It was possible that there were two gods in this church.
Ronan crouched by the pew again, studying the list, his fingers running idly over his stubble as he thought. When he wasn’t trying to look like an asshole, his face looked very different, and for a tilting moment, Adam felt the startling inequality of their relationship: Ronan knew Adam, but Adam wasn’t sure he knew Ronan, after all.
“I’ll do it now,” Ronan said finally.
“Now?” Adam asked incredulously. “Here? Now?”
Ronan flashed a cocky grin, pleased to have gotten a reaction. “No time like the present, Parrish. Now. Everything but the phone. I have to see what kind he has before I can dream that.”
Adam glanced around the still church. It still felt so inhabited. Even though he intellectually believed Ronan that the church would stay empty, in his heart, he felt crowded by … possibilities. But Ronan’s face held a challenge and Adam wasn’t going to back down. He said, “I know what kind of phone he has.”
“Telling me a model isn’t good enough. I need to see it,” replied Ronan.
Adam hesitated, and then asked, “What if I asked Cabeswater to show you his phone in the dream? I know what kind it is.”
He waited for Ronan to falter or wonder over Adam’s strangeness, but Ronan just straightened and rubbed his hands together. “Yeah, good. Good. Look, maybe you should go, though. To the apartment, and I’ll meet you after I’m done.”
“Why?”
Ronan said, “Not everything in my head is a great thing, Parrish, believe it or not. I told you. And when I’m bringing something back from a dream, sometimes I can’t bring back only one thing.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“At least give me some room.”
Adam retreated to sit beside Mary as Ronan stretched out on the pew, rubbing out the dingy plan with the legs of his jeans. Something about his stillness on the pew and the funereal quality of the light reminded Adam of the effigy of Glendower they’d seen at the tomb. A king, sleeping. Adam couldn’t imagine, though, the strange, wild kingdom that Ronan might rule.
“Stop watching me,” Ronan said, though his eyes were closed.
“Whatever. I’m going to ask Cabeswater for the phone.”
“See you on the other side.”
As Ronan fidgeted, Adam flicked his eyes over to the candles at Mary’s feet. It was harder to look into a flame than a pool of black water, but it served the same purpose. As his vision whited out, he felt his mind loosen and detach from his body, and just before he fell out of himself, he asked Cabeswater to give Ronan the phone. Asking was not quite the right word. Showing was better, because he showed Cabeswater what he needed: the image of the phone presenting itself to Ronan.
Time was impossible to judge when he scryed.
Nearby — what was nearby? — he heard a sharp sound, like a caw, and he suddenly realized that he wasn’t sure if he’d been staring into the light for a minute or an hour or a day. His own body felt like the flame, flickering and fragile; he was getting in too deep.
Time to go back.
He waded back, retreating into his bones. He felt the moment his mind clung to his body once more. His eyes flickered open.
Ronan was convulsing in front of him.
Adam jerked his legs in toward his body, out of reach of the disaster just in front of him. Ronan’s arms were streaked with blood and his hands were pinpricked with visceral, juicy wounds. His jeans were soaked black. The church carpet glistened with it.
But the horror was his spine, bent back on itself. It was his hand, pressed to his throat. It was his breath — a gasp, a gasp, a choked-off word. It was his fingers, shaking as he held them to his mouth. It was his eyes, open too wide, too bright, cast up to the ceiling. Seeing only pain.
Adam didn’t want to move. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t do this. This wasn’t happening.
But it was, and he could.
He scrambled forward. “Ronan — Oh, God.”
Because now that he was closer, he could see what a ruin Ronan’s body was. Beyond repair. He was dying.
I did this — this was my idea — he didn’t even really want to —
“Are you happy now?” Ronan asked. “Is this what you wanted?”
Adam started violently. The voice had come from somewhere else. He looked up and found Ronan sitting cross-legged on the pew above them, his expression watchful. One of this Ronan’s hands was bloody, too, but it was clearly not his own blood. Something dark flickered across his face as he cast his eyes down to his dying double. The other Ronan whimpered. It was a hideous sound.
“What — what’s happening?” Adam asked. He felt light-headed. He was awake; he was dreaming.
“You said you wanted to stay and watch,” Ronan snarled from the bench. “Enjoy the show.”
Adam understood now. The real Ronan had not moved; he’d woken exactly where he had fallen asleep. This dying Ronan was a copy.
“Why would you dream this?” demanded Adam. He wanted his brain to believe that this agonized Ronan wasn’t real, but the duplication was too perfect. He saw at once a Ronan Lynch violently dying and a Ronan Lynch watching with cool remove. Both were true, though both should have been impossible.
“I tried for too much at once,” Ronan said from the pew. His words were short, clipped. He was trying not to look like he cared about watching himself die. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe this happened all the time. What a fool Adam was to think he knew anything about Ronan Lynch. “It wasn’t the sort of thing — the sort of things I normally dream about, and everything got agitated. The night horrors came. Then the wasps. I could tell I would bring them back with me. That I’d wake up like that. So I dreamt another me for them to have and then — I woke up. And here I am. And here I am, again. What a cool trick. What a damn cool trick.”
The other Ronan was dead.
Adam felt the same way he had when he had seen the dream world. Reality was twisting in on itself. Here was Ronan, dead, and ungrievable, because there was Ronan, alive and unblinking.
“Here —” said Ronan. “Here’s your shit. The lies you wanted.”
He thrust a bulging, oversized manila envelope at Adam, full, presumably, of the evidence to frame Greenmantle. It took Adam too long to realize that Ronan wanted him to take it, and then a second longer to shift his mind to the mechanics of taking it. Adam told his hand to reach out, and reluctantly it did.
Get it together, Adam.
There was blood on the envelope, and now, on Adam’s hand. He asked, “Did you get everything?”
“It’s all there.”
“Even the —”
“It’s all there.”
What an impossible and miraculous and hideous thing this was. An ugly plan hatched by an ugly boy now dreamt into ugly life. From dream to reality. How appropriate it was that Ronan, left to his own devices, manifested beautiful cars and beautiful birds and tenderhearted brothers, while Adam, when given the power, manifested a filthy string of perverse murders. Adam asked, “What now? What do we do with …”
“Nothing,” growled Ronan. “You do nothing. No, you do what I asked before. Go.”
“What?”
Ronan was quivering. Not from venom, like the other Ronan, but from some chained emotion. “I said I didn’t want you here in case this happened, and now it has, and look at you.”