The Raven King
Page 76

Ronan’s nightmares used to be one or two of these things. Only rarely were they all. That was back when they wanted him dead.
The difference was that he’d been alone in those. Now Maura and Calla were supporting him in the waking world – Calla sitting on his hood and Maura sitting in the backseat. He could feel their energy like hands around his head, blocking out some of the dreadful sound. And he had Adam’s mind here in the dream with him. In the real world, he was scrying in the passenger seat again, and in this one, he stood in this ruined forest, hunched over, face unsure.
No. Ronan had to admit to himself that even though they made it easier, their presence wasn’t the real difference between his old nightmares and this one. The real difference was that, back then, the nightmares had wanted him dead, and so had Ronan.
He looked around for some safe place in the dream, someplace that his creation might possibly develop in safety. There was no such place. The only uncorrupted things in the dream were Adam and himself.
So he would hold it himself. Ronan pressed his palms together, imagining a tiny ball of light forming there. The demon did not care for this. In his ear, he heard a gasp. Unmistakably his father. Unmistakably in pain. Dying alone.
Your fault.
Ronan pushed it away. He kept thinking about the tiny brilliant thing that he was forming to find Gansey. He imagined its weight, its size, the pattern of its miniature wings.
“Did you really think I’m going to stay in this place for you?” Adam said in his other ear, all chilly dismissal.
The real Adam was standing with his head turned to the side as an unreasonable facsimile of his father screamed in his face, the cadence of his voice perfectly and eerily matched to the real Robert Parrish. There was a firm set to Adam’s mouth that was less fear and more stubbornness. He had been slowly untangling himself from his real father for weeks; this duplicate was easier to resist.
Leavable.
I’m not asking him to stay, Ronan thought. Only to come back. He wanted badly to check if the object in his hands was what he intended it to be, but he could feel how the demon longed to corrupt the object, to turn it inside out, to make it opposite and ugly. Better to keep it hidden from sight for now, trusting only that he was creating something positive. He had to hold on to the idea of what it was supposed to do when it was brought back to waking life, and not the demon’s idea of what it wanted the object to do when brought back to waking life.
Something was scratching at Ronan’s neck. Lightly, harmlessly, repeatedly, relentlessly, until it had worked its way through the topmost layer of his skin and found blood.
Ronan ignored it and felt the object in his hand stir to life against his fingers.
The dream splattered a body in front of him. Black and torn, ripped and corrupt. Gansey. Eyes still alive, mouth moving. Ruined and helpless. A claw from one of Ronan’s night horrors was still hooked in the corner of his mouth, punched through his cheek.
Powerless.
No. Ronan didn’t think so. He felt the dream fluttering against the palms of his hands.
Adam met Ronan’s gaze, even as the duplicate version of his father kept screaming at him. The strain of whatever energy balance he was doing was visible on his face. “Are you ready?”
Ronan hoped so. The truth was that they really wouldn’t know who’d won this round until he opened his eyes in the BMW. He said, “Wake me up.”
 
 
Gansey had been here before – seven years and some change. Impossibly, it had been for another Congressional fund-raiser. Gansey remembered that he had been excited to go. Washington, D.C., in the summer was airless and close, its inhabitants reluctant hostages, bags over their heads. Although the Ganseys had just taken an overseas trip to visit mint farms in Punjab (a political trip that Gansey still didn’t fully understand the purpose of), the travel had only served to make the youngest Gansey more restless. The only backyard their Georgetown house had was filled wall to wall with flowers older than Gansey, and he was forbidden to go into it during high summer, because the backyard drowsed with bees. And although his parents took him to antiques shows and museums, horse races and art shindigs, Gansey’s feet grew itchier. He had seen all of these things. He felt greedy for new curiosities and wonders, for things he had never seen before and things he couldn’t understand. He wanted to go.
So although he was not excited by the idea of politics, he had been excited by the idea of leaving.
“It will be fun,” his father had said. “There will be other children there.”
“Martin’s kids,” his mother had added, and the two of them exchanged a private snigger over a long-ago slight.
It had taken Gansey a moment to realize that they were offering this as an incentive rather than merely reporting the fact as a weather update. Gansey had never found children fun, including the child he had been. He had always looked to a future where he could change his own address at will.
Now, years later, Gansey stood on the ivy-tangled staircase and looked at the plaque by the door. THE GREEN HOUSE, it read. EST. 1824. Up close, it was hard to say precisely why the property looked grotesque rather than merely shaggy. The attendance of ravens on every horizontal surface of the house didn’t hurt. He tried the front door: locked. He clicked on the torch function on his phone and leaned against the sidelight windows, trying to see inside. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He would know it when he saw it, maybe. Perhaps a back door was unlocked, or a window could be slid open. Though there was no particular reason why the interior of the neglected house should hold any secrets relevant to Gansey, the part of him that was good at finding things battered silently against the glass, wanting in.
“Look at this,” Henry called from a few yards away. His voice was theatrically shocked. “I have discovered that, at some point, this side door was broken into by a teenage Korean vandal.”
Gansey had to pick across a bed of dead lilies to join him at a less elaborate side entrance. Henry had finished the work of a cracked windowpane in order to reach inside and open the lock. “Kids these days. ‘Cheng’ isn’t Korean, is it?”
“My father isn’t,” Henry said. “I am. I got that, and the vandal part, from my mother. Let us enter, Dick, as I’ve already broken.”
Gansey hesitated, though, outside the door. “You had RoboBee looking out for me.”
“It was friendly. That was a friend thing.”