The Raven King

  “Then why aren’t you having this conversation with him? He’s half of this, you know.”

  He spread his hands out at the still-empty restaurant, as if he, too, was amazed by the turn this conversation had taken. “Because I was here to talk to you about how to save him from dying. Then I found out you guys were going to a party together, and I couldn’t believe how irresponsible you were being.”

  Now Blue also spread her hands. It was a rather less elegant gesture than Adam’s, more like a fist clench in reverse. “Irresponsible? Excuse me?”

  “Does he know about your curse?”

  Her cheeks felt hot. “Oh, don’t.”

  “You don’t think it’s a little relevant that the guy who is supposed to die in the next year is dating the girl who’s supposed to kill her true love with a kiss?”

  She was too angry to do anything but shake her head. He merely raised an eyebrow in reply, an action that warmed the temperature of Blue’s blood by a single degree.

  She snapped, “I can control myself, thanks.”

  “In any circumstance? You’re not gonna fall on him, or get tricked into it, or magic’s not gonna go wrong in Cabeswater — can you guarantee? I don’t think you can.”

  Now she’d definitely tipped over the crest of the wave into boiling anger. “You know what, I’ve been living with this a heck of a lot longer than you have, and I don’t really think you can come in here and tell me how to deal with it —”

  “I can when it’s my best friend.”

  “He’s mine as well!”

  “If he really was, you wouldn’t be so damn selfish.”

  “If he really was yours, you’d be happy he had someone.”

  “How could I have been happy about it when I wasn’t supposed to know about it?”

  Blue stood up. “It’s amazing, really, how this seems to be about you instead of him.”

  Adam stood up, too. “Funny, because I was about to say the same thing.”

  They faced each other, both furious. Blue could feel poisonous words bubbling up in a dark queue like the sap from that tree. She wasn’t going to say them. She wasn’t. Adam’s mouth went very thin, like he was about to retort something, but in the end, he just swiped his keys from the table and walked out of the restaurant.

  Outside, thunder growled. There was no sign of the sun; the wind had dragged the clouds across the entire sky. It was going to be a wild night.

  Many years before this afternoon, a psychic had told Maura Sargent that she was “a judgmental but gifted clairvoyant with a talent for bad decision-making.” The two of them had been standing by the side of an I-64 exit ramp about twenty miles outside of Charleston, West Virginia. Both had bags on their backs and their thumbs out. Maura had hitchhiked from points farther west. The other psychic had hitchhiked from points south. They did not know each other. Yet.

  “I’m gonna take that as a compliment,” said Maura.

  “Shocking,” snarled the other psychic, but in a way that made it kind of another compliment. She was a harder weapon than Maura, more unforgiving, already tempered by blood. Maura liked her at once.

  “Where are you headed?” Maura asked. A car approached; they both stuck out their thumbs. The car vanished onto the interstate; they put their thumbs down. They were not yet discouraged; it was a green and rippling summer of the sort that made anything seem possible.

  “East, I guess. You?”

  “Same. Feet are walking me there.”

  “My feet are running,” the other psychic said, grimacing. “How far east?”

  “I guess I’ll know when I get there,” Maura said thoughtfully. “We could travel together. Set up shop when we get there.”

  The other psychic raised a knowing eyebrow. “Turning tricks?”

  “Continuing education.”

  They both laughed, which was how they knew they would get along. Another car came; they put out their thumbs; the car went.

  The afternoon continued.

  “What’s this?” said the other psychic.

  A mirage had appeared at the end of the exit ramp, only now that they looked a bit harder, it was a real person, behaving like an unreal person. She was walking directly up the middle of the asphalt toward them, gripping an overstuffed butterfly-shaped bag in one hand. She had high, old-fashioned boots laced all the way up beyond where her peculiar dress ended. Her hair was a blond frothy cloud and her skin was chalky. Except for her black eyes, everything about her was as pale as the psychic beside Maura was dark.

