Adam glanced around the still church. It still felt so inhabited. Even though he intellectually believed Ronan that the church would stay empty, in his heart, he felt crowded by … possibilities. But Ronan’s face held a challenge and Adam wasn’t going to back down. He said, “I know what kind of phone he has.”
“Telling me a model isn’t good enough. I need to see it,” replied Ronan.
Adam hesitated, and then asked, “What if I asked Cabeswater to show you his phone in the dream? I know what kind it is.”
He waited for Ronan to falter or wonder over Adam’s strangeness, but Ronan just straightened and rubbed his hands together. “Yeah, good. Good. Look, maybe you should go, though. To the apartment, and I’ll meet you after I’m done.”
“Why?”
Ronan said, “Not everything in my head is a great thing, Parrish, believe it or not. I told you. And when I’m bringing something back from a dream, sometimes I can’t bring back only one thing.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“At least give me some room.”
Adam retreated to sit beside Mary as Ronan stretched out on the pew, rubbing out the dingy plan with the legs of his jeans. Something about his stillness on the pew and the funereal quality of the light reminded Adam of the effigy of Glendower they’d seen at the tomb. A king, sleeping. Adam couldn’t imagine, though, the strange, wild kingdom that Ronan might rule.
“Stop watching me,” Ronan said, though his eyes were closed.
“Whatever. I’m going to ask Cabeswater for the phone.”
“See you on the other side.”
As Ronan fidgeted, Adam flicked his eyes over to the candles at Mary’s feet. It was harder to look into a flame than a pool of black water, but it served the same purpose. As his vision whited out, he felt his mind loosen and detach from his body, and just before he fell out of himself, he asked Cabeswater to give Ronan the phone. Asking was not quite the right word. Showing was better, because he showed Cabeswater what he needed: the image of the phone presenting itself to Ronan.
Time was impossible to judge when he scryed.
Nearby — what was nearby? — he heard a sharp sound, like a caw, and he suddenly realized that he wasn’t sure if he’d been staring into the light for a minute or an hour or a day. His own body felt like the flame, flickering and fragile; he was getting in too deep.
Time to go back.
He waded back, retreating into his bones. He felt the moment his mind clung to his body once more. His eyes flickered open.
Ronan was convulsing in front of him.
Adam jerked his legs in toward his body, out of reach of the disaster just in front of him. Ronan’s arms were streaked with blood and his hands were pinpricked with visceral, juicy wounds. His jeans were soaked black. The church carpet glistened with it.
But the horror was his spine, bent back on itself. It was his hand, pressed to his throat. It was his breath — a gasp, a gasp, a choked-off word. It was his fingers, shaking as he held them to his mouth. It was his eyes, open too wide, too bright, cast up to the ceiling. Seeing only pain.
Adam didn’t want to move. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t do this. This wasn’t happening.
But it was, and he could.
He scrambled forward. “Ronan — Oh, God.”
Because now that he was closer, he could see what a ruin Ronan’s body was. Beyond repair. He was dying.
I did this — this was my idea — he didn’t even really want to —
“Are you happy now?” Ronan asked. “Is this what you wanted?”
Adam started violently. The voice had come from somewhere else. He looked up and found Ronan sitting cross-legged on the pew above them, his expression watchful. One of this Ronan’s hands was bloody, too, but it was clearly not his own blood. Something dark flickered across his face as he cast his eyes down to his dying double. The other Ronan whimpered. It was a hideous sound.
“What — what’s happening?” Adam asked. He felt light-headed. He was awake; he was dreaming.
“You said you wanted to stay and watch,” Ronan snarled from the bench. “Enjoy the show.”
Adam understood now. The real Ronan had not moved; he’d woken exactly where he had fallen asleep. This dying Ronan was a copy.
“Why would you dream this?” demanded Adam. He wanted his brain to believe that this agonized Ronan wasn’t real, but the duplication was too perfect. He saw at once a Ronan Lynch violently dying and a Ronan Lynch watching with cool remove. Both were true, though both should have been impossible.
“I tried for too much at once,” Ronan said from the pew. His words were short, clipped. He was trying not to look like he cared about watching himself die. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe this happened all the time. What a fool Adam was to think he knew anything about Ronan Lynch. “It wasn’t the sort of thing — the sort of things I normally dream about, and everything got agitated. The night horrors came. Then the wasps. I could tell I would bring them back with me. That I’d wake up like that. So I dreamt another me for them to have and then — I woke up. And here I am. And here I am, again. What a cool trick. What a damn cool trick.”
The other Ronan was dead.
Adam felt the same way he had when he had seen the dream world. Reality was twisting in on itself. Here was Ronan, dead, and ungrievable, because there was Ronan, alive and unblinking.
“Here —” said Ronan. “Here’s your shit. The lies you wanted.”
He thrust a bulging, oversized manila envelope at Adam, full, presumably, of the evidence to frame Greenmantle. It took Adam too long to realize that Ronan wanted him to take it, and then a second longer to shift his mind to the mechanics of taking it. Adam told his hand to reach out, and reluctantly it did.
Get it together, Adam.
