He turned the phone around so that Blue could watch the live reporting of Laumonier’s actions. The text came in fits and starts, and was strangely conversational, describing Laumonier’s slow progress out of the parking lot in the same way that Henry had described the upcoming artefact sale. Henry’s thoughts, on screen. It was a weird and specific magic.
As they watched it together, Gansey opened up his overcoat and tucked Blue inside it with him. This, too, was a weird and specific magic, the ease of it, the warmth of him around her, his heartbeat thumping against her back. He cupped a hand over her injured eye as if to protect it from something, but it was only an excuse for his fingertips to touch her.
Henry was unaffected by this public display of closeness. He pressed fingers against the screen of his phone; it blinked a few times and reported something to him in Hangul.
“Do you want …” Blue started, and hesitated. “Should you stay with one of us tonight?”
Surprise lit Henry’s smile, but he shook his head. “No, I can’t. I must go back to Litchfield, a captain to his ship. I wouldn’t forgive myself if they came looking for me and found Cheng Two and the others instead. I will set RoboBee watch until we can —” He circled one finger in a gesture that indicated something like a rendezvous.
“Tomorrow?” Gansey asked. “I’m supposed to meet my sister for lunch. Both of you please come.”
Neither Henry nor Blue had to say anything out loud; Gansey surely had to know that merely by asking, he’d assured both would come.
“I take it we’re friends now,” Henry said.
“We must be,” Gansey replied. “Jane says it should be so.”
“It should be so,” Blue agreed.
Now something else lit Henry’s smile. It was genuine and pleased but also something more, and there were not quite words for it. He pocketed his phone. “Good, good. The coast is clear; I leave you. Until tomorrow.”
That night, Ronan didn’t dream.
After Gansey and Blue had left the Barns, he leaned against one of the front porch pillars and looked out at his fireflies winking in the chilly darkness. He was so raw and electric that it was hard to believe that he was awake. Normally it took sleep to strip him to this naked energy. But this was not a dream. This was his life, his home, his night.
After a few moments, he heard the door ease open behind him and Adam joined him. Silently they looked over the dancing lights in the fields. It was not difficult to see that Adam was working intensely with his own thoughts. Words kept rising up inside Ronan and bursting before they ever escaped. He felt he’d already asked the question; he couldn’t also give the answer.
Three deer appeared at the tree line, just at the edge of the porch light’s reach. One of them was the beautiful pale buck, his antlers like branches or roots. He watched them, and they watched him, and then Ronan could not stand it. “Adam?”
When Adam kissed him, it was every mile per hour Ronan had ever gone over the speed limit. It was every window-down, goose-bumps-on-skin, teeth-chattering-cold night drive. It was Adam’s ribs under Ronan’s hands and Adam’s mouth on his mouth, again and again and again. It was stubble on lips and Ronan having to stop, to get his breath, to restart his heart. They were both hungry animals, but Adam had been starving for longer.
Inside, they pretended they would dream, but they did not. They sprawled on the living room sofa and Adam studied the tattoo that covered Ronan’s back: all the sharp edges that hooked wondrously and fearfully into each other.
“Unguibus et rostro,” Adam said.
Ronan put Adam’s fingers to his mouth.
He was never sleeping again.
That night, the demon didn’t sleep.
While Piper Greenmantle slept fitfully, dreaming of the upcoming sale and her rise to fame in the magical artefact community, the demon unmade.
It unmade the physical trappings of Cabeswater – the trees, the creatures, the ferns, the rivers, the stones – but it also unmade the dreamy ideas of the forest. The memories caught in groves, the songs invented only in night-time, the creeping euphoria that ebbed and flowed around one of the waterfalls. Everything that had been dreamt into this place it undreamt.
The dreamer it would unmake last.
He would fight.
They always fought.
As the demon unwound and undid, it kept encountering threads of its own story teased through the underbrush. Its origin story. This fertile place, rich with the energy of the ley line, was not just good for growing trees and kings. It was also good for growing demons, if there was enough bad blood spilled on it.
There was more than enough bad blood pooled in this forest to make a demon.