  Both Maura and the other psychic watched this third person labor up the exit ramp, seemingly unconcerned with the possibility of motorized vehicles.

  Just as the pale young woman had nearly reached them, an elderly Cadillac rounded the corner onto the exit ramp. The woman had plenty of time to leap out of the way, but she didn’t. Instead, she paused and tugged up the zipper on her butterfly bag as the Cadillac’s brakes squealed mightily. The car came to a stop inches away from her legs.

  Persephone peered at Maura and Calla.

  “I think you’ll find,” she told them, “that this lady is going to give us a ride.”

  Twenty years had passed since that meeting in West Virginia, and Maura was still a judgmental but gifted clairvoyant with a talent for bad decisions. But in the years between, she’d grown used to being a member of an inseparable three-headed entity that shared decision making equally. They’d let themselves think that would never end.

  It was so much harder to see things clearly without Persephone.

  “Picked up anything?” Mr. Gray asked.

  “Go around again,” Maura replied. They headed back through Henrietta as store lights flickered in time with an unseen ley line. The rain had stopped, but evening had come on, and Mr. Gray turned on the headlights before rebraiding his fingers with hers. He was acting as driver as Maura tried to solidify an increasingly urgent hunch. It had begun this morning when she woke up, an ominous feeling like one had after waking from a bad dream. Instead of fading as the day went on, however, it only grew more pointed, focusing on Blue, and Fox Way, and a creeping darkness that felt like passing out.

  Also her eye hurt.

  She’d been doing this for long enough to know that there was nothing wrong with it. There was something wrong with someone else’s eye at some point in time, and Maura was just tuned into the station. It irritated her, but it wasn’t an action item. The hunch was. The problem with pursuing bad feelings was that it was always difficult to tell if one was running toward a problem to fix it, or running to a problem to create it. It would’ve been easier if it had still been the three of them. Usually Maura started a project, Calla made it into a tangible thing, and Persephone sent it flying into the ether. Nothing worked the same with just two.

  “Go around again, I guess,” Maura told Mr. Gray. She could feel him thinking as he drove. Poetry and heroes, romance and death. Some poem about a phoenix. He was the worst decision she’d made so far, but she couldn’t keep from making it again and again.

  “Do you mind if I talk?” he asked. “Will it ruin everything?”

  “I’m not having any luck. You might as well. What are you thinking about? Birds rising from ashes?”

  He glanced over at her with an appraising nod, and she gave him a cunning smile. It was a parlor trick, the simplest of things she could do — pluck a current thought from an unguarded and sympathetic mind — but it was nice to be appreciated.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about Adam Parrish and his band of merry men,” Mr. Gray admitted. “And this dangerous world they tread.”

  “That’s a strange way of putting it. I would have said Richard Gansey and his band of merry men.”

  He inclined his head as if he could see her point of view as well, even if he didn’t share it. “I was just thinking how much danger they’ve inherited. Colin Greenmantle leaving Henrietta doesn’t make it safer; it makes it more perilous.”

  “Because he kept the others away.”
r />   “Just so.”

  “And now you think others will come here, even though no one is selling anything here? Why would they still be interested?”

  Mr. Gray indicated a buzzing streetlight as they drove by the courthouse. Three shadows passed over the top of it, cast by nothing Maura could see. “Henrietta is one of those places that looks supernatural even from a distance. It will be a perennial stop for people in the business, poking around for things that might be the cause or effect of it.”

  “Which is dangerous for the merry men because there is actually something for them to find? Cabeswater?”

  Mr. Gray inclined his head again. “Mm. And the Lynch property. I don’t forget my part in this, either.”

  Neither did Maura. “You can’t undo that.”

  “No. But —” His pause at this point in the conversation was evidence of the Gray Man regrowing his heart. It was a pity that the seedling of it had to erupt into the same torched ground that had killed it in the first place. Consequences, as Calla often said, were a bitch. “What do you see for me? Do I stay here?” When she didn’t answer, he pressed, “Do I die?”

