“I told you, I told you,” Gwenllian cawed. Her hair was a tangle of feathers and oak leaves.
“Were you sleeping?” Blue asked Ronan. He had not been sleeping. He hadn’t been awake, though, either, not really. He stared at her. He had forgotten her wound until he was staring at it again; it was such a violent signature, written on her skin. So against everything Noah would ordinarily do. Everything backwards. Demon, demon. “Ronan. Did you see where Gansey went?”
Now he was awake.
“He’s on the hunt!” Gwenllian shrilled gleefully.
“Shut up,” Blue said, with unexpected rudeness. “Gansey’s gone after Glendower. The Pig’s gone. Gwenllian says he went after birds. Did you see where he went? He’s not picking up his phone!”
She swept her hand dramatically behind her to demonstrate this truth. The empty kerb in front of 300 Fox Way, the street littered with feathers of all colours, the neighbours’ doors opening and closing with curiosity.
“He can’t go alone,” Adam said. “He’ll do something stupid.”
“I’m infinitely aware,” Blue replied. “I’ve called him. I’ve called Henry, to see if we could use RoboBee. No one’s picking up. I don’t even know if calls are going through.”
“Can you locate him?” Adam asked Maura and Calla.
“He’s tied into the ley line,” Maura said. “Somehow. Somewhere. So I can’t see him. That’s all I know.”
Ronan’s mind was wobbling as reality began to jostle at him. The horror of every nightmare being made into truth jittered his fingers on the steering wheel.
“Maybe I can scry,” Adam said. “I don’t know that I’ll know where it is, though. If he’s somewhere I haven’t been, I won’t recognize it and we’ll have to piece together clues.”
Blue spun in an angry circle. “That will take for ever.”
The feathers scattered across the street struck Ronan. Every fine edge of them seemed sharp and real and important against the fuzzed events of the days before. Gansey had gone after Glendower. Gansey had gone without them. Gansey had gone without him.
“I’ll dream something,” he said. No one heard him the first time, so he said it again.
“What?” Blue asked, at the same time that Maura said, “What kind of something?” and Adam said, “But the demon.”
Ronan’s mind was still a fresh horror of seeing his mother’s body. The recent memory effortlessly cross-pollinated with the older one of finding his father’s body, creating a toxic and expanding flower. He did not want to go back into his head right now. But he would. “Something to find Gansey. Like Henry Cheng’s RoboBee. It only has to have one purpose. Something small. I can do it fast.”
“You could be killed fast, you mean,” Adam said.
Ronan did not reply to this. Already he was trying to think of what form he could swiftly invest with such a skill. What could he most reliably create, even with the hurricane of the demon distracting him? What could he be certain the demon wouldn’t corrupt even as he manifested it?
“Cabeswater can’t help you,” Adam pressed. “It can only hinder you. You’d have to try to create something not terrible among all that, which seems impossible to start, and then you’d have to bring back that, and only that, from the dream, which sounds even more impossible.”
Ronan addressed the steering wheel. “I’m aware of how dreaming works, Parrish.”
He did not say I can’t stand the idea of finding Gansey’s body, too. He did not say If I can’t save my old family, I can save my new one. He did not say I will not let the demon have everything.
He did not say that the only true nightmare was not being able to do something and that this, at least, was something.
He just said, “I’m going to try,” and hoped that Adam knew all of the rest already.
Adam did. So did the others.
Maura said, “We’ll do our best to support your energy and hold back some of the worst.”
Adam put the seatback in its fully upright and locked position. He said, “I’ll scry.”
“Blue,” Ronan said, “I think you’d better hold his hand.”
The Camaro broke down.
It was always breaking down and living again, but tonight – tonight, Gansey needed it.
It broke down anyway. He’d only got to the outskirts of town when it coughed, and the lights inside dimmed. Before Gansey even had time to react, the car had died. His power brakes and steering vanished and he had to wrestle it to the shoulder. He tried the key, looked in the mirror, tried to see if the birds were waiting. They were not.
Make way for the Raven King! they shouted, sailing on. Make way!
Damn this car!
Not so long ago, the car had died in just the same way in a pitch-black night, leaving him stranded by the side of the road, nearly getting him killed. Adrenaline hit him in the same way as it had that night, immediate and complete, like time had never progressed.
He pumped the gas, let it sit, pumped the gas, let it sit.
The birds were drawing away. He could not follow.