The Raven Boys (39 page)

Even though he knew it was coming, Adam’s arm was too slow to protect his face.

When his father’s hand hit his cheek, it was more sound than feeling: a pop like a distant hammer hitting a nail. Adam scrambled for balance, but his foot missed the edge of the stair and his father let him fall.

When the side of Adam’s head hit the railing, it was a catastrophe of light. He was aware in a single, exploded moment of how many colors combined to make white.

Pain hissed inside his skull.

He was on the ground by the stairs without any recollection of the second between hitting the railing and the ground. His face was caked with dust; it was in his mouth. Adam had to put together the mechanics of breathing, of opening his eyes, of breathing again.

“Oh, come on,” his father said, tired. “Get up. Really.”

Adam slowly pushed himself to his hands and knees. Rocking back, he crouched, knees braced on the ground, while his ears rang, rang, rang. He waited for them to clear. There was nothing but an ascending whine.

Halfway down the drive, he saw the brake lights on Ronan’s BMW.

Just go, Ronan.

“You’re not playing that game!” Robert Parrish snapped. “I’m not going to stop talking about this just because you threw yourself on the ground. I know when you’re faking, Adam. I’m not a fool. I can’t believe you’d make this kind of money and throw it away on that damn school! All of those times you’ve heard us talking about the power bill, the phone?”

His father was far from done. Adam could see it in the way he pushed off his feet with every step down the stairs, from the coil in his body. Adam drew his elbows into his body, ducking his head, willing his ears to clear. What he needed to do was put himself in his father’s head, to imagine what he had to say to defuse this situation.

But he couldn’t think. His thoughts crashed explosively across the dirt in front of him, in time with the rhythm of his heart. His left ear screamed at him. It was so hot that it felt wet.

“You lied,” growled his father. “You told us that school was giving you money to go. You didn’t tell me you were making” — he stopped long enough to withdraw a battered piece of paper from his shirt pocket. It shook in his hand — “eighteen thousand, four hundred and twenty-three dollars a year!”

Adam gasped an answer.

“What’s that?” His father came in close. Grabbing Adam’s collar, he pulled his son up, as easy as he’d lift a dog. Adam stood, but only just. The ground was sliding away from him, and he stumbled. He had to struggle to find the words again; something was fractured inside him.

“Partial,” Adam gasped. “Partial scholarship.”

His father bellowed something else at him, but it was into his left ear, and there was nothing but a roar on that side.

“Do not ignore me,”
his father growled. And then, inexplicably, he turned his head from Adam, and he shouted, “What do
you
want?”

“To do this,” Ronan Lynch snarled, smashing his fist into the side of Robert Parrish’s face. Beyond him, the BMW sat, the driver’s side door hanging open, headlights illuminating clouds of dust in the darkness.

Ronan,
said Adam. Or maybe he only thought it. Without his father holding him up, he staggered.

Grabbing Ronan’s shirt, Adam’s father propelled him back toward the double-wide. But it only took Ronan a moment to get his feet under him. His knee found Parrish’s gut. Doubled over, Adam’s father snatched a hand toward Ronan. His fingers passed harmlessly over Ronan’s shaved head. It set him back just half a second. Parrish crashed his skull into Ronan’s face.

Out of his right ear, Adam heard his mother screaming at them to stop. She was holding the phone, waving the phone at Ronan like that would make him stop. There was only one person who could stop Ronan, though, and Adam’s mother didn’t have that number.

“Ronan,” said Adam, and this time he was certain he said it out loud. His voice sounded strange to him, stuffed with cotton. He took a step and the ground slid out from under him entirely.
Get up, Adam.
He was on his hands and knees. The sky looked the same as the ground. He felt fundamentally broken. He couldn’t stand. He could only watch his friend and his father grappling a few feet away. He was eyes without a body.

The fight was dirty. At one point Ronan went down and Robert Parrish kicked, hard, at his face. Ronan’s forearms came up, all instinct, to protect himself. Parrish lunged in to rip them free. Ronan’s hand lashed out like a snake, dragging Parrish to the ground with him.

Adam caught bits and pieces: his father and Ronan rolling, dragging, punching. Red and blue flashing strobes bounced off the sides of the double-wide, lighting the fields for a second at a time. The cops.

His mother was still yelling.

It was all just noise. What Adam needed was to be able to stand, to walk, to think, and then he could stop Ronan before something awful happened.

“Son?” An officer knelt beside him. He smelled like juniper. Adam thought he might choke on it. “Are you okay?”

With the officer’s hand helping him, Adam stumbled to his feet. Across the dirt, another officer dragged Ronan off Robert Parrish.

“I’m okay,” Adam said.

The cop released his arm and then, as quickly, caught it again. “Boy, you’re not okay. Have you been drinking?”

Ronan must have caught this question because, from across the lot, he shouted an answer. It involved a lot of profanity and the phrase
beats the shit
.

Adam’s vision shifted and cleared, shifted and cleared. He could make out Ronan, dimly. Appalled, he asked, “Is he being cuffed?”

This can’t happen. He can’t go to jail because of me.

“Have you been drinking?” the cop repeated.

“No,” Adam replied. He was still not steady on his feet; the ground slanted and pitched with every move of his head. He knew he looked drunk. He needed to get himself together. Only this afternoon he’d touched Blue’s face. It had felt like anything was possible, like the world soared out in front of him. He tried to channel that sensation, but it felt apocryphal. “I can’t —”

“Can’t what?”

