The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Before Adam could reply to this, movement from above caught their attention. Something light and strange flapped between the dark trees that lined the neighborhood streets. A monster.

  Ronan’s monster.

  His albino night horror rarely left the protected fields of the Barns, and when it did, it was only to trail after Ronan. Not in a faithful, canine way, but rather in the careless, widening gyre of a cat. But now it flew down the street toward them, straight and purposeful. In the purple-black space, it was as visible as smoke, dragging ragged-edged wings and cloth from its body. The sound of its wings was more prominent than anything else: thump, thump, thump. When it opened its pair of beaks, they trembled with a ferocious cry inaudible to human ears.

  Both Ronan and Adam tipped their heads back. Ronan shouted, “Hey! Where are you going?” But it glided over them without so much as a pause. Straight on toward the mountains. Ugly fucker was going to get shot by some terrified farmer someday.

  He didn’t know why he cared. He guessed it had saved his life that one time, probably.

  “Creepy bastard,” Ronan said again.

  Adam frowned after it and then asked, “What time is it?”

  “It’s 6:21,” Ronan replied, and Adam frowned. “No, 8:40. I read my watch wrong.”

  “Still time if it’s not far, then.” Adam Parrish was always thinking about his resources: money, time, sleep. On a school night, even one with supernatural threats breathing on his collar, Ronan knew that Adam would be stingy with all of these; this was how he had stayed alive.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know. I want to try to find out where this devil is — I’m trying to decide if I can scry while you drive. I wish I could drive and scry at the same time, but that’s impossible. Really, all I want is to move my body where my mind tells it to go.”

  Overhead, a streetlight buzzed and then went out. It had not been raining for several hours, but the air still felt as charged as a thunderstorm. Ronan wondered where his night horror was heading. He said, “Okay, magician, if I’m driving while you’re whacked out, how am I going to know where to go?”

  “I guess I’ll try to stay present enough to tell you where to go.”

  “Is that possible?”

  Adam shrugged; the definitions of possible and impossible were negotiable these days. He leaned to offer his arm to Chainsaw. She leapt on, flapping to balance as his sleeve twisted under her weight, and tilted her head as Adam carefully stroked the fine feathers by her beak. He said, “Never know until we try. You up for it?”

  Ronan jingled his car keys. As if he was ever not in the mood to drive. He jerked his chin toward the Hondayota. “Are you going to lock your shitbox?”

  Adam said, “No point. Hooligans got in anyway.”

  The hooligan in question smiled thinly.

  They drove.

  Adam jerked awake at the sound of a car door closing.

  He was in his terrible little car — was he supposed to be in his car?

  Persephone settled herself in the passenger seat, her froth of pale hair cascading over the console onto the driver’s seat. She carefully placed the toolbox that had been on the seat on the floor between her feet.

  Adam squinted against the colorless new dawn — was it supposed to be daytime? — his eyes still pinched with exhaustion. It felt like only a few minutes had passed since he’d emerged from his night shift at the factory. The drive home had felt like too enormous an undertaking without a few minutes of sleep; it felt no more doable now.

  He couldn’t understand if Persephone was really there or not. She must be; her hair was tickling his bare arm.

  “Take out the cards,” she ordered in her small voice.

  “What?”

  “Time for a lesson,” Persephone said mildly.

  His fatigued brain slid out from under him; something about all of this struck him as not entirely true. “Persephone — I — I’m too tired to think.”

  The thin morning light illuminated Persephone’s secret smile. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

  As he reached for the cards, fumbling into the door pocket he used to keep them in, it struck him. “You’re dead.”

  She nodded in agreement.

  “This is a memory,” he said.

  She nodded again. Now it made sense. He was wandering in a recollection of one of his early lessons with Persephone. The goals of those sessions were always the same: Escape his conscious mind. Discover his unconscious. Expand that to the collective unconscious. Look for the threads that connected all things. Rinse and repeat. In the beginning, he had never gotten past the first two. Every session had been spent trying to lure himself out of his own concrete thoughts.

