Page 54 of The Raven King(The Raven Cycle 4)
He got in.
There was a sick rightness to it, as if somehow, Gansey had always known this was how the chase would go. As they left the Camaro behind, time was slipping and he was inside of it. Above them, the ravens burst and tumbled through the black. They were sometimes stark against buildings, sometimes invisible against trees. They flashed and flickered before the last of the town’s streetlights like fan blades. Gansey and Henry drove through the last vestiges of civilization into the countryside. Henrietta was so large in Gansey’s mind that he was somewhat surprised to see, when he was not paying attention to it, how quickly the lights of the small town vanished in his rearview mirror.
Out of Henrietta, the ravens streamed and bobbed north. They flew faster than Gansey thought birds ought to be able to fly, ducking into trees and valleys. Pursuing them was not a simple matter; the ravens flew dead-on straight, while the Fisker had to stick to roads. His heart screamed at him, Don’t lose them. Don’t lose him. Not now.
He could not shake the idea that this was his only chance.
His head was not thinking. His heart was thinking.
“Go, go, go,” Henry said. “I’ll watch for cops. Go, go, go.”
He typed something into the phone and then ducked his head to look out of the car to watch RoboBee spin away to do his work.
Gansey went went went.
Northeast, through tangled roads Gansey had probably been on before but didn’t remember. Hadn’t he crawled over this entire state? The ravens led them over the mountains on twisting roads that turned to dirt and then back to asphalt. At one point, the Fisker clung to the side of a mountain and looked down a steep drop with nary a guardrail in sight. Then the road turned back to asphalt and trees hid the sky.
The ravens were instantly invisible behind the night-black branches, flying off in some direction without them.
Gansey slammed on the brakes and rolled down the window. Henry, without any questions, did the same. Both boys tilted their heads and listened. Winter trees creaked in the breeze; distant trucks rolled on the highway below; ravens called urgently to one another.
“There,” Henry said immediately. “Right.”
The Fisker charged ahead. They were headed along the ley line, Gansey thought. How far would the ravens fly? Washington, D.C.? Boston? All the way across the Atlantic? He had to believe they wouldn’t go where he could not follow. It ended tonight, because Gansey had said it ended tonight, and he had meant it.
The birds continued on, unerring. An interstate sign loomed in the dark.
“Does that say 66?” Gansey said. “Is that the ramp for 66?”
“I don’t know, man. Numbers confuse me.”
It was I-66. The birds swept forward; Gansey got onto the interstate. It was faster, but a little risky. There were no options to turn off if the ravens altered their path.
The birds didn’t waver. Gansey poured on speed, and more speed.
The birds were headed along the ley line, taking Gansey back toward Washington, D.C., and his childhood home. He had a sudden, terrible thought that that was precisely where they were leading him. Back to the Gansey home in Georgetown, where he learned that his ending was his beginning, and he finally accepted that he had to grow up to be just another Gansey with all that entailed.
“What did you say this was? I-66?” Henry asked, typing in his phone again as another sign flew by them proclaiming the fact of I-66.
“However do you drive?”
“I don’t. You do. Mile marker?”
“Eleven.”
Henry studied his phone, his face blue by its light. “Hey. Hey. Slow up. Cop in a mile.”
Gansey let the Fisker glide down to something closer to the speed limit. Sure enough, the dark paint of an unmarked police car glistened in the median a little less than a mile from when Henry had noted it. Henry saluted him as they drove by.
“Thank you for your service, RoboBee.”
Gansey let out a breathless laugh. “Okay, now you — wait. Can RoboBee find us an exit?”
The ravens had been getting slightly farther away from the interstate with each mile, and now it was becoming quite clear that they were diverging in a permanent way.
Henry tapped into his phone. “Two miles. Exit 23.”
Two miles in an ever-widening triangle would put a lot of space between the ravens and the car. “Can RoboBee keep up with the birds?”
“I’ll find out.”
