“Yes, violence,” Maura said. “Is that what you meant, Persephone? Yes.”
All three of them had leaned unconsciously toward one another. Sometimes Maura, Persephone, and Calla seemed more like three parts of the same entity instead of three separate women. The three of them turned as one to Mr. Gray.
He admitted, “My work is sometimes violent.”
“I thought you said you were researching a novel.” Maura’s tone was more than a little prickly.
“That was a lie,” the Gray Man said. “I’m sorry. I had to think quickly when you said I couldn’t have a reading.”
“So what’s the truth?”
“I’m a hit man.”
This confession ushered in several moments of silence. The Gray Man’s answer seemed very flippant but his voice suggested otherwise. It was the sort of answer that required an immediate clarification or qualification, but he offered nothing.
Maura said, “That’s not very funny.”
“No, it’s not,” the Gray Man agreed.
Everyone in the room was waiting for Maura’s response. She asked, “And does work bring you here tonight?”
“Just research.”
“For work?”
Unperturbed, Mr. Gray said, “Everything is research for work. In its way.”
He did absolutely nothing to make his words easier to accept. It was impossible to tell if he was asking them to believe him, or to humor him, or to fear him. He merely laid out this confession and waited.
Finally, Maura said, “Might be nice to have someone deadlier than Calla in the room for a change.”
She glanced at him. He glanced back. There was a wordless, tacit agreement in it.
They all had another drink. The Gray Man asked knowledgeable questions full of wry humor. Some time later, he stood, took everyone’s empty glasses to the kitchen, and excused himself with a glance at his watch. “Not that I wouldn’t like to stay.”
Then he asked if he could return later in the week.
And Maura said yes.
After he had gone, Calla looked through his wallet, which she had stolen as he left. “The ID is fake,” she remarked, closing the billfold and stuffing it into the couch cushions where he had been sitting. “But he’ll miss his credit cards. Why ever did you say yes?”
“Something like that,” Maura replied, “makes me feel better if I can keep my eye on it.”
“Oh,” Persephone said, “I think we all know what you’re keeping your eye on.”
15
Adam remembered how cruel he had thought Gansey would be. There wasn’t a day during his first month at Aglionby Academy when he hadn’t doubted his decision to come there. The other boys were so alien and daunting; he would never be able to look like one of them. How incredibly naive he’d been to think he would ever possess a room like one of the other Aglionby students did. And Gansey was the worst of them. The other boys attended Aglionby and fit in life around the edge. But Gansey — it was impossible to forget that he had arrived with a life intact, and instead fit Aglionby into it. He was the boy all eyes turned to when he strode into the gym. He was the student with the easiest smile when called on in Latin. He was forever loitering behind after classes to chat with the teachers like equals —Mr. Gansey, would you hold up a moment? I found an article I think you’d be interested in — and he was the boy with the most beautifully interesting car and the most savagely handsome of friends, Ronan Lynch. He was the opposite of Adam in every possible way.
They didn’t speak. Why would they speak? Adam slid into class and kept his head down and listened, trying to learn how to clip his accent. Gansey, a furious sun, glowed from the other side of the universe, his gravitational pull too distant to affect Adam. Although Gansey seemed to be friends with the entire school, it was Ronan who was always with him. And it was this friendship, all wordless glances and wry twists of the mouth, that made Adam think that Gansey must be cruel. Ronan and Gansey were laughing, he thought, at a joke where the rest of the world was the punch line.
No, Adam and Gansey didn’t speak.
They didn’t exchange a word until six weeks into the year, when Adam bicycled past the Camaro on the way to school. Dark tire tracks pointed its path to the side of the road; its hood stood open. It wasn’t an unusual sight: Adam had seen the Camaro behind a tow truck at least twice already. There was no reason at all to think that Gansey, hovering by the engine, would want Adam’s help. Probably he’d already called a mechanic he had at the ready.
But Adam stopped. He remembered how afraid he’d been right then. Of all of the agonizing days at Aglionby, that had been the worst moment so far: knocking down his old bike’s kickstand next to Richard C. Gansey III’s glorious burningorange Camaro and waiting for him to turn. His stomach had been a ruin of fear.
Gansey had pivoted and in his slow, lovely accent, said, “Adam Parrish, right?”
“Yeah. Di — Richard Gansey?”
“Just Gansey.”
Already Adam had spotted what had stopped the Camaro in its tracks. With daring, he’d asked, “Do you want me to fix it? I know a little about cars.”
“No,” Gansey had replied curtly.
Adam remembered how his ears had burned, how he’d wished he’d never stopped, how he hated Aglionby. He was nothing, he knew, and of course Gansey, of all of them, could see it on him. The worthlessness of him. His secondhand uniform, his shitty bike, his stupid accent. He didn’t know what had possessed him to stop.
