The Raven Boys (30 page)

But there wasn’t an option of not going with Gansey. She wanted to explore as much as he did.

No sooner had Blue hung up than she heard her name being called.

“Bloo-OOOO-oooooo, my child, my child, come in here!”

This was Maura’s voice, and the sing-song rhythm to it was highly ironic. With a sinking sensation, Blue followed it into the living room, where she found Maura, Calla, and Persephone drinking what Blue suspected were screwdrivers. When she walked into the room, the women all looked up at her with indolent smiles. A pack of lionesses.

Blue raised her eyebrows at the cocktails. The morning light through the windows turned the drinks a brilliant, translucent yellow. “It’s only ten o’clock.”

Calla reached out, enclosing Blue’s wrist with her fingers, and dragged her onto the mint green love seat. Her glass was already mostly empty. “It’s a Sunday. What else would we do?”

“
I
have to go walk dogs,” Blue said.

From her blue-striped chair across the room, Maura sipped her screwdriver and made a wild face. “Oh, Per
seph
one. You make them with
far
too much vodka.”

“My hand always slips,” Persephone said sadly from a wicker bench in front of the window.

When Blue started to rise, Maura said, a thinly veiled iron behind her tone, “Sit with us a moment, Blue. Talk to us about yesterday. And the day before. And the day before. And — oh, let’s just talk about these past few weeks.”

Blue realized then that Maura was furious. She had seen her furious only a few times before, and having it directed at her made her skin go instantly clammy.

“Well, I was …” She trailed off. A lie seemed pointless.

“I’m not your dungeon master,” interrupted Maura. “I’m not going to bolt you in your room or send you to a convent, for crying out loud. So you can just stop all the sneaking around stuff right now.”

“I wasn’t —”

“You were. I have been your mother since you’ve been born and I promise you, you were. So I take it you and Gansey get along, then?” Maura’s expression was annoyingly knowing.

“Mom.”

“Orla told me about his muscle car,” Maura continued. Her voice was still angry and artificially bright. The fact that Blue was well aware that she’d earned it made the sting of it even worse. “You aren’t planning on kissing him, are you?”

“Mom, that will
never
happen,” Blue assured her. “You
did
meet him, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t sure if driving an old, loud Camaro was the male equivalent of shredding your T-shirts and gluing cardboard trees to your bedroom walls.”

“Trust me,” Blue said. “Gansey and I are nothing like each other. And they aren’t cardboard. They’re repurposed canvas.”

“The environment breathes a sigh of relief.” Maura attempted another sip of her drink; wrinkling her nose, she shot a glare at Persephone. Persephone looked martyred. After a pause, Maura noted, in a slightly softer voice, “I’m not entirely happy that you’re getting in a car without air bags.”

“
Our
car doesn’t have air bags,” Blue pointed out.

Maura picked a long strand of Persephone’s hair from the rim of her glass. “Yes, but you always take your bike.”

Blue stood up. She suspected that the green fuzz of the sofa was now adhered to the back of her leggings. “Can I go now? Am I in trouble?”

“You are in trouble. I told you to stay away from him and you didn’t,” Maura said. “I just haven’t decided what to do about it yet. My feelings are hurt. I’ve consulted with several people who tell me that I’m within my rights to feel hurt. Do teenagers still get grounded? Did that only happen in the eighties?”

“I’ll be very angry if you ground me,” Blue said, still wobbly from her mother’s unfamiliar displeasure. “I’ll probably rebel and climb out my window with a bedsheet rope.”

Her mother rubbed a hand over her face. Her anger had completely burned itself out. “You’re well into it, aren’t you? That didn’t take long.”

“If you don’t tell me not to see them, I don’t have to disobey you,” Blue suggested.

“This is what you get, Maura, for using your DNA to make a baby,” Calla said.

Maura sighed. “Blue, I know you’re not an idiot. It’s just, sometimes smart people do dumb things.”

Calla growled, “Don’t be one of them.”

