The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(99)

The corpse roads.

The energy flickered and sputtered through him, less like electricity and more like remembering a secret. It was strong, all-encompassing, and then fading, waiting. Sometimes he was nothing but it, and sometimes, it was nearly forgotten.

And beneath it all, he felt the oldness of Cabeswater. The strangeness. There was something true and inhuman at its core. It had been there so many centuries before him, and it would exist for centuries after. In the relative scheme of things, Adam Parrish was irrelevant. He was such a small thing, just a whorl in the fingerprint of a massive being — I didn’t agree to give my thoughts away.

He would be Cabeswater’s hands and Cabeswater’s eyes, but he wouldn’t be Cabeswater.

He would be Adam Parrish.

He sat back.

He was in the reading room. A drop of water sat on top of the framed photograph. Across from him, Persephone dabbed three bloody scratches on her wrist; her sleeve had been ripped through.

Everything in the room looked different to Adam. He just wasn’t sure how. It was like — like he’d adjusted the aspect on his television, from wide screen to normal.

He didn’t know how he’d thought before that Persephone’s eyes were black. Every color combined to make black.

“They won’t understand,” Persephone said. She laid her deck of tarot cards on the table in front of him. “They didn’t when I came back.”

“Am I different?” he asked.

“You were different before,” Persephone replied. “But now they won’t be able to stop noticing.”

Adam touched the tarot cards. It seemed a very long time ago that he’d looked at the deck on the table. “What am I supposed to do with them?”

“Knock on them,” she whispered. “Three times. They like that. Then shuffle them. And then hold them to your heart.”

He softly rapped his knuckles on the deck, shuffled the cards, and then grasped the oversized deck. When he held it to his chest, the cards felt warm, like a living creature. They hadn’t felt like that before.

“Now ask them a question.”

Adam closed his eyes.

What now?

“Put down four of them,” Persephone said. “No, three. Three. Past, present, future. Faceup.”

Carefully, Adam laid three cards on the table. The art in Persephone’s deck was dark, smudgy, barely visible in this dim light. The figures on them seemed to move. He read the words at the bottom of each: The Tower. The Hanged Man. Nine of swords.

Persephone pursed her lips.

Adam’s eyes drifted from the first card, where men fell from a burning tower, to the second, where a man hung upside down from a tree. And then to the last, where a man wept into his hands. That third card, that utter despair. He couldn’t take his gaze from it.

Adam said, “It looks like he’s woken from a nightmare.”

It looks, he thought, like I will, if the vision from the dreaming tree comes true.

When Adam lifted his eyes to Persephone, he was certain she was seeing the same things he was seeing. He could tell from the flattening of her lips, the remorse in her eyes. The room stretched out around them, black and limitless. A cave or an old forest or a flat, mirror-black lake. The future kept being a something Adam was thrown into: a quest, a sacrifice, the dead face of a best friend.

“No,” Adam said softly.

Persephone echoed, “No?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Maybe this is the future. But it’s not the end.”

Persephone said, “Are you sure?”

There was a note to her voice that hadn’t been there before. Adam thought about it. He thought about the warm feeling to the deck of cards, and how he’d asked that question what now and they had given him this terrible answer. He thought about how he could still hear the sound of Persephone’s voice echoing all around him, although it should have disappeared into the close walls of this reading room. He thought about how he had been Cabeswater and felt the corpse road snaking through him.

He said, “I am. I’m — I’m pulling another card.”

He hesitated, waiting for her to tell him it wasn’t allowed. But she just waited. Adam cut the deck, laid his hand on each stack. He took the card that felt warmer.

Flipping it, he placed the card beside the nine of swords.

A robed figure stood before a coin, a cup, a sword, a wand — all of the symbols of all the tarot suits. An infinity symbol floated above his head; one arm was lifted in a posture of power. Yes, thought Adam. Understanding prickled and then evaded him.

He read the words at the bottom of the card.

The Magician.

Persephone let out a long, long breath and began to laugh. It was a relieved laugh that sounded as if she’d been running.

“Adam,” she said, “finish your pie.”





Blue had indeed cut herself.

After Adam had gone into the reading room, she’d experimentally opened the switchblade and it had obligingly attacked her. It was just a scratch, really. It barely warranted a Band-Aid, but she put one on anyway.

She did not feel like Blue Sargent, superhero, or Blue Sargent, desperado, or Blue Sargent, badass.

Maybe she shouldn’t have told the truth.

Even though it had been hours since the fight, her heart still felt jittery. Like it wasn’t attached to anything and every time it beat, it rattled around in her chest cavity. She kept replaying their words. She shouldn’t have lost her temper; she should have told him at the very beginning; she should have — Anything but how it happened.