Holes in the ground were, in Greenmantle’s opinion, the very best place to throw dog crap into. He swiped the EMF reader across the wall with one hand and a geophone with the other. He would have gotten an identical amount of insight if he’d been holding a flare and a ukulele. “What I’m going to do is hire a billion million minions to come look in caves for this woman, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just eviscerate her daughter in front of the Gray Man instead.”
“Minions! I don’t want a million minions tramping around down here. I want to explore my psychic connections without all that grunting going on.”
“Your psychic connections!” He felt her glaring at him; the skin on the back of his neck was melting. “Fine, I’ll tell them to be tactful.”
“You know what? You should let me have two of them, to help me in my life goals.”
“What?”
“I could call them and pretend to be you. Hi, thugman, this is Colin, could you do me a solid?” She did a passable job of his voice, if slightly too nasal and in love with itself. She stopped short, legs apart, blond hair billowing around her like a caving photo shoot. For a strange, slipping moment, Greenmantle thought that he’d found her in the cave and was bringing her back to the light, and then he remembered the bag of dog shit and how they’d gotten here. He thought that this cave was probably full of carbon monoxide. He was probably dying.
Piper asked, “Did you hear that?”
“The sound of you mocking me?”
She didn’t reply. She was frowning down the tunnel, her chin lifted, her eyebrows pushed together as if she were listening. He thought about someone sleeping. He thought about waking them up.
“The sound of my love?” he tried.
She still didn’t reply. She was still listening.
“The sound of you creeping me the hell out?”
But really he was creeping himself out.
Finally, she turned back to him. She did not look as if she had heard the sound of his love. She said, “I definitely need two of your minions. Let’s get back to a cell phone signal.”
He was very happy to oblige. He never wanted to see a cave again.
Gansey might have found Gwenllian, but Blue had to live with her. All of the women of 300 Fox Way had to, actually. It was like living with a natural disaster, or a feral child, or a feral natural child disaster.
For starters, she didn’t sleep. She shouted at Calla that she had had enough sleep for one thousand lifetimes and that she intended to spend the rest of this one awake, and then proceeded to do just that. At small hours of the morning, Blue would wake and hear her clogging around in the attic above her room.
Then there was her manner of dress. Her supernatural awareness inside the tomb had given her just enough exposure to the changing outside world to not be shocked by the existence of cars or befuddled by the English language, but not enough to award her any social customs. So she wore what she wanted to wear (Blue could at least respect the motivation, if not the outcome), which was always a dress, sometimes two or three on top of each other, sometimes backward. This often involved stealing clothing from other people’s closets. Blue was spared only because she was so much shorter.
There were problems with mealtimes, too: For Gwenllian, every time was mealtime. She seemed to have neither sense of fullness nor taste, and would often combine foods in manners that struck Blue as problematic. She didn’t believe in telling people how to live their lives (well, maybe a little), but it was hard to stand by and watch Gwenllian spread peanut butter on a cold hot dog.
And there was the crazy part. Forty percent of what came out of her mouth came out in song, and the rest was a varied mixture of chanting, screaming, mocking, and creepy whisper. She climbed on the roof, she talked to the tree in the backyard, and she stood on furniture. She often put things in her hair for later retrieval, and then seemed to forget they were there. In very short order, her enormous tangle of hair became a vertical repository for pencils, leaves, tissues, and matches.
“We could cut it,” Orla suggested at one point.
Persephone said, “I do not think that is a decision one human can make for another human.”
Orla asked, “Even if that other human looks like a hobo?”
It was a point on which Blue and Orla agreed.
The worst part of it was that Gansey had offered to take her away — kept offering to take her away — and Persephone insisted Gwenllian stay with them.
“It takes longer than a weekend to undo centuries of damage,” Persephone said.
“Centuries of damage are being incurred in just a weekend,” Calla replied.
“She’s a very gifted psychic,” Persephone said mildly. “Eventually she will earn her keep.”
“And pay for my therapy,” Blue added.
“Good one,” Orla said. To reward Blue for her excellent comeback, she painted Blue’s fingernails to match the Pig, a polish color, she informed Blue, that was called Belligerent Candy.
