The Raven King (The Raven Cycle #4) - Maggie Stiefvater Page 0,39

dark, nor of the things in it. Fear was unworthy of her devotion; the rightness was.

She groped for it now.

Opening her eyes, she made her way around a lump that was probably a sofa. Certainty thrummed through her more strongly as she found a staircase and began to climb. At the top was an open-plan kitchen, dimly lit with purple-gray through the massive new windows, green-blue from the microwave clock.

It was unpleasant. She couldn’t tell if it was something about the room itself, or merely Mr Gray’s memories pressing up against her own. She proceeded.

Here was a pitch-black hallway, no windows, no light at all.

It was more than dark.

As she stepped cautiously into it, the darkness ceased to be darkness and instead became an absence of light. The two conditions are similar in several ways, but none of which were important when you were standing in one instead of the other.

Something whispered Blue in Maura’s ear.

Every one of her senses was wrung raw; she couldn’t tell if she was meant to push forward or not.

Mr Gray touched her back.

Except that it wasn’t him. She only had to turn her head slightly to the right to realize that he was still at the edge of the liquid dark. Maura took a moment to visualize a protective shell around herself. Now she could see that the hallway ended at a doorway. Though there were other closed doors on either side, the one at the end was obviously the source.

She glanced back at the light switch beside Mr Gray. He flicked it.

The lights were like losing an argument with the correct answer. They should have been on. They were on. When Maura peered at the bulbs, she could tell in an objective way that they were on.

But the hallway was still not lit.

Maura met Mr Gray’s narrowed eyes.

They crossed the final few feet, soundless, pushing the absence of light before them, and then Maura hovered her hand above the doorknob. It looked ordinary, which is how the most dangerous things looked. It cast no shadow on the door, because no light reached it.

Maura stretched for the rightness and found terror. Then she stretched beyond that and found the answer.

Turning the knob, she pushed open the door.

The hall lights seeped darkly past her, revealing a large bathroom. A scrying bowl lay beside the bathtub. Three colourless candles had dripped all over the back of the sink. PIPER PIPER PIPER was written backwards on the mirror in a substance that looked a lot like pink lipstick.

There was something large on the floor, and it was moving and scraping.

Maura told her hand to find the light switch, and it did.

The thing on the floor was a body – no. It was a human. It was twisting in a way a human shouldn’t, though, shoulders unfolding. Fingers claws on the tile. Legs scrabbling, scuttling. An inhuman sound escaped from his mouth, and then Maura understood.

This person was dying.

Maura waited until he had finished, and then she said, “You must be Noah.”

Calla had also been having a persistently negative hunch that day, but unlike Maura, she had been stuck in an Aglionby Academy office doing paperwork and didn’t have the liberty of trying to find out what the source of the bad feeling was. Nonetheless, it grew and grew, filling her mind like a black headache, until she had given in and asked to go home an hour early. She was lying on her face upstairs in the room she shared with Jimi when the front door slammed.

Maura’s voice rose clearly from the front hallway. “I’ve brought home dead people. Cancel every appointment! Hang up your phones! Orla, if you have a boy here, he’s gotta go!”

Calla extracted herself from her comforter and scooped up her slippers before heading down the hall. Jimi, benevolent busybody that she was, smashed her ample hip on the sewing table in her hurry to see what was up.

They both stopped halfway down the stairs.

To her credit, Calla only thought about dropping her slippers when she saw Noah Czerny standing beside Maura and Mr Gray.

Noah Czerny was a very human name to give something that did not look very human to Calla’s eyes. She had seen a lot of living humans in her time, and she’d seen a lot of spirits in her time, but she hadn’t ever seen something like this. A soul this decayed shouldn’t have been – well, it shouldn’t have been anything. It should have been a remnant of