The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  She said, “Out! We need him out!”

  “Out of where?” Ronan asked, picking his way around the pool to them. He looked up at the rock face, at the mountainside around him, trying to plot a path out.

  “Cabeswater,” Orphan Girl said. “Something is happening. Ah!”

  In between the submerged and damaged leaves in the pool, the liquid was turning black. This was a nightmare.

  “Get up, Parrish,” Ronan said, gripping Adam’s arm. “We’re getting out of here.”

  Adam opened his eyes; one lid was drooping. He said, “Don’t forget she’s coming with us.”

  It was 6:21.

  No one had been answering the Fox Way phone for ages. Blue had obediently used Gansey’s phone to call home every forty-five minutes as her mother had asked, but no one picked up. This didn’t strike her as unusual the first time; if the line was tied up with a long-distance psychic consult, outside calls rang through to voicemail. It was unusual when it kept happening, though. Blue tried again in another forty-five minutes, and then another.

  “We need to go,” Blue said to Gansey.

  He did not question it. Neither, to Henry Cheng’s credit, did he, even though he was quite philanthropically drunk and would’ve rather they stayed. Instead, he seemed to instantly divine that this was private and to be left untouched. He accepted their bedsheets and bid them good night and begged Blue once more to travel to Venezuela with him.

  In the car, they realized that Gansey’s watch kept turning 6:21.

  Something was wrong.

  At 300 Fox Way, she tried the front door. Although it was late — was it late? It was 6:20, now 6:21, always 6:20, then 6:21 — the door wasn’t locked. Beside her, Gansey was both wary and electric.

  They closed the front door behind them.

  Something was wrong.

  In the dark house, Blue could not immediately tell what was amiss, only that she was absolutely certain something was. She was frozen with it, unable to move until she determined what was troubling her. This, she thought, must be what it is like to be psychic.

  Her hands quivered.

  What was wrong? It was darker, perhaps, than usual, the ambient light from the kitchen failing to penetrate the night. It was cooler, perhaps, than it ordinarily was, but that might have been her anxiety. It was quieter, with no chattering of television or clink of mugs, but that could have been simply the lateness of the hour. A bulb flickered — no, it was just car lights reflecting off the glass face of the clock on the hallway table. The clock said 6:21.

  She couldn’t move.

  It seemed impossible to be trapped here by dread and nothing more, and yet she stood. She told herself that she had crawled through mysterious caverns, stood under the sparks of a nightmare dragon, and been in the presence of a desperate man with a gun, and so the mere fact of her very own house with no obvious threat shouldn’t paralyze her.

  But she couldn’t move, and Gansey did not stir, either. One finger was pressed absently against his left ear. His eyes had the glassy look that she recalled from his panic attack in the cave not long ago.

  She had half a thought that they were the last two people left in the world. She would step into the living room and find nothing but bodies.

  Before she could catch herself, a single note of a whimper escaped from her.

  Be sensible!

  Gansey’s hand fumbled into hers. His palm was sweaty, but it didn’t matter — hers was, too. They were both terrified.

  Now that she thought about it, the house was not silent after all. Beneath the quiet, she heard something crackling and humming like discordant electronics.

  Gansey’s eyes darted to hers. She squeezed his fingers tightly, gratefully. Then, at the same time, they released each other’s hands. They weren’t sure if they’d need both hands to defend themselves.

  Move, Blue.

  They started forward, gently, both hesitating if the floorboards began to creak. Both afraid to make a sound until they were sure of what they found.

  Just: afraid.

  At the base of the stairs, she rested her hand on the solid knob of the railing and listened. The hum she’d heard before was louder now, more dissonant and alive. It was a buzzing, wordless song, eerily voicing one note before modulating to another further up the unfamiliar scale.

  A thud from directly behind them made Gansey start. But Blue was glad for this sound, because she knew it. It was the brush-clunk of her cousin’s giant clogs on the uneven floor. With relief, she turned to find Orla, comfortingly familiar and silly in her usual bell-bottoms. Her gaze was fixed on some place over Blue’s head.

