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Adam couldn’t sleep.
That wasn’t new. He hadn’t slept well since he’d left the Barns, and he really hadn’t slept well since Ronan had left his dorm room looking like a crustacean crime scene. But tonight he stared at his desk until the sun rose, until it was early enough that he could record his sociology notes into his phone without waking up Fletcher.
He knew it was selfish of him to want Ronan safe at the Barns. He knew Ronan wanted more. Needed more.
He knew Ronan.
And so he knew that while he pleaded with Ronan to listen to Declan’s advice, of all people, and take things slow, he’d have a more constructive conversation with the rubber plant sitting next to his desk.
“Adam.” Fletcher’s plummy, cheerful voice slammed Adam back to reality like a glass of cold water to the face. “Gillian mentioned a costume party in Thayer tonight and –”
“Can I borrow your helmet?”
Adam loved how the bike roared to life between his legs. It drove like a dream, which was to say, he felt powerful as he rode it. Sexy. It felt like Ronan. Smelled like Ronan. Responded like Ronan, sensitive to his every touch.
It was very difficult to pay attention to the sociology notes droning in his ear, but he managed, even when he dumped the bike each time he had to stop to take a piss.
Adam winced a bit as he steadied the bike outside a gas station. Not that the batshit thing needed gas at all, the tank was nothing but wood, but he needed something to drink. He should have stopped by the cafeteria to grab a bottle of water or something to go, but he’d been in too much of a hurry. Every second he wasted was another second of being away from Ronan.
Missing Ronan hurt physically, as if someone had reached into his lungs and squeezed. He still wasn’t used to it. And now, now…
He wasn’t sure if he was homesick, or just worried about Ronan, or if there was something more, but he couldn’t shake the idea that he was racing after Ronan, that Ronan was halfway gone already.
It had been easier to dismiss that feeling as insecurity before Ronan decided that playing around in a criminal dream market was his new pastime.
Before some stranger started whispering in his dreams.
Ronan said that Bryde was another dreamer, but Adam wasn’t so sure. It seemed too convenient. And the timing…
Adam had scryed twice since he got to Cambridge. He hadn’t told Ronan, because Ronan wouldn’t like it. He hadn’t told Ronan, because there was something there, something dark, something that made his knees turn to jelly and his stomach fall to his feet whenever he thought about it.
It was the same black as Ronan’s nightwash, Adam thought. The same soul-sucking emptiness. An unmaking.
Adam sped up, taking the next turn so fast the speed gave him chills. He breathed in the familiar scent of moss and mist.
He knew Ronan. Ronan was reckless and infuriating, raw energy made human by some trick of physics. He couldn’t sit in the Barns with a thumb up his ass forever.
He’d almost died.
Ronan had tried to skip over that part as he talked, but Adam couldn’t stop imagining it. The nightwash, pouring from his nose and mouth, choking him from within. Adam had heard it before, the desperate, wet, hacking breaths Ronan had to take while he drowned.
Copies of his parents had saved him, apparently on the command of this Bryde, and all of it made a tangle of Adam’s nerves. What reason would they have to save him? Adam couldn’t help but remember the time pigs got loose in the trailer park. The farmer had been painstakingly careful recovering the animals, gentle and kind as he lured them back into the rusted trailer behind his truck.
“They’re worth more when they’re fat,” he’d said. “These aren’t quite there yet.”
Bryde had saved Ronan.
Adam wanted to know why.
Adam’s legs throbbed as he pulled down the road towards the Barns. The bike reminded him of Ronan, alright, strong and pretty and fucking painful when he handled it wrong. The asphalt had peeled a good inch of skin off his left shin, but he was getting better at stopping. He eased on the brake and didn’t even fall when he turned left to get into the Barns.
“Damn it.” He didn’t topple the bike, but it was a close thing. Mist, thick and forbidding and cold, hung heavy in the air where the long dirt road to the Barns had always been before.
The Barns weren’t there.
It was a helluva thing. A thing he suspected was Ronan’s doing. Hoped. If it wasn’t Ronan, that meant it was another dreamer.
Like Bryde.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as he approached the woods where the dirt road towards home had always been. He pulled out his cellphone; he was proud of it, had saved up for it all summer, and even now he liked how it glinted in the setting sun, shiny and new and his. It was exactly like his classmates’ phones, sleek and expensive.
He shoved it back into his front pocket. Ronan had surprised him on campus, and it had all felt wrong until he’d cradled Ronan’s head in his hand and breathed in the reality of him.
Ronan had looked like a stranger. Handsome as ever, but in a way that almost made Adam take a step back.
Adam wanted to fix that.
