Footsteps moved softly in the hallway, and then Persephone stood in the doorway. Maura sighed and looked down at her lap, as if she’d been expecting this.
"I don’t mean to interrupt. But in either three or seven minutes," Persephone said, "Blue’s raven boys are going to pull down the street and sit in front of the house while they try to find a way to convince her to sneak out with them."
Her mother rubbed the skin between her eyebrows. "I know."
Blue’s heart raced. "That seems awfully specific."
Persephone and her mother exchanged a quick glance.
"That’s another thing I wasn’t quite truthful about," Maura said. "Sometimes Persephone, Calla, and I are very good with specifics."
"Only sometimes," Persephone echoed. Then, a little sadly, "More and more often, it seems."
"Things are changing," Maura said.
Another silhouette appeared at the doorway. Calla said, "Also, Neeve still hasn’t come back. And she scuttled the car. It won’t start."
Outside the window, they all heard the sound of a car pulling up in front of the house. Blue looked at her mother entreatingly.
Instead of replying, her mother looked at Calla and Persephone. "Tell me we’re wrong."
Persephone said in her soft way, "You know I can’t tell you that, Maura."
Maura stood up. "You go with them. We’ll take care of Neeve. I hope you know how big this thing is, Blue."
Blue said, "I have an inkling."
Chapter 44
There are trees, and then there are trees at night. Trees after dark become colorless and sizeless and moving things. When Adam got to Cabeswater, it felt like a living being. The wind through the leaves was like the bellows of an exhaled breath and the hiss of the rain on the canopy like a sucked-in sigh. The air smelled like wet soil.
Adam cast a flashlight beam into the edge of the trees. The light barely penetrated the woods, swallowed by the fitful spring rain that was beginning to soak his hair.
I wish I could’ve done this in the daytime, Adam thought.
He didn’t have a phobia of the dark. A phobia meant that the fear was irrational, and Adam suspected there was plenty to be afraid of in Cabeswater after the sun had gone down. At least, he reasoned, if Whelk is here and using a flashlight, I’ll see him.
It was a cold comfort, but Adam had come too far to turn back. He cast another glance around himself — one always felt observed here — and then he stepped over the invisible gurgle of the tiny creek, into the woods.
And it was bright.
Jerking his chin down, eyes squeezed shut, he shielded his face with his own flashlight. His eyelids burned red with the difference from black to light. Slowly, he opened them again. All around him, the forest glowed with afternoon light. Dusty gold shafts pierced the canopy and made dapples of the insubstantial brook to his left. In the slanting light, the leaves were made yellow, brown, pink. The furred lichen on the trees was a murky orange.
The skin of his hand in front of him had become rose and tan. The air moved slowly around his body, somehow tangible, gold flaked, every dust mote a lantern.
There was no sign of night, and there was no sign of anyone else in the trees.
Overhead, a bird called, the first that he remembered hearing in the wood. It was a long, clarion song, just four or five notes. It was like a sound the hunting horns made in the fall. Away, away, away. It both awed him and saddened him, Cabeswater’s brand of bittersweet beauty.
This place should not exist, Adam thought, and at once, he hastily thought the opposite. Cabeswater had become bright just as Adam had wished that it wouldn’t be dark, just as it had changed the color of the fish in the pool as soon as Gansey had thought it would be better if they were red. Cabeswater was as literal as Ronan was. He didn’t know if he could think it into nonexistence, and he didn’t want to find out.
He needed to guard his thoughts.
Switching off the flashlight, Adam dropped it into his bag and moved along the tiny creek they’d first followed. The rain had swelled it, so the creek was easier to follow toward its source, wending a way through newly flattened grasses down the mountain.
Ahead, Adam saw slowly moving reflections on the tree trunks, the strong, slanting afternoon light mirroring off the mysterious pool they’d found the first day. He was nearly there.
He stumbled. His foot had turned on something unforgiving and unexpected.
What is this?
At his feet was an empty, wide-mouthed bowl. It was a glistening, ugly purple, strange and man-made in this place.