“Persephone?” asked Maura.

In her small voice, Persephone said, “I have nothing to add.” After a moment of consideration, she added, however, “If you are going to punch someone, don’t put your thumb inside your fist. It would be a shame to break it.”

“Okay,” Blue said hurriedly. “I’m out.”

“You could at least say sorry,” Maura said. “Pretend like I have some power over you.”

Blue wasn’t sure how to reply to this. Maura had all sorts of control of Blue, but it wasn’t usually the sort that came with ultimatums or curfew. So she just said, “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you I was going to do what you didn’t want me to do.”

Maura said, “That was not as satisfying as I imagined it would be.”

Calla caught Blue’s wrist again, and for a moment Blue was worried that Calla would sense the level of strangeness surrounding Gansey’s quest. But she merely swallowed the last of her drink before purring, “What with all this running around, don’t forget our movie night on Friday, Blue.”

“Our — movie — night —” Blue repeated.

Calla’s eyebrows hardened. “You promised.”

For a shapeless moment, Blue tried to remember when she had ever talked about a movie night with Calla, and then she realized what this was really about: the conversation from days and days ago. About tossing Neeve’s room.

“I forgot that was this week,” Blue replied.

Maura swirled her drink, which still looked mostly full. She always preferred watching other people drink to doing it herself. “Which movie?”

“Even Dwarfs Started Small,”
Calla replied immediately. “In the original German:
Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen
.”

Maura winced, though Blue couldn’t tell if it was at the movie or at Calla’s accent. She said, “Just as well. Neeve and I are out that evening.”

Calla raised an eyebrow and Persephone picked at a string on her lace stockings.

“What are you doing?” Blue asked.
Looking for my father? Scrying in pools?

Maura stopped swirling her drink. “Not hanging out with Gansey.”

At least Blue could still be certain that her mother would never lie to her.

She just wouldn’t say anything at all.

W
hy the church?” Blue asked from the passenger seat of the Camaro. She’d never ridden in the front before, and in the passenger seat, the sensation of the car being a few thousand parts flying in uneasy formation was even more pronounced.

Gansey, installed comfortably behind the wheel with expensive sunglasses and Top-Siders, took his time answering. “I don’t know. Because it’s on the line, but it’s not as … whatever Cabeswater is. I have to think more about Cabeswater before we go back.”

“Because it’s like we’re going into someone’s house.” Blue tried not to look at Gansey’s boat shoes; she felt better about him as a person if she pretended he wasn’t wearing them.

“Exactly! That’s exactly what it feels like.” He pointed at her like he pointed at Adam when Adam made a comment he approved of. Then he put his hand back on the gearshift knob to stop its rattling.

Blue found it a thrilling idea, actually, that the trees were thinking creatures, that they could speak. That they
knew
her.

“Turn here!” Blue ordered, as Gansey nearly passed the ruined church. With a broad smile, he hauled on the wheel and dropped down a few gears. With only a few protesting rubber noises, they made it into the overgrown drive. As they did, the glove box fell open and shot its contents onto Blue’s lap.

“Why do you even
have
this car?” she asked. Gansey shut off the engine, but her legs still felt like they vibrated in time with it.

“Because it is a classic,” he replied primly. “Because it’s unique.”

“But it’s a piece of crap. Don’t they make unique classics that don’t —” Blue demonstrated her point by unsuccessfully shoving the door to the glove box shut a few times. Now, as she reinserted the box’s contents and slammed the door shut, it once again ejected its contents onto her legs.

“Oh, they do,” Gansey said, and she thought she detected a bit of an edge to his voice. Not anger, really, but irony. He put a mint leaf in his mouth and climbed out of the car.

Blue replaced the car’s registration and an ancient strip of beef jerky in the glove box, and then she inspected the other object that had fallen into her lap. It was an EpiPen — a syringe meant to restart someone’s heart in the case of a severe allergic reaction. Unlike the beef jerky, its expiration date was current.

