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Once, a long time ago, Gansey was stung to death by hornets.
And once, much less long ago, Gansey was killed by a kiss.
Those two truths, his two deaths, followed him everywhere and all the time: when he climbed into the Pig and the radio searched for signal, spitting static from the speakers like a hive spitting insects; when the smell of ozone blew in on a storm and the air tasted like Blue’s lips; when he took the stairs too fast and his heart shuddered against his lungs, leaving him certain for just a fraction of a second that he knew what came next.
At any moment, he could reach out and brush his fingers against it — a death, marked just for him.
Sometimes, it took the initiative and reached for him first.
He had had a lifetime to learn how to evade it. Since his first death, he’d gotten so good at running that he made it look like chasing. When hornets pressed down his throat, he soothed them with mint. When his ears hummed with insect wings, he revved the Pig louder. When his past swelled up and blotted out the sun, he looked toward Glendower instead.
Now, mint sat stale on his tongue.
Now, the Camaro wouldn’t start.
Now, Glendower was just another shadow on his heels, threatening to swallow him if he let it catch up.
Sleep had been the enemy from the start. It was the waking that mattered. But the king in the tomb still slept, and since that moment, Gansey knew he’d never really be awake again either. Time tipped, moments sometimes streaking by without definition and other times lingering for far too long, minutes and memories like the echo of nails on a chalkboard. Days were clouded, details dim and unscripted.
By comparison, his dreams were the realest part of him.
And, since his second death, his dreams were only nightmares.
The first night after being woken on the roadside, he dreamt of Cabeswater. Or, the not-Cabeswater part of Cabeswater — the forest that stood before the magic had been there and still stood now that the magic had gone. He dreamt of shadows shifting underneath tall trees as the sun looped through the sky, once and again and again. He dreamt of spring turning to summer, and summer turning to fall. He dreamt of the cotton of his clothes coming apart under a blanket of crumbling autumn leaves. He dreamt of his body being eaten through by worms.
He woke up with maggots where his eyes should’ve been and blood all over his pillow. It wasn’t until he caught his reflection in the window behind his bed that he realized it was just a dream, and even once he had, the cold wouldn’t leave his bones.
The next time he slept, he dreamt of a car crash. No context, just the moment of impact — the crumple of metal as the Pig wrapped itself around a pole, the stick-shift useless in his hand, and a fear that didn’t match; a worry about something bigger, something outside the car, like death wasn’t a millisecond away.
He let Ronan drive him to school the next morning, unable to get into the Pig with the image of its corpse behind his eyelids.
The next time he slept, it was all dark. Like being trapped under the mantle of the earth. Like being lost; like wanting to be found but not even knowing how to call for help. There was a door, but he couldn’t open it, but everything in him begged to.
A universe away, someone called Adam’s name, and a pain in his hand woke him up.
After that, he went almost fifty hours without sleeping, certain that as soon as he closed his eyes, he’d walk too far into the dark to find his way back.
But perhaps he already had.
Because there was no Glendower. There was no point. There was only the charade, like his insides weren’t cracking apart along tectonic faults.
So he smiled, when it was right to. He apologized to his parents, for missing the fundraiser. He apologized to Blue, for (however briefly) making her a murderer. He apologized to Ronan and Adam, for taking Cabeswater from them. He apologized to Noah’s headstone, for living his life and not knowing what to do with it.
And he slept, when he had to. Or always.
The next time he dreamt, he was killed by a skateboard. But when he looked up, it was Robert Parrish standing over him.
And somewhere, under the terror and the blood and the ringing in his ear and the way the ground under his feet pitched like the sea, he finally realized what was happening.
But realizing didn’t matter, because the dream tore on without him, sweeping him into another death. A moment later, his vision still swimming, he was standing over his own body on the side of the road, and then he blinked, and it wasn’t him; it was Niall Lynch, with a tire iron buried in his brain matter.
The grief was enough to wake him up, finally, but it was little relief.
It made sense, sort of, that he’d be having the others’ nightmares. Cabeswater had been Ronan’s heart and Adam’s eyes and Blue’s home and Noah’s grave, and now it lived inside of him, something far too big to be a soul trying its best anyway.
The magic had always been sensitive to his fear. Before, it’d always been hornets. But now, it had a bigger vocabulary — it knew fear in all kinds of shapes.
It was another three days until he slept.
That night, it was the sound that tipped him off first.
Tck-tck-tck-tck.
He didn’t have to look to know they were there, right on his tail, big and ugly, claws and wings and darkness and blood-thirst. He was sure of nothing — not the ground under his feet or the sun on the horizon, not himself, not anything — except that the night horrors wanted him dead. It was such a simple, honest kind of hate that Gansey kind of wanted to give them what they wanted.