  Adam’s fingers scraped the bare bottom of the door pocket. The truth of where the cards had been in his memory was bumping up against the knowledge of where he stored them in the present. That window had started to leak after Persephone’s death, and he had begun to keep the cards in the glove box instead to prevent damage.

  “Why are you here? Is this a dream?” he asked, then corrected himself. “No. I’m scrying. I’m looking for something.”

  And just like that, he was alone in the car.

  He was not only alone, but he was in the passenger seat where she had been, holding a single tarot card in his hand. The art on the card was sketchy and scribbly and looked a little bit like a pile of hornets. Actually, it might have been a face. It was unimportant. What was he looking for? It was difficult to navigate the space between conscious and unconscious. Too much focus, and he would lose the meditation. Too little, and he would lose the purpose.

  He let his mind wander slightly closer to his present.

  Electronic music bled into his awareness, reminding him that his body was actually in Ronan’s car. In this other place, it was easy to tell that the music was the sound of Ronan’s soul. Hungry and prayerful, it whispered of dark places, old places, fire, and sex.

  Adam was grounded by the pulsing backbeat and the memory of Ronan’s closeness. The Devil. No, a demon. The knowledge was not there, and then it was.

  North, he said.

  A ring of glowing white surrounded everything. It was so bright that it seared his vision if he looked directly at it; he had to keep his gaze focused ahead. A very faraway part of him, a part that thudded with electric beat, remembered suddenly that it was the light of the phone charger. That was the part of his brain that was still present enough to whisper directions to Ronan.

  Turn right.

  Cabeswater muttered into his deaf ear. It whispered of taking apart, of disowning, of violence, of nothingness. A backward step of self-doubt, a lying promise that you knew would hurt you later, a knowledge that you were going to get hurt and you probably deserved it. Demon, demon, demon.

  Go go go

  Somewhere, a dark car raced along a night road. A hand gripped the wheel, leather bands looped over the wrist bone. The Greywaren. Ronan. In this dreamplace, all times were the same time, and so Adam had a strange, lucid beat of reliving the moment Ronan had offered his hand to help Adam up from the asphalt. Stripped of context, the physical sensations exploded: the surprising shock of heat from that skin-to-skin grip; the soft hiss of the bracelets against Adam’s wrist; the sudden bite of possibility —

  Everything in his mind was ringed by the searing white light.

  The deeper Adam moved through the music and the white-ringed dark, the closer he got to some sort of hidden truth about Ronan. It was hidden in things Adam already knew, half-glimpsed behind a forest made of thoughts. For a bare moment, Adam thought he nearly understood something about Ronan, and about Cabeswater — about Ronan-and-Cabeswater — but it slid away. He darted after it, deeper into whatever stuff Cabeswater’s thoughts were made of. Here, Cabeswater hurled images at him: a vine strangling a tree, a cancerous growth, a creeping rot.

  Adam realized all at once that the demon was inside.

  He could feel the demon watc
hing him.

  Parrish.

  He was seen.

  PARRISH.

  Something brushed his hand.

  He blinked. Everything was that glowing circle, and then he blinked again, and it resolved into the bright iris of the phone charger plugged into the cigarette lighter.

  The car was not moving, though it had only recently stopped. Dust still swirled by its headlights. Ronan was absolutely silent and still, one hand resting on the gearshift, made into a fist. The music had been turned off.

  When Adam looked over, Ronan continued looking out the windshield, clenching his jaw.

  The dust cleared and Adam finally saw where he had brought them.

  He sighed.

  Because the helter-skelter drive through the cold night and Adam’s subconscious had brought them not to some disaster in Cabeswater, not to some schism in rocks along the ley line, not to whatever threat Adam had seen in the glaring headlights of his car. Instead, Adam — freed from reason and turned loose in his own mind, set upon the task of finding a demon — had directed them back to the trailer park where his parents still lived.

  Neither of them spoke. The lights were on in the trailer, but there were no silhouettes in the windows. Ronan hadn’t shut off the headlights, so they shone directly on the front of the trailer.

