Neeve blinked. “Respected.”
“Same diff,” Piper said. “Well, don’t go just yet. I did sort of shaft you, before, because I was dying and sort of rude. Just a little? But I want to make it right.”
Neeve looked less enthusiastic about this than Piper had hoped, but she at least didn’t try to run away again. This was positive; Piper didn’t really want to be alone with the demon. Not because she was scared, but because she felt more energized with an audience. She’d taken an online quiz that said she was some special sort of extrovert and that she was likely to be this way for the rest of her life.
“This is going be a new start for both of us,” Piper assured Neeve.
The demon tilted its head, its antennae waving again. Hornet eyes were not meant to be so large, Piper thought. They were like big brown-black aviator sunglasses. Possibilities of life and death moved darkly in them.
What now?
Piper said, “Time to call Dad again.”
It was not 6:21.
It was either late at night or early in the morning.
When Adam and Ronan arrived at the Mountain View Urgent Care, they found a small waiting room empty except for Gansey. Music strummed overhead; the fluorescent lights were soulless and innocent. His khakis were bloody, and he sat in a chair with his head in his hands, either sleeping or grieving. A painting of Henrietta hung on the wall opposite him, and water dripped from it, because that was apparently the world they lived in now. Another time, Adam might have tried to understand what such a sign meant; tonight, his mind was already overflowing with data points. His hand had stopped twitching now that Cabeswater had regained some of its strength, but Adam had no illusions that this meant the danger was over.
“Hey, Shitlord,” Ronan said to Gansey. “Are you weeping?” He kicked the side of Gansey’s shoe. “Sphincter. You asleep?”
Gansey removed his face from his hands and looked up at Adam and Ronan. There was a small smear of blood by his jawline. His expression was sharper than Adam had expected, and only grew sharper when he saw Ronan’s filthy clothing. “Where were you?”
“Cabeswater,” Ronan said.
“Cabeswa— What is she doing here?” Gansey had just caught sight of the Orphan Girl as she stumbled through the door behind Adam. She was clumsy in a pair of muck boots that Ronan had pulled from the trunk of the BMW. They were far too big for her legs and of course entirely the wrong shape for her hooves, but that was kind of the desired effect. “What was the point of us using an entire afternoon to take her out there if you were just going to bring her back out again?”
“Whatever, man,” Ronan said, an eyebrow raised at Gansey’s fury. “It was two hours.”
Gansey said, “Maybe two hours doesn’t mean anything to you, but some of us go to school, and two hours is what we had for ourselves.”
“Whatever, Dad.”
“You know what?” Gansey said, standing. There was something unfamiliar in his tone, a bowstring drawn back. “If you call me that one more time —”
“How’s Blue?” Adam interrupted. He already assumed that she was not dead, or Gansey would not have had the bandwidth to be arguing with Ronan. He assumed, actually, that it had looked worse than it had really been, or Gansey would have led with a status report.
Gansey’s expression was still edged and glistening. “She’ll keep the eye.”
“Keep the eye,” Adam echoed.
“She’s getting stitches now.”
“Stitches,” Ronan echoed.
Gansey said, “Did you think I was just panicking over nothing? I told you: Noah was possessed.”
Possessed, like by a devil. Possessed, like Adam’s hand. In between that simmering black in Cabeswater and this violent result of Noah’s possession, Adam was beginning to get a feel for what his own hand might be capable of if Cabeswater couldn’t protect him. Part of him wanted to tell Gansey about it, but part of him had never forgotten Gansey’s agonized shout when Adam had made the bargain with Cabeswater in the first place. He didn’t really think Gansey would say I told you so, but Adam would know that he would have been within his rights to do so, which was worse. Adam had always been the most negative voice in his own head.
Unbelievably, Ronan and Gansey were still fighting. Adam tuned back in as Ronan said, “Oh come on – there was no way I cared if Henry Cheng asked me to a party.”
“The point was that I asked you,” Gansey said. “Not that Henry asked. He didn’t care; I cared.”
“Aw,” said Ronan, but not in a kind way.
“Ronan,” Adam said.
Gansey flicked at the bloodstain on his slacks. “And instead, you went to Cabeswater. You could have died there, and I wouldn’t have even known where you were because you couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone. Do you remember that tapestry that Malory and I were talking about while he was here? The one with Blue’s face on it? Oh, of course you do, Adam, because you dredged up those nightmare Blues in Cabeswater. When the Noah thing was over, Blue looked just like it.” He lifted his hands, palms out. “Her hands were all red. Her own blood. You were the one who told me, Ronan, that something was starting, all those months ago. Now’s not the time to be going rogue. Someone’s going to get killed. No more playing around. There’s no more time for anything but truth. We’re supposed to be in this together, whatever this is.”
There was no effective protest to be made to any of this; it was all unquestionably true. Adam could have said that he had been to Cabeswater countless times to do the ley line’s work and that he had thought this was just like any other time, but he knew full well that he had realized something was off about the forest and continued anyway.