The Gray Man said, “I told you it wasn’t an artifact, and I stand by that. It’s a phenomenon, not a thing.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Mr. Gray,” Greenmantle said pleasantly. He put a cheese cracker in his mouth and spoke around it. “How do you think I knew what it was called? Niall Lynch told me. Fucking braggart. He thought he was invincible. Can I pour you some wine? I’ve got this abusive red I brought with me. It’s a thing of beauty.”
The Gray Man gave him a cool look. His hit man look. Greenmantle had always liked the idea of being a mysterious hit man, but that career goal invariably paled in comparison with his enjoyment of going out on the town and having people admire his reputation and driving his Audi with its custom plate (GRNMNTL) and going on cheese holidays in countries that put little hats over their vowels like so: ê.
“What do you want from me?” Mr. Gray asked.
Greenmantle replied, “If we had a time machine, I’d say you could zip back and do what I asked the first time, but I guess that ship has sailed off into the sea of clusterfuck. Do you want to open the wine? I always cork it. No? All right, then. I guess you understand that you’re going to have to be an example.”
He crossed the kitchen and placed a cheese cracker on Piper’s tongue. He offered one to the Gray Man, who neither accepted it nor lowered the gun. He continued, “I mean, what would the others think if I let you get away with this? Would not be good. So, although I’ve enjoyed our time together, I guess that means you’re probably going to have to be destroyed.”
“Then shoot me,” the Gray Man said without fear.
He really was a work of art, the Gray Man. A hit man action figure. All his nobility did was prove what Greenmantle already knew: There were things in this town the Gray Man considered more important than his own life.
“Oh, Mr. Gray. Dean. You know better. No one remembers a corpse. I know you are aware of how this works.” Greenmantle cut another piece of cheese. “First I’m going to hang out here, just observing. Taking in the view. Figuring out the best breakfast places, seeing the tourist sights, watching you sleep, figuring out everything that’s important to you, finding that woman you fell in love with, planning the best way to make destroying all of the above publicly excruciating for you. Et cetera and so forth.”
“Give me another one, but not so much cheese,” Piper said.
He did so.
The Gray Man said, “If you are going to dismantle my life anyway, there’s no motivation for me to not just kill you and Piper right now.”
“Talk dirty to me,” Greenmantle said. “Like old times. There’s actually another option, Mr. Gray. You can give me the Greywaren, just like I asked, and then we’ll film a short video of you cutting off your own trigger finger, and then we’ll call it a day.”
He held up his hands like Lady Justice, weighing the cheese in one hand with the knife in the other. “Either/or.”
“And if there’s no Greywaren?”
Greenmantle said, “Then there’s always the public destruction of everything you love. Options: the American Dream.”
The Gray Man seemed to be considering. Usually everyone else looked frightened by this point of this conversation, but it was possible the Gray Man didn’t have emotions.
“I’ll need to think about it.”
“Sure you do,” Greenmantle said. “Shall I give you a week? No, nine days. Nine’s very three plus three plus three. I’ll just keep looking around while you decide. Thanks for dropping by.”
The Gray Man backed away from Piper, gun still pointed at her, and then disappeared through a door behind her. The room was silent.
“Isn’t that a closet?” Greenmantle asked.
“It’s the door to the garage, you piece of shit,” Piper said with characteristic affection. “Now I’ve missed yoga, and what am I going to tell them? Oh, I had a gun pointed to my head. Also, I told you to throw out those boxers months ago. The band’s all stretched out.”
“That was me,” he said. “I stretched it. Get it?”
Piper’s voice remained as the rest of her left. “I’m tired of your hobbies. This is the worst vacation I’ve ever been on.”
Adam was alone in the shop.
In the still-rainy evening, it grew prematurely dark inside, the corners of the garage consumed by a gloom that the fluorescents overhead couldn’t reach. He had spent countless hours working there, though, so his hands knew where to find things even when his eyes did not.
