The Raven King
Page 73

The creature lifted its head to look at him with brilliant eyes. It was the sort of animal that everyone thought they knew the name of until they saw it, and then the name ran away and left behind only the feeling of seeing it. It was older than anything, more lovely than anything, more terrible than anything.
Something winning and frightened sang in Gansey’s chest; it was the precise same feeling that had taken him the first time he’d seen Cabeswater. He realized that he had seen something like this creature before: the herd of white beasts that had stampeded through Cabeswater. Now that he was looking at this one, though, he realized that those were copies of this, descendants of this, dreamt memories of this.
The beast twitched an ear. Then it plunged into the night.
Gwenllian asked Gansey, “Well, aren’t you going to follow it?”
Yes.
She pointed at the oak branches, and he did not question her. He edged quickly to where a great branch overhung the roof, climbed out on to it, getting a handhold here and there on upright spurs. He slipped down from branch to branch and then jumped the eight or nine feet to the ground, feeling the jolt of the landing from the balls of his feet to his teeth.
The beast was gone.
There was not even time for Gansey to register disappointment, though, because of the birds.
They were everywhere: The air dazzled and shimmered with feathers and down. The birds swirled and dived and plummeted around the neighbourhood street, the streetlights catching wings, beaks, claws. Most of them were ravens, but there were others, too. Little chickadees, streamlined mourning doves, compact jays. These smaller birds seemed more chaotic than the ravens, though, as if they had gotten caught up in the spirit of the night without understanding the purpose. Some of them let out little squawks or cries, but mostly the sound was wings. The humming, rushing whoosh of frantic flight.
Gansey stepped into the yard and the dense flock immediately rushed up around him. They swirled around him, wings brushing against him, feathers touching his cheek. He couldn’t see anything but the birds, every shape and colour. His heart was a winged thing itself. He couldn’t catch his breath.
He was so afraid.
If you can’t be unafraid, Henry said, be afraid and happy.
The flock dipped away. They meant to be followed, and they meant to be followed now. They swirled up in a great column over the Camaro.
Make way! they shouted. Make way for the Raven King! It was loud enough now that lights were beginning to come on in the houses.
Gansey climbed into the car and turned the key – start, Pig, start. It growled to life. Gansey was all things at once: elated, terrified, overcome, satiated.
With a squeal of tires, he pursued his king.
 
 
Ronan was operating on emergency battery power. Running on cruise control. He was a drop of water beaded on a windshield. The slightest jolt would be enough to send him skidding downward.
Because he was practising such a delicate balancing act between waking and sleep, it wasn’t until the driver’s-side door of the BMW wrenched open that he realized something had happened. The noise was terrific, particularly because Chainsaw flew into the car as soon as the door had opened. The Orphan Girl shrieked in the backseat and Adam jolted awake.
“I don’t know,” Blue said.
Ronan wasn’t sure what this meant until he realized that she wasn’t addressing him, but the people behind her. Maura, Calla and Gwenllian stood in the road in various states of night-time disarray.
“I told you, I told you,” Gwenllian cawed. Her hair was a tangle of feathers and oak leaves.
“Were you sleeping?” Blue asked Ronan. He had not been sleeping. He hadn’t been awake, though, either, not really. He stared at her. He had forgotten her wound until he was staring at it again; it was such a violent signature, written on her skin. So against everything Noah would ordinarily do. Everything backwards. Demon, demon. “Ronan. Did you see where Gansey went?”
Now he was awake.
“He’s on the hunt!” Gwenllian shrilled gleefully.
“Shut up,” Blue said, with unexpected rudeness. “Gansey’s gone after Glendower. The Pig’s gone. Gwenllian says he went after birds. Did you see where he went? He’s not picking up his phone!”
She swept her hand dramatically behind her to demonstrate this truth. The empty kerb in front of 300 Fox Way, the street littered with feathers of all colours, the neighbours’ doors opening and closing with curiosity.
“He can’t go alone,” Adam said. “He’ll do something stupid.”
“I’m infinitely aware,” Blue replied. “I’ve called him. I’ve called Henry, to see if we could use RoboBee. No one’s picking up. I don’t even know if calls are going through.”
“Can you locate him?” Adam asked Maura and Calla.
“He’s tied into the ley line,” Maura said. “Somehow. Somewhere. So I can’t see him. That’s all I know.”
Ronan’s mind was wobbling as reality began to jostle at him. The horror of every nightmare being made into truth jittered his fingers on the steering wheel.
“Maybe I can scry,” Adam said. “I don’t know that I’ll know where it is, though. If he’s somewhere I haven’t been, I won’t recognize it and we’ll have to piece together clues.”
Blue spun in an angry circle. “That will take for ever.”
The feathers scattered across the street struck Ronan. Every fine edge of them seemed sharp and real and important against the fuzzed events of the days before. Gansey had gone after Glendower. Gansey had gone without them. Gansey had gone without him.
“I’ll dream something,” he said. No one heard him the first time, so he said it again.
“What?” Blue asked, at the same time that Maura said, “What kind of something?” and Adam said, “But the demon.”
Ronan’s mind was still a fresh horror of seeing his mother’s body. The recent memory effortlessly cross-pollinated with the older one of finding his father’s body, creating a toxic and expanding flower. He did not want to go back into his head right now. But he would. “Something to find Gansey. Like Henry Cheng’s RoboBee. It only has to have one purpose. Something small. I can do it fast.”
“You could be killed fast, you mean,” Adam said.
Ronan did not reply to this. Already he was trying to think of what form he could swiftly invest with such a skill. What could he most reliably create, even with the hurricane of the demon distracting him? What could he be certain the demon wouldn’t corrupt even as he manifested it?