"Yes," Neeve replied. She didn’t look away from Adam. Again, he thought he saw a flash of something when he was looking at her face: a black mask, two mirrors, Persephone’s face. "It must be a personal sacrifice. Killing me wouldn’t accomplish that. I’m nothing to you."

"But I’m nothing to you," Whelk said.

"But killing is," she replied. "I’ve never killed anyone. I give up my innocence if I kill you. That is an incredible sacrifice."

When Adam spoke, he was surprised by how clearly the contempt came through. "And you’ve already killed someone, so you don’t have that to give up."

Whelk began to swear, very softly, as if no one else were there. Leaves the color and shape of pennies drifted down around them. Neeve was still staring at Adam. The sensation of seeing someplace else in her eyes was now undeniable. It was a black, mirrored lake, it was a voice deep as the earth, it was two obsidian eyes, it was another world.

"Mr. Whelk!"

Gansey!

Gansey’s voice had come from just behind the hollowed-out vision tree, and then the rest of him followed as he strode into view. Behind him were Ronan and Blue. Adam’s heart was a bird and a stone; his relief was palpable, but so was his shame.

"Mr. Whelk," Gansey said. Even in his glasses and with his musty bedhead, he was in full Richard Gansey III splendor — shiny and powerful. He didn’t look at Adam. "The police are on their way. I really recommend you step away from that woman to avoid making this any worse."

Whelk looked as if he was going to reply, but then he didn’t. Instead, everyone looked at the knife in his hand and the ground just below it.

Neeve was gone.

At once, they all looked around the pentagram, at the hollowed-out tree, at the pool — but it was ridiculous. Neeve could not have slithered away without anyone seeing, not in ten seconds’ time. She had not moved. She had disappeared.

For a moment, nothing happened. Everyone was frozen in a diorama of uncertainty.

Whelk plunged from the pentagram. It took Adam only a bare second to realize that he was lunging in the direction of the gun.

Ronan hurled himself toward Whelk at the same moment that Whelk rose with the gun. Whelk smashed the side of it into Ronan’s jaw. Ronan’s head snapped back.

Whelk pointed the pistol at Gansey.

Blue shouted, "Stop!"

There was no time.

Adam threw himself into the middle of the pentagram.

Curiously, there was no sound here, not in any reasonable way. The end of Blue’s cry was muffled, as if it had been shoved under water. The air was still around him. It was as if time itself had become a sluggish thing, barely existing. The only true sensation he felt was that of electricity — the barely perceptible tingling of a lightning storm.

Neeve had said that it wasn’t about the killing, that it was about the sacrifice. It was obvious that stymied Whelk completely.

But Adam knew what sacrifice meant, more than he thought Whelk or Neeve had ever had to know. He knew that it wasn’t about killing someone or drawing a shape made of bird bones.

When it came down to it, Adam had been making sacrifices for a very long time, and he knew what the hardest one was.

On his terms, or not at all.

He wasn’t afraid.

Being Adam Parrish was a complicated thing, a wonder of muscles and organs, synapses and nerves. He was a miracle of moving parts, a study in survival. The most important thing to Adam Parrish, though, had always been free will, the ability to be his own master.

This was the important thing.

It had always been the most important thing.

This was what it was to be Adam.

Kneeling in the middle of the pentagram, digging his fingers into the soft, mossy turf, Adam said, "I sacrifice myself."

Gansey’s cry was agonized. "Adam, no! No."

On his terms, or not at all.

I will be your hands, Adam thought. I will be your eyes.

There was a sound like a breaker being thrown. A crackle.

Beneath them, the ground began to roll.

Chapter 46

Blue was thrown into Ronan, who was already crouched, rising from where Whelk had hit him. In front of her, the great stone slabs among the trees rippled as if they were water, and the pool tipped and splashed from its banks. There was a great sound all around them like a train bearing down, and all Blue could think was, Nothing really bad has ever really happened to me.

The trees heaved toward one another as if they would pull free from the soil. Leaves and branches rained down, thick and furious.

"It’s an earthquake!" Gansey shouted to them. He had one arm thrown up over his head and the other hooked around a tree. Debris coated his hair.

"Look what you’ve done, you crazy bastard!" Ronan shouted to Adam, whose gaze was sharp and wary as he stood in the pentagram.

Will it stop? Blue wondered.

An earthquake was such a shocking thing, such a wrong thing, that it didn’t seem impossible to believe that the world had been inherently broken and that it would never be right again.

As the ground shifted and groaned around them, Whelk staggered to his feet, the gun in hand. It was a blacker and uglier thing than it had seemed before, from a world where death was unfair and instant.

Whelk was able to keep his footing. The bucking of the rocks was beginning to slow, though everything still tilted like a fun house.

"What would you know what to do with power?" he snapped at Adam. "What a waste. What a fucking waste."

Whelk pointed the gun at Adam, and, without any ceremony, he pulled the trigger.

