The headlights illuminated ill-kept grandeur: the oversized teeth of landscaping stones lining the driveway, grass growing between them; a four-board fence with a board hanging loose; asphalt cracked and spewing dead weeds.
The sensation of time slipping was even greater now. He had been here before. He had done this, or lived this life before.
“This place, man,” Henry said, craning his neck, trying to look. “It’s a museum.”
The driveway climbed until it rose above the tree line and reached the crest. There was a grand circle at the end of the drive, and behind that, a dark and looming house. No, not house. Gansey, who had grown up in a mansion, knew a mansion when he saw one. This one was far larger than his parents’ current home, adorned with columns and roof decks and porticoes and conservatories, a sprawling entity of brick and cream. Unlike his parents’ home, however, this mansion’s boxwoods were overgrown by weedy tall locust trees, and the ivy had crawled off the brick walls on to the stairs leading to the front door. The rosebushes had shot up uneven and ugly.
“Not a lot of kerb appeal,” Henry noted. “Bit of a fixer-upper. Would be some great zombie parties on the roof though, yo.”
As the Fisker pulled slowly around the circle, the ravens watched them from the roof and the roof deck railings. Déjà vu plucked at Gansey’s mind, like looking at Noah and seeing both the living and dead version of him.
Gansey touched his lower lip pensively. “I’ve been here.”
Henry peered up at the ravens, who peered back, unmoving. Waiting. “When?”
“This is where I died.”
Ronan had known before he fell asleep that Cabeswater was going to be unbearable, but he had not realized how unbearable.
It was not the sights that were the worst; it was the emotions. The demon was still working on the trees and the ground and the sky, but it was also corrupting the feel of the forest, the things that make a dream a dream even if there is no scenery in it. Now it was every guilty breath sucked in after a sort-of lie. It was the drop of the stomach after finding a body. It was the gnawing suspicion that you were leavable, that you were too much trouble, that you were better off dead. It was the shame of wanting something you shouldn’t; it was the ugly thrill of nearly being dead. It was all of those things, all at once.
Ronan’s nightmares used to be one or two of these things. Only rarely were they all. That was back when they wanted him dead.
The difference was that he’d been alone in those. Now Maura and Calla were supporting him in the waking world – Calla sitting on his hood and Maura sitting in the backseat. He could feel their energy like hands around his head, blocking out some of the dreadful sound. And he had Adam’s mind here in the dream with him. In the real world, he was scrying in the passenger seat again, and in this one, he stood in this ruined forest, hunched over, face unsure.
No. Ronan had to admit to himself that even though they made it easier, their presence wasn’t the real difference between his old nightmares and this one. The real difference was that, back then, the nightmares had wanted him dead, and so had Ronan.
He looked around for some safe place in the dream, someplace that his creation might possibly develop in safety. There was no such place. The only uncorrupted things in the dream were Adam and himself.
So he would hold it himself. Ronan pressed his palms together, imagining a tiny ball of light forming there. The demon did not care for this. In his ear, he heard a gasp. Unmistakably his father. Unmistakably in pain. Dying alone.
Your fault.
Ronan pushed it away. He kept thinking about the tiny brilliant thing that he was forming to find Gansey. He imagined its weight, its size, the pattern of its miniature wings.
“Did you really think I’m going to stay in this place for you?” Adam said in his other ear, all chilly dismissal.
The real Adam was standing with his head turned to the side as an unreasonable facsimile of his father screamed in his face, the cadence of his voice perfectly and eerily matched to the real Robert Parrish. There was a firm set to Adam’s mouth that was less fear and more stubbornness. He had been slowly untangling himself from his real father for weeks; this duplicate was easier to resist.
Leavable.
I’m not asking him to stay, Ronan thought. Only to come back. He wanted badly to check if the object in his hands was what he intended it to be, but he could feel how the demon longed to corrupt the object, to turn it inside out, to make it opposite and ugly. Better to keep it hidden from sight for now, trusting only that he was creating something positive. He had to hold on to the idea of what it was supposed to do when it was brought back to waking life, and not the demon’s idea of what it wanted the object to do when brought back to waking life.
Something was scratching at Ronan’s neck. Lightly, harmlessly, repeatedly, relentlessly, until it had worked its way through the topmost layer of his skin and found blood.
Ronan ignored it and felt the object in his hand stir to life against his fingers.
The dream splattered a body in front of him. Black and torn, ripped and corrupt. Gansey. Eyes still alive, mouth moving. Ruined and helpless. A claw from one of Ronan’s night horrors was still hooked in the corner of his mouth, punched through his cheek.
Powerless.
No. Ronan didn’t think so. He felt the dream fluttering against the palms of his hands.
Adam met Ronan’s gaze, even as the duplicate version of his father kept screaming at him. The strain of whatever energy balance he was doing was visible on his face. “Are you ready?”
Ronan hoped so. The truth was that they really wouldn’t know who’d won this round until he opened his eyes in the BMW. He said, “Wake me up.”