  “Orla,” Blue said, and her cousin’s eyes dropped to meet hers.

  Orla screamed.

  Blue’s hands acted without her mind, cupping over her ears like a child, and her feet followed suit, stumbling back into Gansey. Orla pressed her hands over her heart and screamed again, the sound cracking and pitching higher. It was nothing Blue had ever thought she’d hear out of her cousin. Some part of Blue darted away from it, making it not Orla’s face screaming, making it not Blue’s body watching, making it a dream instead of reality.

  Orla fell silent.

  Her eyes, though — she was still looking past Blue at nothingness. At something inside herself. Her shoulders heaved with horror.

  And behind everything, that hum continued from somewhere in the house.

  “Orla,” Gansey whispered. “Orla, can you hear me?”

  Orla didn’t reply. She was looking at a world that Blue couldn’t see.

  Blue didn’t want to say the truth, but she did anyway. “I think we have to find the sound.”

  Gansey nodded grimly. Leaving Orla in her unseeing weeping, they crept deeper into the house. At the end of the front hall, the light of the kitchen seemed to promise safety and certainty. But between them and the kitchen was the blackness of the reading room doorway. Although Blue’s heart told her that the interior of the room was completely dark, her eyes showed her that there were three candles on the table within. They were lit. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t affect the blackness.

  The strange, multiheaded buzz spilled from inside the reading room.

  There was also a dull scuffling, like someone running a broom over the floorboards.

  Gansey’s knuckles brushed tentatively against hers.

  Take a step.

  She took a step.

  Go in.

  They went in.

  On the floor of the reading room, Noah twisted and twitched, his body impossible. Somewhere, he was dying. Always dying. Even though Blue had seen him reenact his death before, it never got easier to watch. His face turned to the ceiling, his mouth open in mindless pain.

  Gansey’s breath hitched audibly.

  Above Noah, Calla sat at the large reading table, her eyes focused on nothing at all. Her hands rested on top of scattered tarot cards. A phone sat beside them; she’d been in the middle of a long-distance reading.

  The dissonant hum was louder than anything.

  It was coming from Calla.

  “Are you afraid?” Noah whispered.

  Both Gansey and Blue started. They hadn’t realized that Noah had stopped twitching, but he had, and he was lying on his back, knees drawn up, looking at them. There was suddenly something a little taunting about his expression, a little un-Noah-like. His skull’s teeth smiled through his lips.

  Blue and Gansey glanced at each other.

  The thing that was Noah suddenly gazed up as if it had heard something approaching. He began to hum, too. It was not musical.

  Every cell in Blue’s body burned a warning at her.

  Then Noah duplicated and singled.

  Blue wasn’t sure how else to put it. There was a Noah, then another right beside him, facing the other way, and then the single Noah again. She could not decide if it was an error in Noah, or an error in how she was seeing Noah.

  “We should all be afraid,” Noah said, his voice thin
through the buzzing. “When you play with time —”

  He was suddenly close to them, eye to eye, standing, or at least just his face was, and in a blink, he was a few feet away again. He’d pulled some of his Noah-ness — his boy-guise — over himself again. He had his hands on his knees like a runner, and every time he panted out, the hum reluctantly escaped him.

  Blue’s and Gansey’s breath hung in a cloud before them, shimmering, like they were the dead ones. Noah was pulling energy from them. A lot of energy.

  “Blue, go,” Noah said. His voice was strained, but he’d controlled the hideous humming. “Gansey … go. It won’t be me!” He slid to the right and then back again; it was not the way matter was meant to behave. A lopsided smile snuck across his mouth, utterly at odds with his knitted eyebrows, and vanished. There was a challenge in his face, and then there wasn’t.

  “We’re not leaving,” Blue said. But she did begin to throw all of her protection up around herself. She could not keep whatever had Noah from drawing on both Gansey and Calla, but she could cut off her own considerable battery.

  “Please,” Noah hissed. “Unmaker, unmaker.”

