Somewhere along the way, during this hunt for Glendower, he’d forgotten to notice how much magic there was in the world. How much magic that wasn’t just buried in a tomb. He was feeling it now.
You will be on of those gods without magic powers. What are they called? King.
He was the worst decision she’d made so far, but she couldn’t keep from making it again and again.
It was Ronan, unperformed. No. Ronan, unprotected. This tone reminded Adam of that unshielded smile from before. Don’t play, he told himself. This is not a game. But it didn’t feel like a game, if he was being honest. Adrenaline whispered in his heart.
Silence is an extinct word.
Some feelings are rooted too strongly in the body to exist without it, and this one, desire, is one of them.
History was always buried deep, even when you know where to look. And it was hard to excavate it without damaging it. Brushes and cotton swabs, not chisels and pickaxes. Slow work. You had to like doing it.
And they dreamt. They dreamt and dreamt, and the stars wheeled overhead and away and the moon hid in the trees and the sun moved around the car.
Blame the poets. It’s easier to stir people to rebellion if they think they’re on the side of a demigod or some chosen one. Never trust a poet.
With a sigh, Ronan took a photo of his elbow bent to make it look like a butt, texted it over, and got up.
Then he closed his eyes and he began to dream.
Opal was glad to see he was slowly turning his ship toward the shore of solutions.
The stars stopped their laughing to watch her gallop beneath them, and the moon covered its face with a cloud, and then, as she grew close, the stars scrambled down below the horizon so that they would not have to watch. The sun delayed its rising, too, so as to not bear witness, hesitating just at the edge of the earth, so the early morning hung in an eerie half-light.
Democracy’s a farce,” Ronan said, and Adam smirked, a private, small thing that was inherently exclusionary. An expression, in fact, that he could’ve very well learned from Ronan.
Oh,” said Blue. It was hollow eyes dead and teeth-bared lips and soul threaded through naked bones. It had not been alive for years. It was impossible to not see how decayed the soul was, how removed from humanity, how stretched thin from time away from a pulse. Noah Czerny had died. This was all that was left. That was the truth. Blue’s body was a riot of shivers. She had kissed this. This thin, cold memory of a human.
Oh, come on,” Ronan said. For starters, it was Henrietta. And for finishers, it was Henrietta. No one got burgled, and if they did, they didn’t get beaten up. And if anyone was going to get beaten up, it wouldn’t be the Lynch brothers. There was very little worse than Ronan in Henrietta, and what worse there was was too busy racing around in a little white Mitsubishi to burgle the remaining Lynches.
It felt good to have identified the problem. That had always been the hardest part. With an engine, with school, with life. Solutions were easy, once you knew what was in your way.
From the sea, to the sea.
Sometimes they sat in their cars and cried softly. She liked this best of all, because it was rare, and she found she liked rare things the most.
Night fell; that, at least, could still be relied upon.