  She removed her hand from his. “Do you actually want to know?”

  “Simle þreora sum þinga gehwylce, ær his tid aga, to tweon weorþeð; adl oþþe yldo oþþe ecghete fægum fromweardum feorh oðþringeð.” He sighed, which told Maura more about his mental state than his untranslated Anglo-Saxon poetry did. “It was easier to tell hero from villain when the stakes were only life and death. Everything in between gets harder.”

  “Welcome to how the other half lives,” she said. With sudden clarity, she drew a loopy symbol in the air. “What’s the company with the logo like this?”

  “Disney.”

  “Har.”

  “Trevon-Bass. It’s nearby.”

  “Is there a dairy farm close to it?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Gray answered. “Yes, there is.”

  He made a safe but illegal U-turn. In a few minutes, they passed the faded concrete monolith of the Trevon-Bass factory, then turned onto a back road, and finally down a drive bounded by four-board fence. Rightness trickled through Maura, like reaching for a pleasant memory and finding it exactly how you left it.

  Maura said, “How did you know it was back here?”

  “I’ve been here before,” Mr. Gray said in a vaguely ominous tone.

  “I hope you didn’t kill someone here.”

  “No. But I did hold a gun to someone’s head here, in full disclosure.” A barely visible farm sign welcomed them to the vacation property. The drive ended in a gravel lot; the headlights illuminated a barn that had clearly been converted into stylish living space. “This is where the Greenmantles stayed when they were in town. The dairy’s way over there.”

  Maura was already opening the car door. “Do you think we can get inside?”

  “I would merely suggest brevity.”

  The side door was unlocked. Both Maura’s clairvoyance and her heart could sense Mr. Gray standing close behind her as they stepped inside, tense and watchful. Nearby, some cows lowed and grunted, sounding larger than they must have really been.

  The inside of the rental was very dark, all shadows, no corners. Maura closed her eyes, letting them adjust to the idea of total blackness. She was not afraid of the dark, nor of the things in it. Fear was unworthy of her devotion; the rightness was.

  She groped for it now.

  Opening her eyes, she made her way around a lump that was probably a sofa. Certainty thrummed through her more strongly as she found a staircase and began to climb. At the top was an open-plan kitchen, dimly lit with purple-gray through the massive new windows, green-blue from the microwave clock.

  It was unpleasant. She couldn’t tell if it was something about the room itself, or merely Mr. Gray’s memories pressing up against her own. She proceeded.

  Here was a pitch-black hallway, no windows, no light at all.

  It was more than dark.

  As she stepped cautiously into it, the darkness ceased to be darkness and instead became an absence of light. The two conditions are similar in several ways, but none of which were important when you were standing in one instead of the other.

  Something whispered Blue in Maura’s ear.

  Every one of her senses was wrung raw; she couldn’t tell if she was meant to push forward or not.

  Mr. Gray touched her back.

  Except that it wasn’t him. She only had to turn her head slightly to the right to realize that he was still at the edge of the liquid dark. Maura took a moment to visualize a protective shell around herself. Now she could see that the hallway ended at a doorway. Though there were other closed doors on either side, the one at the end was obviously the source.

  She glanced back at the light switch beside Mr. Gray. He flicked it.

  The lights were like losing an argument with the correct answer. They should have been on. They were on. When Maura peered at the bulbs, she could tell in an objective way that they were on.

  But the hallway was still not lit.

  Maura met Mr. Gray’s narrowed eyes.

  They crossed the final few feet, soundless, pushing the absence of light before them, and then Maura hovered her hand above the doorknob. It looked ordinary, which is how the most dangerous things looked. It cast no shadow on the door, because no light reached it.

  Maura stretched for the rightness and found terror. Then she stretched beyond that and found the answer.

  Turning the knob, she pushed open the door.

  The hall lights seeped darkly past her, revealing a large bathroom. A scrying bowl lay beside the bathtub. Three colorless candles had dripped all over the back of the sink. PIPER PIPER PIPER was written backward on the mirror in a substance that looked a lot like pink lipstick.

