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After ApocalypseTwo weeks after the end of the world, Declan wakes up from a pleasant dream about his childhood. He’s been having a lot of those lately. Funnily enough, this dream wasn’t even a memory that was uncovered to him recently. It was a dream about his father taking him at twelve to meet Seondeok Cheng in the fairy market. It once would have disturbed him, now he smiled at the realization this was a sign of his fathers love and respect. Beside him, Jordan was gently snoring. His smile widened as he took in her beautiful sleeping form, then got up quietly so as not to disturb her. Instead of the Barns kitchen, it was like Declan had walked into a black void. There was no space or definition to his surroundings, only that velvety soft blackness wrapping around Declan like a cocoon.
“Declan, Declan.”
“Declan are you alright?”
“Declan you asshole!” rose the voice Declan would know anywhere. “You are not going to be the next comatose member of this family after the apocalypse!”
Declan blinked his eyes open. He looked around and saw that they were in a space that looked like it could be a conference room, only everything was rendered translucent from the walls to the tables. Yet he somehow couldn’t see what was outside either… Everything was transparent except for the large amount of people collected here. There had currently been nine people taking up space in the Barns and that was a lot more than even their family in the good old days. All eight of those other people were in the room right now; his younger brother Ronan who had spoken and was glaring hot daggers at him now, his even younger brother Mathew, his future wife Jordan, Jordan’s.. was she a clone or a sister or a shadow? Hennessy, Carmen Farooq Lane who he felt an odd kinship with, Ronan’s boyfriend Adam who Declan harbored some less than ecstatic feelings towards from the last couple weeks, and of course his mother Mor and … sort of father The New Fenian.Of the others present, he recognized Richard Campbell Gansey III, Ronan’s high school best friend. Next to him was the short girl with spiky black hair who he thinks is his girlfriend. Ronan calls her Sargento right? Helen Gansey, his sister, is there looking around with calculated curiosity. Then there are the psychics of 300 fox way, Maura Calla and Gwenllian, who the Gray Man lives with. The Gray Man himself. A very pretty woman about Declan’s age who winks in his direction. Bryde. And even.. “Henry?” he asks bewildered.
Henry Cheng glares daggers at him.
“You know each other?” asked Gansey. “Oh. Yeah of course you do.”
He meant Aglionby, but that wasn’t where Declan and Henry had met. And anyway, they’d run in different scenes at school.
“What’s going on?” Declan asked.
Calla snorted. “Apparently, it’s important to the future for all of us to revisit our pasts in these books.” She pointed at the table. Declan saw now that there were several tomes, as well as a piece of paper. Calla picked it up and read aloud. “It is important for the sake of the future that the people gathered in this room revisit their pasts. Think closely about each book. You might spot gaps in your memories, or see different choices as possible from those you made. These books are divided into two series. First is The Raven Cycle series which is about Gansey, Blue, Adam and Ronan in their high school years with appearances from other characters.” None of the four looked at all happy about this.
“Stupid fate.” muttered the girl who Declan realized now must be Blue.
“Affirmative.” Adam concurred.
Hennessy broke into a shit eating grin.
“Oh, by all means. I’d like to see how an eldritch being forced into a desk in snotty rich boy classes worked out.”
“Well,” Adam said dryly. “He was never in class enough for it to matter.”
Hennessy cackled. “Oh, I’m going to be hearing about your grand love story in these books I reckon. Oh this will be fun.”
Ronan and Adam looked horrified. Gansey and Blue looked intrigued.
“I’d kind of like to see that for myself, actually.” said Gansey. At their annoyed glares, he shrugged. “I know I was there for it, and in retrospect I can see bits of it but… I feel like I missed a lot. Which is embarrassing. I mean you’re my best friends, I spent so much time with one or both of you yet I was clueless…”
“Yeah, that seems to be a theme with you. Cluelessness.” sniped Henry.
Gansey looked pained. “If you would just let me explain-“
“There’s nothing to explain. I am done with you.”
Gansey eyes are filled with hurt.
Blue touches his shoulder gently, “Henry, he really is sorry.”
Declan saw Ronan and Adam watch this interaction seemingly startled, then exchanged looks of wary confusion. He knew Henry and Gansey had been on the rowing team together but didn’t know if they’d been close or not.“I’m not done reading.” snapped Calla. “The Raven Cycle consists of four books. Book one is “The Raven Boys”, book two is “The Dream Thieves”, book three is “Blue Lily, Lily Blue”, book four is “The Raven King”. The second series is The Dreamer Trilogy, a story focused on Ronan, Declan, Hennessy, Jordan, Mathew and Carmen, with appearances from other characters.
“Fuck.” said Ronan. “Fuck.” agreed Hennessy, looking much less excited.
“This series is three books. Book one is Call Down The Hawk, book two is Mister Impossible, book three is Greywaren.”
Blue burst out laughing. “Mister Impossible… is that supposed to be Ronan?”
“Terrible title.” Gansey agreed.
Mathew frowned. “Ronan, did you ever dream of a Hawk or something?”
Ronan shook his head. “Maybe Mister Impossible is Declan?”
Hennessy shook her head. “Figures we’d get the lousy titles.”
Calla’s voice rose above everyone else's as she finished reading. “You will find out who I, the person writing this note, am after you’ve completed all seven books. Now onto practical matters: this is the reading room, it is where you will spend almost all of your time until you are finished.”
“Fuck that,” said Ronan.
“Food and drink will be consistently available, think of a meal or beverage and it will appear in the room.” Declan imagined a cup of coffee, and it appeared in his hand. He saw several items of food or beverage appear by the others, Mathew whooped as a cheeseburger appeared, there was also a half sausage half avocado pizza that Gansey gestured to Blue, Ronan and Adam to share with him.
“There is a hallway you may exit into if you need a moment alone, and a restroom at the end of the hall.”“Are we in a dream?” asked Jordan.
Ronan and Hennessy communicated silently with their eyes. “It could be a dream.” Ronan admitted. “It’s not mine.”
“And how would you know that?” Hennessy and Adam said in unison, Hennessy’s tone amused and Adam’s more than a little angry. They glared at each other.
“Jinx!” said Mathew and Jordan at the same time. “Double jinx!” they high fived.
Hennessy’s expression slackened. It seemed this happened every time Jordan showed her she was a person outside of her, with other dreams and ambitions and people she wanted to have relationships with.
Hennessy noticed Declan’s gaze and glared defiantly back at him.
“Alright,” said Blue. “Are we going to take turns reading these books out loud?”
Adam frowned. “If that’s the case, how will we know if someone isn’t omitting parts of the books? If they paint people in a better or worse light.”
“Good thinking, Adam.” said Gansey.
“How about,” said Helen, who had been uncharacteristically quiet until this moment – why was she here? Declan understood why most of the others were but even though she knew Gansey who had some relationship to magic, she shouldn’t be here as far as he was concerned. “Since the paper lists who the books are mainly about, the people whose names aren’t in it get to read the books?”
“Oh, great idea!” said the beautiful dark haired girl.
“Orla,” Blue snapped.
“Helen.” Gansey grimaced.
“That could work,” said Maura thoughtfully. “But many of us are still involved in the text in some way, especially family members.” Helen and Orla deflated.
“How about,” said Mor. “My husband and I take turns reading? We’ve observed parts that have to do with the Lynch brothers but not payed much attention to the rest. And neither of us has reason to lie about anything.”
Declan could see her reasoning. He knew from the memories he’d been given that if Mor could be trusted with one thing, it was in keeping herself impartial and unclouded by emotion as opposed to logic. And the New Fenian valued a true story. They really were the best candidates.
“All in favor?” asked the New Fenian.
Gansey was properly looking at him for the first time and his face turned white as a sheet. “Hi…Ronan are you seeing…”
“It’s not my dad and mom, Gansey.” said Ronan. “Don’t worry, you are still the only man here who died twice. Mor is the woman my dad based Aurora on and this is the guy she based on my Dad.”
Gansey looked even more alarmed. Blue’s eyes blazed with fury. “Excuse me– your dad not only dreamt himself a housewife, he based her on a woman who was real?”
“Jesus christ.” said Gansey. “Christ. Jesus.”
“So,” said Mor. “Let’s start.” They all took seats around the astonishingly long table, Declan between Jordan and Ronan.
“Here we go,” Jordan muttered under her breath to him.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“

Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love.”

In the present, Blue Sargent felt the deja vu wash over her. She felt as if she were back in those card readings, back in that graveyard seeing Gansey’s spirit for the first time, back on the road kissing and killing him. She felt a dark cloud of panic in her lungs, making its way up her throat. Then a touch on her wrist, fingers lightly stroking the skin there in rhythmic circles. “I’m here,” Gansey whispered in her ear. “We’re both here. It’s okay.”

Blue sighed and leaned into him.

Helen frowned. “What’s this about killing people with kisses.”

“You will just have to be patient, Helen.” said Gansey.

They had given her a run down on psychics and magic and dreams when she’d demanded an explanation, but she was still regarding this whole thing with skepticism.

“

Her family traded in predictions. These predictions tended, however, to run toward the nonspecific. Things like: Something terrible will happen to you today. It might involve the number six. Or: Money is coming. Open your hand for it. Or: You have a big decision and it will not make itself.

” 
 
“That’s not exactly true, though.” said Adam to Maura and Calla. “I mean, predictions can be unspecific, but the ones you gave to us usually were.”

“Something can be not a truth and not a lie.” said Gwenllian in her sing-song tone. “You know all about those in betweens, don’t you princeling understudy?”
 
Adam glared at her. 
 
“

The people who came to the little, bright blue house at 300 Fox Way didn’t mind the imprecise nature of their fortunes. It became a game, a challenge, to realize the exact moment that the predictions came true. When a van carrying six people wheeled into a client’s car two hours after his psychic reading, he could nod with a sense of accomplishment and release. When a neighbor offered to buy another client’s old lawn mower if she was looking for a bit of extra cash, she could recall the promise of money coming and sell it with the sense that the transaction had been foretold. Or when a third client heard his wife say, This is a decision that has to be made, he could remember the same words being said by Maura Sargent over a spread of tarot cards and then leap decisively to action. “But the imprecise nature of the fortunes stole some of their power. The predictions could be dismissed as coincidences, hunches. They were a chuckle in the Walmart parking lot when you ran into an old friend as promised. A shiver when the number seventeen appeared on an electric bill. A realization that even if you had discovered the future, it really didn’t change how you lived in the present. They were truth, but they weren’t all of the truth.

“I should tell you,” Maura always advised her new clients, “that this reading will be accurate, but not specific.”

It was easier that way.

But this was not what Blue was told. Again and again, she had her fingers spread wide, her palm examined, her cards plucked from velvet-edged decks and spread across the fuzz of a family friend’s living room carpet. Thumbs were pressed to the mystical, invisible third eye that was said to lie between everyone’s eyebrows. Runes were cast and dreams interpreted, tea leaves scrutinized and séances conducted.

All the women came to the same conclusion, blunt and inexplicably specific. What they all agreed on, in many different clairvoyant languages, was this:

If Blue was to kiss her true love, he would die.”

“So what does that mean exactly?” asked the girl next to Declan.

Jordan

, Blue remembered Ronan’s gruff introduction of her and the girl who looked just like her, Hennessy. “Like you just kiss him and he dies? Does it have to be on the lips or can it happen anywhere?” 
 
“It’s a moot point now.” said Gansey.

“I’ll say,” snorted Ronan.

“For a long time, this bothered Blue. The warning was specific, certainly, but in the way of a fairy tale. It didn’t say how her true love would die. It didn’t say how long after the kiss he would survive. Did it have to be a “kiss on the lips? Would a chaste peck on the back of his palm prove as deadly?Until she was eleven, Blue was convinced she would silently contract an infectious disease. One press of her lips to her hypothetical soulmate and he, too, would die in a consumptive battle untreatable by modern medicine.

“That’s such an awful thing to put a child through.” said the girl named Carmen. “Having her feel responsible for something that might not be her fault and that hasn’t happened yet.”

“It’s not awful-“ said Blue, disliking the pity and the presumption about her mother’s choice.

Maura pursed her lips. “I never wanted to treat my daughter like she wasn’t privy to information that could be useful, and being her own person. I can’t say I haven’t sometimes wished I’d kept her prophecy under wraps but ultimately I have no regrets.”
 
“

When she was thirteen, Blue decided that jealousy would kill him instead — an old boyfriend emerging at the moment of that first kiss, bearing a handgun and a heart full of hurt.”

Adam’s eyes met hers, some alarm in them. She gave him a reassuring smile. That was something that had never crossed her mind as possible with her Raven boys. Even at his most jealous or when things got most unpleasant between them, Blue always knew he loved Gansey far too much for that scenario. 
 
““

When she turned fifteen, Blue concluded that her mother’s tarot cards were just a pack of playing cards and that the dreams of her mother and the other clairvoyant women were fueled by mixed drinks rather than otherworldly insight, and so the prediction didn’t matter.”

“Pshaw,” said Orla.

“I was fifteen!” Blue looked from her cousin to her mother. “I was just trying to justify it.”

“I’d probably do the same thing.” said Declan.

Blue didn’t feel complimented by that, based on what she knew of Declan from Gansey and Ronan. 
 
“We don’t hold it against you, Blue.” said Maura. “That was understandable.” 
 
“

She knew better, though. The predictions that came out of 300 Fox Way were unspecific, but undeniably true. Her mother had dreamt Blue’s broken wrist on the first day of school. Her aunt Jimi predicted Maura’s tax return to within ten dollars. Her older cousin Orla always began to hum her favorite song a few minutes before it came on the radio.

No one in the house ever really doubted that Blue was destined to kill her true love with a kiss. It was a threat, however, that had been around for so long that it had lost its force. Picturing six-year-old Blue in love was such a far-off thing as to be imaginary.

And by sixteen, Blue had decided she would never fall in love, so it didn’t matter.”

“Maybe we should make a drinking game out of this.” Ronan suggested. 
 
                “Can we get drunk in this room?” asked Jordan.
 
                 “We’d better be able to,” said Calla who was already taking a swig of gin. Several others ordered the alcoholic beverage of their choice. 
 
                  “The first rule can be anytime someone says ‘never’ about something they’ll later do.” said Maura with a twinkle in her eye. They agree to make up the rest of the game as they go along.
 
                  “

But that belief changed when her mother’s half sister Neeve came to their little town of Henrietta. Neeve had gotten famous for doing loudly what Blue’s mother did quietly. Maura’s readings were done in her front room, mostly for residents of Henrietta and the valley around it. Neeve, on the other hand, did her readings on television at five o’clock in the morning. She had a website featuring old soft-focus photographs of her staring unerringly at the viewer. Four books on the supernatural bore her name on the cover. “Blue had never met Neeve, so she knew more about her half aunt from a cursory web search than from personal experience. Blue wasn’t sure why Neeve was coming to visit, but she knew her imminent arrival spurred a legion of whispered conversations between Maura and her two best friends, Persephone and Calla — the sort of conversations that trailed off into sipping coffee and tapping pens on the table when Blue entered the room. But Blue wasn’t particularly concerned about Neeve’s arrival; what was one more woman in a house filled to the brim with them?”

Blue felt a wave of deep sadness wash over her at Persephone’s name. She saw it reflected in Maura, Calla and Adam’s eyes.
 
“

Neeve finally appeared on a spring evening when the already long shadows of the mountains to the west seemed even longer than usual. When Blue opened the door for her, she thought, for a moment, that Neeve was an unfamiliar old woman, but then her eyes grew used to the stretched crimson light coming through the trees, and “she saw that Neeve was barely older than her mother, which was not very old at all.

Outside, in the distance, hounds were crying. Blue was familiar enough with their voices; each fall, the Aglionby Hunt Club rode out with horses and foxhounds nearly every weekend. Blue knew what their frantic howls meant at that moment: They were on the chase.

“You’re Maura’s daughter,” Neeve said, and before Blue could answer, she added, “this is the year you’ll fall in love.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Chapter 1
  Right now, Jordan thought she very much didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be back at the Barns, in bed with a cup of coffee and a book and Declan, or in her art studio. One apocalypse taken care of should ensure at least

three

weeks of rest for those who more or less saved the world. The others here were people the Lynch brothers knew from high school she’d gathered. She had a passing familiarity with The Gray Man as a concept, and knew that Gansey had been Ronan’s best friend in high school. Most of the others were entirely new names and concepts to her. 
 
       This girl Blue was a little intriguing, and she was interested in how Declan reacted to the boy named Henry but it wasn’t worth it to be stuck in this room. She expected Hennessy to agree, and was disappointed when she instead was focused on her new best friend Ronan Lynch. Before Hennessy defeated her dream, it would have made sense that she wanted to read these books about more experienced dreamers. The knowledge was still worthwhile, but they didn’t need to acquire it in this way… She tried to meet Hennessy’s eye but she was muttering darkly at Ronan about something. 
 
          Mor lifted her palms facing them to signal she would begin to read the next chapter. They all quieted down. 
 
“

It was freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrived. Every year, Blue and her mother, Maura, had come to the same place, and every year it was chilly. But this year, without Maura here with her, it felt colder.

It was April 24, St. Mark’s Eve. For most people, St. Mark’s Day came and went without note. It wasn’t a school holiday. No presents were exchanged. There were no costumes or festivals. There were no St. Mark’s Day sales, no St. Mark’s Day cards in the store racks, no special television programs that aired only once a year. No one marked April 25 on their calendar. In fact, most of the living were unaware that St. Mark even had a day named in his honor. But the dead remembered.”

Mathew whistled. “Creepy.”

Jordan had heard creepier. 
 
“

As Blue sat shivering on the stone wall, she reasoned that at least, at the very least, it wasn’t raining this year.  Every St. Mark’s Eve, this was where Maura and Blue drove: an isolated church so old that its name had been forgotten. The ruin was cupped in the densely wooded hills outside of Henrietta, still several miles from the mountains proper. Only the exterior walls remained; the roof and floors had long ago collapsed inside. What hadn’t rotted away was hidden under hungry vines “rancid-smelling saplings. The church was surrounded by a stone wall, broken only by a lych-gate just large enough for a coffin and its bearers. A stubborn path that seemed impervious to weeds led through to the old church door.

“Ah,” hissed Neeve, plump but strangely elegant as she sat beside Blue on the wall. Blue was struck again, as she had been struck the first time she’d met Neeve, by her oddly lovely hands. Chubby wrists led to soft, child-like palms and slender fingers with oval nails.

“Ah,” Neeve murmured again. “Tonight is a night.”

She said it like this: “Tonight is a night,” and when she did, Blue felt her skin creep a little. Blue had sat watch with her mother for the past ten St. Mark’s Eves, but tonight felt different.

Tonight was a night.”

“She sounds like a hack,” said Hennessy. “I’ve met women like that in the market. All elegant fingers and finesse and a spooky aesthetic to make up for no substance.”
 
“She was right, though.” said Blue. “It was a night.”
 
“

This year, for the first time, and for reasons Blue didn’t understand, Maura sent Neeve to do the church watch in her place. Her mother had asked Blue if she would go along as usual, but it wasn’t really a question. Blue had always gone; she would go this time. It was not as if she had made plans for St. Mark’s Eve. But she had to be asked. Maura had decided sometime before Blue’s birth that it was barbaric to order children about, and so Blue had grown up surrounded by imperative question marks.

Blue opened and closed her chilly fists. The top edges of her fingerless gloves were fraying; she’d done a bad job knitting them “last year, but they had a certain trashy chic to them. If she hadn’t been so vain, Blue could’ve worn the boring but functional gloves she’d been given for Christmas. But she was vain, so instead she had her fraying fingerless gloves, infinitely cooler though also colder, and no one to see them but Neeve and the dead.”

There was some fond laughter from those who knew Blue well. Ronan shook his head, but appeared just as fond. “Of fucking course you did, Maggot.”

“Fuck off, Lynch.”

“I’m sure they were beautiful,” mentioned Henry. “I always like your taste, Blue.”

Jordan caught Blue blushing a little.

“April days in Henrietta were quite often fair, tender things, coaxing sleeping trees to bud and love-mad ladybugs to beat against window panes. But not tonight. It felt like winter

.” 
 
  “You’re missing your girlfriend, aren’t you?” Gansey’s sister asked him.
 
   Gansey rolled his eyes, but didn’t deny it. “I do miss spring in Henrietta… but we should be back by then.”
 
    Blue looks like she wants to say something on that, but Mor goes on.
 
  “

Blue glanced at her watch. A few minutes until eleven. The old legends recommended the church watch be kept at midnight, but the dead kept poor time, especially when there wasn’t a moon.

Unlike Blue, who didn’t tend toward patience..”

There was snickering from Ronan and Adam. Gansey looked like he was suppressing a smile too.  
 
“

Neeve was a regal statue on the old church wall: hands folded, ankles crossed beneath a long wool skirt. Blue, huddled, shorter and thinner, was a restless, sightless gargoyle. It wasn’t a night for her ordinary eyes. It was a night for seers and psychics, witches and mediums.

In other words, the rest of her family.”

And us, spoke Gwenllian. “Witches have a say in St. Mark’s Eve too, even if we don’t feel spirits quite the way psychics do.”

“Out of the silence, Neeve asked, “Do you hear anything?” Her eyes glittered in the black.

“No,” Blue answered, because she didn’t. Then she wondered if Neeve had asked because Neeve did.

“Neeve was looking at her with the same gaze that she wore in all of her photos on the website — the deliberately unnerving, other “otherworldly stare that lasted several more seconds than was comfortable. A few days after Neeve had arrived, Blue had been distressed enough to mention it to Maura. They had both been crammed into the single bathroom, Blue getting ready for school, Maura for work. “Blue, trying to clip all of the various bits of her dark hair back into a vestigial ponytail, had asked, “Does she have to stare like that?”

In the shower, her mother drew patterns in the steamed glass door. She had paused to laugh, a flash of her skin visible through the long intersecting lines she had drawn. “Oh, that’s just Neeve’s trademark.”

“Honestly,” admitted Maura, “looking back I should have listened to you, Blue. I’ll never let anyone into the house you don’t feel safe with again.”
 
“Thanks Mom, but you do need to take some shady client’s money. Don’t stop that on my account,” said Blue. 
 
Jordan thought that the man who killed Declan and Mathew and Ronan’s father living with her might contradict the idea of safety, but who was she to voice that really. 
 
“I would think the bloke who killed Ronan’s dad living with your family would make one uneasy.” commented Hennessy.
 
“Oh, Mr. Gray and I understand each other,” said Blue.
 
“Indeed we do,” Mr. Gray smiled with only the corner of his mouth.
 
“He’s not dangerous to us,” commented Maura.
 
Jordan expected at least one of the Lynch brothers to protest but they seemed uncharacteristically understanding.

Ronan must have some intense history with these women.

She mused.

“Blue thought there were probably better things to be known for.

In the churchyard, Neeve said enigmatically, “There is a lot to hear.”

The thing was, there wasn’t. In the summer, the foothills were alive with insects buzzing, mockingbirds whistling back and forth, ravens yelling at cars. But it was too cool, tonight, for anything to be awake yet.

“I don’t hear things like that,” Blue said, a little surprised Neeve wasn’t already aware. In Blue’s intensely clairvoyant family, she was a fluke, an outsider to the vibrant conversation her mother and aunts and cousins held with a world hidden to most people. The only thing that was special about her was something that she herself couldn’t experience. “I hear as much of the conversation as the telephone. I just make things louder for everyone else.”

Gansey leaned over to whisper something into his girlfriend’s ear, something involving the word telephone, and she blushed visibly.

“

Neeve still hadn’t looked away. “So that’s why Maura was so eager for you to come along. Does she have you at all her readings as well?”

Blue shuddered at the thought. A fair number of the clients who entered 300 Fox Way were miserable women hoping Maura would see love and money in their future. The idea of being trapped in the house with that all day was excrutiating. Blue knew it had to be very tempting for her mother to have Blue present, making her psychic powers stronger. When she was younger, she’d never appreciated how little Maura called on her to join in a reading, but now that Blue understood how well she honed other people’s talents, she was impressed at Maura’s restraint.

“Not unless it’s a very important one,” she replied.

Neeve’s gaze had edged over the subtle line between discomfiting and creepy. She said, “It’s something to be proud of, you know. To make someone else’s psychic gift stronger is a rare and valuable thing.”

“Oh, pshaw,” Blue said, but not cruelly. She meant to be funny. She’d had sixteen years to get used to the idea that she wasn’t privy to the supernatural. “Blue didn’t reply. She wasn’t interested in telling other people’s futures. She was interested in going out and finding her own.”

Jordan felt a strange kinship with the teenage Blue, with the wanting to be known for something original and all your own yet feeling like you existed to replicate or elevate other people’s talent. 
 
     “

Neeve finally dropped her eyes. Tracing an idle finger through the dirt on the stones between them, she said, “I passed by a school on the way into town. Aglionby Academy. Is that where you go?”

Blue’s eyes widened with humor. But of course Neeve, an outsider, couldn’t know. Still, surely she could have guessed from the massive stone great hall and the parking lot full of cars that spoke German that it wasn’t the sort of school that they could afford.

“It’s an all-boys school. For politicians’ sons and oil barons’ sons and for” — Blue struggled the think of who else might be rich enough to send their kids to Aglionby — “the sons of mistresses living off hush money.”

“Well,” said Henry as other former Raven Boys snickered, “not a son of a mistress, but hush money isn’t off the money”. 
 
“

Neeve raised an eyebrow without looking up.

“No, really, they’re awful,” Blue said. April was a bad time for the Aglionby boys; as it warmed up, the convertibles appeared, bearing boys in shorts so tacky that only the rich would dare to wear them. During the school week, they all wore the Aglionby uniform: khaki pants and a V-neck sweater with a raven emblem. It was an easy way to identify the advancing army. Raven boys.

Blue continued. “They think they’re better than us and that we’re all falling all over ourselves for them, and they drink themselves senseless every weekend and spray paint the Henrietta exit sign.”

“Nope, that was just Ronan.” said Adam in an airy, cutting tone. Jordan wasn’t sure if it was meant to be flirtatious teasing or not, but Ronan seemed unperturbed. She did not know what to make of Adam quite yet. He seemed polite in a southern gentlemanly way, but also remote. Almost cold. But she didn’t real know him aside from a few meetings over the last couple weeks and Declan’s opinions, and she wasn’t one to commit to a reading of someone so fast. She did notice Declan looking at his brother and Adam quite a bit, observing tone and body language. 
 
    “Hey,” Ronan said, “I was drunk senseless, and I have graffiti painted a few things in Henrietta but not the sign.”
 
    “Well, I wouldn’t know. You haven’t exactly been accessible for months.” Adam snipped. 
 
     “Maybe it was Kavinsky,” offered Gansey. As someone who had played the role of peacemaker more often than she’d like with the other clones and Hennessy, or anyone Hennessy didn’t like (which was almost everyone) and Hennessy, she could tell he was attempting that for his two friends. 
 
      Jordan was a little annoyed with not getting their easy references.

“Kavinsky was the other dreamer, right?” asked Hennessy, leaning forward. “Oh, I want to know about him.”
 
      “You really don’t,” said Gansey, Adam and Blue at the same time. It was a bit freaky, the way they and Ronan seemed in sync. Almost like they were the clones. 
 
       “

Aglionby Academy was the number one reason Blue had developed her two rules: One, stay away from boys, because they were trouble. And two, stay away from Aglionby boys, because they were bastards.”

“Is that right?” Gansey waggled his eyebrows down at his girlfriend.

“Well well well,” said Henry in a smug tone. “How the tables have turned.”

“There was quite a bit of teasing of Blue from most of the ex Raven Boys involved.

“Well,” admitted Adam. “I get it, I mean I thought they were all terrible till I started and then still did for a little while until…” He gestured at Gansey and Ronan.

“I did think you were a bastard at first,” Blue informed Gansey. “Just never forget that.”

“Oh,” said Ronan, a glint in his eye. “I can’t wait for that part.”

“I can,” said Gansey. 
 
“

You seem like a very sensible teen,” Neeve said, which annoyed Blue, because she already knew she was a very sensible teen. When you had as little money as the Sargents did, sensibility in all matters was ingrained young.

In the ambient light from the nearly full moon, Blue caught sight of what Neeve had drawn in the dirt. She asked, “What is that? Mom drew that.”

“Did she?” Neeve asked. They studied the pattern. It was three curving, intersecting lines, making a long sort of triangle. ”

There were yet more knowing looks exchanged between the four. 
 
    “

Did she say what it was?”

“She was drawing it on the shower door. I didn’t ask.”

“I dreamt it,” Neeve said, in a flat voice that sent an unpleasant shudder along the back of Blue’s neck. “I wanted to see what it looked like drawn out.” She rubbed her palm through the pattern, then abruptly held up a beautiful hand.

She said, “I think they’re coming.”

This was why Blue and Neeve were here. Every year, Maura sat on the wall, knees pulled up to her chin, staring at nothing, and recited names to Blue. To Blue, the churchyard remained empty, but to Maura, it was full of the dead. Not the currently dead, but the spirits of those who would die in the next twelve months. For Blue, it had “always been like hearing one half of a conversation. Sometimes her mother would recognize the spirits, but often she would have to lean forward to ask them their names. Maura had once explained that if Blue wasn’t there, she couldn’t convince them to answer her — the dead couldn’t see Maura without Blue’s presence. “Blue never grew tired of feeling particularly needed, but sometimes she wished needed felt less like a synonym for useful.”

Again, feelings Jordan could relate to. As much as Hennessy had always needed her, the fact remained that she was the real one and Jordan was a copy. How needed could she be? Not just to Hennessy, but in the world. But no, she had struck out on her own and been her own person and succeeded. Yet this younger version of herself still resonated with the bitterness and wistfulness of this young girl.
 
      “

The church watch was critical for one of Maura’s most unusual services. So long as clients lived in the area, she guaranteed to let them know if they or a local loved one was bound to die in the next twelve months. Who wouldn’t pay for that? Well, the true answer was: most of the world, as most people didn’t believe in psychics.

“Can you see anything?” Blue asked. She gave her numb hands a bracing rub before snatching up a notebook and pen from the wall.

Neeve was very still. “Something just touched my hair.”

Again, a shiver thrilled up Blue’s arms. “One of them?”

In a husky voice, Neeve said, “The future dead have to follow the corpse road through the gate. This is probably another … spirit called by your energy. I didn’t realize what an effect you would have.”

Maura had never mentioned other dead people being attracted by Blue. ”

“Well, she does attract dead people.” Henry said it like it was a fact they all knew. Jordan wanted to know too, but she supposed her questions would be answered by this book anyway.
 
       “

Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to scare her. Or maybe Maura “just hadn’t seen them — maybe she was as blind to these other spirits as Blue was.

Blue became uncomfortably aware of the slightest breeze touching her face, lifting Neeve’s curly hair. Invisible, orderly spirits of not yet truly dead people were one thing. Ghosts that weren’t compelled to stay on the path were another.

“Are they —” Blue started.

“Who are lol you? Robert Neuhmann,” Neeve interrupted. “What’s your name? Ruth Vert. What’s your name? Frances Powell.”

Scratching quickly to catch up, Blue printed the names phonetically as Neeve solicited them. Every so often, she lifted her eyes to the path, trying to glimpse — something. But as always, there was only the overgrown crabgrass, the barely visible oak trees. The black mouth of the church, accepting invisible spirits.

Nothing to hear, nothing to see. No evidence of the dead except for their names written in the notebook in her hand.

Maybe Neeve was right. Maybe Blue was having a bit of an identity crisis. Some days it did seem a little unfair that all of the wonder and power that surrounded her family was passed to Blue in the form of paperwork.

At least I can still be a part of “Blue thought grimly, although she felt about as included as a seeing eye dog. She held the notebook up to her face, close, close, close, so she could read it in the darkness. It was like a roster of names popular seventy and eighty years before: Dorothy, Ralph,”

“Clarence, Esther, Herbert, Melvin. A lot of the same last names, too. The valley was dominated by several old families that were large if not powerful.

Somewhere outside of Blue’s thoughts, Neeve’s tone became more emphatic.

“What’s your name?” she asked. “Excuse me. What is your name?” Her consternated expression looked wrong on her face. Out of habit, Blue followed Neeve’s gaze to the center of the courtyard.

And she saw someone.”

“Oh,” breathed Gansey. “So this is it.”
 
      “

Blue’s heart hammered like a fist to her breastbone. On the other side of the heartbeat, he was still there. Where there should have been nothing, there was a person.

“I see him,” Blue said. “Neeve, I see him.”

Blue had always imagined the procession of spirits to be an orderly thing, but this spirit wandered, hesitant. It was a young man in slacks and a sweater, hair rumpled. He was not quite transparent, but he wasn’t quite there, either. His figure was as murky as dirty water, his face indistinct. There was no identifying feature to him apart from his youth.

He was so young — that was the hardest part to get used to.

As Blue watched, he paused and put his fingers to the side of his nose and his temple. It was such a strangely living gesture that Blue felt a little sick. Then he stumbled forward, as if jostled from behind.

“Get his name,” Neeve hissed. “He won’t answer me and I need to get the others!”

“Me?” Blue replied, but she slid off the wall. Her heart was still ramming inside her rib cage. She asked, feeling a little foolish, “What’s your name?”

He didn’t seem to hear her. Without a twitch of acknowledgment, he began to move again, slow and bewildered, toward the church door.

Is this how we make our way to death? Blue wondered. A stumbling fade-out instead of a self-aware finale?”

“As Neeve began again to call out questions to the others, Blue made her way toward the wanderer.

“Who are you?” she called from a safe distance, as he dropped his forehead into his hands. His form had no outline at all, she saw now, and his face was truly featureless. There was nothing about him, really, that made him human shaped, but still, she saw a boy. There was something telling her mind what he was, even if it wasn’t telling her eyes.

There was no thrill in seeing him, as she had thought there would be. All she could think was, He will be dead within a year. How did Maura bear it?

Blue stole closer. She was close enough to touch him as he began to walk again, but still he made no sign of seeing her.

This near to him, her hands were freezing. Her heart was freezing. Invisible spirits with no warmth of their own sucked at her energy, pulling goose bumps up her arms.

The young man stood on the threshold of the church and Blue knew, just knew, that if “he stepped into the church, she would lose the chance to get his name.

“Please,” Blue said, softer than before. She reached out a hand and touched the very edge of his not-there sweater. Cold flooded through her like dread. She tried to steady herself with what she’d always been told: Spirits drew all their energy from their surroundings. All she was feeling was him using her to stay visible.

But it still felt a lot like dread.

She asked, “Will you tell me your name?”

He faced her and she realized with shock that he wore an Aglionby sweater.

“Gansey,” he said. Though his voice was quiet, it wasn’t a whisper. It was a real voice spoken from someplace almost too far away to hear.”

“What,” interjected Hennessy, “the fuck?”

“It didn’t stick,” supplied Henry.

Jordan looked at Declan, and caught the split second he appeared as confused as she was before he smoothed it over with a mask.

“So are you a ghost? Or a

dream?”

Enquired Hennessy.

“No he’s not,” snapped Ronan immediately.

Gansey had a strange look on his face. “I’m person enough, I think.”

That wasn’t exactly reassuring.

“

Blue couldn’t stop staring at his mussed hair, the suggestion of staring eyes, the raven on his sweater. His shoulders were soaked, she saw, and the rest of his clothing rain spattered, from a storm that hadn’t happened yet. This close, she could smell something minty that she wasn’t sure was unique to him or unique to spirits.

He was so real. When it finally happened, when she finally saw him, it didn’t feel like magic at all. It felt like looking into the grave and seeing it look back at her.

“Is that all?” she whispered.

Gansey closed his eyes. “That’s all there is.”

He fell to his knees — a soundless gesture for a boy with no real body. One hand splayed in the dirt, fingers pressed to the ground.”

“Jesus,” moaned Henry. “The sweater…” Adam and Ronan too looked deeply disturbed, Blue looked white as a sheet. There was something somber and remote about Gansey’s eyes. 
 