There was blood on the envelope, and now, on Adam’s hand. He asked, “Did you get everything?”
“It’s all there.”
“Even the —”
“It’s all there.”
What an impossible and miraculous and hideous thing this was. An ugly plan hatched by an ugly boy now dreamt into ugly life. From dream to reality. How appropriate it was that Ronan, left to his own devices, manifested beautiful cars and beautiful birds and tenderhearted brothers, while Adam, when given the power, manifested a filthy string of perverse murders. Adam asked, “What now? What do we do with …”
“Nothing,” growled Ronan. “You do nothing. No, you do what I asked before. Go.”
“What?”
Ronan was quivering. Not from venom, like the other Ronan, but from some chained emotion. “I said I didn’t want you here in case this happened, and now it has, and look at you.”
Adam thought he’d taken the whole thing pretty well, considering. Gansey would have swooned by this point. He certainly couldn’t see how his presence had made the situation any worse. He could see, however, that Ronan Lynch was angry because he wanted to be angry. “Way to be an asshole. This wasn’t my fault.”
“I didn’t say it was your fault,” Ronan said. “I said get the hell away from me.”
The two boys stared at each other. Insanely, it felt like every other argument they’d ever had, even though this time there was a Ronan-shaped body curled between them covered in gore. This was just Ronan wanting to shout where someone could hear him. Adam felt it whittling away at his temper, not because he believed Ronan was angry at him, but because he was tired of Ronan thinking this was the only way to show he was upset.
He said, “Oh, come on. What now?”
Ronan said, “Bye. That’s what.”
“Whatever,” Adam said, heading for the stairs. “Next time you can die alone.”
Back at the apartment, Adam stood in the shower for a very long time. For once, the part of his brain that calculated how much a long, hot shower might cost was silent. He stood in the water until it had gone tepid. After he got out and dressed, it occurred to him, belatedly, that Ronan might have been upset by the dream itself, not by watchi
ng himself die. He had gone to sleep intending to get evidence of murder, and had woken with blood on his hands. Adam knew that the night horrors only came to Ronan when he had a nightmare. Ronan must have known what would be waiting for him, but still, he’d charged in willingly when Adam had asked him.
Probably Adam should see if he was all right. Surely he would still be there.
But Adam stayed where he was, thinking about the other Ronan. The dead one. The strangest part was that the moment had been Adam’s vision from the tree in Cabeswater, but turned inside out. Not Gansey dying, but Ronan. So had that vision been wrong? Had he changed his future already? Or was there more to come?
There was a knock on the apartment door.
Probably Ronan. Although, it would be uncommonly unlike him to be the first to admit wrongdoing.
The knock came again, more insistent.
Adam checked to make sure his hands were no longer bloody, and then he opened the door.
It was his father.
He opened the door.
It was his father.
He opened the door.
It was his father.
“Aren’t you going to ask me to come in?” his father was saying.
Adam’s body wasn’t his, and so, with a little wonder, he watched himself step back to allow Robert Parrish to enter his apartment.
How narrow-shouldered he was beside this other man. It was hard to see where he’d come from without a close look at their faces. Then one could see how Robert Parrish wore Adam’s thin, fine lips. Then it wasn’t hard to see the same fair hair, spun from dust, and the wrinkle between the eyebrows, formed by wariness. It was actually not a difficult thing at all to see that one had sired the other.
Adam couldn’t remember what he had been thinking about before he opened the door.
“So this is where you’re keeping yourself,” said Robert Parrish. He peered at the thrift-store shelf, the makeshift nightstand, the mattress on the floor. Adam was a thing standing out of the way.
“It seems like you and I have a date together soon,” added his father. He stopped to stand directly in front of Adam. “You gonna look in my face when I talk to you, or you gonna keep looking at that shelf?”
Adam was going to keep looking at that shelf.
“Okay, then. Look, I know we had some words, but I think you might as well call this thing off. Your mother’s real upset, and it’s going to look pretty ridiculous on the day of it.”
Adam was pretty sure that his father was not allowed to be here. He didn’t remember everything that had happened after he’d pressed charges, but he did think it had involved a temporary restraining order. At the time, he thought he remembered finding it comforting, a memory that seemed foolish now. His father had beaten him for years before being caught, and a punch was a bigger act than a trespass. He could call the police afterward, of course, and report his father’s violation; he wasn’t certain if they would penalize his father, but the adult side of Adam thought that it seemed like a good thing to get on the record. All of that, though, would come after these minutes that he still had to live through.
He did not want to get hit.
It was a strange realization. It wasn’t that Adam had ever gotten used to being struck. Pain was a wondrous thing that way; it always worked. But back when he’d lived at home, he’d gotten used to the idea of that sort of intimate violence. Now, though, enough days had passed that he had stopped expecting it, which made the sudden possibility of it somehow more intolerable.
He did not want to get hit.
He would do what he needed to do to not get hit.
Anticipation trembled in his hands.
Cabeswater is not the boss of you, Persephone’s voice said.
“Adam, I’m being real decent here, but you’re trying my patience sorely,” his father told him. “At least pretend like you heard what I said.”
“I heard,” Adam replied.
