The Raven King (The Raven Boys #4)(75)

She crashed down heavily on her shoulder, all breath escaping her, and looked up to see Blue and her dead friend staring at her. Others stood in the doorway to the house, but Gwenllian was too dazzled by the fall to identify them.

“What!” Blue exclaimed. “What just happened? Is he —?”

“In the tree?” finished Noah.

“My mother was in a tree and she’s dead,” Gwenllian snapped. “Your father is in a tree and he’s a coward. You’re the unlucky one. I’ll just kill you when you come out, you poisoned branch!” This was in the direction of the tree. Artemus could hear her, she knew, his soul curled inside that tree as he was, damned tree-light, damned magician. It infuriated Gwenllian to know that he could hide there as long as the beech survived. There was no reason for the demon to be interested in a tree so far outside Cabeswater, and so even after everyone else and everything else had died, he would once again emerge unscathed.

Oh, the fury.

Blue looked at the beech tree with her mouth gently agape. “He’s … he’s in it?”

“Of course!” Gwenllian said. She pushed herself up from the ground and took big handfuls of her skirt in her hands so she wouldn’t trip on it again. “That’s who he is! That’s your blood. Didn’t you feel roots in your veins? Curses! Curses.”

She stomped back to the house, shoving past Maura and Calla.

“Gwenllian,” Maura said, “what is going on?”

Gwenllian paused in the hallway. “Demon’s coming! Everyone dies. Except for her useless father. He’ll live for ever.”





On Saturday, Adam woke up to perfect silence. He had forgotten what such a thing was like. Fog moved lightly outside the windows of Declan’s bedroom, muting any birds. The farmhouse was too far from a road for the sounds of any cars to reach him. There was no church administration office clunking behind him, no one walking a dog on the pavement, no children shrilling on to a school bus. There was only a quiet so deep that it felt like it was pressing on his ears.

Then Cabeswater gasped back into existence inside him, and he sat up. If it had come back, it meant it had gone.

Are you there?

He felt his own thoughts, and more of his own thoughts, and then, quietly, barely there, Cabeswater. Something wasn’t right.

But Adam lingered for a moment after he cast off the covers and stood. Here he was, waking in the Lynch home, wearing last night’s clothing that still smelled of smoke from the grill, having overslept the weight class he had this morning by a magnitude of hours. His mouth remembered Ronan Lynch’s.

What was he doing? Ronan was not something to be played with. He didn’t think he was playing.

You’re leaving this state, he told himself.

But he hadn’t felt the fire on his heels for a long time. There was no longer the understood second half of the statement: and never coming back.

He headed downstairs, peering into each room that he passed, but he seemed to be alone. For a brief, trippy moment, he imagined that he was dreaming, walking through this desaturated farmhouse in his sleep. Then his stomach growled and he found the kitchen. He ate two leftover hamburger buns with nothing on them since he couldn’t find butter, and then drank the remainder of the milk directly from the carton. He borrowed a jacket from the coat rack and went out.

Outside, the fields drifted mist and dew. Autumn leaves stuck to the tops of his boots as he walked down the path between the pastures. He listened for sounds of activity in any of the barns, but on an essential level, he was fine with the silence. This quiet, this absolute quiet, nothing but the low gray sky and Adam’s thoughts.

He was so still inside.

The silence was interrupted as a creature darted up to him. She skittered so quickly and so oddly on her hooves that it wasn’t until her hand had slid into his that he realized it was the Orphan Girl. She held a black-wet stick, and when he looked down at her, he saw that she had bits of bark stuck to her teeth.

“Should you eat that?” he asked her. “Where’s Ronan?”

She pressed her cheek to the back of his hand with affection. “Savende e’lintes i firen —”

“English or Latin,” he said.

“This way!” But instead of leading him in any particular direction, she released his hand and galloped around him in circles, flapping her arms like a bird. He kept walking, and she kept circling, and overhead, a flying bird checked itself mid-flight. Chainsaw had spotted the movement of the Orphan Girl, and now she cawed, wheeled, and headed back towards the upper fields. This was where Adam found Ronan, a black smudge in fog-washed field. He had been watching something else, but Chainsaw had alerted him, and so now he turned, hands in the pockets of his dark jacket, and watched Adam approach.

“Parrish,” Ronan said. He eyed Adam. He was clearly taking nothing for granted.

Adam said, “Lynch.”

Orphan Girl trotted up between them and poked Ronan with the end of her stick.

“You little puke,” Ronan told her.

“Should she be eating that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if she has internal organs.”

Adam laughed at that, at the ridiculousness of all of it.

“Did you eat?” Ronan asked.

“Other than sticks? Yeah. I missed weights.”