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He would sooner not eat than consume a meal that violated his secret inner rules.
He had rules for other parts of life, too. He had to sit by a window. He would not be the first through a door. He did not like to be seen without shoes. He would not allow others to carry his bag. He needed to have a pen on his person at all times. He wanted to listen to opera or silence. He had to brush his teeth three times a day. He preferred to not sleep in a full-sized bed. He would not sleep with the windows closed. He would not drink tap water. Bathroom stalls had to have doors that went all the way to the floor if he was to do anything of consequence. He would not go out in public
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Niall had no for-bearers that were ever spoken of—there was an aunt and an uncle in New York,
His brother’s Declanisms never ceased to amaze Ronan; just when he felt he had reached peak Declan, he always dug deep and found another gear.
Instead, an explosion of wings and talons surged out.
They shredded the air, a flock of terror contained in a small handle.
He handed Ronan an unmarked keycard. “Ink on your skin means you’re hiding things,” he told Ronan. “That’s what breathing means,” Ronan replied. The doorman’s face hemorrhaged into a smile, and he opened the door.
She was late, but she took a moment anyway, because she was having one of her episodes. Jordan didn’t dream when she slept—she didn’t think any of Hennessy’s dreamed girls did—but when this feeling started, she thought she knew what it must feel like. Her thoughts pulsed with slightly wrong memories and places she had never been and people she had never met. If she didn’t stay focused, those daydreams would seem as important as reality. She’d find herself breathing in time with a pulse outside herself. If she didn’t focus, she’d find herself heading toward the Potomac, or just due west. Once
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Everyone has pale skin and blue eyes, every man has long dark hair, every woman has long golden hair.
It was a Wednesday. Declan remembered that, because for years he’d considered Wednesdays days of bad news. Maybe he still did. He wouldn’t schedule something on a Wednesday if he could help it.
He was going to be alone, he thought, he was going to be alone and it was going to be just him and that new terrifying Ronan, and Matthew whose life depended on him, and somewhere out there was something that killed Lynches.
“Alter idem,” Ronan said, and found himself alone.
He sucked in more longing with every inhale, he exhaled some of his happiness on the other side. How miserable.
He wanted to send it to Adam, but he didn’t want Adam to think he had to devote time to it.
Ronan didn’t know how to make things right again, and he was afraid of making things more wrong.
He ate a handful of antacids and washed them down with coffee, which Ronan suspected was counter-indicated, but hell, everyone had their vices.
she didn’t soften the heroes’ taboos. Their geasa. All the heroes had them. Some were acquired along their journeys; some were given to them by other heroes; some were inherited. All were peculiar. Some heroes couldn’t refuse food from a woman, and others couldn’t be struck three times in a row without a word spoken in between; some couldn’t kill a boar, and others couldn’t pass an orphan without helping them. The penalty for defying one’s geis was deliciously terrible: death.
He just remembered a wasteland of many convulsing darknesses, and Bryde’s voice breaking gently through.
“I saved your life because I love you and I was scared and I didn’t know what else to do.
Aglionby had ever come away with such a thorough understanding of Latin (or, possibly, of each other).
“I think you’re all safe and sorted. Why don’t you dress the rest of you like your feet?” “Why do you only paint what other people have already painted?”
She was beginning to understand his game; it was the same game as hers, played in the exact opposite way.
She couldn’t picture it. She could only imagine the same dream that was already happening behind all of her thoughts. Over and over and over again.
For one second of one minute of the day, he didn’t run the probabilities and worst-case scenarios and possibilities and consequences. For one second of one minute of the day, he just let himself feel. There it was:
Things had been the same for so long, and now everything was different, and it was harder to keep up than Ronan had thought.
The idea of Adam Parrish on a motorcycle was more than enough birthday present for Ronan; he was senselessly turned on. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he said, “What the fuck.” Normally this was his job, to be impulsive, to be wasteful of time, to visibly need. “What the fuck.”
“I’m starving. I need to eat. I need to take off your clothes. But first, I want to look at Bryde.”
The dim walls of the room felt like they absorbed it. Somehow this scream would always be embedded in the plaster, needled into the supports of the house, gasping in the places no one ever saw. Somehow there would always be a thing that would never be happy and whole again.
Ronan bundled him close and for several minutes, the two of them stayed like that, tightly wound together, lit by the abandoned dreamt sun, Adam’s skin cold as the moon.
It struck Ronan then that he didn’t want Adam to go. For many reasons: beginning with the bad feeling of that scream, proceeding through the way his body would miss Adam’s when he curled in his bed, and finishing with the knowledge that something big and unknown lurked out there, unseeable to his dreamer’s eyes, seeable to Adam’s uncanny ones. It seemed incorrect that Adam visiting would have made his loneliness worse, but he missed him acutely even as he was looking at him.
“Inuisus natalis adest, qui rure molesto et sine Adam tristis agendus erit.”
He reminded himself of where his physical body was in the present. He reminded himself that what was about to happen to him was in the past.
Instead it was every time Ronan had been alone. There was no gore. No shrilling with terror. There was only the quiet that came after all those things. There was only the quiet that came when you were the only one left. Only the quiet that came when you were something strange enough to outsurvive the things that killed or drove away everyone you loved.
She imagined the air was water. She longed for it to be water. One of her strange episodes had begun on the drive from the harbor back here, and now, part of her was once again being made to look at water plunging over rocks, turbulent clouds of smoke rolling over asphalt, moss on rocks, mist ghosting over blue mountains. She felt thirsty for all of it. If she went to the mountains, she thought, she wouldn’t feel like this. Starving. Suffocating. Deprived of something she needed to live.
“I’m so knackered,” Hennessy said. “I’m so goddamn knackered.” “I know,” whispered Jordan. “I know you are.”
Same face, same smile, same driver’s ID, same career, same boyfriends, same girlfriends.
He looked like his brother, in a harder way, like Declan Lynch had been inserted into a pencil sharpener and Ronan Lynch had been taken out after.
They only had two data points, which was not enough for even the shoddiest of theses.
“Hungry for this.” For the river. Always hungry for the river.
“If I was Dad’s, I’d be asleep,” Matthew said. “So I must be one of Ronan’s.”
“I had appointments. This created a situation that put me into a difficult place.” A prime Declanism. “Created a situation,”
I’ve never lived my own life, thought Jordan.
She felt as if she had been given a craft project without any tools, a puzzle without all its pieces. A quest with only Parsifal Bauer as her guide. It was unsolvable as currently structured, and yet she was being blamed for it.
In my mind, they’re old lovers who can’t stand to live with each other but can’t stand to live entirely without, and so they keep this place as a sort of pact to see each other for one week each season.
It was a strange feeling to be studied after years of attempting to avoid it.
His life in black and white; this moment in color.
“He thinks I’m a liar.” “Then perhaps,” Bryde said, “you shouldn’t have lied.”
Crazed white scars traveled up his forearms, carved by a sizeable weapon. “Night horrors,” he said. “Claws like this.”
“They all thought it was something easy as razor blades. And they couldn’t fucking understand even that.”
“My boyfriend saw something like that,” Ronan said. “I don’t know if it’s the same thing you’re seeing. But he’s a psychic, and he described something similar to that. Scared the shit out of him, too.”
