Henry shuffled the jewelled insect back out of his pocket. It amber heart warmed light through the pit again. “Back in the lab, of course, as father dear tries to copy it with nonmagical parts. My mother told me to keep this one to remind me of what I am.”
“And what is that?”
The bee illuminated both itself and Henry: its translucent wings, Henry’s wickedly cut eyebrows.
“Something more.”
Gansey looked at him sharply. Somewhere along the way, during this hunt for Glendower, he’d forgotten to notice how much magic there was in the world. How much magic that wasn’t just buried in a tomb. He was feeling it now.
“Here is the thing I need to tell you before we are friends,” Henry said. “My mother sells magic. She told me to watch you to find your secrets. I do not mean to use you now, but that is what I was supposed to do. I did not begin this game looking for a friend.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing yet,” Henry said. “I want you to think about it. And then I hope you will choose to trust me. Because I’m overfull on secrets and underfed on friends.”
He held the bee between them so that Gansey was looking at him through the glow of its marvellous body. Henry’s eyes were lively and ferocious.
He tossed the bee into the air. “Let’s get out of this hole.”
The world didn’t have words to measure hate. There were tons, yards, years. Volts, knots, watts. Ronan could explain how fast his car was going. He could describe exactly how warm the day was. He could specifically convey his heart rate. But there was no way for him to tell anyone else exactly how much he hated Aglionby Academy.
Any unit of measurement would have to include both the volume and the weight of the hate. And it would also have to include a component of time. The days logged in class, wasted, useless, learning skills for a life he didn’t want. No single word existed, probably, to contain the concept. All, perhaps. He had all the hate for Aglionby Academy.
Thief? Aglionby was the thief. Ronan’s life was the dream, pillaged.
He had told himself that he would let himself quit: that was his eighteenth birthday present to himself.
And yet here he was.
Quit. Just quit. Either he believed he could do it or he didn’t.
He could hear Gansey’s voice: Just stick it out until graduation; that’s only a couple more months. Surely you can make it that long.
So now he tried.
The school day was a pillow over his head. He would suffocate before the final bell. The only oxygen to be found was the pale band of skin on Adam’s wrist where his watch had been and the glimpse of the sky between classes.
Four more hours to go.
Declan wouldn’t stop texting him. When you have a minute, give me a text. Ronan did not just give people texts. Hey I know you’re at school but maybe in between let me know. This was a lie, Declan’s superpower. He assumed Ronan was not at school. Hey I’m in town I need to talk to you.
This got Ronan’s attention. Now that Declan had graduated, he was generally safely stored two hours away in D.C., a distance that had, in Ronan’s estimation, improved their relationship in all the ways it could possibly be improved. He returned only for Sunday Mass, an extravagant four-hour round-trip that Matthew took for granted and Ronan only partially understood. Surely Declan had better things to be doing in D.eclan C.ity than spending half his day in a town he hated with a family he had never wanted to be a part of.
Ronan did not care for any of this. It made him feel as if he had won nothing over the summer. Back at Aglionby, his dreams fearful things, trying to avoid Declan.
Three more hours to go.
“Lynch,” said Jiang, passing him in the dining hall. “I thought you’d died.”
Ronan shot him a cool look. He didn’t want to see Jiang’s face unless it was behind the wheel of a car.
Two more hours to go.
Declan called during a guest presentation. The phone, on silent, hummed to itself. The sky outside was blue torn by clouds; Ronan longed to be out in it. His species died in captivity.
One more hour.
“I thought I was hallucinating,” Adam said, next to the lockers, an announcement droning on over the hall speakers. “Ronan Lynch in the halls of Aglionby.”
Ronan slammed his locker. He had not put anything in it and had no reason to open or close it, but he liked the satisfying bang of the metal down the hall, the way it drowned out the announcements. He did it again for good measure. “Is this a real conversation, Parrish?”
Adam didn’t bother to reply. He merely exchanged three textbooks for his gym hoodie.
Ronan wrenched his tie loose. “You working after school?”
“With a dreamer.”
He held Ronan’s gaze over his locker door.
School had improved.
Adam gently closed his locker. “I’m done at four thirty. If you’re up for brainstorming some repair of your dream forest. Unless you have homework.”
“Asshole,” Ronan said.
Adam smiled cheerily. Ronan would start wars and burn cities for that true smile, elastic and amiable.
Ronan’s good mood lasted only as long as the hallway and the set of stairs at the end of it, because outside, Declan’s sleek Volvo was parked on the kerb. Declan himself stood next to it, talking to Gansey. Gansey had dirt on the elbows of his uniform shirt – how he’d managed to get them so dirty during the course of the school day was mystifying to Ronan. Declan was dressed in a suit, but it never seemed like a special occasion when he did. He wore a suit the way other people wore pyjama bottoms.