Puzzled, Adam’s eyes slid from the dry bowl at his feet to another bowl about ten feet away, equally conspicuous among the pink and yellow leaves on the ground. The second bowl was identical to the one at his feet, only it was full to the brim with a dark liquid.
Adam was again struck by how out of place this clearly man-made thing was in the middle of these trees. Then he was puzzled again when he realized that the surface of the bowl was undisturbed and perfect; no leaves or silt or twigs or insects marred the black liquid. Which meant the bowl had been filled only recently.
Which meant —
The adrenaline hit his system a second before he heard a voice.
Tied in the back of the car, it had been hard for Whelk to know when he should make his play for freedom. The fact was, Neeve clearly had a plan, which was far more than Whelk could say of himself. And it seemed extremely unlikely that she’d try to kill him until she’d set up the finer details of the ritual. So Whelk allowed himself to be driven in his own car, now reeking of garlic and full of crumbs, to the edge of the woods. Neeve was not brave enough to take his car off-road — a fact for which he was very grateful — so she parked it in a little gravel turn-around and made them both walk the rest of the way. It was not yet dark, but still, Whelk stumbled over hummocks of field grass on the way.
"Sorry," Neeve said. "I did look on Google Maps for a closer place to park."
Whelk, who was annoyed by absolutely everything about Neeve, from her soft, fluffy hands to her crinkled broom skirt to her curled hair, replied, without much civility, "Why are you bothering to apologize? Aren’t you planning on killing me?"
Neeve winced. "I wish you wouldn’t say it like that. You’re meant to be a sacrifice. Being a sacrifice is quite a fine thing, with a lovely tradition behind it. Besides, you deserve it. It’s fair."
Whelk said, "If you kill me, does that mean that someone else ought to kill you in fairness? Down the road?"
He tripped over another clump of grass, and this time, Neeve did not apologize or answer his questions. Instead, she fixed a gaze of interminable length on him. It was not so much keenly penetrating as exhaustively extensive. "For a brief time, Barrington, I’ll admit that I was feeling slight regret over choosing you. You seemed very pleasant until I Tasered you."
It’s a hard thing to hold a civil conversation after recalling that one party has used a Taser on the other, so both of them finished the walk in silence. It was a strange feeling for Whelk to be back inside the woods where he’d last seen Czerny alive. He’d thought that woods were woods and he wouldn’t be affected by returning, especially at a different time of the day. But something about the atmosphere immediately took him back to that moment, the skateboard in his hand, the sad question gasped in Czerny’s dying sounds.
The whispers hissed and popped in his head, like a fire just getting underway, but Whelk ignored them.
He missed his life. He missed everything about it: the carelessness, the extravagant Christmases at home, the gas pedal beneath his foot, free time that felt like a blessing instead of an empty curse. He missed skipping classes and taking classes and spray-painting the Henrietta sign on I-64 after getting astonishingly drunk on his birthday.
He missed Czerny.
He had not let himself think it once in the past seven years. He had tried instead to convince himself of Czerny’s uselessness. Tried to remind himself of the practicality of the death instead.
But instead, he remembered the sound Czerny made the first time he hit him.
Neeve didn’t have to tell Whelk to sit quietly while she arranged the ritual. Instead, as she laid out the five points of a pentagram with an unlit candle, a lit candle, an empty bowl, a full bowl, and three small bones arranged in a triangle, he sat with his knees pulled up to his chin and his hands still tied behind him and wished he could find it in himself to cry. Something to relieve this terrible weight inside him.
Neeve caught a glimpse of him and imagined that he was upset over his approaching death. "Oh," she said mildly, "don’t be like that. It will not hurt very much." She reconsidered what she had said, and then corrected, "At least for very long."
"How are you going to kill me? How does this ritual work?"
Neeve frowned at him. "That is not an easy question. That is like asking a painter why he chooses the colors he does. Sometimes it is not a process, but a feeling."
"Fine, then," Whelk said. "What are you feeling?"