“Sass. Nice.”
Just because it tantrums doesn’t mean it’s more right than you.
To the shelf, Adam said, “I think you should go.”
He felt cowardly and boneless.
“So that’s how it’s going to be?”
That was how it was going to be.
“You should know, then, that you’re going to look like a fool in that courtroom, Adam,” Robert Parrish said. “People know me and they know what kind of man I am. You and I both know this is just a pathetic cry for attention, and everyone else will, too. It’s too easy to look at you and see what kind of shit you’ve become. Don’t think I don’t know where this comes from. You prancing around with those entitled bitch-boys.”
Part of Adam was still there with his father, but most of him was retreating. The better part of him. That Adam, the magician, was no longer in his apartment. That Adam walked through trees, running his hand along the moss-covered stones.
“Court’s gonna see right through that. And you know what you’re going to be then? In the papers as that kid who wanted to put his hardworking daddy in jail.”
The leaves rustled, close and protective, pressing up against his ears, curled in his fists. They didn’t mean to frighten. They only ever tried to speak his language and get his attention. It was not fearsome Cabeswater’s fault that Adam had already been a fearful boy when he’d made the bargain.
“You think they’re really gonna look at you and see an abused kid? Do you even know what abuse is? That judge will’ve heard enough stories to know a whopper. He’s not gonna blink an eye.”
The branches leaned toward Adam, curling around him protectively, a thicket with thorns pointed outward. It had tried, before, to cling to his mind, but now it knew to surround his body. He’d asked to be separate, and Cabeswater had listened. I know you are not the same as him, Adam said. But in my head, everything is always so tangled. I am such a damaged thing.
“So we’re back where we started, you and me, when I came here. You can call off that hearing quick as you please, and this all goes away.”
The rain splattered down through the leaves, turning them upside down, trickling onto Adam.
“And look at you, and I’ve just been talking to you. Practicing for your day in court? At least pretend like I haven’t been talking to a wall. What the hell —?”
The braying note in his father’s voice brought Adam rushing back to himself. One hand was poised in the air, as if he had meant to touch Adam, or had already, and was withdrawing.
In the meat of his palm, a small thorn protruded. A thread of blood trembled from the wound, bright as a miracle.
Plucking the thorn free, his father regarded Adam, this thing he had made. He was silent for a long moment, and then something registered in his face. It wasn’t quite fear, but it was uncertainty. His son was before him, and he did not know him.
I am unknowable.
Robert Parrish began to speak, but then he didn’t. Now he had seen something in Adam’s face or eyes, or felt something in that thorn that pricked him, or maybe, like Adam, he could now smell the scent of a damp forest floor in the apartment.
“You’re going to be a fool in that courtroom,” his father said finally. “Are you going to say anything?”
Adam was not going to say anything.
His father slammed the door behind him as he left.
Adam stood there for a long moment. He wiped the heel of his hand over his right eye and cheek, then dried it on his slacks.
He climbed back into his bed and closed his eyes, hands balled to his chest, scented with mist and with moss.
When he closed his eyes, Cabeswater was still waiting for him.
The thing that amazes me,” Greenmantle mused aloud, “is that there are some people who actually do this as a form of leisure. People who trade vacation days for this experience. It dazzles, really. I have absolutely no idea where we are. I’m assuming you’d have said something if we were lost and/or were going to die down here.”
The Greenmantles we
re in a cave: wife, husband, dog, an American cave family. Piper had discovered that Otho, when left alone, ate through the bathroom doors of rental homes, so he now minced ahead of her. The cave was dark and armpit-scented. Greenmantle had done a perfunctory amount of research on caving before setting out this afternoon. He’d discovered that caves were supposed to be vessels of natural untouched beauty.
It turned out they were just holes in the ground. He felt caves had been extremely oversold.
“We’re not going to die down here,” Piper said. “I have book club on Tuesday.”
“Book club! You’ve only been here two weeks and you’re in a book club.”
“What else am I supposed to do while you’re out finding yourself? Just hang around the house, getting fat, I suppose? Don’t say ‘talk to your little friends on the phone’ because I’ll put this pickax through your right eye.”
“What’s the book?”
Piper pointed the flashlight at the ceiling and then the damp floor. Both the flashlight beam and Piper’s lip curled in disgust. “I don’t remember the title. Something about citrus. It’s a literary memoir of a young woman coming of age on an orange plantation set against a backdrop of war and subversive class struggle with possible religious undertones or something like that. Don’t say ‘I’d rather die.’ ”
“I didn’t say anything,” Greenmantle replied, although he had indeed been considering “I’d rather die” as a candidate to further the conversation. He preferred spy thrillers that involved dashing men who were slightly over thirty darting in and out of high-technology shadows while driving fast cars and making important phone calls. He held up the EMF reader in his hand to see if he could vary the degree of flashing going on across its face. He could not.
Otho had stopped to relieve himself; Piper flicked out a plastic baggie.
“This is pointless. Did you just put that shit in your bag?”
“I saw a spot on ABC about how ecotourism is denuding caves,” she informed him. “That face? The one you’re wearing now? Is part of the problem. You are part of the problem.”