“We take this one,” he said immediately. She nodded. It went in the backseat with the others.
They had only just headed back down the street when another car pulled into the driveway they’d just abandoned.
Close.
Multiple stones were stacked in the tri-colored car now, but this latest one pressed into Adam’s consciousness more than the others. It would be useful, with the lightning, he thought. For . . . something. For concentrating the ley line into Cabeswater. For . . . making a gate.
Hurry.
“Why now?” he asked her. “Why are all these parts frayed?”
She didn’t look up from her task, which was laying cards on the dashboard. The smudgy, inked art looked like thoughts instead of images. “It’s not just fraying now. It’s only that it’s more obvious with the greater current running through it. Like a wire. In the past, priestesses would’ve taken care of the line. Maintained it. Just like we’re doing now.”
“Like Stonehenge,” he said.
“That’s a very large and cliché example, yes,” she answered softly. She glanced up at the sky. The clouds at the horizon had gotten just a little closer since he’d last looked; they were still white, but they were beginning to pile on top of one another.
“I wonder,” he said, more to himself than to her, “what it would be like if all the ley lines were repaired.”
She replied, “I expect that would be a very different world with very different priorities.”
“Bad?” he asked. “A bad world?”
She looked at him.
“Different isn’t bad, right?” he asked.
Persephone turned back to her cards. Swick. She turned over a second one.
I should call work, Adam thought. He was supposed to come in tonight. He hadn’t called off sick before. I should call Gansey.
But there was no time. They had so many more places to go before — before —
Hurry.
As they pulled onto the interstate, Adam’s attention was snagged by a white Mitsubishi screaming in the opposite direction on the other side of the median. Kavinsky.
But was that Kavinsky behind the wheel? Adam craned his head to look in the mirror, but the other car was already a diminishing speck on the horizon.
Persephone turned over a card. The Devil.
All of a sudden, Adam was quite certain of why they were hurrying. He’d known since the night before that he needed to hone the line’s energy in order for Cabeswater to reappear. An important task, certainly, but not life-or-death.
But now, he knew all at once what he was hurrying for. They were restoring the ley line for Cabeswater. They were restoring it now because Ronan was going to need it. Tonight.
Hurry.
59
The first thing Ronan noticed at church on the Fourth was that the priest had a black eye. The second thing he noticed was that Matthew wasn’t there. The third thing he noticed was that there was space for two people on the pew beside Declan. Everyone at St. Agnes knew the Lynch brothers didn’t come to church alone.
It was an oddly discomfiting image. For the first few weeks after Niall had died, the boys had always left room for their mother, as if she would magically arrive partway through the service.
I’m working on that , Ronan thought, and then pushed it out of his head..
He was quite late to the special Mass; it looked like insolence. By the time he slid into the pew beside Declan, a small crumpled woman had already begun to intone the first reading. It was a passage Ronan used to love as a child — of this one I am proud. Really, Ronan’s tardiness was because he had gone with Gansey to pick up the Gray Man from the car rental office. The boys had given him the Mitsubishi and, in return, Ronan had gotten the puzzle box back. It seemed a fair trade. A dream thing for a dream thing.
Declan looked sharply to Ronan. He hissed, “Where’s Matthew?”
“You tell me.”
The churchgoers in the pew behind them rustled meaningfully.
“You weren’t here on Sunday.” Declan’s voice held the weight of an accusation. “And Matthew says you didn’t ever explain.”
Ronan had to guiltily admit to himself that this was true. He’d been lying on the hood of an invented Camaro and he hadn’t given a second’s though to what day it was. Then he realized what Declan was hinting at — that possibly, Matthew was taking revenge on Ronan with an unannounced disappearance of his own. While it was true that tricking Ronan into a solo church visit with Declan would have been an excellent punishment, it didn’t feel like Matthew’s handiwork at all.
“Oh, please,” Ronan whispered. “He’s not that clever.”
Declan looked shocked and poisonous. He was always so alarmed by the truth.
“Have you called him?” Ronan asked.
“Not picking up.” Declan narrowed his eyes as if this failure to answer his phone was an infection his youngest brother had picked up from Ronan.
“You saw him this morning?”
“Yeah.”
Ronan shrugged.
“He doesn’t skip.” The inverse statement was implied: unlike you.
“Until he does.”
“This is all your fault,” Declan said, hushed. His eyes darted to the empty pew beside Ronan and then to the priest. “I told you to keep your mouth shut. I told you to keep your head down. Why can’t you just do what you’re told for once?”
Someone kicked the back of their pew. It struck Ronan as an extremely un-Catholic action. He looked over his shoulder, elegant and dangerous, and raised an eyebrow at the middle-aged man sitting behind him. He waited. The man dropped his eyes.
Declan flicked Ronan’s arm. “Ronan.”
“Stop acting like you know everything.”
“Oh, I know enough. I know exactly what you are.”
There was a time when this statement would’ve trickled through Ronan like venom. Now, he didn’t have time for it. In the relative scheme of things, his older brother’s opinion ranked very low. In fact, Ronan was only here because of Matthew, and without Matthew here, there was no reason to stay. He slid out of the pew.
“Ronan,” whispered Declan ferociously. “Where are you going?”
Ronan put a finger to his lips. A smile snaked out on either side of it.
Declan just shook his head, lifting a hand like he was simply done with Ronan. And that, of course, was another lie, because he was never done with Ronan. But at the moment, eighteen and freedom seemed a lot closer than it had before, and it didn’t matter.