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Adam woke up when Ronan died. It was like that some nights. He would be dreaming, reliving, and then his eyes opened to the cool darkness of his tiny apartment above the church, hands knotted in the sheets, the blanket all twisted up around his legs.
Tonight was no different.
The black tank top he had worn to bed was sticking to his back with sweat. His face was damp too.
It was a dream. It was just a dream. Not real.
Adam sat up and pressed a shaking hand over his eyes, the lids crusty with sleep.
It was just a dream.
He felt blearily on the floor, and then on the upturned cardboard box that served as a bedside table until he located his watch. His hand was still shaking slightly as he scooped it up and pressed his thumb to a small black button on the side. The watch face lit up at once, a pale circle in the black all around him, somehow not so bright that it hurt his eyes when he looked at it.
Adam knew the watch was a dream thing.
Ronan had left it on the passenger seat in his car five days previously, without any explanation or ceremony. The plain brown strap was nearly identical to the strap on the watch Adam had gifted to Opal a month earlier, minus the teeth marks and scrapes that had accumulated since she took possession. This new watch appeared unremarkable at first glance, although closer inspection revealed that the hands always kept perfect time, despite the fact that they could not be wound, and there was no battery compartment to be found anywhere. The face seemed to repel grease and dirt, which came in handy as Adam spent long hours working at the factory and on cars. He also suspected that the watch was waterproof. Not in the same way that his old one had been, insofar as it could be splashed or rained on, but completely impervious to any prolonged contact with liquid.
Now he brought the watch closer to his face to peer at the position of the hands.
It was 2:45AM.
He had gone to bed little more than an hour earlier, but Adam knew it would take him a long time to fall back asleep. His heart still slammed a bruise behind his ribs. He felt jarred and wild from the nightmare, his senses razor sharp with a phantom panic that was, thankfully, the very worst thing he could ever bring back when he woke up.
Adam set his watch aside, and crawled out of bed.
The rough wooden floorboards were cool underneath his bare feet as he felt his way slowly across the apartment to the tiny bathroom. He eased open the door and switched on the light, leaning both hands on the edge of the sink to face off with his own reflection in the mirror. The dark circles underneath his eyes indicated his lack of sleep, not just tonight, but many other nights. His face was pale, the cheekbones and the shape of his nose odd when compared to the well-bred boys that he attended Aglionby with.
Adam sighed and ran his fingers through his tousled hair.
He closed his eyes, but kept his guard up even though he knew he was entirely alone in the apartment. He had locked the door when he had come home earlier. The problem was that sometimes Adam had trouble hearing out of only one ear, and his deaf side was left feeling woefully unprotected, especially at night. A locked door meant very little when reality had cracked straight down the centre less than a year ago, and continued breaking apart ever since.
But just then everything was quiet around him.
Henrietta was a sleepy place after dark, particularly so late on a weekday night, particularly since Kavinsky had died that summer. Aside from the occasional low rumble of a vehicle driving down the road outside the church, that sleepiness went undisturbed.
Adam opened his eyes again.
This time his gaze was drawn to a narrow crack in the mirror above the sink.
The light from the bare bulb above him caught in the gash just so, like the sharp flash of a knife blade. Adam tilted his head slightly to the left, and then to the right. He stood with his hands braced on the sink and waited for something to happen, tired enough to believe that it was possible, even without Cabeswater as a source.
He waited.
He waited.
He waited.
Nothing.
There was no familiar rustle of leaves in his deaf ear, and no flickering vision in the corner of his tired eyes. Adam felt a wistful ache spread through him as the nothing continued to exist all around him. It was a pain that started in the very centre of his chest, right at his core, and pushed out towards the very tips of his fingers.
He reached out and pressed a hand to the mirror. The glass was cold underneath his warm palm, the damp imprint of his fingers appearing as he carefully ran his thumb over the crack.
What would he give in that moment for it to be more than ordinary?
His aloneness throbbed in his blood.
The hairline crack in the mirror glimmered like water droplets on a spider web.
Adam let out his breath in a quiet rush. “Cabeswater?” he whispered.
The word shivered with anticipation in the black silence that filled the bathroom, and Adam leaned further over the sink, close enough to the glass that his hot breath misted across the surface.
“Cabeswater?” he repeated. “I’m here. I’m still listening. Can you hear me?”
No answer.
The light bulb above him splashed yellow across his tanned skin.
His reflection in the mirror stared back at him.
Adam let out a frustrated sigh.
He almost thought about going back to bed, but even while his mind dwelled on the possibility of attempted sleep, his bare feet were already carrying him across the floor to his desk. Adam pulled open drawers and thumbed through papers until he found a half used roll of aluminum foil. His hands and breath were both a little unsteady as he tore several strips off and used them to carefully line the sink in the bathroom.