        “

Blue saw the blackness of the church more clearly than the curved shape of his shoulder.

“Neeve,” Blue said. “Neeve, he’s — dying.”

Neeve had come to stand just behind her. She replied, “Not yet.”

Gansey was nearly gone now, fading into the church, or the church fading into him.

Blue’s voice was breathier than she would have liked. “Why — why can I see him?”

Neeve glanced over her shoulder, either because there were more spirits coming or because there weren’t — Blue couldn’t tell. By the time she looked back, Gansey had vanished entirely. Already Blue felt warmth returning to her skin, but something behind her lungs felt icy. A dangerous, sucking sadness seemed to be opening up inside her: grief or regret.

“There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve, Blue. Either you’re his true love,” Neeve said, “or you killed him.”

“Well,” said Mor, looking up from the book. “Things just got a little interesting.”

“Interesting,” exclaimed Helen. “What is this about you killing my brother?” she asked Blue.

“Well I’m perfectly fine now, Helen.” interjected Gansey.

“But being very cryptic!” snapped Helen.

“That prophecy about Blue and her true love has passed, with Gansey.” said Maura calmly and evenly. “There’s nothing to worry about anymore. They can be together as they like.”
 
      Well, Jordan is interested to hear how that worked out. Her curiosity outweighs her desire for rest.

“You should rest your lovely voice, my love.” says The New Fenian, taking the book from Mor. “I’ll read the next chapter.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Normally, being trapped and unaware of why she was in a place was Hennessy’s second worst nightmare. However, the potential material by which to torment Ronan Lynch compelled her to be interested in these books. Besides, she could use a distraction. Since the averted end of the world she’d been doing.. not badly, but that in itself was a surprise to her. She had been spending time either by herself resting or with her.. something, Carmen Farooq-Lane or with Ronan. She hadn’t been self

destructing as hard as normal, but because things were relatively good she felt a tidal wave of the imminent Badness to come. The change in scenery gave her other priorities to focus on, and she didn’t want to be alone. 
 
       She studied some of the others, Ronan’s high school friends. The girl Blue wore an interesting corset top covered in soda bottle caps paired with a long black skirt and pink high tops. Her black hair was done up with blue and silver barrettes, with patches left unkempt and spike-y in a way that seemed purposeful. She was easy on the eyes and Hennessy might’ve been tempted to hit on her in different circumstances. If she hadn’t had her… situation with Carmen and the business with Jordan to deal with. 
 
       And there was her apparent boyfriend, true love or whatever? She knew the name “Gansey,” as one that had come up in Ronan’s consciousness from time to time when they were sharing it. His oldest friend. But he’d been relegated to subconscious when other thoughts and feelings and people were so loud in there, so she didn’t actually know much beyond the high school best friend title. He looked most unimpressive to her— god, what was it with beautiful girls wanting to be with boring white men? It was so tragic. There was however, something a little familiar about him she couldn’t place… she’d figure that out later.
 
        She’d been getting to know Adam Parrish a little over the last couple of weeks. Sort of. Neither of them was really a “people person” and she found him insufferable and it seemed she annoyed the piss out of him. That being said, she could see what Ronan saw in him, between the striking features and the keen, clever mind. And then there was Henry Cheng, Hennessy knew his mother from the fairy market. She’d only met with Seondek a couple of times and both times she’d been herself, not a double. The New Fenian began to read.

“It’s me,” said Gansey.

He turned around so that he was facing his car. The Camaro’s bright

orange hood was up, more as a symbol of defeat than for any practical use. Adam, friend of cars everywhere, might have been able to determine what was wrong with it this time, but Gansey certainly couldn’t.”

“Friend of cars?” Adam sounded amused, not displeased as he leaned over to face Gansey. Blue and Gansey were seated opposite Adam and Ronan. Gansey grinned at him, clear fond adoration in his eyes and smile. “You are.. you always have a way with them. You’re so clever with your hands.” A faint flush of red crept into Adam’s cheeks at that, and he quickly looked away.

Interesting.

Hennessy thought to herself. She glanced over at Ronan to see if he had a reaction to it. He raised an eyebrow at her as it to say, “What the fuck do you want?” She raised a middle finger at him. So all was copacetic.

“

He’d managed to roll to a stop about four feet off the interstate and now the car’s fat tires sat off-kilter on top of lumpy tufts of valley grass. A semitruck roared by without pause; the Camaro rocked in its wake.

On the other end of the phone, his roommate Ronan Lynch replied, “You missed World Hist. I thought you were dead in a ditch.”

Gansey flipped his wrist around to examine his watch. He had missed a lot more than World History. It was eleven o’clock, and already the chilliness of last night seemed improbable. A gnat was stuck in the perspiration on his skin next to the watch-band; he flicked it off. Gansey had camped, once, when he was younger. It had involved tents. Sleeping bags. An idling Range Rover parked nearby for when he and his father lost interest. As an experience, it had not been anything like last night.”

“Pshaw,” muttered Blue. “Speaking of turning tables…”

“Yeah,” said Henry. “I mean we camped in Arizona for like a week… I’d say progress was made.”

He asked, “Did you get notes for me?”

“No,” Ronan replied. “I thought you were dead in a ditch.” Gansey blew grit off his lips and readjusted the phone against his cheek. He would’ve gotten notes for Ronan. “The Pig stopped. Come get me.” A sedan slowed as it passed, the occupants staring out the window. Gansey was not an unpleasant-looking boy and the Camaro was not too

hard on the eyes, either, but this attention had less to do with comeliness and more to do with the novelty of an Aglionby boy broken down by the side of the road in an impudently orange car. Gansey was well aware that

there was nothing little Henrietta, Virginia, preferred over seeing humiliating things happen to Aglionby boys, unless it was seeing humiliating things happen to their families.”

“Oh, get over yourself. We’re not thinking of you all the time.” sniped Blue.

Gansey looked mildly apologetic. “Sorry, Jane. But I mean.. You did think about them that way last chapter…’

“Once, when Neeve brought it up.”

“Fair point.”

Adam looked as though he had something to say, but remained quiet. 
 
“

Ronan said, “Come on, man.”

“It’s not like you’re going to class. You know what, it’ll be lunch break anyway.” Then he added, perfunctory, “Please.”

Ronan was silent for a long moment. He was good at silence; he knew it made people uncomfortable.”

Hennessy thought that wasn’t inaccurate but it wasn’t quite the Ronan Lynch she knew. Of course she’d been on a road trip with him where they were constantly sniping at each other, sniping at Bryde, trying to learn from Bryde and from each other. There hadn’t been a lot of silence, and what had existed was permeated with their darkest subconscious thoughts reading themselves out loud to each other.

I’m afraid to be alone. I’ve been alone a long time.

But she thought again that Ronan hadn’t been alone, not really. And now neither was she. Hennessy glanced at Carmen Farooq-Lane’s lovely features. She appeared lost in thought, listening intently to every word of the story.

“But Gansey was immune from long exposure. He leaned into the car to see if he had any food in the glove box while he waited for Ronan to speak. Next to an EpiPen, there was a stick of beef jerky, but the jerky had expired two years ago. Possibly it had been when he’d bought the car.”

Declan, Carmen, Calla and Helen all wore expressions of disgust. 
 
“

Where are you?” Ronan asked, finally.

“Next to the Henrietta sign on 64. Bring me a burger. And a few gallons of gas.” The car had not run out of gas, but it couldn’t hurt. Ronan’s voice was acidic. “Gansey.”

“Bring Adam, too.”

“Ronan hung up. Gansey stripped off his sweater and threw it in the back of the Camaro. The tiny back of the car was a cluttered marriage of everyday things — a chemistry textbook, a Frappuccino-stained notebook, a half-zipped CD binder with naked discs slithering out across the seat — and the supplies he’d acquired during his eighteen months in Henrietta. Rumpled maps, computer printouts, ever-present journal, flashlight, willow stick. When Gansey plucked a digital recorder out of the mess, a pizza receipt (one large deep-dish, half sausage, half avocado) fluttered to the seat, joining a half-dozen receipts identical except for the date.”

Now it was Hennessy’s turn to be disgusted, and she locked eyes with Jordan who clearly thought the same.

“Who puts avocado on pizza?”

“Him,” said Ronan, Adam, Blue, Henry and Declan all pointing to Gansey. She looked down to see that indeed, the pizza he’d ordered was as offensive as the receipts, he had one slice left.

Hennessy hit Gansey with her most unimpressed death stare. “Kill yourself.” 
 
Gansey gulped.

“All night he’d sat outside the monstrously modern Church of the Holy Redeemer, recorder running, ears straining, waiting for — something. The atmosphere had been less than magical. Possibly not the best place to try to

make contact with the future dead, but Gansey had maintained high hopes for the power of St. Mark’s Eve. It wasn’t that he’d expected to see the dead. All of the sources said that church watchers had to possess “the second sight” and Gansey barely possessed first sight before he put his contacts in. He’d just hoped for —

Something. And that was what he had gotten. He just wasn’t quite sure what that something was yet.

The digital recorder in hand, Gansey settled himself against the rear tire to wait, letting the car shield him from the buffeting of passing vehicles. On the other side of the guard rail, a greening field stretched out and down to the trees. Beyond it all rose the mysterious blue crest of the mountains.

On the dusty toe of his shoe, Gansey drew the arcing shape of the promised supernatural energy line that had led him here. As the mountain breeze rushed over his ears, it sounded like a hushed shout — not a whisper, but a loud cry from almost too far away to hear.

The thing was, Henrietta looked like a place where magic could happen. The valley seemed to whisper secrets. It was easier to believe that they wouldn’t give themselves up to Gansey rather than that they didn’t exist at all.

Please just tell me where you are.

His heart hurt with the wanting of it, the hurt no less painful for being difficult to explain.”

Blue and Gansey exchanged a significant look. Hennessy was honestly getting quite annoyed at the amount of significant looks which kept getting passed along.

“Ronan Lynch’s shark-nosed BMW pulled in behind the Camaro, its normally glossy charcoal paint dusted green with pollen. Gansey felt the bass of the stereo in his feet a moment before he made out the tune. When he stood up, Ronan was just opening his door. In the passenger seat was Adam Parrish, the third member of the foursome that made up Gansey’s closest friends.”

“Foursome?” enquired Adam, sounding on edge. “That can’t be right… we hadn’t met Blue yet…”

Adam and Ronan both wore expressions of upset and an emotion Hennessy recognized all too well; jealousy.

Gansey himself looked confused. “That can’t be right. Maybe it’s a typo in the book?”

“We’ll see if it repeats,” said Adam, eyes narrowed in his strangely lovely face.

“I don’t suppose he meant me,” snarked Henry.

Ronan and Adam glared at him. “Sorry Henry but… no, I don’t think that’s what I would think.” professed Gansey apologetically.

They all covet his attention

,

like he’s a king or something.

Hennessy was disliking Richard Campbell Gansey III more and more, both inside and outside of his own head. 
 
“

The knot of Adam’s tie was neat above the collar of his sweater. One slender hand pressed Ronan’s thin cell phone tightly to his ear.

Through the open car door, Adam and Gansey exchanged the briefest of looks. Adam’s knitted eyebrows asked, Did you find anything? and Gansey’s widened eyes replied, You tell me.

Adam, frowning now, spun the volume knob down on the stereo and said something into the phone.

Ronan slammed the car door — he slammed everything — before heading to the trunk. He said, “My dick brother wants us to meet him at Nino’s tonight. With Ashley.”

Declan’s perpetually bland expression soured. It was like watching milk curdle before your eyes. “Ronan-“
 
“I’m sure I’ll say and do worse in these books,” said Ronan dryly.
 
“He’s right,” said Gansey, “he did say worse things about you than that.”

“Is that who’s on the phone?” Gansey asked. “What’s Ashley?”

Ronan hefted a gas can from the trunk, making little effort to keep the greasy container from contacting his clothing. Like Gansey, he wore the Aglionby uniform, but, as always, he managed to make it look as disreputable as possible. His tie was knotted with a method best described as contempt and his shirt-tails were ragged beneath the bottom of his sweater. His smile was thin and sharp. If his BMW was shark-like, it had learned how from him. “Declan’s latest. We’re meant to look pretty for her.”

Gansey resented having to play nicely with Ronan’s older brother, a senior at Aglionby, but he understood why they had to. Freedom in the Lynch family was a complicated thing, and at the moment, Declan held the keys to it.

Ronan traded the fuel can for the digital recorder. “He wants to do it tonight because he knows I have class.”

The fuel-tank lid for the Camaro was located behind the spring-loaded license plate, and Ronan watched silently as Gansey simultaneously wrestled with the lid, the gas can, and the license plate.

“You could have done this,” Gansey told him. “Since you don’t care about crapping up your shirt.”

Unsympathetic, Ronan scratched at an old, brown scab beneath the five knotted leather bands he wore around his wrist. Last week, he and Adam had taken turns dragging each other on a moving dolly behind the BMW, and they both still had the marks to show it.

“Ask me if I found something,” Gansey said.”

Sighing, Ronan twitched the recorder toward Gansey. “Did you find anything?”

Ronan didn’t sound very interested, but that was part of the Ronan Lynch brand. It was impossible to tell how deep his disinterest truly was.”

“How true,” said Adam thoughtfully.

“Fuel was leeching slowly into Gansey’s expensive chinos, the second

pair he’d ruined in a month. It wasn’t that he meant to be careless — as Adam told him again and again, “Things cost money, Gansey” — it was just that he never seemed to realize the consequences of his actions until too late. “Something. I recorded about four hours of audio and there’s — something. But I don’t know what it means.” He gestured to the recorder. “Give it a whirl.”

Turning to stare out over the interstate, Ronan pressed PLAY. For a

moment there was merely silence, broken only by icy-sounding shrills of crickets. Then, Gansey’s voice:

“Gansey,” it said.

There was a long pause. Gansey rubbed a finger slowly along the pocked chrome of the Camaro’s bumper. It was still strange to hear himself on the recording, with no memory of saying the words.

Then, as if from very far away, a female voice, the words hard to make out: “Is that all?”

Ronan’s eyes darted to Gansey, wary.

Gansey lifted his finger: Wait. Murmured voices, quieter than before, hissed from the recorder, nothing clear about them except the cadence: questions and answers. And then his disembodied voice spoke out of the recorder again:

“That’s all there is.”

Ronan cast a glance back over to Gansey beside the car, doing what Gansey thought of as his smoker breath: long inhale through flared nostrils, slow exhale through parted lips.

Ronan did not smoke. He preferred his habits with hangovers

.”
 
“Isn’t that the truth.” snarked Hennessy.

Ronan pointed at her. “Pot. Kettle.”

“He stopped the recorder and said, “You’re dripping gas on your pants, geezer.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me what was happening when I recorded that?”

Ronan didn’t ask. He just kept looking at Gansey, which was the same thing.

“Nothing was happening. That’s what. I was staring at a parking lot full of bugs that shouldn’t be alive when it’s this cold overnight, and there was nothing.”

Gansey hadn’t really been sure if he’d pick up anything in the parking lot, even if he was in the right place. According to the ley hunters he’d spoken to, the ley line sometimes transmitted voices across its length, throwing sounds hundreds of miles and dozens of years from when they’d first been heard. A sort of audio haunting, an unpredictable radio transmission where nearly anything on the ley line could be a receiver: a recorder, a stereo, a pair of well-tuned human ears. Lacking any psychic ability, Gansey had brought the recorder, as the noises were often only audible when played back. The strange thing in all this was not the other voices on the player. The strange thing was Gansey’s voice: Gansey was quite certain he was not a spirit.”

“In a way, you were always a spirit.” Mused Maura.

“Indeed, Princeling.” Gwenllian smirked.

“I don’t see how my little brother is a spirit, or was or whatever.” groused Helen. Everyone ignored her as they either didn’t know what this business with Gansey’s spirit and death were or didn’t seem to know how to tell his if possible even more WASP-y, but hotter, older sister.

“I didn’t say anything, Ronan. All night long, I didn’t say anything. So what’s my voice doing on the recorder?”

“How did you know it was there?”

“I was listening to what I’d recorded while I was driving back. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then: my voice. Then the Pig stopped.”

“Coincidence?” Ronan asked. “I think not.”

It was meant to be sarcastic. Gansey had said I don’t believe in coincidences so often that he no longer needed to.

Gansey asked, “Well, what do you think?”

“Holy grail, finally,” Ronan replied, too sarcastic to be any use at all. But the fact was this: Gansey had spent the last four years working with

the thinnest scraps of evidence possible and the barely heard voice was all the encouragement he needed. His eighteen months in Henrietta had used some of the sketchiest scraps of all as he searched for a ley line — a

perfectly straight, supernatural energy path that connected spiritual places — and the elusive tomb he hoped lay along its path. This was just an occupational hazard of looking for an invisible energy line. It was ... well, invisible.

And possibly hypothetical, but Gansey refused to consider that notion. In seventeen years of life, he’d already found dozens of things people hadn’t known could be found, and he fully intended to add the ley line, the tomb, and the tomb’s royal occupant to that list of items.

A museum curator in New Mexico had once told Gansey, Son, you have an uncanny knack for discovering oddities. An astonished Roman historian commented, You look under rocks no one else thinks to pick up, slick. And a very old British professor had said, The world turns out its pockets for you, boy. The key, Gansey found, was that you had to believe that they existed; you had to realize they were part of something bigger. Some secrets only gave themselves up to those who’d proven themselves worthy.

The way Gansey saw it was this: If you had a special knack for finding things, it meant you owed the world to look.”

God, could he be any more pretentious? She hoped not much of the book was in Gansey’s head because she’d probably fall asleep from boredom in that case.
 
“

Hey, is that Whelk?” Ronan asked.

A car had slowed considerably as it passed them, affording them a glimpse of its overly curious driver. Gansey had to agree that the driver did look a lot like their resentful Latin teacher, an Aglionby alumnus by the unfortunate name of Barrington Whelk. Gansey, owing to his official title of Richard “Dick” Campbell Gansey III, was fairly immune to posh names, but even he had to admit there wasn’t much forgivable about Barrington Whelk.

“Hey, don’t stop and help or anything,” Ronan snapped after the car. “Hey, runt. What went down with Declan?”

This last part was directed at Adam as he climbed out of the BMW with Ronan’s phone still in hand. He offered it to Ronan, who shook his head disdainfully. Ronan despised all phones, including his own.

Adam said, “He’s coming by at five tonight.”

Unlike Ronan, Adam’s Aglionby sweater was secondhand, but he’d taken great care to be certain it was impeccable. He was slim and tall, with dusty hair unevenly cropped above a fine-boned, tanned face. He was a sepia photograph.

Adam shifted in his seat, an odd, half uncomfortable hal something else expression playing on his face. 
 
“

Joy,” Gansey replied. “You’ll be there, right?”

“Am I invited?” Adam could be peculiarly polite. When he was uncertain about something, his Southern accent always made an appearance, and it was in evidence now.

Adam never needed an invitation. He and Ronan must’ve fought. Unsurprising. If it had a social security number, Ronan had fought with it.

“Don’t be stupid,” Gansey replied, and graciously accepted the grease- splotched fast-food bag that Adam offered. “Thanks.”

“Ronan got it,” Adam said. In matters of money, he was quick to assign credit or blame.

Gansey looked to Ronan, who lounged against the Camaro, absently biting one of the leather straps on his wrist. Gansey said, “Tell me there’s no sauce on this burger.”

Dropping the strap from his teeth, Ronan scoffed. “Please.”

“No pickle, either,” Adam said, crouching behind the car. He’d not only brought two small containers of fuel additive, but also a rag to place between the gas can and his khakis; he made the entire process look commonplace. Adam tried so hard to hide his roots, but they came out in the smallest of gestures.”

Adam let out an aggravated huff.

Gansey seemed to anticipate this and was immediately saying, “Adam, I don’t mean it how you-“

“What, you meant it in a good way?” Adam snapped.

“Yes! I know you won’t believe me but yes!”

Ronan rolled his eyes. “I thought you two were past this routine.”

“We were until he thought that!”

“I can’t control what I think, Adam!”

“God, forget it.” 
 
“

Now Gansey grinned, the warmth of discovery starting to course through him. “So, pop quiz, Mr. Parrish. Three things that appear in the vicinity of ley lines?”

“Black dogs,” Adam said indulgently. “Demonic presences.” “Camaros,” Ronan inserted.

Gansey continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “And ghosts. Ronan, queue up

the evidence if you would.”

The three of them stood there in the late morning sun as Adam screwed

the fuel-tank lid back on and Ronan rewound the player. Yards and yards

away, over the mountains, a red-tailed hawk screamed thinly. Ronan pressed PLAY again and they listened to Gansey say his name into thin air.

Adam frowned distantly, listening, the warm day reddening his cheeks.

It could have been any one of the mornings in the last year and a half.

Ronan and Adam would make up by the end of the day, his teachers would forgive him for missing class, then he and Adam and Ronan and Noah would go out for pizza, four against Declan.

Adam said, “Try the car, Gansey.”

Leaving the door hanging open, Gansey crashed onto the driver’s seat. In the background, Ronan played the recording again. For some reason, from this distance, the sound of the voices made the hair on his arms stand slowly. Something inside him said that this unconscious speech meant the start of something different, although he didn’t know what yet.

“Come on, Pig!” snarled Ronan. Someone laid on their horn as they blew by on the highway.

Gansey turned the key. The engine turned over once, paused for the briefest of moments — and then roared to deafening life. The Camaro lived to fight another day. The radio was even working, playing the Stevie Nicks song that always sounded to Gansey like it was about a one-winged dove. He tried one of the french fries they’d brought him. They were cold.

Adam leaned into the car. “We’ll follow you back to the school. It’ll get you back, but it’s not done yet,” he said. “There’s still something wrong with it.”

“Great,” Gansey replied, loudly, to be heard over the engine. In the background, the BMW pumped out a nearly inaudible bass line as Ronan dissolved what was left of his heart in electronic loops. “So, suggestions?”

Reaching into his pocket, Adam retrieved a piece of paper and offered it to him.

“What’s this?” Gansey studied Adam’s erratic handwriting. His letters always looked like they were running from something. “A number for a psychic?”

“If you didn’t find anything last night, this was going to be next. Now you have something to ask them about.”

Gansey considered. Psychics tended to tell him he had money coming his way and that he was destined for great things. The first one he knew was always true and the second one he was afraid might be. But maybe with this new clue, with a new psychic, they’d have something else to say.

“Okay,” he agreed. “So what am I asking them?”

Adam handed him the digital recorder. He knocked the top of the Camaro once, twice, pensive.

“That seems obvious,” he answered. “We find out who you were talking to.”

“And the rest is history,” said Gansey, gazing at Blue.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“This is insane.” Blue whispered into his ear.

“I know,” Gansey murmured back.

As someone who has been in many strange situations sometimes resulting in his death, this still landed in the top 40% in terms of strangeness. At first he’d been excited to see Ronan and Adam, and they’d seemed pleased to see him too. He had missed them. Ronan hadn’t even texted in so long. It made Gansey worry and then he told himself not too, that it was just Ronan’s hatred for phones especially since Declan or Adam could be counted on to call if something was really wrong. He did speak with Adam on the phone, but not as often or for as long as he’d like.
 
 Also, while Adam could be counted on to pick up or at least return calls, there was something stilted about their conversations recently. Their last one had been a month ago, and there’d been a polite distance in Adam’s voice, like he was speaking to someone he’d been friends with long ago. Gansey tried not to let that sting: he was happy for his friend, that the future he’d been working so hard for had been worth it. He just selfishly wished he could be more present in it, but was aware enough of Adam’s boundaries not to press. He liked to think he’s gotten better about that. 
 
Of course, from what they’d briefly explained to him Ronan had quite a lot going on… that Adam nor Declan had told him about. That made him feel like he might have been too hard on Ronan and not hard enough on Adam for the communication gaps. And now Adam was mad at him again. Henry still despised him for what happened in Kansas. Ronan’s new friend — Ronan made friends with new people now? He felt uncomfortable with this notion and with the ease with which the two laughed at each other’s dark jokes without being sure why —- Hennessy hated him on sight. Helen was here. Everything was awful.. except for the girl next to him scowling in that way he loves so much, her intensity washing his away into calm.
 
“

Mornings at 300 Fox Way were fearful, jumbled things. Elbows in sides and lines for the bathroom and people snapping over tea bags placed into cups that already had tea bags in them. There was school for Blue and work for some of the more productive (or less intuitive) aunts. Toast got burned, cereal went soggy, the refrigerator door hung open and expectant for minutes at a time. Keys jingled as car pools were hastily decided.”

Blue shifted uncomfortably. Gansey could tell she missed 300 Fox way… he did too despite never having lived there. She was looking towards Maura and Calla now. “Do you mind if I-“

“Of course,” he said, squeezing her hand gently. She flashed him a grin, then did go over to Maura’s chair. Maura promptly scooted over so that Blue could share the chair with her. Blue’s legs were easily slung over Maura’s, and she leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder. Maura started to stroke her hair. Gansey felt this pang, thinking of his own prim and pristine mother who didn’t often bestow physical affection so easily. Then immediately he chastened himself; he had a wonderful mother who loved him very much. Others didn’t have that. He very purposefully does not look at Adam, but he can imagine him looking at Blue and Maura in that intent, almost hungry way he does.
 
“

Partway through breakfast, the phone would begin to ring and Maura would say, “That’s the universe calling for you on line two, Orla” or something like that, and Jimi or Orla or one of the other aunts or half aunts or friends would fight over who had to pick it up on the upstairs phone. Two years ago, Blue’s cousin Orla had decided that a call-in psychic line would be a lucrative addition and, after some brief skirmishes with Maura about public image, Orla won. “Winning” involved Orla waiting until Maura was at a conference over a weekend to secretively set up the line, and it was not so much a sore spot as the memory of a sore spot. Calls started coming in around seven A.M., and some days a dollar a minute felt

more worth it than others.

Mornings were a sport. One that Blue liked to think she was getting better at.”

“You sound like Declan,” said Mathew.

Declan shot him a withering look.

“But the day after the church watch, Blue didn’t have to worry about battling for the bathroom or trying to make a bag lunch while Orla dropped toast butter-side down. When she woke up, her normally morning-bright room had the breath-held dimness of afternoon. In the next room over, Orla was talking to either her boyfriend or to one of the psychic hotline callers. With Orla, it was difficult to tell the difference between the two sorts of calls. Both of them left Blue thinking she ought to shower afterward

.”
 
“Someone’s got the green eyes.” Orla scoffed.

“Yeah Orla.” said Blue, rolling her eyes. “I’m so jealous you're a phone tramp. And I have a boyfriend.”

“Oh, I’m the phone tramp? Miss ‘stayed awake till 3am to sneak into the phone-sewing-cat room and go ‘oh Gansey, remember when you ate the fruit out of my yogurt-“

“Oh fuck off.” Blue groaned.

“Blue took over the bathroom uncontested, where she gave most of her attention to her hair. Her dark hair was cut in a bob, long enough to plausibly pull back but short enough that it required an assembly of clips to do so successfully. The end result was a spiky, uneven ponytail populated by escaped chunks and mismatched clips; it looked eccentric and unkempt. Blue had worked hard to get it that way.

“Mom,” she said as she jumped down the crooked stairs. Maura was at the kitchen counter making a mess of some kind of loose tea. It smelled appalling

.”
 
“My teas are an acquired taste,” said Maura, but in good humor.

“Yes, first aid kits have been required due to them,” joked Calla gruffly.
 
“

Her mother didn’t turn around. On the counter on either side of her were green, oceanic drifts of loose herbs. “You don’t have to run everywhere.”

“You do,” Blue retorted. “Why didn’t you wake me up for school?” “I did,” Maura said. “Twice.” Then, to herself, “Dammit.”

From the table, Neeve’s mild voice said, “Do you need my help with

that, Maura?” She sat at the table with a cup of tea, looking plump and angelic as always, no sign of having lost any sleep the night before. Neeve stared at Blue, who tried to avoid eye contact.

“I’m perfectly capable of making a damn meditation tea, thank you,” Maura said. To Blue, she added, “I told the school you had the flu. I emphasized that you were vomiting. Remember to look peaked tomorrow.”

Blue pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. She’d never missed class the day after the church watch. Been sleepy, perhaps, but never wasted like last night.

“Was it because I saw him?” she asked Neeve, lowering her hands. She wished that she couldn’t remember the boy so clearly. Or rather, the idea of him, his hand sprawled on the ground. She wished she could un-see it. “Is that why I slept so long?”

“It’s because you let fifteen spirits walk through your body while you chatted with a dead boy,” Maura replied tersely, before Neeve could speak.

“From what I’ve heard, anyway. Christ, is this what these leaves are supposed to smell like?”

Blue turned to Neeve, who continued to sip her tea with a sanguine air. “Is that true? Is it because spirits walked through me?”

“You did let them draw energy from you,” Neeve replied. “You have quite a lot, but not that much.”

Blue had two immediate thoughts about this. One was I have quite a lot of energy? and the other was I think I am annoyed. It was not as if she had intentionally allowed the spirits to draw power from her.

“You should teach her to protect herself,” Neeve told Maura.

“I have taught her some things. I’m not an entirely wretched mother,” Maura said, handing Blue a cup of tea.

Blue said, “I’m not trying this. It smells awful.” She retrieved a cup of yogurt from the fridge. Then, in solidarity with her mother, she told Neeve, “I’ve never had to protect myself at the church watch before.”

Neeve mused, “That’s surprising. You amplify energy fields so much, I’m surprised they don’t find you, even here.”

“Oh, stop,” Maura said, sounding irritable. “There is nothing frightening about dead people

.”
 
“Beg to differ,” said Ronan in a low, penetrating tone. For a moment, Gansey thought his friend was looking straight at him. His thoughts drifted to those nightmares where he was still dead, a ghost watching all of his friends move on and lead better lives without him. Or the ones where they suffered, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. But Ronan was gazing from The New Fenian to Mor and back again.

Of course.

Ronan had loved Niall Lynch more than he loved himself, perhaps more than he could love anything. Gansey had been confused by how laid back he seemed about them being identical copies of his parents, but perhaps he’d been masking his true feelings. Or hadn’t let himself know about them until just now, with the forced proximity.
 
“

Blue was still seeing Gansey’s ghostly posture, defeated and bewildered. She said, “Mom, the church-watch spirits — can you ever prevent their deaths? By warning them?”

The phone rang then. It shrilled twice and kept going, which meant Orla was still on the line with the other caller.

“Damn Orla!” Maura said, though Orla wasn’t around to hear it. “I’ll get it,” Neeve said.

“Oh, but —” Maura didn’t finish what she was going to say. Blue

wondered if she was thinking that Neeve normally worked for a lot more than a dollar a minute.

“I know what you’re thinking,” her mother said, after Neeve had left the kitchen. “Most of them die from heart attacks and cancer and other things that just can’t be helped. That boy is going to die.”

Blue was beginning to feel a phantom of the sensation she’d felt before, that strange grief. “I don’t think an Aglionby boy will die from a heart attack. Why do you bother telling your clients?”

“What about going to Aglionby means you won’t die from a heart attack?” Gansey felt a strange tug in his stomach at every mention of his own death, and wanted to lighten the mood.
 
Both Blue’s dark brow and Adam’s fair one judged him for it. Surprisingly, neither turned it into an argument.

““So they can get their things in order and do everything they want to do before they die.” Her mother turned then, fixing Blue with a very knowing gaze. She looked as impressive as someone could look when standing barefoot in jeans, holding a mug of tea reeking of rotting soil.

“I’m not going to stop you from trying to warn him, Blue. But you need to know he’s not going to believe you, even if you find him, and it’s probably not going to save him, even if he knows. You might keep him from doing something stupid. Or you might just ruin the last few months of his life.”

“You’re a Pollyanna,” Blue snapped. But she knew Maura was right — at least about the first part. Most everyone who met her thought her mother did parlor tricks for a living. What did Blue think she would do — track down an Aglionby student, tap on the window of his Land Rover or Lexus, and warn him to have his brakes checked and life-insurance policy updated?”

Adam snickered. Everyone looked at him. “Sorry just.. had a visual of Gansey in a Land Rover and Ronan in a Lexus.

Ronan wrinkled his nose. “I wouldn’t be caught dead.”

Gansey enjoyed the implication that his choice of car contrasted from the image Blue had of someone like him back then. Oh how he loved the Pig…
 
“I probably can’t stop you from meeting him anyway,” Maura said. “I mean, if Neeve is right about why you saw him. You’re fated to meet him.”

“Fate,” Blue replied, glowering at her mother, “is a very weighty word to throw around before breakfast.”

“Everyone else,” said Maura, “had breakfast a very long time ago.”

The stairs creaked as Neeve returned. “Wrong number,” she said in her affectless way. “Do you get many?”

“We’re one number off from a gentlemen escort company,” Maura replied.

“Ah,” Neeve said. “That explains it. Blue,” she added, as she settled back down at the table again, “if you’d like, I can try to see what killed him.”

This got both Maura’s and Blue’s attention in a hurry.

“Yes,” Blue said.

Maura started to reply, then merely pressed her lips back together.
 
 “

Neeve asked, “Do we have any grape juice?”

Puzzled, Blue went to the fridge and held up a jug questioningly. “Cran- grape?”

“That will work fine.”

Maura, her face still complicated, reached into the cupboard and drew out a dark blue salad bowl. She set it in front of Neeve, not gently.

“I won’t be responsible for anything that you see,” Maura said.

Blue asked, “What? What is that supposed to mean?”

Neither of them answered.

With a soft smile on her soft face, Neeve poured the juice into the bowl

until it reached the edge. Maura turned off the light switch. The outside suddenly seemed vivid in comparison to the dim kitchen. The April-bright trees pressed against the windows of the breakfast area, green leaf upon green leaf upon glass, and Blue was suddenly very aware of being surrounded by trees, of having a sense of being in the middle of a still wood.

“If you are going to watch, please be quiet,” Neeve remarked, looking at no one in particular. Blue jerked out a chair and sat. Maura leaned on the counter and crossed her arms. It was rare to see Maura upset but not doing something about it.

Neeve asked, “What was his name again?”

“He only said Gansey.” She felt self-conscious saying his name.”

“Gansey”, he remembered himself saying. “That’s all there is.” That was all there was. 
 
Somehow the idea that she would have a hand in his life or his death made his nominal existence in this kitchen her responsibility.

“That’s enough.”

Neeve leaned over the bowl, her lips moving, her dark reflection moving slowly in the bowl. Blue kept thinking of what her mother had said:

I won’t be responsible for anything that you see.

It made this thing they did seem bigger than it usually felt. Further away from a trick of nature and closer to a religion.

Finally, Neeve murmured. Though Blue couldn’t hear any particular meaning in the wordless sound, Maura looked abruptly triumphant.
 
 “

Well,” Neeve said. “This is a thing.”

She said it like, “This is a thing,” and Blue already knew how that turned out.

“What did you see?” Blue asked. “How did he die?”

Neeve didn’t take her eyes off Maura. She was asking a question, somehow, at the same time that she answered. “I saw him. And then he disappeared. Into absolutely nothing.”

Maura flipped her hands. Blue knew the gesture well. Her mother had used it to end many an argument after she’d delivered a winning line. Only this time the winning line had been delivered by a bowl of cran-grape juice, and Blue had no idea what it meant.

Neeve said, “One moment he was there, and the next, he didn’t exist.”

“It happens,” Maura said. “Here in Henrietta. There is some place — or places — that I can’t see. Other times, I see” — and here she didn’t look at Blue in such a way that Blue noticed that her mother was trying hard not to look at her — “things I wouldn’t expect.”

“Was that about Artemus?” asked Blue. “Gwenllian? Mr. Gray?”
 
“A little of all of it,” replied Maura evasively. “But at that point I was most focused on Artemis. On what directly concerned you.”
 
It had turned all of the above concerned Blue, but that was obvious.
 
Declan’s girlfriend who was

not

a blonde named Ashley furrowed her brow. “Who is Artemus?”
 
“Butternut.” said Calla evasively.
 
“Blue’s father,” supplied Gansey.
 
