Beside her, Ronan breathed a soft swear word, and Gansey, pressed up against the warm wall of the tree, turned his face away as if he could not bear to see them.
The tree pulled them into a vision.
In this vision, the night smeared jeweled reflections across wet, steaming pavement, stoplights turning from green to red. The Camaro sat at a curb, Blue in the driver’s seat. Everything was soaked in the smell of gasoline. She caught a glimpse of a collared shirt in the passenger seat; this was Gansey. He leaned across the gearshift toward her, pressing fingers to the place her collarbone was exposed. His breath was hot on her neck.
Gansey, she warned, but she felt unstable and dangerous.
I just want to pretend, Gansey said, the words misting on her skin. I want to pretend that I could.
The Blue in the vision closed her eyes.
Maybe it wouldn’t hurt if I kiss you, he said. Maybe it’s only if you kiss me —
In the tree, Blue was jostled from behind, jolting her from the vision. She just had time to see Gansey — the real Gansey — with widened eyes as he pushed past her and out of the tree.
Chapter 47
Gansey only allowed himself a confused moment of a vision — his fingers, somehow, touching Blue’s face — and then he threw himself out of the tree, jostling the real Blue out of his way. He needed to see what had happened to Adam, though in his heart he felt a dreadful premonition, like he already knew what he would see.
Sure enough, Adam still stood in the circle, unharmed, his arms adrift by his sides. The gun hung in one of his hands. Just a few feet away, outside of the circle, Whelk lay broken. His body was covered with leaf litter, as if he’d lain there for years, not minutes. There was not as much blood as one would expect in a trampling, but there was something broken in his appearance nonetheless. A sort of rumpled look to his form.
Adam was just staring at him. His uneven hair was mussed in the back, and it was the only hint that Adam had moved at all since Gansey had last seen him.
"Adam," Gansey gasped. "How did you get the gun?"
"The trees," Adam said. That chilling remoteness was in his voice, the sound that meant that the boy Gansey knew was pressed somewhere far down inside him.
"The trees? God! Did you shoot him!"
"Of course not," Adam said. He put the gun on the ground, carefully. "I only used it to keep him from coming in here."
Horror was rising up inside Gansey. "You let him get trampled?"
"He killed Noah," Adam said. "It’s what he deserved."
"No." Gansey pressed his hands over his face. There was a body here, a body, and it used to be alive. They didn’t even have the authority to choose an alcoholic beverage. They couldn’t be deciding who deserved to live or die.
"You really wanted me to let a murderer in here?" demanded Adam.
Gansey couldn’t begin to explain the size of this awfulness. He only knew that it burst inside him, again and again, fresh every time he considered it.
"He was just alive," he said helplessly. "He just taught us four irregular verbs last week. And you killed him."
"Stop saying that. I didn’t save him. Stop telling me what I should believe is wrong or right!" Adam shouted, but his face looked as miserable as Gansey felt. "Now the ley line is awake and we can find Glendower on it and everything will be as it should be."
"We have to call the police. We have to —"
"We don’t have to do anything. We leave Whelk to be worn away, just like he left Noah."
Gansey turned away, sickened. "What about justice?"
"That is justice, Gansey. That’s the real thing. This place is all about being real. About being fair."
This all felt inherently wrong to Gansey. It was like the truth, but turned sideways. He kept looking at it, and looking at it, and it still had a young man dead who looked an awful lot like Noah’s crippled skeleton. And then there was Adam, his appearance unchanged, but still — there was something in his eyes. In the line of his mouth.
Gansey felt loss looming.
Blue and Ronan had emerged from the tree, and Blue’s hand covered her mouth at the sight of Whelk. Ronan had an ugly bruise rising on his temple.
Gansey simply said, "He died."
"I think we should get out of here," Blue said. "Earthquakes and animals and — I don’t know how much of an effect I’m having, but things are …"
"Yes," Gansey said. "We need to go. We can decide what to do about Whelk outside."
Wait.
They all heard the voice this time. In English. None of them moved, unconsciously doing precisely what the voice had asked.
Boy. Scimus quid quaeritis.
(Boy. We know what you’re looking for.)
Though the trees could have meant any of the boys, Gansey felt as if the words were directly particularly at him. Out loud, he said, "What am I looking for?"
In response, there was a babble of Latin, words tumbling over one another. Gansey crossed his arms over his chest, hands fisted. They all looked at Ronan for a translation.
"They said there’ve always been rumors of a king buried somewhere along this spirit road," Ronan said. His eyes held Gansey’s. "They think he may be yours."
Chapter 48
It was a fine, sunny day at the very beginning of June when they buried Noah’s bones. It had taken several weeks for the police department to finish their work with evidence, and so it was the end of the school year before the funeral took place. A lot had taken place in between Whelk’s death and Noah’s funeral. Gansey had recovered his journal from police evidence and quit the rowing team. Ronan successfully scraped through his finals to Aglionby’s satisfaction and unsuccessfully repaired the apartment door lock. Adam, with probable help from Ronan, moved from Monmouth Manufacturing to a room belonging to St. Agnes Church, a subtle distance that affected both boys in different ways. Blue triumphantly welcomed the end of the school year and the beginning of more freedom to explore the ley line. Power failures plagued the town of Henrietta a total of nine times, and the phone system failed almost half as many times. Maura, Persephone, and Calla went through the attic and dismantled Neeve’s things. They’d told Blue that they still weren’t precisely sure what they’d done when they rearranged her mirrors that night.
"We’d meant to disable her," Persephone acknowledged. "But we seem to have disappeared her instead. It’s possible she will reappear at some point."