  “Why are we here?” he asked.

  “Wrong devil,” Adam replied quietly.

  It had not been that long since the court case against his father. He knew that Ronan remained righteously furious over the outcome: Robert Parrish, a first-time offender in the eyes of the court, had walked away with a fine and probation. What Ronan didn’t realize was that the victory hadn’t been in the punishment. Adam didn’t need his father to go to jail. He had merely needed someone outside the situation to look at it and confirm that yes, a crime had been committed. Adam had not invented it, spurred it, deserved it. It said so on the court paperwork. Robert Parrish, guilty. Adam Parrish, free.

  Well, almost. He was still here looking at the trailer, his pulse thudding lowly in his stomach.

  “Why,” Ronan repeated, “are we here?”

  Adam shook his head, his eyes still on the trailer. Ronan had not turned off his headlights yet, and Adam knew that part of him was hoping for Robert Parrish to come to the door to see who it was. Part of Adam was, too, but in the shivery way of waiting for the dentist to just pull your tooth and get it over with.

  He felt Ronan’s eyes on him.

  “Why,” Ronan said a third time, “are we at this fucking place?”

  But Adam didn’t answer because the door opened.

  Robert Parrish stood on the steps, the finer details of his expression washed out by the headlights. Adam didn’t have to see his face, though, because so much of what his father felt was conveyed by his body. The thrust of his shoulders, the slant of his neck, the curvature of his arms into the dull traps of his hands. So Adam knew that his father recognized the car, and he knew precisely how he felt about that fact. Adam felt a curious thrill of fear, completely discrete from his conscious thoughts. His fingertips had gone numb with a jolt of sick adrenaline that his mind had never ordered his body to produce. Thorns studded his heart.

  Adam’s father just stood there, looking. And they sat there, looking back. Ronan was coiled and simmering, one hand resting on his door.

  “Don’t,” said Adam.

  But Ronan merely hit the window button. The tinted glass hissed down. Ronan hooked his elbow on the edge of the door and continued gazing out the window. Adam knew that Ronan was fully aware of how malevolent he could appear, and he did not soften himself as he stared across the patchy dark grass at Robert Parrish. Ronan Lynch’s stare was a snake on the sidewalk where you wanted to walk. It was a match left on your pillow. It was pressing your lips together and tasting your own blood.

  Adam looked at his father, too, but blankly. Adam was there, and he was in Cabeswater, and he was inside the trailer at the same time. He noted with remote curiosity that he was not processing correctly, but even as he marked it, he continued to exist in three split screens.

  Robert Parrish didn’t move.

  Ronan spat into the grass — an indolent, unthreatened gesture. Then he rolled his chin away, contempt spilling over and out of the car, and silently put the window back up.

  The interior of the BMW was entirely silent. It was so quiet that when a breeze blew, the sound of dried leaves scuttling up against the tires was audible.

  Adam touched the place on his wrist where his watch normally sat.

  He said, “I want to go get Orphan Girl.”

  Ronan finally looked at him. Adam expected to see gasoline and gravel in his eyes, but he wore an expression Adam wasn’t sure he’d seen on his face before: something thoughtful and appraising, a more deliberate, sophisticated version of Ronan. Ronan, growing up. It made Adam feel … he didn’t know. He didn’t have enough information to know how he felt.

  The BMW reversed with a show of dirt and menace. Ronan said, “Okay.”

  The toga party was not terrible at all.

  It was, in fact, wonderful.

  It was this: finding the Vancouver crowd all lounged on sheet-covered furniture in a sitting room, all dressed in sheets themselves, everything black and white, black hair, white teeth, black shadows, white skin, black floor, white cotton. They were people Gansey knew: Henry, Cheng2, Ryang, Lee-Squared, Koh, Rutherford, SickSteve. But here, they were different. At school, they were driven, quiet, invisible, model students, Aglionby Academy’s 11-percent-of-our-student-body-is-diverse-click-the-link-to-find-out-more-about-our-overseas-exchange-programs. Here, they slouched. They would not slouch at school. Here, they were angry. They could not afford to be angry at school. Here, they were loud. They did not trust themselves to be loud at school.