“A miserable little worm eating his own tail.” exclaimed Gwenllian.
 
“So like most father’s?” asked Hennessy. 
 
“Affirmative.” Adam agreed.
 
Declan looked like he was torn on whether to say something or not. It was uncharacteristic of Declan to know to hold back his opinion of Niall Lynch for Ronan’s sake, and Gansey felt a spark of happiness at the improvement. 
 
“

Now Blue was recalling the countless times her mother had insisted that they stay in Henrietta, even as it became more expensive to live here, even when opportunities to go to other towns opened up. Blue had once intercepted a set of e-mails on her mother’s computer; one of Maura’s male clients had ardently begged Maura to bring Blue “and whatever else you cannot live without” to his row house in Baltimore. In the reply, Maura had sternly informed him that this was not a possibility, for many reasons, chief of which that she would not leave Henrietta and least of which that she didn’t know if he was an ax murderer. He had e-mailed back only a sad-face smiley. Blue always wondered what became of him.”

“Hmph. That was before you brought home an actual axe murderer.” Calla grumbled, with a withering side eye towards Mr. Gray. Gansey admired Mr. Gray’s ability to look totally unfazed by it. He gazed at Maura, eyes burning steadily.

“I feel almost blessed to be the first, considering the competition.”

“Hey,” said Blue. “I like you, but  don’t flirt with my mom in front of me.” 
 
“

I would like to know what you saw,” Blue said. “What is ‘nothing’?”

Neeve said, “I was following the boy we saw last night to his death. I felt it was close, chronologically, but then he disappeared into someplace I couldn’t see. I don’t know how to explain it. I thought it was me.”

“It’s not,” Maura said. When she saw that Blue was still curious, she explained, “It’s like when there’s no picture on the television but you can tell it’s still on. That’s what it looks like. I’ve never seen someone go into it before, though.”

“Well, he went into it.” Neeve pushed the bowl away from her. “You said that’s not all. What else will that show me?”

Maura said, “Channels that don’t show up on basic cable.”

Neeve tapped her beautiful fingers on the table, just once, and then she said, “You didn’t tell me about this before.”

“It didn’t seem relevant,” Maura replied.

“A place where young men can disappear seems quite relevant. Your daughter’s skill also seems quite relevant.” Neeve leveled her eternal gaze on Maura, who pushed off the counter and turned away.”

“So the place is Cabeswater,” Adam said in that definitive way he answered one question as a warm up to several follow ups. God, Gansey had missed him. “But once the ley line woke up Persephone was able to scry into Cabeswater with me. And Lindenmere never felt like a void, even if it’s harder for me to connect with than Cabeswater. Is that just because my sacrifice was to Cabeswater?” 
 
“There were multiple factors,” admitted Maura. “Only time will tell about some of them. We don’t know for sure whether or not you had psychic inclinations before Cabeswater, although I know Persephone was inclined to think yes.”
 
“I don’t see how I could.” said Adam flatly. “It’s genetic, right? Magic isn’t the type of thing my parents were predisposed towards.”
 
“Maybe it skipped a generation.” offered Maura. “It happens, even if Blue’s case is very different. Speaking of which: have you ever taken Blue to Lindenmere? Perhaps she would have elevated your connection to it.”

Gansey knew this logic because Blue herself had groused to him about not being invited.

“Jane, we’re not even in Henrietta. They can’t invite us because of geography.” 
 
Blue had rolled her eyes. “We aren’t so far away from Virginia, with the car Ronan gave me we could go back to see the new forest in person. But he doesn’t seem to want me there. And you

know

Adam knows that I would be useful there, so it is personal.”
 
“Maybe this is just their thing,” Gansey offered. “Now that they’re dating. Like, Ronan created this forest consciously, not by accident, for them to be together there. It makes sense they don’t want us around.” 
 
Blue cast him her withering glare. It didn’t liquify his organs quite the way Calla’s did, but it was still terrifying. She was his terrifying, magnificent, exquisite creature. She was like a piranha. 
 
“We’re also dating, but that’s no reason to be exclusionary.” said Blue. “We always went to Cabeswater, the four of us. Of course we can’t always go to Lindenmere together but we should at least get to visit a couple times. And Henry goes practically everywhere with us these days. ”

“I’m sure next summer we’ll all go there together, and you can make things loud for Adam then.” Gansey reassured her. “You two do the tarot readings over the phone and stuff right? For Adam that still shows how much he trusts you. He values your skills just as much as I do.”

Blue’s gaze grew still more withering.

“What-“ started Gansey, then he blushed furiously. “

Oh.

I mean not

those

types of skills, I mean Adam and I do the tarot reading thing too even though I’m not an amplifier but because you are one he values your-“

“I get it.” She laughed. Blue laughed like nobody else. He remembered meeting that boy who’d been struck by lightning and survived, how he’d described the feeling to Gansey as “like I was made of air and hurtling towards earth, but the impact never came”. That was how he felt listening to Blue laugh for just him.

“Okay, I can try to let Adam off the hook until after our trip. Do you want to go to dinner? Henry said he saw a Mexican place nearby that looked good.”

“Mmm. Yeah, let’s meet Henry at his room then head out.” Gansey concurred. The hostel room was dilapidated and gray, far from the lavish 5 star suites he was used too, but with Blue here that didn’t matter. They stole a few kisses before going to meet Henry, making up for the lost time now that there was no fear of death involved. That had been a little before “Blue & Gansey, Henry” had turned into “Blue & Gansey & Henry”. Now, he seeks Henry’s gaze across the room. He finds Henry looking back, gaze full of contempt. Gansey aches from wanting so many things that tangle. 
 
Adam looked contemplative. “Do you and Calla feel a difference between Lindenmere and Cabeswater?”
 
“I feel a difference,” admitted Maura. “It’s the difference between a waterfall and a river; they’re both powerful and moving in a distinct direction, but you can see the end of one and not the other.” 
 
“Are you saying one is inferior?” Asked Ronan, in that casual, gruff way of his that underlined insecurity, jealousy. Gansey was confused about who or what he’d be jealous of in this instance though, so maybe he just still didn’t like the psychic women much? 
 
““

I have work this afternoon,” Blue said finally, when she realized that the conversation had perished. The reflection of the leaves outside rippled slowly in the bowl, a forest still, but darkly.

“Are you really going to work in that?” Maura asked.

Blue looked at her clothing. It involved a few thin layering shirts, including one she had altered using a method called shredding. “What’s wrong with it?”

Maura shrugged. “Nothing. I always wanted an eccentric daughter. I just never realized how well my evil plans were working. How late do you work?”

“Seven. Well, probably later. Cialina is supposed to work until seven thirty but she’s been saying all week that her brother got her tickets for Evening and if only someone would take over the last half hour ...”

“You could say no. What’s Evening? Is that the one where all the girls die with hatchets?”

“That’s the one.” As Blue slurped down her yogurt, she spared a quick glance at Neeve, who was still frowning at the bowl of juice, pushed just out of her reach. “Okay, I’m out.”

She pushed back her chair. Maura was quiet in that heavy way that was louder than talking. Blue took her time tossing her yogurt into the trash can and dropping her spoon into the sink beside her mother, then she turned to go upstairs for her shoes.

“Blue,” Maura said finally. “I don’t have to tell you not to kiss anyone, right?”

This would have been the morning before he and Blue met. He allowed a smile to overtake his face at that, to think they’d both had such ordinary mornings before the unforgettable started to occur, even after the unforgettable had already happened on St. Mark’s Eve. Then he realized something; that meant their meeting was probably recorded in this book! Their meeting where he’d humiliated himself… oh, he wasn’t happy at all now. Was there any chance the book would skip over it completely? And skip over Blue and Adam dating? And maybe skip over him dying too? In delineating order of priority, of course

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“

Adam Parrish had been Gansey’s friend for eighteen months, and he knew that certain things came along with that friendship. Namely, believing in the supernatural, tolerating Gansey’s troubled relationship with money, and co- existing with Gansey’s other friends. The former two were problematic only when they took time away from Aglionby, and the latter was only problematic when it was Ronan Lynch.”

There were a few guffaws from Mathew, Hennessy, Blue and Henry. Gansey and Jordan both looked amused, and Declan snorted in either derision or humor or both. Adam Parrish in the present knew immediately that he was not going to be a fan of his own thoughts being read aloud. When it had first been announced that these were four books about “Gansey, Blue, Adam and Ronan” he had immediately latched onto the order. It made sense that the note would list the characters from most important to least important, that was what he did when he had to write a literature paper. That meant that Gansey and then Blue were the main characters, while he and Ronan were secondary. 
 
He’d felt that rush of bitterness which was all too frequent in high school; of course Gansey would be the lead, while Adam played second fiddle. Then, once it became clear that the main characters would alternate perspectives, Adam felt he had less cause to complain. He had no interest in his personal private business being aired, and for once he felt that being considered less important than Gansey could be alright with him. Maybe the story just being about Gansey and Blue could be better, even if it was going to be humiliating when he and Blue dated while she knew Gansey was her true love. Of course, the world wasn’t going to spare him anything. 
 
Next to him, Ronan quirked a furious dark eyebrow at him. “I was “problematic” huh?”

“You still are.” Adam shot back.

Ronan smirked devilishly. “Glad to know I got under your skin, Parrish.”

Adam’s heart ached. He’d missed this, the trading of barbs which were light fuses, not explosives. His boyfriend’s casually cruel warmth. The last few weeks had been.. good, it had been good that neither of them were in a coma anymore and the world wasn’t ending and they were both alive and present. But there was a stiltedness to it all sometimes. Adam wondered if it was because he was going against his natural instincts when he forgave Ronan. He didn’t regret forgiving him, and he

had

forgiven him … he’d made the right decision there, yes he had. He repeated the mantra in his head

don’t fight with Ronan, don’t fight with Ronan

.  
 
“

Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn’t know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.”

It was a bizarre experience, listening to what he’d thought of Ronan three years ago. In some ways he knows he misjudged him. A part of him has always found Ronan Lynch fascinating, he can admit to himself looking back. Fascinating and attractive. Back then, he’d also found him to be an exhausting presence. Had been disdainful of his priorities, or what he’d seen as a lack theroff. 
 
To be so wealthy in both time and money, and so wasteful with both.. it had made Ronan easy to write off to his sixteen year old self, to whom ambition was everything. He’d had limited reserves in his emotional bank, and hadn’t seen Ronan as worth the investment. Yet, hadn’t Adam fallen anyway, cut himself on Ronan’s blunt edges?

Don’t break him, Adam.

What a joke that had turned out to be. And how had Gansey gotten to thinking of Adam as the ticking time bomb, the one who would hurt Ronan, when this was how he’d thought of Ronan and an unknown stranger back then? Why did the stranger merit concern whereas Adam didn’t? Adam swallowed down all his bitter anger at both Ronan and Gansey; that wasn’t important right now, the important thing was the problem at hand. He was trapped in some spell that forced him, his closest friends and their families, and several people he didn’t know very well to relive high school, the best and worst time of his life. 
 
The note had said paying attention to the story would help them figure out what was going on. Hopefully that meant it would  help them find out who was responsible for the note and how to end whatever enchantment this was. Adam had to pay close attention and keep a cool head, not get sidetracked by emotions the past brought up.

“Sometimes Adam wondered if Ronan had been like Ronan before the Lynch brothers’ father had died, but only Gansey had known him then. Well, Gansey and Declan, but Declan seemed incapable of handling his brother…”

“Hey,” Declan said indignantly, glowering at Adam. He still wasn’t happy with him for what he’d said while Ronan was in a coma. Well, Adam wasn’t going to apologize. He hadn't even exactly apologized to Ronan… or had he? He had felt that Ronan was sorry, when they’d been in magic spirit mode, and knew Ronan had felt that Adam was sorry too, but it was hard to grasp onto who was sorry for what when there had been no words involved, no real apology.
 
 In the immediate aftermath of them both almost dying and the world almost ending,  what had transpired seemed enough to mean mutual forgiveness, which translates into togetherness. And Adam had missed Ronan, so much. He’d let himself ride the wave of not having to miss him anymore. 
 
“Well, he’s not wrong,” said Mathew. “You don’t seem to be able to handle much.”

Declan and Ronan both looked taken aback by this from sunny Mathew, although Ronan looked pleased while Declan decidedly did not.

“..which was why he’d been careful to schedule his visit while Ronan was in class.

“Outside of 1136 Monmouth, Adam waited on the second-story landing with Declan and his girlfriend. Girlfriend, in fluttering white silk, looked a lot like Brianna, or Kayleigh, or whoever Declan’s last girlfriend had been. They all had blond, shoulder-length hair and eyebrows that matched

Declan’s dark leather shoes.”

“So you mostly dated white girls before me,” said Jordan teasingly.

Hennessy snorted. “Mostly dated white blonde girls who look just like

her.”

She gestured towards Mor, who indeed had ash blonde hair and very dark eyebrows. And who was a carbon copy of Aurora Lynch. “I guess you cured Mr. Oedpius, congratulations. Although I guess this makes him slightly less boring..”

“Oh, like you're one to talk, Miss Mommy Issues.” Scoffed Jordan.

Adam was a little fascinated by the two women. How could he not be; he’d met dreamers and their dreams but never their dreams who were doubles. And the fact that Hennessy willingly kept her double around perplexed him, how could she stand Jordan’s presence? The presence of someone who was as far as he could tell, a nicer and more palatable version of Hennessy herself? 
 
       Adam knew that if someone like that existed for him he would despise them, and that only one of them could survive or he’d never be able to trust himself or his life. There was also the fact they had saved his life, and so he owed them. Both of them. And they were both very beautiful, although Hennessy was also terrible to be around. Yet Ronan liked her. Actually, Ronan probably liked her because she was terrible. 
 
      “

Declan’s dark leather shoes. Declan, wearing the suit that his senior-year political internship required, looked thirty. Adam wondered if he would look that official in a suit, or if his childhood would betray him and render him ridiculous.

“Thanks for meeting us,” Declan said.

Adam replied, “No problem.” Really, the reason he had agreed to walk with Declan and Girlfriend from Aglionby had nothing to do with kindness and everything to do with a nagging hunch. Lately, Adam had felt as if someone had been … looking in on their search for the ley line. He wasn’t quite sure how to put this feeling into concrete terms. It was a stare caught out of the corner of his eye, a set of scuffed footprints in the stairwell that didn’t seem to belong to any of the boys, a library clerk telling him an arcane text had been checked out by someone else right after he had returned it. He didn’t want to trouble Gansey with it until he was certain, though. Things seemed to weigh heavily enough on Gansey as it was.”

“And you were right,” said Gansey. Adam blinked. “About the search,” Gansey continued, “you were right that I should have been more cautious with who I spoke to about Glendower.” He smiled hesitantly at Adam. It was that thing he did after upsetting him, bringing Adam that smile and a concession about something unrelated to what they’d most recently fought about. Adam doesn’t always accept it, but more often than not he does. He nods in acknowledgement of Gansey’s psuedo apology. Adam is aware that it’s not entirely reasonable to feel anger at Gansey for a passing thought he had two years ago, one that no one ever could have expected would be read aloud. It’s just that back when he’d first met Gansey, he’d constantly been thinking about how Gansey must view him and his accent and his frayed sweater and his job and his… everything that made him so clearly inferior to someone like Gansey. Had been so taken aback by how kind Gansey was to him, how he didn’t seem to judge him and even seemed appreciative of things like his mechanic background. 
 
      Yet there must be something behind that, he’d thought? So he pushed and pushed to see some of that ugliness, and sometimes he’d been proven a little right

I’m sorry your father never taught you the meaning of repugnant

, but more of the time he’d been proven wrong, had seen again and again how Gansey’s friendship really was that. Not pity or control, but friendship. Love. Platonic love, of course. High school has been a constant cycle of having to remind himself that Gansey really was his best friend, that he really had Adam’s best interests at heart and could be trusted, that Adam wasn’t stupid for wanting to believe that was genuine. That it wasn’t all a beautiful illusion that could shatter at any moment, leaving Adam to pick up the broken glass. Because of that, any confirmation of Gansey seeing his dirt poor roots felt like an insult, it cut deep. 
 
      “Well, sometimes you telling people everything comes in handy.” Adam admitted. Henry might not be his favorite person, but he knew Gansey confiding in him had ultimately been for the better. Gansey beamed that smile that could have powered the sun.

“It wasn’t that Adam wondered if Declan was spying on them. Adam knew he was, but he believed that had everything to do with Ronan and nothing to do with the ley line. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to do a bit of observation.

Currently, Girlfriend was glancing around in the furtive way that was more noticeable for its furtiveness. 1136 Monmouth was a hungry-looking brick factory, gutted and black-eyed, growing out of an overgrown lot “that took up nearly all of a block. A clue to the building’s original identity was painted on the eastern side of the building: MONMOUTH MANUFACTURING. But for all their research, neither Gansey nor Adam had been able to figure out precisely what Monmouth had manufactured. Something that had required twenty-five-foot ceilings and wide open spaces; something that had left moisture stains on the floor and gouges in the brick walls. Something that the world no longer needed.

At the top of the second-floor staircase, Declan whispered all this knowledge into Girlfriend’s ear, and she giggled nervously, as if it were a secret. Adam watched the way Declan’s lip barely brushed the bottom of Girlfriend’s earlobe as he spoke to her; he looked away just as Declan glanced up.

Adam was very good at watching without being watched. Only Gansey ever seemed to catch him at it.”

Adam really didn’t want to make eye contact with either Declan or Gansey at this moment. He hesitantly looked at Ronan, those ice blue eyes were vehemently judging him. “You were ogling my brother,” he muttered in disgust.

“I was sixteen! I hate your brother now.” said Adam.

“Thank god.” said Declan. “I hate you too, just so you know.”

“Oh what a tangled web your family weaves.” Hennessy looks highly amused.

“

Girlfriend pointed out the cracked window toward the lot below; Declan followed her gaze to the black, angry curves Gansey and Ronan had left doing donuts. Declan’s expression hardened; even if they were all Gansey’s doing, he’d assume it was Ronan.

Adam had knocked already, but he knocked again — one long, two short, his signal. “It will be messy,” he apologized.

This was more for the benefit of Declan’s girlfriend than it was for Declan, who knew full well what state the apartment would be in. Adam suspected Declan somehow found the mess charming to outsiders; Declan was “calculating, if anything. His goal was Ashley’s virtue, and every step of tonight would have been planned with that in mind, even this brief stop at Monmouth Manufacturing.”

“Your boyfriend is looking like more and more of a charmer,” Hennessy commented dryly to Jordan.
 
      “First of all you are one to talk ,” said Jordan. “Second of all, hearsay.” 
 
     Declan glared at Adam, then Hennessy, then back again. 
 
     “

There was still no answer.

“Should I call?” Declan asked.

Adam tried the knob, which was locked, and then jimmied it with his knee, lifting the door on its hinges a bit. It swung open. Girlfriend made a noise of approval, but the success of the break-in had more to do with the door’s failings than Adam’s strengths.

They stepped into the apartment and Girlfriend tipped her head back, back, back. The high ceiling soared above them, exposed iron beams holding up the roof. Gansey’s invented apartment was a dreamer’s laboratory. The entire second floor, thousands of square feet, spread out before them. Two of the walls were made up of old windows — dozens of tiny, warped panes, except for a few clear ones Gansey had replaced — and the other two walls were covered with maps: the mountains of Virginia, of Wales, of Europe. Marker lines arced across each of them. Across the floor, a telescope peered at the western sky; at its feet lay piles of arcane electronics meant to measure magnetic activity.

And everywhere, everywhere, there were books. Not the tidy stacks of an intellectual attempting to impress, but the slumping piles of a scholar obsessed.”

“Oh,” said Gansey, sounding surprised but pleased. “I like the way you describe it very much.”

Adam was glad. However, he was growing more and more aware of how constantly his narration was referring to or relating things to Gansey… surely no one else would pay much attention to that right? And this was the introduction to Monmouth so it made sense to be thinking about Gansey a lot during it. There was nothing out of the ordinary for anyone to think too hard about.

“Some of the books were dictionaries for the languages that some of the other books were in. Some of “the books were actually Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Editions.

Adam felt the familiar pang. Not jealousy, just wanting. One day, he’d have enough money to have a place like this. A place that looked on the outside like Adam looked on the inside.”

Adam steadfastly refuses to meet Gansey’s gaze.

“A small voice within Adam asked whether he would ever look this grand on the inside, or if it was something you had to be born into. Gansey was the way he was because he had lived with money when he was small, like a virtuoso placed at a piano bench as soon as he could sit. Adam, a latecomer, a usurper, still stumbled over his clumsy Henrietta accent and kept his change in a cereal box under his bed.”

“Whatever you have to say just say it so we can move on.” said Adam in a long breath. 
 
      Gansey pursed his lips. “Just that, you’ve always been that grand Adam. I hope you get to have that, I’m glad if you do have a place that’s this way for you now, but it doesn’t change who you are.”
 
       He’s right in some ways and wrong in others, Adam doesn’t trust himself to speak so he gives a jerk of his head as acknowledgement, but rolls his eyes a little. Gansey seems to have the sense to realize this went over better than it would have in high school, and that he shouldn’t push more. He’d learned, at least a little.

“Beside Declan, Girlfriend held her hands to her chest in an unconscious reaction to masculine nakedness. In this case, the naked party was not a person, but a thing: Gansey’s bed, nothing but two mattresses on a bare metal frame, sitting baldly in the middle of the room, barely made. It was somehow intimate in its complete lack of privacy.”

At this, some strange looks were directed Adam’s way by Declan, Ronan, Gansey, Jordan, Blue, Helen and a handful of others. “Ashley told me the bed looked disgusting,” said Declan.

“Of course,” said Jordan. “Who sleeps on mattresses without sheets or anything… in the living room? That’s so appalling.”

Adam willed himself to keep a neutral expression but felt heat rise to his face. “Well, I was just observing how she looked at it. Maybe I got the wrong impression.”

“Fascinating,” said Helen. “But more importantly Dick, I hope you aren’t planning to have the same sleeping arrangements now that you have a serious girlfriend. After this trip is over you need to sort that out.”

“I like Monmouth,” said Blue. “I always have, although of course with college we won’t be moving back there permanently…”

Gansey appeared startled. “We won’t? Oh yes,” he recovered quickly, “of course we won’t…”
 
      “

Gansey himself sat at an old desk with his back to them, gazing out an east-facing window and tapping a pen. His fat journal lay open near him, the pages fluttering with glued-in book passages and dark with notes. Adam was struck, as he occasionally was, by Gansey’s agelessness: an old man in a young body, or a young man in an old man’s life.”

Ronan and Blue both snickered at the reference to Gansey being like an old man.

“You make him sound like a vampire,” remarked Henry. “You’d look good all sparkly.” he said to Gansey.

Gansey flushed a becoming shade of pink.

Orla clapped her hands. “Ooh, are you team Edward or team Jacob?”

“Edward, of course.” said Henry. “But Rosalie is the best character.”

“Obviously,” agree Orla.

Blue made a disgusted noise, “Orla, you are literally magic. Why do you watch those terrible vampire movies?”

Orla rolled her eyes. “I know how to have fun, unlike some people.”

“I have a lot of fun.” said Blue. “You should have been with us on Mardi Gras and you’d know just how much fun I can be.”

“She really was a sight to behold there,” Gansey agreed.

“Anyway,” interjected Henry dryly, “Blue, it’s not like you don’t love Charmed, and you live with a family of magical women.”

“That’s completely different.” Blue replied indignantly. “Charmed is nothing like Twilight.”

“They’re both fun.” Orla seemed unbothered. Adam was grateful for the segue away from what his own perspective.
 
          “

It’s us,” Adam said. “When Gansey didn’t reply, Adam led the way to his oblivious friend. Girlfriend made a variety of noises that all began with the letter O. With a variety of cereal boxes, packing containers, and house paint, Gansey had built a knee-high replica of the town of Henrietta in the center of the room, and so the three visitors were forced to walk down Main Street in order to reach the desk. Adam knew the truth: These buildings were a symptom of Gansey’s insomnia. A new wall for every night awake.

Adam stopped just beside Gansey. The area around him smelled strongly of mint from the leaf he chewed absently.

Adam tapped the earbud in Gansey’s right ear and his friend startled.

Gansey jumped to his feet. “Why, hello.”

As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.”

Adam desperately hoped whatever being had forced this upon him would have the decency to let him sink into the floor and disappear. And then allow him to kill them, slowly and painfully.

Ronan snorted in amusement. “Quite a description.”

“Oh, fuck off.” Adam rolled his eyes. “I bet your chapters will be worse when we get there.”

Blue and Henry were also giving him scrutinizing looks he did his best to ignore. Helen looked like a cat who’s just been gifted a canary, Hennessy had a devilish grin on her face and Declan appeared silently judging.

Gansey however just seemed baffled. “I’ve never thought of myself as seeming like that. Or looking like that.”

Adam wants to scream thinking about Gansey in his chapter calling himself “not unpleasant looking”. Did Gansey not own a mirror? Maybe people at a certain level of hotness didn’t even register their own hotness. Except no because Ronan and Helen definitely realize how hot they are, as do plenty of other people, it’s just a Gansey thing then.

Ugh.

He needs to get it together.

Girlfriend stared.

Adam remembered finding him intimidating when he first met him. There were two Ganseys: the one who lived inside his skin, and the one Gansey put on in the morning when he slid his wallet into the back pocket of his chinos. The former was troubled and passionate, with no discernible accent to Adam’s ears, and the latter bristled with latent power as he greeted people with the slippery, handsome accent of old Virginia money. It was a mystery to Adam how he could not seem to see both versions of Gansey at the same time.

“I didn’t hear you knock,” Gansey said unnecessarily. He knocked fists with Adam. Coming from Gansey, the gesture was at once charming and self-conscious, a borrowed phrase of a another language.

“Ashley, this is Gansey,” Declan said, in his pleasant, neutral voice. It was a voice that reported tornado damage and cold fronts. Narrated side effects of small blue pills. Explained the safety procedures of this 747 we’re flying in today. He added, “Dick Gansey.”

If Gansey was thinking Declan’s girlfriend was expendable, a renewable resource, he didn’t show it. He merely said, voice just a little chilly as he corrected, “As Declan knows, it’s my father who’s Dick. For me, it’s just Gansey.”

Ashley looked more shocked than amused. “Dick?”

“Family name,” Gansey said, with the weary air of someone trotting out a tired joke. “I try my best to ignore it.”

“You’re Aglionby, right? This place is crazy. Why don’t you live on the school grounds?” Ashley asked.

“Because I own this building,” Gansey said. “It’s a better investment than paying for dorm housing. You can’t sell your dorm after you’re done with school. And where did that money go? Nowhere.”

Dick Gansey III hated to be told that he sounded like Dick Gansey II, but right then, he did. Both of them could trot out logic on a nice little leash, wearing a smart plaid jacket, when they wanted to.

Helen snorted. “You’ve got his number there, Parrish.”

“Hey,” proclaimed Gansey.

“God,” Ashley remarked. She glanced at Adam. Her eyes didn’t linger, but still, he remembered the fray on the shoulder of his sweater. Don’t pick at it. She’s not looking at it. No one else notices it.

He sees Blue shift uncomfortably out of the corner of his eye.
 
      “

With effort, Adam squared his shoulders and tried to inhabit the uniform as easily as Gansey or Ronan.

“Ash, you won’t believe why Gansey came here, of all places,” Declan said. “Tell her, Gansey.”

Gansey couldn’t resist talking about Glendower. He never could. He asked, “How much do you know about Welsh kings?”

Ashley pursed her lips, her fingers pinching the skin at the base of her throat. “Mmmm. Llewellyn? Glendower? English Marcher lords?”

The smile on Gansey’s face could have lit coal mines. ”

Ugh, there it is again! Adam cursed his past self for being so… gushy.

“Adam hadn’t known about Llewellyn or Glendower when he’d first met Gansey. Gansey had needed to describe how Owain Glyndr — Owen Glendower to non-Welsh speakers — a medieval Welsh noble, had fought against the English for Welsh freedom and then, when capture seemed inevitable, disappeared from the island and from history altogether. “But Gansey never minded retelling the story. He’d related the events like they’d just happened, thrilled again by the magical signs that had accompanied Glendower’s birth, the rumors of his power of invisibility, the impossible victories against larger armies, and, finally, his mysterious escape. When Gansey spoke, Adam saw the green swell of the Welsh foothills, the wide glistening surface of the River Dee, the unforgiving northern mountains that Glendower vanished into. In Gansey’s stories, Owain Glyndr could never die.

Listening to him tell the story now, it was clear to Adam that Glendower was more than a historical figure to Gansey. He was everything Gansey wished he could be: wise and brave, sure of his path, touched by the supernatural, respected by all, survived by his legacy.”

looked touched, and a bit shaken. “I didn’t know I was so easy to read.”
 
     “Wow Adam,” said Gansey, sounding impressed. “I mean I knew you were observant but this is almost scary…”

Helen coughed. “Yeah. He’s certainly observant about some things.”

Adam ponders on the younger version of him. He feels both so far away from him and not nearly as changed or removed as he wants to be.

Ronan was watching him knowingly, and he had to resist the urge to snap at him. 
 
       “

Gansey, now fully warmed to his tale, enchanted again by the mystery of it, asked Ashley, “Have you heard of the legends of sleeping kings? The leg “legends that heroes like Llewellyn and Glendower and Arthur aren’t really dead, but are instead sleeping in tombs, waiting to be woken up?”

Ashley blinked vapidly, then said, “Sounds like a metaphor.”

Perhaps she wasn’t as dumb as they’d thought.”

“You are really judgemental of her,” grumbled Blue.

“It was both of us.” Adam defended.

“By ‘you’ I was referring to both of ya’ll.”

“We’re sorry, Jane,” said Gansey tiredly, but not insincerely.

“Sorry,” muttered Adam.
 
        “

Maybe so,” Gansey said. He made a grandiose gesture to the maps on the wall, covered with the ley lines he believed Glendower had traveled along. Sweeping up the journal behind him, he paged through maps and notes as examples. “I think Glendower’s body was brought over to the New World. Specifically, here. Virginia. I want to find where he’s buried.”

To Adam’s relief, Gansey left out the part about how he believed the legends that said Glendower was still alive, centuries later. He left out the part about how he believed the eternally sleeping Glendower would grant a favor to whoever woke him. He left out the part about how it haunted him, this need to find this long-lost “king. He left out the midnight phone calls to Adam when he couldn’t sleep for obsessing about his search. ”

Adam noticed Blue looking startled, then her expression grew to something partially perturbed, partially amused. She and Gansey locked eyes, and he blushed a little. What was that about?
 
       “

He left out the microfiche and the museums, the newspaper features and the metal detectors, the frequent flier miles and the battered foreign language phrase books.”

“Huh,” said Mathew. Everyone looked at him. “I guess I always thought you two,” he gestured from Adam to Gansey and back again, “weren’t that close? Like, I thought you were both Ronan’s friends and Gansey’s his best friend and Adam finally became his boyfriend after Ronan had a crush on him forever…”

“What?” asked Gansey. Adam had almost said the same thing but bit his tongue, do not engage. “Forever? Define forever.”

Ronan was scowling, an ‘I’m deeply uncomfortable’ scowl as opposed to his ‘aloof and unbothered’ scowl.

Mathew clearly noticed this and shifted uncomfortably. For someone who seemed so naive and like his head was in the clouds on a good day, Adam thought that the youngest Lynch brother picked up on others emotions quite well. So did Ronan, in a certain sense. As an only child Adam regarded Ronan’s relationship with his brothers with a combination of academic fascination, envy, and apprehension. He liked Mathew  more than he liked Declan, as everyone did, yet he was often nervous to interact with the youngest Lynch brother in a way he wasn’t with the eldest. Part of it was about where he came from, even though that also made him fascinating — he’s literally been made of Ronan. Did that make Ronan his father or god as well as his brother? Were they even brothers (he would never pose the latter question to Ronan of course, but he does wonder). Yet Mathew’s innocence was one that clearly should be protected, and Adam didn’t want to be responsible for sullying him in some way. How did Declan bear it?

“I might be wrong, it was just something I thought. Classic silly Mathew, not understanding something.” 
 
     Gansey looked unconvinced and continued frowning. Adam caught Mathew mouthing, “Sorry.” Ronan rolled his eyes in response.

“I just thought you were both always closer to Ronan than to each other.” finished Mathew. “I thought deklo thought that too?” 
 
      Declan gave him a withering side eye. “I didn’t waste my time in high school thinking about Ronan’s social life.”
 
       “That’s not true because…” Mathew began, then cut himself off. “Whatever you say.” 
 
      Gansey frowned. “Well yeah, I was friends with Adam and then eventually he became friends with Ronan and then more. And they’re both my best friends, it’s not especially complicated.” 
 
       “Did you ever have a favorite?” asked Hennessy.
 
        There was an awkward pause. “No, of course not.” said Gansey, affronted. “I’d never play favorites.” 
 
         “Excluding Sargento, you mean.” said Ronan. Adam had been thinking the same thing. 
 
         “That’s different,” said Gansey wearily. “I mean, I would never accuse one of you of playing favorites because you talk to each other about things you won’t talk to me about. You two are dating. That would be ridiculous.” The former sentence was spoken like a king, that wonderfully powerful voice that Adam would know anywhere. The latter two ran together more uncertainly, and it took Adam by surprise. Was Gansey… he didn’t think of Gansey as a jealous person the way he was or the way Ronan was, but perhaps them being together and having secrets from him did evoke discomfort. Adam knew at one point that would have vindictively pleased him, for Gansey to know he possessed something he didn’t control. Now Adam only felt a wary spark of concern, and he saw it reflected in Ronan’s eyes.

“You only assume he has a favorite because you would,” Ronan challenged Hennessy.

Jordan looked down at her hands, examining her palm.

“And he left out all the parts about magic and the ley line.

“That’s crazy,” Ashley said. Her eyes were locked on the journal. “Why do you think he’s here?”

There were two possible versions of this answer. One was grounded merely in history and was infinitely suitable for general consumption. The other added divining rods and magic to the equation. Some days, some rotten days, Adam believed the former, and only barely. But being Gansey’s friend meant that more often he hoped for the latter. This was where Ronan, much to Adam’s dissatisfaction, excelled: His belief in the supernatural explanation was unwavering. Adam’s faith was imperfect.”

“Well,” said Adam, “Now I know why. Cheater.” 
 
        “Sounds like someone was worried about not being the favorite. Teacher’s pet.” Ronan winked.
 
           “

Ashley, either because she was transient or because she’d been deemed skeptical, got the historical version. In his best professor voice, Gansey explained a bit about Welsh place names in the area, fifteenth-century artifacts found buried in Virginia soil, and historical support for an early, pre-Columbus Welsh landing in America.

Midway through the lecture, Noah — Monmouth Manufacturing’s reclusive third resident — emerged from the meticulous room directly next to the office Ronan had claimed as his bedroom. Noah’s bed shared the tiny space with a piece of mysterious equipment Adam guessed was some sort of printing press.”

Gansey’s brow furrowed handsomely. “I would definitely remember if another guy lived with me.”

“I would too.” grumbled Ronan.

“Noah, stepping farther into the room, didn’t so much smile at Ashley as goggle at her. He wasn’t the best with new people.

“That’s Noah,” Declan said. He said it in a way that confirmed Adam’s assumption: Monmouth Manufacturing and the boys who lived in it were a “tourist stop for Declan and Ashley, a conversation piece for a later dinner.

Declan shot Adam another dirty look.
 
      “

Noah extended his hand.

“Oh! Your hand is cold.” Ashley cupped her fingers against her shirt to warm them.

“I’ve been dead for seven years,” Noah said. “That’s as warm as they get.”

Noah, unlike his pristine room, always seemed a little grubby. There was something out of place about his clothing, his mostly combed-back fair hair. His unkempt uniform always made Adam feel a little less like he stuck out. It was hard to feel like part of the Aglionby crowd when standing next to Gansey, whose crisp-as-George-Washington white collared shirt alone cost more than Adam’s bicycle (anyone who said you couldn’t tell the difference between a shirt from the mall and a shirt made by a clever Italian man had never seen the latter), or even Ronan, who had spent nine hundred dollars on a tattoo merely to piss off his brother.”