Neeve pressed a perfectly shaped mauve fingernail to her lip as she surveyed her work. "I have made a pentagram. It is a strong shape for any sort of spell, and I work well with it. Others find it challenging or too constricting, but it satisfies me. I have my lit candle to give energy, and my unlit candle to invite it. I have my scrying bowl to see the other world and I have my empty bowl for the other world to fill. I have crossed the leg bones of three ravens I killed to show the corpse road the nature of the spell I mean to do. And then I think I will bleed you out in the center of the pentagram while invoking the line to wake."
She stared hard at Whelk at this, and then added, "I may tweak it as I go along. These things need to be flexible. People rarely show interest in the mechanics of my work, Barrington."
"I’m very interested," he said. "Sometimes the process is the most interesting part."
When she turned her back to get her knives, he slipped his hands from the binding. Then he selected a fallen branch and crashed it down on her head with as much force as he could muster. He didn’t think it would be enough to kill her, because it was still green and flexible, but it certainly brought her to her knees.
Neeve moaned and shook her head slowly, so Whelk gave her another blow for good measure. He tied her up with the bindings he’d removed from himself — he did them up rather tightly, having learned from her errors — and dragged her semi-unconscious form into the middle of the pentagram.
Then he looked up and saw Adam Parrish.
It was the first time Blue had felt as if it were truly dangerous for her to be in Cabeswater — dangerous because she made things louder. More powerful. By the time they got to the woods, the night already felt charged. The rain had given way to an intermittent drizzle. The combination of the charged feeling and the rain had made Blue look quite anxiously at Gansey when he got out of the car, but his shoulders were barely damp and he wasn’t wearing his Aglionby uniform. He had definitely been wearing the raven sweater when she saw him at the church watch, and his shoulders had definitely been wetter. Surely she hadn’t managed to change his future enough to make tonight the night he died, had she? Surely she had been meant all along to meet him, since she was supposed to kill him or fall in love with him. And surely Persephone wouldn’t have let them go if she’d sensed that tonight was the night Gansey died.
Making a path with their flashlight beams, they found the Pig parked near where they’d found Noah’s Mustang. Several trampled paths led from the car to the woods, as if Adam had been unable to decide where he wanted to enter.
At the sight of the Camaro, Gansey’s face, which had already been grim, became positively stony. None of them spoke as they broached the boundary of the trees.
At the edge of the woods, the feeling of charge, of possibility, immediately became more pronounced. Shoulder to shoulder, they entered the trees, and between one blink and the next, they found themselves surrounded by a dreamy afternoon light.
Even having braced herself for magic, Blue was breathless with it.
"What is Adam thinking?" Gansey muttered, but not to anyone in particular. "How can you mess with …" He lost interest in answering his own question.
Before them was Noah’s Mustang, in the unearthly golden light looking even more surreal than the first time they’d found it. Shafts of sun punched opaquely through the canopy, making stripes over the pollen-coated roof.
Standing by the front of the car, Blue caught the boys’ attention. They joined her, staring at the windshield. Since they had last been in the clearing, someone had written a word on the dusty glass. In round, handwritten letters, it said: MURDERED.
"Noah?" Blue asked the empty air — though it didn’t feel so empty. "Noah, are you here with us? Did you write this?"
Gansey said, "Oh."
It was a very flat little sound, and instead of asking him to clarify, Blue and Ronan followed his gaze to the driver’s side window. An invisible finger was in the process of tracing another letter on the glass. Though Blue had felt that Noah must’ve been the one to write the first word on the glass, in her head she had pictured him having a body while he did it. Far more difficult was watching letters appear spontaneously. It made her think of the Noah with the dark hollows for eyes, the smashed-in cheek, the barely human form. Even in the warm afternoon woods, she felt cold.
It’s Noah, she thought. Drawing energy from me. That’s what I feel.
On the glass, the word took shape.
MURDERED
It began another word. There was not enough space left between the D and the new word, and so the second word partially obliterated the first.