heart and screamed again, the sound cracking and pitching higher. It was nothing Blue had ever thought she’d hear out of her cousin. Some part of Blue darted away from it, making it not Orla’s face screaming, making it not Blue’s body watching, making it a dream instead of reality.
Orla fell silent.
Her eyes, though – she was still looking past Blue at nothingness. At something inside herself. Her shoulders heaved with horror.
And behind everything, that hum continued from somewhere in the house.
“Orla,” Gansey whispered. “Orla, can you hear me?”
Orla didn’t reply. She was looking at a world that Blue couldn’t see.
Blue didn’t want to say the truth, but she did anyway. “I think we have to find the sound.”
Gansey nodded grimly. Leaving Orla in her unseeing weeping, they crept deeper into the house. At the end of the front hall, the light of the kitchen seemed to promise safety and certainty. But between them and the kitchen was the blackness of the reading room doorway. Although Blue’s heart told her that the interior of the room was completely dark, her eyes showed her that there were three candles on the table within. They were lit. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t affect the blackness.
The strange, multiheaded buzz spilled from inside the reading room.
There was also a dull scuffling, like someone running a broom over the floorboards.
Gansey’s knuckles brushed tentatively against hers.
Take a step.
She took a step.
Go in.
They went in.
On the floor of the reading room, Noah twisted and twitched, his body impossible. Somewhere, he was dying. Always dying. Even though Blue had seen him reenact his death before, it never got easier to watch. His face turned to the ceiling, his mouth open in mindless pain.
Gansey’s breath hitched audibly.
Above Noah, Calla sat at the large reading table, her eyes focused on nothing at all. Her hands rested on top of scattered tarot cards. A phone sat beside them; she’d been in the middle of a long-distance reading.
The dissonant hum was louder than anything.
It was coming from Calla.
“Are you afraid?” Noah whispered.
Both Gansey and Blue started. They hadn’t realized that Noah had stopped twitching, but he had, and he was lying on his back, knees drawn up, looking at them. There was suddenly something a little taunting about his expression, a little un-Noah-like. His skull’s teeth smiled through his lips.
Blue and Gansey glanced at each other.
The thing that was Noah suddenly gazed up as if it had heard something approaching. He began to hum, too. It was not musical.
Every mobile in Blue’s body burned a warning at her.
Then Noah duplicated and singled.
Blue wasn’t sure how else to put it. There was a Noah, then another right beside him, facing the other way, and then the single Noah again. She could not decide if it was an error in Noah, or an error in how she was seeing Noah.
“We should all be afraid,” Noah said, his voice thin through the buzzing. “When you play with time —”
He was suddenly close to them, eye to eye, standing, or at least just his face was, and in a blink, he was a few feet away again. He’d pulled some of his Noah-ness – his boy-guise – over himself again. He had his hands on his knees like a runner, and every time he panted out, the hum reluctantly escaped him.
Blue’s and Gansey’s breath hung in a cloud before them, shimmering, like they were the dead ones. Noah was pulling energy from them. A lot of energy.
“Blue, go,” Noah said. His voice was strained, but he’d controlled the hideous humming. “Gansey … go. It won’t be me!” He slid to the right and then back again; it was not the way matter was meant to behave. A lopsided smile snuck across his mouth, utterly at odds with his knitted eyebrows, and vanished. There was a challenge in his face, and then there wasn’t.
“We’re not leaving,” Blue said. But she did begin to throw all of her protection up around herself. She could not keep whatever had Noah from drawing on both Gansey and Calla, but she could cut off her own considerable battery.
“Please,” Noah hissed. “Unmaker, unmaker.”
“Noah,” Gansey said, “you’re stronger than this.”
Noah’s face went black. From skull to ink in the opposite of a heartbeat. Only the teeth glowed. He gasped or laughed. “YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE.”
“Get out of him!” Blue snarled.
Gansey shuddered badly with the cold. “Noah, you can do this.”
Noah lifted his hands in front of him, the palms and fingers