Then Cabeswater gasped back into existence inside him, and he sat up. If it had come back, it meant it had gone.
Are you there?
He felt his own thoughts, and more of his own thoughts, and then, quietly, barely there, Cabeswater. Something wasn’t right.
But Adam lingered for a moment after he cast off the covers and stood. Here he was, waking in the Lynch home, wearing last night’s clothing that still smelled of smoke from the grill, having overslept the weight class he had this morning by a magnitude of hours. His mouth remembered Ronan Lynch’s.
What was he doing? Ronan was not something to be played with. He didn’t think he was playing.
You’re leaving this state, he told himself.
But he hadn’t felt the fire on his heels for a long time. There was no longer the understood second half of the statement: and never coming back.
He headed downstairs, peering into each room that he passed, but he seemed to be alone. For a brief, trippy moment, he imagined that he was dreaming, walking through this desaturated farmhouse in his sleep. Then his stomach growled and he found the kitchen. He ate two leftover hamburger buns with nothing on them since he couldn’t find butter, and then drank the remainder of the milk directly from the carton. He borrowed a jacket from the coat rack and went out.
Outside, the fields drifted mist and dew. Autumn leaves stuck to the tops of his boots as he walked down the path between the pastures. He listened for sounds of activity in any of the barns, but on an essential level, he was fine with the silence. This quiet, this absolute quiet, nothing but the low gray sky and Adam’s thoughts.
He was so still inside.
The silence was interrupted as a creature darted up to him. She skittered so quickly and so oddly on her hooves that it wasn’t until her hand had slid into his that he realized it was the Orphan Girl. She held a black-wet stick, and when he looked down at her, he saw that she had bits of bark stuck to her teeth.
“Should you eat that?” he asked her. “Where’s Ronan?”
She pressed her cheek to the back of his hand with affection. “Savende e’lintes i firen —”
“English or Latin,” he said.
“This way!” But instead of leading him in any particular direction, she released his hand and galloped around him in circles, flapping her arms like a bird. He kept walking, and she kept circling, and overhead, a flying bird checked itself mid-flight. Chainsaw had spotted the movement of the Orphan Girl, and now she cawed, wheeled, and headed back towards the upper fields. This was where Adam found Ronan, a black smudge in fog-washed field. He had been watching something else, but Chainsaw had alerted him, and so now he turned, hands in the pockets of his dark jacket, and watched Adam approach.
“Parrish,” Ronan said. He eyed Adam. He was clearly taking nothing for granted.
Adam said, “Lynch.”
Orphan Girl trotted up between them and poked Ronan with the end of her stick.
“You little puke,” Ronan told her.
“Should she be eating that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if she has internal organs.”
Adam laughed at that, at the ridiculousness of all of it.
“Did you eat?” Ronan asked.
“Other than sticks? Yeah. I missed weights.”
“Jesus weeps. You want to carry some hay bales? That’ll put hair on your chest. Hey. You poke me with that one more time —” This was to the Orphan Girl.
As they scuffled in the grass, Adam closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He could nearly scry just like this. The quiet and the cold breeze on his throat would take him away and the dampness of his toes in his shoes and the scent of living creatures would keep him here. Within and without. He couldn’t tell if he was letting himself idolize this place or Ronan, and he wasn’t sure there was a difference.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that Ronan was looking at him, as he had been looking at him for months. Adam looked back, as he had been looking back for months.
“I need to dream,” Ronan said.
Adam took Orphan Girl’s hand. He corrected, “We need to dream.”
Twenty-five minutes away, Gansey was wide awake, and he was in trouble.
He didn’t know yet what he was in trouble for, and knowing the Gansey family, he might never know. He could feel it, though, sure as he could feel the net of the Glendower story lowering over him. Annoyance in the Gansey household was like a fine vanilla extract. It was used sparingly, rarely on its own, and was generally only identifiable in retrospect. With practice, one could learn to identify the taste of it, but to what end? There’s some anger in this scone, don’t you think? Oh, yes, I think a little —
Helen was pissed at Gansey. That was the upshot.
The Gansey family had convened at the schoolhouse, one of the Gansey investment properties. It was a comfortably shabby old stone schoolhouse located in the verdant and remote hills between Washington, D.C., and Henrietta, where it earned its keep as a short-term rental. The rest of the family had stayed the night there – they’d tried to convince Gansey to come spend the night with them, a request he might have fulfilled if not for Ronan, if not for Henry. Maybe that was why Helen was annoyed with him.
In any case, surely he had made up for it by bringing interesting friends for them to play with. The Ganseys loved to delight other people. Guests meant more people to display elaborate cooking skills for.
But he was still in trouble. Not with his parents. They were delighted to see him – How tan you are, Dick – and they were, as predicted, even more delighted to see Henry and Blue. Henry immediately passed some sort of friend-peer test that Adam and Ronan had always seemed to struggle with, and Blue was – well, whatever it was about Blue’s sharply curious expression that had attracted the youngest Gansey in the first place clearly also caught the older Ganseys. They immediately began to question Blue about her family’s profession as they diced eggplant.