The Raven King (The Raven Boys #4)(10)

She had barely finished saying it when he felt …

Something

Some

one?

It was not the cool, dry scales of the snakes. Nor the warm, rapid heartbeats of the moles. It was not the moving-dirt-softness of earthworms or the smooth, slow flesh of the grubs.

It was dark.

It seeped.

It was not so much a thing as not a thing.

Ronan did not wait. He knew a nightmare when he felt it.

“Girl,” he said, “pull me out.”

He snatched the dream skin in one of his root-hands, rapidly trying to commit the feeling of it to memory. The weight, the density, the realness.

Orphan Girl was pawing at the soil around him, burrowing like a dog, making frightened little noises. How she hated his dreams.

The darkness that was not darkness crept up through the dirt. It was eating the things it touched. Or rather, they were there, and then they were not.

“Faster,” Ronan snapped, retreating with the skin clutched in his root fingers.

He could leave the dream skin behind and wake himself up.

He didn’t want to leave it. It could work.

Orphan Girl had a hold of his leg, or his arm, or one of his branches, and she was pulling, pulling, pulling, trying to unearth him.

“Kerah,” she wept.

The darkness gnawed up. If it got ahold of Ronan’s hand, he might wake up without one. He was going to have to cut his losses —

Orphan Girl fell back, tugging him free of the soil. The blackness burst up through the ground behind him. Without thinking, Ronan threw himself over the girl protectively.

Nothing is impossible, said the forest, or the darkness, or Ronan.

He woke. He was trapped in place, as he always was after he brought something of any size from a dream. He couldn’t feel his hands – please, he thought, please let me still have hands – and he couldn’t feel his legs – please, he thought, please let me still have legs. He spent several long minutes staring up at the ceiling. He was in the living room on the old plaid couch, looking at the same three cracks that had made the letter M for years. Everything smelled of hickory and boxwood. Chainsaw flapped over him before settling heavily on his left leg.

So he must at least still have one leg.

He couldn’t quite formulate what had made the darkness so terrifying, now that he wasn’t looking at it.

Slowly, his fingers began to move, so he must still have them, too. The dream skin had come with him and was draped halfway off the couch. It was gauzy and insubstantial looking, stained with dirt and ripped to shreds. He had his limbs, but the suit was a wash. He was also starving.

His phone buzzed, and Chainsaw flapped up to the back of the couch. Ordinarily he would not have checked it, but he was so unnerved by the memory of the nothingness in the dream that he used his newly mobile fingers to pluck it from his pocket to be sure it wasn’t Matthew.

It was Gansey. Parrish wants to know if you killed yourself dreaming just now please advise

Before Ronan had time to formulate an emotion about this knowledge of Adam’s, Chainsaw suddenly ducked her head down low on the back of the couch. The feathers on her neck stood in wary attention. Her gaze was fixed on some point across the room.

Pushing himself up, Ronan followed her attention. At first he saw nothing but the living room’s familiar clutter. The coffee table, the TV, the game cabinet, the walking stick basket. Then his eyes caught movement beneath the end table.

He froze.

Slowly, he realized what he was looking at.

He said, “Shit.”





Blue Sargent had been thrown out of school.

Only for a day. Twenty-four hours was supposed to cure her of willful destruction of property and, frankly, Blue, a surprisingly bad attitude. Blue couldn’t quite make herself as sorry as she knew she ought to be; nothing about school felt particularly real in comparison to the rest of her life. As she had stood in the hallway outside the administration offices, she heard her mother explaining how they’d had a recent death in the family and that Blue’s biological father had just returned to town and it was all very traumatic. Probably, Maura added – smelling of mugwort, which meant she’d been doing a ritual with Jimi while Blue was at school – her daughter was acting out even without realizing it.

Oh, Blue realized it all right.

Now she sat beneath the beech tree in 300 Fox Way’s backyard, feeling cranky and out of sorts. A very faraway part of her realized that she was in trouble – more serious trouble than she’d been in for a long time. But the more immediate part of her was relieved that for a whole day she didn’t have to try to pretend that she cared about her classes. She hurled a bug-eaten beech nut; it bounced off the fence with a crack like a gunshot.

“OK, here’s the idea.”

The voice came first, then the chill across her skin. A moment later, Noah Czerny joined her, dressed as always in his navy Aglionby sweater. Joined was perhaps the wrong verb. Manifested was better. The phrase trick of the light was even more superior. Trick of the mind was the best. Because it was rare that Blue noticed the moment Noah actually appeared. It wasn’t that he gently resolved into being. It was that somehow her brain rewrote the minute before to pretend that Noah had been slouching beside her all along.

It was a little creepy, sometimes, to have a dead friend.

Noah continued amiably, “So you get a trailer. Not an Adam trailer. A commercial trailer.”