“Of course you got it to piss him off.” Hennessy nodded like it all made sense. 
 
       Adam did think having someone like this around, someone unkempt and unassuming, would have made him feel better about measuring up next to Gansey and Ronan. It would have made him feel guilty he thought that way, but it did make him even more curious about this Noah. 
 
      “

Ashley’s obliging giggle was cut off as Ronan’s bedroom door opened. A cloud like there would never be sun again crossed Declan’s face.

Ronan and Declan Lynch were undeniably brothers, with the same dark brown hair and sharp nose, but Declan was solid where Ronan was brittle. Declan’s wide jaw and smile said, Vote for me while Ronan’s buzzed head and thin mouth warned that this species was poisonous.

“Ronan,” Declan said. On the phone with Adam earlier, he had asked, When will Ronan not be available? “I thought you had tennis.”

“I did,” Ronan replied.

There was a moment of silence, where Declan considered what he wanted to say in front of Ashley, and Ronan enjoyed the effect that awkward silence had on his brother. The two elder Lynch brothers — there were three total at Aglionby — had been at odds for as long as Adam had known them. Unlike most of the world, Gansey preferred Ronan to his elder “brother Declan, and so the lines had been drawn. Adam suspected Gansey’s preference was because Ronan was earnest even if he was horrible, and with Gansey, honesty was golden.”

Adam bit his lip, thinking about his less than stellar honesty track record of late. He knew he could trust Ronan not to tell, but he still felt guilty for reasons he’d rather not confront.
 
“

Declan waited a second too long to speak, and Ronan crossed his arms over his chest. “You’ve got quite the guy here, Ashley. You’ll have a great night with him and then some other girl can have a great night with him tomorrow.”

Hennessy shook with mirth. Jordan looked like she was trying not to smile.

“For god sake,” muttered Declan.

“  A fly buzzed against a windowpane far above their heads. Behind Ronan, his door, covered with photocopies of his speeding tickets, drifted closed.  Ashley’s mouth didn’t make an O so much as a sideways D. A second too late, Gansey punched Ronan in the arm.

“He’s sorry,” Gansey said. Ashley’s mouth was slowly closing. She blinked at the map of Wales and back to Ronan. He’d chosen his weapon well: only the truth, untempered by kindness.

“So it is the truth.” Hennessy crowed.

“Heresay,” said Jordan and Declan in unison. Declan looked annoyed at himself for responding.
 
“

My brother is —” said Declan. But he didn’t finish. There wasn’t anything he could say that Ronan hadn’t already proven. He said, “We’re going now. Ronan, I think you need to reconsider your —” But again, he had no words to end the sentence. His brother had taken all the catchy ones.

Declan snagged Ashley’s hand, jerking her attention away and toward the apartment door. “Declan,” Gansey started.

“Don’t try to make this better,” Declan warned. As he pulled Ashley out into the tiny stairwell and down the stairs, Adam heard the beginnings of damage control: He has problems, I told you, I tried to make sure he wouldn’t be here, he’s the one who found Dad, it messed him up, let’s go get seafood instead, don’t you think we look like lobster tonight? We do.

The moment the apartment door was closed, Gansey said, “Come on, Ronan.”

Ronan’s expression was still incendiary. His code of honor left no room for “infidelity, for casual relationships. It wasn’t that he didn’t condone them; he couldn’t understand them.”

“That’s so admirable,” breathed Orla.

Blue shot her cousin a withering glare. “He’s gay, and taken.”

“So he’s a man-whore. It’s not your problem,” Gansey said. ”

“Hey,” exclaimed Declan.

Gansey looked appropriately chagrined. “Sorry about that, Declan.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Hennessy’s eyes shone with mirth. “This makes me dislike you slightly less.”

“You dislike me?” Gansey looked crestfallen. He was used to being liked by everyone, so Adam could see why this caught him off guard.

“You aren’t the type I would like. But neither is he.” Hennessy jerked her chin at Declan.

“I don’t know what you have against me…” Declan started. Adam knew that wasn’t true, Declan was certainly perceptive enough to tell that Hennessy was resentful of him for holding Jordan’s attention.
 
“I’m just against the concept of you, it’s nothing personal.” said Hennessy, forced smoothness in an otherwise rough tone. “No actually, I lied. It’s very personal.”
 
Jordan made a dismissive noise. “You can’t just accept someone other than you makes me happy, can you?”

“Oh, it’s not about that.”

“You lying hypocrite —“

“I thought that did it for you, eh?”

Jordan changed tactics, sliding a hand into Declan’s and leaning into him. “Ignore her.”

As an expert on jealousy, Adam recognized it in the tight set to Hennessy’s chin and lips, how she attempted to look unaffected by the display yet shot looks at the couple through the corners of her eye. Adam was rather impressed by how well Jordan pulled the maneuver off. It was clearly to send a message to Hennessy, yet she didn’t look her way at all.

“Ronan was not really Gansey’s problem, either, in Adam’s opinion, but they’d had this argument before.

One of Ronan’s eyebrows was raised, sharp as a razor.”

“Your thoughts on me are real flattering, Parrish.”

Ronan’s tone was gruff and amused, but was that underlying hurt? Adam chose not to dignify it with a response if so; he wasn’t sorry for those thoughts. They’d been true to him at the time. They weren’t untrue now. He remembered his words to Declan… remembered returning the watch…
 
“

Gansey strapped his journal closed. “That doesn’t work on me. She had nothing to do with you and Declan.” He said you and Declan like it was a physical object, something you could pick up and look underneath. “You treated her badly. You made the rest of us look bad.”

Ronan looked chastened, but Adam knew better. Ronan wasn’t sorry for his behavior; he was only sorry that Gansey had been there to see him. What lived between the Lynch brothers was dark enough to hide anyone else’s feelings.”

“Amen to that,” muttered Mathew.

Ronan and Declan looked at him questioningly.

“Just,” Mathew muttered, “it was exhausting having to deal with your almost never speaking to each other and fighting when you did.”

“We’re trying to do better.” Declan reassured Mathew.

“Hmm.” was all Mathew replied with.

“But surely Gansey knew that as well as Adam. He ran his thumb back and “He ran his thumb back and forth across his bottom lip, a habit he never seemed to notice and Adam never bothered to point out. ”

Henry let out a snicker.

“What’s so funny?”

“Yeah, Parrish.” Henry smirked. “You’re the only one who ever noticed that.”

“I didn’t used to realize it,” Gansey looked unphased. Adam wasn’t sure if he should feel relieved or upset about that. “Blue pointed it out to me eventually.”

There were some raised eyebrows from Helen and Henry at that.

I’m going to kill whoever is responsible for this

, Adam thought it over and over again.

“Easy, Parrish.” Ronan whispered in his ear.

Adam looked down to see he was gripping his chair arms hard. He willed himself to seem less tense.. he never really wasn’t, but he had been working on looking and moving in a way that looked effortless.
 
“

Catching Adam’s gaze, he said, “Christ, now I feel dirty. Come on. Let’s go to Nino’s. We’ll get pizza and I’ll call that psychic and the whole goddamn world will sort itself out.”

This was why Adam could forgive that shallow, glossy version of Gansey he’d first met. Because of his money and his good family name, because of his handsome smile and his easy laugh, because he liked people and (despite his fears to the contrary) they liked him back, Gansey could’ve had any and all of the friends that he wanted. Instead he had chosen the three of them, three guys who should’ve, for three different reasons, been friendless.”

“You make it sound like I was friends with you as a favor,” there was an edge of brittle anger in Gansey’s voice, “I was friends with the people I wanted to be friends with. There was nothing else to it.” 
 
Adam bit his lip, avoiding his friend's direct gaze. “I know that now, I just used to find it… hard to trust. I’m sorry.”
 
Gansey nodded in acquiescence, his features smoothing to be unreadable. Was it really okay? Adam was never sure anymore.

“I’m not coming,” Noah said.

“Need some more alone time?” Ronan asked.

“Ronan,” Gansey interjected. “Set your weapons to stun, will you? Noah, we won’t make you eat. Adam?”

“Adam glanced up, distracted. His mind had wandered from Ronan’s bad behavior to Ashley’s interest in the journal, and he was wondering if it was more than the ordinary curiosity people possessed when faced with Gansey and his obsessive accessories. He knew Gansey would find him overly suspicious, unnecessarily proprietary of a search Gansey was more than willing to share with most people.

But Gansey and Adam sought Glendower for different reasons. Gansey longed for him like Arthur longed for the grail, drawn by a desperate but nebulous need to be useful to the world, to make sure his life meant something beyond champagne parties and white collars, by some complicated longing to settle an argument that waged deep inside himself.

Adam, on the other hand, needed that royal favor.”

“So did you believe in his quest or didn’t you?” Henry’s eyes met Adam’s, a challenge there.

“I don’t owe you an explanation for that.”

“I’d also like to know,” offered Gansey.

Henry preened at Gansey taking his side. Adam felt an urge to hit him.

“I wasn’t sure if I believed it or not, but I wasn’t going to rule out it being real and I wanted the favor if it existed.”

“And that meant they needed to be the ones to wake Glendower. They needed to be the ones to find him first.

“Parrish,” Gansey repeated. “Come on.”

Adam made a face. He felt it would take more than pizza to improve Ronan’s character.”

“Truer words were never spoken.” said Hennessy. There was a noise under the table, then Ronan yelped in pain. He must have tried to kick Hennessy under the table, then hit the table leg instead. Hennessy grinned wickedly.

But Gansey was already grabbing the car keys to the Pig and stepping around his miniature Henrietta. Even though Ronan was snarling and Noah was sighing and Adam was hesitating, he didn’t turn to verify that they were coming. He knew they were. In three different ways, he’d earned them all days or weeks or months before, and when it came to it, they’d all follow him anywhere.

“Excelsior,” said Gansey, and shut the door behind them.”

“Let’s take a break, shall we?” said The New Fenian as he closed the book. Adam silently cursed him.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Declan was beyond irritated at whoever had decided to trap him with the version of himself he hated. His mood had picked up with the coffee, and now had soured once more thanks to that last chapter. He felt that the portrait of him in these books would remain the one of his worst self as long as Ronan and his friends told the story. He was worried that it would affect how Jordan saw him, that she would recoil from the crueler, colder version of him presented in these pages. So far though, she hadn’t.  He noticed that Adam was deliberately avoiding eye contact with either Ronan or Gansey, and that made him mad for some reason. Before he could figure out if he wanted to say something about it (he probably wouldn’t have, not without a strategy) Blue asked Adam some questions about energies that Adam seemed quick to fall into conversation about. Declan glared at Ronan once more then purposefully turned to his inner circle of Jordan and Mathew. Hennessy had also moved in closer, as if she were a hawk and he were a mouse. Let her think that. Declan knew he was more wolf than sheep, when it came down to it.  “Sorry again deklo,” Mathew did sound apologetic, yet there was a crispness in the air between them that had never been there before. Declan felt like he should be doing something to dissolve it, but didn’t know what. He was tired of feeling like he was the one who needed to apologize for how things were. It wasn’t like he’d asked for this.  “It’s fine,” he said with a brusque nod. “I feel like a new girl at a school,” said Jordan, “or like the tag along at a party where everyone knows each other already.” She huffed in annoyance.“Don’t worry,” said Declan. “There’s not much from Aglionby that was important.”  Jordan curled an eyebrow at him. “Clearly what happened at Aglionby was important, if we’re rehashing it all now. Don’t worry, I don’t care about Ashley.”  Declan nodded. Jordan did seem perfectly blasé about this. He was not going to make a big deal out of this when she wasn’t, he told himself. He wasn’t. “Well if he didn’t tell you about his blonde-fixation,” said Hennessy, “then what else is he keeping from you?” Well you might care about other Ashleys,” said Hennessy, “if not this one.”“What is your problem?” snapped Jordan.Mathew looked back and forth between the two, seeming to search for a method by which to defuse the tension but then giving up. “I will read again.” said Mor, taking the white book in her long, elegant hands.  “Barrington Whelk was feeling less than sprightly as he slouched down the hall of Whitman House, the Aglionby admin building.” “Why is this loser included?” Ronan growled. “He tried to kill Gansey!” Adam agreed. “Why should we care what he thinks about?”Professor Whelk tried to kill Gansey? Declan was confused, but couldn’t show it. As far as he knew Whelk’s transfer from Aglionby had been ordinary, nothing like what had happened to his successor Colin Greenmantle. Was that not the case? “So not only the four of you have perspectives in this book.” Henry clarified. “I wonder where I come in.”  
“It was five P.M., the school day well over, and he’d only left his town house in order to pick up homework that had to be graded before the next day. Afternoon light spilled in the tall, many-paned windows to his left; on the right was a hum of voices from the staff offices. These old buildings looked like museums at this time of day.
“Barrington, I thought you were out today. You look terrible. You sick?”Whelk didn’t immediately formulate an answer. For all intents and purposes, he was still out. The question asker was Jonah Milo, the well- scrubbed eleventh- and twelfth-grade English teacher. Despite an affinity for plaid and thin-legged corduroy pants, Milo wasn’t unbearable, but Whelk didn’t care to discuss his absence from class this morning with him.” “Who is this man?” Jordan whispered in Declan’s ear.“The Latin teacher at Aglionby my senior year.” Declan whispered back. “Your Latin teacher tried to kill a student? And here I thought my education was the most unorthodox.”“You were homeschooled?” Declan tried to imagine Hennessy as a teacher of the other girls. Even with Jordan no doubt playing half student and half teacher – he hates how soon he knows Jordan had to grow up, even as he simultaneously knows it’s one reason they fit so well – he can not picture it. “Well,” Jordan is still whispering, “I went to school for Hennessy a lot, when she wasn’t feeling up to it. I actually quite liked school.” “St. Mark’s Eve was beginning to have a sheen of tradition for him, one that involved spending most of the night getting smashed before falling asleep on his kitchenette floor just before dawn. This year he’d had the forethought to request St. Mark’s Day off. Teaching Latin to Aglionby boys was punishment enough.Teaching it with a hangover was excruciating.
Finally, Whelk merely held up the grubby stack of handwritten homework assignments as answer. Milo’s widened his eyes at the sight of the name written on the topmost paper.
“Ronan Lynch! Is that his homework?” Declan scoffs, and he knows he isn’t the only one. “Of course that’s the reaction Aglionby teachers would have to your work.” Adam teases his boyfriend. “As opposed to how teacher’s would react to your work, ‘Adam Parrish turned in another assignment perfectly punctually and wrote the essay in such detail that I wonder if he’s masturbated to–” Adam punched his arm, Declan could see his cheeks were a little flushed and his eyes shone with the humor that seemed to exist for his brother. Declan tried to reconcile this display, and the similar ones he’d witnessed where he thought wow, my brother loves this boy more than anyone, and Adam is just as invested in him, with the Adam who was cold enough to break up with his brother while he was in a coma, and with the Adam in the book who had seemed so dismissive of Ronan. He found he couldn’t. “Asshole,” said Adam. It sounded like an endearment. Declan shook his head, maybe nothing about his brother or his relationships would ever make sense to him. Although if was a way to understand, maybe these books would help …“Flipping the stack around to read the name on the front, Whelk agreed that it was. As he did, a few boys on their way to crew team practice crashed past, pushing him into Milo. The students probably didn’t even realize they were being disrespectful; Whelk was barely older than they were, and his dramatically large features made him look younger. It was still easy to mistake him for one of the students.
Milo disentangled himself from Whelk. “How do you get him to come to class?”

The mere mention of Ronan Lynch’s name had scraped something raw inside Whelk. Because it was never Ronan by himself, it was Ronan as part of the inseparable threesome: Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey, and Adam Parrish. All of the boys in his class were affluent, confident, arrogant, but the three of them, more than anyone else, reminded him of what he’d lost.” 
Gansey’s brow furrowed. “I thought he just wanted the ley line for power, I had no idea he resented us specifically.” “Whelk struggled to remember if Ronan had ever missed a class with him. The days of the school year blurred together, one long and unending day that began with Whelk parking his crappy car next to the beautiful Aglionby cars, shouldering his way past laughing, thoughtless boys, standing in front of a room of students who were glassy-eyed at best and derisive at worst. And at the end of the day Whelk, alone and haunted, never, ever able to forget that he was once one of them.
When did this become my life?

Whelk shrugged. “I don’t remember him skipping.”
“You have him with Gansey, though, don’t you?” Milo asked. “That explains it. Those two are tight as ticks.”
It was a strange, old expression, one that Whelk hadn’t heard since his own days at Aglionby, when he, too, had been tight as ticks with his roommate Czerny. He felt a hollowness inside him, like he was hungry, like he should’ve stayed home and drank more to commemorate this miserable day.”
“Oh,” said Adam dismissively. “He was just jealous. Missed his glory days, and wanted to take that out on Gansey.”“He swam back to the present, looking at the attendance sheet the substitute teacher had left. “Ronan was in class today, but Gansey wasn’t. Not in mine, anyway.”“Oh, that’s probably because of that St. Mark’s Day hoopla he was talking about,” Milo said.
This got Whelk’s attention. No one knew that today was St. Mark’s Day. No one celebrated St. Mark’s Day, not even St. Mark’s mother. Only Whelk and Czerny, treasure hunters and troublemakers, cared about its existence.

Whelk said, “Beg pardon?”
“I don’t know what all’s going on,” Milo replied. One of the other teachers said hi to him on the way out of the staff room, and Milo looked over his shoulder to reply. Whelk imagined grabbing Milo’s arm, forcing his attention back his way. It took all of his effort to wait instead. Turning back around, Milo seemed to sense Whelk’s interest, because he added, “He hasn’t talked to you about it? He wouldn’t shut up about it yesterday. It’s that ley line stuff he’s always on about.”Ley line.” “Like I said, I should have listened to your concerns.” Gansey acknowledged. Adam made a noncommittal noise, like he agreed but was being polite enough not to say so. “If no one knew about St. Mark’s Day, truly no one knew about ley lines. Certainly no one in Henrietta, Virginia. Certainly not one of Aglionby’s richest pupils. Definitely not in conjunction with St. Mark’s Day. This was Whelk’s quest, Whelk’s treasure, Whelk’s teen years. Why was Richard Gansey III talking about it?
With the words ley line spoken aloud, a memory was conjured: Whelk in a dense wood, sweat collected on his upper lip. He was seventeen and shivering. Every time his heart beat, red lines streaked in the corners of his vision, the trees darkening with his pulse. It made the leaves seem like they were all moving, though there was no wind. Czerny was on the ground. Not dead, but dying. His legs still pedaled on the uneven surface beside his red car, making drifts of fallen leaves behind him. His face was just ... done. In Whelk’s head, unearthly voices hissed and whispered, words blurred and stretched together.”
         “Czerny was the name of the other student he sacrificed,” Gansey said suddenly. “I think that was on the id of the boys Jane and I found in the woods, I don’t know why I didn’t remember his name before.”         Blue’s eyes shone with recognition. “I had forgotten but.. yeah, that was his name.”               “Some sort of energy source or something,” Milo said.
            Whelk was suddenly afraid that Milo could see the memory on him, could hear the inexplicable voices in his “head, incomprehensible but nonetheless present ever since that failed day.
 
      Whelk schooled his features, though what he was really thinking was: If someone else is looking here, I must have been right. It must be here.
       “What did he say he was doing with the ley line?” he asked with studied calm. 
      “I don’t know. Ask him about it. I’m sure he’d love to talk your ear off about it.” Milo looked over his shoulder as the secretary joined them in the hall, her bag on her arm, her jacket in her hand. Her eyeliner was smudged after a long day in the office.
       “We talking about Gansey the third and his New Age obsession?” the secretary asked. She had a pencil stuck in her hair to keep it up and Whelk stared at the stray strands that wound up around the lead. It was clear to him from the way she stood that she secretly found Milo attractive, despite the plaid and the corduroy and the beard. She asked, “Do you know how “much Gansey senior is worth? I wonder if he knows what his kid spends all his time on. Man, sometimes these entitled little bastards make me want to slit my wrists. Jonah, are you coming with me for a smoke break or not?”       “I quit,” said Milo. He cast a quick, uneasy glance from the secretary to Whelk, and Whelk knew he was thinking about how much Whelk’s father had been worth, once upon a time, and how little he was worth now, long after the trials had left the front pages of the newspapers. All the junior faculty and the admin staff hated the Aglionby boys, hated them for what they had and what they stood for, and Whelk knew they were all secretly pleased that he had fallen down among their ranks.”“Blimey,” Hennessy rollled her eyes. “The white men in this book do pity themselves so.”“Even if you dislike me,” said Gansey calmly, “please don’t compare me to him.”              “How about you, Barry?” the secretary asked. Then she answered her own question: “No, you don’t smoke, you’re too pretty for that. Oh well, I’ll go myself.”
 Milo turned to go as well. “Feel better,” he said kindly, although Whelk had never said he was sick.
 
      The voices in Whelk’s head were a roar, but for once, his own thoughts had drowned them out.
 
      “I think I do already,” said Whelk.
 
      It was possible that Czerny’s death wasn’t for nothing after all.”
          Mor closed the book with a dramatic flourish. Henry whistled. “That wasn’t ominous at all.”           “It doesn’t make sense,” muttered Blue. “Why is he the fourth perspective? Shouldn’t it be Ronan?”             “Ronan might still have chapters later on,” said Adam, like he was reminding himself of this.               “Also,” added Maura, “you don’t know there are only four.”               “Shouldn’t it be threes? Aren’t you always saying threes are powerful?”               “We also don’t do absolutes.”                Blue huffed indignantly. “Fine,” she gestured to Mor, “read on.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

At the moment, Blue was distraught with feeling that she’d never truly escape it all. Fate, destiny, a prophecy. In theory that was behind her; she’d kissed her true love. He’d died. He’d been brought back to life, through her and her friends' collective efforts. Now they were supposed to be living in the aftermath. She was supposed to get to b

been brought back to life, through her and her friends' collective efforts. Now they were supposed to be living in the aftermath. She was supposed to get to be happy, to be a person no longer confined by destiny now that she’d chosen her own path. But no, she was being dragged backwards. Something about Whelk’s chapter had solidified that, made her angrier. She already felt hot and unpleasant as Mor resumed reading.

“

Blue wouldn’t really describe herself as a waitress. After all, she also taught penmanship to third graders, made wreaths for the Society for Ladies of Perpetual Health, walked dogs that belonged to inhabitants of Henrietta’s poshest condo complex, and replaced bedding plants for the elderly ladies of their neighborhood. Really, being a waitress at Nino’s was the least of things she did.”

Henry whistled. “Our girl; a virtuoso. A jack of all trades.” He paused, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Jane. A Jane of all trades.”

“Pshaw,” Blue rolled her eyes.

Don’t blush, don’t blush don’t –

“Very clever,” Gansey said wryly. If Henry using the name only Gansey called her perturbed him, he didn’t let it on.

Blue thought about them, the three of them. How they’d been so together, and then they weren’t. Just like how Maura and Calla and Persephone had been so together, for each other and for Blue, and then Maura had vanished when Blue needed her, and when she’d come back to her she’d lost Persephone. How she and Gansey and Adam and Ronan had all been one unit, and then she’d lost Gansey, and then when Gansey was back it was her and him, comma Adam and Ronan. Separate entities all of a sudden.

It had been good for her in a lot of ways, getting out of Henrietta for a bit. She’d always wanted to see the world and now she had the chance. Her finally having the freedom to explore the world outside of Virginia had come at the same time she was finally allowed to explore her relationship with Gansey, physically and also outside of what the four of them had been, so deeply entwined you couldn’t tell whose roots belonged to one over another.

Blue had felt pulled between her happiness, and missing what had been. And then there had been Henry; he was an Aglionby boy yet in some ways Blue felt more alike to him than to even Adam, who should have been the Raven boy she was alike with. He was a reminder of home while not being a part of “home”. Henry brought the balance they needed, and then it all disintegrated from a misunderstanding.
 
        “But the hours were flexible, it was the most legitimate-looking entry on her already bizarre résumé, and it certainly paid the best. There was really only one problem with Nino’s, and it was that for all practical purposes, it belonged to Aglionby. The restaurant was six blocks over from the iron-gated Aglionby campus at the very edge of the historic downtown. It

wasn’t the nicest place in Henrietta. There were other with bigger televisions, louder music, but none of them had managed to grip the school’s imagination like Nino’s. Just to know that Nino’s was the place to be was a rite of passage; if you could be seduced by Morton’s Sports Bar on Third, you didn’t deserve to be in the inner circle.”

Gansey looked perplexed. “Inner circle? There was never one specific inner circle at Aglionby.”

“In a way there was,” said Adam.

When the others looked to him to explain, he shrugged. “Gansey wasn’t a member but he had an open invitation. And by extension we had an invitation.”

“I hate to say it, but Parrish is right.” Henry smirked. Adam’s mouth formed a thin line. 
 
“

So the Aglionby boys at Nino’s were not just Aglionby students, but they were the most Aglionby that the school had to offer. Loud, pushy, entitled.

Blue had seen enough of the raven boys to last a lifetime.”

Blue remembered how sure she’d been that those boys were all the same. Never in her wildest dreams would she have expected a group of them to become her family, just as surely as Maura or Calla were.

“Tonight, the music was already loud enough to paralyze the finer parts of her personality.”

“Which are?” Ronan remarked.

Blue put her middle finger in the air at him. “Pig.” She had grown accustomed to Ronan’s manner of coating sweet sentiments with sour armor near the end of high school. When she’d learned about him and Adam – from Gansey, which sparked a certain annoyance within her but she didn’t know if that was fair or not – she’d been taken aback at first, but when she’d really thought about it she could see it. Ronan’s barbs were directed at him so often, yet there was a warmth to their banter. The Rona Lynch brand of affection. 
 
“She tied on her apron, tuned out the Beastie Boys as best she could, and put her tip-earning smile on. Close to the beginning of her shift, four boys came through the front

door, letting a cold hiss of fresh air into the room that smelled of oregano and beer. In the window beside the boys, a neon light that said Since 1976 lit their faces a Limesicle green. The boy in front was talking on his cell phone even as he showed Cialina four fingers to indicate party size. Raven boys were good at multitasking, so long as all tasks were exclusively to benefit themselves.”

“Is that us?” asked Adam.

“No, that’s not us.” said Gansey.

Blue cleared her throat, “Actually, I think it is.”

As Cialina hurried by, her apron pocket stuffed with tickets to deliver, Blue handed her four greasy menus. Cialina’s hair floated above her head with static electricity and abject stress.

Blue asked, very unwilling, “Do you want me to take that table?”

“Are you kidding?” Cialina replied, eyeing the four boys. Having finally ended his call, the first one slid into one of the orange vinyl booths. The tallest of them knocked his head on the green cut-glass light hanging over the table; the others laughed generously at him. He said, Bitch. A tattoo snaked out above his collar as he swiveled to sit down. There was something hungry about all of the boys.”

“I’ll say.” Calla grinned devilishly in Ronan’s direction.

“You could feel it in the air,” sang Gwenllian. “Even then you could feel it

hap-hap-happening

chickadee! And you thought you weren’t intuitive.” 
 
Blue felt deeply uncomfortable. At the beginning of the summer, before her trip with Gansey and Henry, Gwenllian had taken Blue aside one bustling evening at Fox Way. She’d asked her to come to the back porch with her. Blue had been hesitant, but relented. She’d taken a pitcher of Blackberry iced tea and a couple of glasses, since she’d heard Jimmi complain about Gwenllian gulping the stuff faster than she could brew it and thought a digestible distraction could mitigate the expected awkwardness.

When they were seated and refreshed, Gwenllian had spread her long pale hands. “It’s time Blue Lily, for me to teach you about what you are. To teach you how to be what you are; a mirror, a witch.”

Blue almost dropped her glass in shock. Once she had steadied herself – and her hand – she wasn’t sure how to respond. She settled on anger. “Why now? You could have offered this help before. I’m about to be leaving for a trip I’ve been looking forward to, one I never thought I’d be able to go on.”

Gwenllian shook her head like she was trying to dislodge a bat that had made its home in her raven tresses. “I knew you were busy with your undead princeling, thought I’d let you gain… that dead Aunt of yours,”

“Persephone.” Blue all but growled.

“Persephone’s book said term would be ‘closure’, or is it ‘treatment’? Anyway, it wasn’t the time.”

“It’s not the time now!” Blue did feel torn. In a lot of ways Gwenllian was offering her something she’d always wanted, the chance to hone her powers and be an equal to the other women at 300 fox way. The fact that these powers weren’t quite what everyone else did made it even more enticing, she was carving out her own destiny with them rather than telling it for others. But that had been what she wanted before she met the boys and found a different kind of impossible magic. The magic of kings and Cabeswater and friendships that ran deeper than blood, deeper than the ocean. It wasn’t that she didn’t want that anymore, but it wasn’t what she was focused on.

And besides… every time Blue thought about using her powers, she remembered the press of her lips to Gansey’s. Him falling limply from her arms, this boy who could fill up a room with his voice, who was so alive, as sedentary as stone. Because of her. Since that day, she hadn’t wanted to be used as an amplifier except for cases of absolute urgency. She’d only let two psychics use her gift on two separate occasions since that day. And both times, she’d felt like retching afterward. Retching ? She thought to herself. I really am spending too much time with Gansey.

“I won’t force you to stay and learn,” said Gwenllian. “Just thought I’d offer.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.” Blue went inside.

Now, Blue did her level best not to meet Gwenllian’s eyes. 
 
“

Blue didn’t want them anyway.”

“Sounds like you did…” Orla’s tone was leading. Blue rolled her eyes.

What she wanted was a job that wouldn’t suck all the thoughts out of her head and replace them with the leering call of a synthesizer. Sometimes, Blue would creep outside for an infinitesimal break, and as she lay her head back against the brick wall of the alley behind the restaurant, she’d dream idly about careers studying tree rings. Swimming with manta rays.

Scouring Costa Rica to find out more about the scale-crested pygmy tyrant.

Really, she didn’t know if she’d truly like to find out more about the pygmy tyrant. She just liked the name, because, for a five-foot-tall girl, pygmy tyrant sounded like a career.”

She noticed Gansey and Adam exchange a look, and then break into twin fits quiet laughter. “What’s so funny?” she asked them.

Gansey recovered first. “Oh nothing,” he said hastily. “Just, Mallory went to a rare bird show once and there were Pygmy Tyrants, and I told Adam about it. That’s why we were laughing, Mallory’s behavior with the birds was amusing.”

“All of those imagined lives seemed pretty far away from Nino’s.”

Since then, Blue had not only seen incredible wonders in Henrietta but also been to Mardis Gras in New Orleans, climbed the Grand Canyon, been to night clubs in San Francisco and protested in five different national parks. She thought about that girl, and all that was in store for her. Some of that was wonderful.
 
“

Just a few minute

s

after Blue’s shift began, the manager signaled to Blue from the kitchen. Tonight it was Donny. Nino’s had about fifteen managers, all of them related to the owner and none of them high-school graduates. Donny managed to both lounge and offer the phone at once. “Your parent. Uh, mother.”

But there was no need to clarify, because Blue didn’t really know who her other parent was. Actually, she’d tried to pester Maura about her father before, but her mother had neatly slithered out of that line of questioning.”

Maura frowned. “Slithered? You make me sound quite malevolent.

Blue shrugged. “I resented not knowing anything… of course now that I’ve met Artemus, I can’t say you were keeping me from much.”

The Gray Man chuckled.

“Plucking the phone from Donny’s hand, Blue tucked herself back into the corner of the kitchen, next to a terminally greasy fridge and a large- basined sink. Despite her care, she still got jostled every few moments.

“Mom, I’m working.”

“Don’t panic. Are you sitting? You probably don’t need to sit. Well, possibly. At least lean on

something. He called. To schedule a reading.”

“Who, Mom? Speak louder. It’s loud here.”

“Gansey.”

For a moment, Blue didn’t understand. Then realization tumbled down, weighting her feet. Her voice was a bit faint. “When ... did you schedule it for?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. It was the fastest I could get him in. I tried to get him in sooner, but he said he had school. Do you have a shift tomorrow?”

“I’m changing i

i

t,” Blue replied immediately. It was someone else saying the words, though. The real Blue was back in the churchyard, hearing his voice say Gansey.

“Yes, you are. Go work.”

As she hung up, she could feel her pulse fluttering. It was real. He was real.

It was all true and terribly, terribly specific.

It seemed foolish to be here, now, busing tables and filling drinks and smiling at strangers. She wanted to be home, leaning back against the cool bark of the spreading beech tree behind the house, trying to decide what this changed about her life. Neeve had said this was the year she’d fall in love. Maura had said that she’d kill her true love if she kissed him. Gansey was supposed to die this year. What were the odds? Gansey had to be her true love. He had to be. Because there was no way she was going to kill someone.

Is this the way life is supposed to be? Maybe it would be better not to know.

Something touched her shoulder.

Touching was strictly against Blue’s policy. No one was to touch her person while she was at Nino’s, and especially no one was to touch her now, when she was having a crisis. She whirled.

“Can. I. Help. You?”

Before her stood the multitasking cell phone Aglionby boy, looking tidy and presidential.”

“Oh,” Ronan’s eyes were practically ablaze with mirth. “You’re in for it now, old man.”

Gansey sank lower in his chair, seemingly attempting to sink into the floorboards.

“His watch looked as if it cost more than her mother’s car, and every area of exposed skin was a flattering shade of tan. Blue had never figured out how Aglionby boys managed to tan earlier than locals. It probably had something to do with things like spring break and places like Costa Rica and the Spanish coast.”

Gansey, Henry, Ronan and Declan looked at varying levels of bemusement.

“I always wondered that too,” Adam offered Blue a small smile. She took comfort in it, as she steeled herself for what lay ahead.

“President Cell Phone had probably been closer to a pygmy tyrant than she would ever be.”

“Well, he’s standing next to one right now,” said Ronan. Adam snorted. Blue’s gratitude for Adam’s show of solidarity dwindled.

“I certainly hope so,” he said, in a way that indicated less hope and more certainty. He had to speak loudly to be heard, and he had to incline his head to meet her eyes. There was something annoyingly impressive about him, an impression that he was very tall, although he was no taller than most boys. “My socially inhibited friend Adam thinks you’re cute, but he’s unwilling to make a move. Over there. Not the smudgy one. Not the sulky one.”

Blue, largely against her will, glanced to the booth he pointed to. Three boys sat at it: one was smudgy, just as he said, with a rumpled, faded look about his person, like his body had been laundered too many times. The one who’d hit the light was handsome and his head was shaved; a soldier in a war where the enemy was everyone else. And the third was — elegant. It was not the right word for him, but it was close. He was fine boned and a little fragile looking, with blue eyes pretty enough for a girl.”

Adam flushed a little. Ronan glowered. 
 
“

Despite her better instincts, Blue felt a flutter of interest. “So?” she asked.

“

So would you do me a favor and come over and talk to him?”

Blue used one millisecond of her time to imagine what that might be like, throwing herself at a booth of raven boys and wading through awkward, vaguely sexist conversation. Despite the comeliness of the boy in the booth, it was not a pleasant millisecond.

“What exactly is it you think I’m going to talk to him about?

President Cell Phone looked unconcerned. “We’ll think of something. We’re interesting people.”

Blue doubted it. But the elegant boy was rather elegant. And he looked genuinely horrified that his friend was talking to her, which was slightly endearing. For one brief, brief moment that she was later ashamed of and bemused by, Blue considered telling President Cell Phone when her shift ended. But then Donny called her name from the kitchen, and she remembered rules number one and two.

She said, “Do you see how I’m wearing this apron? It means I’m working. For a living.”

The unconcerned expression didn’t flag. He said, “I’ll take care of it.” She echoed, “Take care of it?”

“Yeah. How much do you make in an hour? I’ll take care of it. And I’ll

talk to your manager.”

