Adam doesn't really know how he got here.
He's supposed to be at this school so he can get into a good college, so he can leave this town behind. And then he meets Richard Gansey III and all of that is suddenly pushed to the side.
Gansey is what he would call driven. Others, less caught up in the boy's hunt, would use the word 'obsessed.' He certainly could be single minded, and he was a charismatic force. It's easy to see how he sweeps even such grounded people as Adam Parrish off his feet.
Also, Gansey was so easy to believe in. And God knows Adam needs someone to believe in.
Blue, Gansey's latest find, sighs when she walks into the warehouse that serves as both Gansey's home and their base of operations. She drops her backpack with a thud and throws herself down onto the couch next to Adam. When she lifts her feet onto his lap, he doesn't protest.
Blue they found almost by accident, following the ley lines to a strange lake. Not on any map (and Gansey had every map of the area one could make or buy), deep and yet perfectly clear. And there, at the bottom, was Blue. The sleeping girl in the lake.
"I'd have preferred a sword," muttered Ronan into Adam's ear, once they'd gotten her out. Adam can't tell if it's a Camelot reference or a gay joke, so he doesn't respond.
Blue had been in the lake since the eighties, although how she actually got the is still something she's not sure about. And after they woke her up and she started to accumulate to life in 2015, Gansey like the total gentleman he is offered her a place in his home. The papers and documents that made her into someone that actually existed came from Ronan, who had a way of speaking that made you feel like you were asking for the biggest favour ever whether you needed a ride or an assassination. Blue confided in Adam that she was grateful, she really was, but she didn't want to mention that fact too often, otherwise Gansey might get more knightly than he already is.
Adam knows what she means. Gansey does have a bit of a knightly, chivalrous air to him. But Adam also sees his collector side, the thing that keeps him up at odd hours sculpting a monster menagerie out of scraps and glue. Adam knows he loves Blue, like he loves Ronan and Adam too. But he also knows that part of that connection is based in that Gansey, in the boy who builds monsters and collects folk tales and wants so badly to find the things others dismiss as unreal.
Although he supposes that ties in with the knight nicely too. Waking the princess, saving people from monsters.
It's also why he and Adam butt heads, why Adam hasn't come to live in the big bug jar that is Monmouth Manufacturing. Because Adam's monster is flesh and blood, no fairy tales needed. And Adam refuses to be rescued. He'll do it himself, in his own time. On his terms.
Until then, he has to deal with pitying glances from Gansey and glares from Ronan when he shows up with new bruises. He knows Ronan probably thinks he's weak for not fighting back. He pretends not to care.
"How was school?"
Blue shrugs. She's eating a yoghurt cup that Adam hopes hasn't been sitting in her backpack all day. "It was fine, Dad, thanks."
Okay, that's fair. It did sound like something a dad in a commercial would say. She smiles at him though, so he knows she's not annoyed with his less than inspiring attempt at conversation.
"Where's Gansey?"
"Around." That's not entirely true. The door was open when Adam got here, so he's probably here. It's not unusual for Gansey to disappear into the basement, getting lost among the maze of ghost-reading, monster-seeking instruments. Adam could go look for him, but he's gone and done something to his foot ("Stop whining and get up, you can't throw yourself around just so you don't have to deal with your mistakes."), and he knows if he lets the others see that he's limping, they'll worry. He'd rather just doze off, if he's being honest. Gansey's couch is old and comfortable.
"How'd you get in here?"
Adam jerks awake. For a moment, he doesn't remember where he is, and he panics. He throws himself to his feet, getting tangled with Blue on the way. His bad foot refuses to support him, and down the two of them go, a mess of limbs.
"That was the least graceful thing I've ever seen," remarks Ronan dryly from the doorway. When Adam looks up, his eyes find the scarred boy's immediately. Lately, Ronan is always staring at him, and he doesn't know what it means. He's always the first to look away.
Ronan makes a noise that might be a strangled laugh, and stalks past them into his room, slamming the door behind him. Adam can feel his cheeks go red as he offers Blue a hand up. She waves him off, curls back up on the couch with her book. It's The Goblet of Fire, because regardless of their varying literary tastes all three of the boys had decided that Harry Potter was a must for the top of Blue's 'join the 21st century' reading list. She seemed to be liking them, judging by how she was burning through the series.
"What do you mean, how did we get in?" He situates himself back down next to her, hoping his injury can just be passed off as clumsiness. "It was open when I got here. I thought you had beaten me here."
Gansey frowns, his nimble fingers tugging at his lip thoughtfully. "I had to attend a meeting with the dean." With Ronan, which means Gansey had been begging and bargaining so that Ronan wouldn't get kicked out of school. Again. "I could have sworn I locked it…" He turns around, heading back down the stairs to check readings, no doubt. Because in Gansey's world, there are no unlocked doors or coincidences. Everything has a deeper meaning, a purpose. Adam wonders if that extends to the people in Gansey's life. If he has a purpose, no one's mentioned it to him.