  There was something large on the floor, and it was moving and scraping.

  Maura told her hand to find the light switch, and it did.

  The thing on the floor was a body — no. It was a human. It was twisting in a way a human shouldn’t, though, shoulders unfolding. Fingers claws on the tile. Legs scrabbling, scuttling. An inhuman sound escaped from his mouth, and then Maura understood.

  This person was dying.

  Maura waited until he had finished, and then she said, “You must be Noah.”

  Calla had also been having a persistently negative hunch that day, but unlike Maura, she had been stuck in an Aglionby Academy office doing paperwork and didn’t have the liberty of trying to find out what the source of the bad feeling was. Nonetheless, it grew and grew, filling her mind like a black headache, until she had given in and asked to go home an hour early. She was lying on her face upstairs in the room she shared with Jimi when the front door slammed.

  Maura’s voice rose clearly from the front hallway. “I’ve brought home dead people. Cancel every appointment! Hang up your phones! Orla, if you have a boy here, he’s gotta go!”

  Calla extracted herself from her comforter and scooped up her slippers before heading down the hall. Jimi, benevolent busybody that she was, smashed her ample hip on the sewing table in her hurry to see what was up.

  They both stopped halfway down the stairs.

  To her credit, Calla only thought about dropping her slippers when she saw Noah Czerny standing beside Maura and Mr. Gray.

  Noah Czerny was a very human name to give something that did not look very human to Calla’s eyes. She had seen a lot of living humans in her time, and she’d seen a lot of spirits in her time, but she hadn’t ever seen something like this. A soul this decayed shouldn’t have been — well, it shouldn’t have been anything. It should have been a remnant of a ghost, a mindless, repetitive haunting. A hundred-year-old scent in a hallway. A shiver standing next to a certain window.

  But somehow, she was looking at a shambles of a soul, and in it, there was still a dead kid.

  “Oh, baby,” Jimi said, full of instant compassion. “You poor thing. Let me get you some …” Jimi, ever the herbali
st, generally had an herbal suggestion for every possible mortal ill.

  “Some what?” Calla prompted.

  Jimi pursed her mouth and rocked a bit on her feet. She was clearly stumped, but could not lose face in front of the others. Also, she did have a tediously good heart, and there was no doubt that Noah’s existence distressed her.

  “Mimosa,” Jimi finished, triumphant, and Calla sighed with grudging appreciation. Jimi wagged a finger at Noah. “Mimosa flowers help make spirits appear, and that’ll make you feel stronger!”

  As she stomped back up the stairs, Maura asked Mr. Gray to show Noah into the reading room, and then she and Calla conferred at the base of the stairs. Rather than telling her how they’d come to have Noah with them, she merely held out her arm and allowed Calla to press her palm against her skin. Calla’s psychometry — divination through touch — was often unspecific, but in this case, the event was recent and vivid enough for her to pick it up easily, along with a kiss Maura had shared with Mr. Gray beforehand.

  “Mr. Gray is talented,” Calla observed.

  Maura looked withering. She said, “Here’s the rub. I think I was being shown that mirror with Piper’s name on it on purpose, but I don’t think it was Noah’s purpose. He doesn’t remember how he got there or why he was doing it.”

  Calla kept her voice low. “Could he have been a portent?”

  Portents — supernatural warnings of ill tidings to come — were not of particular interest to Calla, mostly because they were usually imaginary. People tended to see portents where there were none: black cats bringing bad luck, a crow promising sadness. But a true portent — an ominous suggestion from a little-understood cosmic presence — was not something to be ignored.

  Maura’s voice was also hushed. “Could be. I haven’t shaken this terrible feeling all day. The only thing is, I didn’t think something sentient could be a portent.”

  “Is he sentient?”

  “Part of him, anyway. We were talking in the car. I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s decayed enough to appear as a mindless portent, but at the same time, there’s a boy in there still. I mean, we had him in the car.”