Ronan could tell straightaway that something wasn’t right.
When they stepped into Cabeswater, Adam said, “Day,” at the same time that Ronan said, “Fiat lux.” The forest was ordinarily quite attuned to the wishes of its human occupants, particularly when those human occupants were either its magician or its Greywaren. But in this case, the darkness around the trees remained stubbornly present.
“I said, fiat lux,” Ronan snapped, then, grudgingly, “Amabo te.”
Slowly, the dark began to rise, like water bleeding through a paper. It never made it quite to full daylight, however, and what they could see was … not right. They stood among black trees blossomed with dull gray lichen. The air was gloomy and green. Though there were no leaves left on the trees, the sky felt low, a mossy ceiling. The trees had still said nothing; it was like the dull hush before a storm.
“Huh,” said Adam out loud, clearly unsettled. He was not wrong.
“You still up for this?” Ronan asked. Everything was reminding him precisely of his nightmares. The entire evening did: the race to the trailer, Robert Parrish’s specter, this sick gloom. Chainsaw would have normally taken flight to explore by now, but instead she ducked on Ronan’s shoulder, claws dug tight into his jacket.
And like one of Ronan’s dreams, he felt he knew what was going to happen before it did:
Adam hesitated. Then he nodded.
It was always impossible to tell in the dreams if Ronan knew what was going to happen before it did, or if the things only happened because he thought of them first. Did it matter? It did when you were awake.
They took a moment at the edge of the forest to establish their location. For Ronan, it was merely moving around enough for the trees to see that he was among them; they would do their best to do what he wanted, which included not letting anything supernatural murder him. For Adam, it meant linking in to the ley line that pulsed beneath the forest, unwrapping himself and allowing the bigger pattern inside. It was a process that was both eerie and awesome to watch from the outside. Adam; then Adam, vacated; then Adam, more.
Ronan thought about the story of Adam’s wandering eye and rogue hand. I will be your hands. I will be your eyes.
He sliced the thought out of his head. The memory of Adam bargaining part of himself away was too frequent a visitor in his nightmares already; he didn’t need to call it back up again through intention.
“Are you done with your magician business?” Ronan asked.
Adam nodded. “Time?”
Ronan handed him his phone, glad to be rid of it.
Adam studied it. “6:21,” he said with a frown. Ronan frowned, too. It was not puzzling because it was unexpected here. Time on the ley line was always uncertain, skipping to and fro, minutes taking hours and vice versa. What was surprising was that 6:21 had now happened enough outside of the ley line to arouse their suspicions. Something was happening, but he did not know what.
“Are you done with your Greywaren business?” Adam asked.
“That’s ongoing,” Ronan replied. Cupping his hands over his mouth, he shouted into the hush, “Orphan Girl!”
Far off through the still green air, a raven cawed back. Ha ha ha.
Chainsaw hissed.
“Good enough for me,” Ronan said, and set off through the green trees. He wasn’t happy about the gloom, but it wasn’t like he was a stranger to working in nightmares. The key was to learn what rules and fears they were playing off as quickly as possible, and lean into them. Panic was how you got hurt in nightmares. Reminding the dream that you were something alien was a good way to get ejected or destroyed.
Ronan was good at being a dream thing, especially in Cabeswater.
They kept going. All the while, the forest continued being wrong around them. It was as if they walked on a slant, though the ground beneath them was level enough.
“Tell me again,” Adam said carefully, catching up, “how your dreams were wrong. Use less cursing and more specifics.”
“Without changing Cabeswater around us?” Even though Cabeswater had been slow to respond to their request for light, it didn’t mean that it would be slow to respond to a nightmare prompt. Not when it already looked like this, a gray-green half-world of black trunks.
“Obviously.”
“They were wrong like this.”
“Like what?”
Ronan said, “Just like this.”
He didn’t say anything more. He shouted, “Orphan Girl!”
Caw caw caw!
This time it sounded a little more like a girl, a little less like a bird. Ronan picked up the pace a little; now they were climbing. To their right, a bare rock surface slanted steeply down with only a few small trees bursting from cracks in the naked surface. They picked their way cautiously along this precarious edge; a loose step would send them sliding for yards with no fast way to climb back up.