Blue Lily, Lily Blue (17 page)

onan drove back to St. Agnes. Adam thought he meant to go to Adam’s apartment above the church office, but when they got out at the street, Ronan veered off and

Although Adam lived above the church, he had not been inside it since he’d moved into his apartment. The Parrishes had never been churchgoers, and although Adam himself suspected there might be a God, he also suspected it didn’t matter.

“Lynch,” he said as Ronan opened the door to the dusky sanctuary. “I thought we were going to talk.”
Ronan dipped his fingers into the holy water and touched his forehead. “It’s empty.”
But the church didn’t feel empty. It was claustrophobic with the scent of incense, vases of foreign lilies, reams of white cloth, the broken gaze of a sorrowing Christ. It bled with stories Adam didn’t know, rituals he would never do, connections he would never share. It was dense with a humming sort of history that made him feel light-headed.
Ronan hit Adam’s arm with the back of his hand. “Come on.”
He walked along the back of the dim church and opened a door to a steep staircase. At the top, Adam found himself on a hidden balcony populated by two pews and a pipe organ. A statue of Mary — probably Mary? — held its hands out to him, but that was because she didn’t know him. Then again, she entreated Ronan, too, and she probably
did
know him. A few small candles burned at her feet.
“The choir sits up here,” Ronan said, sitting at the organ. Without warning, he played a terrifically loud and shockingly sonorous fragment.
“Ronan!” hissed Adam. He looked at Mary, but she didn’t seem bothered.
“I told you. No one’s here.” When Ronan saw that Adam still did not believe, he explained, “It’s confession day up in Woodville, and they share our priest. This is when Matthew used to have his organ lessons because no one would be around to care how bad he sucked.”
Adam finally sat down on one of the pews. Laying his cheek against the smooth back of it, he looked at Ronan. Strangely enough, Ronan belonged
here
, too, just as he had at the Barns. This noisy, lush religion had created him just as much as his father’s world of dreams; it seemed impossible for all of Ronan to exist in one person. Adam was beginning to realize that he hadn’t known Ronan at all. Or rather, he had known part of him and assumed it was all of him.
The scent of Cabeswater, all trees after rain, drifted past Adam, and he realized that while he’d been looking at Ronan, Ronan had been looking at him.
“So, Greenmantle,” he said, and Ronan looked away.
“Fucker. Yeah.”
“I looked up all the public stuff that first night.” It would have been easy enough for Ronan to do it himself, but perhaps he had known that Adam would like the mind-occupying puzzle of it. “Double PhD, home in Boston, three speeding tickets in the last eighteen months, blah blah blah.”
“What about the spider-in-web stuff?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Adam replied. It had taken him only a little bit of time to get the readily available version of Colin Greenmantle’s life story. And only a little bit more time to realize that it wasn’t really the life story he needed. He didn’t need to undo the web — probably
couldn’t
undo the web. He needed to spin a new web.
“Of course it matters. It’s all that matters.”
“No, Ronan, look — come here.”
Adam began to write in the dust on the pew beside him. Ronan joined him, crouching to read it.
“What’s that?”
“The things we would put into place,” Adam said. He’d worked it all out in his head. Though it would have been easier to write it down, he’d thought better of it. Better to have no paper trail or electronic record. Only Cabeswater could hack into the record of Adam’s mind. “This is all of the bits of evidence you’d need to dream and how we’d need to bury them.”
Some of the things needed to be literally buried. The plan was tidy in conception but not in execution; it was filthy business framing someone, and murders required bodies. Or at least parts of bodies.
“It looks like a lot,” Adam admitted, because it did, once he had written it all down in the dust. “I guess it kind of is. But it’s mostly small things.”
Ronan finished reading Adam’s plan. He had his face slightly turned away from the horror of it, just as he had turned his face away from his dream object. He said, “But — this isn’t what happened. This isn’t what Greenmantle
did.
”
Ronan didn’t have to say it:
This is a lie.
Adam should have known this would be a problem for him. He struggled to explain. “I know it’s not. But it’s too hard to frame him for having your father killed. It’s too subtle and it has too many pieces I don’t know. He could refute one of our pieces with a real piece, or something real, like the real timeline of what he actually did, could ruin something we’d come up with. But if I invent the crime, I can control all the pieces.”
Ronan just stared at him.