Can’t hear out of my left ear
, Adam thought.

His mother stood on the porch, watching him and the cop, her eyes narrowed. Adam knew what she was thinking, because they’d had the conversation so many times before:
Don’t say anything, Adam. Tell him you fell down. It really was a little your fault, wasn’t it? We’ll deal with it as a family.

If Adam turned his father in, everything crashed down around him. If Adam turned him in, his mother would never forgive him. If Adam turned him in, he could never come home again.

Across the lot, one of the officers put his hand on the back of Ronan’s head, guiding him down into the police car.

Even without the hearing in his left ear, Adam heard Ronan’s voice clearly. “I said I’ve
got
it, man. Do you think I’ve never been in one of these before?”

Adam couldn’t move in with Gansey. He had done so much to make sure that when he moved out, it would be on his own terms. Not Robert Parrish’s. Not Richard Gansey’s.

On Adam Parrish’s terms, or not at all.

Adam touched his left ear. The skin was hot and painful, and without his hearing to tell him when his finger was close to his ear cavity, his touch felt imaginary. The whine in the ear had subsided and now there was … nothing. There was nothing at all.

Gansey said,
You won’t leave because of your pride?

“Ronan was defending me.” Adam’s mouth was dry as the dirt around them. The officer’s expression focused on him as he went on. “From my father. All this … is from him. My face and my …”

His mother was staring at him.

He closed his eyes. He couldn’t look at her and say it. Even with his eyes closed, he felt like he was falling, like the horizon pitched, like his head tilted. Adam had the sick feeling that his father had managed to knock something crucial askew.

And then he said what he couldn’t say before. He asked, “Can I … can I press charges?”

W
helk missed the good food that came with being rich.

When he’d been home from Aglionby, neither of his parents had ever cooked, but they’d hired a chef to come in every other evening to make dinner. Carrie, the chef’s name had been, an effusive but intimidating woman who adored chopping things up with knives. God, he missed her guacamole.

Currently, he sat on the curb of a now-closed service station, eating a dry burger he’d bought from a fast-food joint several miles away; the first fast-food burger he’d had in seven years. Uncertain of just how hard the cops might be looking for his car, he’d parked out of the reach of the streetlight and returned to the curb to eat.

As he chewed, a plan was falling into shape, and the plan involved sleeping in the backseat of his vehicle and making another plan in the morning. It was not confidence inspiring, and his spirits were low. He should’ve just abducted Gansey, now that he considered it, but abduction took so much more planning than theft, and he hadn’t left the house prepared to put someone in his trunk. He hadn’t left the house prepared to do anything, actually. He’d merely seized the opportunity when Gansey’s car had broken down. If he’d considered the matter at all, he would’ve abducted Gansey for the ritual later, after he’d gotten to the heart of the ley line.

Except that Gansey would never have been a good target; the manhunt for his killer would be monumental. Really, the Parrish kid would have been a better bet. No one would miss a kid born in a trailer. He always turned his homework in on time, though.

Whelk grimly took another bite of the dusty burger. It did nothing to lift his mood.

Beside him, the pay phone began to ring. Until then, Whelk hadn’t even been aware that the phone was there; he thought cell phones had driven pay phones out of business years before. He eyed the only other car parked in the lot to see if anyone was awaiting a call. The other vehicle was empty, however, and the sagging right tire indicated that it had been parked in the lot for longer than a few minutes.

He waited anxiously as the phone rang twelve times, but no one appeared to answer it. He was relieved when it stopped, but not enough to remain where he was. He wrapped up the other half of his burger and stood up.

The phone began to ring again.

It rang all the while that he walked to the trash can on the other side of the service station’s door (
COME IN, WE ARE OPEN!
lied the flip-around sign on the door), and it rang all the while he returned to the curb to retrieve one of the fries that he’d missed, and it rang the entire time that he walked back to where he’d parked his car.

Whelk was not prone to philanthropy, but it occurred to him that whoever was on the other side of that pay phone was really trying to get ahold of someone. He returned to the pay phone, which was still ringing — such an old-fashioned ring, really, now that he thought of it, phones just didn’t sound like this anymore — and he removed the phone from its cradle.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Whelk,” Neeve said mildly. “I hope you are having a good evening.”

Whelk clung to the phone. “How did you know where to contact me?”

“Numbers are a very simple thing for me, Mr. Whelk, and you aren’t difficult to find. Also I have some of your hair.” Neeve’s voice was mild and eerie. No live person, Whelk thought, should sound so much like a computerized voicemail menu.

“Why are you calling me?”

“I’m glad that you asked,” Neeve remarked. “I am calling regarding the idea that you proposed the last time we spoke.”

“The last time we spoke, you said you weren’t interested in helping me,” Whelk replied. He was still thinking about the fact that this woman had collected one of his hairs. The image of her moving slowly and mildly through his dark abandoned apartment was not a pleasant one. He turned his back to the service station and looked out into the night. Possibly she was out there, somewhere, perhaps she had followed him and that was how she knew where to call him. But he knew that was not true. The only reason he’d contacted her in the first place was because he knew she was the real thing. Whatever that “thing” might be.

“Yes, about helping you,” Neeve said. “I’ve changed my mind.”