He would steer it now, and if there were rocks near shore, so be it.
“Tell me where Owen Glendower is,” he said to the darkness. Crisp and sure, with the same power he had used to command Noah, to command the skeletons in the cave. “Show me where the Raven King is.”
The night began to wail.
The sound came from everywhere – a wild scream. A primal scream. A battle cry.
It got louder and louder, and Gansey clambered to his feet, his hands half-held over his ears. Gwenllian shouted something in delight and fervour, but the sound drowned out her voice. It drowned out the rattle of the remaining dry oak leaves in the trees, and it drowned out the sound of Gansey’s shoes scuffing on the roof as he minced towards the edge for a better vantage point. The sound drowned out the lights, and the street was plunged into blackness. The scream drowned out everything, and when the sound stopped and the lights returned, a dull white-horned beast stood askance in the middle of the street down below, hooves splayed on the asphalt.
Somewhere there was the ordinary world, a world of stoplights and shopping malls, of fluorescent lights at gas stations and light blue carpet in a suburban home. But here, now: There was only the moment before the scream and the moment after.
Gansey’s ears rang.
The creature lifted its head to look at him with brilliant eyes. It was the sort of animal that everyone thought they knew the name of until they saw it, and then the name ran away and left behind only the feeling of seeing it. It was older than anything, more lovely than anything, more terrible than anything.
Something winning and frightened sang in Gansey’s chest; it was the precise same feeling that had taken him the first time he’d seen Cabeswater. He realized that he had seen something like this creature before: the herd of white beasts that had stampeded through Cabeswater. Now that he was looking at this one, though, he realized that those were copies of this, descendants of this, dreamt memories of this.
The beast twitched an ear. Then it plunged into the night.
Gwenllian asked Gansey, “Well, aren’t you going to follow it?”
Yes.
She pointed at the oak branches, and he did not question her. He edged quickly to where a great branch overhung the roof, climbed out on to it, getting a handhold here and there on upright spurs. He slipped down from branch to branch and then jumped the eight or nine feet to the ground, feeling the jolt of the landing from the balls of his feet to his teeth.
The beast was gone.
There was not even time for Gansey to register disappointment, though, because of the birds.
They were everywhere: The air dazzled and shimmered with feathers and down. The birds swirled and dived and plummeted around the neighbourhood street, the streetlights catching wings, beaks, claws. Most of them were ravens, but there were others, too. Little chickadees, streamlined mourning doves, compact jays. These smaller birds seemed more chaotic than the ravens, though, as if they had gotten caught up in the spirit of the night without understanding the purpose. Some of them let out little squawks or cries, but mostly the sound was wings. The humming, rushing whoosh of frantic flight.
Gansey stepped into the yard and the dense flock immediately rushed up around him. They swirled around him, wings brushing against him, feathers touching his cheek. He couldn’t see anything but the birds, every shape and colour. His heart was a winged thing itself. He couldn’t catch his breath.
He was so afraid.
If you can’t be unafraid, Henry said, be afraid and happy.
The flock dipped away. They meant to be followed, and they meant to be followed now. They swirled up in a great column over the Camaro.
Make way! they shouted. Make way for the Raven King! It was loud enough now that lights were beginning to come on in the houses.
Gansey climbed into the car and turned the key – start, Pig, start. It growled to life. Gansey was all things at once: elated, terrified, overcome, satiated.
With a squeal of tires, he pursued his king.
Ronan was operating on emergency battery power. Running on cruise control. He was a drop of water beaded on a windshield. The slightest jolt would be enough to send him skidding downward.
Because he was practising such a delicate balancing act between waking and sleep, it wasn’t until the driver’s-side door of the BMW wrenched open that he realized something had happened. The noise was terrific, particularly because Chainsaw flew into the car as soon as the door had opened. The Orphan Girl shrieked in the backseat and Adam jolted awake.
“I don’t know,” Blue said.
Ronan wasn’t sure what this meant until he realized that she wasn’t addressing him, but the people behind her. Maura, Calla and Gwenllian stood in the road in various states of night-time disarray.