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"My stick! All week we’ve been walking in the woods! That seems awfully —"
"Cavalier?" Gansey suggested. "The truth is that there’s not even really a point having an EpiPen. The last they told me was that it would only work if I got stung once, and even then, they don’t know. I was four the first time I had to go to a hospital for a sting, and the reactions only got worse after that. It is what it is. It’s this or live in a bubble. "
Blue thought about the Death card, and how her mother hadn’t actually interpreted it for Gansey. It was possible, she thought, that the card hadn’t been about Gansey’s foretold tragedy at all, but rather about his life — how he walked side by side with death everyday.
With her stick, Blue thwacked the ground ahead of them. "Okay, go on. "
Gansey sucked in his lips and then released them. "Well, seven years ago, I was at a dinner party with my parents. I can’t remember what it was for. I think one of my dad’s friends had gotten the party nomination. "
"For … Congress?"
The ground beneath their feet or the air around them vibrated with thunder.
"Yeah. I don’t remember. You know how you sometimes don’t remember everything right? Ronan says that memories are like dreams. You never remember how you got to the front of the classroom with no clothes on. Anyway, the party was dull — I was nine or ten. It was all little black dresses and red ties and any sort of food you wanted, as long as it was shrimp. A few of us kids started to play hide-and-seek. I remember thinking I was too old to play hide-and-seek, but there was nothing else to do. "
Blue and he entered a narrow copse of trees, sparse enough that grass grew between them instead of brambles. This Gansey, this story-telling Gansey, was a different person altogether from any of the other versions of him she’d encountered. She couldn’t not listen.
"It was hot as Hades. It was spring, but it had suddenly decided it was summer. Virginia spring. You know how that is. Heavy, somehow. There was no shade in the backyard, but there was this great forest that bounded it. Dark and green and blue. Like diving into a lake. In I went, and it was fantastic. Only five minutes and I couldn’t see the house. "
Blue stopped poking the ground. "Did you get lost?"
Gansey shook his head a little.
"I stepped on a nest. " His eyes were narrowed in that way people do when they’re trying hard to appear casual, but it was obvious this story was anything but casual to him. "Hornets, like you said. They nest on the ground. I don’t have to tell you. But I didn’t know back then. The first thing I felt was a little prickle on my sock. I thought I’d stepped on a thorn — there were a ton of them, those green, whip-shaped ones — but then I felt another. They were just such small hurts, you know?"
Blue felt a little sick.
He continued, "But then I felt one on my hand, and by the time I jumped away, I saw them. All over my arms. "
Somehow, he’d managed to take her there, to put her in that moment of discovery. Blue’s heart felt dragged down, snared with venom.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"I knew I was dead. I knew I was dead before I started to feel everything start to go wrong in my body. Because I’d been to the hospital for just one sting, and this was, like, a hundred. They were in my hair. They were in my ears, Blue. "
She asked, "Were you scared?"
He didn’t have to answer. She saw it in the hollow of his eyes.
"What happened?"
"I died," he said. "I felt my heart stop. The hornets didn’t care. They were still stinging me, even though I was dead. "
Gansey stopped. He said, "This is the difficult part. "
"Those are my favorite," Blue replied. The trees were quiet around them; the only sound was the growl of thunder. After a pause, she added, a little ashamed, "Sorry. I didn’t mean to be … but my whole life is the ‘difficult part. ’ Nobody believes in what my family does. I’m not going to laugh. "
He exhaled slowly. "I heard a voice. It was a whisper. I won’t forget what it said. It said: ‘You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not. ’"
Blue was very quiet. The air pressed on them.
"I told Helen. She said it was a hallucination. " Gansey brushed a hanging vine from his face. The brush was getting thicker here, the trees closer. They probably needed to turn back. His voice was peculiar. Formal and certain. "It was not a hallucination. "
This was the Gansey who had written the journal. The truth of it, the magic of it, possessed her.
She asked, "And that’s enough to make you spend your life looking for Glendower?"
Gansey replied, "Once Arthur knew the grail existed, how could he not look for it?"
Thunder growled beneath them again, the hungry snarl of an invisible beast.
Blue said, "That’s not really an answer. "
He didn’t look at her. He replied, voice terrible, "I need to, Blue. "
Every light on the EMF reader went out.
Equal parts relieved to be back on safe ground and disappointed not to pry deeper into the real Gansey, Blue touched the machine. "Did we step off the line?"
They retreated several yards, but the machine didn’t turn back on.
"Is the battery dead?" she suggested.
"I don’t know how to check. " Gansey switched it off and then on again.
Blue stretched out her hand for the reader. The moment she took it from him, the lights burst red. Solid red, no blinking. She turned from side to side. Orange to her left. Red to her right.
They met each other’s eyes.