Now he was stretched over the engine of an old Pontiac, the grimy radio on the shop shelves keeping him company. Boyd had set him on the task of changing a head gasket and closing up shop. Dinner, he said, was for old men like him. The long monotony of head gaskets was for young men like Adam.
It wasn’t difficult work, which was worse, in a way, because his unoccupied mind whirred. Even as he mentally went over the details of the major events of 1920s United States history for a quiz, he had plenty of leftover brainpower to consider how his back ached from leaning over the engine, the grease he could feel in his ear, the frustration of this rusted head stud, the proximity of his court date, and the presence of others here on the ley line.
He wondered if Gansey and the others had really gone out in the rain to explore Coopers Mountain. Part of him hoped that they hadn’t, though he tried his best to kill the baser emotions regarding his friends — if he let them run wild, he would be jealous of Ronan, jealous of Blue, jealous of Gansey with either of the other two. Any combination that didn’t involve Adam would provoke a degree of discomfort, if he let it.
He wouldn’t let it.
Don’t fight with Gansey. Don’t fight with Blue. Don’t fight with Gansey. Don’t fight with Blue.
There was no point telling himself not to fight with Ronan. They would fight again, because Ronan was still breathing.
Outside the shop, the wind blew, spattering rain against the small, streaky windows of the garage doors. Dry leaves rustled up against the walls and skittered away. It was that time of year when it could be hot or cold from day to day; it was neither summer nor fall. An in-between, liminal time. A border.
As he shifted to better reach the engine block, he felt a cool breeze around his ankles, playing just inside the cuff of his slacks. His hands ached; they were even more chapped. When he was a kid, he used to lick the back of them, not realizing at first that it made them even more chapped in the long run. It had been a hard habit to break. Even now, as they stung, he resisted the impulse to relieve the discomfort for just a second.
Outside, the wind blew again, more leaves rattling the windows. Inside, something shifted and clicked. Something settling in the garbage can, maybe.
Adam rubbed his arm against his cheek, realizing only as he did it that his arm had a smear of grease on it. There was no point wiping off his face, though, until he was done for the night.
There was another click from inside the shop. He paused in his work, wrench hovered above the engine, top of his skull touching the open hood overhead. Something seemed different, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.
The radio was no longer playing.
Adam warily eyed the old radio. He could just see it, two bays away, on the other side of the Pontiac and a pickup truck and a little Toyota. The power light was off; possibly it had finally died.
But still, Adam asked the empty garage, “Noah?”
It was unlike Noah to be intentionally scary, but Noah had been less Noah than usual lately. Less Noah and more dead.
Something popped.
It took Adam a second to realize that it was the portable work light he had hanging from the edge of the hood. It had gone dark.
“Noah? Is that you?”
Adam suddenly had the terrible and looming feeling that something was behind him, watching him behind his back. Something close enough to blow a chill around his ankles again. Something big enough to block out some of the light from the incandescent bulb by the side door.
It was not Noah.
br />
Outside, thunder suddenly crashed. Adam broke. He scrambled out from beneath the hood, spinning, pressed back against the car.
There was nothing there but concrete block, calendars, tools on walls, posters. But one of the wrenches on the tool wall was swinging. The other side of the garage was dim in a way that Adam couldn’t remember it being.
Go away, go away —
Something touched the back of his neck.
He closed his eyes.
All at once, Adam understood. This was Cabeswater, trying to make itself understood. Persephone had been working with him to improve their communication: Normally, he asked it each morning what it needed, while he flipped tarot cards or scryed into his bathroom sink. But he hadn’t asked since school began.
So now it forced him to listen.
Cabeswater, Persephone had said once, quiet and stern, is not the boss of you.
Something clattered on the table by the opposite wall.
Adam said, “Wait!”
He dove for his messenger bag as the room darkened further. His fingers found his notebooks, textbooks, envelopes, pens, the forgotten candy bar. Something else fell over, closer by. For an airless minute he thought he had left the tarot cards back in the apartment.
