Adam gasped and twitched. One hand flailed out, grabbing for a handhold that wasn’t there, nails scratching against the plaster in a thin attack. His gaze swam on to the Gray Man with obvious effort.
“Wake him,” he said in a slurred voice. “Don’t let him stay there by himself!” The hooved girl leapt up from her position without any sluggishness. (Maybe, the Gray Man thought in retrospect, she had actually not been scrying at all, and had instead remained perfectly still only as camouflage when Maura and the Gray Man came into the house, a chilling but perfectly plausible thought.) She threw her arms around Ronan where he sprawled, then began to agitate at him, hands pressed flat against his cheeks, pounding his chest, speaking all the while in something that sounded like Latin but was not.
Then a peculiar thing happened. In principle, the Gray Man knew what was happening, but it was a very different thing to see it actually occur before one’s eyes.
Ronan Lynch brought something back from his dreams.
In this case: blood.
In one moment, he was asleep, and in the next he was awake, and his hands were mired in gore. The Gray Man’s brain moved uneasily between those moments, and he felt that it had neatly removed the most difficult image, the one in the middle.
Adam had clambered unsteadily to his feet. “Bring Maura back! You have no idea —”
Yes, ninety seconds, it had been ninety seconds. The Gray Man used Maura’s hand to tug her away from the scrying bowl, and because she had only wandered in shallowly, she returned to him at once.
“Oh no,” she said. “It’s awful. It’s so awful. The demon – oh no.”
She looked at once to Ronan on the couch. He had not moved even a fraction, although his eyebrows had become more intentional over his closed eyes. There was not a lot of blood on the outside of him, in comparison to how much a human generally carried on the inside, but there was nonetheless something fatal-looking about the display. It was the combination of blood and mud, the bits of bone and viscera stuck to the heels of his hands.
“Fuck,” said Adam vehemently. He had begun to shake, though his face had not changed.
“Is Ronan hurt?” Maura asked.
“He doesn’t move right after,” Adam said. “If he brings something back. Give him a second. Fuck! His mother’s dead.”
“Look out!” the girl shouted. And it was that, and only that, that kept the Gray Man from dying when Laumonier appeared around the corner with a gun.
Laumonier did not hesitate for even a second when he saw the Gray Man: To see him in this context was to shoot him.
The sound was bigger than the room.
The girl let out a shriek that had nothing to do with the sound a human girl would make and everything to do with the sound that a crow would make.
The Gray Man had hit the deck immediately, taking Maura down with him. He found, in that bare second on the worn floorboards, that he was facing a choice.
He could try to disarm this part of Laumonier, securing the area and reminding him that now that Greenmantle was dead, Laumonier should not have had any quarrel with the Gray Man. It was not as impossible as it sounded: The Gray Man had a gun within easy reach of his hand as well, and Adam Parrish had already proven himself extremely cool and resourceful. Such a negotiation would leave the Barns open to Laumonier’s interest, of course, and once Laumonier caught sight of the girl with the hooves, that interest would be undying. This part of the world – and along with it 300 Fox Way and Maura and Blue – would for ever be open to threat unless they fled as Declan and Matthew Lynch had. If he chose this path, he would have to be constantly vigilant to protect them from the interested parties. Constantly on the defensive.
Or the Gray Man could shoot Laumonier.
It would be a declaration of war. The other two parts of Laumonier would not let it pass without remark. But perhaps a war was what this twisted business needed. It had been devolving into a dangerous anarchy of alleyways and basements and kidnappings and hit men since some time before him, and had only become more unruly. Perhaps what it needed was someone to impose some rules from the top down, to get these messy kings in line. But it would not be easy, and it would take years, and there was no version of it that meant that the Gray Man got to stay with Maura and her family. He’d have to take the danger elsewhere, and he’d have to once again throw himself into that world.
He wanted to stay so badly, in this place where he had begun to put violence down. In the place where he’d learned how to feel again. In this place that he loved.
Only a second had passed.
Maura sighed.
The Gray Man shot Laumonier.
He was a king.
It was not at all impossible for Blue to believe that a demon had killed Ronan’s mother and was killing Cabeswater, too. When they came back from the lunch at the schoolhouse – having received dozens of calls from both Ronan’s phone and 300 Fox Way – it felt like the end of the world. Knots of clouds snarled over the town and inside the house, where the Gray Man was packing the few small things that he had left behind there.
“You kill the demon,” he told them all. “I will do my best to handle the rest. Will I be back some day?”
Maura just put her hand on his cheek.
He kissed her, hugged Blue, and was gone.
Jimi and Orla, shockingly, were gone as well. They did not deserve to be in the line of fire, Maura said, and had gone to stay with old friends in West Virginia until it was certain what would happen to Henrietta and the psychics in it.
Every appointment had been cancelled, so there were no clients, and the hotline was set up to send every caller straight to voicemail.