“Look, and it has to be something really horrible, something he wouldn’t want to go to prison for,” Adam said. Now he was feeling a little dirty; he couldn’t tell if Ronan’s visible distaste was just from of the nature of the crime Adam had suggested, or from Adam being able to contemplate such a crime at all. But he persisted, because it was too late to back out now. “We want him too threatened to even think about opening his mouth or countering. If he was even accused of this, he’d be ruined, and he’ll know that. And if he did get nailed for it, people who commit crimes against children are treated badly in jail, and he’ll know that, too.”
Adam could see the two sides of Ronan warring. Could see, unbelievably, that the lie was going to lose.
“Only once,” Adam said quickly. “It’s just this once. I could redo it to actually be about your father, but it wouldn’t be as bulletproof. And then you’d have to deal with court cases. So would Matthew.” He felt bad about that last part, even though it was true. Because he knew it would sway Ronan, and it did.
“Okay,” Ronan said unhappily. He looked at the plan written in the dust, and his eyebrows furrowed. “Gansey would hate this.”
Because it was the worst kind of filth. Kings were not meant to drag their hems in this.
“That’s why we’re not going to tell him.”
He expected Ronan to balk on this point, too, but he just nodded. Two things they agreed on: protecting Gansey’s crumbling feelings, and lying by omission.
“Do you think you can do it?” Adam asked. “It’s a lot of specifics.”
It should have been impossible. No one should have been able to dream any of these things, much less all of them. But Adam had seen what Ronan could do. He’d read the dreamed will and ridden in the dreamed Camaro and been terrified by the dreamed night terror.
It was possible that there were two gods in this church.
Ronan crouched by the pew again, studying the list, his fingers running idly over his stubble as he thought. When he wasn’t trying to look like an asshole, his face looked very different, and for a tilting moment, Adam felt the startling inequality of their relationship: Ronan knew Adam, but Adam wasn’t sure he knew Ronan, after all.
“I’ll do it now,” Ronan said finally.
“Now?” Adam asked incredulously. “Here?
Now?
”
Ronan flashed a cocky grin, pleased to have gotten a reaction. “No time like the present, Parrish. Now. Everything but the phone. I have to see what kind he has before I can dream that.”
Adam glanced around the still church. It still felt so
inhabited.
Even though he intellectually believed Ronan that the church would stay empty, in his heart, he felt crowded by . . . possibilities. But Ronan’s face held a challenge and Adam wasn’t going to back down. He said, “I know what kind of phone he has.”
“Telling me a model isn’t good enough. I need to
see
it,” replied Ronan.
Adam hesitated, and then asked, “What if I asked Cabeswater to show you his phone in the dream? I know what kind it is.”
He waited for Ronan to falter or wonder over Adam’s strangeness, but Ronan just straightened and rubbed his hands together. “Yeah, good. Good. Look, maybe you should go, though. To the apartment, and I’ll meet you after I’m done.”
“Why?”
Ronan said, “Not everything in my head is a great thing, Parrish, believe it or not. I told you. And when I’m bringing something back from a dream, sometimes I can’t bring back only one thing.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“At least give me some room.”
Adam retreated to sit beside Mary as Ronan stretched out on the pew, rubbing out the dingy plan with the legs of his jeans. Something about his stillness on the pew and the funereal quality of the light reminded Adam of the effigy of Glendower they’d seen at the tomb. A king, sleeping. Adam couldn’t imagine, though, the strange, wild kingdom that Ronan might rule.
“Stop watching me,” Ronan said, though his eyes were closed.
“Whatever. I’m going to ask Cabeswater for the phone.” “See you on the other side.”
As Ronan fidgeted, Adam flicked his eyes over to the candles at Mary’s feet. It was harder to look into a flame than a pool of black water, but it served the same purpose. As his vision whited out, he felt his mind loosen and detach from his body, and just before he fell out of himself, he asked Cabeswater to give Ronan the phone.
Asking
was not quite the right word.
Showing
was better, because he showed Cabeswater what he needed: the image of the phone presenting itself to Ronan.
Time was impossible to judge when he scryed.
Nearby — what was nearby? — he heard a sharp sound, like a caw, and he suddenly realized that he wasn’t sure if he’d been staring into the light for a minute or an hour or a day. His own body felt like the flame, flickering and fragile; he was getting in too deep.
Time to go back.
He waded back, retreating into his bones. He felt the moment his mind clung to his body once more. His eyes flickered open.
Ronan was convulsing in front of him.