  “Noah,” Gansey said, “you’re stronger than this.”

  Noah’s face went black. From skull to ink in the opposite of a heartbeat. Only the teeth glowed. He gasped or laughed. “YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE.”

  “Get out of him!” Blue snarled.

  Gansey shuddered badly with the cold. “Noah, you can do this.”

  Noah lifted his hands in front of him, the palms and fingers facing each other like a clawsome dance. They were Noah’s hands, and then they were scribbly lines.

  “Nothing is impossible,” Noah said, his voice flat and deep. The darting sketch lines took the place of his hands again, corrupt and useless. Blue could see inside his chest cavity, and there was nothing there but black. “Nothing is impossible. I’m coming for him. I’m coming for him. I’m coming for him.”

  The only thing that kept Blue planted, the only thing that kept her so close to this creature, was the knowledge that she was witnessing a crime. This wasn’t Noah being unintentionally terrifying. This was something in Noah, through Noah, without permission.

  The buzzing voice kept going. “I’m coming for him — Blue! — I’m coming for him — Please! Go! — I’m coming for him —”

  “I won’t leave you,” Blue said. “I’m not afraid.”

  Noah let out a wild laugh, a goblin’s delight. In a high, sideways voice, he thrilled, “You will be!”

  And then he threw himself at her.

  Blue caught a glimpse of Gansey snatching for him just as Noah’s claws dug into her face.

  The reading room went as light as it had been dark. Pain and brilliance, cold and heat —

  He was digging out her eye.

  She wailed, “Noah!”

  Everything was squiggling lines.

  She threw her hands to her face, but nothing changed. She felt hooked onto claws, his fingers dug in her flesh. Her left eye saw only white; her right eye saw only black. Her fingers felt slick; her cheek felt hot.

  Light was exploding from Noah like a flare off the sun.

  Suddenly, hands gripped her shoulders, wrenching her away from him. She was surrounded by warmth and mint. Gansey held her so tightly that she could feel him trembling against her. The hum was everywhere. She could feel it in her burning face as Gansey twisted to put himself between her and the buzzing fury that was Noah.

  “Oh, Jesus. Blue, I need your energy,” Gansey told her, right into her ear, and she heard fear laced through his words. “Now.”

  Pain exploded with every beat of her heart, but she let him take her slick fingers.

  Gansey gripped her hand. She took down all the walls around her energy.

  Crisp and certain and loud, he told the thing: “Be. Noah.”

  The room went silent.

  It was 6:21.

  A little less than six hundred miles down the ley line, a million tiny lights winked across the dark, cold ripples of the Charles River. The toothful November air found its way in the balcony door of Colin Greenmantle’s Back Bay town house. He had not left the door open, but it was open nonetheless. Just a crack.

  In they crawled.

  Colin Greenmantle himself was on the ground floor of the townhome, in the golden-brown, windowless room he had reserved for his collection. The cases themselves were beautiful, glass and iron, mesh and gold, suitably outlandish displays for suitably outlandish objects. The floor beneath the cases was made of oak reclaimed from an old farmhouse in Pennsylvania; the Greenmantles always preferred to possess things that used to be someone else’s. It was impossible to tell how large the room really was, because the only lights were the spotlights that illuminated each unusual artifact. The bulbs glowed through the blackness in each direction like ships in a night sea.

  Greenmantle stood in front of an old mirror. The edge was all carved in acanthus leaves and swans feasting upon other swans, and a brass-rimmed clock was embedded in the topmost frame. The clock face read 6:21 P.M. Supposedly, the mirror itself beaded tears on viewers’ reflections if they’d had a recent death in the family. His reflection was dry-eyed, but he felt he looked pitiful, anyway. In one hand he held a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon whose label promised notes of cherry and graphite. In the other hand he held a pair of earrings he had obtained for his wife, Piper. He was wearing a beautifully cut jacket and a pair of boxers. He was not expecting company.

  They came anyway, picking their way across the crown molding of the second-floor library, crawling over each other’s bodies.