Gansey kept trying to talk with Gwenllian, but she was always sassily deferential when he came to the house.
On top of that, Gansey had some sort of school commitment that he was cagey about, Ronan and Adam kept vanishing places together, and Noah couldn’t or wouldn’t come into 300 Fox Way.
Blue was feeling a little as if she had been locked into a madhouse.
Mom, it’s time for you to come home.
The Gray Man came over midweek, much to her gratitude.
“It’s me,” he called down the hallway as he stepped inside. Blue could see him from her homework post at the kitchen table; he was tidy and dangerous looking in a gray shirt and slacks. He looked more optimistic than the last time she had seen him.
Gwenllian, who was examining the roaring vacuum cleaner but not vacuuming with it, spotted him, too. “Hello, handsome sword! Have you killed anyone today?”
“One sword knows another,” he told her mildly, placing his car keys in his pocket. “Have you killed anyone?”
She was so delighted that she turned off the vacuum cleaner so that her insane smile could be the loudest thing in the hall.
“Mr. Gray, leave her alone and come get a cup of tea,” Blue called from the kitchen table. “You’ll make her start singing again.”
The Gray Man glanced over his shoulder at Gwenllian as he came into the kitchen and did as Blue instructed, taking a few minutes to find a tea more likely to provoke sanguinity than loose stools.
“I have been employed by your friends Mr. Parrish and Mr. Lynch,” he said as he sat down opposite Blue. So this is where those two were going! He tapped one of her algebra problems until she dragged it back to her and reworked it correctly. “They have a plan for Greenmantle, and it seems quite promising.”
“What is it?”
“I would rather not tell you, as it is better the fewer people know it. Also, it is not polite table conversation,” Mr. Gray said. “I have a question for you. Your cursed cave. Do you think it is the sort of place you could hide a body? Or at least part of one?”
Blue narrowed her eyes. “There was lots of room in that cave for lots of things. Whose body? Which part?”
Gwenllian instantly manifested in the kitchen, dragging the vacuum cleaner behind her like a reluctantly walked dog. “What about the curse, lily?”
“I thought you were the curse,” Blue replied.
“Probably,” Gwenllian said carelessly. “What else is there but I? I’m known to Welshmen free, lovely Gwen, lovely Gwen, from Gower to Anglesey, lovely Gwen, oh Gwen the dead!”
Blue said, “I told you she would start singing.”
But the Gray Man just raised his eyebrows. “Weapons and poetry go hand in hand.”
Gwenllian drew herself up. “What a cunning weapon you are. A poet is how I ended up in that cave.”
“Is it a good story?” the Gray Man asked.
“Oh, it is the finest.”
Blue watched the exchange with a bit of awe. Somewhere there was a
lesson in this.
The Gray Man took a sip of his tea. “You should sing it for us.”
And unbelievably, she did.
She sang a furious little song about Glendower’s poet Iolo Goch, and how he whispered war in her father’s ear (she whispered this part into Blue’s ear) and so, as blood soaked into the ground of Wales, Gwenllian did her level best to stab him to death.
“Was he sleeping?” the Gray Man asked with professional interest.
Gwenllian laughed for about a minute. Then she said, “It was at dinner. What a lovely meal he would’ve been!”
Then she spit in the Gray Man’s tea, but it seemed to have more to do with Iolo Goch than Mr. Gray.
He sighed and pushed the cup away. “So they sentenced you to that cave.”
“It was that or hanging! And I chose hanging, so they gave me the false grave instead.”
Blue squinted at Gwenllian, trying to imagine her as she had been six centuries before. A young woman, Orla’s age, the daughter of a nobleman, a witch in an age when witches were not always the best thing to be. Surrounded by war, and doing her best to stop it.
Blue wondered if she would have the courage to stab someone if she thought it would save lives.
Gwenllian dragged the vacuum cleaner back into the hall without any sort of good-bye.
“Gwenllian and vacuum, exit stage right,” Blue said.
The Gray Man pushed his tea even farther away. “Do you think you might have time to show me this cave you pulled her from? Just so I know where it is, as an option?”