  It was this: Henry giving Gansey and Blue a tour of Litchfield House as the other boys followed in their togas. One of the things about Aglionby that had always appealed to Gansey was the sense of sameness, of continuity, of tradition, of immutability. Time didn’t exist there … or if it did, it was irrelevant. It had been populated by students forever and would always be populated by students; they formed a part of something bigger. But at Litchfield House, it was the opposite. It was impossible not to see that each of these boys had come from a place that was not Aglionby and would be headed to a life that was also not Aglionby. The house was messy with books and magazines that were not for school; laptops were tipped open to both games and news sites. Suits hung like bodies in doorways, worn often enough to require easy access. Motorcycle helmets rolled up against used boarding passes and crates of agriculture magazines. Litchfield House boys already had lives. They had pasts and they hurtled on beyond them. Gansey felt strange: He felt he had looked into a funhouse mirror. The details wrong, the colors the same.

  It was this: Blue, teetering on the edge of offense, saying, I don’t understand why you keep saying such awful things about Koreans. About yourself. And Henry saying, I will do it before anyone else can. It is the only way to not be angry all of the time. And suddenly Blue was friends with the Vancouver boys. It seemed impossible that they accepted her just like that and that she shed her prickly skin just as fast, but there it was: Gansey saw the moment that it happened. On paper, she was nothing like them. In practice, she was everything like them. The Vancouver crowd wasn’t like the rest of the world, and that was how they wanted it. Hungry eyes, hungry smiles, hungry futures.

  It was this: Koh demonstrating how to make a toga of a bedsheet and sending Blue and Gansey into a cluttered bedroom to change. It was Gansey politely turning his back as she undressed and then Blue turning hers — maybe turning hers. It was Blue’s shoulder and her collarbone and her legs and her throat and her laugh her laugh her laugh. He couldn’t stop looking at her, and here, it didn’t matter, because no one here cared that they were together. Here, he could play his fingers over her fingers as they stood close, she could lean her cheek on his bare shoulder,
he could hook his ankle playfully in hers, she could catch herself with an arm around his waist. Here he was unbelievably greedy for that laugh.

  It was this: K-pop and opera and hip-hop and eighties power ballads blaring out of a speaker beside Henry’s computer. It was Cheng2 getting impossibly high and talking about his plan to improve economics in the southern states. It was Henry getting drunk but not loud and allowing Ryang to trick him into a game of pool played on the floor with lacrosse sticks and golf balls. It was SickSteve putting movies on the projector with the sound turned down to allow for improved voice-overs.

  It was this: the future beginning to hang thick in the air, and Henry starting a quiet, drunk conversation about whether or not Blue would like to travel to Venezuela with him. Blue replying softly that she would, she very much would, and Gansey hearing the longing in her voice like he was being undone, like his own feelings were being unbearably mirrored. I can’t come? Gansey asked. Yes, you can meet us there in a fancy plane, Henry said. Don’t be fooled by his nice hair, Blue interjected, Gansey would hike. And warmth filled the empty caverns in Gansey’s heart. He felt known.

  It was this: Gansey starting down the stairs to the kitchen, Blue starting up, meeting in the middle. It was Gansey stepping aside to let her pass, but changing his mind. He caught her arm and then the rest of her. She was warm, alive, vibrant beneath the thin cotton; he was warm, alive, vibrant beneath his. Blue slid her hand over his bare shoulder and then onto his chest, her palm spread out flat on his breastbone, her fingers pressed curiously into his skin.

  I thought you would be hairier, she whispered.

  Sorry to disappoint. The legs have a bit more going on.

  Mine too.

  It was this: laughing senselessly into each other’s skin, playing, until it was abruptly no longer play, and Gansey stopped himself with his mouth perilously close to hers, and Blue stopped herself with her belly pressed close to his.