"Take it back," Blue said.
But as soon as Gansey touched the EMF reader, the lights went dead again. When the thunder came this time, seductive and simmering, she felt like it started something inside her trembling that didn’t stop after the sound had died.
"I keep thinking there must be a logical explanation," Gansey said. "But there hasn’t been all week. "
Blue thought there probably was a logical explanation, and she thought it was this: Blue made things louder. Only she had no idea what she was amplifying at the moment.
The air shuddered again as thunder grumbled. There was no sign of the sun now. All that was left was the heavy green air around them.
He asked, "Where is it steering us?"
Letting the solid red light lead them, Blue stepped hesitantly through the trees. They had only made it a few yards when the machine went dead again. No amount of switching hands or manipulation would encourage it to flicker again.
They stood with the machine between them, heads bowed close, looking silently at the dark face of it.
Blue asked, "What now?"
Gansey stared down between their feet, directly below the machine. "Step back. There’s —"
"Oh my gosh," Blue said, jerking away from Gansey. Then, again: "Oh my —"
But she couldn’t finish the sentence, because she had just stepped off something that looked an awful lot like a human arm bone. Gansey was the first to crouch, brushing away the leaves from the bone. Sure enough, beneath the first arm bone was a second. A filthy watch encircled the wrist bone. Everything looked fake, a skeleton in the woods.
This can’t be happening.
"Oh no. " Blue breathed. "Don’t touch it. Fingerprints. "
But the corpse was long beyond fingerprints. The bones were clean as a museum piece, the flesh long since rotted off, and there were only threads remaining of whatever the person had worn. Picking carefully at leaves, Gansey uncovered the entire skeleton. It lay crumpled, one leg crooked up, arms sprawled to either side of its skull, a freeze-frame of tragedy. Time had spared strange elements and taken others: the watch was there, but the hand was not. The shirt was gone, but a tie remained, rippled over the hills and valleys of the collapsed rib bones. The shoes were dirty but unchanged from exposure. The socks, too, were preserved insid
e the leather shoes, ankle-height bags of foot bones.
The skull’s cheek was smashed in. She wondered if that was how the person had died.
"Gansey," Blue said, voice flat. "This was a kid. This was a kid from Aglionby. "
She pointed at his rib cage. Crooked between two bare ribs was an Aglionby patch, the synthetic fibers of the embroidery impervious to the weather.
They stared at each other over the body. Lightning lit the sides of their faces. Blue was very aware of the skull beneath Gansey’s skin, his cheekbones so close to the surface, high and square like those on the Death card.
"We should report it," she said.
"Wait," he replied. It only took him a moment to find the wallet beneath the hip bone. It was good leather, spattered and bleached, but mostly unmolested. Gansey flipped it open, eyeing the multicolored edges of credit cards that lined one side. He spotted the top edge of a driver’s license and thumbed it out.
Blue heard Gansey’s breath catch in naked shock.
The face on the driver’s license was Noah’s.
Chapter 29
At eight P. M. , Gansey called Adam at the trailer factory.
"I’m coming to get you," he said, and hung up.
He didn’t say it was important, but this was the first time he’d ever asked for Adam to leave work, so it had to be.
Outside, the Camaro idled in the parking lot, the uneven tripping of the engine echoing across the darkness. Adam got in.
"I’ll explain when we get there," said Gansey.
He put the car into gear, stomping the gas hard enough that the back tires squeaked on the asphalt as they left. From Gansey’s expression, Adam thought that something had happened to Ronan. Maybe, finally, Ronan had happened to Ronan. But it wasn’t the hospital that they drove to. The Camaro tore straight into the lot outside Monmouth Manufacturing. Together, they climbed the dark, creaking stairs to the second floor. Under Gansey’s hands, the door fell open, crashing against the wall.
"Noah!" he shouted.
The room stretched out, limitless in the dark. Against the windows, the miniature Henrietta was a false skyline. Gansey’s alarm clock beeped continuously, sounding a warning for a time that had long since passed.
Adam’s fingers searched unsuccessfully for the light switch.
Gansey shouted again, "We need to talk. Noah!"
The door to Ronan’s room opened, releasing a square of light. Ronan was silhouetted in the doorway, one hand curled against his chest, the raven foundling hunched down between his fingers. He pulled a pair of silkily expensive headphones from his ears and looped them around his neck. "Man, you’re back late. Parrish? I thought you were working. "
So Ronan knew no more than Adam did. Adam felt a cold bit of relief over this, which he quickly extinguished.
"I was. " Adam finally found the light switch. The room was transformed into a twilight planet, the corners alive with sharp-mouthed shadows.
"Where’s Noah?" demanded Gansey. He jerked the alarm clock’s power cord out of the wall to silence it.