The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4)

by Maggie Stiefvater

Psychic was not so much a personality type as a skill set. A belief system. A general agreement that time, like a story, was not a line; it was an ocean. If you couldn’t find the precise moment you were looking for, it was possible you hadn’t swum far enough. It was possible that you simply weren’t a good enough swimmer yet. It was also possible, the women grudgingly agreed, that some moments were hidden far enough in time that they really should be left to deep-sea creatures.

Adam Parrish — magician and puzzle, student and logician, man and boy —

It was too cold for fireflies, but a multitude of them glistened in and out of being above the fields nonetheless. Those were his. Fanciful, purposeless, but lovely. Ronan Lynch loved to dream about light.

It was Gansey. Parrish wants to know if you killed yourself dreaming just now please advise

It was just that there was something newly powerful about this assembled family in this car. They were all growing up and into each other like trees striving together for the sun.

Need was Adam’s baseline, his resting pulse. Love was a privilege. Adam was privileged; he did not want to give it up. He wanted to remember again and again how it felt.

He caught Adam’s eye. When Adam’s mouth quirked, Ronan’s expression stilled for a moment before turning to the loose smile he ordinarily reserved for Matthew’s silliness. Adam felt a surge of both accomplishment and nerves.

Jumping up and down

“It … just feels like such a waste. Falling in love with all of them.” All of them really meant all of them: 300 Fox Way, the boys, Jesse Dittley. For a sensible person, Blue thought that maybe she had a problem with love.

“Trees in your eyes,” Calla added, more gently than usual. “Stars in your heart.”

Wait GAGGG oh she knew

Gansey was outrageously and eternally driven to distraction by the image of her behind the wheel of his car.

Now Blue looked properly judgmental, which was about two ticks off from her ordinary expression and one tick off from Ronan’s.

Adam lived in an apartment located above the office of St. Agnes Catholic Church, a fortuitous combination that focused most of the objects of Ronan’s worship into one downtown block.

Love

Ronan crossed his arms to wait, just looking. At Adam’s fine cheekbones, his furrowed fair eyebrows, his beautiful hands, everything washed out by the furious light. He had memorized the shape of Adam’s hands in particular: the way his thumb jutted awkwardly, boyishly; the roads of the prominent veins; the large knuckles that punctuated his long fingers. In dreams Ronan put them to his mouth.

AYOOO

His feelings for Adam were an oil spill; he’d let them overflow and now there wasn’t a damn place in the ocean that wouldn’t catch fire if he dropped a match.

Half a dreamer, half a dream, maker of ravens and hoofed girls and entire lands.

There was a lot of night in those days behind him, and he preferred to turn his face into the sun.

Because I’m overfull on secrets and underfed on friends.”

Adam smiled cheerily. Ronan would start wars and burn cities for that true smile, elastic and amiable.

GOT UP AND CHEERED

He imagined Adam, ever the scientist. Ronan, ferocious and loyal and fragile. “Don’t break him, Adam.”

It was a night for truth, but they both had run out of things they were sure about.

When Adam kissed him, it was every mile per hour Ronan had ever gone over the speed limit. It was every window-down, goose-bumps-on-skin, teeth-chattering-cold night drive. It was Adam’s ribs under Ronan’s hands and Adam’s mouth on his mouth, again and again and again. It was stubble on lips and Ronan having to stop, to get his breath, to restart his heart. They were both hungry animals, but Adam had been starving for longer.

IM SO UPPPP

He couldn’t tell if he was letting himself idolize this place or Ronan, and he wasn’t sure there was a difference.

“I stopped asking how. I just did it. The head is too wise. The heart is all fire.”

He was a book, and he was holding his final pages, and he wanted to get to the end to find out how it went, and he didn’t want it to be over.

Wanting to live, but accepting death to save others: that was courage. That was to be Gansey’s greatness.

Now that the moment had come, there was a certain glory to it. He didn’t want to die, but at least he was doing it for these people, his found family. At least he was doing it for people who he knew were going to really live. At least he was not dying pointlessly, stung by wasps. At least this time it would matter.