Page 53 of The Raven King(The Raven Cycle 4)
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 dove and plummeted around the neighborhood 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 color. 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 practicing 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 nighttime 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 backward. 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 curb in front of 300 Fox Way, the street littered with feathers of all colors, the neighbors’ 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 forever.”
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?
“Cabeswater can’t help you,” Adam pressed. “It can only hinder you. You’d have to try to create something not terrible among all that, which seems impossible to start, and then you’d have to bring back that, and only that, from the dream, which sounds even more impossible.”
Ronan addressed the steering wheel. “I’m aware of how dreaming works, Parrish.”
He did not say I can’t stand the idea of finding Gansey’s body, too. He did not say If I can’t save my old family, I can save my new one. He did not say I will not let the demon have everything.
He did not say that the only true nightmare was not being able to do something and that this, at least, was something.
He just said, “I’m going to try,” and hoped that Adam knew all of the rest already.
Adam did. So did the others.
Maura said, “We’ll do our best to support your energy and hold back some of the worst.”
Adam put the seatback in its fully upright and locked position. He said, “I’ll scry.”
“Blue,” Ronan said, “I think you’d better hold his hand.”
The Camaro broke down.
It was always breaking down and living again, but tonight — tonight, Gansey needed it.
It broke down anyway. He’d only gotten to the outskirts of town when it coughed, and the lights inside dimmed. Before Gansey even had time to react, the car had died. His power brakes and steering vanished and he had to wrestle it to the shoulder. He tried the key, looked in the mirror, tried to see if the birds were waiting. They were not.
Make way for the Raven King! they shouted, sailing on. Make way!
Damn this car!
Not so long ago, the car had died in just the same way in a pitch-black night, leaving him stranded by the side of the road, nearly getting him killed. Adrenaline hit him in the same way as it had that night, immediate and complete, like time had never progressed.
He pumped the gas, let it sit, pumped the gas, let it sit.
The birds were drawing away. He could not follow.
“Come on,” he pleaded. “Come on.”
The Camaro did not come on. The ravens cried furiously; they did not seem to want to leave him, but also seemed to be pulled by a force beyond them. With a soft swear, he scrambled out of the car and slammed the door. He didn’t know what he would do. He would give chase on foot, until he had lost them. He would —
“Gansey.”
Henry Cheng. He stood before Gansey, his Fisker parked askance in the street behind him, door hanging open. “What’s happening?”
The impossibility of Henry’s presence hit Gansey harder than anything else that nig
ht, even though it was actually the least impossible thing. They were not far from Litchfield’s side of town, and Henry had clearly arrived to this place by means automotive rather than magical. But still, the timing was too clearly on Gansey’s side, and Henry, unlike the ravens, could not have appeared just because Gansey bade him to.
“How are you here?” Gansey demanded.
Henry pointed up into the sky. Not at the birds, but at the tiny, winking body of RoboBee. “RoboBee was told to tell me if you needed me. So I say again unto thee: What’s happening?”
The ravens were still crying for Gansey to follow. They were getting even farther; soon he wouldn’t be able to see them. His pulse rummaged in his chest. With great effort, he made himself focus on Henry’s question. “The Camaro won’t start. Those birds. They’re taking me to Glendower. I have to go, I have to follow them or they’ll be —”
“Stop. Stop. Get in my car. You know what? You drive. This thing scares the piss out of me.”
Henry tossed him the keys.