Cabeswater could no longer come to him, but maybe he could still go to Cabeswater, or at least see what was left of it.
He plugged the drain and put on the tap to fill the sink with water.
He turned off the light.
Darkness soaked in from the corners of the tiny bathroom to fill up all the available space as Adam leaned back over the sink. He let the sharp edge of the aluminum foil scratch his palm as he peered into the water, the constant itch a reminder that his body remained in the real world.
Cabeswater? he said again. Or maybe this time he just thought it.
The water rippled with each breath that escaped past his lips.
It was so intensely dark.
Adam felt the moment that his mind was finally cut loose. He tipped forward and crashed through shadows that were somehow blacker and thicker than he had ever seen in real life, or even in Cabeswater. The rough floor of his apartment had been replaced with something that was softer and more insubstantial.
Mist curled all around him.
Adam could not see it, he could not see anything at all, but he could feel the way that the cold dampness of it twisted around his bare ankles, and he could taste it in his mouth when he opened it to speak.
Cabeswater? Where are you? Tell me what to do.
He stretched out with all of his senses and felt… something.
Cabeswater. Please.
The nameless presence shifted just beyond his reach, and Adam felt a shiver roll down his spine as the air moved with it. He strained his ears. Both of them. His blind eyes searched in every direction for even the smallest glimmer of light.
I miss you.
Nothing.
The blackness was everywhere and it was complete. It was inside him.
Adam was choking on it.
Panic fluttered through him, a frantic bird escaping a gunshot, and he turned around to try and wade back to his apartment, fingers tangling in the mist and bare feet tripping over invisible obstacles.
What were they? Maybe tree branches or stones. Maybe the corpses of things that had been unmade when Cabeswater sacrificed itself to bring Gansey back.
Adam landed hard on his hands and knees, gasping sharply as pain jolted through his body. It was less like he had stumbled, more like he had fallen down several hundred feet to land on solid concrete.
Cabeswater? Help me. Please.
But how could Cabeswater help him when it was no longer with him?
Adam shivered. He knelt there on the ground that was not really the ground and tasted the sharp tang of salt in his mouth. He had been so stupid to think that scrying inside this empty space would do anything except kill him. He should have waited. He should have gone to Blue or Ronan and asked them for advice.
When was he going to learn that he did not have to do everything alone?
Lonesome.
The mist filled his mouth and poured down his throat.
Adam kept his eyes open and waited to die.
His heart pounded and blood rushed in his one good ear.
And then—
“Adam?”
He heard the voice as if from an impossible distance. The darkness writhed and twisted around him as blood pounded through his veins, and Adam turned his head this way and that, searching desperately for a shape or a reflection, anything that would tell him he had not just imagined that voice.
“Adam?” Ronan said, and cold fingertips brushed his face.
“I can’t see you,” Adam whispered. He put his hand out, and Ronan caught it almost instantly with his own.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here. You’re okay.”
His lips were as cold as his hands when he kissed Adam’s knuckles, and his breath tasted like ice when Adam shifted to press their lips together instead.
“I want to wake up,” Adam said urgently. “Help me wake up. I think I’m dying.”
Ronan put his arms around him and held him close.
“Open your eyes,” he said into Adam’s hearing ear.
Adam did.
He instantly fell back and cracked his elbow on the edge of the doorframe. The pain that exploded in his arm was sharp and so very real, and he let out several low curses before he looked around. He was back in his apartment. Water has splashed over the edges of the sink and pooled on the floor. Someone, or perhaps something, had torn apart the aluminum foil that lined the porcelain.
Adam felt on the wall for the light switch and flicked it on again.
His reflection in the mirror was drawn and white. Blood dripped from his nostrils and down over his cracked lips. The tank top he had on was torn across the front from his shoulder to his chest, but when Adam slipped it off over his head the skin beneath it appeared to be untouched.
He balled up the aluminum foil and threw it in the trash.
He used some tissue to clean the blood off his face.
Then he took out the garbage.
As Adam tramped quietly across the parking lot to the enormous metal bin that sat behind the church, cool night air whispered across his bare skin. He heaved the bag over the side of the bin, and stood there for a moment in his sneakers and sweatpants with his hands dangling limply. The breeze rustled through leaves and bare branches, and somewhere in the distance a raven cried out.
Adam was having a hard time believing everything that had just happened.
He was having a hard time believing that he was not dead.
His hands trembled as he brushed them off on his sweats, and turned to head back towards the empty church office. He crept upstairs and eased the door to his apartment shut behind him. He locked it.
His bed did not seem particularly welcoming at the moment, even though Adam knew that he needed to sleep. His earlier nightmare flitted through his head and made the final decision for him.
Adam took out the book he had to finish for his English Lit class and curled up in his desk chair with some scrap paper and a pencil to make notes as he read. He occasionally raised a hand to his face to make sure blood was no longer dripping like tar from his nose, but otherwise managed to focus his attention until pink started to stain the sky outside his window.
