“Parrish,” Ronan said. Adam didn’t respond. His pupils were pinhole cameras to another world. “Parrish.”
Just one of Adam’s hands lifted in the direction of Ronan’s leg. His fingers twitched in a way that conveyed don’t bother me with the absolute minimum of motion.
Ronan crossed his arms to wait, just looking. At Adam’s fine cheekbones, his furrowed fair eyebrows, his beautiful hands, everything washed out by the furious light. He had memorized the shape of Adam’s hands in particular: the way his thumb jutted awkwardly, boyishly; the roads of the prominent veins; the large knuckles that punctuated his long fingers. In dreams Ronan put them to his mouth.
His feelings for Adam were an oil spill; he’d let them overflow and now there wasn’t a damn place in the ocean that wouldn’t catch fire if he dropped a match.
Chainsaw flapped to where the tarot cards were laid out, beak parted curiously, and when Ronan silently pointed at her, she sulked underneath the car. Ronan turned his head sideways to read the cards. Something with flames, something with a sword. The Devil. One thousand images were triggered by that single word, devil. Red skin, white sunglasses, his brother Matthew’s terrified eyes in the trunk of a car. Dread and shame together, thick enough to vomit up. Ronan was uneasily reminded of his recent nightmares.
Adam’s fingers tensed, and then he sat back. He blinked, and then blinked again, rapidly, touching the corner of his eye with just the tip of his ring finger. This didn’t suffice, so he rubbed his palms over them until they watered. Finally, he tilted his chin up to Ronan.
“Headlights? That’s hardcore, Parrish.” Ronan held out his hand; Adam took it. Ronan hauled him up, his mind all palm against palm, thumb crossed over thumb, fingers pressed into wrist bone – and then Adam was facing him and he released his hand.
The ocean burned.
“What the hell’s wrong with your eyes?” Ronan asked.
Adam’s pupils were still tiny. “Takes me a while to come back.”
“Creepy bastard. What’s with the Devil?”
Adam stared up at the dark stained glass of the church. He was still partway caught in the kingdom of the headlights. “I can’t understand what it’s telling me. It feels like it’s holding me at an arm’s length. I need to find a way to scry deeper, but I can’t without someone to watch me in case I get too far away from myself.”
Someone in this case being Ronan.
“What are you trying to find out?”
Adam described the circumstances surrounding his eye and his hand with the same level tone he would use to answer a question in class. He allowed Ronan to lean in to compare his eyes – close enough that Ronan felt his breath on his cheek – and he allowed Ronan to study the palm of his hand. The latter was not strictly necessary, and they both knew it, but Adam watched Ronan closely as he lightly traced the lines there.
This was like walking the line between dream and sleep. The night-sharp balance of being asleep enough to dream and awake enough to remember what he wanted.
He knew Adam had figured out how he felt. But he didn’t know if he could step off this knife-slender path without destroying what he had.
Adam held Ronan’s gaze as Ronan released his hand. “I’m trying to find the source of what’s attacking Cabeswater. I can only assume it’s the same thing as what was attacking that black tree.”
“It’s in my head, too,” Ronan admitted. His day at the Barns had been marked by dreams that he’d hastily woken himself from.
“Is it? Is that why you look like hell?”
“Thanks, Parrish. I like your face, too.” He briefly described how the corruption of the nightmare tree seemed identical to the corruption of his dreams, hiding his relative distress over the content of the dreams and the fact that it was evidence of a larger secret with an excess of swear words. “So, I’m just never sleeping again.”
Before Adam could reply to this, movement from above caught their attention. Something light and strange flapped between the dark trees that lined the neighbourhood streets. A monster.
Ronan’s monster.
His albino night horror rarely left the protected fields of the Barns, and when it did, it was only to trail after Ronan. Not in a faithful, canine way, but rather in the careless, widening gyre of a cat. But now it flew down the street towards them, straight and purposeful. In the purple-black space, it was as visible as smoke, dragging ragged-edged wings and cloth from its body. The sound of its wings was more prominent than anything else: thump, thump, thump. When it opened its pair of beaks, they trembled with a ferocious cry inaudible to human ears.
Both Ronan and Adam tipped their heads back. Ronan shouted, “Hey! Where are you going?” But it glided over them without so much as a pause. Straight on towards the mountains. Ugly fucker was going to get shot by some terrified farmer someday.
He didn’t know why he cared. He guessed it had saved his life that one time, probably.
“Creepy bastard,” Ronan said again.
Adam frowned after it and then asked, “What time is it?”
“It’s 6:21,” Ronan replied, and Adam frowned. “No, 8:40. I read my watch wrong.”
“Still time if it’s not far, then.” Adam Parrish was always thinking about his resources: money, time, sleep. On a school night, even one with supernatural threats breathing on his collar, Ronan knew that Adam would be stingy with all of these; this was how he had stayed alive.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. I want to try to find out where this devil is – I’m trying to decide if I can scry while you drive. I wish I could drive and scry at the same time, but that’s impossible. Really, all I want is to move my body where my mind tells it to go.”