He pushed the bike through the woods. The thick, lacy mist engulfed him. He knew that the road to the Barns should be there, and so it was there, but so was the first time his father hit him. So was the argument at Gansey’s family estate, with priceless trinkets crashing to the ground, along with the fragile, repressed hope that there could have been something more. There was the long drive away from Ronan, toward Boston, so bleak and sad he hadn’t been able to play the cassette Ronan had burned for him without crying, so he’d driven in silence for hours.
At the end of it, there was an empty rocking chair outside of a local general store. Adam held a soda and Persephone was gone.
He was gone. The soda became smoke, hot to the touch. He became smoke, drifting. He was never going back to his body. He was untethered, unmoored. Lost and forgotten.
There was Ronan. He had another Adam. He had five. He looked at the smoke with a disinterested flick of his eyelid and then settled back to sleep.
The mist fell away. Adam’s face was wet, and he mopped at it with his leather sleeve, pushing around the tears more than anything else.
He cursed and studied the strange mist out of the corner of his eye.
Free will was important to Ronan. Adam didn’t like how the mist had twisted inside his mind; if he hadn’t known the Barns was there, he would have fled. It wanted him to flee. Something must have scared Ronan badly in order to bring a nightmare like this out.
How did he bear going through it every day?
What was he scared of?
Rolling his shoulders, Adam tried to push the nagging worry away. He didn’t have time for it. Only a few hours, and then he’d be riding back to Boston. He didn’t even have a gift. Adam winced. A hell of a boyfriend he was turning out to be, doling out a few hours of his time like Ronan should be grateful for it.
“Ronan?”
Adam looked around the porch. Ronan sometimes liked to sit there in the evenings to watch the sunset and throw corn for the chickens, but it was empty. The rocking chair creaked as Adam stepped around it.
The key was where it always was, beneath a chipped yellow flower pot that would only give the key to people it liked. Something inside him settled at that, at the house still welcoming him home. He unlocked the door, replaced the key, and stepped inside.
Tension fell from his body as soon as he stepped inside. He kicked off his shoes in the mudroom and opened the screen door.
“Ronan?”
Metal clicked on metal with a deadly shnik, and Adam looked up. There was Ronan, just outside the sepia-toned kitchen Adam loved. Adam took his time lifting his helmet up, so happy to see him that he almost didn’t notice that Ronan was holding a gun.
“Jesus, Ronan, it’s me.” Ronan must have seen a stranger wandering around in a helmet and assumed the worst. That’s what Adam got for trying to be romantic. His voice was wry when he teased, “You know how to take a surprise well.”
He expected Ronan to either laugh or tell him to fuck off, but he did neither. He didn’t move at all. He simply held the gun, pointed directly at Adam’s heart, with knitted brows and skeptical eyes.
“How did you get through the driveway?”
“Horribly.”
Adam kept his face impassive and hands still, even as his heart slammed against his chest.
He was back in the trailer. His father had just come home, with the simmering sort of mood that could be navigated only if Adam were nimble. It was a tightrope stretched taut, with lions snarling beneath, and Adam could only make it across if he found the right words.
Adam had become very good at finding the right words.
Gently, as if everything were normal, Adam rolled the scooter helmet onto the counter. Sometimes, if he just acted like everything was fine, it would become so. It was his own little magic trick. He peeled off his gloves, slowly, slowly, and then set about removing his jacket. Cold sweat pricked along his back, making it stick, but he didn’t tug it.
He couldn’t make any sudden moves.
“Is it as bad leaving as it is coming?” His voice didn’t shake, but it was a close thing. “Because if so I’m staying here forever.”
Ronan didn’t reply. He looked as confused as Adam felt, but his hands on the gun never wavered. That was the only thing he seemed sure of, that Adam posed some sort of threat, even if he didn’t know why.
For a long, terrible moment, they stared at each other. Adam’s mind worked at breakneck speed. Ronan thought he was a dream, either his or someone else’s.
Had he dreamt other Adams before?
Killed other Adams?
Ronan might shoot him here, never knowing he was real until a call came in from Harvard. Ronan was his emergency contact, after all. And how long would that phone call take? No one knew he was here. He’d lied to everyone, saying he was driving to New York to spend Halloween with some unnamed friends.
Ronan would bury him under that large oak, where all the other dreams rotted, before he ever knew the truth.
Adam’s knees were liquifying. He didn’t understand anything. A primal fear drove him out of his body and into his ever-turning mind. He couldn’t feel his hands.
“Tell me what I need to say to prove it.” His voice felt so far away from his body. He struggled to think of anything on his own; what didn’t Ronan know about him already? Tamquam alter idem. If Ronan were to dream him up, how close to the original would he be? How would he tell the difference? Oh, God, there was a thought. Maybe this had already happened. Maybe Ronan had already killed him, and he was only a copy, or a copy of a copy. Copies all the way down.
