He had not let himself think it once in the past seven years. He had tried instead to convince himself of Czerny’s uselessness. Tried to remind himself of the practicality of the death instead.

But instead, he remembered the sound Czerny made the first time he hit him.

Neeve didn’t have to tell Whelk to sit quietly while she arranged the ritual. Instead, as she laid out the five points of a pentagram with an unlit candle, a lit candle, an empty bowl, a full bowl, and three small bones arranged in a triangle, he sat with his knees pulled up to his chin and his hands still tied behind him and wished he could find it in himself to cry. Something to relieve this terrible weight inside him.

Neeve caught a glimpse of him and imagined that he was upset over his approaching death. "Oh," she said mildly, "don’t be like that. It will not hurt very much." She reconsidered what she had said, and then corrected, "At least for very long."

"How are you going to kill me? How does this ritual work?"

Neeve frowned at him. "That is not an easy question. That is like asking a painter why he chooses the colors he does. Sometimes it is not a process, but a feeling."

"Fine, then," Whelk said. "What are you feeling?"

Neeve pressed a perfectly shaped mauve fingernail to her lip as she surveyed her work. "I have made a pentagram. It is a strong shape for any sort of spell, and I work well with it. Others find it challenging or too constricting, but it satisfies me. I have my lit candle to give energy, and my unlit candle to invite it. I have my scrying bowl to see the other world and I have my empty bowl for the other world to fill. I have crossed the leg bones of three ravens I killed to show the corpse road the nature of the spell I mean to do. And then I think I will bleed you out in the center of the pentagram while invoking the line to wake."

She stared hard at Whelk at this, and then added, "I may tweak it as I go along. These things need to be flexible. People rarely show interest in the mechanics of my work, Barrington."

"I’m very interested," he said. "Sometimes the process is the most interesting part."

When she turned her back to get her knives, he slipped his hands from the binding. Then he selected a fallen branch and crashed it down on her head with as much force as he could muster. He didn’t think it would be enough to kill her, because it was still green and flexible, but it certainly brought her to her knees.

Neeve moaned and shook her head slowly, so Whelk gave her another blow for good measure. He tied her up with the bindings he’d removed from himself — he did them up rather tightly, having learned from her errors — and dragged her semi-unconscious form into the middle of the pentagram.

Then he looked up and saw Adam Parrish.

It was the first time Blue had felt as if it were truly dangerous for her to be in Cabeswater — dangerous because she made things louder. More powerful. By the time they got to the woods, the night already felt charged. The rain had given way to an intermittent drizzle. The combination of the charged feeling and the rain had made Blue look quite anxiously at Gansey when he got out of the car, but his shoulders were barely damp and he wasn’t wearing his Aglionby uniform. He had definitely been wearing the raven sweater when she saw him at the church watch, and his shoulders had definitely been wetter. Surely she hadn’t managed to change his future enough to make tonight the night he died, had she? Surely she had been meant all along to meet him, since she was supposed to kill him or fall in love with him. And surely Persephone wouldn’t have let them go if she’d sensed that tonight was the night Gansey died.

Making a path with their flashlight beams, they found the Pig parked near where they’d found Noah’s Mustang. Several trampled paths led from the car to the woods, as if Adam had been unable to decide where he wanted to enter.

At the sight of the Camaro, Gansey’s face, which had already been grim, became positively stony. None of them spoke as they broached the boundary of the trees.

At the edge of the woods, the feeling of charge, of possibility, immediately became more pronounced. Shoulder to shoulder, they entered the trees, and between one blink and the next, they found themselves surrounded by a dreamy afternoon light.

Even having braced herself for magic, Blue was breathless with it.

"What is Adam thinking?" Gansey muttered, but not to anyone in particular. "How can you mess with …" He lost interest in answering his own question.

Before them was Noah’s Mustang, in the unearthly golden light looking even more surreal than the first time they’d found it. Shafts of sun punched opaquely through the canopy, making stripes over the pollen-coated roof.

Standing by the front of the car, Blue caught the boys’ attention. They joined her, staring at the windshield. Since they had last been in the clearing, someone had written a word on the dusty glass. In round, handwritten letters, it said: MURDERED.

"Noah?" Blue asked the empty air — though it didn’t feel so empty. "Noah, are you here with us? Did you write this?"

Gansey said, "Oh."

It was a very flat little sound, and instead of asking him to clarify, Blue and Ronan followed his gaze to the driver’s side window. An invisible finger was in the process of tracing another letter on the glass. Though Blue had felt that Noah must’ve been the one to write the first word on the glass, in her head she had pictured him having a body while he did it. Far more difficult was watching letters appear spontaneously. It made her think of the Noah with the dark hollows for eyes, the smashed-in cheek, the barely human form. Even in the warm afternoon woods, she felt cold.