“Famous last words.” Ronan was back to anticipatory glee.

‘For a moment, Blue was actually lost for words. She had never believed

people who claimed to be speechless, but she was. She opened her mouth, and at first, all that came out was air. Then something like the beginning of a laugh. Then, finally, she managed to sputter, “I am not a prostitute.”

Practically everyone who was not Blue or Gansey began to laugh. Even Adam cracked a smile. Declan looked incredulous, like he could not believe this of Gansey.

“Well,” said Helen, once she’d regained her composure, “I never knew you were

this

awful at talking to girls. That explains why you and Kim didn’t hit it off, not to mention the other dates.”

“And you still dated him?” Jordan asked, her nose scrunched up in confusion.

“Not then,” said Blue. “It took… a while to get to that point. And before then…” She did her best not to make eye contact with Adam. That was going to be awkward.

“The Aglionby boy appeared puzzled for a long moment, and then realization dawned. “Oh, that was not how I meant it. That is not what I said.”

“That is what you said! You think you can just pay me to talk to your friend? Clearly you pay most of your female companions by the hour and don’t know how it works with the real world, but ... but ...” Blue remembered that she was working to a point, but not what that point was. Indignation had eliminated all higher functions and all that remained was the desire to slap him.”

“You pay most of your female companions by the hour.” Henry looked genuinely amazed. “Wow. When you guys told me about this it didn’t sound as brutal. She destroyed you man.”

“And then you dated him.” Carmen’s tone was also incredulous.

“A lot happened after that.” She snapped.

“You should have slapped him,” said Hennessy, who seemed especially amused by the situation. “But agreed, the takedown was impressive. I would judge you for dating him later, but recently it’s come to my attention that most women have worse taste in men than I do —”

“You have bad taste in everything.” Interjected Ronan.

“Agreed.” said Jordan, dryly.

“I really didn’t know,” said Gansey, “that what I was saying would come off like that.” He tilted his head towards her, a sincere apology in his hazel eyes. “Once again, I am so sorry.” 
 
Blue nodded. They’d spoken about it before, sometimes with laughter, sometimes with more serious emotions at the forefront. She was never going to feel just one way about their meeting; it was the night her life had changed mostly for the better, it was the night she’d met Gansey, the night she’d met Adam, the night she’d been humiliated and angry for good reason that an Aglionby boy would talk to her like that, the night she’d hated him and been relieved she hated him. She wasn’t going to comfort him at this moment though. As much as she’d misjudged Gansey in some ways, he’d made a huge mistake and she wouldn’t try to make him believe otherwise.

“The boy opened his mouth to protest, and her thought came back to her all in a rush. “Most girls, when they’re interested in a guy, will sit with them for free.”

To his credit, the Aglionby boy didn’t speak right away. Instead, he thought for a moment and then he said, without heat, “You said you were working for living. I thought it’d be rude to not take that into account. I’m sorry you’re insulted. I see where you’re coming from, but I feel it’s a little unfair that you’re not doing the same for me.”

“I feel you’re being condescending,” Blue said.

In the background, she caught a glimpse of Soldier Boy making a plane of his hand. It was crashing and weaving toward the table surface while Smudgy Boy gulped laughter down. The elegant boy held his palm over his face in exaggerated horror, fingers spread just enough that she could see his wince.”

“Some nicknames you were workshopping, Sargent.” said Ronan, one eyebrow raised mockingly.

“Oh, like ‘maggot’ is so creative. Or ‘the poverty twins’.” Blue wasn’t sure that had made her include the latter, but there was something satisfying about Ronan and Adam both looking uncomfortable. 
 
Mathew frowned. “Who were the poverty twins?”

“Nevermind that,” Gansey said hastily. The part of him that had been used to cleaning up Ronan’s mess seemed to have been redirected to only protecting Ronan’s image from Mathew. “He did look a little like a soldier with that buzzcut.” 
 
“

Dear God,” remarked Cell Phone boy. “I don’t know what else to say.” “‘Sorry,’” she recommended.

“I said that already.”

Blue considered. “Then, ‘bye.’”

He made a little gesture at his chest that she thought was supposed to mean he was curtsying or bowing or something sarcastically gentleman- like. Calla would’ve flipped him off, but Blue just stuffed her hands in her apron pockets.

As President Cell Phone headed back to his table and picked up a fat leather journal that seemed incongruous with the rest of him, the soldier boy let out a derisive laugh and she heard him mimic, “... ‘not a prostitute.’” Beside him, the elegant boy ducked his head. His ears were bright pink.

Not for a hundred dollars, Blue thought. Not for two hundred dollars.

But she had to confess she was a little undone by the blushing ears. It didn’t seem very ... Aglionby. Did raven boys get embarrassed?

She’d stared a moment too long. The elegant boy looked up and caught her gaze. His

eyebrows were drawn together, remorseful rather than cruel, making her doubt herself.

But then she flushed, hearing again President Cell Phone’s voice saying I’ll take care of it. She shot him a foul look, a real Calla number, and whirled back toward the kitchen.

Neeve had to be wrong. She’d never fall in love with one of them.”

“Drink!” called out Orla. Blue sighed, exasperated.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Chapter 7

“

Tell me again,” Gansey asked Adam, “why you think a psychic is a good idea?”

The pizzas had been demolished (no help from Noah), which made Gansey feel better and Ronan feel worse. By the end the meal, Ronan had picked off all his moving-dolly scabs and he would’ve picked off Adam’s as well if he’d let him. ”

“Hmm.” Gansey was thoughtful. “Maybe I was picking up on something there, subconsciously.”

Ronan rolled his eyes. “Your hindsight isn’t much better than your eyesight, hate to break it to you.”
 
          Adam wasn’t certain what had turned Ronan’s mood although he had some guesses. It could be about Whelk, how it stirred up the memory of Gansey almost dying then actually dying  and maybe then the memory of Niall Lynch’s death, combined with presence of both The New Fenian and Mr. Gray. Or it could be something pettier. Either was fair game. 
 
          “

Gansey sent him outside to blow off steam and Noah to babysit him. Now Gansey and Adam stood in line while a woman argued about mushroom topping with the cashier. “They deal in energy work,” said Adam, just loud enough to be heard over the blaring music. He studied his arm where he’d worried his own scab off. The skin beneath looked a little angry. Looking up, he peered over his shoulder, probably looking for the evil, not-a-prostitute waitress.”

“You thought I was

evil?”

Blue’s eyebrows were something fierce as she glared at her now boyfriend. “Because I wasn’t falling over myself to please you and flirt with your friend..” she caught Adam’s eye and her ears turned a little pink. He knew they were both thinking about how she’d described him. It was a nice, albeit slight, ego boost to know she had really been attracted to him at one point. Even if that time had been before she really knew him…

Gansey shook his head. “I just didn’t grasp what I had done that was so upsetting — I get it now.”
 
Blue nodded but there was a look of discontent on her face, one Adam felt he recognized. From when he was the one causing her to look like that, or from when Gansey would half apologize to him for something yet deep down inside something in Adam still resembled Blue’s expression. He shook his head. There was no use dwelling on any of that, he needed to focus on a) figuring out the puzzle of this situation and who had brought them here, and b) manage whatever was going on with Ronan.

“Part of Gansey felt guilty for botching Adam’s chances with her. The other part felt he’d possibly saved Adam from having his spinal cord ripped out and devoured.”

Blue shot Gansey another look. Gansey once again looked apologetic.

“It was possible, Gansey thought, that he’d once again been oblivious about money. He hadn’t meant to be offensive but, in retrospect, it was possible he had been. This was going to eat at him all evening. He vowed, as he had a hundred times before, to consider his words better.”

Adam was discomfited by the sensation of being privy to his friend’s thoughts. So often in high school he’d wished to know what Gansey was thinking. He’d spent more time trying to come up with the answers than had probably been a smart investment. But now that it was at his fingertips… it felt a bit wrong, listening, yet also satisfying. Then when he thought about the possibility of hearing Gansey’s thoughts when it came to their own fights Adam felt slightly sick. Not as much as he dreaded the thought of his

own

thoughts there filling these pages.

“Adam continued, “The ley lines are energy. Energy and energy.”

“Matchy matchy,” Gansey replied. “If the psychic is for real.”

Adam said, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” Gansey looked at the handwritten ticket for the pizza in his hand. According to the bubbly writing, their waitress’s name had been Cialina. She’d included her telephone number, but it was hard to say which boy she’d been hoping to attract. Some of the parties at the table were less dangerous to consort with than others. She clearly hadn’t found him condescending.”

Ronan’s mouth quirked. “Am I the most dangerous one?”

Gansey rolled his eyes. “Yes, you're perfectly terrifying.”

Blue was visibly bristling. “Excuse me, but Ciliana flirting with you has nothing to do with what you said to me.” 
 
Gansey held up a hand. “Yes, I realize now that I was completely out of line. But I was trying to justify it then, in the moment.” 
 
“

Which was probably because she hadn’t heard him speak.”

There were noises of agreement or mirth from around them.

“All night. This was going to bother him all night. He said, “I wish we had a sense of how wide the lines were. I don’t know if we’re looking for a thread or a highway, even after all this time. We could’ve been feet away from it and never known.”

Adam’s neck might have broken from all the looking around he was doing. There was still no sign of the waitress. He looked tired, up too late too many nights in a row working and studying. Gansey hated seeing him like this, but nothing he thought of in his head sounded like something he could actually say to him. Adam wouldn’t tolerate pity.”

A multitude of emotions stirred in Adam at that, none of them useful. Partly indignant, that Gansey was once again seeing him as someone who needed coddling and saving. On the other hand he felt a spark of warmth that Gansey cared, and that Adam occupied his thoughts this much. He chose to just not react. He could feel Gansey’s eyes on him though, as he made a concerted effort not to look back.

“We know they can be dowsed, so they can’t be that narrow,” Adam said. He rubbed the back of his hand against his temple.

That was what had brought Gansey to Henrietta in the first place: months of dowsing and research. Later, he’d tried to dowse the line more precisely with Adam. They’d circled the town with a willow divining rod and an electromagnetic-frequency reader, swapping the instruments between the two of them. The machine had spiked strangely a few times, and Gansey had thought he’d felt the divining rod twitch in his hands in time with it, but it might have been wishful thinking by that point.

I could tell him his grades are going to go to hell if he doesn’t cut back on his hours, Gansey thought, looking at the dark skin beneath Adam’s eyes. If he made it about him, Adam wouldn’t interpret it as charity. He considered how to frame it so that it sounded selfish: You’re no good to me if you get mono or something. Adam would see through that in a second.”

“Gansey,” Adam began, exasperated.

“I don’t get it,” said Matthew. “Why couldn’t you just help him out so he didn’t have to work so much? Or tell him those things”
 
Gansey looked pained. “Mathew,” Declan chided, wearing an unreadable expression. He looked towards Adam and Gansey in apology. 
 
“What?” snapped Mathew angrily, “Is this another thing I shouldn’t bother trying to understand because I’m a dream?”
 
Ronan rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry, Mathew. I’m not a dream and I never understood why everything had to be so difficult with those two.” 
 
Adam felt a stab of anger. “Well, not all of us are you.”

Ronan frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When things are difficult some of us actually work on them. We don’t just… run off to avoid dealing with anything hard.”

“Well fuck, Parrish. It’s not like you making things more difficult for yourself than they need to be has helped? Has it?”

Several people including Gansey Blue Declan Mathew and Jordan were looking back and forth between Ronan and Adam with concern, or in Jordan’s case cautious curiosity, or in Declan’s resigned wariness.

“You don’t have any right –”

“Well neither do you.”

Gansey put his hands upm that same gesture that he’d given Blue. “Okay you two, I’m sure there’s —”

Adam boiled over. “Oh, stop doing that.”

Gansey frowned. “Stop what?”

“You don’t need to moderate between us like we’re your pets. We’re not your foot soldiers you can tell to do whatever you want.” He regretted the words the second they left his mouth.
 
            Gansey looked shocked for a second, then his face pulled tight behind a mask. Adam hated it, and hated himself for causing it to fall into place. Gansey smiled tightly. “You are right. Your relationship is none of my business. But please, if you want to argue, do it in the hallway.”

“Gansey,” Adam felt sick. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

Gansey shrugged. “Like what Adam? I can’t tell what you mean if you don’t explain.”

“He’s right,” said Ronan. “I can’t either.”

“Oh like you two don’t expect people to interpret what’s actually wrong —“ Adam suddenly isn’t sorry for what he said to them. Not now that they’re ganging up on him. 
 
                Now Blue interjected. “You two don’t get to be mad at him treating you like children when your acting that way.”

Adam huffed. “I’m sorry Blue, we can’t all leave all our principles at the door to cater to him.”

Blue’s glare was so withering he felt like he might actually turn to stone under it. “Don’t you

dare

act like you are better than me. Not when you go to school where you do or drive Ronan’s BMW.”

“That’s different.” Adam doesn’t really know how it’s different, but he feels strongly it is. “Ronan didn’t pay for my ticket out of Henrietta, I did.”

“Wow, do you hear yourself? Your such an insufferable asshole.”

“And your a hypocritical…” Adam caught himself, searching for a different word. “Pygmy Tyrant.”

Blue’s eyebrows raised. “Did you just—“ She actually started choking on a laugh. Then Ronan and Gansey joined her. Adam wasn’t sure if he should be pleased or insulted.

“What the fuck,” asked Jordan, “is going on?”

“My thoughts exactly.” said Hennessy, who looked disappointed that the fight had paused.

Blue recovered and continued where she’d left off, still indignant. “I don’t think I’m the only hypocrite here, Adam. You're not the only one who knows hardship.”

“She’s right.” Ronan muttered.

“Oh yeah?” Adam redirects his anger to Ronan. “Okay. I’m not the only one with hardships. But maybe if my boyfriend could actually

face

his hardships instead of

abandoning me

for

months

to go dreamer hunting with

her

,” he gestured at Hennessy, “and

that”

he gestured at the man called Bryde, who’d been huddled in a corner murmuring to himself since they’d entered the room, “causing havoc that caught the FBI’s attention, I’d be feeling less bitter but that’s not the case.”

Ronan’s expression changed to one that to those who knew how to read it looked like misery. Gansey and Blue both appeared stunned. He tried not to be satisfied that if Gansey was attempting to put up a mask it wasn’t effective.

“That’s enough!” said Maura. Her voice was high and clear, and it broke through the fog in Adam’s head. “You four, either go to the hall and talk this out or put your issues on hold while Mor reads.”

Adam seethes internally, but doesn’t object. Blue on the other hand could be visibly annoyed with her mother, and glared.

“Instead, Gansey said, “We need a solid point A before we even start thinking about point B.”

But they had point A. They even had point B. The problem was just that the points were too large. Gansey had a map torn from a book depicting Virginia with the ley line marked darkly across it. Like the ley-line enthusiasts in the UK, American ley-line seekers determined key spiritual places and drew lines between them until the arc of the ley line became obvious. It seemed like all the work had been done for them already.

But the creators of those maps had never meant for them to be used as road maps; they were too approximate. One of the maps listed merely New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, as possible reference points. Each of those points was miles wide, and even the finest of pencil lines drawn on a map was no narrower than thirty-five feet — even eliminating the possibilities left them with thousands of acres where the ley line could be. Thousands of acres where Glendower could be, if he was along the ley line at all.

“I wonder,” Adam mused aloud, “if we could electrify either the rods or the line. Hook up a car battery to them or something.”

If you got a loan, you could stop working until after college. No, that would immediately birth an argument. Gansey shook his head a little, more at his own thoughts than at Adam’s comment. He said, “That sounds like either the beginning of a torture session or a music video.”

“

Adam’s searching-for-devil-waitress face had given way to his brilliant- idea face. The fatigue melted away. “Well, amplification. That’s all I was thinking. Something to make it louder and easier to follow.”

It wasn’t an awful idea. Last year in Montana, Gansey had interviewed a lightning-strike victim. The boy had been sitting on his ATV in the doorway of a cattle barn when he was struck, and the incident had left him with an inexplicable fear of being indoors and an uncanny ability to follow one of the western ley lines using only a bent bit of radio antenna. For two days, they’d trailed together across fields carved by glaciers and marked by round hay bales higher than their heads, finding hidden water sources and tiny caves and lightning-burned stumps and strangely marked stones. Gansey had tried to convince the boy to come back to the East Coast to perform his same miracle on the ley line there, but the boy’s newly pathological fear of the indoors ruled out all plane and car travel. And it was a long walk.

Still, it wasn’t an entirely useless exercise. It was further proof of the amorphous theory Adam had just described: ley lines and electricity could be linked. Energy and energy.

Matchy matchy.

As he moved up to the counter, Gansey became aware that Noah was lurking at his elbow, looking strained and urgent. Both were typical for Noah, so Gansey was not immediately troubled. He passed a folded-over packet of bills to the cashier. Noah continued to hover.

“Noah, what?” demanded Gansey.

Noah seemed about to put his hands in his pockets and then didn’t. Noah’s hands seemed to belong fewer places than other people’s. He eventually just let them hang as he looked at Gansey. He said, “Declan’s here.”

“What awful words to hear,” muttered Hennessy.
 
“

An immediate scan of the restaurant offered nothing. Gansey demanded, “Where?”

“Parking lot,” Noah said. “He and Ronan —”

Not bothering to wait for the rest of the sentence, Gansey burst out into the black evening. Scrambling around the side of the building, he skidded onto the parking lot just in time to see Ronan throw a punch.

The swing was infinite.

From the looks of it, it was the opening act. In the sickly green light of a buzzing streetlamp, Ronan had an unbreakable stance and an expression hard as granite. There was no wavering in the line of the blow; he had accepted the consequences of wherever his fist landed long before he began the punch.

From his father, Gansey had gotten a head for logic, an affection for research, and a trust fund the size of most state lotteries.”

“That’s certainly a way to put it,” said Helen.
 
“

From their father, the Lynch brothers had gotten indefatigable egos, a decade of obscure Irish music instrument lessons, and the ability to box like

they meant it.”

Ronan seemed to thaw a bit at the description. “I take that as a compliment.”

“Niall Lynch had not been around very much, but when he had been, he had been an excellent teacher.

“Ronan!” Gansey shouted, too late.

Declan went down, but before Gansey even had time to form a plan of action, he was back up again, fist smacking into his brother. Ronan released a string of profanity so varied and pointed that Gansey was amazed that the words alone didn’t slay Declan. Arms windmilled. Knees met chests. Elbows rammed into faces. Then Ronan grabbed Declan’s suit coat and used it to throw him onto the mirrorlike hood of Declan’s Volvo.

“Not the fucking car!” snarled Declan, his lip bloody.

The story of the Lynch family was this: Once upon a time, a man named Niall Lynch had three sons, one of whom loved his father more than the others.”

“For fucks sake,” Declan exploded. “You didn’t love Dad more than me, Ronan. I just actually knew who he was.”

"You didn’t know the first thing about him” snapped Ronan.

“That’s where you’re wrong. Just ask her.” He gestured at Mor.

“I want no part in this,” Mor said cooly. “Don’t interrupt me.”

Declan’s  face was a storm cloud.

“Niall Lynch was handsome and charismatic and rich and mysterious, and one day, he was dragged from his charcoal-gray BMW and beaten to death with a tire iron. It was a Wednesday. On Thursday, his son Ronan found his body in the driveway. On Friday, their mother stopped speaking and never spoke again.

On Saturday, the Lynch brothers found that their father’s death left them rich and homeless. The will forbade them to touch anything in the house — their clothing, the furniture. Their silent mother. The will demanded they immediately move into Aglionby housing. Declan, the eldest, was meant to control the funds and their lives until his brothers reached eighteen.

On Sunday, Ronan stole his deceased father’s car.

On Monday, the Lynch brothers stopped being friends.”

“I thought that had changed,” said Mathew. “I thought you two had finally found a way to agree.”

“We never agreed.” said Ronan.

“We just coexist,” concurred Declan.

“Ripping Ronan from the Volvo, Declan hit his brother hard enough that

even Gansey felt it. Ashley, her light hair more visible than the rest of her, blinked at him from inside the Volvo.

Gansey took several strides across the lot. “Ronan!”

Ronan didn’t even turn his head. A grim smile, more skeleton than boy, was etched onto his mouth as the brothers whirled around. This was a real fight, not for show, and it played in fast-forward. Someone would be unconscious before Gansey had time to cry havoc, and he just didn’t have time to take someone to the ER tonight.

Gansey sprang, seizing Ronan’s arm in mid-swing. Ronan still had fingers hooked inside Declan’s mouth, though, and Declan already had a fist flying from behind, like a violent embrace. So it was Gansey who got Declan’s blow. Something wet misted his arm. He was fairly certain it was spit, but it was possible it was blood. He shouted a word he’d learned from his sister, Helen.

Ronan had Declan by the knot of his burgundy tie, and Declan gripped the back of his brother’s skull with one white-knuckled hand. Gansey might as well have not been there. With a neat flick of his wrist, Ronan smacked Declan’s head off the driver’s side door of the Volvo. It made a sick, wet sound. Declan’s hand fell away.”

“Charming.” said Hennessy.

Ronan and Declan both scoffed. Jordan

expression was unreadable, and neither Hennessy nor Declan seemed to know what to make of that.
 
              “

Gansey seized the opportunity to propel Ronan about five feet away. Jerking in his grip, Ronan jackrabbited his legs on the pavement. He was unbelievably strong.

“Quit it,” Gansey panted. “You’re ruining your face.”

Ronan twisted, all muscle and adrenaline. Declan, his suit looking more bedraggled than any suit ought to look, started back toward them. He had a hell of a bruise rising on his temple, “but he looked ready to go again. There was no way of telling what had set them off — a new home nurse for their mother, a poor grade at school, an unexplained credit card bill. Maybe just Ashley.

Across the lot, the manager of Nino’s emerged from the front entrance. It wouldn’t be long before the cops were called. Where was Adam?”

A lump formed in Adam’s throat, and unwillingly his eyes moved across the room to meet Gansey’s. They locked eyes for a second and then Adam turned away again.

“Declan,” Gansey said, voice full of warning, “if you come back over here, I swear ...”

With a jerk of his chin, Declan spit blood at the pavement. His lip was bleeding, but his teeth were still good. “Fine. He’s your dog, Gansey. You leash him. Keep him from getting kicked out of Aglionby. I wash my hands of him.”

Adam felt a wave of bitterness thinking back to the inseparability of Ronan and Gansey. How he’d felt it was something he’d never crack, the two of them. He noticed Ronan had turned to look at Gansey, and Gansey was looking back.

Figures.

The two of them would always

belong

together and to each other in a way he never would. He’d always be the usurper taking Gansey’s place.

“I wish,” snarled Ronan. His entire body was rigid underneath Gansey’s hand. He wore his hatred like a cruel second skin.

Declan said, “You’re such a piece of shit, Ronan. If Dad saw —” and this made Ronan burst forward again. Gansey clamped arms around Ronan’s chest and dragged him back.

“Why are you even here?” Gansey asked Declan.

“Ashley had to use the bathroom,” Declan replied crisply. “I should be able to stop where I like, don’t you think?”

The last time Gansey had been in the Nino’s co-ed bathroom, it had smelled like vomit and beer. On one of the walls, a red Sharpie had scrawled the word BEEZLEBUB and Ronan’s number below.”

“Wait,” Blue held up a hand. “That’s Ronan’s number?”

Gansey frowned. “What do you mean, you have Ronan’s number.”

Blue knit her brow. “I guess we weren’t close enough for me to have it for a while, and then pretty soon after he gave it to me we were leaving. And in the in between time I wasn’t thinking about the mystery number.”

“A mystery number?” enquired Henry.

“At Nino’s the workers sometimes place bets on who wrote what in the bathroom, including whose number is whose.” Blue explained. “I never joined. It’s not like I’d have much luck.” Her eyes flickered to Adam with something like bitterness for a moment. “Anyway, now I know. Who wrote it?”

“Kavinsky, probably.” said Gansey.

Blue nodded. Adam wondered what all Gansey knew about Ronan and Kavinsky, or if it was merely his suspicions he’d confided in Blue.

“It was hard to imagine Declan choosing to inflict Nino’s facilities on his girlfriend. Gansey’s voice was short. “I think you should just go. This isn’t getting solved tonight.”

Declan laughed, just once. A big, careless laugh, full of round vowels. He clearly found nothing about Ronan funny.

“Ask him if he’s going to get by with a B this year,” he told Gansey. “Do you ever go to class, Ronan?”

Behind Declan, Ashley peered out of the driver’s side window. She’d rolled down the window to listen; she didn’t look nearly as much like an idiot when she thought no one was paying any attention to her. It seemed like justice that perhaps this time, Declan was the one getting played.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, Declan,” Gansey said. His ear throbbed where it had been boxed. He could feel Ronan’s pulse crashing in his arm where he restrained him. His vow to consider his words more carefully came back to him, and so he framed the rest of the statement in his head before saying it out loud. “But you are not Niall Lynch, and you won’t ever be. And you’d get ahead a lot faster if you stopped trying.”

Gansey released Ronan.”

“He was right,” said Mathew to Declan. “You couldn’t be.”

Declan scowled.

“You all need to get it together,” Calla grumbled. “We’ll never get through these books if you try to take each others heads off every couple minutes.”

Maura raised an eyebrow. “Pot and kettle, Calla?”

“Bah! When someone makes me want to bash my skull in I’ll say as much, but I won’t let it get in the way of a task at hand. Unlike these children.”

Ronan didn’t move, though, and neither did Declan, as if by saying their father’s name, Gansey had cast a spell. They wore matching raw expressions. Different wounds inflicted by the same weapon.

“I’m only trying to help,” Declan said finally, but he sounded defeated. There was a time, a few months ago, when Gansey would’ve believed him.

Next to Gansey, Ronan’s hands hung open at his sides. Sometimes, after Adam had been hit, there was something remote and absent in his eyes, like his body belonged to someone else. When Ronan was hit, it was the opposite; he became so urgently present that it was as if he’d been sleeping before.

Ronan told his brother, “I’ll never forgive you.” The Volvo’s window hissed closed, as if Ashley had just realized that this had become a conversation she wasn’t meant to hear.

Sucking on his bloody lip, Declan looked at the ground for a bare moment. Then he straightened and adjusted his tie.

“Wouldn’t mean much from you anymore,” he said, and tugged open the Volvo’s door.

As he slid into the driver’s seat, Declan said, “I don’t want to talk about it” to Ashley and slammed the door shut. The Volvo’s tires squealed as they bit into the pavement, and then Gansey and Ronan were left standing next to each other in the strange dim light of the parking lot. A block away, a dog barked balefully, three times. Ronan touched his pinkie finger to his eyebrow to check for blood, but there was none, just a raised, angry bump.

“Fix it,” Gansey said. He wasn’t entirely sure that whatever Ronan had done, or failed to do, was easily corrected, but he was sure that it must be corrected. The only reason Ronan was allowed to stay at Monmouth Manufacturing was because his grades were acceptable. “Whatever it is. Don’t let him be right.”

Ronan said, low, just for Gansey, “I want to quit.”

“One more year.”

“I don’t want to do this for another year.” He kicked a piece of gravel

under the Camaro. Now his voice did rise, but only in ferocity, not in volume. “Another year, and then I get strangled with a necktie like Declan? I’m not a damn politician, Gansey. I’m not a banker.”

“Why wouldn’t you just let him quit?” asked Hennessy sharply.

Gansey and Declan both looked uncomfortable. “I wanted him to have a life.” Declan explained. “Not just dreaming and … he needed a purpose.”

“I wanted him to live.” Gansey said simply. “And I didn’t know he was this magical …” he looked at Ronan again. “What are you exactly?”

“Apparently, a god,” said Adam. He wanted Gansey to look at him. He got his wish; Gansey looked to him then Ronan, then him then Ronan and back again. “Wow.” his eyes were bright with wonder. “A god and a magician. What astonishing creatures you are.” Adam willed his face not to redden, and resolutely didn’t look to Ronan. 
 
“

Gansey wasn’t, either, but it didn’t mean he wanted to leave school. The pain in Ronan’s voice meant he couldn’t have any in his when he said, “Just graduate, and do whatever you want.”

Adam did look at Ronan then, to find him frowning.

“The trust funds from their fathers had ensured that neither of them had to work for a living, ever, if they didn’t choose to. They were extraneous parts in the machine that was society, a fact that sat differently on Ronan’s shoulders than Gansey’s.”

Adam thought about how different the two were. How this was something he’d initially found to scorn in Ronan, and yet ultimately it hadn’t caused him as much turmoil as Gansey’s conflictedness,

“Ronan looked angry, but he was in the mood where he was going to look angry no matter what. “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what the hell I am.”

He got into the Camaro.

“You promised me,” Gansey said through the open car door.

Ronan didn’t look up. “I know what I did, Gansey.”

“Don’t forget.”

When Ronan slammed the door, it echoed across the parking lot in the

too-loud way of sounds after dark. Gansey joined Adam at his safely distant vantage point. In comparison to Ronan, Adam looked clean, self-contained, utterly in control.”

That startled Adam. He’d always assumed Gansey saw him as a mess compared to himself. Wondered if he seemed boring compared to Ronan’s power and reckless allure. He hadn’t really considered that Gansey saw him as in control, which pleased him before he remembered that ‘saw’ existed in past tense.

“From somewhere, he had gotten a rubber ball printed with a SpongeBob logo, and he bounced it with a pensive expression.

“I convinced them not to call the cops,” Adam said. He was good at making things quiet.

Gansey let out his breath. Tonight, he didn’t have it in him to talk to the police on Ronan’s behalf.

Tell me I’m doing the right thing with Ronan. Tell me this is how to find the old Ronan. Tell me I’m not ruining him by keeping him away from Declan.

But Adam had already told Gansey he thought Ronan needed to learn to clean up his own messes.”

“I mean, he’s right.” said Hennessy.

“It was only Gansey who seemed afraid that Ronan would learn to live in the dirt.

So he merely asked, “Where’s Noah?”

“He’s coming. I think he was leaving a tip.” Adam dropped the ball and caught it again. He had an almost mechanical way of snapping his fingers round the ball as it bounced back toward him; one moment his hand was open and empty, and the next, tight shut around it.

Bounce. Snap.

Gansey said, “So, Ashley.”

“Yes,” Adam replied, as if he’d been waiting for him to bring her up. “Quite some eyes on her.” It was an expression his dad used all the

time, a family catchphrase for someone nosy.

Adam asked, “Do you think she’s really here for Declan?”

“Why else would she be here?”

“Glendower,” Adam replied immediately.

Gansey laughed, but Adam didn’t. “Really, why else?”

Instead of answering, Adam twisted his hand and released the rubber

ball. He’d chosen his trajectory carefully: The ball bounced off the greasy asphalt once, struck one of the Camaro’s tires, and arced high in the air, disappearing in the black. He stepped forward in time for it to slap in his palm. Gansey made an approving noise.

Adam said, “I don’t think you should talk to people about it anymore.” “It’s not a secret.”

“Maybe it should be.”

Adam’s uneasiness was contagious, but logically, there was nothing to

support suspicion. For four years, Gansey had been searching for Glendower, freely admitting this fact to all and any who showed interest, and he’d never seen the slightest evidence of anyone else sharing his precise quest. He had to admit, however, that the suggestion of that possibility gave him a peculiarly unpleasant feeling.

He said, “It’s all out there, Adam. Pretty much everything I’ve done is public record. It’s too late for it to be a secret. It was too late years ago.”

“Come on, Gansey,” Adam said with some heat. “Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel ...?”

“Feel what?” Gansey despised fighting with Adam, and somehow this felt like a fight.

Something about that word,

despised

, softened Adam. He turned to Gansey, “I really am sorry. For then, and for what I said, I just know I was wrong. I hated it when we fought too, I don’t want to go back to that.” 
 
Gansey nodded, his expression unreadable. When had Adam grown less skilled in deciphering those microexpressions? Or had he never really known how?
 
“

Unsuccessfully, Adam struggled to put his thoughts into words. Finally, he replied: “Observed.”

“Well–” started Henry.

“Yes, you were observing us weren’t you?” There’s a teasing note in Gansey’s voice Adam doesn’t like at all directed at Henry. He catches Ronan’s eye and finds his own discomfort reflected there. Ronan’s hand finds his under the table and squeezes it. They’re back on the same page.

“Across the parking lot, Noah had finally emerged from Nino’s and he slouched toward them. In the Camaro, Ronan’s silhouetted form lay back in the seat, head tilted as if he slept. Close by, Gansey could smell roses and grass mowed for the first time that year, and farther away, he smelled damp earth coming to life beneath last year’s fallen leaves, and water running over rocks in mountain crooks where humans never walked. Perhaps Adam was right. There was something pregnant about the night, he thought, something out of sight opening its eyes.

This time, when Adam dropped the ball, it was Gansey’s hand that reached out to snap it up.