His dream watch told him that it was almost six in the morning.
Adam flexed his stiff fingers and disarmed his alarm. He put his book away.
In the shower, he stood underneath the hot water and watched as condensation crept across the walls and the mirror. His mind was hazy with exhaustion, but it was not the first time that Adam Parrish would make it through a long day of school and work on the absolute minimal amount of sleep. Once he had dried off and his hair was combed mostly flat, he stumbled into his clothes and shoes, grabbed his messenger bag, and headed out to where his car was parked.
Autumn had come in earnest over the last week and a half. Dried leaves crackled underneath his shoes as he crossed the back lot and unlocked his car. Adam coaxed the engine to life, and jerked the gearstick into reverse.
He had not eaten anything, but he was not exactly hungry.
He still had time to stop for coffee before school.
When Adam arrived outside Aglionby Academy half an hour later, he was surprised to see a charcoal BMW parked across two spaces next to the Camaro. Ronan had not been back to school since his birthday. Since the demon unmade his mother, and Glendower was discovered as bones and dust underneath all his armour. Since Gansey died, and Cabeswater had been sacrificed to bring him back to life again.
Now he leaned casually against the hood of the BMW in torn black jeans and an expensively faded leather jacket. Chainsaw was perched on his shoulder, and when Adam took a closer look at the BMW he saw a pair of enormous, dark eyes peering out at him through the back passenger window.
Opal reached up and pressed her hand to the glass.
Adam felt a strange tug inside his chest.
“Lynch,” he said. His throat was tight, and the casual disinterested that he tried to inflect came out sounding incomplete, rough, like he had swallowed gravel.
Ronan turned around. He gave Adam a look of fake surprise, like he had not just heard the tricoloured Hondayota pull in on the other side of the Camaro.
“Parrish.”
“What are you doing here?” Adam said.
Chainsaw croaked and flapped her wings, her feathers ruffled in the cool breeze.
Ronan lounged against the BMW with all the grace of a furious pit viper.
“Why do you think?” he said. His sharp gaze lingered on Adam, on his still tousled, dusty hair and the dark circles underneath his eyes that Adam knew betrayed his restless night.
He tugged nervously on the wrinkled sleeve of his button down shirt.
He had forgot to iron it before school.
“What?” he said, a challenge.
Ronan crossed his arms over his chest. It stretched the leather jacket tighter across his broad shoulders, and Adam realized that he was looking when it was already too late to stop.
“Nothing,” Ronan said. Then he added, “You look like shit, is all.”
“Great. Thanks,” Adam drawled.
They both stood there for a moment, at an impasse in the gravel parking lot outside Aglionby Academy. Ronan was wound tight and electric. Adam stared at him, and realized that had never felt so unlike himself in his life.
Finally, he muttered, “Come on.”
Ronan shoved away from his car and started across the grass after him, keeping pace with Adam once he caught up. Chainsaw came with him, still crouched low on his shoulder, flapping her wings every once in a while to keep her balance as the two boys strode across the sprawling front lawn. Ronan hesitated next to the front door to Borden House, where Adam always took his first class on Wednesday, but Adam pulled him around the corner instead and into the sheltered area between two tall buildings.
Brick and stone and shadows rose up all around them.
Adam paused to wipe his hands on his pants. They were shaking again.
“What do you—” Ronan started, but he stopped when Adam took a step closer to him, leaning over to rest his head on Ronan’s chest. He could hear Ronan’s heartbeat next to his good ear, thumping along much faster than usual. After a moment of hesitation, Ronan reached up and slid both hands lightly around his waist.
“What happened?” he said.
His voice was a slow breath that stirred the hair on Adam’s head.
Adam squeezed his eyes shut. He breathed in, and he breathed out.
“I dreamed last night,” he muttered finally. “About you, and the demon. And when I woke up, I tried to scry—”
“You fucking what?” Ronan interjected.
Adam could picture his expression, dark and furious.
He did not look up.
“Because I couldn’t sleep,” he explained. “And Cabeswater… I couldn’t hear it, but I thought that it must be trying to talk to me. I mean, there has to be more on the Ley Line that still needs fixing.”
He paused to let Ronan argue, but the only answer he got was a steely silence.
“Anyway. It was a waste of time,” he continued, trying to swallow around the lump in his throat. “Everything was gone when I got there. It was all black, no trees, nothing, and I just felt so… wrong.”
He stopped and swallowed again.
Ronan tightened his arms around Adam, holding him closer, and Adam squeezed his eyes more tightly shut as he inhaled his smell. It was all boxwood and wet grass and the fresh smell of living animals. It was Chainsaw and the leather seats in his BMW.