It won’t hurt me. This will be scary, but it won’t hurt me —
But fear hurt, too.
Just because it tantrums, Persephone had added, doesn’t make it more right than you.
The cards. Crouching by his bag, Adam snatched out the velvet bag and tumbled the deck into his hands. Persephone had been teaching him all kinds of meditation methods, but there would be no meditating now. Shivering, he shuffled the deck as oil in the pan beneath the Pontiac began to tip, a furious ocean.
He slapped down three cards on the concrete floor. Death, the Empress, the Devil.
Think, Adam, think, get inside it —
The closest fluorescent buzzed harshly, suddenly over-bright, then just as suddenly out.
Adam’s subconscious fled through Cabeswater’s consciousness, both of them tangled up in this strange bargain he’d made.
Death, the Empress, the Devil. Three sleepers, yes, yes, he knew that, but they only needed one, and anyway, what did Cabeswater care about who was sleeping on the ley line, what did it need from Adam?
His mind focused on a branched thought, traveled along a limb, to a trunk, down to roots, into the ground. In that darkness and dirt and rock, he saw the ley line. Finally, he saw the connection and where it broke and understood what Cabeswater was asking him to repair. Relief washed over him.
“I get it,” he said out loud, falling back, catching himself on the cold concrete. “I’ll do it this week.”
The shop immediately returned to normal. The radio had resumed playing; Adam hadn’t heard the moment it had started up again. Although Cabeswater’s means of communication could be terrifying — apparitions, black dogs, howling winds, faces in mirrors — the point was never to intimidate. He knew that. But it was hard to remember it as the walls shifted and water beaded on the inside of windows and imaginary women sobbed in his ear.
It always stopped as soon as Adam understood. It only ever wanted him to understand.
He heaved a big breath next to his tarot cards. Time to get back to work.
But.
He heard something. There should not have been anything, not anymore.
But something was scraping on the shop door. It was a dry, thin noise, like paper tearing. A claw. A nail.
But he’d understood. He’d promised to do the work.
He wanted to tell himself that it was only a leaf or a branch. Something ordinary.
But Henrietta was no longer someplace ordinary. He was no longer someone ordinary.
“I said I understood,” Adam said. “I get it. This week. Does it need to be sooner?”
There was no response from within the garage, but outside, something light and uneasy moved past one of the windows, high off the ground. There was just enough light to see its scales.
Scales.
Adam’s pulse sped, his heart beating so hard that it hurt.
Surely Cabeswater believed him; he had never let it down before. There were not rules, but there was trust.
A noise came just outside the door: tck-tck-tck-tck.
The garage door hurtled open. It sounded like a freight train as it roared along its tracks on the ceiling.
In the grim evening, in the deep-blue-black rain of it, a pale monster reared. It was needle claws and savage beaks, ragged wings and greasy scales. It was so against everything that was real that it was hard to even see it truly.
Terror owned Adam. The old terror, the one that was just as much confusion and betrayal as fear itself.
He had done everything right. Why was this still happening if he’d done everything right?
The horror of an animal took a scratching, slithering step toward Adam.
“Shoo, you ugly bastard,” said Ronan Lynch.
He stepped out of the rain and into the shop; he had been hidden in the dark in his jacket and his dark jeans. Chainsaw clung to his shoulder. Ronan lifted a hand to the white beast as if casting off a ship. The creature drew its head back, side-by-side beaks parting.
“Go on,” Ronan said, unafraid.
It took flight.
Because it was not just any monster; it was Ronan Lynch’s monster. A night horror brought to vicious life. It floated up into the dark, strangely graceful once its face was out of sight.
“Damn, Ronan, damn,” Adam gasped, ducking his head. “Oh, God. You scared the shit out of me.”