It didn’t matter what he wanted, though, because he was certain they would catch him. But he ran, because he was supposed to, and the adrenaline of either option — outrunning them or succumbing — stayed with him even as he tripped and fell and they tore him to shreds.
He woke up to his heartbeat rushing through his veins and through his skin and onto his sheets. But when his hand snapped to his wrist to staunch the bleeding, there was nothing except goosebumps and pale blue veins in the moonlight.
How many deaths would he have to die? One for each of them? He deserved it, probably. But right then, in the middle of the night, under a sliver of moon and in the expanse of Monmouth that once felt like home and now felt like the hollow of his ribcage, he wished to die only one more death.
He knew that wasn’t fair. All last year, he’d wanted nothing but to live. “Don’t throw it away,” Noah had said, so he couldn’t.
But knowing he had to live didn’t make doing it any easier. He’d spent eight months quietly preparing to reach the finish line, only to find out he had hundreds of miles still to go. And for what? Glendower was nothing, and he had died his fated death — his story was over, and now he was flipping through blank pages.
What was life without direction, instruction, meaning? Not living. Just surviving.
If anyone knew about surviving, it was Ronan. In that moment, the dream hit him again, powerful and true as he remembered the other side of it, the side that had belonged to him for over a year now — calling the ambulance after finding Ronan with his veins torn open, staring down at splotched hospital carpet while doctors attempted to sew life back into his best friend.
Cold all over like the blood loss was his own, he put on his wireframes and knocked on Ronan’s door.
There was no response, and his anxiety told him catastrophe, that his dream was not a dream but a prophecy or a vision. So he pushed the door open, careful to be quiet just in case he was wrong.
Ronan’s room was dark like a tomb, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust. But there he was, sitting up on the end of his bed, taut and furious like a man fresh out of battle himself.
“Why bother knocking?” Ronan spat, rubbing a hand over his face and barely glancing Gansey’s way.
For the first time in maybe days, Gansey felt something like contentment. Ronan, angry. Ronan, whole. This was real; this was right. He stayed in the doorway, crossing his arms over his chest. “Because I knew you wouldn’t answer.”
“What do you want?”
Gansey opened his mouth to respond — what did he want? To see Ronan breathing; to be reminded that the world was not really ending; to be told he was okay, even if they both knew it was a lie; to be told he wasn’t okay, so he could stop pretending to be even for just one moment — when something in the shadows scraped against the floor.
Every hair on Gansey’s body stood, his heart taking off and leaving his body behind. It was a night horror. Ronan had dreamt up another one, or maybe he himself had, and it was going to kill them both, claws sliding through skin like tissue paper and hooking into the veins underneath—
The night horror said “Kerah,” and it was not a night horror, but Chainsaw, dragging around a metal hanger.
That knowledge did little to calm his pulse.
Finally, he found his words. He cleared his throat and said, carefully, “I’ve been having your nightmares.” Ronan’s eyebrows pulled together, his eyes growing darker. “And Adam’s, and Blue’s, and Noah’s.”
Silence but for Chainsaw shuffling around Ronan’s feet.
“I suppose it’s Cabeswater.”
Ronan’s chin shifted a little, a sign that he was not a statue but a boy, younger than the shadows made him seem. “Glad at least one of us gets to dream there now,” he said, not sounding very glad at all.
Red-hot guilt speared him, and Gansey leaned into it, knowing it was deserved. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice coming out tight, “Rough deal.”
Ronan’s eyes slid toward him, catching the little bit of light from the doorway. “Shut the fuck up,” he said, sounding tired, sliding over on the bed just enough to make room for Gansey at the end of it.
Gansey nodded, leaving the door cracked and easing down next to him. The mattress and the air were still warm where Ronan’s body had been. “Cabeswater is— was— your dreaming place,” he said, thorns tightening around his heart. “Did you ever have this happen?”
“Dreaming other people’s dreams?” Ronan almost laughed. “No. My own are enough.”
Gansey could still feel his skin separating under the claws of night horrors. “I know.”
In the corner of his eye, Ronan bristled, rubbing at his jaw and turning his head away. “What was it?” he asked.
“Nightmares,” Gansey reiterated.
“Which ones?”
All of them, he wanted to say, but for the sake of Ronan’s dignity, he didn’t. “Night horrors.”
The thorns pulled tighter as Ronan’s shoulders read relief. “Fun. Classic.”
It was quiet for a moment as Gansey tried to find the words for the questions he wanted to ask for the answers he wanted to hear. “You don’t still—“ he began, but the rest of the thought got lodged halfway up his throat and he promptly swallowed it.
Ronan’s voice was crisp and sure in the dark. “Night horrors? No.”
“Other things?”
