“I might be amplifying it, too,” Blue said. She was staring at Gansey’s rain-spattered shoulders; her expression was so stricken that he glanced at his sweater to be certain that the splash had not eaten holes in the material. “Can we … can we get away from it now?”
“I think that’s wise,” Aurora advised. She did not seem particularly concerned, merely pragmatic, and it occurred to Gansey that to a dream, perhaps a nightmare was simply an unpleasant acquaintance rather than anything uncanny.
“You should stay away from it,” Ronan told his mother.
“It finds me,” she said.
“Operae pretium est,” Orphan Girl said.
“Don’t be a weirdo,” Ronan told her. “We’re not in a dream any more. English.”
She didn’t translate, though, and Aurora reached out to pat her skullcap-covered head. “She’ll be my little helper. Come on, I’ll walk you out.”
Back at the forest’s edge, Aurora walked with them to the SUV. It was outside the boundaries of the forest, but she never fell asleep straightaway. Unlike Kavinsky’s dreamt creatures, who fell asleep instantly after his death, Niall Lynch’s wife always managed to persist for a bit of time on her own. She’d stayed awake for three days after his death. She had once stayed awake for an hour outside Cabeswater. But in the end, the dream needed the dreamer.
So now Aurora walked them out to the SUV, looking even more like a dream when removed from Cabeswater, a vision wandered into waking life, clothed in flowers and light.
“Give Matthew my love,” Aurora said, and hugged Ronan. “It was so nice to see all of you again.”
“Stay with her,” Ronan ordered Orphan Girl, who swore at him. “Watch your mouth around my mother.”
The girl said something else, rapid and lovely, and he snapped, “I can’t understand that when I’m awake. You have to use English or Latin. You wanted out; you’re out now. Things are different.”
His tone drew the keen attention of both Aurora and Adam.
Aurora said, “Don’t be sad, Ronan,” which made him look away from all of them, the set of his shoulders unmoving and furious.
She spun in a circle, hands outstretched. “It’s going to rain,” she said, and then she fell gently to her knees.
Ronan, still and dark and very much real, closed his eyes.
Gansey said, “I’ll help you carry her.”
The moment Blue got back from Cabeswater, she promptly got herself into yet more trouble.
After the boys had dropped her off, Blue stormed into 300 Fox Way’s kitchen and began a one-sided interrogation of Artemus, who was still hidden behind the closed storage closet door. When he failed to reply to her reasonably asked questions about murder-handed women with Blue’s face and about the possible whereabouts of Glendower, she got progressively louder and added door pounding. Her heart was full of the memory of the spattered shoulders of Gansey’s Aglionby sweater – precisely what his spirit had been wearing on the church watch – and her head was full of frustration that Artemus knew more about all of this than he was saying.
Gwenllian delightedly watched the proceedings from a perch on the counter.
“Blue!” Her mother’s voice broke in from somewhere else in the house. “Blooooooooo. Why don’t you come chat with us for a moment?”
The gooeyness of her tone was how Blue knew she was in trouble. She lowered her fist from the kitchen closet door and started up the stairs. Her mother’s voice was coming from the house’s single shared bathroom, and when Blue got there, she found her mother, Calla and Orla all sitting in a full bathtub, all fully clothed and all equally soaking. Jimi was sitting on the closed toilet lid with a burning candle in her hands. They had all been crying but none of them were crying now.
“What?” Blue demanded. Her throat was a little sore, which meant that she’d possibly been shouting even louder than she’d intended.
Her mother peered up at her with more authority than one would think a woman could in her position. “Do you think you would like it if someone pounded on your bedroom door and ordered you to come out?”
“A storage closet is not a bedroom,” Blue said. “For starters.”
“The past decades have been stressful for him,” Maura said.
“The past few centuries have been stressful for Gwenllian, and she’s out on the counter at least!”
From the toilet, Jimi said, “You can’t compare one person’s coping capacity to another, hon.”
Calla snorted.
“Is that why you guys are all in a bathtub?” Blue asked.
“Don’t be mean,” Maura replied. “We were trying to make contact with Persephone. And no, before you ask, it didn’t work. And while we’re on the topic of you doing things that are unwise, where exactly did you disappear to? Being suspended is not a vacation.”
Blue bristled. “I was not on vacation! Ronan dreamt up his inner child, or something, and we had to take her to his mother. While we were there, we saw the three women from that tapestry I told you about, and a tree that looked messed up, and Gansey could have died really easily and I would have been right there beside him!”
The women looked pitying, which maddened Blue further.
She said, “I want to warn him.”
There was silence.
She hadn’t known she was going to say it until it came out of her mouth, but it was out now. She filled the quiet. “I know you said before that it would only ruin someone’s life to know, and it wouldn’t save them. I get that. But this is different. We’re gonna find Glendower, and we’re gonna ask for Gansey’s life to be saved. So we need Gansey to stay alive until then. And that means he has to stop charging into danger!”