Blue’s lips were pressed together, and Adam knew she was feeling it, too.
Why wasn’t it working?
Perhaps it was just as it had been at the Barns. They were close, but not close enough. Perhaps Gwenllian was right; they were not worthy.
Gwenllian was backing up from them, her arms stretched by her sides, her eyes darting from beast to beast as if she expected one to break first and wanted to be watching.
Gansey’s eyebrows drew together as he surveyed the herds and flocks, Gwenllian and the streaming light, his friends frozen in an invisible battle.
Adam could not stop seeing his fallible king, hanging in the pit of the ravens.
Gansey touched his lower lip very gently. He lowered his hand, and he said, “Wake up.”
He said it like he had said stop earlier. He said it in a voice Adam had heard countless times, a voice he could never not listen to.
The beasts woke.
The stags and the horses, the lions and the hawks, the goats and the unicorns, and the creatures that Adam could not name.
One moment they were bones, and the next they were whole. Adam missed the moment of transformation. It was like Noah from smudged ghost to boy, from impossible to possible. Every creature was alive and shimmery and more beautiful than anything Adam could have ever imagined.
They reared and they called and they whinnied and they leapt.
Adam could see Gansey’s chest heave with disbelief.
They had done this. Were still doing this.
“We have to go!” Blue shouted. “Look!”
The creatures were galloping away. Not as one, but as a hundred disparate minds with one goal, and that goal was a cave passage that had appeared on the other side of the valley. It was like a gaping mouth, though, slowly closing. If they didn’t go through it, soon, it would disappear.
But no human could run that fast.
“This!” Blue shouted, and she flung herself onto the Irish elk. It tossed its massive antlers and twisted, but she clung on.
Adam couldn’t believe it.
“Yes —” Ronan said, and snatched at a deer, and another, before he seized the ruff of a primordial creature and pulled himself on.
It was easier said than done, though. The beasts were fast and skittish, and Adam came away with handfuls of fur. A few yards away, he saw Gansey, frustrated, show him a palm coated with fur, too. Gwenllian laughed and ran after the creatures, clapping her hands and herding them.
“Run along, little creatures! Run! Run!”
Adam suddenly pitched forward, his shoulder stinging, as some sort of creature half-leapt over him. He rolled, covering his head. Another hoof knocked him — he thought of his old Latin teacher trampled to death in Cabeswater.
The difference was that Cabeswater wouldn’t let Adam die.
It would let him get hurt, though. He scrambled farther out of the way and then back to his feet.
“Adam,” Gansey said, pointing.
Adam’s eyes found what he gestured to: Ronan’s and Blue’s beasts leaping through the diminished cave passage, right before it disappeared.
Blue found herself in a strange, low-ceilinged cavern of indeterminate space. Light from behind illuminated the ground as it sloped away from her and to a jagged-floored pit.
No. That was not the floor. That was the ceiling, reflected.
She was looking at a vast, still lake. The water mirrored the spiked ceiling perfectly, hiding the true depth of the dead lake. There was something dead and uncomforting about it. On the other side of the lake was another tunnel, barely visible in the dim light.
Blue shivered. Her shoulder ached where she had fallen on it, and so did her butt.
She turned away from the lake — uneasily, because who knew what a mirror might hold — and looked for signs of the others. She saw her great, white beast standing aloof and still, like a part of the cave. And she saw the cavern path that led back up the way she had hurtled.
“You’re here,” Blue said, relieved, because she was not alone: Here was Ronan. It was his ghost light, slung over his shoulder still, that lit the cavern.
He stood as aloof as the elk, eyes wary and dark and foreign as he strode out of the dimness. There was no sign of the creature he must have ridden to gain access, though.
Suddenly full of misgiving, she flicked out her switchblade. “Are you the real Ronan?”
He scoffed.
“I’m serious.”
“Yes, maggot,” Ronan said. He peered around as uneasily as she did, which made her feel a little better about him. It was the lake, or something on the underside of it, that was making her nervous.
“Why didn’t you need to ride in on something?”
“I did. It got away.”
“Got away? To where?”
He stalked closer to her, and then he leaned to scoop up a loose rock from the ground. He tossed it underhand into the lake. There was a sound like air blowing across their ears, and then the rock vanished. Blue saw the moment it hit the water and disappeared — not into the water, but into nothing.
There were no ripples.
“So, you know what?” Ronan asked Blue. “Fuck magic. Fuck this.”
Blue walked slowly toward the lake’s edge.
“Hey! Didn’t you hear me? Don’t do anything stupid. It ate my deer thing.”
“I’m just looking,” Blue said.
She got as close as she dared, and then she looked in, trying to see the bottom.
Once again she saw the golden reflection of the ceiling above, then the black of the water, and then her own face, her eyes hollowed out and strange.
Her face seemed to rise through the water toward her, closer and closer, skin paler and duller, until she saw that it was not her own face at all.
It was her mother’s.
Her eyes were dead, mouth slack, cheeks hollow and water-logged. She floated just below the surface. Face closest, torso falling away, legs lost in the black.
Blue could feel herself begin to shake. It was everything she’d felt after Persephone’s death. It was grief right in the moment, singeing her.
“No,” she said out loud. “No. No.”
But her mother’s face kept floating, deader and deader, after all this, and Blue heard herself making a thin, awful sound.
Be sensible — Blue couldn’t make herself so. Drag her out.
Suddenly, she felt arms around her, yanking her away from the lake’s edge. The arms around her were trembling, too, but they were iron tight, scented with sweat and moss.
“It’s not real,” Ronan told her, voice low. “It’s not real, Blue.”
“I saw her,” Blue said, and she heard the sob in her voice. “My mother.”
He said, “I know. I saw my father.”
“But she was there —”
“My father’s dead in the ground. And Adam saw your mother farther on in this godforsaken cave. That lake is a lie.”
But it felt real to her heart, even if her head knew better.
For a moment they remained that way, Ronan holding her as tightly as he would hold his brother Matthew, his cheek on her shoulder. Every time she thought she could go on, she saw the face of her mother’s corpse again.
Finally, she pulled back, and Ronan stood up. He looked away, but not before she saw the tear he flicked from his chin.
“Fuck this,” he said again.