It’s Noah, she thought. Drawing energy from me. That’s what I feel.

On the glass, the word took shape.

MURDERED

It began another word. There was not enough space left between the D and the new word, and so the second word partially obliterated the first.

MURDERED

And again, again, again, across each other:

MURDERED

MURDERED

MURDERED

The writing continued until the driver’s side glass was clear, entirely swept clean by an invisible finger, until there were so many words that none of them could be read. Until it was only a window into an empty car with the memory of a burger on the passenger seat.

"Noah," Gansey said, "I’m so sorry."

Blue wiped away a tear. "Me, too."

Stepping forward, leaning over the hood of the car, Ronan pressed his finger to the windshield, and while they watched, he wrote:

REMEMBERED

Calla’s voice spoke in Blue’s head, so clearly that she wondered if everyone else could hear it: A secret killed your father, and you know what it was.

Without any comment, Ronan put his hands into his pockets and strode deeper into the woods.

Noah’s voice hissed in Blue’s ear, cold and urgent, but she couldn’t understand what he was trying to say. She asked him to repeat it, but there was silence. She waited in vain for another few seconds, but still — nothing. Adam was right: Noah was getting less and less.

Now that Ronan had had a few moments’ head start, Gansey seemed anxious to get going. Blue understood entirely. It seemed important to keep them all within sight of one another. Cabeswater felt like a place for things to get lost at the moment.

"Excelsior," Gansey said bleakly.

Blue asked, "What does that even mean?"

Gansey looked over his shoulder at her. He was, once more, just a little bit closer to the boy she’d seen in the churchyard.

"Onward and upward."

Chapter 45

"For the love of God," said Whelk when he saw Adam standing beside the bowl he had just kicked. Whelk held a very large and efficient-looking knife. He was scruffy and unshaven and looked like an Aglionby boy after a bad weekend. "Why?"

His voice held genuine aggravation.

Adam had not seen his Latin teacher since he’d discovered he’d killed Noah, and he was surprised by the rush of emotion the sight of Whelk caused. Especially when he realized that this was once again a ritual, with yet another sacrifice in the middle of it. In this context, it took him a moment to place Neeve’s face — that night at 300 Fox Way. Neeve gazed at him from the center of the circle made from points on a pentagram. She didn’t look quite as afraid as he thought someone tied in the middle of a diabolic symbol might be expected to look.

Adam had several things he thought about saying, but when he opened his mouth, it was none of those things.

"Why Noah?" he asked. "Why not someone horrible?"

Whelk closed his eyes for a bare second. "I’m not having this conversation. Why are you here?"

It was obvious that he wasn’t sure what to do with the fact of Adam — which was fair, because Adam had no idea what to do with the fact of Whelk. The only thing he had to do was keep him from waking the ley line. Everything else (disabling Whelk, saving Neeve, avenging Noah) was negotiable. He remembered, all at once, that he had his father’s gun in his bag. It was possible that he could point that at Whelk and convince him to do something, but what? In the movies, it looked simple: Whoever had the gun won. But in reality, he couldn’t point the gun at Whelk and tie him up at the same time, even if he had something to tie him with. Whelk could overpower him. Maybe Adam could use Neeve’s binding to …

Adam withdrew the gun. It felt heavy and malevolent in his hand. "I’m here to stop this from happening again. Untie her."

Whelk said again, "For the love of God."

He took two steps to Neeve and put his knife against the side of her face. Her mouth tightened, just a very little. He said, "Just put down the gun so that I don’t slice her face off. Actually, throw it over here. And make sure you put the safety on before you throw it or you might end up just shooting her anyway."

Adam had a sneaking suspicion that, if he’d been Gansey, he would’ve been able to talk his way out of this. He would straighten his shoulders and look impressive and Whelk would’ve done whatever he wanted. But he was not Gansey, so all he could think to say was, "I didn’t come here for anyone to die. I’m going to throw the gun out of my reach, but I’m not going to throw it into your reach."

"Then I cut her face off."

Neeve’s face was quite placid. "You’ll ruin the ritual if you do. Weren’t you listening? I thought you were interested in the process."

Adam had the curious, discomfiting sensation of seeing something unusual when he looked at her eyes. It was like he saw a brief flash of Maura and Persephone and Calla in them.

Whelk said, "Fine. Throw the gun over there. Don’t come any closer, though." To Neeve, he said, "What do you mean it won’t work? Are you bluffing?"

"You may throw the gun," Neeve told Adam. "I won’t mind."

Adam tossed the gun into the brush. He felt terrible as he did, but he felt better when he wasn’t holding it.

Neeve said, "And, Barrington, the reason why it will not work is because the ritual needs a sacrifice."

"You were planning on killing me," Whelk said. "You expect me to believe that it doesn’t work the other way around?"