Mister Impossible - Maggie Stiefvater (ereader manga TXT) 📗

parking lot outside a dying mall. They filled canals and emptied swimming pools. Everywhere they went looked different when they were gone. Or rather, it looked less different. More like it had before humans arrived.

When they dreamt, Ronan dreamt of Ilidorin. He dreamt of the stump, and he dreamt of a slowly uncurling green shoot growing from its interior. It was getting stronger.

Ronan was getting stronger, too.

“What do you feel?” Bryde asked.

They sat on the roofline of an abandoned Victorian, looking out over the battered town around it. It was just at sunset, and there was barely enough light to see shapes by natural light. The dreamers would’ve been visible on their perch if anyone had looked up, but no one in this town had looked up for decades.

“Ronan,” prompted Bryde. “What do you feel?”

Ronan didn’t answer. It was the kind of night that made him want to run and run and run until he couldn’t catch his breath, but that wasn’t the kind of feeling Bryde meant.

“I feel like I can still smell that mill,” Hennessy said. “I will smell like it for the rest of my life.”

The dreamers had just destroyed a pulp mill on the other side of town. It had been one of the worst smells Ronan had ever smelled, and that included the odors at the West Virginia Museum of Living History, the trash dump they’d destroyed, and the bodies he’d buried over the years. He wondered how long it would take people to notice it was gone. The mill. The smell. All of it. Would they notice the silhouette was missing from the horizon before the sun went down? Perhaps tomorrow when they arrived to work, only to discover the mill had been replaced with a meadow. Unless tomorrow was a weekend. Ronan had no idea what day of the week it was. Time worked differently now. Weekends felt like a concept that had been important Before.

“What do you feel?” Bryde persisted. “Nothing?”

“This dinosaur,” Ronan said, running his fingers over Chainsaw’s nubbly talons. The raven clutched the peak of the roof beside him and peered off at the disappearing sun, beak parted, as if imagining how good it would’ve tasted. “And the spine of this roof up my—”

Hennessy gasped.

Bryde just had time to grab her arm before she tumbled from the roof. Her fingers clung to him as he dragged her back up.

Ronan didn’t have time to ask what had happened. It hit him next.

Suddenly, he was electric.

He was free, his thoughts flying into the air. He was trapped, his body fused to something deep in the earth. He was both these things at once. He felt as if he could do anything, anything he had ever possibly wanted to do, anything except untangle himself from that thing he was wound around. This thing, this thing. This entity, this energy, this whatever-it-was, it was what was making him so powerful, so alive.

He understood it, he heard it, he was it—

“Goddamn,” he whispered.

Bryde smiled.

It was an altogether different smile than Ronan had ever seen him wear, his light teeth visible in the deepening dark, his eyes half-closed, head thrown back. Euphoric. Relieved.

“That’s the ley line,” Bryde said.

Ronan felt it uncurl through him, like vines stretching toward the sun. It was the humming possibility of his dreams, the sense of ever-widening options, but he was awake.

With a glorious cry, Chainsaw threw herself from the roof and soared high up into the air. Part of him felt like he might be able to join her.

“Why is it doing that?” Hennessy asked in a small voice. Bryde was still holding her steady on the roof, a hand gripped very firmly around her upper arm.

“It’s a surge,” he said. “It won’t last. If we are lucky, we will feel another. Perhaps a third. The heartbeat of a sick planet coming round.”

Nightwash felt a million miles away, like something that could never touch Ronan. He was the night and he was the world and he was as infinite as them both.

Chainsaw cawed up above and Ronan spontaneously leapt to his feet, keeping his balance easily on the ridge of the roof. He cawed back to his dreamt raven at the top of his lungs. The sound echoed all around the roofs of this dead town, making it sound like there was a whole flock of ravens, a whole flock of Ronans, even though there was just the pair of them.

“It’s so strong,” Hennessy said, even though it was already beginning to wane.

The world was changing. It was becoming a place someone like him had been made for.

Bryde said, “This is only the beginning.”

Carmen Farooq-Lane hadn’t told Lock about Jordan Hennessy’s sword.

In the commotion of Rhiannon Martin’s death, she’d hastily shoved it through one of the galvanized fans at the end of the turkey barn. Later, after they’d all been briefed and the area was being cleaned up, she’d snuck it back into the rental car.

It was not the first secret she’d kept from the Moderators, but it was certainly the most dramatic. The sword was nearly as tall as she was, and wondrously and impossibly made. It felt like an extension of her arm, no more or less heavy than her own hand. The hilt was stunning, smooth silvery metal engraved with the words from chaos, and when one was gripping it, one felt the words even when they weren’t visible. The blade was made of the night sky, a sentence absurd to say out loud but even more absurd to process. It did not look like a sword-shaped window into the night sky. It did not look like a blade painted to look like the night sky. It was the night sky. That was all there was to it. When she swung it—and she did, an embarrassing number of times, to Liliana’s amusement, taking it out in living rooms and hotel rooms and in the backyards of places where