when they were pointed at each other, the weaker one gave.
Gansey’s ley line heart had been gifted, not grown.
He pulled back from her.
Out loud, with intention, with the voice that left no room for doubt, he said, “Let it be to kill the demon.”
Right after he spoke, Blue threw her arms tightly around his neck. Right after he spoke, she pressed her face into the side of his. Right after he spoke, she held him like a shouted word. Love, love, love.
He fell quietly from her arms.
He was a king.
Depending on where you began the story, it was about Noah Czerny.
The problem with being dead was that your stories stopped being lines and started being circles. They started to begin and end in the same moment: the moment of dying. It was difficult to focus on other ways of telling stories, and to remember that the living were interested in the specific order of events. Chronology. That was the word. Noah was more interested in the spiritual weight of a minute. Getting killed. There was a story. He never stopped noticing that moment. Every time he saw it, he slowed and watched it, remembering precisely every physical sensation that he had experienced during the murder.
Murder.
Sometimes he got caught on a loop of constantly understanding that he had been murdered, and rage made him smash things in Ronan’s room or kick the mint pot off Gansey’s desk or punch in a pane of glass on the stairs up to the apartment.
Sometimes he got caught in this moment instead. Gansey’s death. Watching Gansey die, again and again and again. Wondering if he would have been that brave in the forest if Whelk had asked him to die instead of forcing him to. He didn’t think he would have. He wasn’t sure they’d been that sort of friends. Sometimes when he went back to see the still-living Gansey, he forgot whether or not this Gansey already knew that he was going to die. It was easy to know everything when time was circular, but it was hard to remember how to use it.