Dead Dreaming
Prologue
Ronan wasn't sure when he'd last seen anyone so brave. Or when he'd last met a girl he could imagine himself wanting to be with.
Ceri, in her pretty yellow sundress and impractical black flip flops, with her usually olive toned face pasty, walked very slowly, almost hesitantly down the corpse road.
Blue, Gansey, and Adam stood back, watching. Blue had only hours before told Ceri where to follow the corpse road, the same way the soon-to-be dead walked on St. Mark's Eve every year.
Her eyes, Ceri's dark brown eyes, were blurred as she took in her surroundings. Her amulets jangled with each step, a sharp, metallic clank in the quiet night.
"It veers-" Blue began, but Ceri followed the invisible road without help. "Do we follow her?" Blue asked quietly. "Should we?"
Ronan began following Ceri, his eyes focused on the bright yellow of her swishing dress, the crackling of her flip flops over dead leaves.
"We can't let her come out of it alone," Gansey said reasonably.
Adam, quiet, thoughtful, said, "Noah's with her."
When Ronan blinked and focused, he saw it was true. Noah was steps ahead of Ceri, as if he'd been guiding her the whole time.
"We should stay together," Blue said, as always the voice of reason.
Ceri stopped dead; then, as if in a trance—perhaps she was—she lifted her protective charms over her head and, stretching her right arm straight out very slowly, she dropped it on the grass beside her.
Blue let out what might've been a gasp, except it was more a hiss, so "Oooh" instead of "oh!"
Ronan watched Ceri jerk, hard, as if struck, and watched Noah reach for her. His hands passed through because, of course, he was dead. The ley line let him touch everything but Ceri.
"She sees more without it?" Gansey guessed, to which Blue muttered something in response.
Ronan picked up the necklace. The charms hanging off of the braided leather were iron and bronze and copper. One that might've been silver. No gold. Nothing remotely like girlie jewelry. Keys, small shaped pieces of metal, screws, pieces of tools, a bronze cage holding a small animal bone.
Things blessed or charmed, he'd been told, to keep the dead at bay.
Necromancers tended to collect them, Blue's mother had said. They needed them, the charms, to stay sane, to stay themselves.
To take them off was brave to the point of stupid to the point of suicidal.
Ceri's arm dropped back to her side and she continued forward.
She glanced over her shoulder and smiled, her lips stretched so widely that it had to hurt, her eyes glowing and bloodshot. "Coming?"
That, Ronan thought with unwavering certainty, is not Ceri. He'd know Ceri's eyes anywhere, and those things playing at being her eyes were a lie.
