The Raven King (The Raven Boys #4)(103)
“Whoa, stand back!” Gansey shouted.
The entire car rocked.
Henry demanded, “What was that?”
“He’s brought it back from his dreams,” Gansey said. “When he passed out. It won’t hurt us.”
“What’s happening?” Adam demanded.
Gansey’s voice was low and miserable. It reached the edge and cracked. “He’s being unmade.”
It was impossible to believe that Adam had thought that the previous moment was the worst.
This was the worst: being blindfolded and tied in the back of a car and knowing that the soft, gasping sound was Ronan Lynch choking for breath every time he waded back to consciousness.
So much of Ronan was bravado, and there was none left.
And Adam was nothing but a weapon to kill him faster.
It felt like years ago that he had made his bargain with Cabeswater. I will be your hands. I will be your eyes. How horrified Gansey had been, and maybe he had been right. Because here was Adam stripped of all of his options. Rendered so easily and simply powerless.
His thoughts were a battlefield now, and Adam ran away into the blackness of the blindfold. It was a dangerous game, scrying when Cabeswater was so endangered, when everyone else would be too busy to notice if he also began to die in the backseat, but it was the only way he could survive being so close to Ronan’s pained gasps.
He wheeled far and fast, throwing his unconscious far away from his conscious thoughts, as far away as he could get from the truth of the car as quickly as he could manage it. There was very, very little Cabeswater left. Mostly darkness. Maybe he wouldn’t find his way back to his corrupted body. Maybe he would be lost, like Persephone
Persephone
As soon as he thought her name, he realized that she was with him. He couldn’t tell how he knew, since he couldn’t see her. In fact, he couldn’t see anything. In fact, he found that he was once more intensely aware of the fabric of the blindfold against his eyes and the dull ache of his fingers braided and jammed against each other. Once more intensely aware of his physical reality; once more grounded inside his useless body.
“You pushed me back here,” he accused.
Ish, she replied. Mostly you let yourself get pushed.
He didn’t know what to say to her. He was too painfully glad to feel her presence again. It was not that Persephone, vague Persephone, was a creature given to providing comfort. But her brand of sense and wisdom and rules had comforted him greatly when he was chaos, and even though she had not yet really said anything to him, the mere recollection of that comfort gave him a burst of outsized happiness.
“I’m ruined.”
Mmm.
“It’s my fault.”
Mmm.
“Gansey was right.”
Mmm.
“Stop saying mmm!”
Then perhaps you should stop saying things you got tired of saying to me weeks ago.
“My hands, though. My eyes.” When he named them, he felt them. The clawing hands. The rolling eyes. They were thrilled by the destruction of Ronan. This was their purpose. How they longed to help in that dreadful task.
Who did you make that deal with?
“Cabeswater.”
Who is using your hands?
“The demon.”
That is not the same thing.
Adam didn’t reply. Once again Persephone was giving him advice that sounded good but was impossible to use in the real world. It was wisdom, not an actionable item.
You made your deal with Cabeswater, not with a demon. Even though they look the same and feel the same, they are not the same.
“They feel the same.”
They are not the same. The demon has no claim to you. You didn’t choose the demon. You chose Cabeswater.
“I don’t know what to do,” Adam said.
Yes, you do. You have to keep choosing it.
But Cabeswater was dying. Soon there might be no Cabeswater left to choose. Soon it might just be Adam’s mind, Adam’s body, and the demon. He didn’t say it out loud. It didn’t matter. In this place, his thoughts and his words were the same thing.
That does not make you a demon. You will be one of those gods without magic powers. What are they called?
“I don’t think there is a word.”
King. Probably. I am going to go now.
“Persephone, please – I —” miss you.
He was alone; she had gone. He was left, as always, with equal parts comfort and uncertainty. The feeling that he knew how to move forward; the doubt that he was capable of executing it. But this time, she’d come an awfully long way to give him his lesson. He didn’t know if she could see him any more now, but he didn’t want to let her down.
And the truth was that if he thought about the things that he loved about Cabeswater, it wasn’t difficult at all to tell the difference between the demon and it. They grew from the same soil, but they were nothing like each other.
These eyes and hands are mine, Adam thought.
And they were. He didn’t have to prove it. It was a fact as soon as he believed it.
He turned his head and rubbed the blindfold off his eyes.
He saw the end of the world.
The demon slowly worked at the fibres of the dreamer.
They were difficult things to unmake, dreamers. So much of a dreamer didn’t exist inside a physical body. So many complicated parts of them snarled in the stars and tangled in tree roots. So much of them fled down rivers and exploded through the air between raindrops.