Behind her, Artemus blinked, which was notable because he hadn’t really been blinking before. His shoulder was bleeding in a way that seemed like he might have been shot. Every time he dripped on the cave floor, the blood ran together and trickled through the fallen rock toward the red door.
Uphill.
They all stopped to watch it.
Piper’s gaze followed it all the way to the door, and to the handle, and her bubble-gum pink lips parted.
Then Artemus used his tied hands to swing the ghost light at her hands.
It careened into the gun, colliding with an unremarkable snick sound. The ghost light went dark, and they all stood in the perfect blackness of the cave.
No one moved, or if they did, they were soundless. No one except Piper knew if she was still holding the gun to Maura’s head.
There was silence except for the chitinous rattle of stones from the ceiling. The worst sound was one that came from above or around the cavern: a sort of creaking roar as rocks moved in a cavern above them. From closer by there was a groan, which Blue thought was Morris.
She felt oddly breathless, like the cave was running out of air. She knew what the feeling really was: panic.
Then everyone began to move.
It started with a shuffling sound from the direction of either Piper or Artemus or Maura, and then maybe the Gray Man, and it became so jumbled it was impossible to tell who was who. Blue snapped away her switchblade, because the odds were good that she’d stab someone she didn’t want to stab, and began feeling around the floor for the dropped flashlight. Maybe the top just needed to be screwed on again for it to work once more.
Maura’s voice suddenly said, “Don’t open that door! Don’t open it!”
Blue couldn’t even tell where the door was now. There was shuffling in every direction.
But she could also hear the third sleeper now. It was as if its collective whispers in everyone else’s head had become so loud that they spilled into the cavern itself. It didn’t tug on Blue, but it billowed through the darkness and condensed on her arms. Dripping down her fingers.
Blue thought she knew how the mirror lake had come to be now.
“Stop her!”
It was impossible to tell whose voice it was. Somewhere close by, she heard someone’s breathing getting faster.
Her fingers closed over the flashlight. Come on, come on —
Suddenly, there was a thud and a half shout.
The flashlight came on in time to illuminate Piper curled in front of the red door, clutching the back of her head.
“Come on,” Mr. Gray said. He dropped a very bloody rock to the ground. “At once.”
Rocks were showering down now, bigger than before.
“We’re getting out of here. Right now,” the Gray Man said, brisk and efficient. He turned his head to Artemus. “You. You’re bleeding. Let me see? Oh, you’re fine. Blue? You’re all right?”
Blue nodded.
“And Maura?” the Gray Man turned to her. She had an ugly scratch on her jaw and she looked studiously at the ground, arms tied behind her. He gently lifted her dirty bangs from her forehead to examine her face.
“We need to get her away from the door,” Blue said. “What about … the others?”
She meant Piper and Morris. Both of them were on the ground. Blue didn’t want to think too hard about it.
There was no kindness on Mr. Gray’s face. “Unless you have hidden reserves of strength you didn’t display on the way down, we cannot carry her and Maura, and I know which one I prefer. We need to go.”
As if to confirm, the tunnel Blue had entered by collapsed in a hail of stones and dirt.
They seized hands. With Blue and the flashlight leading the way, they climbed back into the small hole at the top of the cavern. Blue crawled up it a few yards and then waited, counting bodies as they climbed up.
One (Artemus), two (Maura), and three (the Gray Man), four —
Four
Piper, nearly unrecognizable behind all of the dirt, appeared in the tunnel opening. She had not climbed in, but she was framed in the opening. In one shaking hand was the gun.
“You —” she said, and stopped, as if she couldn’t imagine what to say next.
“Just go!” shouted the Gray Man. “Go, Blue, fast, take the light away!”
Blue scurried up the tunnel.
Behind her, a shot exploded again. But none of the tunnel was disturbed.
“Keep going!” the Gray Man’s voice called. “It’s okay!”
Then there was half a high-pitched shout, too throaty for a scream, and an explosion of sound as the cavern collapsed behind them.
Blue wanted to stop hearing that cry. She didn’t care that it was someone who had just been trying to kill her mother. She couldn’t make herself feel like that made it better.
But she couldn’t, so she just kept climbing and leading them out of the cave.
It was dark outside when they emerged, but nothing could ever be as dark as that cavern by the red door. Nothing could ever smell as wonderful as the grass and the trees and even the asphalt of a nearby highway.
The entrance here was just a jagged hole in the side of a hill; it was impossible to tell where they were except out. Artemus woozily leaned against the hillside, touching his wound gingerly.
Blue untied her mother; Maura threw her arms around Blue’s neck and crushed her to her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said after a few minutes. “I’m so so so sorry. I’m going to buy you a car and make your bedroom bigger and all we’ll ever eat is yogurt and …”
She trailed off, and finally they released each other.
The Gray Man stood by her elbow, and when she turned, she made a face, and then she touched his stubbled cheek.
“Mr. Gray,” she said.
He just nodded. He traced one of her eyebrows with his finger in an efficient, competent, in-love kind of way, and then he looked to Blue.
She said, “Let’s go find the others.”
Adam Parrish was awake.
The opposite of awake was supposed to be asleep, but Adam had spent much of the last two years of his life being both at once, or neither. In retrospect, he wasn’t sure he had known what awake really felt like until now.
He sat in the backseat of the Camaro with Ronan and Blue, watching the D.C. streetlights go by, feeling the pulse of the ley line ebb the farther away he got from Henrietta. A week had passed since they emerged from the valley of bones, and things were returning to normal.
No, not normal.
There was no normal.
Maura was back at 300 Fox Way, but Persephone was not. The boys were back at school, but Greenmantle wasn’t. Jesse Dittley’s death dominated the newspapers. One of the articles had noted that the valley was beginning to look like a dangerous place to live: Niall Lynch, Joseph Kavinsky, Jesse Dittley, Persephone Poldma.
Everyone had been surprised to discover Persephone had a last name.
“Was it everything you expected?” Gansey asked Malory.
Malory and the Dog looked up from their boarding passes. “More. Much more. Too much. No offense meant to you and your company, Gansey, but I shall be very relieved to go back to my drowsy ley line for a while.”
Adam worked a scab off his hand; the smallest of the scratches he’d gotten from sliding down into the pit of ravens and then climbing back out. The most lasting wound was invisible but persistent: The knowledge of Persephone’s death hummed constantly through Adam like the pulse of the ley line.