“Do you think there would be any point to someone spying on us,” Gansey said, “if we weren’t on the right track?”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Chapter 10 Being Henry Cheng often meant that you were on the outside looking into certain situations. Sometimes even when you were surrounded by people, this was true. There was a discomfort to this reality, yet at the same time he felt powerful because of it. On some level you were impervious to harm as an observer, as someone no one was truly invested in beyond the flash of your perfect teeth or a witty one liner you might pass. He sometimes liked to think of himself as existing on a silver screen, unreal and everlasting. Seondeck wouldn’t have liked that if he’d told her. “Dreaming of immortality is useless.” She’d have said dismissively. “Focus on building your empire in the here and now. Then you’ll be able to build a legacy.” It was good advice, and Henry had no problem being realistic and cutthroat when it was what his mother needed from him. But at his core, Henry was a dreamer. It was what had drawn him to Gansey, why he had formed such a kinship with Blue. Which might be proof that his mother knew best. He wanted to continue to be mad at both of them about what happened in Kansas. It was admittedly a bit hard when Gansey looked at him with those puppy dog eyes, and Blue was being blunt in that way of hers which made it feel warm instead of cold. It was easier to remain antagonistic towards Adam and Ronan, who were being reliably awful. He was almost grateful to them for that. And then there was Declan … The eldest Lynch brother was currently speaking in hushed tones with his girlfriend and youngest brother, and had seemed to do his best to ignore Henry’s existence since he’d realized he was in the room. Well! Two could play in that game. In any case, as an outsider he felt like he was more comfortable with reading these books than most of the others here. Then again, nothing about him had been exposed thus far. He hoped he would remain the observer, and after all his name hadn’t been in the list of characters who were focused on. Yet he was still wary. Especially after Adam’s chapter, it was clear that these books could expose truly embarrassing details about their narrators. He needs to at some point find a way to get a look at the other books, and figure out if there’s something for him to worry about. Perhaps if he can find an excuse to speak to Mor alone, he can use his family name and association with the Fairy Market to get her to leave out anything he doesn’t want to be said in front of Gansey or Blue or Declan. It was the New Fenian’s turn to read again, and he began with gusto.“By the time Blue made her slow way outside, weariness had extinguished her anxiety. She sucked in a huge breath of the cool night air. It didn’t even seem like it could be the same substance that filtered through Nino’s air- conditioning vents. She tilted her head back to look at the stars. Here, on the edge of downtown, there weren’t enough streetlights to obliterate the stars completely. Ursa Major, Leo, Cepheus. Her breaths came easier and slower with each familiar constellation she found.” Henry remembered the night when they had been camping, Gansey was researching something – even in a tent, he found a way to research. It was impressively, frustratingly cute. Meanwhile, he and Blue lay underneath the stars. She pointed out constellations to him, some he knew and several he didn’t know. Astronomy had never been one of his main pursuits. He’d focused more on what was within his gravitational field. Except for Gansey and his friends. When he’d asked her how she knew so much about the stars she bristled a little. “I may not have grown up going to private schools and with tutors on speaking French at the dining table –”“That’s Gansey, not me. I had tutors in speaking Italian for blackmarket trading.”Blue let out a little laugh, one that was a little horrified, but also a little delighted. He could tell his world both disturbed and enchanted her. He kind of liked that thought. “Well. My mom and Calla and Persephone,” her voice cracked a little speaking of the third woman of fox way. Henry had never met her, but whenever Blue spoke about her he wished he had. “They taught me everything about constellations, about herbs, about tarot, about everything that makes up being a psychic basically. Regardless of the fact I couldn’t be one. They never wanted me to feel like I was lesser.” “And they were right to.” said Henry. “You’ve proved to be so competent without those powers. Not to mention your other gifts.”Blue’s eyes narrowed. “Is there something you want from me? I don’t just melt at pretty words you know.” Henry gestured to the tent. “I thought boys who give pretty speeches would be in your realm of interests.” Blue rolled her eyes. “One boy. And Gansey isn’t always good with words. Take our first meeting.”Henry’s interest peaked. “Oh, I’d love to hear how that went.”   
“The chain was cold as Blue unlocked her bike. Across the parking lot, muffled conversations faded in and out. Footsteps scuffed across the asphalt somewhere close behind her. Even when they were quiet, people really were the noisiest animals.” 
“You're right, they are.” said Adam. Blue nodded at him. They had an awkwardness around each other that wasn’t obvious unless you paid close attention. Henry had heard a bit about their relationship, from both Blue and Gansey, although some of the details conflicted. What he was sure of was the fallout between them dating and Blue and Gansey getting together had been messy. Henry filed the interaction away in his mind.  
“One day, she would live someplace where she could stand outside her house and see only stars, no streetlights, where she could feel as close as she ever got to sharing her mother’s gift. When she looked at the stars, something tugged at her, something that urged her to see more than stars, to make sense of the chaotic firmament, to pull an image from it. But it never made sense. She only ever saw Leo and Cepheus, Scorpio and Draco. Maybe she just needed more horizon and less city. The only thing was, she didn’t really want to see the future. What she wanted was to see something no one else could see or would see, and maybe that was asking for more magic than was in the world.”
 “And you found that, didn’t you?” Henry asked Blue. She pursed her lips, as if she didn’t want to answer. Or at least, she didn’t want to answer when he was asking. “I did,” she said finally, inclining her chin. “With all of you,” she looked around at the boys, “I got to see a new type of magic. And then on our road trip I got to see the world.”Gwenllian leaned forwards. Henry thought Gwenllian was kind of incredible, with her wacky clothes and hair — even wackier than Blue’s, which said something. Perhaps that was part of Blue’s discomfort with her, the competition. Yet she was dating Gansey who could rock a tailored suit when occasion called for it, but preferred to wear some truly bizarrely colored polos. But Gwenllian radiated power and authenticity in a way that impressed him. “But that didn’t sate you hunger for magic, did it Blue Lily? Be honest with them.” Blue clenched her jaw. “Yeah, I want to see more of the world and more of magic. Which is what I’ll do.”Gwenllian waggled her eyebrows. “Yet you won’t train with me, in a town full of magic.”That was interesting. Gansey frowned. “Blue, what is she talking about?” Blue glared daggers at Gwenllian, then said, “she’s talking about how before I left for the trip with you and Henry, she offered to teach me to hone my powers. If I stayed. And I turned her down.” Gansey looked extremely confused. Maura also looked surprised. “But Blue, I thought you always wanted the opportunity to practice your gift. Why would you say no?”“I don’t want her to teach me, first of all.” Blue glared defiantly at Gwenllian. “And I didn’t want to be stuck in Henrietta. I wanted to explore with my friends. After everything that happened, I felt like I deserve a break from mirrors and magic and fate and prophecies, to just be happy.” Adam was looking at her with a thoughtful expression on his face.  
“Excuse me, um, miss — hi.”

The voice was careful, masculine, and local; the vowels had all the edges sanded off. Blue turned with a lukewarm expression.

To her surprise, it was Elegant Boy, face gaunter and older in the distant streetlight. He was alone. No sign of President Cell Phone, the smudgy one, or their hostile friend. One hand steadied his bike. The other was tucked neatly in his pocket. His uncertain posture didn’t quite track with the raven- breasted sweater, and she caught a glimpse of a worn bit of seam on the shoulder before he shrugged it under his ear as if he was cold.

“Hi,” Blue said, softer than she would’ve if she hadn’t noticed the fray. She didn’t know what sort of Aglionby boy wore hand-me-down sweaters.”
 Now he watched both of them look distinctly more uncomfortable. It must be awkward considering how much Adam hadn’t wanted that to be noticed. Gansey was also watching them, his expression pensive. “I never knew that was what you noticed,” said Adam. “Yeah, I never felt like telling you.”  
“Adam, is it?”

He gave a jerky, abashed nod. Blue looked at his bike. She didn’t know what sort of Aglionby boy rode a bicycle instead of driving a car, either.

“I was on my way home,” Adam said, “And I thought I recognized you over here. I wanted to say sorry. About what happened earlier. I didn’t tell him to do that and I wanted you to know.”

It didn’t escape Blue that his slightly accented voice was as nice as his looks. It was all Henrietta sunset: hot front-porch swings and cold iced-tea glasses, cicadas louder than your thoughts. He glanced over his shoulder, then, at the sound of a car on a side street. When he looked back to her, he still wore a wary expression, and Blue saw that this expression — a wrinkle pinched between his eyebrows, mouth tense — was his normal one. It fit his features perfectly, matched up with every line around his mouth and eyes. This Aglionby boy isn’t often happy, she thought.

“Well, that’s nice of you,” she said. “But it’s not you that needed to apologize.”

Adam said, “I can’t let him take all the blame. I mean, he was right. I did want to talk to you. But I didn’t want to just — try to pick you up.”

This was where she ought to brush him off. But she was stymied by his blush at the table; his honest expression; his newly minted, uncertain smile.”
 This was interesting. He knew Blue liked honesty and openness, so it was a bit odd to him that the men she dated, including himself, tended to be so… closed off in some way or the other. But Gansey was open with her in what he’d seen, and Adam had been open in the beginning. He wondered if he’d succeeded in being open with her in that way?  
“His face was just strange enough that she wanted to keep looking at it.

The fact was that she’d never been flirted with by someone who she wanted to succeed at it.

Don’t do it! warned the voice inside Blue.

But she asked, “And what is it you wanted to do?”

“Talk,” he said. In his local accent, it was a long word and it seemed

less of a synonym for speak than it was for confess. She couldn’t help but look at the thin, pleasant line of his mouth. He added, “I guess I could have just saved a lot of trouble by coming up to talk to you in the first place. Other people’s ideas always seem to get me into more trouble.”

Blue was about to tell him how Orla’s ideas got everyone into trouble at her house, too, but then she realized he would say something else and then she would reply and it could go on all night. Something about Adam told her that this was a boy she could have a conversation with. Out of nowhere, Maura’s voice was in Blue’s head. I don’t have to tell you not to kiss anyone, right?

And just like that, Blue was done. She was, as Neeve pointed out, a sensible girl. Even the very best outcome here could only end in torment. She blew out a breath.

“It wasn’t about what he was saying about you, anyway. It was that he offered me money,” she said, putting her foot on the bike pedal. The thing was not to imagine what it would’ve been like to stay and talk. When Blue didn’t have enough money for something, the worst thing in the world was to imagine what it would’ve been like to have whatever the something was.” 
 “I understand that.” said Adam. “I never would let myself want things I couldn’t have, back then.” Blue and Adam are making more eye contact. Gansey and Ronan both look visibly uncomfortable. Henry is sure he would have his own feelings about this if they were in another situation, but right now he kind of wants to just sit back with popcorn and enjoy this show. As soon as he thought about it, the gourmet popcorn appeared. Magic.  
“Adam sighed, as if he recognized her retreat. “He doesn’t know. He’s stupid about money.”

“And you aren’t?”

He just leveled her with a very steady look. It wasn’t an expression that left room for folly.

Blue tipped her head back, staring up at the stars. It was strange to imagine how quickly they wheeled across the sky: a vast movement too far away for her to detect. Leo, Leo Minor, Orion’s Belt. If she had been her

mother or her aunts or her cousins, scrying up through the heavens, would she see what she ought to say to Adam?

She asked, “Are you coming back to Nino’s?”

“Am I invited?”

She smiled in reply. It felt like a very dangerous thing, that smile, like

something Maura wouldn’t be pleased with.

Blue had two rules: Stay away from boys, because they’re trouble, and
stay away from raven boys, because they were bastards.But those rules didn’t seem to apply to Adam. Fumbling in her pocket,
she pulled out a tissue and wrote her name and the phone number for 300 Fox Way on it. Heart thumping, she folded it up and handed it to him.

Adam said only, “I’m glad I came back.” Turning his long self around, he began to push his dolefully squeaking bike back the way he’d come.

Blue pressed her fingers to her face.

I gave a boy my number.

I gave a raven boy my number.

Hugging her arms around herself, she imagined a future argument with

her mother. Giving someone your number doesn’t mean you’re going to kiss him.

Blue jumped when the rear door of the restaurant cracked open. But it was only Donny, his expression clearing when he saw her. In his hand was a tantalizingly fat leather-bound book that Blue knew instantly. She’d seen it in President Cell Phone’s hands.” 
 “I still don’t understand why that was your name for me.” Gansey said resignedly.“I do.” said Henry. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Adam had made as if to respond as well, but ultimately remained silent. He was now glaring at Henry. “It’s because you're so impressive, so put together, but give this air like you're unavailable and constantly on the move.” Not unlike me, went unsaid. “But inside, you’re soft, like the sweet center of a hard candy.” Gansey dimpled adorably at that. He also looked more hopeful, and Henry cursed himself for saying that out loud. He would not forgive him! He also caught the jealous glances from Adam and Ronan, although that he wasn’t sorry for.                “Donny asked, “Do you know who left this behind? Is it yours?”
 Meeting him halfway across the lot, Blue accepted the journal and flipped it open. The journal didn’t immediately choose a page to open to; it was so well-worn and well-stuffed that every page claimed seniority. It finally split down the middle, obeying gravity instead of use.

The page it opened to was a mishmash of yellowed clippings from books and newspapers. Red pen underlined “a few phrases, added commentary in the margins (Luray Caverns count as spiritual place? crows = ravens?), and jotted a neatly boxed list titled “Welsh-Influenced Place Names Near Henrietta.” Blue recognized most of the towns listed. Welsh Hills, Glen Bower, Harlech, Machinleth.

“I didn’t really read it,” Donny said. “I just wanted to see if there was a name in there to return it. But then I saw that it was — well, it’s your stuff.”

By this, he meant it was what he expected of a psychic’s daughter.”
      “It must have been lonely,” said Jordan. Henry knew of Jordan Hennessy, but not about the doubling. His mother would be upset to learn about it, unless she already knew and just hadn’t told him. “The people in your town viewing you like that, not as yourself just as an extension of your family.”     Blue shrugged. “Well, yeah I wasn’t friends with the whole town growing up. I didn’t really have a ‘group’ until I met Adam.”       “So the two of you went out?” asked Hennessy.          Blue and Adam looked at each other again. “We did.” said Adam. “For a while.”         “Yeah, I always wondered about that.” mused Helen. “I remember seeing you two together. I always wanted to know what happened between Blue being with you and then my brother… I guess I’ll get to learn.”             “Helen,” said Gansey with a warning tone.            “I think I know who it belongs to,” Blue said. She had no immediate thought other than wanting to spend more time flipping through its pages. “I’ll take it.”
   After Donny had returned inside the restaurant, she flipped the journal back open. Now she had time to marvel at the sheer density of it. Even if the content hadn’t immediately caught her, the feel of the thing would have. There were so many of the clippings she’d noticed before that the journal   “wouldn’t stay book-shaped unless tied shut with leather wrappings. Pages and pages were devoted to these ripped and scissored excerpts, and there was an undeniable tactile pleasure to browsing. Blue ran her fingers over the varied surfaces. Creamy, thick artist paper with a slender, elegant font. Thin, browning paper with spidery serif. Slick, utilitarian white stock with an artless modern type. Ragged-edged newspaper in a brittle shade of yellow.

Then there were the notes, made with a half-dozen different pens and markers, but all in the same business-like hand. They circled and pointed and underlined very urgently. They made bulleted lists and eager exclamation points in the margins. They contradict one another and refer to one another in third person. Lines became cross-hatching,  doodles of mountains became squirrelly tire tracks behind fast-looking cars.

It took her a while to make sense of what the journal was really about. It “was organized into rough sections, but it was clear that whoever had created it had run out of space in some and begun anew later in the journal. There was a section on ley lines, invisible energy lines that connected spiritual places. There was a section on Owain Glyndr, the Raven King. There was a section about legends of sleeping knights who waited beneath mountains for discovery and new life. There was a section of strange stories about sacrificed kings and ancient water goddesses and all of the old things that ravens represented.”
 Gansey had shown the journal to Henry a couple of times. He found it beautiful, yet something about the journal felt lonely. When he’d told Gansey that he’d feigned confusion at first. “I’m the only one who writes in it, but all my friends have handled it. It’s not like it’s never been seen by another pair of eyes.”Henry hesitated “Do they understand it though? Do they understand you?” Gansey looked away quickly. “Blue does, she sees all of me. Adam and Ronan understand parts, but … they never seemed to manage that with the whole.” There was a tinge of bitterness at the end, and then jerked, as if waking himself from a bad dream. “I shouldn’t say that … I love my friends, they’re wonderful. And they have bigger problems than – ““Maybe so,” said Henry. He didn’t like Gansey’s friends very much, but he would never try to dissuade Gansey from valuing them. He knew how important those relationships are to him. “I’m not asking because I want to discredit what those friendships have done for you. I’m only asking if you feel understood by them.” There was a pause. “I guess more often than not, I don’t feel like they understand me.”  
“More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.

A familiar shape stood out from the rest of the doodles. Three intersecting lines: a long, beaked triangle. It was the same shape Neeve had drawn in the churchyard dust. The same shape her mother had drawn on the steamed shower door.

Blue flattened the page to get a better look. This section was on ley lines: “mystical energy roads that connect spiritual places.” Throughout the journal, the writer had doodled the three lines again and again, along with a sickly-looking Stonehenge, strangely elongated horses, and a labeled sketch of a burial mound. There was no explanation of the symbol.

It couldn’t be a coincidence.

There was no way this journal could possibly belong to that presidential raven boy. Someone must’ve given it to him.”

“Hey,” said Gansey. “Some presidents kept journals. Reagan for instance –” He was joking, probably so Blue wouldn’t be self conscious, but Henry could tell he was hurt by her initial impression of him. Even though they had come so far.

“Maybe, she thought, it’s Adam’s.

He gave her the same sensation as the journal did: the sense of magic, of possibility, of anxious danger. That same feeling as when Neeve had said that a spirit touched her hair.

Blue thought, I wish you had been Gansey. But as soon as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true. Because whoever Gansey was, he didn’t have long to live.” 
“These chapters do keep ending ominously.” Henry mused. “Perhaps that’s a sign there’ll be a happy ending.” Both Gansey and Blue smiled warmly at him. He refused to think about why he’d said that, or what he was feeling right now. He would not forgive Gansey.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“

Gansey woke in the night to find the moon full on his face and his phone ringing. He fumbled for where it was nestled in the blankets beside him. Blind without his glasses or contacts, he had to hold the screen an inch from his eyes to read the caller ID: MALORY, R. Now Gansey understood the bizarre timing of the call. Dr. Roger Malory lived in Sussex, a five-hour time difference from Henrietta. Midnight in Virginia was five in the morning for Malory-the-early-riser. Malory was one of the prime authorities on British ley lines. He was either eighty or one hundred or two hundred years old and had written three books on the subject, all classics in the (very limited) field.”

“He’s not the only two hundred years old working in that very limited field.” Ronan groused. Jordan caught Declan rolling his eyes. He’d once mentioned to her he thought his brother would tease anything he remotely liked.

Gansey huffed in exasperation. “Now that I know your a thousands of year old entity, you officially can’t call me

“

They’d met the summer Gansey was splitting his time between Wales and London. ”

“You spent time in London?” Jordan enquired.

Gansey nodded and smiled. He seemed most at ease answering questions like this, rather than arguing with others.

“Yes, when I was much younger. I love your museum of—“

“Oh, please don’t say anything that will make me want to kill you again.” said Hennessy.

“

Malory had been the first one “to take fifteen-year-old Gansey seriously, a favor for which Gansey would not soon stop being grateful for.”

“Persephone used to say that many children deserved to be taken more seriously, and adults less.” Mused Calla.

Jordan didn’t need to be psychic to tell that Persephone was no longer of this world. She could see it on their faces, in the way her name was said, the way certain postures slumped as if remembering the world was no longer as bright as it once was. Particularly Blue and her mom and Aunt reacted this way. Jordan sympathized. She knew it was the same way she’d speak or react to the names June, Trinity, Jay, Brooklyn and the rest. They were parts of her that had gone irretrievably missing, in the way Persephone seemed to have that effect for Maura and Calla. Against her better instincts, she looked to Hennessy, hoping to catch her eye. Surely Hennessy must feel it too, perhaps worse than Jordan did?

I wish you were dead like the others.

Hennessy’s voice, cold and slow and terrible, played on a loop in her head. She hadn’t meant it… had she? Then she thought about Jay, the first one, and how Hennessy hadn’t been able to attend her funeral. Jordan had instead. Had that killed Hennessy’s capacity for grief in the future, some how?

“Gansey,” Malory said warmly, knowing better than to call him by his Christian name. Without further preamble, Malory launched into a one- sided conversation about the weather, the historical society’s past four meetings, and how frustrating his neighbor with the collie was. Gansey understood about three quarters of the monologue. After living in the UK for nearly a year, Gansey was good with accents, but Malory’s was often difficult, due to a combination of slurring, chewing, extreme age, bad breeding, and a poor phone connection.”

Both Blue and Adam made disgruntled noises, and shot withering looks at Gansey.

He sighed. “Look I am sorry, but also the two of you don’t even

like

Malory so don’t start defending him.”

“Not the point.” said Blue, crossing her arms.

“Getting out of bed to crouch beside his model of Henrietta, Gansey half- listened for a polite twelve minutes before breaking in, gently. “It’s nice of you to call.”

“I found a very interesting textual source,” Malory said. There was a

sound like he was either chewing or wrapping something in cellophane. Gansey had seen his flat and it was quite possible he was doing both. “Who suggested that the ley lines are dormant. Sleeping. Sound familiar?”

“Like Glendower! So what does that mean?”

“Might explain why they’re so hard to dowse. If they’re still present but not active, the energy would be very faint and irregular. In Surrey, I was following a line with this fellow — fourteen miles, rotten weather, raindrops like turnips — and then it just disappeared.”

Retrieving a tube of glue and some cardboard shingles, Gansey used the strong moonlight to work on a roof while Malory went on about rain. He asked, “Did your source say anything about waking the ley lines up? If Glendower can be woken, the ley lines could be, too, right?”

“That’s the thought.”

“But all it takes to wake Glendower is discovery. People have been walking all over the ley lines.”

“I can scarcely believe there are other people interested in your lines.” said Helen airily. “Much less that many.” Her tone wasn’t condescending exactly, but it was a touch dismissive.

Gansey rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe anyone would go for your match-making business, so that makes two of us.”

Helen pouted. “I’ll have you know it’s very lucrative!”

“I actually was reading about that,” offers Henry. “It sounds fascinating. It’s not too unlike what your Mom and Aunts do , Blue, when you really think about it.”

Blue’s glare could have melted ice. “I guess you do need all the help you can to find a date these days.”

“You know that’s not true darling.” Scoffed Henry.

“Okay, maybe you could find a date. But not a single person would have a real conversation with you unless you paid them. Oh wait, you probably have paid a girl or guy for that.”

“Both of you, please.” Gansey held up a hand. Unlike with Ronan and Adam where that seemed to work, Blue and Henry merely kept on antagonizing each other. Jordan felt quite uncomfortable.

“Did those two used to date?” she asked Declan, pointing from Henry to Blue.

Declan frowned. “I don’t think so.”

Jordan pointed from Henry to Gansey. “Those two?”

Declan’s eyes widened a fraction. “No! I would have known that it would have been such gossip at Aglionby. As far as I know Gansey wasn’t dating anyone before Blue.”

Jordan frowned. “There just seems to be a lot of uncomfortable sexual energy in this friend group.”

“Is that normal for groups?” asked Declan, then he seemed bashful. “I mean… you’ve probably gathered, I didn’t have close friends like this in high school. In a way your my first friend.”

Was he Jordan’s first friend? Hennessy had been her first everything, but she wasn’t sure she could say they were friends. But then some might say she and Declan weren’t friends because there were more. “I don’t really know enough about friendship to say.”

“Oh no, Mr. Gansey, that’s where you’re mistaken. The spirit roads are underground. Even if they weren’t always, they’re now covered by meters of dirt accumulated over the centuries,” Malory said. “No one’s really touched them for hundreds of years. You and I, we don’t walk the lines. We just follow the echoes.”

Gansey recalled how the trail had seemed to come and go for no reason while he and Adam dowsed the lines. Malory’s theory had a ring of plausibility, and, really, that was all he needed. He wanted nothing more than to start scouring his books for further support for this new idea, school day be damned. He felt a rare stab of resentment at being a teen, being tied to Aglionby; maybe this was how Ronan felt all the time.

“Okay. So we go to them underground. Caves, maybe?”

“Oh, caves are dreadful things,” Malory replied. “Do you know how many people die in caves every year?”

Gansey replied that he was sure he didn’t.

“Thousands,” Malory assured him. “They are like elephant graveyards. Much better to stay aboveground. Spelunking is more dangerous than motorcycle racing.”

No, this source was all about a ritual way to wake the spirit roads from the surface, letting the ley line know of your presence. You’d do a symbolic laying of hands on the energy there in Marianna.”

“Henrietta.”

“Texas?”

Whenever Gansey talked to British people about America, they always

seemed to think he meant Texas. He said, “Virginia.”

“Right,” agreed Malory warmly. “Think how easy it would be to follow

that spirit rode to Glendower if it’s shouting loud instead of whispering. You find it, perform the ritual, follow it to your king.”

When Malory said it, it sounded inevitable.

Follow it to your king.”

“Why did you want to find him so badly?” asked Carmen. Her tone was not judgemental, it was simply curious. Jordan had mixed feelings about the other girl. She knew Declan trusted her, and felt a kinship with her. She understood that. She was sympathetic to her distress at the hands of the moderators and her brother. But she also didn’t like the other girl very much. She had this quality to her that was a little stoic, a little bland. Jordan felt she was being unfair or uncharitable when she thought that, but she couldn’t help it.

“I’m sure it’ll be addressed,” said Gansey. “But I died once when I was a kid, and Glendower’s spirit saved my life. Or so I thought.”

“I’ll admit,” said Helen. “You found a lot more than any of us expected. From an archeological standpoint it was impressive.”

Gansey, smiled, but it looked pained. 
 
“

Gansey closed his eyes to calm his pulse. He saw a dimly gray image of a king in repose, hands folded on his chest, a sword by his right side, a cup by his left. This slumbering figure was dizzyingly important to Gansey in a way that he couldn’t begin to understand or shape. It was something more, something bigger, something that mattered. Something without a price tag. Something earned.

“Now, the text was not quite clear on how to perform the ritual,” Malory admitted. He rambled about the vagaries of historical documents, and Gansey only paid a little attention until he finished with, “I’m going to try it on the Lockyer road. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Brilliant,” Gansey said. “I can’t say thanks enough.”

“Give my regards to your mother.”

“I wi —”

“You’re lucky you still have your mother at your age. When I was about

your age, my mother was murdered by the British health-care system. She was perfectly fine until she was admitted after a little cough....”

Gansey half-listened to Malory’s oft-repeated story of the government’s failure to cure his mother’s throat cancer. Malory sounded quite cheerful by

the time the phone had gone silent.

Now Gansey felt infected by the chase; he needed to talk to someone

before the unfinished feeling of the quest ate him from the inside out. Adam would be the best, but the odds were good that Ronan, who swung wildly between insomnia and hyper-somnia, would be awake.”

“I don’t know Dick,” Helen’s voice was teasing in the way Jordan had come to associate with how Ronan addressed Declan these past couple weeks. “Sounds like you did have a favorite.”

Gansey rolled his eyes. “There’s just something comforting about talking to Adam.”

Both Adam and Ronan look like they would like prefer for Gansey to elaborate on the sentiment, but he does not.

“

He’d only made it halfway to Ronan’s room before the thought struck him that it was empty. Standing in the dark doorway, Gansey whispered Ronan’s name, and then, when that got no response, spoke it aloud.

Ronan’s room was not to be broached, but Gansey did it anyway. Putting his hand on the bed, he found it unmade and cool, the blankets thrown aside with the speed of Ronan’s going. Gansey hammered Noah’s closed door with a fist while fumbling to dial Ronan’s number with his other hand. It rang twice before Ronan’s voicemail said merely, “Ronan Lynch.”

Gansey cut off the recorded voice mid-word, his pulse tripping. For a long moment he debated, and then he dialed another number. This time, it was Adam’s voice that answered, low with sleep and caution. “Gansey?”

“Ronan’s gone.”

Adam was quiet. It was not just that Ronan had vanished, it was that he had vanished after a fight with Declan. But it wasn’t an easy thing to leave the Parrish household in the middle of the night. The consequences of getting caught could leave physical evidence, and it was getting too warm for long sleeves. Gansey felt wretched for asking this of him.”

“Why did you feel badly about asking that?” asked Jordan, more forcefully than she’d meant to. The nature of Gansey’s fear for Ronan was apparent to her; he was afraid to find Ronan dead, in a puddle of nightwash or having overdosed or having self destructed in some other way, be it a bang or a whimper. She knew because she’d been terrified of finding Hennessy like that countless times.

“Don’t be naive, Jordan.” scoffed Hennessy. “Pay attention to what he’s trying not to think about.”

“Outside, a midnight bird cried, high and piercing. The little replica of Henrietta was eerie in the half-light, the die-cast cars parked on the streets appearing as though they had just paused. Gansey always thought that, after dark, it felt like anything could happen. At night, Henrietta felt like magic, and at night, magic felt like it might be a terrible thing.

“I’ll check the park,” Adam whispered finally. “And, uh, the bridge, I guess.”

Adam hung up so softly that it took Gansey a moment to realize the connection had ended. He pressed his fingertips to his eyes, which was how Noah found him.

“You’re going to look for him?” Noah asked. He looked pale and

insubstantial in the yellow, late-night light of the room behind him; the skin beneath his eyes was darker than anything. He looked less like Noah than the suggestion of Noah. “Check the church.”

“So none of you know this Noah person?” Jordan felt silly that she kept having to ask questions, but the others didn’t seem that intent on solving the mystery or being transparent about anything going on. “Besides him being the student who your teacher killed?”

“I’ve never heard of him before in my life,” grumbled Declan. “I never knew Whelk was a murderer. It would have been nice to be told.” He sounded quite bitter. 
 
“

Noah didn’t say he would go along, and Gansey didn’t ask him to. Six months ago, the only time it had ever mattered, Noah had found Ronan in an introspective pool of his own blood, and so he was exempt from ever having to look again. Noah hadn’t gone with Gansey to the hospital afterward, and Adam had been caught trying to sneak out, so it was only Gansey who’d been with Ronan when they stitched his skin whole again. It had been a long time ago, but also, it was no time at all.”

Declan, Mathew and Gansey all appeared ashen. Adam and Hennessy also looked troubled, but their expressions were better schooled to mask their true feelings. Jordan didn’t know how she looked. She didn’t particularly like Ronan, but he was important to two people who were important to her. And no one deserved this. Her heart went out to him.  
“

Sometimes, Gansey felt like his life was made up of a dozen hours that he could never forget.”

“I feel like mine is,” said Hennessy gruffly. “Quit looking at Ronan like he’s about to keel over and die, both of you.” She gestured towards Declan and Gansey. Ronan looked oddly grateful as Gansey and Declan’s gazes rested on their shoes. “And quit looking me like I’m about to do that.” Hennessy snapped at Jordan.

Jordan glared back. “Sorry for caring about you. I’ll try not to make that mistake in the future.”

“Good. I’m sick of your crocodile tears.”

“And I’m sick of your condescension!”

Mor cleared her throat. “May I continue?”

“Get on with it,” Hennessy and Jordan snapped in unison. They crossed their arms over their chests to glare at each other.
 
“

Pulling on his jacket, he headed out into the greenish light of the chilly parking lot. The hood of Ronan’s BMW was cold, so it hadn’t been driven recently. Wherever he’d gone, he’d gone on foot. The church, its spire illuminated by dusky yellow light, was within walking distance. So was Nino’s. So was the old bridge with the fast current rushing away beneath it.

He started to walk. His mind was logical, but his traitorous heart stuttered from beat to beat. He wasn’t naive; he carried no illusions that he’d ever recover the Ronan Lynch he’d known before Niall died. But he didn’t want to lose the Ronan Lynch he had now.”

There was hurt in Ronan’s expression as he regarded Gansey. “You really thought of me as a lost cause.”

Gansey practically leapt from his seat. “No! Of course not, Ronan. I just wanted you to be happy… Can you really blame me?”

Adam cut in. “You can’t just want the people around you to change the way you want them to. Or not change when you don’t want them to. People don’t work that way, Gansey.”

He didn’t sound angry, he just sounded exhausted.

Gansey’s next words were said in a tone as cold as ice. It was such a change from his previous mellowness it gave Jordan a start.

“Change doesn’t always just happen, Adam. Maybe with Ronan it did but sometimes people have choices, and that’s great for you, you should have as many choices as you want, but don’t pretend the decisions just happen to you.”

There was a desperate edge to Adam’s voice. “That’s not fair. I don’t know everything, I don’t know what every choice will lead to or how you're going to feel about it. I don’t always know what I want it to lead to! So why do you act like I’m responsible for everything, when if it’s Ronan you’ll just swoop in and clean up whatever mess he’s landed himself in, no consequences?”

“I don’t know what you want from me, Adam.” Gansey was the one who sounded tired now. “You wanted me to respect you, right? To treat you like you can take care of yourself, to not interfere. Well you were right, and I’m treating you just like that from now on. But you don’t seem to like that either.”

“I wanted to be treated like an equal, I didn’t want to be … exiled. It’s like you’ve drawn a circle and I’m outside of it. When did that happen? Treating me like a ticking time bomb isn’t better than trying to handle me with kid gloves. You’d never treat Blue or Ronan like that.”

“I know that I can trust Blue with anything. And blaming Ronan for the things he does is like blaming the gravity involved in a car crash. But you don’t work like that Adam, you seem dependable one moment and then your off the rails the next. And I’m sorry, but you want me to respect your autonomy — which I can admit, I didn’t always do very well in the past, and I’m truly sorry for that — I’m going to blame you for the things you’d done, too.”

Adam looked as if Gansey had slapped him.

“What about me?” asked Ronan. They both looked at him, seemingly startled. “Don’t I get some of that respect you have for Adam and Blue? Even if I agreed with what you said to Adam — which I think is shitty of you to say — you aren’t flattering me with this either.”

Gansey looked appropriately chastised.

Adam scooted closer to Ronan, and Jordan wouldn’t have been surprised if he was holding his hand under the table.

“

Despite the strong moonlight, the entrance to St. Agnes lay in total darkness. Shivering a bit, Gansey put his hand on the great iron ring that pulled open the church door, unsure if it would be unlocked. He’d only been to St. Agnes once, on Easter, because Ronan’s younger brother, Matthew, had asked them all to come.”

“I remember that,” Mathew told her in a low voice. “Gansey had to bring the herring for the feast, but he brought one that was all fancy and rich people like.” He wrinkled his nose in distaste. Jordan forwent reminding him that he and his brothers were also “rich people”. Hennessy was rich as well, in a way. But there were sometimes different connotations when you added “people” after a word. It did seem that Gansey and his sister belonged to a very different mold of people than the Lynch family did.

“He wouldn’t have thought of it as a place someone like Ronan would go in the middle of the night, but then again, he wouldn’t have pegged Ronan as a churchgoer at all. And yet all of the Lynch brothers went to St. Agnes every Sunday. For an hour, they managed to sit next to one another in a pew even when they couldn’t meet one another’s eyes over a restaurant table.

Stepping through the black arch of the entrance, Gansey thought Noah is good at finding things. He hoped that Noah was right about Ronan.

The church enveloped Gansey in an incense-scented pocket of air, a rare enough smell that it instantly evoked half a dozen memories of family weddings, funerals, and baptisms, every one of them summer. How strange that a season should be held captive in one breath of trapped air.

“Ronan?” The word was sucked into the empty space. It echoed off the unseeable ceiling far overhead so it was only his own voice, in the end, that answered him.”

Jordan remembered one night, after a particularly intense party, when Hennessy had vanished completely. Jordan had been beside herself with worry, had run down June for any details about where she could be.

“You’d know better than me.” June snarked. “You’re her favorite. I know that makes some of the others jealous of you, but me? I feel sorry for you. You might seem the most like a person of us now, but one day when our dreamer is gone for good the rest of us will be happy. We might grieve a little, but ultimately we’ll be better off. What’s going to happen to you? When you don’t have your mistress telling you what a good girl you are, how you're the best of all the defective dolls she made as a kid. I think when that day comes, you’ll crumble. And it’s not as if you have a life now, you just have to clean up her messes.”

Jordan was overcome with a rage she had never anticipated could live inside her. She slammed June against the wall. Her nails dug into the hollow of her throat, before she came to her senses. What was wrong with her? She moved her hands down to pin the other clone’s wrists as she sputtered out coughs.

“Don’t ever speak that way about us again, or you’ll be sorry.”

Whatever June had seen in her eyes made her gulp, and Jordan took off to hotwire a car and find Hennessy. She tried a few of their usual haunts, and then began going through their contacts – which were identical, except for the ones with the initials J.H. and H.J. It was the fifth from last who turned out to be successful. Hennessy and Jordan’s ex girlfriend Talia, who Hennessy had found boring except for her parties, and who Jordan had quite liked aside from the way she acted at parties. When Jordan had called her, Talia sounded livid on the other side. “Jordan, first you came to my house and drank most of the wine we had left at the party, but now you’ve vanished off to god knows where. The next time I see you again, we’re through.”

When Jordan got to the house, it was empty and dark. There was no sign of Talia, she must have gone off somewhere with her loser friends. Jordan picked the lock, and headed out back to the pool house. There, she saw a figure floating in the water. Dread filled her, threatened to come up like bile, or like she herself had the nightwash.

“Boo,” said Hennessy.

Jordan had been so furious with her stunt, she hadn’t spoken to her for three whole days. She’d still helped out with whatever Hennessy needed of course, but she hadn’t spoken to her for three days.

“

The subdued aisle light made peaked shadows of arches. The darkness and uncertainty crushed Gansey’s ribs as small as a fist, his breathless lungs reminding him of yet another long-ago summer day, the afternoon he first realized there was such a thing as magic in the world.

And there Ronan was, stretched out on one of the shadowed pews, an arm hanging off the edge, the other skewed above his head, his body a darker bit of black in an already black world. He wasn’t moving.

Gansey thought, Not tonight. Please don’t let it be tonight.”

Jordan understood that Gansey felt Ronan’s death to be inevitable. In part, she wanted to reach out to him and tell him that, but she couldn’t with Hennessy and Ronan in earshot.

Ronan was looking at Gansey with something deep and unfathomable in his eyes.
 
“

Edging into the pew behind Ronan, he put his hand on the other boy’s shoulder, as if he could merely wake him, praying that by assuming it so, it would be true. The shoulder was warm below his hand; he smelled alcohol.

“Wake up, dude,” he said. The words didn’t sound light, though he meant them to.

Ronan’s shoulder shifted and his face turned. For a brief, unchained moment, Gansey had a sudden thought that he was too late and Ronan was dead after all, and that his corpse woke now only because Gansey had commanded it to. But then Ronan’s brilliant blue eyes opened, and the moment dissipated.

Gansey let out a sigh. “You bastard.”

Ronan said plainly, “I couldn’t dream.” Then, taking in Gansey’s stricken expression, he added, “I promised you it wouldn’t happen again.”

