The Raven King (The Raven Boys #4)(94)

So he walked and walked, as his battery flickered up and down. Mostly down.

When it was only a warning-red sliver, he hesitated. He could turn back now, and he might have light for a little bit. The rest of the walk would be in darkness, but at least he knew there had been no pitfalls in it during his trip down. Or he could keep going until the very last bit of light was gone, hoping to find something. Hoping he wouldn’t need it once he got to wherever he was going.

“Jesus,” Gansey breathed out loud. He was a book, and he was holding his final pages, and he wanted to get to the end to find out how it went, and he didn’t want it to be over.

He kept walking.

Sometime later, the light went out. His phone was dead. He was in utter blackness.

Now that he was standing still, he realized it was also chilly. A cool bit of water dripped on the crown of his head, and another slid down the collar of his shirt. He could feel the shoulders of Henry’s borrowed sweater getting wet. The darkness was like an actual thing, crowding him.

He could not decide what to do. Did he press forward in the dark, inch by inch? Now that he was in absolute blackness, he remembered well the sensation of the ground being robbed from him in the cave of the ravens. There was no safety rope to catch him here. No Adam to keep him from sliding in further. No Ronan to tell the humming swarms to be ravens instead of wasps. No Blue to whisper to him until he was once again brave enough to rescue himself.

The darkness wasn’t just in the tunnel; it was inside him.

“Do you not want me to find you?” he whispered. “Are you here?”

The tunnel was silent except for the faint pat of water dropping from the ceiling to the stone floor.

Fear mounted in him. Fear, when it was Gansey, had a very specific form. And unlike the hole beneath Borden House, fear had power in a place like this.

He realized that the tunnel was no longer quiet. Instead, a sound had begun to form in the distance: an intensely familiar note.

Swarm.

This was not a single insect travelling down the hall. Not RoboBee. This was the oscillating wail of hundreds of bodies bouncing off the walls as they approached.

And even though it was dark in the tunnel, Gansey could feel the blackness that had bled out of that Cabeswater tree.

Gansey could see the entire story spread out in his head: how he had been saved from a death by stinging a little over seven years before, as Noah died. And now, as Noah’s spirit decayed, Gansey would die by stinging again. Perhaps there had never been a purpose to all this except to return to the status quo.

The hum came closer. Now the gaps in the buzzing were punctuated by nearly inaudible taps, insects ricocheting through the dark towards him.

He remembered what Henry had said when he put the bee in Gansey’s hand. He’d told him not to think of it as something that could kill him, but rather as something that might be beautiful.

He could do that. He thought he could do that.

Something beautiful, he told himself. Something noble.

The buzzing hummed-struck-hummed against the walls close to him. It was hideously loud.

They were here.

“Something that won’t hurt me,” he said out loud.

His vision went red and then black.

Red, then black.

Then just black.

“Leaves,” Ronan Lynch’s voice said, full of intention.

“Dust,” Adam Parrish said.

“Wind,” Blue Sargent said.

“Shit,” Henry Cheng added.

Light striped across Gansey and away, red and then black again. A torch.

In the first sweep of the light, Gansey thought the walls were trembling with hornets, but in the second, he saw that they were only leaves and dust and a breeze that sent them all scuttling down the tunnel. And in this new light, Gansey saw his friends shivering in the tunnel where the leaves had been.

“You dumb shit,” said Ronan. His shirt was very grubby, and the side of his face had dried blood on it, although it was impossible to tell if it was his own.

Gansey couldn’t immediately find his voice, and when he did, he said, “I thought you were staying behind.”

“Yeah, me too,” Henry said. “Then I thought, I can’t let Gansey Three wander around in the mysterious pit alone. We have such few old treasures left; it would be so careless to let them get destroyed. Plus, someone had to bring the rest of your court.”

“Why would you go alone?” Blue asked. She flung her arms around him, and he felt her trembling.

“I was trying to be heroic,” Gansey said, holding her tight. She was real. They were all real. They’d all come here for him, in the middle of the night. The completeness of his shock told him that no part of him had really thought they would do such a thing for him. “I didn’t want you guys to hurt any more.”

Adam said, “You dumb shit.”

They laughed restlessly, uneasily, because they needed to. Gansey pressed his cheek against the top of Blue’s head. “How did you find me?”

“Ronan nearly died making something to track you,” Adam said. He pointed, and Ronan opened his hand to show a firefly nestled in his palm. The moment his fingers stopped being a cage for it, it flew to Gansey and stuck upon his sweater.

Gansey plucked it carefully from the fabric and cradled it in his own hand. He glanced up at Ronan. He didn’t say I’m sorry, but he was, and Ronan knew. Instead, he said, “Now what?”