He didn’t respond, which Gansey knew meant that he didn’t want to lie but couldn’t voice the truth. So he asked instead, “As bad as night horrors?”
Ronan shook his head. That was good. That was something.
“How did you… deal with it?”
“It was just nightmares.”
“Except for when it wasn’t.”
Ronan’s jaw clenched, and he forced his mouth into a grim smile. “Unless you got my ability to bring things out of your dreams too, then you don’t have to worry about that.”
Heat rose in Gansey’s cheeks, his vision speckling against the darkness. Ronan was really going to make him ask. “How did you make them stop?”
Instead of answering, Ronan asked, “Is this about Glendower?”
Gansey flinched. He and Ronan didn’t talk about Glendower. Troubling Ronan with his grief over his quest was unfathomable when Ronan had lost so much more — when Gansey had made it out with his life but Ronan’s mother hadn’t.
But the question remained. Was it about Glendower? It was about Glendower only as much as it was about Gansey. At some point, he’d stop drawing the distinction.
“I suppose so,” Gansey said.
“You don’t need Glendower,” Ronan said.
“I don’t know what I need.”
“Fine. Then what do you want?”
Nothing, Gansey thought. I want nothing at all.
To think it was terrifying. To speak it was unthinkable. But as he reached for a lie, or some more digestible version of the truth, Ronan said, “The night horrors only wanted what I wanted.”
The world went still. He had asked; Ronan had answered. But the truth Ronan had given him was bright and horrible — a car alight with a Molotov, a sunrise, a supernova.
He wanted nothing. Not as an absence, but as a thing in itself. Nothing, like ash and ember. Nothing as something to drown in.
The words had trouble gaining traction on the gasoline slick of his tongue, but if he didn’t say it now, he knew he wouldn’t. Syllable by syllable, his voice far away, he asked, “And how did you stop wanting… that?”
Ronan looked at him, and the space between them was narrow or nonexistent, like they were sitting inside the same skin. “Gansey,” he said.
Smoke blurred Gansey’s vision, choked down his throat, charred his lungs. How are you breathing, he wanted to ask, but all that made it through the wreckage was a sob.
Ronan put an arm around him and pulled him into his side, bones knocking together on impact. It jarred another sob from him, and then another.
For a minute or a thousand years, Ronan let him cry. No reassurance, no pity, no apology — just a warm embrace to keep Gansey alive once he’d burned down to the wick, once his tears had run out and there was nothing left but the truth.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Gansey finally said, when he could sit up on his own.
But Ronan kept his arm around him. “Remember when I taught you to throw a hook?”
He nodded. Of course he did. But he’d forgotten when he’d needed it, and his thumb still didn’t fit properly against his hand.
Ronan’s voice was quiet, which somehow made it angrier. “You have to look where you’re punching.”
Gansey could see it, now. The slam of the Camaro against the telephone pole; the ringing in Adam’s ear; the corpses, dead; the skeleton left to rot; the night horrors. It was all the same shape, all the same size, all the same hopeless heartbeat. The moment where nothing would’ve been better. Loss and fear and the whole world ending.
Between Gansey and his horizon stood a million miles of it.
But with a furious, determined edge, Ronan prompted: “And…”
Gansey let out an exhale through his teeth. “Don’t think about how much it will hurt.”
There was no leaving it behind, no turning away, no avoiding it. There was no easier way; no option but through.
But he was not the first one to walk through it. And Ronan was a torch, willing to show him the way.
“Thank you,” Gansey said.
“Shut up,” Ronan said.
“I’ll go.”
“Sweet dreams.”
But as Gansey got to his feet and turned toward the door, Ronan caught his wrist, thumb right against his pulse.
“That was a joke,” Ronan said, and goosebumps scaled up Gansey’s spine. “Let’s drive.”
Somewhere beneath the tear streaks, Gansey felt his mouth fold into something like a smile. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s.”
Ronan grabbed his keys, and Gansey shrugged on a shirt, and for a moment, time slipped, and it was any other night. The cold Henrietta air tasted the same as every other time they’d rode out their insomnia side-by-side. The stars in the sky were the same as the day he and Ronan met.
This was real; this was right. This was his; his and Ronan’s.
For once, for now, Gansey was awake.
But at the door, Ronan stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. And as he turned, Ronan pressed the keys to the BMW into his hand.
“You drive,” Ronan said.
Gansey dug his thumb against the teeth on the ignition key. He didn’t know where he was supposed to go, where he was supposed to take them. But just as he was about to say so, he looked up and saw Ronan smile.
It was a challenge and a promise.
Wherever they went, they went together.
“Okay,” Gansey said, and Ronan’s smile turned crooked and proud.
“Okay,” Ronan said back, and then shouldered passed him, through the doorway, out into the night.
Step-by-step, Gansey followed.