His eyes flicker to Ronan's closed door. There's the sound of angry music leaking from it, a bad sign. Adam knows what Ronan will read from how quickly he looked away. That Adam, like most of the people in their school or around town, couldn't bare to look at his face, the heavy scarring that twisted his mouth, made one eye unable to open fully. Adam doesn't know how to tell the permanently scowling boy 'no, it's not the scars, I don't give a shit about the scars. It's you, your eyes and how you'd rather take on the whole world than let anyone know you. You don't want them to see your aggressive kindness, how you save baby crows and stop for boys with broken arms on dirt roads and you never ask questions when you know people would rather not answer. I'm scared if I look long enough I'll have to name this feeling, I'll be branded and I can't survive that, I'm not strong like you, if me and my monster fight I'll have more than just scars.'
It's easier to let Ronan think Adam's like all the rest. Ronan hates him anyway. Better to keep this to himself. To distract himself from the closed door, Adam checks the time. He hadn't been asleep for long, but it was enough to take the edge off his exhaustion. Which makes watching a boy in an Aglionby sweater walk through the wall all the more confusing.
For a moment, he thinks the boy is Gansey, just because it makes more sense for it to be Gansey than a stranger, regardless of walking through walls. But no, this boy holds himself too cautiously, like he's afraid to take up any space. And his hair isn't light, just transparent. There's a bruise that covers half of his face, or maybe it's a hole. It's hard to tell if his cheekbone has been smashed in or if he's just spotty, one moment almost dense enough to be real, the next Adam's looking right through him.
Shit.
"Gansey?" Adam's voice comes out more scared than he means it to. He tracked Ronan's monster and found Blue in the lack but Monmouth is their safe place, a locked door and wards tucked into the windowsills keeping out every kind of nightmare. Until now.
The boy starts at Adam's shout, as does Blue, who looks up from her book with wide eyes.
"Oh, I didn't know there were so many people here…" He drifts sideways, towards the doors for Blue and Ronan's rooms. "I got the door open but was too tired to close it. You're not robbers, are you?"
Adam shakes his head, can hear Gansey coming back up the stairs. Ronan's music blares on, undisturbed. Blue is tense next to him. She finds her voice first.
"Did you just walk into a stranger's house and then ask the people there if they were the robbers?"
The ghost boy darkens, like some strange ectoplasm blush. "I was just checking."
Gansey comes through the door faster than Adam is expecting, making him flinch. Surprisingly, so does the ghost. Gansey's eyes go right to the stranger in his home, and his face breaks into a smile, eyes bright with an almost child-like wonder.
"Hello!" he says, and sticks out his hand, like he's meeting someone at one of his mother's fancy parties. "I'm Gansey. I was hoping we would get to meet soon."
"I… Excuse me?" says the ghost. "You wanted to meet me?"
"Well, I wanted to meet whoever kept leaving weird energy spots at the school. I'm assuming that was you?"
This is Gansey's element, Adam notes. Everyone in the room, ghost included, staring at him in disbelief. His cheeks still flushed with discovery, the only one who has any idea what is going on. It's a true loss to this nation that Gansey's interests are in the urban mysteries and cryptids, as opposed to politics or military. Adam has never met anyone else who can so easily win a room over with nothing but a hello.
And his charm apparently extends to ghosts. The boy is taking in the half-finished centaur by his floating foot, a lopsided smile on his face. "I'm Noah. I like the school. You can see me?"
Gansey nods. Blue has stood up, approaching Noah with curiosity. Noah, in turn, seems entranced with how Blue almost seems to shine when she moves, the last echoes of whatever kept her safe underwater for almost thirty years.
"It was Ronan's idea. He's in there." Gansey motions to Ronan's closed door. "We knew someone was haunting the school, and he's good at tinkering, so we made this machine…" Gansey is much more about the who and the what than the how. How was for Ronan and his scrap metal creatures. "It should last, now that you've come here. Some testing might be needing, tweaking, but the idea is to take everything ghosts accidentally leave behind and bring it back to you. Hence the sudden visibility."
Noah looks from Blue to Gansey like they are the miraculous things, even as he floats a few inches from the ground. He's not wrong. Adam's friends are all astonishing, the things legends are made of. Not for the first time, he feels out of place.
Then Noah looks past them to find Adam on the couch. His eyes light up.
"Oh! I know you!"
What?
"What the fuck?"
Ronan voices what they're all thinking, standing in the doorway of his room, school uniform traded in for a tight black tank top that shows off the scars running up each arm and the tattoo that winds through them. With Ronan's eyes on Noah, Adam lets himself look, just for a moment. Then he too looks back at the ghost, who is moving towards him, hand outstretched like Adam is the one he can hardly believe exists.
