It’s a hard thing to hold a civil conversation after recalling that one party has used a Taser on the other, so both of them finished the walk in silence. It was a strange feeling for Whelk to be back inside the woods where he’d last seen Czerny alive. He’d thought that woods were woods and he wouldn’t be affected by returning, especially at a different time of the day. But something about the atmosphere immediately took him back to that moment, the skateboard in his hand, the sad question gasped in Czerny’s dying sounds.
The whispers hissed and popped in his head, like a fire just getting underway, but Whelk ignored them.
He missed his life. He missed everything about it: the carelessness, the extravagant Christmases at home, the gas pedal beneath his foot, free time that felt like a blessing instead of an empty curse. He missed skipping classes and taking classes and spray-painting the Henrietta sign on I-64 after getting astonishingly drunk on his birthday.
He missed Czerny.
He had not let himself think it once in the past seven years. He had tried instead to convince himself of Czerny’s uselessness. Tried to remind himself of the practicality of the death instead.
But instead, he remembered the sound Czerny made the first time he hit him.
Neeve didn’t have to tell Whelk to sit quietly while she arranged the ritual. Instead, as she laid out the five points of a pentagram with an unlit candle, a lit candle, an empty bowl, a full bowl, and three small bones arranged in a triangle, he sat with his knees pulled up to his chin and his hands still tied behind him and wished he could find it in himself to cry. Something to relieve this terrible weight inside him.
Neeve caught a glimpse of him and imagined that he was upset over his approaching death. "Oh," she said mildly, "don’t be like that. It will not hurt very much." She reconsidered what she had said, and then corrected, "At least for very long."
"How are you going to kill me? How does this ritual work?"
Neeve frowned at him. "That is not an easy question. That is like asking a painter why he chooses the colors he does. Sometimes it is not a process, but a feeling."
"Fine, then," Whelk said. "What are you feeling?"
Neeve pressed a perfectly shaped mauve fingernail to her lip as she surveyed her work. "I have made a pentagram. It is a strong shape for any sort of spell, and I work well with it. Others find it challenging or too constricting, but it satisfies me. I have my lit candle to give energy, and my unlit candle to invite it. I have my scrying bowl to see the other world and I have my empty bowl for the other world to fill. I have crossed the leg bones of three ravens I killed to show the corpse road the nature of the spell I mean to do. And then I think I will bleed you out in the center of the pentagram while invoking the line to wake."
She stared hard at Whelk at this, and then added, "I may tweak it as I go along. These things need to be flexible. People rarely show interest in the mechanics of my work, Barrington."
"I’m very interested," he said. "Sometimes the process is the most interesting part."
When she turned her back to get her knives, he slipped his hands from the binding. Then he selected a fallen branch and crashed it down on her head with as much force as he could muster. He didn’t think it would be enough to kill her, because it was still green and flexible, but it certainly brought her to her knees.
Neeve moaned and shook her head slowly, so Whelk gave her another blow for good measure. He tied her up with the bindings he’d removed from himself — he did them up rather tightly, having learned from her errors — and dragged her semi-unconscious form into the middle of the pentagram.
Then he looked up and saw Adam Parrish.
It was the first time Blue had felt as if it were truly dangerous for her to be in Cabeswater — dangerous because she made things louder. More powerful. By the time they got to the woods, the night already felt charged. The rain had given way to an intermittent drizzle. The combination of the charged feeling and the rain had made Blue look quite anxiously at Gansey when he got out of the car, but his shoulders were barely damp and he wasn’t wearing his Aglionby uniform. He had definitely been wearing the raven sweater when she saw him at the church watch, and his shoulders had definitely been wetter. Surely she hadn’t managed to change his future enough to make tonight the night he died, had she? Surely she had been meant all along to meet him, since she was supposed to kill him or fall in love with him. And surely Persephone wouldn’t have let them go if she’d sensed that tonight was the night Gansey died.
Making a path with their flashlight beams, they found the Pig parked near where they’d found Noah’s Mustang. Several trampled paths led from the car to the woods, as if Adam had been unable to decide where he wanted to enter.
At the sight of the Camaro, Gansey’s face, which had already been grim, became positively stony. None of them spoke as they broached the boundary of the trees.
At the edge of the woods, the feeling of charge, of possibility, immediately became more pronounced. Shoulder to shoulder, they entered the trees, and between one blink and the next, they found themselves surrounded by a dreamy afternoon light.
Even having braced herself for magic, Blue was breathless with it.
"What is Adam thinking?" Gansey muttered, but not to anyone in particular. "How can you mess with …" He lost interest in answering his own question.
Before them was Noah’s Mustang, in the unearthly golden light looking even more surreal than the first time they’d found it. Shafts of sun punched opaquely through the canopy, making stripes over the pollen-coated roof.
Standing by the front of the car, Blue caught the boys’ attention. They joined her, staring at the windshield. Since they had last been in the clearing, someone had written a word on the dusty glass. In round, handwritten letters, it said: MURDERED.
"Noah?" Blue asked the empty air — though it didn’t feel so empty. "Noah, are you here with us? Did you write this?"
Gansey said, "Oh."
It was a very flat little sound, and instead of asking him to clarify, Blue and Ronan followed his gaze to the driver’s side window. An invisible finger was in the process of tracing another letter on the glass. Though Blue had felt that Noah must’ve been the one to write the first word on the glass, in her head she had pictured him having a body while he did it. Far more difficult was watching letters appear spontaneously. It made her think of the Noah with the dark hollows for eyes, the smashed-in cheek, the barely human form. Even in the warm afternoon woods, she felt cold.