So they barreled on ahead as the flock grew harder to see in the darkness and eventually disappeared. Gansey’s pulse raced. He had to trust Henry; Henry had to trust RoboBee. At the exit, Gansey sent the Fisker racing off the interstate. There was no sign of the ravens: only ordinary Virginia night all around them. He felt strange as he recognized where they were, near Delaplane, quite far from Henrietta now. This was a world of old money, horse farms, and politicians and tire-company billionaires. It was not a place of archaic wild magic. By day it would reveal itself as a place of genteel loveliness, a place so long beloved and cultivated that it was impossible to imagine it running amok.
“Where now?” Gansey asked. They were driving into nowhere, into ordinariness, into a life Gansey had already lived.
Henry didn’t immediately reply, his head bowed over his phone. Gansey wanted to stomp the gas, but there was no point if they were going the wrong way.
“Henry.”
“Sorry sorry. Got it! Floor it, turn right when you can.”
Gansey did as directed with such efficiency that Henry placed a hand on the ceiling to brace himself.
“Yay,” said Henry. “Also, woo.”
And then, suddenly, there were the ravens again, the flock tumbling and remaking itself above the tree line, perfect black against the deep purple sky. Henry pounded the ceiling in silent triumph. The Fisker wheeled onto a broad, four-lane highway, empty in both directions. Gansey had only begun to accelerate again when the ravens swirled up in a tornado of birds, tossed aloft by an invisible updraft, changing course abruptly. The Fisker’s headlights found a real-estate sign at the end of a driveway.
“There. There!” Henry said. “Stop!”
He was right. The birds had peeled up the driveway. Gansey had already blown by it. He scanned ahead; there was no turnaround immediately in view. He would not lose the birds. He would not lose them. Rolling down his window, he craned his head out the window to be sure the night road behind him was still black, then backed up, the transmission whining in excitement.
“Aight,” said Henry.
The Fisker climbed the steep driveway. Gansey didn’t even pause as he considered that someone might be home. It was late, he was strange and memorable in this fancy car, and this was a private corner of an old-fashioned world. It didn’t matter. He would think of something to say to the home owners if it came to that. He would not leave the ravens. Not this time.
The headlights illuminated ill-kept grandeur: the oversized teeth of landscaping stones lining th
e driveway, grass growing between them; a four-board fence with a board hanging loose; asphalt cracked and spewing dead weeds.
The sensation of time slipping was even greater now. He had been here before. He had done this, or lived this life before.
“This place, man,” Henry said, craning his neck, trying to look. “It’s a museum.”
The driveway climbed until it rose above the tree line and reached the crest. There was a grand circle at the end of the drive, and behind that, a dark and looming house. No, not house. Gansey, who had grown up in a mansion, knew a mansion when he saw one. This one was far larger than his parents’ current home, adorned with columns and roof decks and porticoes and conservatories, a sprawling entity of brick and cream. Unlike his parents’ home, however, this mansion’s boxwoods were overgrown by weedy tall locust trees, and the ivy had crawled off the brick walls onto the stairs leading to the front door. The rosebushes had shot up uneven and ugly.
“Not a lot of curb appeal,” Henry noted. “Bit of a fixer-upper. Would be some great zombie parties on the roof though, yo.”
As the Fisker pulled slowly around the circle, the ravens watched them from the roof and the roof deck railings. Déjà vu plucked at Gansey’s mind, like looking at Noah and seeing both the living and dead version of him.
Gansey touched his lower lip pensively. “I’ve been here.”
Henry peered up at the ravens, who peered back, unmoving. Waiting. “When?”
“This is where I died.”
Ronan had known before he fell asleep that Cabeswater was going to be unbearable, but he had not realized how unbearable.
It was not the sights that were the worst; it was the emotions. The demon was still working on the trees and the ground and the sky, but it was also corrupting the feel of the forest, the things that make a dream a dream even if there is no scenery in it. Now it was every guilty breath sucked in after a sort-of lie. It was the drop of the stomach after finding a body. It was the gnawing suspicion that you were leavable, that you were too much trouble, that you were better off dead. It was the shame of wanting something you shouldn’t; it was the ugly thrill of nearly being dead. It was all of those things, all at once.