"You're the boy in the woods. Your face is there."
"Again," says Ronan. "What the fuck?"
Noah leads them like some strange pied piper, and they follow, past the old church where they found an old vampire, once. There's no path, but Noah never hesitates. Gansey is right behind him, asking him questions and not paying enough attention to his surroundings. Adam thinks of the Epi-Pen Ronan shoved at him, almost a month ago, and feels better knowing it's sitting at the bottom of his bag, hanging over one shoulder. Blue is behind Gansey, than Adam himself, and Ronan is bringing up the rear. Adam grits his teeth and tries to keep his limping to a minimum. If Ronan notices, he doesn't say anything.
For a while Adam thinks they're going to the lake, Blue's lake. But they keep walking, they don't turn. It feels like they've been walking for an hour, at least, before Adam notices that if should have started to get dark.
"My watch has stopped," Gansey notes. Adam's has too.
"That's normal," says Noah from up ahead. "Time is different here."
Adam's ankle has stopped throbbing. He doesn't know when it did, only that it doesn't hurt anymore. He's just about to ask Noah if that's normal too when the ghost stops, and the rest of them stop too.
"It's right through here," Noah says, and slips through a dark spot between two trees. One by one, they follow him, and once Adam's eyes adjust to the dark, he can't help but gasp. Blue whistles, and Ronan mutters something that's either a prayer or a curse.
They've gone from a forest in early afternoon to the aisle of a church. If Adam looks behind him he can still see the sunlight sneaking past the doors that are also trees. At first glance, it's like any church, but as Adam takes more and more of it in, he realizes that the pews are made of twisting trees, what looks like stained glass is just intricate branches twined together, hinting at images that only come together if you're not looking right at them.
"What is this?" Gansey asks, voice soft with awe.
It's Blue who answers. "I've been here. When I was sleeping."
Noah nods. "I woke up here. After I died."
"But what is it?" Adam feels like he should be freaking out. He's always the one to freak out, but this doesn't feel dangerous or alien. It feels comforting in here, like it's a place he used to play, back when he was younger and he still had imaginary friends and imaginary places they played.
Noah shrugs. "It's the center of the forest."
"We must still be on the ley line, too," Gansey peers at a carving in one of the trunks that makes up the wall. "Might even be far enough to be where the two lines meet. Lynch, what do you think?"
"I think I found Parrish's face," Ronan calls from the front of the church, near the altar that is also a huge stump. Suddenly Adam is stuck in an intense moment of deja vu, so that when he walks past the pews and stands next to Ronan and looks at the carving of someone who looks like him, he's not even surprised. It's not part of walls here, and he can't tell if it's a live tree or just a carving wrapped in vines. But it's definitely someone with his face.
Ronan traces some words carved into the tree Adam's shoulder. "It says 'The Magician.'" He translates it with ease, so it must be Latin. "And then it says 'his hands are the key', roughly."
"I'm over here!" Blue shouts. Her and Noah are crouched around another carving, smaller than Adam's. Unmistakably her. She stumbles over the Latin and Ronan translates it. "The Mirror. Her eyes see… Her eyes see the truth?" He scowls. "I don't like this. I'm leaving."
"You're here, too." Ronan's statue is blackened, like someone tried to burn it. The burn matches Ronan's scars. Gansey looks pale.
"There's no writing on it," he tries to explain to Ronan, who stalks past him to stare down at the smaller version of him. But Ronan hadn't come over to read more Latin. He aims a kick at his statue, and when his foot connects, there's a loud crack. He's successfully decapitated the figure, a clean break, head from shoulders. Noah goes in and out of view, obviously distressed.
"What the fuck, Lynch, you shouldn't have done that!" Blue shouts. The trees are groaning, creaking, and Adam must be losing it because it sounds like words, like they're talking. Gansey grabs Ronan's arm, starts dragging him towards the exit. Then goes Blue, and Adam brings up the rear. Noah has already vanished, but Adam can hear him shouting for them to hurry.
Vines are creeping up behind them, Adam sees them stretch past him, going for Ronan. Adam is not a brave boy, but he's not always the smartest, either. He grabs the vine, and in doing so the rest change their course, ignoring Ronan, twisting around him instead.
Ronan clears the doors, then Gansey, then Blue. Adam tries to follow, but he's not strong enough, and the vines have started to grow thorns, digging into his arms, his ankles. The trees that framed the doors seem to grow, the door shrinking. They've just noticed he's not behind them. Too late, too late.
The door closes on Ronan's face. After that, Adam loses himself.
