The Raven King
Page 67

He remembered the academic portions of his life as a historian back in Boston: the lectures, the papers, the parties, the archives. Kings and warriors, honour and wergild. He remembered the Greenmantles, of course. But everything else was difficult to piece together. Hard to discern what was true recollection and what was merely dream. Back then he’d strung one gray day into another, and it seemed likely that he had lost weeks or months or years to this foggy dissociation. Somewhere in there someone had breathed the word mercenary, and somewhere in there someone had given up his identity and become the Gray Man.
“What are we expecting to find here?” Maura asked him now.
They were in the car together, headed out towards Singer’s Falls. The presence of only two parts of Laumonier at the grocery store had been gnawing at the Gray Man ever since he had left them, and he’d spent much of the night in a dedicated search for the third and most unpleasant brother. Now, although they’d lost sight of his rental car, they continued on towards the Barns.
“We are hoping to find nothing,” the Gray Man said. “We are expecting, however, to find Laumonier rifling through Niall Lynch’s closets.”
The part of the Gray Man who used to be a hit man was not thrilled by the idea of Maura insisting on coming with him; the part of him that was very in love with her was deeply satisfied.
“Still no answer from Ronan,” Maura said, peering at the Gray Man’s phone. Blue had told them that morning that Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish were working at the Barns.
“Possibly he wouldn’t pick up my number,” the Gray Man demurred. Also, possibly he was dead. Laumonier could be very difficult when cornered.
“Possibly,” Maura echoed with a frown.
They found the Barns looking idyllic as usual, with only two cars in the gravel area – the Lynch BMW and the Parrish tri-colour jalopy. There was no sign of Laumonier’s rental, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t parked nearby and walked in.
“Don’t tell me to stay in the car,” Maura said.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he replied, opening the door slowly to avoid jamming it into a plum tree still growing barely hidden fruit. “A parked car is a vulnerable place.”
He retrieved his gun and Maura put his phone in her back pocket and they tried the front door – unlocked. It took them very little time to discover Adam and Ronan in the living room.
They were not dead.
But they were not quite alive, either. Ronan Lynch was unresponsive on the faded leather couch, and Adam Parrish was keeled back beside the fireplace. A young girl sat bolt upright in front of a dog bowl, unblinking. She had hooves. None of the room’s occupants responded to Maura’s voice.
The Gray Man found himself strangely affected by the sight of them in such a state, which seemed contradictory given that he had killed Ronan’s father. But it was precisely because he had killed Niall that he now felt responsibility and guilt howling in the corridors of his heart. He was his own man now, and in his position as someone else’s tool, he had left Ronan and the Barns without a protector.
“Is this magic or poison?” the Gray Man asked Maura. “Laumonier loves his poisons.”
Maura leaned over the scrying bowl before flinching back from it. “I think it’s magic. Not that I’m any good at whatever kind of magic they’ve been playing with.”
“Should we shake them?” he asked.
“Adam. Adam, come back.” She touched his face. “I don’t want to wake Ronan, in case he’s keeping Adam’s soul close by. I guess … I will go in and get Adam. Hold my hand. Don’t let me go for more than, I don’t know, ninety seconds.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“It’s how Persephone died. The body can’t live with the soul too far away. I don’t intend on wandering. If he’s not close, I’ll come back.”
The Gray Man trusted Maura to know her own limits, as he assumed she trusted him. He placed his gun on the floor beside his foot – out of easy reach of the girl, if that’s what she was – and took Maura’s hand.
She leaned into the scrying bowl, and as her eyes went blank, he began to count. One, two, three —
Adam gasped and twitched. One hand flailed out, grabbing for a handhold that wasn’t there, nails scratching against the plaster in a thin attack. His gaze swam on to the Gray Man with obvious effort.
“Wake him,” he said in a slurred voice. “Don’t let him stay there by himself!” The hooved girl leapt up from her position without any sluggishness. (Maybe, the Gray Man thought in retrospect, she had actually not been scrying at all, and had instead remained perfectly still only as camouflage when Maura and the Gray Man came into the house, a chilling but perfectly plausible thought.) She threw her arms around Ronan where he sprawled, then began to agitate at him, hands pressed flat against his cheeks, pounding his chest, speaking all the while in something that sounded like Latin but was not.
Then a peculiar thing happened. In principle, the Gray Man knew what was happening, but it was a very different thing to see it actually occur before one’s eyes.
Ronan Lynch brought something back from his dreams.
In this case: blood.
In one moment, he was asleep, and in the next he was awake, and his hands were mired in gore. The Gray Man’s brain moved uneasily between those moments, and he felt that it had neatly removed the most difficult image, the one in the middle.
Adam had clambered unsteadily to his feet. “Bring Maura back! You have no idea —”
Yes, ninety seconds, it had been ninety seconds. The Gray Man used Maura’s hand to tug her away from the scrying bowl, and because she had only wandered in shallowly, she returned to him at once.
“Oh no,” she said. “It’s awful. It’s so awful. The demon – oh no.”
She looked at once to Ronan on the couch. He had not moved even a fraction, although his eyebrows had become more intentional over his closed eyes. There was not a lot of blood on the outside of him, in comparison to how much a human generally carried on the inside, but there was nonetheless something fatal-looking about the display. It was the combination of blood and mud, the bits of bone and viscera stuck to the heels of his hands.
“Fuck,” said Adam vehemently. He had begun to shake, though his face had not changed.
“Is Ronan hurt?” Maura asked.