“I miss it,” he whispered, his voice barely there at all. “Cabeswater.”
Ronan reached up to frame his face in both hands. He tipped Adam’s head back and looked at him. Adam expected hard eyes and a sharp mouth. He expected pity. What he did not expect was to see Ronan looking at him with a kind of reverence that Adam did not know what to do with.
“What?” he said again, shaky, less of a challenge this time.
Ronan sighed. “I get it. I mean… things suck. I miss it too.”
“You lost a lot more than I did,” Adam admitted softly.
“Don’t be stupid, Parrish.”
“You know I just—”
“Parrish. I said, don’t be stupid.”
Adam let out a strained laugh, and rolled his eyes. “Asshole.” He let their bodies slot back together again, let Ronan wrap both arms around him, and kiss first his deaf ear, then his hearing ear, breath ghosting across the sensitive skin.
“I wish I could make it better,” Ronan murmured after a moment.
“You do,” Adam insisted, swallowing around the new lump in his throat. “Ronan, just being around you… it makes me feel more like me. The other me. Before Gansey died and everything went fucking sideways.” He hesitated, and then shook his head at a new and ridiculous thought. “Maybe, subconsciously, I think some of your dream magic will rub off on me or something.”
“Not the only thing that can rub off,” Ronan joked, his own expression turning positively wicked.
“Gross,” Adam moaned, but he stretched up to kiss Ronan anyway, thinking that he should be trying a little harder not to reward bad behavior, and then disregarding that thought immediately when Ronan casually slid one hand down into the back pocket of his trousers, cupping his ass in a decidedly not casual way, an extension of his clever smile.
He tasted like he always did, sharp and slightly metallic.
Adam felt his mind tingling at the perfect way they fit together, not like a pair of matching puzzles pieces, nothing quite so romantic, more like barbed wire and the grass that grew all around it, snarled and tangled up impossibly in each other.
Ronan Lynchwanted him.
Ronan Lynch wanted him.
It was an equally impossible thought, and yet it was the unmistakeable truth.
“I can hear you thinking,” Ronan muttered, breaking the kiss with a frown.
“I’m always thinking,” Adam countered.
Ronan snorted, but it sounded mostly affectionate. They swayed back against the brick wall of the building, hands roaming thoughtlessly, not quite kissing, just quietly breathing each other in until Adam felt as if his unsteadiness was breaking over him like cold water.
“What if this is it, Ronan?” He whispered. “What if this is all I get?”
“What are you talking about?” Ronan demanded. “You’re getting the hell out of here. You’re going to college. Don’t tell me you’ve decided you’re not good enough for that just because you lost your freaky connection to some magical fucking trees.”
“I know, but—”
“Hey,” Ronan interrupted. “Listen to me.” Adam felt a now familiar hand curve around the back of his neck, fingers twisting gently in the uneven hair there, his palm almost hot against the skin. “I know you feel different with Cabeswater gone. But you know that you still have it, right? The magic. That was you. Cabeswater doesn’t make you, Parrish.” Ronan swallowed. “Adam,” he added softly. “You make you.”
He let out a shaky breath.
Adam took it in.
His hands were just as unsteady when he gripped Ronan by the hips and guided him closer, mouth finding the curve of his throat, and then the hinge of his jaw, the barely there stubble burning his lips anyway.
Adam Parrish never seemed to know what to say when it mattered, but he was not used to Ronan having the upper hand.
Words were complicated.
Everything else was easy in comparison.
“You okay?” Ronan said, head tipped back to give Adam more room to work.
“Getting there,” Adam admitted, moving to suck a bruise over Ronan’s pulse point just as the first bell of the day rang. It was not the shrill blare that could be expected at school, because Aglionby had a proper bell that was rung by a student.
Adam sighed and stepped back.
Ronan groaned, grabbing his hand. “Fuck it, I hate this. You should skip.”
“I can’t,” Adam said. “I’m sorry.”
“Come on. Just one class.”
“Ronan,” Adam warned him wearily, and Ronan released his hand, a resigned look chasing every other complicated expression off his face. Adam sighed again, and leaned back in long enough to kiss Ronan one more time, square on the mouth. He tried to put everything he was feeling into that kiss, but there was so much, and in the end the second bell cut them off, leaving him feeling slightly frustrated.
Ronan pushed them away from the wall, and Chainsaw immediately flapped back down to land his shoulder.
“You working after school?” Ronan said.
“At the factory.”
“Cool. I’ll bring you dinner.”
“You don’t have to,” Adam started, and then caught himself. “Thanks,” he added.
Ronan knew it was about more than dinner.
He said, “Okay.”
Then he walked with Adam up to the front doors of Borden House, and stood there in the grass, looking both very menacing and incredibly attractive in his ripped black jeans and leather jacket, raven perched loyally on his shoulder, while Adam stepped inside.