Gansey blames himself. Ronan drinks and drives and ends up with his car wrapped around a lamp post, walks away without a scratch. He doesn't seem happy about it. Blue puts down Harry Potter and starts researching magic, old magic and ley lines and anything else she can think of to do. Noah fits in well at Monmouth, like something that had always been missing before, and Gansey has a hunch that if Adam were here, they would be complete. A complete something, but what he's not sure, and now he'll never know, because they walked into those woods and the woods kept one of them. His fault.
His disappearance isn't reported. Blue scowls and Ronan punches a wall and the Parrishes don't give a shit that their son never comes home. At least not officially. One night, two weeks after Adam's gone, Gansey wakes up to someone banging on their door. It's Mr. Parrish, obviously drunk, yelling at them that Adam can't hide here forever. Ronan comes out of his room, eyes sharp in the darkness, threatening violence. But something out in the darkness makes Mr. Parrish go silent before Ronan gets a chance to try.
The next day, the papers report that a local man has gone missing. It takes two weeks for them to find his body. He must have been drunk, stumbled off the road and down a ravine, breaking his neck in the process. It's a strange death, for sure, but there's no sign of foul play. The scratches that look like they might have been caused by fingernails are revealed to be nothing more than thorns.
Blue eyes Gansey. Neither of them want to voice their hope out loud. That would make it real, and therefore breakable. They keep it to themselves, and wait.
Four months after Adam was taken, Noah shows up for class, forged documents in hand. He's a transfer student, he tells everyone. From Canada. Everyone believes him. He smiles for a week straight.
One of their teachers goes missing next. They find his car in the woods, but no sign of him. Noah leans over and confides to the others that he was the one who killed Noah, when they were kids. No one finds his body.
Almost a full year after they lose Adam, a strange old lady is found drowned in a lake. Blue's lake. When Blue sees her picture ('DO YOU RECOGNIZE THIS WOMAN?'), she freezes, hand finding Gansey's and holding on as tight as she can.
"She's the one who put me in the lake. I remember her. I don't remember why, but I remember her."
A few weeks later, Ronan finds a baby crow, carefully cupped in the nook of a tree. A tree that had grown up to Ronan's window overnight.
Blue turns to Gansey, furious tears in her eyes.
"You find things. You hunt creatures. Find him."
Gansey nods. He's become more withdrawn in the last year, more somber. But there's a light in his eyes that's been missing, the light of a hunt. Blue sees it come back, and something in her chest loosens.
"I will. We will."
It's Noah who finds the next clue, wandering the forest at night while the rest of them sleep. It's a key, made of twigs, hanging where the church used to be. Adam's the key. This is a key. He rushes home so fast he can barely stay tangible enough to hold on, but he makes it, drops the key into Gansey's hand. He's shaking, the lights in the building flickering, and Gansey looks down at the key and grins.
He wakes Blue and Ronan up. That next night, they go out with flashlights and dowsing rods, and Blue swears she sees a boy-shaped something slip into a thicket only fifty feet away from her. They stay out until almost dawn, but that's all they find.
Ronan takes to wearing the key around his neck. Blue confides in Gansey that she worries he's not sleeping, staying out all night with Noah instead. Gansey confronts him, but Ronan immediately snaps back at him and storms out. He takes his crow, no longer a baby, and nothing else.
They don't see him for three days.
Ronan gets turned around somewhere past Blue's lake, lost and not willing to admit it. He is almost at the point where he has to turn around, but when he looks down, he realizes his key- Adam's key- is glowing.
"I never thought it would be you."
Ronan jumps, turns around, and there's Adam. Green has crept across his dusty skin, and his eyes are a deep green, or brown, or maybe they're shifting. But the first thing that goes through Ronan's head is I don't think I've ever seen him without bruises.
"What do you mean?"
Adam shrugs. It's a weird jerky movement, like he has to remember how to make the gesture.
"I thought it would be Blue, or Gansey, or Noah..."
"Oh." Ronan feels like he should be hurt, but it all feels too unreal, like a dream. "Thanks for the crow."
"She's a raven."
"I knew that."
"Okay."
Ronan Lynch is not lost in the forest talking to a dead boy. And he is definitely not blushing.
"Look, are you coming home or not?"
Adam looks surprised. "I have a home?"
"Of course you do. Jesus, Parrish, I thought you were supposed to be the smart one."
"What would that make you?"
Ronan grins, making his scars stretch. "I'm the beast."
And yeah, maybe that means he just kinda called Parrish the beauty of the equation, but whatever. Because when he reaches out to grab his wrist (he'll drag the idiot back if he has to) he accidentally grabs Adam's hand instead. And instead of pushing him away, he holds fast.
Ronan notes that Adam hasn't looked away from his face since he found him. Something to think about later, after they're out of the woods, back in real life or as close as one can get in Henrietta.
Adam Parrish may be the key but Ronan Lynch opened the door.