  Greenmantle took a swig of the wine directly from the bottle — when he’d selected it from the kitchen, he had thought it would look more aesthetically pathetic and desperate than carrying a solitary glass, and it did. He wished there was someone here to see just how aesthetically pathetic and desperate he looked.

  “Notes of black powder and abandonment,” he told his reflection. He took another swallow; this mouthful he choked on. A little too much black powder and abandonment at once.

  His reflection went wide-eyed; his wife stood behind him, fingers wrapped around his throat. A few of her blond hairs strayed from her otherwise smooth hair, and the collection lights behind her burned these strands golden-white-fiery. Her eyes were black. One of her eyebrows was raised, but she looked otherwise unperplexed as her fingertips pressed into his skin. His neck purpled.

  He blinked.

  She wasn’t there.

  She had never been there. She had left him behind. Well, in fairness, he had left her behind, but she’d started it. She was the one who had chosen to perpetuate a considerable amount of tactless violent crime in the wilds of Virginia, right when he had decided he was ready to take his toys and go.

  “I’m alone,” Greenmantle told the mirror.

  But he wasn’t. They buzzed down the stairs, alighting upon the tops of the picture frames, and ricocheted into the kitchen.

  Greenmantle turned from the mirror to face his collection. A four-armed suit of armor, a taxidermy unicorn the size of a pygmy goat, a blade that continuously dripped blood on the floor of its glass case. It represented the finest of nearly two decades of collecting. Not really the finest, Greenmantle mused, merely the objects he thought most likely to capture Piper’s attention.

  He thought he heard something in the hallway to the room. A humming. Or scratching. Not quite scratching — it was too light for that.

  “After numerous personal betrayals, Colin Greenmantle had a nervous breakdown in his late thirties,” Greenmantle narrated, ignoring the sound, “leading many to believe he would fade into obscurity.”

  He regarded the earrings in his hand. He had taken steps to acquire them over two years before, but it had taken this long for his suppliers to cut them from a woman’s head in Gambia. Rumor had it that the wearer could see through walls. Certain types of walls, anyway. Not brick. Not stone. But drywall. They could handle drywall. Gre
enmantle didn’t have pierced ears, so he hadn’t tried them. And with Piper pursuing a new life of crime, it seemed he might never find out.

  “But the onlookers had underestimated Colin’s personal fortitude,” he said. “His ability to bounce back from emotional injury.”

  He turned to the door just as the visitors exploded through it.

  He blinked.

  They did not disappear.

  He blinked, and blinked again, and something was still coming in through the door, something that was neither his imagination nor a cursed mirror image. It took his mind a moment to process the sound and the sight to realize it was not a single visitor: It was many. They poured and tumbled and scrabbled over one another.

  It was not until one broke free from the horde and flew at him erratically that he realized that it was insects. As the black wasp landed on his wrist, he told himself not to slap it. It stung him.

  “Bitch!” he said, and swung the wine bottle at it.

  Another wasp joined the first. Greenmantle shook his arm, dislodging it, but a third flew at him. A fourth, a fifth, a hallway-full of them. They were all over him. He was wearing a beautiful jacket, and boxers, and wasps.

  The earrings fell to the floor as he spun. In the mirror, his reflection dripped tears and he saw not wasps, but Piper, her arms and smile wrapped around him.

  “We’re through,” her mouth said.

  The lights went out.

  It was 6:22.

  You could say what you liked about Piper Greenmantle, but she wasn’t a quitter, even when things didn’t turn out exactly as she imagined. She kept going to Pilates long after it was physically satisfying, continued attending book club after she discovered she was a far speedier reader than her fellow members, and persisted in getting fake mink eyelashes sewed into her own every two weeks, even after the salon location closest to her was shut down for health violations.

  So when she went looking for a magical sleeping entity supposedly buried near her rental house, she didn’t quit until she found it.

  Unmaker.

  That had been the first thing it had said when she’d found it. It had taken her a moment longer to realize that it was replying to her question (“What the hell?”).