Adam jerked his legs in toward his body, out of reach of the disaster just in front of him. Ronan’s arms were streaked with blood and his hands were pinpricked with visceral, juicy wounds. His jeans were soaked black. The church carpet glistened with it.
But the horror was his spine, bent back on itself. It was his hand, pressed to this throat. It was his breath — a gasp, a gasp, a choked-off word. It was his fingers, shaking as he held them to his mouth. It was his eyes, open too wide, too bright, cast up to the ceiling. Seeing only pain.
Adam didn’t want to move. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t do this. This wasn’t happening.
But it was, and he could.
He scrambled forward. “
Ronan —
Oh God.”
Because now that he was closer, he could see what a ruin Ronan’s body was. Beyond repair. He was dying.
I did this — this was my idea — he didn’t even really want to —
“Are you happy now?” Ronan asked. “Is this what you wanted?”
Adam started violently. The voice had come from somewhere else. He looked up and found Ronan sitting cross-legged on the pew above them, his expression watchful. One of this Ronan’s hands was bloody, too, but it was clearly not his own blood. Something dark flickered across his face as he cast his eyes down to his dying double. The other Ronan whimpered. It was a hideous sound.
“What— what’s happening?” Adam asked. He felt lightheaded. He was awake; he was dreaming.
“You said you wanted to stay and watch,” Ronan snarled from the bench. “Enjoy the show.”
Adam understood now. The real Ronan had not moved; he’d woken exactly where he had fallen asleep. This dying Ronan was a copy.
“Why would you dream this?” demanded Adam. He wanted his brain to believe that this agonized Ronan wasn’t real, but the duplication was too perfect. He saw at once a Ronan Lynch violently dying and a Ronan Lynch watching with cool remove. Both were true, though both should have been impossible.
“I tried for too much at once,” Ronan said from the pew. His words were short, clipped. He was trying not to look like he cared about watching himself die. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe this happened all the time. What a fool Adam was to think he knew anything about Ronan Lynch. “It wasn’t the sort of thing — the sort of things I normally dream about, and everything got agitated. The night horrors came. Then the wasps. I could tell I would bring them back with me. That I’d wake up like
that
. So I dreamed another me for them to have and then — I woke up. And here I am. And here I am, again. What a cool trick. What a damn cool trick.”
The other Ronan was dead.
Adam felt the same way he had when he had seen the dream word. Reality was twisting in on itself. Here was Ronan, dead, and ungrievable, because there was Ronan, alive and unblinking.
“Here—” said Ronan. “Here’s your shit. The lies you wanted.”
He thrust a bulging, oversized manila envelope at Adam; full, presumably, of the evidence to frame Greenmantle. It took Adam too long to realize that Ronan wanted him to take it, and then a second longer to shift his mind to the mechanics of taking it. Adam told his hand to reach out, and reluctantly it did.
Get it together, Adam.
There was blood on the envelope, and now, on Adam’s hand. He asked, “Did you get everything?”
“It’s all there.”
“Even the —”
“
It’s all there.
”
What an impossible and miraculous and hideous thing this was. An ugly plan hatched by an ugly boy now dreamed into ugly life. From dream to reality. How appropriate it was that Ronan, left to his own devices, manifested beautiful cars and beautiful birds and tenderhearted brothers, while Adam, when given the power, manifested a filthy string of perverse murders. Adam asked, “What now? What do we do with . . .”
“Nothing,” growled Ronan. “You do nothing. No, you do what I asked before. Go.”
“What?”
Ronan was quivering. Not from venom, like the other Ronan, but from some chained emotion. “I said I didn’t want you here in case this happened, and now it has, and look at you.”
Adam thought he’d taken the whole thing pretty well, considering. Gansey would have swooned by this point. He certainly couldn’t see how his presence had made the situation any worse. He
could
see, however, that Ronan Lynch was angry because he wanted to be angry. “Way to be an asshole. This wasn’t my fault.”
“I didn’t say it was your fault,” Ronan said. “I said
get the hell away from me.
”
The two boys stared at each other. Insanely, it felt like every other argument they’d ever had, even though this time there was a Ronan-shaped body curled between them covered in gore. This was just Ronan wanting to shout where someone could hear him. Adam felt it whittling away at his temper, not because he believed Ronan was angry at
him
, but because he was tired of Ronan thinking
this
was the only way to show he was upset.
He said, “Oh, come on. What now?”
Ronan said, “Bye. That’s what.”
“Whatever,” Adam said, heading for the stairs. “Next time you can die alone.”