The idea of leaving the house was incredibly appealing. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to see Jesse again, either. And although she was annoyed that Adam and Ronan hadn’t trusted her with whatever their Greenmantle plan was, she wanted to be helpful anyway. “Possibly. Will you feed me?”
“I won’t even spit in it.”
Blue warned Calla that she was leaving the house with a hit man, and then Mr. Gray took her to the downtown drugstore for a tuna fish sandwich (BEST TUNA FISH IN TOWN!) before driving out of Henrietta. The car zoomed and darted through the darkness in a way that seemed slightly out of the Gray Man’s control.
“This car is really terrible,” Blue said.
This was allowed, as the car was not really Mr. Gray’s. It was a hand-me-down white Mitsubishi of the sort that young men with big dreams and egos normally drove. It sported a custom license plate that read THIEF.
“It grows on you,” Mr. Gray said. He paused. “Like a cancer.”
“Buh dum pa.”
Both Blue and Mr. Gray enjoyed a laugh, and then were briefly silent as they realized it had been too long since they had been in the company of someone with their precise sense of humor, i.e., Maura Sargent. In the background, the Kinks played gently, the sound of Mr. Gray’s soul.
“I keep waiting for things to go back to normal,” Blue admitted. “But I know now that that’s not going to happen, even when Mom comes back.” She meant if, but she said when.
“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a fan of normal,” the Gray Man said. He slowed slightly as the headlights illuminated the eyes of three deer standing by the side of the road.
It was warming to be so known. She said, “I’m not, really, but I was used to it, I guess. It’s boring, but at least it’s not scary. Do you ever get scared? Or are you too badass for that?”
He looked amused, but also like a badass, sitting quietly and efficiently behind the wheel of the car.
“In my experience,” the Gray Man said, “the badasses are the most scared. I just avoid being inappropriately frightened.”
Blue thought this seemed like a reasonable goal. After a pause, she said, “You know, I like you.”
He glanced over at her. “I do, too.”
“Like me or like you? The grammar was unspecific.”
The two of them enjoyed another laugh and the presence of someone else with their precise sense of humor.
“Oh, here it is,” Blue said. “Don’t pass it.”
The Dittley farm was mostly dark as they pulled down the driveway, with only the kitchen window lit up. For a moment, Blue thought perhaps Jesse had left to win back his wife and son and dog. But then she saw his big silhouette pull aside the curtain to observe their headlights pulling up to the house.
He came to the door at once.
“Howdy,” Blue said. “I came to impose on you and maybe show Mr. Gray your cave, if that’s okay.”
He let them in. “YOUR BREATH SMELLS LIKE TUNA FISH.”
“Should I have brought you some?” she asked.
“I ONLY EAT SPAGHETTIOS.” He shook hands with the Gray Man, who introduced himself as Mr. Gray. Then Jesse leaned and Blue stood on tiptoes and they hugged, because that seemed right.
“I JUST TOOK SOME GIRL SCOUT COOKIES OUT OF THE FREEZER.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Blue said. “As you smelled, we just ate.”
“I’ll take one,” the Gray Man interjected. “If they’re Thin Mints.”
Jesse fetched them. “NOTHING FOR YOU, ANT?”
She said, “How about a glass of water and an exciting update about how great your life is now that we’ve taken the crazy person out of your cave?”
“LIFE IS GREAT,” Jesse admitted. “BUT THE CAVE — ARE YOU WEARING BOOTS? BECAUSE IT IS MUDDY.”
Blue and Mr. Gray assured him they were fine with their current footwear. Retrieving a flashlight for Blue and a floodlight and a shotgun for himself, Jesse led the three of them across the dark field to the building that housed the cave. As they grew closer, Blue thought she smelled something familiar. It was not the earthy scent of the wet field or the smoky scent of the fall night. It was metallic and close, damp and stagnant. It was the smell, Blue realized, of the cave of ravens.
“WATCH YOUR STEP.”
“What am I watching for?” Mr. Gray asked.
“THAT IS THE RIGHT QUESTION.”
Jesse minced as best a Dittley could mince to the door. He handed the floodlight to Blue as he unlocked the padlock.