Around them, the world went still. The leaves quivered and the water lapped slowly at the pool’s banks, but otherwise, the ground was quiet.

Blue screamed.

Every set of eyes was on Adam, who remained standing in the middle of the pentagram. His expression was perplexed. He cast his gaze over his chest, his arms. There was not a mark on him.

Whelk had not missed, but Adam had also not been shot, and the two were somehow the same thing.

There was a crushing sadness to Gansey’s face as he looked at Adam. That was the first clue Blue got that something was inherently different, irretrievably altered. If not about the world, then about Cabeswater. And if not about Cabeswater, then about Adam.

"Why?" Gansey asked Adam. "Was I so awful?"

Adam said, "It was never about you."

"But, Adam," Blue cried, "what have you done?"

"What needed to be done," Adam replied.

From his place several feet away, Whelk made a strangled noise. When his bullet had failed to wound Adam, he’d dropped the gun by his side, defeated as a child in a game of pretend.

"I think you should give that back to me," Adam told Whelk. He was shaking, a little. "I don’t think Cabeswater wants you to have it. I think if you don’t give it to me, it might take it."

Suddenly, the trees began to hiss as if a breeze was coming through them, though no wind touched Blue’s skin. Adam’s and Ronan’s faces wore matching shocked expressions, and a moment later, Blue realized that it was not hissing: It was voices. The trees were speaking, and now she could hear them, too.

"Take cover!" Ronan shouted.

There was another sound like rustling, only this resolved itself very quickly into a more concrete noise. It was the sound of something massive moving through the trees, snapping branches and trampling underbrush.

Blue yelled, "Something’s coming!"

She clutched at both Ronan and Gansey, snagging their sleeves. Only a few yards behind them was the craggy mouth of the hollowed-out vision tree, and it was there that she pulled them. For a moment, before the tree’s magic enveloped them, they had time to see what was bearing down on them — a tremendous rippling herd of white-horned beasts, coats glinting like ice-crusted snow, snorts and cries choking the air. They were shoulder to shoulder, hectic and heedless. When they tossed their heads back, Blue saw that they were somehow like that raven carved into the hillside, like that dog sculpture she’d held, strange and sinuous. The thunder of them, of their pressed bodies, rumbled the ground like another earthquake. The herd, snorting, began to part around the pentagram-marked circle.

Beside her, Ronan breathed a soft swear word, and Gansey, pressed up against the warm wall of the tree, turned his face away as if he could not bear to see them.

The tree pulled them into a vision.

In this vision, the night smeared jeweled reflections across wet, steaming pavement, stoplights turning from green to red. The Camaro sat at a curb, Blue in the driver’s seat. Everything was soaked in the smell of gasoline. She caught a glimpse of a collared shirt in the passenger seat; this was Gansey. He leaned across the gearshift toward her, pressing fingers to the place her collarbone was exposed. His breath was hot on her neck.

Gansey, she warned, but she felt unstable and dangerous.

I just want to pretend, Gansey said, the words misting on her skin. I want to pretend that I could.

The Blue in the vision closed her eyes.

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt if I kiss you, he said. Maybe it’s only if you kiss me —

In the tree, Blue was jostled from behind, jolting her from the vision. She just had time to see Gansey — the real Gansey — with widened eyes as he pushed past her and out of the tree.

Chapter 47

Gansey only allowed himself a confused moment of a vision — his fingers, somehow, touching Blue’s face — and then he threw himself out of the tree, jostling the real Blue out of his way. He needed to see what had happened to Adam, though in his heart he felt a dreadful premonition, like he already knew what he would see.

Sure enough, Adam still stood in the circle, unharmed, his arms adrift by his sides. The gun hung in one of his hands. Just a few feet away, outside of the circle, Whelk lay broken. His body was covered with leaf litter, as if he’d lain there for years, not minutes. There was not as much blood as one would expect in a trampling, but there was something broken in his appearance nonetheless. A sort of rumpled look to his form.

Adam was just staring at him. His uneven hair was mussed in the back, and it was the only hint that Adam had moved at all since Gansey had last seen him.

"Adam," Gansey gasped. "How did you get the gun?"

"The trees," Adam said. That chilling remoteness was in his voice, the sound that meant that the boy Gansey knew was pressed somewhere far down inside him.

"The trees? God! Did you shoot him!"

"Of course not," Adam said. He put the gun on the ground, carefully. "I only used it to keep him from coming in here."

Horror was rising up inside Gansey. "You let him get trampled?"

"He killed Noah," Adam said. "It’s what he deserved."

"No." Gansey pressed his hands over his face. There was a body here, a body, and it used to be alive. They didn’t even have the authority to choose an alcoholic beverage. They couldn’t be deciding who deserved to live or die.

"You really wanted me to let a murderer in here?" demanded Adam.

Gansey couldn’t begin to explain the size of this awfulness. He only knew that it burst inside him, again and again, fresh every time he considered it.