Blue kissed him.
He had dreamt of it often enough, and here it was, willed into life. In another world, it would just be this: a girl softly pressing her lips to a boy’s. But in this one, Gansey felt the effects of it at once. Blue, a mirror, an amplifier, a strange half-tree soul with ley line magic running through her. And Gansey, restored once by the ley line’s power, given a ley line heart, another kind of mirror. And when they were pointed at each other, the weaker one gave.
Gansey’s ley line heart had been gifted, not grown.
He pulled back from her.
Out loud, with intention, with the voice that left no room for doubt, he said, “Let it be to kill the demon.”
Right after he spoke, Blue threw her arms tightly around his neck. Right after he spoke, she pressed her face into the side of his. Right after he spoke, she held him like a shouted word. Love, love, love.
He fell quietly from her arms.
He was a king.
Depending on where you began the story, it was about Noah Czerny.
The problem with being dead was that your stories stopped being lines and started being circles. They started to begin and end in the same moment: the moment of dying. It was difficult to focus on other ways of telling stories, and to remember that the living were interested in the specific order of events. Chronology. That was the word. Noah was more interested in the spiritual weight of a minute. Getting killed. There was a story. He never stopped noticing that moment. Every time he saw it, he slowed and watched it, remembering precisely every physical sensation that he had experienced during the murder.
Murder.
Sometimes he got caught on a loop of constantly understanding that he had been murdered, and rage made him smash things in Ronan’s room or kick the mint pot off Gansey’s desk or punch in a pane of glass on the stairs up to the apartment.
Sometimes he got caught in this moment instead. Gansey’s death. Watching Gansey die, again and again and again. Wondering if he would have been that brave in the forest if Whelk had asked him to die instead of forcing him to. He didn’t think he would have. He wasn’t sure they’d been that sort of friends. Sometimes when he went back to see the still-living Gansey, he forgot whether or not this Gansey already knew that he was going to die. It was easy to know everything when time was circular, but it was hard to remember how to use it.
“Gansey,” he said. “That’s all there is.”
This was not the right moment. Noah had been sucked into Gansey’s spirit life instead, which was a different line entirely. He moved away from it. It was not a spatial consideration but a timing one. It was a bit like playing skip rope with three – Noah could no longer remember who he had done such a thing with, only that he must have done it at some point to remember it – you had to wait for the right moment to move forward or you got repelled by rope.
He didn’t always remember why he was doing this, but he remembered what he was doing: looking for the first time Gansey had died.
He couldn’t remember the first time that he’d made this choice. It was hard, now, to remember what was remembering and what was actually repeating. He wasn’t even certain now which he was doing.
Noah just knew he had to keep doing it until the moment. He only had to stay solid long enough to make sure it stuck.
Here he was: Gansey, so young, twitching and dying in the leaves of a wood at the same time that Noah, miles away, had been twitching and dying in the leaves of a different wood.
All times were the same. As soon as Noah died, his spirit, full of the ley line, favoured by Cabeswater, had felt spread over every moment he had experienced and was going to experience. It was easy to look wise when time was a circle.
Noah crouched over Gansey’s body. He said, for the last time, “You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.”
Gansey died.
“Goodbye,” Noah said. “Don’t throw it away.”
He quietly slid from time.
Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love.
Her family traded in predictions. They read cards and they held séances and they upturned teacups on to saucers. Blue had never been part of this, except in one important way: She was the person with the longest-standing prediction in the household.
If you kiss your true love, he’ll die.
For most of her life, she’d considered how it would happen. She’d been warned by all sorts of clairvoyants. Even without a hint of psychic ability, she had lived enmeshed in a world that was equal parts present and future, always knowing in a certain sense where she was headed.
But not any more.
Now she was looking at Gansey’s dead body in its rain-spattered V-neck sweater and thinking, I have no idea what happens now.
The blood was draining off the highway, and crows had landed a few yards off to peck at it. All active signs of demonic activity had vanished at once.
“Get him,” Ronan started, and then had to gather himself to finish, in a snarl, “Get him off the road. He’s not an animal.”
They dragged Gansey’s body into the green grass by the side of the little road instead. He still looked entirely alive; he had only been dead for a minute or two, and there just wasn’t a lot of difference between being dead and sleeping until things started to go bad.
Ronan crouched beside him, black still smeared on his face under his nose and around his ears. His dreamt firefly rested on Gansey’s heart. “Wake up, you bastard,” he said. “You fucker. I can’t believe that you would …”