And the truth was that if he thought about the things that he loved about Cabeswater, it wasn’t difficult at all to tell the difference between the demon and it. They grew from the same soil, but they were nothing like each other.
These eyes and hands are mine, Adam thought.
And they were. He didn’t have to prove it. It was a fact as soon as he believed it.
He turned his head and rubbed the blindfold off his eyes.
He saw the end of the world.
The demon slowly worked at the fibres of the dreamer.
They were difficult things to unmake, dreamers. So much of a dreamer didn’t exist inside a physical body. So many complicated parts of them snarled in the stars and tangled in tree roots. So much of them fled down rivers and exploded through the air between raindrops.
This dreamer fought.
The demon was about unmaking and nothingness, and dreamers were about making and fullness. This dreamer was all of that to an extreme, a new king in his invented kingdom.
He fought.
The demon kept pulling him unconscious, and in those short bursts of blackness, the dreamer snatched at light, and when he swam back to consciousness, he thrust the dream into reality. He shaped them into flapping creatures and earthbound stars and flaming crowns and golden notes that sang by themselves and mint leaves scattered across the blood-streaked pavement and scraps of paper with jagged handwriting on them: Unguibus et rostro.
But he was dying.
Wanting to live, but accepting death to save others: that was courage. That was to be Gansey’s greatness.
“It has to happen now,” he said. “I have to do the sacrifice now.”
Now that the moment had come, there was a certain glory to it. He didn’t want to die, but at least he was doing it for these people, his found family. At least he was doing it for people who he knew were going to really live. At least he was not dying pointlessly, stung by wasps. At least this time it would matter.
This was where he was going to die: on a sloped field speckled with oak leaves. Black cattle grazed far up the hill, tails swishing as the rain fell in fitful spells. The grass was strikingly green for October, and the shock of colour against the fall-bright leaves made it look like a calendar photo. There was no one else around for miles. The only thing out of place was the flower-strewn river of blood across the winding road, and the young man dying in his car.
“But we’re nowhere near Cabeswater!” Blue said.
Ronan’s phone was ringing again: Declan, Declan, Declan. Everything was falling apart everywhere.
Ronan flickered briefly back into consciousness, his eyes awash with black, a rain of flickering pebbles scattering from his hand and skidding to a mucky stop on the bloody pavement. Terribly, the Orphan Girl was just watching blankly from the backseat, black slowly running from her closest ear. When she saw Gansey looking at her, she simply mouthed Kerah without any sound coming out.
“Are we on the ley line?” All that mattered was that they were on the line, so the sacrifice would count to kill the demon.
“Yes, but we’re nowhere near Cabeswater. You’ll just die.”
One of the great things about Blue Sargent was that she never really gave up hope. He would have told her this, but he knew it would only upset her more. He said, “I can’t watch Ronan die, Blue. And Adam – and Matthew – and all this? We don’t have anything else. You already saw my spirit. You already know what we chose!”
Blue closed her eyes, and two tears ran out of them. She did not cry noisily, or in a way that asked him to say anything different. She was a hopeful creature, but she was also a sensible creature.
“Untie me,” Adam said from the backseat. “If you’re going to do it now, for God’s sake, untie me.” His blindfold was off and he was looking at Gansey, his eyes his own instead of the demon’s. His chest was moving fast. If there was any other way, Gansey knew Adam would have told him.
“Is it safe?” Gansey asked.
“Safe as life,” Adam replied. “Untie me.”
Henry had been waiting for something to do – he clearly did not know how to process this without having a task – so he leapt to untie Adam. Shaking his reddened wrists free of the ribbon, Adam first touched the top of the Orphan Girl’s head and whispered, “It’s going to be all right.” And then he climbed out of the car and stood before Gansey. What could they possibly say?
Gansey bumped fists with Adam and they nodded at each other. It was stupid, inadequate.
Ronan clawed briefly back to consciousness; flowers spilled out of the car in shades of blue Gansey had never seen. Ronan was frozen in place, as he always was after a dream, and black slowly oozed out of one of his nostrils.
Gansey had never understood really what it meant for Ronan to have to live with his nightmares.
He understood it now.
There was no time.
“Thanks for everything, Henry,” Gansey said. “You’re a prince among men.”
Henry’s face was blank.
Blue said, “I hate this.”
It was right, though. Gansey felt the feeling of time slipping – one last time. The sense of having done this before. He gently laid the backs of his hands on her cheeks. He whispered, “It’ll be OK. I’m ready. Blue, kiss me.”
The rain spattered about them, kicking up splashes of red-black, making the petals around them twitch. Dream things from Ronan’s newly healed imagination piled around their feet. In the rain, everything smelled of these mountains in fall: oak leaves and hay fields, ozone and dirt turned over. It was beautiful here, and Gansey loved it. It had taken a long time, but he’d ended up where he wanted after all.