Ronan smirked. He didn’t understand that Adam’s heart was actually going to explode. Adam wrapped his arms over the back of his neck, curling into a ball on the concrete, waiting to feel like he wasn’t going to die.
He heard the garage door rattle closed again. The temperature rose immediately as the wind was locked out.
A boot shoved Adam’s knee.
“Get up.”
“You asshole,” Adam muttered, still not lifting his head.
“Get up. It wasn’t going to hurt you. I don’t know why you’re pissing yourself.”
Adam uncurled. He was slowly getting enough function back to be more annoyed than afraid. He pushed to his feet. “There’s more going on in the world than just you, Lynch.”
Ronan turned his head sideways to read the cards. “What’s this?”
“Cabeswater.”
“What the fuck is wrong with your face?”
Adam didn’t reply to this. “Why was it with you?”
“I was at the Barns. It followed the car.” Ronan prowled around the Pontiac, peering at the process inside with a disinterested lack of comprehension. Chainsaw flapped down to crouch on the engine block, head ducked.
“Don’t,” Ronan warned. “That’s toxic.”
Adam wanted to ask what it was that Ronan had been doing at the Barns all of these days and evenings, but he didn’t press. The Barns was Ronan’s family business, and family was private.
“I saw your shitbox in the lot on the way back,” Ronan said. “And I figured, anything to avoid Malory for a few more minutes.”
“Touching.”
“What do you think of the idea of researching Greenmantle’s spiderweb? Possible? Not possible?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“Do it, then, for me,” Ronan said.
Adam laughed in disbelief. “Do it for you! Some of us have homework, you know.”
“Homework! What’s the point?”
“Passing grades? Graduation?”
Ronan swore in a way that indicated further disinterest.
“Are you just trying to make me angry?” Adam asked.
Ronan picked up a socket from the worktable on the other side of the Pontiac. He studied it in a way that suggested he contemplated its merit as a weapon. “Aglionby is kind of pointless for people like us.”
“What is ‘people like us’?” r />
“I’m not going to use it,” Ronan said, “to get some job with a tie —” He made a hanging motion above his neck, head tilted. “And you could find a way to make the ley line work for you since you’ve already bargained with it.”
Adam retorted, “What’s it you see me doing right now? Where is it we even are?”
“Insultingly close to that Toyota is where I am.”
“I’m at work. Two hours from now, I’m going to my next job for another four hours. If you’re trying to convince me that I don’t need Aglionby after I have killed myself over it for a year, you’re wasting your breath. Be a loser if you want to, but don’t make me part of it to make yourself feel better.”
Ronan’s expression was cool over the top of the Pontiac. “Well,” he said, “fuck you, Parrish.”
Adam just looked at him witheringly. “Do your homework.”
“Whatever. I’m getting out of here.”
By the time Adam had leaned to get a rag to get the grease out of his ear, the other boy had gone. It was as if he had taken all of the noise of the garage with him; the wind had died down, so the leaves no longer rattled, and the radio’s tuning had shifted so that the station was ever so slightly fuzzy. It felt safer, but also lonelier.
Later, Adam walked out through the cool, damp night to his small, shitty car. As he sank into the driver’s seat, he found something already sitting on the seat.
He retrieved the object and held it up under the feeble interior cab light. It was a small white plastic container. Adam twisted off the lid. Inside was a colorless lotion that smelled of mist and moss. Replacing the lid with a frown, he turned the container over, looking for more identifying features. On the bottom, Ronan’s handwriting labeled it merely: manibus.
For your hands.
I mean this in the kindest possible way,” Malory said, reclined in Gansey’s desk chair, “but you cannot make tea for love or money.”
The night outside the wall of windows was black and damp; the lights of Henrietta seemed to move as the dark trees blew back and forth before them. Gansey sat on the floor beside his model of town, working slowly at it. He hadn’t had time to add anything new; instead he’d snatched minutes here and there to repair the damage incurred that summer. It was distinctly less satisfying to restore something to what it had been than to grow it.