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.
But we all have darkness inside us. It is just a question of how much of us is light as well.
Fear and rage are not very different when you think about it, two hungry animals that often hunt the same prey – emotion – and hide from the same predator – logic.
It was a little creepy, sometimes, to have a dead friend.
I was here. I exist. I’m alive, because I bleed.
How right it had felt at each moment he had met them all. How certain that they plunged towards something bigger than even this moment.
Even though Ronan was snarling and Noah was sighing and Adam was hesitating, he didn’t turn to verify that they were coming. He knew they were. In three different ways, he’d earned them all days or weeks or months before, and when it came to it, they’d all follow him anywhere.
It was this: this moment and no other moment, and for the first time that Gansey could remember, he knew what it would feel like to be present in his own life.
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 –.
Is it safe?” Gansey asked. “Safe as life,” Adam replied.
It felt like sadness was like radiation, like the amount of time between exposures was irrelevant, like you got a badge that eventually got filled up from a lifetime of it, and then it just killed you.
Adam Parrish – magician and puzzle, student and logician, man and boy.
But Adam lingered for a moment after he cast off the covers and stood. Here he was, waking in the Lynch home, wearing last night’s clothing that still smelled of smoke from the grill, having overslept the weight class he had this morning by a magnitude of hours. His mouth remembered Ronan Lynch’s.
Adam translated, “Not death, but his brother, sleep.
Time tugged at his soul.
I can see her clearly, standing on the rock beside Peg Gratton, unflinching before Eaton and the rest of the race committee. I can’t remember when I’ve been that brave, and it shames me. The truth is, I feel myself being fascinated and repelled by her; She’s both a mirror of myself and a door to part of the island that i’m not. It’s like when the mare goddess looked into my eye; I felt that there was a part of myself that I didn’t know.
Maybe if you want things to change, you should start in yourself.
I laughed, loud enough that Delia looked up at me. She made motions for me to come over, but I pretended to be looking past her into the food tent. “Hurry. Pretend you’re pointing something out so I can pretend not to see her.” Luke put a hand on my shoulder and pointed with the other towards the sky. “Look, the moon.” “That was the best you could come up with?” I demanded.
You’re being creepy,” Blue said. “Maybe you mean to be, but in case you’re just being accidentally creepy, I thought I’d let you know.
I knew he wouldn’t come, but I howled anyway, and when I did, the other wolves would pass images of him to me of what he looked like: lithe, gray, yellow-eyed. I would pass back images of my own, of a wolf on the edge of the woods, silent and cautious, watching me. The images, clear as the slender-leaved trees in front of me, made finding him seem urgent, but I didn’t know how to begin to look.