They vanished from the scrying pool.
“Bath time,” Piper said triumphantly. She did not tell Neeve to give her privacy, but Neeve did anyway. She needed to get out. She needed to be alone. She needed to find calm, so that she could see things truthfully.
She wasn’t sure she would ever be calm again.
Outside, at the top of the waspy stairs, Neeve clutched at her hair. In retrospect, she knew that she had used the universe’s power only for personal gain. That was how she had got here. She could not be angry at this lesson. She was going to have to try to save it. That was what it came down to. She could not live with herself otherwise, knowing she’d stood by while a holy place was destroyed.
She began to run.
Neeve did not ordinarily run, but once she had started, she couldn’t believe that she had not done it immediately. She should have started running the moment she saw the demon, and not stopped until it was too far away to hear it in her head. Fear and revulsion suddenly caught up to her, and as she heaved through the forest, sobs gasped from her. Demon, demon, demon. She was so afraid. The dry leaves beneath her feet turned into tarot cards with her face on them. She slipped on their surfaces, but as they flipped from under her shoes, they were leaves once more.
Water, she thought to the forest. I need a mirror if I’m to help you.
Leaves stirred listlessly over her. A drop of rain spattered on her cheek, mingling with her tears.
Not rain. Water for a mirror, Neeve thought. She looked over her shoulder as she ran. Stumbled. She felt watched, but of course she would feel watched. This entire place was watching. Skidding down a slope, her hands catching only on dry leaves that shifted her further, she found herself looking at a hollowed-out stump.
Water, water. As she watched, water gurgled to fill it. Neeve placed her hand in it and prayed to a few select goddesses, and then she held her hands over it to scry. Her mind filled with images of Fox Way. The attic she had stayed in, the rituals she had done there. The mirrors that she had set to propel her through possibilities that had eventually taken her here.
She badly wanted to look over her shoulder.
She couldn’t break focus.
Neeve felt the moment it took hold. She didn’t recognize the face, but it didn’t matter. If it was a woman in 300 Fox Way, the information would get to people who wanted to do something about it. Neeve whispered, “Can you hear me? There’s a demon. It’s unmaking the forest and everything attached to it. I’m going to try to —”
“You know,” Piper said, “if you had a problem with me, I wish you would have come to me first.”
Neeve’s connection was broken. The water in the stump rippled, just water, and then the hard black shell of the demon rose up through the surface. With a little shake of its antennae, it crawled on to her arm. Heavy. Malevolent. Whispering terrible possibilities that were increasingly terrible probabilities. Piper came into focus on the other side of the stump, walking through the leaves to them. Her hair was still damp from the bath.
Neeve did not bother to beg.
“God, Neeve. You New Age types are the worst.” Piper flipped her hand towards the demon. “Unmake her.”
There was something living about the night.
Declan and Matthew had gone. Gansey, Blue, Ronan and Adam remained at the Barns, sitting in a circle in the hickory-scented living room. The only lights were the things Ronan had dreamt. They hovered overhead and danced in the fireplace. It felt like magic hung between all of them, even in the places the light didn’t touch. Gansey was aware that they all were happier than they had been in a long time, which seemed strange in light of the frightening events of the night before and the ominous news they had just received from Declan.
“This is a night for truth,” Gansey said, and any other time, they would have laughed at him for it, perhaps. But not tonight. Tonight, they all could tell they were part of a slow, wheeling machine, and the enormity of it staggered them. “Let’s piece this thing together.”
Slowly they described what had happened to them the day before, pausing to allow Gansey to write it in his journal. As he jotted down the facts – the ley line seizing at 6:21, Noah’s attack, the black-oozing tree, Adam’s eye moving of its own accord – he began to feel the shape of the roles they played. He could nearly see the end if he looked hard enough.
They discussed whether they felt they had a responsibility to protect Cabeswater and the ley line – they all did. Whether they thought Artemus knew more than he was saying – they all did. Whether they thought he would ever talk freely about it – they were all unconvinced.
Partway through this, Ronan got up to pace. Adam went to the kitchen and returned with a coffee for himself. Blue made herself a nest of sofa cushions beside Gansey and put her head in his lap.
This was not allowed.
But it was. The truth was sliding into the light.
They also talked about the town. Whether or not it was wiser to hide from or to fight with outsiders coming to Henrietta to dig for supernatural relics. As they threw around ideas for dreamt defences and dangerous allies, weaponized monsters and acid moats, Gansey gently touched the hair above Blue’s ear, careful not to brush the skin near her eyebrow because of her wound, careful not to meet Ronan’s or Adam’s eyes because of self-consciousness.
It was allowed. He was allowed to want this.
They talked about Henry. Gansey was mindful that he was telling Henry’s closely guarded secrets, but he had also decided by the end of the school day that to tell Gansey something was to tell Adam and Ronan and Blue. They were a package deal; Gansey could not be expected to be won without winning them as well. Adam and Ronan made puerile jokes at Henry’s expense (“He’s half Chinese” “Which half?”) and sniggered clannishly; Blue called them on it (“Jealous, much?”); Gansey told them to put aside their preconceptions and think about him.