“STAND BACK.”
She stood back.
“BACKER THAN THAT.”
She stood back farther. The Gray Man stepped in front of her. Only enough to block an assault, not her view.
Jesse Dittley kicked in the door. It was a slow-motion kick because his leg was so long — there was a considerable lag between when he began to swing his leg and when his foot actually hit the door. Blue wondered what that was called. A leg roundhouse, or something.
The door opened.
“YUP,” said Jesse as something shot toward him.
It was a terrible something.
Blue was a fairly open-minded human, she thought, willing to accept that there was a good bit of the world that was outside her understanding and knowledge. She knew, academically, that just because something looked scary didn’t mean that it wanted to hurt you.
But this something wanted to hurt them.
It wasn’t even malevolence. It was that sometimes something was on your side, and sometimes it was not, and this was not. Whatever humans were, this was against.
The sensation of being undone buffeted them, and then something charged through the doorway.
The Gray Man took an enormous black handgun from his jacket and shot the thing three times in each of its heads. It fell to the ground. There was not much in the way of heads left.
“THAT SEEMED EXCESSIVE,” Jesse said.
“Yes,” agreed the Gray Man.
Blue was glad that it was dead and then felt bad that she felt glad that it was dead. It was easier to be generous about it now that it wasn’t trying to unwind the core of her existence.
Jesse closed the door and locked it again.
“THAT HAS BEEN MY WEEK.”
She looked at the strange, jointless body, vaguely wormish, glittering rainbow scales in the beam of her flashlight. She couldn’t decide if it was ugly or beautiful or just unlike anything she had seen before. “Have there
been a lot of them?”
“ENOUGH.”
“Have you seen any of these before?” Mr. Gray asked.
“NOT TILL NOW. DON’T ALWAYS LOOK THIS WAY, EITHER. SOME OF THEM DON’T WANT TO KILL YOU. SOME OF THEM ARE JUST OLD THINGS. THEY DO GET IN THE HOUSE, THOUGH.”
“Why are they coming out?” Blue asked.
“TOLD YOU THE CAVE WAS CURSED.”
“But we took her out!”
“RECKON SHE WAS THE ONE KEEPING THEM DOWN. CAVE LOVES A SACRIFICE.”
They all regarded the body for several long minutes.
Mr. Gray said, “Shall we dispose of it?”
“NAH. CROWS WILL EAT WHAT’S LEFT.”
Blue said, “This seems pretty bad.” She wanted to offer to help, but what could they do? Put Gwenllian back?
The Gray Man tucked his gun away. He looked displeased by this entire turn of events. Blue wondered if he was thinking about hiding body parts in a cave that already seemed to be full of bodies, and then she wondered if he was thinking about Maura in a cave with these creatures, and as soon as she thought about it herself, her expression mirrored the Gray Man’s.
“THERE, THERE, LITTLE ANT,” Jesse said. “RECKON SHE GUARDED THE CAVE FOR HER TIME. NOW IT’S MY TURN.”
That night, Gwenllian’s laugh announced her presence at the doorway to Blue’s bedroom. It was poor timing; Blue was in a terrible mood because it was time for Maura to come back or for her to go find Maura or something. She would go to the cave of ravens herself. She would battle monsters in Dittley’s cave and charge to the middle of the earth looking for her. She made plans and broke them and rewrote them, a new one every second.
Gwenllian laughed again, meaningfully. It was her version of clearing her throat. With a sigh, Blue rolled over. She found the other woman treasuring a spoon of something that looked terribly like it might be mayonnaise.
“Are you running away, little blue lily?”
“Not yet,” Blue replied, narrowing her eyes at Gwenllian to see if there was a deeper meaning. In the background, she heard Calla and Persephone fighting in Persephone’s room. Well, really, Calla was fighting, and Persephone was saying nothing. She continued, “Look, there’s no nice way to ask this, so I’m just going to put it out there: Do you think you might grow out of the crazy any time soon? Because I have a lot of questions about my father, and my mother’s missing, and trying to do crime scene via sing-along is starting to stress me out.”