“Whose is this?” she asked.

Gansey was already out of the car, holding the EMF reader and stretching as if he’d been in the car for hours instead of thirty minutes. She noticed that he had impressive arm muscles, probably related to the Aglionby rowing team sticker she’d noticed on the glove box. Glancing over his shoulder at her, he replied, dismissive, “Mine. You’ve got to jimmy that latch to the right, then it’ll shut.”

She did as he recommended and, sure enough, the glove box latched, the EpiPen safely replaced inside.

On the other side of the car, Gansey tipped his head back to look at the storm clouds: living things, moving towers. In the very deep distance, they were nearly the same color as the blue edge of the mountains. The road they’d come in on was a dappled blue-green river twisting back toward town. The indirect light of the sun was peculiar: nearly yellow, thick with humidity. Apart from the birds, there was no sound but the slow, faraway growl of thunder.

“I hope the weather holds,” he remarked.

He strode over to the ruined church. This, Blue had discovered, was how Gansey got places —
striding
. Walking was for ordinary people.

Standing beside him, Blue found the church eerier in the daylight, as she always did. Growing inside the ruined walls among collapsed bits of roof, knee-high grass and trees as tall as her strove toward the sunlight. There was no evidence there had ever been any pews, or any congregation. There was something bleak and meaningless about it: death with no afterlife.

She remembered standing here with Neeve, all those weeks ago. She wondered if Neeve really was looking for her father, and if she was, what she intended to do with him if she found him. She thought about the spirits walking into the church and she wondered if Gansey —

Gansey said, “I feel like I’ve been here before.”

Blue didn’t know how to answer. She’d already told him one half-truth about St. Mark’s Eve, and she wasn’t sure it was right to tell him the other half. Moreover, she wasn’t sure it felt
true
. Standing next to him in his very alive state, she couldn’t imagine that he would be dead in less than a year. He was wearing a teal polo shirt, and it seemed impossible that someone in a teal polo shirt could perish of anything other than heart disease at age eighty-six, possibly at a polo match.

Blue asked, “What’s your magic-o-meter doing right now?”

Gansey turned it toward her. His knuckles were pale, bone pressed through skin. Red lights flashed across the surface of the meter.

He said, “It’s pegged. Same as in the wood.”

Blue surveyed their surroundings. In all likelihood, all of this was private property, even the ground the church was on, but the area behind the church looked more remote. “If we go that way, it seems less like we’ll be shot for trespassing. We can’t be low profile because of your shirt.”

“Aquamarine is a wonderful color, and I won’t be made to feel bad for wearing it,” Gansey said. But his voice was a bit thin, and he glanced back at the church again. Just then he looked younger than she’d ever seen him, his eyes narrowed, hair messed up, features unstudied. Young and, strangely enough, afraid.

Blue thought:
I can’t tell him. I can never tell him. I have to just try to stop it from happening.

Then Gansey, suddenly charming again, flipped a hand in the direction of her purple tunic dress. “Lead the way, Eggplant.”

She found a stick to poke at the ground for snakes before they set off through the grass. The wind smelled like rain, and the ground rumbled with thunder, but the weather held. The machine in Gansey’s hands blinked red constantly, only flickering to orange when they stepped too far away from the invisible line.

“Thanks for coming, Jane,” Gansey said.

Blue shot him a dirty look. “You’re welcome,
Dick
.”

He looked pained. “Please don’t.”

This genuine expression robbed all of the glee of using his real name. She kept walking.

“You’re the only one who doesn’t seem fazed by this,” he said after a moment. “It’s not that I’m accustomed to it, but I’ve run across some unusual things before and I guess I just … but Ronan and Adam and Noah all seem … nonplussed.”

Blue pretended she knew what
nonplussed
meant. “I live with this, though. I mean, my mother is a psychic. All her friends are psychics. This is — well, it’s not like it’s
normal
. But it’s how I always thought it would feel to be them. You know, to see things that other people don’t.”