But he had stayed. Hung in the pit of his father’s anger. A coward, too.
Adam felt like he needed to reconfigure every conversation he’d ever had with Gansey in light of this new knowledge.
As the entrance for Skyline Drive came into view, his thoughts switched abruptly to Cabeswater. Adam had not been to the park, but he knew from a lifetime in Henrietta that it was a national park that stretched along the Blue Ridge Mountains, following the ley line with an almost eerie precision. In front of him, three lanes fed into three squat brown booths. A short line of cars waited.
His gaze found the fee board. He hadn’t realized he needed to pay to enter. Fifteen dollars.
Although he hadn’t been able to pinpoint a precise location for Cabeswater’s task, he was sure it was on the other side of these toll booths. There was no other way in.
But he also knew the contents of his pockets, and it was not fifteen dollars.
I can come back another day.
He was so tired of doing things another day, another way, a cheaper way, a day when Gansey could tidy the edges. This was supposed to be something he could do by himself, his power as the magician, tapped into the ley line.
But the ley line couldn’t get him through a toll plaza.
If Gansey had been here, he would have breezily tossed the bills out of the Camaro. He wouldn’t have even thought about it.
One day, Adam thought. One day.
As he sat in line, he plucked his wallet free, and then, when it failed to produce enough, he began digging for change under the seats. It was a moment that would have been both easier and worse if he’d been with Gansey, Ronan, and Blue. Because then IOUs would have had to be created, the haves assuring them it wasn’t necessary to be paid back, the have-nots insisting that it was.
But since it was only Adam, lonesome Adam, he just silently looked at the meager sum he’d managed to scrape together.
$12.38.
He would not beg at the booth. He had very little of anything except for some damned dignity, and he couldn’t bring himself to hand that through the driver’s side window.
It would have to be another day.
He didn’t get angry. There was no one to get angry at. He just allowed himself a brief moment of leaning his temple against the driver’s side window, and then he pulled out of line and backed onto the shoulder to turn around.
As he did, his attention was drawn to the vehicles still in line. Two of the cars were exactly what Adam might imagine: a minivan with a young family in it, a sedan with a laughing college-aged couple in it. But the third car was not quite right. It was a rental car — he could see the bar code sticker stuck in the corner of the windshield. Perhaps that was not strange; a tourist might fly in and visit the park. But on the dashboard was a device Adam was very familiar with: an electromagnetic frequency reader. Another device sat next to it, although he wasn’t sure what that one was. A geophone, maybe.
The sort of tools Gansey and the others had used for hunting for the ley line. The sort they’d used to find Cabeswater.
Then he blinked, and the dashboard of the car was empty. Had always been empty. It was just a rental car with a bored family in it. A month ago, Adam wouldn’t have understood why he was seeing things that weren’t real. But now he knew Cabeswater better, and he understood that what he had just seen was real — just real in a different place, or a different time.
Someone else had come to Henrietta looking for the ley line.
3
Mapey neat downer,” Blue said, “to see how far it goes.”
“How far what goes?” Gansey demanded. He replayed her words, but they remained nonsense. “Lynch, turn that down.”
It had been several days since their trip into the cave of ravens and now they were on the way to the airport to pick up Dr. Roger Malory, international ley line expert and aged mentor of Gansey’s. Ronan lounged in the passenger seat. Adam keeled against a window in the back, his mouth parted in the unaware sleep of the exhausted. Blue sat behind Gansey, clutching his headrest in an effort to be heard.
“This car,” she despaired.
Gansey knew his reliable and enormous Suburban would have been a more logical choice for the trip, but he wanted the old Camaro to be the first thing the professor saw, not the expensive new SUV. The Camaro was shorthand for the person he had become, and he wanted, more than anything, for Malory to feel that person had been worth the trip. The professor did not fly, but he had flown three thousand miles for him. Gansey couldn’t fathom how to repay such a kindness, especially considering the circumstances under which he had left England.
“I said maybe we should just rappel down into that pit you helpfully found.” Blue’s voice warred with the engine and Ronan’s still-abusive electronica. It seemed impossible that Adam could sleep through it.
“I just don’t — Ronan. My ears are bleeding!”
Ronan turned down the music.
Gansey started again. “I just can’t imagine why Glendower’s men would have gone to the trouble of lowering him into that hole. I just can’t, Jane.”
Even thinking about the pit made long-ago venom hum and burn in his throat; effortlessly, he conjured the image of warning-striped insects prowling the thin skin between his fingers. He had nearly forgotten how horrifying and compelling it was to relive the moment.
Eyes on the road, Gansey.
“Maybe it’s a recent hole,” she suggested. “The collapsed roof of a lower cavern.”
“If that’s true, we’d have to get across it, not in it. Ronan and I would have to climb the walls like spiders. Unless you and Adam have rock climbing experience I don’t know about.”
Outside the car, Washington, D.C., slunk closer; the deep-blue sky got smaller. The widening interstate grew guardrails, streetlights, BMWs, airport taxis. In the rearview mirror, Gansey saw a corner of Blue’s face. Her wide-awake gaze snagged on something outside, fast, and she craned to look out the window, like this was another country.
It kind of was. He was, as ever, a reluctantly returning expatriate. He felt a pang, a longing to run, and it surprised him. It had been a long time.
Blue said, “Ronan could dream a bridge for us.”
Ronan made a noise of glorious disdain.
“Don’t just snort at me! Tell me why not. You’re a magical creature. Why can’t you do magic?”
With acidic precision, Ronan replied, “For starters, I’d have to sleep right there by the pit, since I have to be touching something to pull it out of a dream. And I’d have to know what was on the other side to even know what kind of bridge to make. And then, even if I pulled all that off, if I took something that big out of my dream, it would drain the ley line, possibly making Cabeswater disappear again, this time with us in it, sending us all to some never-never land of time-space f**kery that we might never escape from. I figured after the events of this summer, all this was self-evident, which was why I summed it up before like so —”