Then Gansey, his eyes full of the real Gansey, had said, “I’d like you to show me how to fix it myself, if you could. There’s no point having this car if I can’t speak its language. Speaking of languages, you school me at Latin every day. You’re as good as Ronan.”
It shouldn’t have happened at all, but their friendship had been cemented in only the time it took to get to school that morning — Adam demonstrating how to fasten the Camaro’s ground wire more securely, Gansey lifting Adam’s bike halfway into the trunk so they could ride to school together, Adam confessing he worked at a mechanic’s to put himself through Aglionby, and Gansey turning to the passenger seat and asking, “What do you know about Welsh kings?”
Sometimes Adam wondered what would’ve happened if he hadn’t stopped that day. What would be happening to him right now?
He probably wouldn’t still be at Aglionby. Surely he wouldn’t be in the Camaro headed to a magical forest.
Gansey was giddy now that they’d decided to go back to Cabeswater. He hated nothing more than standing still. He ordered Ronan to put on some terrible music — Ronan was always too happy to oblige in this department — and then he abused the Camaro at every stoplight on the way out of town. “Put your back into it!” Gansey shouted breathlessly. He was talking to himself, of course, or to the gearbox. “Don’t let it smell fear on you!” Blue wailed each time the engine revved up, but not unhappily. Noah played the drums on the back of Ronan’s headrest. Adam, for his part, was not wild, but he did his best not to appear unwild, so as not to ruin it for the others.
They had not been back to Cabeswater since Adam had made his sacrifice.
Ronan rolled down his window, letting in a gust of hot air and the scent of asphalt and mown grass. Gansey followed suit. Already Adam’s lower back was sweaty against the vinyl seat, but his hands felt chilly. Would Cabeswater claim him once he returned to it?
What have I done?
Gansey, dangling his arm outside, patted the side of the car as if it were a horse. “That’ll do, Pig. That’ll do.”
Adam felt like he was watching it all from outside. He felt like he was about to catch another image, like a flick of the tarot cards he’d looked at earlier. Was that someone standing by the side of the road?
I can’t trust my eyes.
Gansey leaned back, head thrown to the side, drunken and silly with happiness. “I love this car,” he said, loud to be heard over the engine. “I should buy four more of them. I’ll just open the door of one to fall into the other. One can be a living room, one can be my kitchen, I’ll sleep in one . . .”
“And the fourth? Butler’s pantry?” Blue shouted.
“Don’t be so selfish. Guest room.” The Camaro charged down the gravel road that would take them to the forest, a cloud of dust parachuting behind it. As they climbed, the field stretched out, green and endless. Once they reached the crest, they’d be able to see the tree line where Cabeswater began.
Adam’s stomach squeezed with sudden nerves, as ferocious as that day when he’d first stopped his bike by Gansey’s car. He almost said something. He didn’t know what he would’ve said. Was that another image? A blank screen.
They crested the hill.
The field went on and on. Scrubby grass gave way to a wash where a stream must have been, and then continued on through more acres of grass. Hundreds of acres of field.
There were no trees.
The car fell quiet.
Gansey drove a few feet farther before pulling up the parking brake. Every head in the car was turned toward that endless field and the old stream. It was not that there had been trees and now they were gone. There were no stumps or tire tracks. It was as if there had never been trees.
Gansey held out his hand, and immediately, Ronan opened the glove box and got the journal. Slowly, Gansey paged through to where he had neatly written the coordinates for Cabeswater. Blue’s breath caught audibly.
This was all ridiculous. It was like checking the coordinates for Monmouth Manufacturing. They all knew where it was.
“Jane,” Gansey said, handing his phone back to her, “please check the GPS.”
He read the numbers from the page. Then he read them again.
Blue, thumbing through the map on the phone, read them back from the screen. They were the same. They were the coordinates that had brought them here every other time. The coordinates that had brought their Latin professor and Neeve here.
They hadn’t made a wrong turn. They hadn’t overshot the road or parked in the wrong place. This was where they’d found Cabeswater. This was where it had all begun.
Noah finally said it: “It’s gone.”
16
And the Camaro broke down.
Its sense of timing was impeccable. In ordinary circumstances, the car would’ve been full of sound: radio blaring, conversation firing. There would have been no audience for the first subtle sounds of fluid filling the Camaro’s lungs. But now, quieted by the impossible, they all heard the engine seize for a moment. Heard the turned-down radio stutter, like it had lost its train of thought. Heard the air-conditioning blower cough politely into its fist.
They had enough time to lift their heads and look at one another.
Then the engine expired.
Suddenly robbed of power steering, Gansey wrestled the coasting car to the shoulder. He hissed between his teeth, the sound identical to the noise of the tires in the grubby gravel.
Then there was absolute silence.
Instantly, the heat began to press in. The engine ticked like the twitch of a dying man’s foot. Adam rested his forehead on his knees and curled his arms behind his head.