Blue was thrown into Ronan, who was already crouched, rising from where Whelk had hit him. In front of her, the great stone slabs among the trees rippled as if they were water, and the pool tipped and splashed from its banks. There was a great sound all around them like a train bearing down, and all Blue could think was, Nothing really bad has ever really happened to me.
The trees heaved toward one another as if they would pull free from the soil. Leaves and branches rained down, thick and furious.
“It’s an earthquake!” Gansey shouted to them. He had one arm thrown up over his head and the other hooked around a tree. Debris coated his hair.
“Look what you’ve done, you crazy bastard!” Ronan shouted to Adam, whose gaze was sharp and wary as he stood in the pentagram.
Will it stop? Blue wondered.
An earthquake was such a shocking thing, such a wrong thing, that it didn’t seem impossible to believe that the world had been inherently broken and that it would never be right again.
As the ground shifted and groaned around them, Whelk staggered to his feet, the gun in hand. It was a blacker and uglier thing than it had seemed before, from a world where death was unfair and instant.
Whelk was able to keep his footing. The bucking of the rocks was beginning to slow, though everything still tilted like a fun house.
“What would you know what to do with power?” he snapped at Adam.
“What a waste. What a fucking waste.”
Whelk pointed the gun at Adam, and, without any ceremony, he pulled the trigger.
Around them, the world went still. The leaves quivered and the water
lapped slowly at the pool’s banks, but otherwise, the ground was quiet.
Blue screamed.
Every set of eyes was on Adam, who remained standing in the middle of the pentagram. His expression was perplexed. He cast his gaze over his chest, his arms. There was not a mark on him.
Whelk had not missed, but Adam had also not been shot, and the two were somehow the same thing.
There was a crushing sadness to Gansey’s face as he looked at Adam.
That was the first clue Blue got that something was inherently different, irretrievably altered. If not about the world, then about Cabeswater. And if not about Cabeswater, then about Adam.
“Why?” Gansey asked Adam. “Was I so awful?”
Adam said, “It was never about you.”
“But, Adam,” Blue cried, “what have you done?”
“What needed to be done,” Adam replied.
From his place several feet away, Whelk made a strangled noise. When his bullet had failed to wound Adam, he’d dropped the gun by his side, defeated as a child in a game of pretend.
“I think you should give that back to me,” Adam told Whelk. He was shaking, a little. “I don’t think Cabeswater wants you to have it. I think if you don’t give it to me, it might take it.”
Suddenly, the trees began to hiss as if a breeze was coming through them, though no wind touched Blue’s skin. Adam’s and Ronan’s faces wore matching shocked expressions, and a moment later, Blue realized that it was not hissing: It was voices. The trees were speaking, and now she could hear
them, too.
“Take cover!” Ronan shouted.
There was another sound like rustling, only this resolved itself very quickly into a more concrete noise. It was the sound of something massive moving through the trees, snapping branches and trampling underbrush.
Blue yelled, “Something’s coming!”
She clutched at both Ronan and Gansey, snagging their sleeves. Only a few yards behind them was the craggy mouth of the hollowed-out vision tree, and it was there that she pulled them. For a moment, before the tree’s magic enveloped them, they had time to see what was bearing down on them — a tremendous rippling herd of white-horned beasts, coats glinting like ice-
crusted snow, snorts and cries choking the air. They were shoulder to shoulder, hectic and heedless. When they tossed their heads back, Blue saw that they were somehow like that raven carved into the hillside, like that dog sculpture she’d held, strange and sinuous. The thunder of them, of their pressed bodies, rumbled the ground like another earthquake. The herd, snorting, began to part around the pentagram-marked circle.
Beside her, Ronan breathed a soft swear word, and Gansey, pressed up against the warm wall of the tree, turned his face away as if he could not bear
to see them.
The tree pulled them into a vision.
In this vision, the night smeared jeweled reflections across wet, steaming pavement, stoplights turning from green to red. The Camaro sat at a curb, Blue in the driver’s seat. Everything was soaked in the smell of gasoline. She caught a glimpse of a collared shirt in the passenger seat; this was Gansey.
He leaned across the gearshift toward her, pressing fingers to the place her collarbone was exposed. His breath was hot on her neck.
Gansey, she warned, but she felt unstable and dangerous.
I just want to pretend, Gansey said, the words misting on her skin. I want
to pretend that I could.
The Blue in the vision closed her eyes.
Maybe it wouldn’t hurt if I kiss you, he said. Maybe it’s only if you kiss me — In the tree, Blue was jostled from behind, jolting her from the vision. She just had time to see Gansey — the real Gansey — with widened eyes as he pushed past her and out of the tree.
