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"What’s he want?" Blue asked

Maura handed her the phone "Apparently, soh both Kavinsky and Gansey were hopelessly entwined in the infrastructure of Henrietta, Ronan had always done a fine job keeping them separate in his hter elelionby desks, junior faculty waving at his car fro his na was typical Gansey: order and aesthete imposed on the ruined and abandoned Kavinsky, on the other hand, ruled the night He lived in the places that wouldn’t even occur to Gansey: in the back parking lots of the public schools, the basements of McMansions, crouched behind the doors of public bathroodolow of a traffic light, but in the black place just outside of the glow

Ronan preferred them separate He did not like his foods to touch

And yet here he was, the night before Gansey left town, taking him to one of Kavinsky’s coarsest rituals

"I can do this without you," Ronan said, kneeling to pick up one of the dozens of identical fake licenses

Gansey, pacing next to his ruined miniature Henrietta, set his eyes on Ronan There was so intense and heedless in them There were many versions of Gansey, but this one had been rare since the introduction of Ada presence It was also Ronan’s favorite It was the opposite of Gansey’s most public face, which was pure control enclosed in a paper-thin wrapper of academia

But this version of Gansey was Gansey the boy This was the Gansey who bought the Caht, the Gansey who contained every wild spark so that it wouldn’t show up in other versions

Was it the shield beneath the lake that had unleashed it? Orla’s orange bikini? The bashed-up remains of his rebuilt Henrietta and the fake IDs they’d returned to?

Ronan didn’t really care All thathad struck the

They took the BMW It would be easier to cope with a firework being inserted in its exhaust pipe than the Pig’s He left Chainsaw behind, much to her irritation Ronan didn’t want her to learn any bad language

Ronan drove, since he knehere they were going He didn’t tell Gansey why he knehere to go, and Gansey didn’t ask

The sun had gone down by the tiround, tucked away on a back road east of Henrietta The site had not been used to host a fair since the county fair had run out of rown field studded with floodlights and strung with tattered bunting made colorless by round was pitch-black at night, out of reach of the lights of Henrietta and far frohts splashed sterile white light over the grass, illu the restless for unbearably sexy about cars at night, Ronan thought The way the fenders twisted the light and reflected the road, the way every driver becaht of them knocked his heartbeat askew

As Ronan turned into the old drive, the headlights illuminated the faaping The trip of his pulse beca stupid to hi drowned out by Kavinsky’s, the bass pulsing up through the ground itself

Gansey rolled his sleeves up and studied his hand as he made a fist and released it "What’s stupid?"

It was hard to tell with Kavinsky

To their left, two cars looht toward each other Neither vehicle flinched fro collision Automotive chicken At the lastsideways, and the white blared a horn A guy half-hung out of the passenger seat of the white car, clinging to the roof with one hand and flipping the bird with the other Dust ed round theine noises

On the other side of this ga of flagged bunting It was lit froister that it was on fire, or was at least working up to it Boys stood around the Volvo, drinking and s upholstery Goblins around a bonfire

Sory and restive The fire ate him from the inside

He pulled the BMW up to the Mitsubishi, nose to nose Now he saw that Kavinsky had already been playing: the right side of the car was shockingly mutilated and crumpled That felt like a drealed; it was immortal Kavinsky hihts erasing the ribs from his concave torso When he saw the BMW, he threw the bottle at the hood It splintered on the lass and liquid everywhere

"Jesus," Gansey said, in either surprise or ad up the parking brake, Ronan threw open the door The air reeked ofplastic and deceased clutches and, beneath it all, the warh the symphony was constructed of so many instruments that it was hard to identify any individual timbres

"Ronan," Gansey said, in the exact sa this?" Ronan replied

Gansey threw open his door Gripping the roof of the car, he slid hiesture, Ronan noted, ildGansey, Gansey-on-fire Like he pulled hi out was too slow

This was going to be a night

The fire inside Ronan hat kept hiht for hie "Hey, lady This is a substance party Nobody’s in unless you brought a substance"

By way of reply, Ronan clasped one hand round Kavinsky’s throat and the other around his shoulder, and hurdled him tidily over the hood of the Mitsubishi For punctuation, he rejoined him on the opposite side and slammed his fist into Kavinsky’s nose