No. No, no, no. Ronan wouldn’t hurt him. He wouldn’t. He hadn’t even been able to hit him when the demon possessed Adam’s hands, when Ronan’s breaths stuttered in his bruised throat, when Adam had begged him to hit him.
All Adam could see was the gun.
He forced himself to look past it, into Ronan’s eyes. Had he ever seen him so lost?
“What will make you know it’s me?”
Ronan didn’t look like he knew, either. “Why are you here?”
That was like a fist to the gut, but Adam swallowed the blow. Did Ronan really think it was so unlike Adam to visit?
Adam babbled an answer and tried not to look at the gun while he spoke. It didn’t matter, he could feel the threat of it. He told Ronan how he’d borrowed Fletcher’s helmet and his proctor’s gloves, and he didn’t tell Ronan that everyone thought he was in New York.
“I read my sociology notes into my phone and I listened to them the whole way down for my quiz tomorrow, and now I’m here.” Shouldn’t Ronan have known he’d come? How could he not, after listening to Ronan talk about fairy markets and nightwash and a voice in his dreams? “Ronan, I know you.”
Something clicked.
“I’m convinced.” Ronan set the gun on the side table. “Only you would listen to sociology notes on a motorcycle.”
Ronan hugged him hard, which was fortunate because he couldn’t feel his legs. Adam melted into him and pressed his nose against his chest and released a long, shuddering breath.
He thought oh God oh God oh God.
He said, “Happy birthday, by the way.”
Ronan looked at him like he was seeing him for the first time, like Adam had daydreamed about the entire ride down. He glanced at the motorcycle jacket and then back at Adam, heat in his eyes.
Maybe the motorcycle had been a gift for them both.
Adam would enjoy that look more if he could just catch his breath.
He’d expected Ronan to be upset at his short stay, but Ronan seemed absurdly pleased, instead. It wasn’t like Adam to be so impulsive. So unlike him, that Ronan couldn’t stop whispering what the fuck in between kisses.
So unlike him, Adam had nearly died for it.
Adam told him the bike was batshit, and Ronan grinned like he already knew. The grin chipped away at Adam’s lingering fear.
Hadn’t it been his fault, walking into the house like that without calling? Something had spooked Ronan enough to dream up a nightmare security fence. Adam should have known something was wrong.
Adam heard his mother’s voice. It was a little bit your fault, too, don’t you think?
“What do you want to do for your three hours?”
Adam’s stomach roared with hunger. He looked around the kitchen, but it didn’t seem like Ronan had been to Food Lion in a while. The milk had gone bad a week ago. There were canned vegetables of questionable age in the cabinet, and stale cereal on the counter, plastic flaps still open as if rolling the bag down after pouring it into a bowl or Ronan’s open mouth had been too much effort. An ancient pizza box sat in the fridge that Adam hoped, for the driver’s sake, had been delivered pre-security system.
He’d make something work.
“I’m starving. I need to eat.”
Ronan looked up at him from beneath his dark lashes. He sat at the kitchen, long legs folded beneath the table, and every fantasy Adam had indulged in as he rode the bike burned. The adrenaline from before melted into something hotter, something he could put to use.
“I need to take off your clothes.”
Ronan, obliging, pulled Adam into his lap for another kiss. It would be so easy to sink into it, but even as Ronan’s lips played cleverly over his, Adam saw the gun.
Worse, he saw the expression Ronan had as he held it.
Confused.
He was beginning to worry that it was all he’d see for a long time when he looked at Ronan. He didn’t like seeing his boyfriend, arrogant and boisterous and cruel, look so paranoid and frightened and small.
Adam had always wondered how well Ronan could tell reality from dreams. Sometimes, when he scryed into Lindenmere, Adam had difficulty telling the dreams and real life apart. What would it be like for Ronan?
A cold chill slowly dripped down Adam’s spine.
Opal always complained when Ronan told her not to lie. It wasn’t fair, she’d cry as she kicked viciously at the couch and spat out whatever photographed eyes or wicker chair she’d been eating. It wasn’t fair because Ronan made his own truth, and she couldn’t.
Ronan said he never lied, but Adam wasn’t sure.
He glanced around the kitchen again. It was pristine, too pristine for Ronan. What was he even eating? Did he need to eat? There was so much about Ronan he didn’t know. So many things he’d learned, but felt better if he didn’t think too much about, like how Ronan never had morning breath and Ronan never got sick.
Ronan looked guilty when he brought any of it up, so Adam quietly filed things away, like how Ronan had fallen into a pit of acid and never burned. There was so much about himself that Ronan didn’t even know, things that Adam knew kept him up at night long after Adam fell asleep.
His father hadn’t taught him anything and Kavinsky hadn’t had time to teach him much more than that.
Ronan had always wanted a teacher.
Just what kind of teacher had he found?
“First,” Adam said, “I want to look at Bryde.”