In Jordan’s experience, it wasn’t the type of thing that could be promised. 
 
“

Gansey tried again to keep his voice light, but failed. “But you’re a liar.”

“He’s not wrong.” said Hennessy.

“I think,” Ronan replied, “that you’re mistaking me for my brother.”

The church was quiet and full around them; it seemed brighter now that Ronan’s eyes were open, as if the building had been asleep as well.

“When I told you I didn’t want you getting drunk at Monmouth, I didn’t mean I wanted you drunk somewhere else.”

Ronan, with only a little slurring, replied, “Pot calling the kettle black.” With dignity, Gansey said, “I drink. I do not get drunk.”

Ronan’s eyes dropped to something he held near his chest.

“What is that?” Gansey asked.

Next to his chest, Ronan’s fingers curled around a dark object. When Gansey reached down to uncurl his grip, he felt something warm and living, a rapid pulse against his fingertips. He snatched his hand away.

“Christ,” said Gansey, trying to make sense of what he’d felt. “Is that a bird?”

Ronan slowly sat up, still holding his cargo close. Another whuff of alcohol-laced breath drifted toward Gansey.

“Raven.” There was a long pause as Ronan regarded his hand. “Maybe a crow. But I doubt it. I ... yeah, seriously doubt it. Corvus corax.”

Even drunk, Ronan knew the Latin name for the common raven.

And it was not just a raven, Gansey saw. It was a tiny foundling, featherless mouth still a baby’s smile, wings still days and nights and days away from flight. He wasn’t sure he would want to touch something that looked so easily destroyable.

The raven was Glendower’s bird. The Raven King, he was called, from a long line of kings associated with the bird. Legend had it that Glendower could speak to ravens, and vice versa. It was only one of the reasons why Gansey was here in Henrietta, a town known for its ravens. His skin prickled.

“Where did it come from?”

Ronan’s fingers were a compassionate cage around the raven’s breast. It didn’t look real in his hands. “I found it.”

“People find pennies,” Gansey replied. “Or car keys. Or four-leaf clovers.”

“And ravens,” Ronan said. “You’re just jealous ’cause” — at this point, he had to stop to regroup his beer-sluggish thoughts — “you didn’t find one, too.”

“Real mature.” scoffed Adam.

“You wouldn’t like me if I was more mature.” returned Ronan.

Adam hmmphed.

“

The bird had just crapped between Ronan’s fingers onto the pew beside him. Holding the fledgling in one hand, Ronan used a church bulletin to scrape the majority of the mess off the wood. He offered the soiled paper to Gansey. The weekly prayer requests were spattered with white.

Gansey only took the paper because he didn’t trust Ronan to bother finding a place to throw it out. With some distaste, he asked, “What if I implement a no-pets policy at the apartment?”

“Then you’d have had to relocate.” said Adam dryly, but Jordan sensed it was meant to send different messages to both Ronan and Gansey.

“Well, hell, man,” Ronan replied, with a savage smile, “you can’t just throw out Noah like that.”

Ronan wrinkled his nose, as though he found the thought of someone else claiming the status of Gansey’s ‘pet’ distasteful.

“It took Gansey a moment to realize that Ronan had made a joke, and by then, it was too late to laugh. In any case, he knew he was going to let the bird return with them to Monmouth Manufacturing, because he saw the possessive way Ronan held it. Already the raven looked up at him, beak cracked hopefully, dependent.

Gansey relented. “Come on. We’re going back. Get up.”

As Ronan unsteadily climbed to his feet, the raven hunched down in his hands, becoming all beak and body, no neck. He said, “Get used to some turbulence, you little bastard.”

“You can’t name it that.”

“Her name’s Chainsaw,” replied Ronan, without looking up. Then: “Noah. You’re creepy as hell back there.”

In the deep, shadowed entrance of the church, Noah stood silently. For a second, all that seemed to be visible was his pale face; his dark clothing invisible and his eyes chasms into someplace unknowable. Then he stepped into the light and he was rumpled and familiar as always.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” Gansey said.

Noah’s gaze traveled past them to the altar, then up to the dark, unseeable ceiling. He said, with typical bravery, “The apartment was creepy.”

“Freak,” Ronan remarked, but Noah seemed unconcerned.

Gansey pulled open the door to the sidewalk. No sign of Adam. Guilt for calling him out for a false alarm was beginning to settle in. Though ... he wasn’t entirely certain it was a false alarm. Something had happened, even if he wasn’t yet sure what. “Where did you say you found that bird again?”

“In my head.” Ronan’s laugh was a sharp jackal cry.

“Dangerous place,” commented Noah.

Ronan stumbled, all his edges blunted by alcohol, and the raven in his

hands let out a feeble sound more percussive than vocal. He replied, “Not for a chain saw.”

Back out in the hard spring night, Gansey tipped his head back. Now that he knew that Ronan was all right, he could see that Henrietta after dark was a beautiful place, a patchwork town embroidered with black tree branches.

A raven, of all the birds for Ronan to turn up with. Gansey didn’t believe in coincidences.”

“Well, that’s something we can agree on.” murmured Hennessy. “Neither do I.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Gansey didn’t hate a lot of things. The list of people he hated had until recently been limited to a few corrupt politicians, Adam’s parents, Blue’s high school counselor who she’d told him hadn’t thought she could go to school outside of Henrietta, Barrington Whelk. Sometimes Declan could make the list when he and Ronan were in a particularly tense place. However, he hated whoever had sentenced them all to sitting together and rehashing the past. He wasn’t a violent person, but he wasn’t going to strongly object to violence being done to this person by the other no doubt equally angry people here. 
“Whelk was not sleeping.

Back when he was an Aglionby boy, sleep had come easy — and why shouldn’t it have? Like Czerny and the rest of his classmates, he slept two or four or six hours on weekdays, up late, up early, and then performed marathon sleeping sessions on the weekend. And when he did sleep, it was hours of easy, dreamless sleep. No — he knew that was false. Everyone dreamed, only some forgot.” 
 Gansey’s sleep schedule while he went to Aglionby had been completely different from what Whelk described. He had chronic insomnia that led to many late nights that turned into early mornings going for drives and orange juice runs with Ronan, researching for the quest and recording the findings in his journal, building his model Henrietta out of cardboard. When he was particularly troubled and needed reassurance he would call Adam, and later Blue, to talk through and soothe his racing thoughts. It had been particularly hellish before he’d quit rowing and had to wake up at 4 am every morning, then afterwards his sleep hadn’t exactly gotten better as he could feel his death looming nearer and nearer. Sometimes he didn’t remember his dreams, other times he dreamt of finding Glendower. Those dreams had later turned into finding Glendower, or kissing Blue, or both. Everything always went to black at the end. 
“Now, however, he rarely closed his eyes for longer than a few hours at a stretch. He rolled in his bedsheets. He sat bolt upright, woken by whispers. He nodded off on his leather couch, the only piece of furniture the government hadn’t seized. His sleep patterns and energy seemed dictated by something larger and more powerful than himself, ebbing and flowing like an uneven tide. Attempts to chart it left him frustrated: He seemed more wakeful at the full moon and after thunderstorms, but beyond that, it was difficult to predict. In his mind, he imagined that it was the magnetic pulse of the ley line itself, somehow invited into his body through Czerny’s death.” 
“He’s thinking about it like he’s sorry, like he’s actually grieving him.” Blue’s tone was disgusted. “If he mattered to him, he wouldn’t have killed his friend.” Gansey agreed with her. It sent a chill down his spine, the idea that two people could be so close and then one of them could betray another in this way. He didn’t understand it. He thought about that story again, the one of Glendower and Hywel, the one that had always disturbed him so much. Now that he knew Glendower wasn’t waiting for him, he could look back on some of these stories with a clearer gaze, he likes to think. He still loves them, Glendower will always be important to him in an intrinsic way. He would be an entirely different person, with an entirely different life, had he never heard the name “Owain Glendower”. He would never know who that person was, but he doubted he wanted to. Would Ronan be his best friend in that life? It was unlikely. He certainly would not have Adam or Blue in his life, and that alone meant he was grateful to the dead king. Even beyond that, Glendower’s values were ones Gansey wholeheartedly believed in, that he knew had influenced him for the better. He would always be close to Gansey’s heart. That story though, it had always haunted him. As had other he'd avoided integrating into his idea of Glendower.  
“Sleep deprivation made his life an imaginary thing, his days a ribbon floating aimlessly in water.

It was nearly a full moon and it had not been long since it rained, so Whelk was awake.

He sat in a T-shirt and boxers in front of the computer screen, operating the mouse with the unprincipled and dubious productivity of the fatigued. All in a rush, the countless voices invaded his head, whispering and hissing.

They sounded like the static that buzzed over phone lines in the vicinity of the ley line. Like the wind before a storm front. Like the trees themselves conspiring. As always, Whelk couldn’t pick out any words, and he couldn’t understand the conversation. But he did understand one thing: Something strange had just happened in Henrietta, and the voices couldn’t stop talking about it.

For the first time in years, Whelk retrieved his old county maps from his tiny hall closet. He had no table and the counter-top was cluttered with opened packages of microwave lasagna and plates with stale bread crusts on them, so he spread the maps out in the bathroom instead. A spider in the bathtub skidded out of his way when he flattened a map against the surface.

Czerny, you’re in a better place than me, I think.

But he didn’t really believe that. He had no idea what had become of Czerny’s soul or spirit or whatever you wanted to call what had been Czerny, but if Whelk had been cursed with whispering voices merely by his part in the ritual, Czerny’s fate must’ve been worse.”
 “A little bit of missed sleep is too good a fate for him,” Carmen said bitterly. “Agreed,” said Hennessy, examining her nails. She had a similar manner to Ronan, in that Gansey struggled to tell what was true nonchalance and what was the performance of it. “He deserved to have his worst nightmare play out before his eyes over and over again for years, with the knowledge it would kill him one day.” “Well, something did kill him.” Ronan nodded in his boyfriend’s direction. He said it in a tone Gansey thought would be more appropriate for describing Adam’s academic prowess or research skills compared to his murdering their teacher. Hennessy raised her glass. “I understand a little more what Ronan sees in you.” Adam looked puzzled, but not displeased.          “Whelk stood back and crossed his arms, studying the dozens of marks and notations he’d made on the maps over the course of his search. Czerny’s impossible handwriting, always in red, noted energy levels along the possible path of the ley line. Back then, it had been a game, a treasure hunt. A play for glory. Was it true? It didn’t matter. It was an expensive exercise in strategy with the East Coast as the playing field. Looking for patterns, Whelk had painstakingly drawn circles around areas of interest on one of the topographical maps. A circle around an old copse of ash trees where the energy levels were always high. A circle around a ruined church that wildlife seemed to avoid. A circle around the place Czerny had died.”  There was something deeply uncomfortable about the way Whelk described Czerny’s writing. The familiarity of it. It was the manner in which Gansey could describe the sprawl of Adam’s runaway letters. The thought made him feel sick.  
“Of course, he had drawn the circle before Czerny had died. The place, a sinister group of oak trees, had been notable because of old words carved into one of the trunks. Latin. It seemed incomplete, difficult to translate, and Whelk’s best guess was “the second road.” The energy levels were promising there, though, if inconsistent. Surely this, then, was on the ley line.

Czerny and Whelk had returned a half-dozen times, taking readings (next to the circle, there were six different numbers in Czerny’s handwriting), digging in the dirt for possible artifacts, watching overnight for signs of supernatural activity. Whelk had constructed his most complicated and sensitive dowsing rod yet, two metal wires bent at a ninety-degree angle and inserted into a metal tube handle so that they could swing freely. They’d dowsed the area around it, trying to establish for certain the path of the line.

But it remained spotty, coming in and out of focus like a distant radio station. The lines needed to be woken, to have their frequencies honed, the volume turned up. Czerny and Whelk made plans to attempt the ritual in the oak grove. They weren’t quite sure of the process, though. All Whelk could find out was that the line loved reciprocity and sacrifice, but that was frustratingly vague. No other information presented itself, so they kept pushing it off. Over winter break. Spring break. End of the school year.

Then Whelk’s mother had called and told Whelk that his father had been arrested for unethical business practices and income tax evasion. It turned out the company had been trading with war criminals, a fact his mother knew and Whelk had guessed, and the FBI had been watching for years. Overnight, the Whelks lost everything.”
 “Well, I for one don’t feel sorry for him.” Helen sniffed. There were murmurs of agreement throughout the room. 
“It was in the papers the next day, the catastrophic crash of the Whelk family fortune. Both of Whelk’s girlfriends left him. Well, the second one was technically Czerny’s, so perhaps that didn’t count.”
Gansey felt deeply, deeply uncomfortable about this sentence for reasons he would rather not look at too closely.  
“The whole thing was all very public. The Virginia playboy, heir to the Whelk fortune, suddenly evicted from his Aglionby dorm, relieved of his social life, freed from any hope of his Ivy League future, watching his car being loaded onto a truck and his room emptied of speakers and furniture.

The last time Whelk had looked at this map had been as he stood in his dorm room, realizing that the only thing he had left was the ten-dollar bill in his pocket. None of his credit cards meant anything anymore.

Czerny had pulled up in his red Mustang. He hadn’t gotten out of the car. “Does this make you white trash now?” he’d asked. Czerny didn’t really have a sense of humor. He just sometimes said things that happened to be funny."
Gansey didn’t need to look at Blue and Adam’s faces to tell that they didn’t think it was funny either. But nobody deserved to die over such offenses, especially by the hand of someone he trusted.  
"Whelk, standing in the wreckage of his life, didn’t laugh this time.

The ley line wasn’t a game anymore.

“Unlock your door,” Whelk had told him. “We’re doing the ritual.”
 And that’s when Richard Campbell Gansey III, who had kept his cool in many far more strenuous situations, threw up the remains of his pizza.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

As soon as Richard the third was clearly out of commission, about half of the present parties leapt up to come to his aid. Hennessy was not one of them, but she did watch with interest. It didn’t seem out of the question for a boy as milquetoast as Gansey still seemed to her to be sick over an unsavory psyche such as Whelk’s. However the figure painted in these chapters, while eye rolling-ly earnest, seemed good at hiding his own less benevolent emotions from those around him. Something specific must have set him off.

Carmen was also watching him with something hard to decipher in those lovely dark eyes. Hennessy really had a thing for brown eyes, she thought to herself. Ronan, Blue, Adam and Henry had all initially sprang to help Gansey, but when it was clear nothing had

seriously

gone wrong, in that he wasn’t choking on poison or dying (which was what the looks on each of their faces had conveyed) Henry and Adam had seemed to hold themselves back a bit, while still positioning themselves to be close to Gansey. They gave bits of contradictory advice to Blue and Ronan who were all up in the boy’s personal space. Granted she was his girlfriend, and Hennessy knew Ronan didn’t give much thought to conventional boundaries, but still. There was something glaringly intimate about Blue’s tiny hands on Gansey’s lower back and shoulder, while Ronan had grabbed his chin with one hand and seemed to be massaging his thighs with the other. Both Adam and Henry watched these touches with an intensity that Hennessy found deeply hilarious. 
 
“It’s alright, everyone.” said Gansey, after this went on for a few minutes. “I just won’t eat anything for a bit. It was just disturbing, being in his head. Brought back some associations about death…” Everyone in his inner circle nodded like this made sense to them. And perhaps it did, what with the drama about Blue’s curse. Had Gansey actually died at one point? Or almost died like Hennessy had, that was more likely even though Hennessy resented the idea of having anything in common with him.

“Just rest, then,” said Adam. “You should be in an elevated seat where there isn’t too much of a draft, I’ll switch with you if you want.”

“He should switch with me,” interjected Henry. “My seat is very comfortable.:

Adam and Henry glared at each other.

“I’m actually good to stay where I am, but thank you.”

“There’s a couch over there,” suggested Jordan. She pointed to the far right wall. Sure enough, a green throw couch had appeared.

“That’s freaky.” said Mathew.

“Right, so I’ll recuperate on the pea green couch.” said Gansey.

“Ugh.” said Blue, Adam and Calla in unison.

“He’s still the worst.” said Hennessy gleefully.

Mor passed the book to the New Fenian. Apparently it was his turn to read.

“One hour and twenty-three minutes before Blue’s alarm was supposed to go off for school, she was woken by the front door closing. Gray dawn light filtered in her bedroom window, making diffuse shadows of the leaves pressed against the glass. She tried not to resent her lost one hour and twenty-three minutes of sleep. Footsteps started up the staircase. Blue caught the sound of her mother’s voice.

“... was up waiting for you.”

“Some things are better done at night.” This was Neeve. Though her voice was smaller than Maura’s, it was crisper, somehow, and carried well. “Henrietta is quite a place, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t ask you to look at Henrietta,” Maura replied, in a stage whisper. She sounded — protective.

“It is difficult not to. It shouts,” Neeve said. Her next words were lost in the sound of a creaking stair.

Maura’s reply was obscured as she, too, started to climb the stairs, but it sounded like, “I would prefer if you left Blue out of this.”

Blue went very still.

Neeve said, “I’m only telling you what I’m finding. If he vanished at the same time that ... possible they’re linked. Do you not want her to know who he is?”

“Who is this ‘he’?” demanded Jordan. “What is Blue being left out of?”

One of Hennessy’s favorite things about Jordan had been her inquisitive nature. In theory, Hennessy was curious about the world, but she was so constantly exhausted to herself she often didn’t have the energy to focus on that impulse. When she did, she only bothered to learn about art, and things relevant to running her unorthodox method of running a business. Jordan wanted to know everything about everything. She especially loved stories, those told by art and outside of it. Naturally she would invest herself in this one.

“The ‘he’ is Artemus. My Dad.” said Blue. She said the last word like it was a word in a foreign language she was attempting to learn with mixed results. “As for the rest of it… there’s too much to humanely explain.” 
 
Hennessy could tell Jordan was frustrated by this, but she did a good job of containing it. She had always been good at compartmentalizing the feelings she wasn’t supposed to have, unlike Hennessy who exploded all over the place.

“Another stair groaned. Blue thought, Why can’t they talk without creaking up the stairs at the same time!”

There was laughter at this. From the couch, Gansey cracked a smile.

“Well,” Maura said with false indignation, “Next time I’ll be sure to wear sensible shoes, so there are no noises to distract from the eavesdropping.”

Blue rolled her eyes. “You almost never wear shoes in the house already.”

“For this purpose.” Maura seemed remarkably good humored about her daughter not doing what she was told. Their interactions seemed to Hennessy less like how a mother acted towards her daughter, and more like two friends or maybe sisters. Jay Hennessy’s idea of motherhood had been nothing like that. A mothers job was to mold her daughter to not be an embarrassment. To take on her image – after all, Jay hadn’t truly loved anyone besides herself – but not to the extent of stealing the spotlight. Hennessy felt faintly sick.

“Maura snapped, “I don’t see how that would be easier for anyone.” Neeve murmured a reply.

“This is already getting out of hand,” her mother said. “It was barely

more than typing his name into a search engine, and now ...”

Blue strained her ears. It felt like she hadn’t heard her mother use a masculine pronoun for quite a long time, with the exception of Gansey.”

“There have been far too many male pronouns around recently.” Grumbled Calla.

Henry put a hand to his chest in mock heartbreak. “You wound me, Miss Johnson. I thought you and I understood each other. I’ve been missing our outings to the farmers market on Sundays.”

Calla looked at Henry approvingly. “You are my favorite of the bunch, it’s true. I was referring to the others, the snakes and kind.”

Ronan rolled his eyes. Gansey appeared stunned. “When I offered to take you to the farmers market you always shot me down.”

Henry smirked. Calla snorted. “I didn’t want my credit with certain stall owners to go down because of you, pretty one. But it isn’t personal; only Blue Maura and Henry are allowed to accompany me to the market.”

“She has a point, you know,” said Blue. “Your track record with customer service isn’t stellar, and if you dress the way you normally do at a market I’d be afraid of you getting mugged. And if you wore the boat shoes I could hardly even blame them.”

Gansey still looked upset, but nodded gravely. “But you would still defend me with your switchblade, right Jane?”

Blue rolled her eyes, although her cheeks were also flushed. “Yes, I would defend your honor. But best not come to that.”
 “It was possible, Blue thought after a long moment, that Maura meant Blue’s father. None of the awkward conversations Blue had attempted with her mother had ever gotten her any information about him, just nonsensical humorous replies (He is Santa Claus. He was a bank robber. He’s currently in orbit.) that changed every time she asked. In Blue’s head, he was a dashing heroic figure who’d had to vanish because of a tragic past. Possibly to a witness protection program. She liked to imagine him stealing a glimpse of her over the backyard fence, proudly watching his strange daughter daydream under the beech tree.

Blue was awfully fond of her father, considering she’d never met him.”

Blue sighed. “I honestly liked him so much more back when I thought he’d abandoned me. He was so much in my head, and now that he’s at Fox Way… he’s just nothing special.”

Gwenllian let out a cackle at this. “Nothing special then, nothing now. A tree with his roots cut down.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Blue snapped. “Either he’s the roots and I’m the leaves, or we’re his roots because we’re family and he got cut off from us. Find a better tree pun.”

“Aren’t you a little botanist?” said Gwenllian snidely.

Adam snickered, then immediately turned his expression blank as Blue turned her glare on him. “You have to admit, that’s a better tree pun.”

“Somewhere in the depths of the house, a door closed, and then there was once more the sort of night-silence that is hard to disturb. After a long moment, Blue reached over to the plastic bin that served as her nightstand and retrieved the journal. She rested a hand on the cool leather cover. The surface of it felt like the cool, smooth bark of the beech tree behind the house. As when she touched the beech tree, she felt at once comforted and anxious: reassured and driven to action.

Henrietta is quite a place, Neeve had said. The journal seemed to agree. A place for what, she wasn’t sure.

Blue didn’t mean to fall asleep, but she did, for another hour and twelve minutes. It wasn’t her alarm that woke her this time, either. It was a single thought shouted in her brain:

Today is the day Gansey comes for his reading.”

“So, you were anticipating meeting me.” Gansey grinned, looking distinctly more alive than he had a few moments ago. Hennessy found his everyone-go-along-to-get-along demeanor so very irritating. She would give him that he seemed less milquetoast than Declan, but that wasn’t saying much.

Blue wore an expression that made Hennessy suspect annoyance with her boyfriend was warring with her desire to kiss him.

“Yes Gansey, I was curious about the guy who I was supposed to kill or fall in love with or both.” Hennessy mused on whether or not the oddball couple kissed. Going off what they’d read so far about Blue, it seemed as though kissing would be a bad idea. But they must be kissing, or if they weren’t they must be getting action in other ways. Maybe there was a rule about which parts of the body were acceptable to kiss.

“So when he eats you out, is it okay as long as his lips don’t make a smooch sound?” She mused, partially because she was curious but largely because she wanted to elicit reactions from the couple. She was not disappointed. Gansey’s face turned as red as a tomato, and he started coughing really loudly. Blue glared at her, setting her jaw defiantly, but in a cool tone replied “We manage to pleasure each other and ourselves  just fine, thank you for the concern.”

Adam and Henry’s faces went on certain journeys at this. The Gray Man looked comically disturbed.

Embroiled in the daily routine of getting ready for school, the conversation between Maura and Neeve seemed more commonplace than it had before. But the journal was still as magical. Sitting on the edge of her bed, Blue touched one of the quotes.

The king sleeps still, under a mountain, and around him is assembled his warriors and his herds and his riches. By his right hand is his cup, filled with possibility. On his breast nestles his sword, waiting, too, to wake. Fortunate is the soul who finds the king and is brave enough to call him to wakefulness, for the king will grant him a favor, as wondrous as can be imagined by a mortal man.

She closed the pages. It felt as if there were a larger, terribly curious Blue inside her that was about to bust out of the smaller, more sensible Blue that held her. For a long moment she let the journal rest on her legs, the cover cool against her palms.

A favor.

If she had a favor, what would she ask? To not have to worry about money? To know who her father had been? To travel the world? To see what her mother saw?

The thought rang through her brain again:

Today is the day Gansey comes for his reading.

What will he be like?

Maybe, if she was standing before that sleeping king, she’d ask the king

to save Gansey’s life.

”

There was a chorus of half-sarcastic

aawws

around the room.

“I would have done that for anyone,” said Blue. “Nobody deserves to die.”

“Blue, I hope you’re awake!” Orla screamed from downstairs. Blue

needed to leave soon if she was to make the bike trip to school on time. In a few weeks, it would be an uncomfortably hot ride.

Possibly, she would ask a sleeping king for a car.”

“Glendower never gave you a car Sargent. That was me.” sniped Ronan, but Hennessy could tell all of his barbs towards the pint sized girl were affectionate.

“So in a way, a sleeping king

did

give her the car.” Mused Adam. 
 
“

I wish I could just cut class today. It wasn’t that Blue dreaded high school; it just felt like ... a holding pattern. And it wasn’t as if she was bullied; it hadn’t taken her very long to discover that the weirder she looked on the outside — the more she let other kids realize that she wasn’t like them, from the very beginning — the less likely she was to be picked on or ignored. The fact was, by the time she got to high school, being weird and proud of it was an asset. Suddenly cool, Blue could’ve happily had any number of friends. And she had tried. But the problem with being weird was that everyone else was normal.

So her family remained her closest friends, school remained a chore, and Blue remained secretly hopeful that, somewhere out there in the world, there were other odd people like her. Even if they didn’t seem to be in Henrietta.”

“Well,” said Blue, “I think it’s safe to say I found people as weird as I am in Henrietta.”

It was like that paragraph in the book had the power to dissolve all the tension within that friend group, at least for the moment. Gansey, Ronan and Adam were all looking at Blue, but also looking at each other. There was also a meaningful glance exchanged between Blue and Henry.

“Indeed, you found your fellow three hundred year old brats.” This made the corner of Blue’s mouth quirk up, while Gansey chuckled. Ronan and Adam’s expressions grew stonier at what must have been an inside joke between the other three. It made Hennessy feel strangely more alone. And angry at Ronan. How dare he act like he had equal ownership over loneliness to her. Ronan had all these people, and Hennessy had been alone with different versions of herself. Most of whom hadn’t even liked her.

“It was possible, she thought, that Adam was also odd.”

Ronan made a “Hah!” sound.

“She’s not wrong,” said Adam. “I did always feel like you described, before I met Gans- before things changed.”

Hennessy noticed Ronan frown slightly at the slip. Gansey merely looked confused, like a labrador confused at not being given a treat, or who’d been given a treat and was trying to puzzle out what he’d done to earn it.

“BLUE!” Orla bellowed again. “SCHOOL.”

With the journal held fast to her chest, Blue headed toward the red-

painted door at the end of the hall. On her way, she had to pass the frenzy of activity in the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room and the furious battle for the bathroom. The room behind the red door belonged to Persephone, one of Maura’s two best friends. The door was ajar, but still, Blue knocked softly. Persephone was a poor but energetic sleeper; her midnight shouting and nocturnal leg paddling ensured that she never had to share a room. It also meant that she grabbed sleep when she could; Blue didn’t want to wake her.

Persephone’s tiny, breathy voice said, “It’s available. I mean, open.”

Pushing open the door, Blue found Persephone sitting at the card table beside the window. When pressed, people often remembered Persephone’s hair: a long, wavy white-blond mane that fell to the back of her thighs. If they got past her hair, they sometimes recalled her dresses — elaborate, frothy creations or quizzical smocks. And if they made it past that, they were unsettled by her eyes, true mirror black, the pupils hidden in the darkness.

Currently, Persephone held a pencil with a strangely childlike grip. When she saw Blue, she frowned in a pointy sort of way.”

All around the room there were expressions that ranged from sad to devastated. Calla strode to the door, and walked out into the hallway.

“She needs a minute,” said Maura. Blue leaned over to hold her hand. Both Sargent women’s faces were grave.

“Good morning,” Blue said.

“Good morning,” Persephone echoed. “It’s too early. My words aren’t working, so I’ll just use as many of the ones that work for you as possible.”

She twirled a hand around in a vague sort of way. Blue took this as a sign to find a place to sit. Most of the bed was covered by strange, embroidered leggings and plaid tights running in place, but she found a place to lean her butt on the edge. The whole room smelled familiar, like oranges, or baby powder, or maybe like a new textbook.

“Sleep badly?” Blue asked.

“Badly,” Persephone echoed again. Then, “Oh, well, that’s not quite true. I’ll have to use my own words after all.”

“What are you working on?”

Often, Persephone was working on her eternal PhD thesis, but because it was a process that seemed to require vexed music and frequent snacks, she rarely did it during the morning rush.

“Just a little something,” Persephone said sadly. Or perhaps thoughtfully. It was hard to tell the difference, and Blue didn’t like to ask. Persephone had a lover or a husband who was dead or overseas — it was always difficult to know details when it came to Persephone — and she seemed to miss him, or at least to notice that he was gone, which was notable for Persephone. Again, Blue didn’t like to ask. From Maura, Blue had inherited a dislike of watching people cry, so she never liked to steer the conversation in a way that might result in tears.”

“I didn’t know that about you, maggot.” said Ronan.

“Well I don’t advertise it,” said Blue. “But watching people cry makes me feel helpless. I want to go yell at whoever made them cry, and I know that’s not helpful. I should want to sit with them while they cry, but I’m no good with that. I need to act.”

Hennessy could understand that. Jordan didn’t cry that often, but whenever she had Hennessy had that same impulse to go and murder something with her bare hands, preferably whoever had caused it. But most often, she didn’t ask who it was. She was too afraid that the person responsible was herself. 
 
“

Persephone tilted her paper up so Blue could see it. She’d just written the word three three times, in three different handwritings, and a few inches beneath it, she’d copied a recipe for banana cream pie.

“Important things come in threes?” Blue suggested. It was one of Maura’s favorite sayings.

Persephone underlined tablespoon next to the word vanilla in the recipe. Her voice was faraway and vague. “Or sevens. That is a lot of vanilla. One wonders if that is a typo.”

“One wonders,” repeated Blue.”

In Hennessy’s experience, many important things came in twos and tens.

“Blue!” Maura shouted up. “Are you gone yet?”

Blue didn’t reply, because Persephone disliked high-pitched sounds and shouting back seemed to qualify as one. Instead, she said, “I found something. If I show it to you, will you not tell anybody else about it?”

But this was a silly question. Persephone barely told anybody anything even when it wasn’t a secret.

When Blue handed over the journal, Persephone asked, “Should I open it?”

Blue flapped a hand. Yes, and quickly. She fidgeted back and forth on the bed while Persephone paged through, her face betraying nothing.

Finally, Blue asked, “Well?”

“It’s very nice,” Persephone said politely.

“It’s not mine.”

“Well, I can see that.”

“It was left behind at Ni — wait, why do you say that?” Persephone paged back and forth. Her dainty, child’s voice was soft

enough that Blue had to hold her breath to hear it. “This is clearly a boy’s journal. Also, it’s taking him forever to find this thing. You’d have already found it.”

“BLUE!” roared Maura. “I’M NOT SHOUTING AGAIN!”

“What do you think I should do about it?” Blue asked.

As Blue had, Persephone ran her fingers over the varying grains of the

papers. She realized Persephone was right; if the journal had been hers, she would’ve just copied down the information she needed, rather than all this cutting and pasting. The fragments were intriguing but unnecessary; whoever put that journal together must love the hunt itself, the process of research. The aesthetic properties of the journal couldn’t be accidental; it was an academic piece of art.

“Well,” Persephone said. “First, you might find out whose journal it is.”

Blue’s shoulders sagged. It was a relentlessly proper answer, and one that she might have expected from Maura or Calla. Of course she knew she had to return it to its rightful owner. But then where would the fun of it go?

Persephone added, “Then I think you’d better find out if it’s true, don’t you?”

Blue walked over to the green couch and sank into it. Gansey took her hand and she lay her head on his shoulder, nuzzling into his collar bone.

“I think we could all use a break,” said Maura. “I’ll go check on Calla now, if you’ll excuse me.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

It was like remembering Persephone’s words to her that day, at the beginning of Blue’s grand adventure, had transported her back to the mirrors in the attic. Back to reaching for her, and that not being enough to bring her back. She felt a tear roll down her cheek.

“Hey,” Gansey wiped the tear away with his thumb. He put his hands on her shoulders and drew her into his chest. She inhaled the scent of him, mint leaves and expensive aftershave. “You did what you could, you can’t blame yourself.” They’d had this conversation about Persephone before. Sometimes they were only talking about Persephone, and other times they were also talking about Gansey.

“You might want to listen to your own advice about self blame.” said Blue pointedly. Gansey chuckled. “I’m serious.”

“I know you are. I’m just glad you can reprimand me, I get more worried about you when you don’t.”

“Pshaw. I feel better about your health now that you're whipping out words like reprimand.”

The door opened once more, and Maura and Calla re-entered the room. Maura’s eyes were a little red, and Calla’s mascara was running although the glare she leveled at everyone in the room who was not a Sargent woman ensured no one would bring it up to her. The women sat next to Orla. “Alright,” said Maura. “You may read on … do you have a name? It feels awkward to continue calling you just “The New Fenian”.

“Oh, I have a name but it’s a little embarrassing.” said The New Fenian sheepishly.

Blue scoffed. “My name is Blue – which I’m not embarrassed by – but it’s hardly typical. Mr. Gray named himself after a color. Gwenllian is, well.” She gestured to her eclectic appearance. “I think it’s safe to say we won’t judge.”

Orla snorted. “Blue, you judge people all the time.”

“It’s a figure of speech!” Blue said angrily. “And I don’t judge people’s names.”

“You sort of just judged mine.” commented The Gray Man.

“It’s not embarrassing in that it’s unusual. I actually think your name is lovely, Blue. It’s that my name is…” He paused for dramatic effect. “Neil Lane.”

“No it’s not.” yelled Ronan and Carmen in unison. They each looked embarrassed to have agreed with the other.

The New Fenian hung his head. “Can you all just keep calling me the New Fenian.”

“I’m very sorry,” said Maura gravely.

The New Fenian began to read, seemingly more to distract from the subject of his name than anything else. 
“Adam wasn’t waiting by the bank of mailboxes in the morning.The first time that Gansey had come to pick up Adam, he’d driven past

the entrance to Adam’s neighborhood. Actually, more properly, he’d used it as a place to turn around and head back the way he’d come. The road was two ruts through a field — even driveway was too lofty a word for it — and it was impossible to believe, at first look, that it led to a single house, much less a collection of them.”

Blue felt Gansey stiffen behind her, as if bracing for impact. Adam wasn’t saying anything though, he just looked as if his jaw were clenched.
 
“

Once Gansey had found the house, things had gone even more poorly. At the sight of Gansey’s Aglionby sweater, Adam’s father had charged out, firing on all cylinders. For weeks after that, Ronan had called Gansey “the S.R.F.,” where the S stood for Soft, the R stood for Rich, and the F for something else.”

Blue hadn’t known this, although she guessed it made sense Adam’s dad was homophobic on top of every other awful thing he was.

“Why did you make fun of me for weeks?” Gansey asked Ronan wonderingly.

Blue expected a sarcastic deflection, but Ronan just shrugged. “Hit a nerve I guess. But also I didn’t know what Gansey expected, going over there like that.” 
 
“

Now Adam just met Gansey where the asphalt ended.

But there was no one waiting by the clustered herd of mailboxes now. It was just empty space, and a lot of it. This part of the valley was endlessly flat in comparison to the other side of Henrietta, and somehow this field was always several degrees drier and more colorless than the rest of the valley, like both the major roads and the rain avoided it. Even at eight in the morning, there were no shadows anywhere in the world.

Peering down the desiccated drive, Gansey tried the house phone, but it merely rang. His watch said he had eighteen minutes to make the fifteen- minute drive to school.

He waited. The engine threw the car to and fro as the Pig idled. He watched the gearshift knob rattle. His feet were roasting from proximity to he V-8. The entire cabin was beginning to stink of gasoline.

He called Monmouth Manufacturing. Noah answered, sounding like

he’d been woken.

“Noah,” Gansey said loudly, to be heard over the engine. Noah had let

him leave his journal behind at Nino’s after all, and its absence was surprisingly unsettling. “Do you remember Adam saying he had work after school today?”

On the days that Adam had work, he often rode his bike in so that he’d have it to get to places later.

Noah grunted to the negative.

Sixteen minutes until class.

“Call me if he calls,” Gansey said.

“I won’t be here,” Noah replied. “I’m almost gone anyway.”

“

Ominous.” grunted Calla.

“Why were we friends with this person?” agreed Ronan.

“I think Persephone said something similar to me once.” several pairs of eyes turned to Blue when she spoke.

“I remember her saying something similar,” said Adam. “On that last day.”

Blue bit down on her lower lip. She had complicated feelings about Adam being the last person to have one of those patented Persephone talks, which were a teaspoon or conversation mixed with two cups of ambiguous philosophical query, one pint of sugar and two cubes of whimsy. She had been the last person to touch Persephone, but Adam had actually reached her. She choked down the unfairness of it. These weren’t nice thoughts, and she especially didn’t want them to bubble over when they were reading about Adam’s parents and childhood home.

This Noah seemed quite curious to her. She wondered at how him being around when she was first joining the group might have changed things. She thinks she probably would have been more comfortable with him as an addition. From what she can tell anyway. He was odd and cryptic, but Blue was born surrounded by odd and cryptic. When she’d first joined the group, every conversation with Gansey or Ronan had felt like a test where she had to prove something. Not that she often had full conversations with Ronan, he’d mostly glared at or been passive aggressive with her. That had made more sense to her in retrospect, when she’d first learned of Ronan and Adam getting together. It had been Gansey who’d told her, on a dreary weekend where they’d had Monmouth to themselves. She’d joked about how he must have made a deal with the devil to get Ronan away for 48 hours. Gansey had shrugged.

“He’s usually staying with Adam these days.”

“Hmm. Nice of them to let us have this weekend being couple-y. And they must be having fun. I’ve never had a sleepover with a friend like in the movies, but it always looked fun.”

Gansey frowned. “Aren’t we having a sleepover?”

Blue almost took his head off for that, but then she noticed his mouth quirk in that adorable way it did when he tried to hide a smile. Gansey could be almost impressively oblivious about some things, but then sometimes he wasn’t at all and would merely play along with the assumption.

“Pshaw. We are, but we’re also dating. Sleepovers are different based on the context.”

“Well, Ronan and Adam have that same context since they’re dating.”

Blue sat up from where she’d been reclining on Gansey’s mattress. Gansey was at his desk, rifling through his papers searching for something. “What?”

He looked up again. “Oh, yeah. I guess neither of them have told you? Adam only sort of told me and it was that night.. Before everything…. So I guess there have been more important things to deal with when we’re all together. But yeah, they’re together now.”

Blue took a moment to consider this. It was surprising, but also somehow less surprising when she really thought about it, than it had been as a passing notion. They were always whispering together or exchanging knowing glances or disappearing at the same time as each other. From the way Gansey had spoken of Ronan and Kavinsky without really talking about them, combined with rumors she’d heard about what Kavinsky’s crew got up to, Blue wasn’t too surprised about the idea of Ronan hooking up with guys. Although the thought of wanting Joseph Kavinsky in that way was revolting to her… Gansey had said something about Ronan not actually wanting Kavinsky but wanting to play with fire, wanting to hurt himself a little bit without handling the knife directly.

She found the idea of Adam liking men a bit disarming, and especially the thought of him liking Ronan that way had been very far from her mind. She somehow felt more complicated about the Adam part of it, but she guessed that was because he was her ex boyfriend.

“Adam told you the night before we found the tomb?” she asked. They all avoided calling it what it really was,

the day Gansey died

,

the day I killed Gansey, the day Adam was possessed and attacked Ronan, the day we lost Cabeswater, the day we got Gansey back from Cabeswater…

It was just the day they found the tomb. After all, that was also how the public thought of it.

“Indeed. Specifically, he told me they kissed that night. And asked for my advice about.. Something. That part feels private.”

Blue raised an eyebrow. “That’s the private part? Not that they kissed at all?”

Gansey’s eyes widened in alarm. “Jesus, I wonder if I wasn’t supposed to tell you…”

“Relax. I’m sure if Adam didn’t want it to get out he wouldn’t have told you at all.” That did leave the question of how Ronan would feel if he knew she’d been told, but she decided to change the subject.

“So, you were going to show me those artifacts from Poland?”

Looking at artifacts from Gansey’s travels had turned into them discussing their dreams and places they would love to travel to together, and from there the weekend had not involved much discussion of Ronan and Adam except for in passing reference.

‘

Gansey hung up and unsuccessfully tried the house again. Adam’s

mother might be there but not answering, but he didn’t really have time to go back into the neighborhood and investigate.

He could cut class.

Gansey tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. “Come on, Adam.” Of all of the places Gansey had attended boarding school — and he’d

attended many in his four years of underage wandering — Aglionby Academy was his father’s favorite, which meant it was the most likely to land its student body in the Ivy League. Or the Senate. It also meant, however, that it was the most difficult school Gansey had ever been to. Before Henrietta, he’d made his search for Glendower his primary activity, and school had been a distant second. Gansey was clever enough and he was good at studying if nothing else, so it hadn’t been a problem to skip classes or push homework to the bottom of the list. But at Aglionby, there were no failing grades. If you dropped below a B average, you were out on your ass. And Dick Gansey II had let his son know that if he couldn’t hack it in a private school, Gansey was cut out of the will.

He’d said it nicely, though, over a plate of fettuccine.’

“He sounds like a jackass.” commented Orla.

Helen made a noncommittal hmmm noise in her throat, as if she saw the perspective enough to not leap to her father’s defense but couldn’t or wouldn’t agree with it.

Blue had mixed feelings about Richard Campbell Gansey II. Granted, she’d only met the man three times in person. The first had been that lunch where Henry had come as well, the second had been a dinner party when they’d insisted on a more formal meeting of Gansey’s girlfriend, and the third had been a function when all five of them had attended a function in Mrs. Gansey’s honor. On the one hand, she liked that he seemed to care enough about his eccentric son to make the effort to welcome his even more eccentric friends. And in a lot of ways he was easier to get along with than she’d anticipated. But then on the other hand, every time she had a conversation with him she felt like an exotic bird he was sizing up and appreciating, but not seeing as a real person. This sometimes made her want to upend whatever was on the table in front of her. It was one thing for him to see her that way, but the way he treated his son also left a lot to be desired by her estimation. He loved him, but he did not know him and didn’t seem interested in doing so.

“He just has high expectations.” Gansey said diplomatically.

“He could tell you about them differently.” Blue said, in her attempt at a light tone. Her words came out with more venom than she’d intended.

“I don’t understand. He said it as nicely as a person could say it.”

Ronan snorted. “Niceness is overrated.”

“For once, the snake has a point.” agreed Calla.

Gansey made a frustrated noise in his throat. “Let’s just continue please.”
 
           “

Gansey couldn’t cut class. Not after missing school the day before. That was what it came down to. Fourteen minutes to make a fifteen-minute drive to school, and Adam not waiting. “He felt the old fear creeping slowly out of his lungs.

Don’t panic. You were wrong about Ronan last night. You have to stop this. Death isn’t as close as you think.”

“You knew even then,” Ronan glared at Gansey. Even though Ronan Lynch often resembled an angry storm cloud with human skin, it was rare that Blue had seen the force of his anger directed at Gansey. Even when he’d been furious about being the only one who didn’t know about Gansey’s death ahead of time, the majority of his anger had been for her and Adam. Blue still smarted remembering some of the words he shouted at her, and feels worse about the things she’d thrown in his face right back.

“I didn’t want to admit it to myself.” said Gansey. “I

couldn’t

admit it to myself. But deep down I knew.” 
 
“

Dispirited, Gansey tried the home phone one more time. Nothing. He had to go. Adam must’ve taken his bike, he must’ve had work, he must’ve had errands to run and forgotten to tell him. The rutted drive down to the neighborhood was still empty.

Come on, Adam.

Wiping his palms on his slacks, he put his hands back on the steering wheel and headed for the school.

Gansey didn’t get a chance to see if Adam had made it to Aglionby until third period, when they both had Latin. This was, inexplicably, the only class Ronan never missed. Ronan was head of class in Latin. He studied joylessly but relentlessly, as if his life depended on it. Directly behind him was Adam, Aglionby’s star pupil, otherwise at the top of every class that he took. Like Ronan, Adam studied relentlessly, because his future life did depend on it.”

It was, Blue thought, a great irony that Ronan’s forest – a part of her still chafed at thinking of it that way, because it had been so much

their

collective place, a forest of them all growing alongside each other and growing more together, and yet of course it was Ronan’s forest, he’d created it, and therefore it was a part of him  – had ensured that his life

did

depend on knowing the language. This sparked a question she’d had for a while.
“Did you know even then about Cabeswater? Do you think that’s why you were studying, or when we got there and it spoke Latin did something click?” He met her gaze steadily. “I couldn’t admit it to myself, but deep down I probably always knew.” 
“

For his part, Gansey preferred French. He told Helen there was very little purpose to a language that couldn’t be used to translate a menu, but really, French was just easier for him to learn; his mother spoke a little.”

“Knew it.” said Helen sardonically.

Gansey stuck his tongue out at her. It never ceased to amaze Blue how childish Gansey could become around Helen. She honestly liked it.

“

He’d originally resigned himself to taking Latin in order to translate historical texts for Glendower research, but Ronan’s proficiency at the language robbed Gansey’s study of any urgency.

Latin was held in Borden House, a small frame house on the other side of the Aglionby campus from Welch Hall, the main academic building. As Gansey strode hurriedly across the center green, Ronan appeared, knocking Gansey’s arm. His eyes looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

Ronan hissed, “Where’s Parrish?”

“He didn’t come in with me today,” Gansey said, mood sinking. Ronan and Adam shared second period. “You haven’t seen him yet?”

“Wasn’t in class.”

Behind Gansey, someone punched his shoulder blade and said, Gansey boy! as they trotted by. Gansey halfheartedly lifted three fingers, the signal of the rowing team.

“I tried calling him at the house,” he said.

Ronan replied, “Well, Poor Boy needs a cell.”

Blue, Adam and of all people Mathew gave Ronan the stink eye.

“Our very own Prince Charming.” Hennessy intoned mirthfully.

“Everyone knows that’s not me.” Ronan said, rolling his eyes, but Blue could detect a hint of self consciousness in his voice. It had taken her the longest to be able to glean Ronan’s moods compared to the others in the group, but once you got a sense for how he worked one couldn’t stop noticing. When Blue had first started walking dogs, she’d been told that the most insecure animals were always the ones who bit you. She thought that dog trainer who had advised her would have a lot to say about Ronan. “I leave the Prince Charming business to Gansey.” 
 
“

A few months earlier, Gansey had offered to buy Adam a cell phone,

and by so doing had launched the longest fight they’d ever had, a week of silence that had resolved itself only when Ronan did something more offensive than either of them could accomplish.”

“Sometimes playing Prince Charming backfires.” observed Henry.

Gansey shot him a withering look.

Blue shook her head. She wanted to be surprised that Gansey had offered to buy Adam a cell phone but… honestly she wasn’t. 
             “Lynch!”

Gansey looked in the direction of the voice; Ronan didn’t. The owner of the voice was halfway across the green, difficult to identify in the homogenous Aglionby uniform.

“Lynch!” the call came again. “I’m going to fuck you up.”

Ronan still didn’t look up. He adjusted the strap on his shoulder and “continued stalking across the grass.

“What’s that about?” Gansey demanded.

“Some people don’t take losing very well,” Ronan replied.

“Was that Kavinsky? Don’t tell me you’ve been racing again.”

“Don’t ask me, then.”

Gansey contemplated if he could give Ronan a curfew. ”

“Like hell you could have.” Snorted Ronan.

“Oh, I think he could have.” Adam drawled. Something clicked in her head: he was speaking with his Henrietta accent again. She hadn’t even realized how seemlessly he had sanded off those vowels before, so different from his haphazard attempts to clip it back when they were in high school. But now he’d dropped the attempt, subconsciously or not. She was glad of it.

“Giving a thousands year old entity a curfew.” Mused Hennessy. “I would have liked to see that.”

“

Or if he should

quit rowing to spend more time with him on Fridays — he knew that was when Ronan got into trouble with the BMW. Maybe he could convince Ronan to ...

Ronan adjusted the strap on his shoulder again, and this time, Gansey took a closer look at it. The bag it belonged to was distinctly larger than his usual, and he handled it gingerly, as if it might spill.

Gansey asked, “Why are you carrying that bag? Oh my God, you have that bird in there, don’t you.”

“She has to be fed every two hours.”

“How do you know?”

“Jesus, the Internet, Gansey.” Ronan pulled open the door to Borden

House; as soon as they breached the threshold, everything within sight was covered with navy blue carpet.

“If you get caught with that thing —” But Gansey couldn’t think of a suitable threat. What was the punishment for smuggling a live bird into classes? He wasn’t certain there was precedent. He finished, instead, “If it dies in your bag, I forbid you to throw it out in a classroom.”

“She,” Ronan corrected. “It’s a she.”

“I’d buy that if it had any defining sexual characteristics. It had better not have bird flu or something.” But he wasn’t thinking about Ronan’s raven. He was thinking about Adam not being in class.”

“You were so worried about him, about both of them.” Blue whispered in Gansey’s ear. Gansey sighed, ever so softly. “I was. I felt like the two people I cared about most were bound to slip away from me, and it was awful. Even then, I think a part of me knew I wasn’t going to make it. But I wanted them to make it for me, and for them to live the lives they deserved.” 
“And they’re living those lives now. You didn’t cause that, they did. And they should have been there for you, too.”

“

Ronan and Gansey took their usual seats in the back of the navy- carpeted classroom. At the front of the room, Whelk was writing verbs on the board.

When Gansey and Ronan had come in, Whelk had stopped writing mid- word: internec — Though there was no reason to think Whelk cared about their conversation, Gansey had the strange idea that the lifted piece of chalk in Whelk’s hand was because of them, that the Latin teacher had stopped writing merely to listen in. Adam’s suspicion really was beginning to rub off on him.”

“Not enough, it seems.” Sniffed Helen. “I rather wish you had listened to him, Dick. I don’t like to think of you in danger around murderers and witches and what not, and that I didn't even know about it.”

“Helen, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it. But I really am fine now.”

Blue snorted.

Gansey is never fine

.

Henry scoffed. “You're never

fine

when you say you are Gansey.”

“

Ronan caught Whelk’s eye and held it in an unfriendly sort of way. Despite his interest in Latin, Ronan had declared their Latin teacher a socially awkward shitbird earlier in the year and further clarified that he didn’t like him. Because he despised everyone, Ronan wasn’t a good judge of character,”

“Some might argue that makes him a decent judge of character.” noted Calla.

‘Aw,” said Ronan. “A compliment. I knew you liked me, deep down.”

Calla didn’t dignify this with a verbal response, just her signature stink eye. 
 
        “

but Gansey had to agree that there was something discomfiting about Whelk. A few times, Gansey had tried to hold a conversation with him about Roman history, knowing full well the effect an enthusiastic academic conversation could have on an otherwise listless grade. But Whelk was too young to be a mentor and too old to be a peer, and Gansey couldn’t find an angle.”

“Of course you can’t talk to adults who aren’t simpering older women who adore you or the strangest old men I’ve ever heard of.” said  Helen, in a tone that made it clear she found this equal parts irritating and endearing.

“Ronan kept staring at Whelk. He was good at staring. There was something about his stare that took something from the other person.”

Blue knew that all too well. She remembered those early days in the group where Ronan’s stare had seemed to tell her

you are not one of us, you never will be

. Their friendship had come along way since then, they all had. 
 
“

The Latin teacher flicked his glance awkwardly away from them.

Having dealt with Whelk’s curiosity, Ronan asked, “What are you going to do about Parrish?”

“I guess I’m going to go by there after class. Right?”

“He’s probably sick.”

They looked at each other. We’re already making excuses for him,

Gansey thought.

Ronan peered inside his bag again. In the darkness, Gansey just caught

a glimpse of the raven’s beak. Usually, Gansey would’ve basked once more in the odds of Ronan of finding a raven, but at the moment, with Adam missing, his quest didn’t feel like magic; it felt like years spent piecing together coincidences, and all he had made from it was a strange cloth — too heavy to carry, too light to do any good at all.

“Mr. Gansey, Mr. Lynch?”

Whelk had managed to suddenly manifest beside their desks. Both boys looked up at him. Gansey, polite. Ronan, hostile.

“You seem to have an extremely large bag today, Mr. Lynch,” Whelk said.

“You know what they say about men with large bags,” Ronan replied. “Ostendes tuum et ostendam meus?”

Gansey had no idea what Ronan had just said, but he was certain from Ronan’s smirk that it wasn’t entirely polite.

Whelk’s expression confirmed Gansey’s suspicion, but he merely rapped on Ronan’s desk with his knuckles and moved off.

“Being a shit in Latin isn’t the way to an A,” Gansey said. Ronan’s smile was golden. “It was last year.”

At the front of the room, Whelk began class.

Adam never showed.”

Adam now looked distinctly troubled by something. Perhaps hearing about the familiar routine of Aglionby made him a bit homesick. As soon as Blue thought that she shook her head to herself, Adam wasn’t her, and likely didn’t feel homesick. It was probably something else, about Gansey or Whelk or both. Or maybe it was about Ronan; the way he’d spoken about Adam or just the way he was with Chainsaw and the dreams.

Gansey was playing with her hair. Blue always loves the feel of his fingers threading through her spiky mane. He’s the only person who does this…right? Why does she feel an odd sense of deja vu, like there was somebody else who would run their hands through her spikes like this. Well, she might have let Henry but he’d never offered. She’d occasionally played with Adam’s hair while they were dating, but he’d never returned that gesture. But who else could it be? Every significant man in her life (except for Artemus, who hardly counted) was in this room. 
She stiffened, feeling the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Gansey instantly dropped his hands. “Sorry.” Blue was dismayed by this loss, and yanked his hands back up to where they belonged. “It’s not you, it’s all of this.” She whispered, leaning further back against him and craning her neck to look up at him. His nose was a little red, and looked so kissable.. 
“Earth to Romeo and Juliet.” snarked Orla.

Blue let out an annoyed huff.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“

M

om, why is Neeve here?” Blue asked.

Like her mother, she was standing on the kitchen table. The moment

she’d come back from school, Maura had enlisted her help for changing the bulbs in the badly designed stained-glass creation that hung over the table. The complicated process required at least three hands and tended to be left until most of the bulbs had burned out. Blue hadn’t minded helping. She needed something to keep her mind off Gansey’s looming appointment. And off Adam’s failure to call. When she thought about giving him her number the night before, she felt weightless and uncertain.”

Declan found that he liked Blue. He’d never gotten an opportunity to know her in high school, beyond the tangential awareness of a girl who was not the type of girl who hung around Aglionby boys hanging around Gansey and his crew. Then again, that fit with the aura Gansey had always cultivated. In that way, it made sense to him that this would be what Gansey’s girlfriend was like. He found it more difficult to parse the idea of her with Parrish. On a logical level, it made sense that the two members of Gansey’s clique of lower economic standing would have made a connection, but Adam has always been so Aglionby, far more Aglionby than Ronan, in how he cultivates the spaces around him. He guesses he’s surprised he would choose Blue as his girlfriend… he’d chosen Ronan, but Ronan was Aglionby in mold if not in practice. Blue wasn’t that at all, and not only because she was a girl although that was part of it. But perhaps Adam was drawn partly to their magic. Blue came from a family of psychics, Ronan from a family of dreamers and dreams. Adam himself, it turned out, had psychic abilities, so perhaps there was a call there. And he was an ambitious creature.

“She’s family,” Maura replied grimly. She savagely gripped the fixture’s chain as she wrestled with a stubborn bulb.

“Family that comes home in the middle of the night?”

Declan knew all about those. When strangers came in the night to visit Niall Lynch, whether friend or foe or family, meaning all of the above, the eldest Lynch brother had been called on to receive them with his father. Once he’d thought that a burden, a sign that Niall thought Declan to be hardened in a manner his brothers weren’t, his innocence not worth protecting. However, now he knew that had been a sign of respect, of love. So why did he feel a pit in his stomach?
 
“

Maura shot Blue a dark look. “You were born with larger ears than I remember. She’s just helping me look for something while she’s here.”

The front door opened. Neither of them thought anything of it, as both Calla and Persephone were about the house somewhere. Calla was less likely, as she was an irascible, sedentary creature of habit, but Persephone tended to get caught in odd drafts and blow around.

Adjusting her grip on the stained glass, Blue asked, “What sort of something?”

“Blue.”

“What sort of something?”

“A Someone,” Maura said, finally.”

“What sort of someone?”

But before her mother had time to reply, they heard a man’s voice: “That is a strange way to run a business.”

They both turned slowly. Blue’s arms had been lifted for so long they

felt rubbery when she lowered them. The owner of the voice stood in the doorway to the front hall, his hands in his pockets. He was not old, maybe mid-twenties, with a shock of black hair. He was handsome in a way that required a bit of work from the viewer. All of his facial features seemed just a little too large for his face.

Maura glanced at Blue, an eyebrow lifted. Blue lifted one shoulder in response. He didn’t seem like he was here to murder them or steal any portable electronics.

“And that,” her mother said, releasing the beleaguered light fixture, “is a very strange way to enter someone’s home.”

“I’m sorry,” the young man said. “There is a sign out front saying this is a place of business.”

There was indeed a sign out front, hand-painted — though Blue didn’t know by whose hand — that read PSYCHIC. And, beneath that:

“By appointment only,” Maura told the man. She grimaced into the kitchen. Blue had left a basket of clean laundry by the kitchen counter and one of her mother’s mauve lacy bras sat on top in full view. Blue refused to feel guilty. It wasn’t as if she had expected men to be wandering through the kitchen.”

“Little did we know how many men would be around the house at all hours from that day on.” Maura teased her daughter.

Blue scoffed. “Pot and kettle.” She pointed at Mr. Gray, an eyebrow raised. Maura inclined her head as if to say

touché.

Declan could understand the magic and secrecy of the Sargent women’s lives, but he finds their interactions bizarre. He didn’t think anyone’s parents interacted with them like this, not like they were adults to care for others with them or children to take care of, but like they were friends. Like they were equals, and yet also deserving of affection. Perhaps it had to do with clairvoyance.

“The man said, “Well then, I’d like to make an appointment.”

A voice from the doorway to the stairs made all three of them turn.

“We could do a triple reading for you,” Persephone said.

She stood at the base of the stairs, small and pale and made largely of hair. The man stared at her, though Blue wasn’t certain if this was because he was considering Persephone’s proposal or because Persephone was quite a lot to take in at first glance.”

Declan, who had never met the former third member of the trio of psychics, was ac  utely aware of how others in the room reacted to her name each time it came up. He didn’t feel a specific way about it, he just filed it away for later.
 
“

What,” the man asked finally, “is that?”

It took Blue a moment to realize that he meant “triple reading” rather than Persephone. Maura jumped off the table, landing with enough force that the glasses in the cabinet rattled. Blue “climbed down more respectfully. She was, after all, holding a box of lightbulbs.

Maura explained, “It’s when three of us — Persephone, Calla, and I — read your cards at the same time and compare our interpretations. She doesn’t offer that to just anyone, you know.”

“Is it more expensive?”

“Not if you change that one stubborn bulb,” Maura said, wiping her hands off on her jeans.”

“A lightbulb change can pay for a reading?” asked Carmen.

“You’d be surprised what can get you a reading.” Maura replied vaguely. Declan was surprised to notice Carmen blushing a little.  
 
    “

Fine,” said the man, but he sounded vexed about it.

Maura gestured for Blue to give a lightbulb to the man, and then she said, “Persephone, would you get Calla?”

“Oh dear,” Persephone said in a small voice — and Persephone’s voice was already quite small, so her small voice was indeed tiny — but she turned and went up the stairs. Her bare feet were soundless as she did.

Maura eyed Blue, asking a question with her expression. Blue shrugged an agreement. “My daughter, Blue, will be in the room, if you don’t mind. She makes the reading more clear.”

With a disinterested glance at Blue, the man climbed onto the table, which “creaked a bit under the weight. He grunted as he tried to twist the stubborn bulb.

“Now you see the problem,” Maura said. “What is your name?”

“Ah,” he said, giving the bulb a jerk. “Can we leave this anonymous?”

Maura said, “We’re psychics, not strippers.”

Hennessy barked out a laugh. “Good one.”

Maura smiled warmly at her.

“Blue laughed, but the man didn’t. She thought this was rather unfair of him; maybe it was in slightly poor taste, but it was funny.

The kitchen abruptly lightened as the new bulb screwed into place. Without comment, he stepped onto a chair and then to the floor.

“We’ll be discreet,” Maura promised. She gestured for him to follow her.

In the reading room, the man looked around with clinical interest. His gaze passed over the candles, the potted “plants, the incense burners, the elaborate dining room chandelier, the rustic table that dominated the room, the lace curtains, and finally landed on a framed photograph of Steve Martin.”

“Why is there a framed photograph of Steve Martin in your home?” enquired Jordan.

“You know how in restaurants they take photos of famous people, or people who might be on their way to getting famous, so they can put them on the wall and say ‘Meryl Streep ate here’.” Calla waved her hand, as if she found this ridiculous yet to be expected. “Maura read for him once, and decided we needed a picture.”

Maura looked quite pleased with herself.
 
       “

Signed,” Maura said with some pride, noticing his attention. Then: “Ah, Calla.”

Calla blew into the room, her eyebrows quite angry at being disturbed. She was wearing lipstick in a dangerous shade of plum, which made her mouth a small, pursed diamond under her pointy nose. Calla gave the man a lacerating look that plumbed the depths of his soul and found it wanting. Then she plucked her deck of cards from a shelf by Maura’s head and flopped into a chair at the end of the table. Behind her, Persephone stood in the doorway, her hands clasping and unclasping each other. Blue slid hastily into a chair at the end of the table. The room seemed a lot smaller than it had a few minutes before. This was mostly Calla’s fault.”

“Not my fault you and your mother are vertically challenged.” Calla snipped.

Blue rolled her eyes. “Har har. Obviously I meant that metaphorically.”

“

Persephone said, in a kind voice, “Have a seat,” and Calla said, in an unkind one, “What is it you want to know?”

The man dropped into a seat. Maura took the chair opposite from him at the table, with Calla and Persephone (and Persephone’s hair) on either side of her. Blue was, as always, just a little apart.

”
 
      Declan could understand that, feeling as if you were the odd man out among your family with their magical eccentricities. Although it seemed Blue had gone the opposite route from him, she’d become as outwardly eccentric as possible to compensate. Declan meanwhile had found his power in the boring, in the conventional.

“I would rather not say,” the man said. “Maybe you’ll tell me.”

Calla’s plum smile was positively fiendish. “Maybe.”

Maura slid her deck of cards across the table to the man and told him to shuffle them. He did so with proficiency and little self-consciousness. When he was done, Persephone and Calla did the same.

“You’ve been to a reading before,” Maura noted.

He made only a vaguely grumbling noise of assent. Blue could see he thought that any information would let them fake the reading. Still, she didn’t “think he was a skeptic. He was merely skeptical of them.

Maura slid her deck back from the man. She’d had her deck for as long as Blue had been paying attention, and the edges were fuzzy with handling. They were a standard tarot deck, only as impressive as she made them. She selected ten cards and laid them out. Calla did the same with her slightly crisper deck — she’d replaced them a few years ago after an unfortunate incident had made her lose her taste for her previous deck. The room was quiet enough to hear the rustle of their cards against the uneven, pocked surface of the reading table.

Persephone held her cards in her long, long hands, eyeing the man for a pregnant moment. Finally, she contributed only two cards, one at the beginning of the spread and one at the end. Blue loved watching Persephone lay down her cards; the limpid turn of her wrist and the swick of the card always made it seem like a sleight of hand or a ballet movement. Even the “cards themselves seemed more otherworldly. Persephone’s cards were slightly larger than Maura’s and Calla’s, and the art on them was curious. Spidery lines and smudgy backgrounds suggested the figures on each card; Blue had never seen another deck like it. ”

Everyone looked to Adam. He was clutching his head, and muttering something. His eyes were closed.

“Should I get closer to him?” asked Blue. “Or move away from him, out of the room?”

Maura frowned. “Just stay where you are right now.”

Ronan had moved his chair closer to Adam’s, their legs almost touching, but was keeping his hands to himself. He was studying Adam’s features with concern, with that worshipful love that always scared Declan so. It was remarkable how much restraint he had, how careful he was capable of being, when it was Adam. Declan thought back to Adam’s outburst, how he’d accused Ronan of abandoning him. It must be true, because Ronan had not denied it. But Declan just can’t comprehend it. He knew Adam would not be enough for Ronan, that he needed more of a world than just this boy, yet he had still thought of Adam as the center, or something near to it. Had he been wrong? He feels the notion should please him more than it does. 
 
“

Maura had told Blue once that it was hard to ask Persephone questions that you didn’t absolutely need the answer to, so Blue had never found out where the deck had come from.

Now that the cards were laid out, Maura, Calla, and Persephone studied the shape of them. Blue struggled to see over their huddled heads. She tried to ignore that, this close to the man, he had the overpowering chemical scent of a manly shower gel. The sort that normally came in a black bottle and was called something like SHOCK or EXCITE or BLUNT TRAUMA.

Calla was the first to speak. She flipped the three of swords around for the man to look at. On her card, the three swords stabbed into a dark, bleeding heart the color of her lips. “You’ve lost someone close to you.”

The man looked at his hands. “I have lost ...” he started, then considered before finishing, “... many things. Maura pursed her lips. One of Calla’s eyebrows edged toward her hair. They darted glances at each other. Blue knew them both well enough to interpret the looks. Maura’s asked, What do you think? Calla’s said, This is off. Persephone’s said nothing

.

”

Jordan sat up, as if stricken by something. “I have a question. Can psychics sense when someone is a murderer?”

Maura and Calla both studied her, as if reassessing the interest she held.

“It depends.” Began Maura. “But we can generally tell when someone has an aura of death around them, an air of loss, an air they did something malignant. Not all murder is equal, but we got a sense that Whelk had harmed an innocent, and that he would again.”

Declan studied Jordan, curious what had brought this on. He’d have to ask her privately – as privately as possible – the next time they took a break.

“Maura touched the edge of the five of pentacles. “Money’s a concern,” she noted. On her card, a man with a crutch limped through snow under a stained-glass window while a woman held a shawl beneath her chin.

She added, “Because of a woman.”

The man’s gaze was unflinching. “My parents had considerable resources. My father was implicated in a business scandal. Now they’re divorced and there is no money. Not for me.”

It was a strangely unpleasant way to put it. Relentlessly factual.”

“He is more a toad that walks on two legs than a man.” said Gwenllian matter of factly.

“For once, I agree with her.” said Blue.

“Hmmph.” Calla seemed to agree.

“Maura wiped her palms on her slacks. She gestured to another card. “And now you’re in a tedious job. It’s something you’re good at but tired of.”

His lips were thin with the truth of it.

Persephone touched the first card she had drawn. The knight of pentacles. An armored man with cold eyes surveyed a field from the back of a horse, a coin in his hand. Blue thought if she looked closely at the coin, she could see a shape in it. Three curving lines, a long, beaked triangle. The shape from the churchyard, from Maura’s unmindful drawing, from the journal.

But no, when she looked harder, it was just a faintly drawn, five-pointed star. The pentacle for which the card was named.

Persephone finally spoke. In her small, precise voice, she told the man, “You’re looking for something.”

The man’s head jerked toward her.

Calla’s card, beside Persephone’s, was also the knight of pentacles. It was unusual for two decks to agree exactly. Even stranger was to see that Maura’s card was also the knight of pentacles. Three cold-eyed knights surveyed the land before them.

Three again. Calla said bitterly, “You’re willing to do whatever it takes to find it. You’ve been working at it for years.”

“Yes,” the man snapped, surprising them all with the ferocity of his response. “But how much longer? Will I find it?”

The three women scanned the cards again, looking for an answer to his question. Blue looked, too. She might not have had the sight, but she knew what the cards were supposed to mean. Her attention moved from the Tower, which meant his life was about to change dramatically, to the last card in the reading, the page of cups. Blue glanced at her frowning mother. It wasn’t that the page of cups was a negative card; in fact, it was the card Maura always said she thought represented Blue when she was doing a reading for herself.

You’re the page of cups, Maura had told her once. Look at all that potential she holds in that cup. Look, she even looks like you.”

Now this was something Declan had experienced. Aurora had sung him songs and told him how he was her dauntless Declan, her brave Declan. He doesn’t think those are true, however the memories made him feel warmer than most from his childhood. 
 
“

And there was not just one page of cups in this reading. Like the knight of pentacles, it was tripled. Three young people holding a cup of full of potential, all wearing Blue’s face. Maura’s expression was dark, dark, dark.

Blue’s skin prickled. Suddenly, she felt as if there was no end to the fates she was tied to. Gansey, Adam, that unseeable place in Neeve’s scrying bowl, this strange man sitting beside her. Her pulse was racing.

Maura stood up so quickly that her chair keeled back against the wall. “The reading’s done,” she snapped. Persephone’s gaze wandered up to Maura’s face, bewildered, and Calla

looked confused but delighted at the appearance of conflict. Blue didn’t recognize her mother’s face.

“Excuse me?” the man asked. “The other cards —”

“You heard her,” Calla said, all acid. Blue didn’t know if Calla was also uneasy, or if she was merely backing Maura up. “The reading’s over.”

“Get out of my house,” Maura said. Then, with an obvious attempt at solicitude, “Now. Thank you. Good-bye.”

Calla moved aside for Maura to whirl past her to the front door. Maura pointed over the threshold.

Rising to his feet, the man said, “I’m incredibly insulted.”

Maura didn’t reply. As soon as he was clear of the doorway, she slammed the door shut behind him. The dishes in the cupboards rattled once again.

Calla had moved to the window. She drew the curtains aside and leaned her forehead against the glass to watch him leave.

Maura paced back and forth beside the table. Blue thought of asking a question, then stopped, then started again. Then stopped. It seemed wrong to ask a question if no one else was.

Persephone said, “What an unpleasant young man.”

Calla let the curtains drift shut. She remarked, “I got his license plate number.”

“I hope he never finds what he’s looking for,” Maura said.

Retrieving her two cards from the table, Persephone said, a little regretfully, “He’s trying awfully hard. I rather think he’ll find something.”

Maura whirled toward Blue. “Blue, if you ever see that man again, you just walk the other way.”

“No,” Calla corrected. “Kick him in the nuts. Then run the other way.”

“You should have taken our advice,” said Calla.

“Whelk never said a word to me, technically,” said Blue. “I personally saw him one other time in my life and he was … taken care of, not by me.” She hedged a glance at Adam as she said this. Adam, who had gotten over whatever craziness had been going on with him at least visibly, held her gaze for only a moment before looking away. Gansey looked concerned. Now that he wasn’t intent on caring for Adam, Ronan looked bored.

“One of us probably should have taken Calla’s advice.” conceded Gansey.

“He would have deserved that.” Ronan concurred. “I’d have loved to –”

“Anyway,” Gansey interrupted, smoothing Ronan’s unsavoriness away like a napkin over a stain. “I do wish you all would have told us about this sooner.” He said it pleasantly, jokingly, but there was a sharper undercurrent to his words which Declan took note of. He felt rather frustrated, that he felt a need to be reserved here. The only people he could speak freely with were Jordan and Matthew, and now Jordan seemed a little distracted while Matthew was occasionally resentful.. He probably could have a fruitful conversation with Carmen if she was separated from Hennessy, he should try to find an opportunity later.

He could feel a pair of eyes on him. He turned to see Mr. Gray was studying him. He found he no longer knew how to meet that gaze. He simply didn’t.