“Maid Marian,” Blue said. “Little John.”
Gansey pointed at her. “Like Batman and Robin. But he died in Wales. Are we to believe he returned to Wales after leaving Glendower here? No. I reject it.”
Blue loved this ponderous, scholarly Gansey, too involved with facts to consider how he appeared on the outside. She asked, “Glendower had a wife, right?”
“Died in the Tower of London.”
“Siblings?”
“Beheaded.”
“Children?”
“A million of them, but most imprisoned and dead, or just plain dead. He lost his entire family in the uprising.”
“Poet it is, then!”
Gansey asked, “Have you ever heard that rumor that if you boil water in the microwave it will explode when you touch it?”
“Has to be pure,” she replied. “Distilled water. Regular water won’t explode because of the minerals. You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”
A roaring sound interrupted them, sudden and complete. Blue started, but Gansey just cast his eyes upward. “It’s rain on the roof. Must be dumping.”
He turned, mug in hand, and suddenly they were an inch apart. She could smell the mint in his mouth. She saw his throat move as he swallowed.
She was furious at her body for betraying her, for wanting him differently than any of the other boys, for refusing to listen to her insistence that they were just friends.
“How was your first day of school, Jane?” he asked, voice different than before.
Mom’s gone. Noah exploded. I’m not going to college. I don’t want to go home where everything is strange, and I don’t want to go back to school where everything is normal.
“Oh, you know, public school,” she said, not meeting his eyes. She concentrated instead on Gansey’s neck, which was right at eye level, and on how his collar didn’t lay quite flat against his skin all the way around because of his Adam’s apple. “We just watched cartoons all day.”
She’d meant it to be wry, but she didn’t think it quite worked.
“We’ll find her,” he said, and her chest twinged again.
“I don’t know if she wants to be found.”
“Fair enough. Jane, if —” He stopped and swirled the tea. “I hope Malory doesn’t want any milk. I completely forgot.”
She wished she could still evoke that Blue who despised him. She wished she knew if Adam would feel terrible about this. She wished she knew if fighting this feeling would make Gansey’s foretold end destroy her any less.
She shut the microwave. Gansey left the room.
Back on the sofa, Malory viewed the tea as a man would view a death sentence.
“What else?” Gansey asked kindly.
Malory shoved the Dog off him. “I’d like a new hip. And better weather. Ah — however. This is your home and I know that I’m an outsider, so far be it from me to chastise or generally overstep. That being said, were you aware there was someone under …?”
He indicated the storm-dark area beneath the pool table. If Blue squinted, she could make out a form in the black.
“Noah,” Gansey said. “Come out at once.”
“No,” Noah replied.
“Well! I see you two know each other and all is well,” Malory said, in the voice of someone who sensed trouble coming and hadn’t brought an umbrella. “I will be in my room nursing my jet lag.”
After he had retreated, Blue said with exasperation, “Noah! I called and called for you.”
Noah remained where he was, arms hugged around his body. He looked markedly less alive than he had earlier; there was something smudgy about his eyes, something uncertain about his edges. It was kind of hard to look at the place where Noah stopped and the shadow below him began. Something unpleasant happened in Blue’s throat when she tried to make out what was off about his face.
“I’m tired of it,” Noah said.
“Tired of what?” Gansey asked, voice kind.
“Decaying.”
He had been crying. That was what was wrong with his face, Blue realized. Nothing supernatural.
“Oh, Noah,” she said, crouching down.
“What can I do?” Gansey asked. “We. What can we do?”
Noah shrugged in a watery way.
Blue was suddenly desperately afraid that Noah might want to actually die. This seemed like something most ghosts wanted — to be laid to rest. It was a dreadful notion, a forever good-bye. Her selfishness warred mightily with every bit of ethics she had ever learned from the women of her family.
Blast. She had to.
She asked, “Do you want us to find a way to, um, to properly, to lay …”
Before she’d even finished, Noah started shaking his head. He hugged his legs closer. “No. Nonono.”
“You don’t have to be ashamed,” Blue said, because it sounded like what her mother would have said. She was certain her mother would have added something comforting about the afterlife, but she was unable, this time, to sound comforting when she herself wanted to be comforted. Lamely, she finished, “You don’t have to be afraid.”
“You don’t know!” Noah said, vaguely hysterical. “You don’t know!”
She stretched out a hand. “Okay, hey —”
Noah repeated, “You don’t know!”
“We can talk this out,” Gansey said, as if a decaying soul was something that could be solved through conversation.
“You don’t know! You don’t know!”
Noah was standing. It was impossible, because there was not room beneath the pool table for him to stand. But he was somehow escaping on either side, surrounding Gansey and Blue. The maps fluttered frantically against the green surface. A flock of dust wads tumbled from beneath the table and raced down the streets of Gansey’s miniature model of Henrietta. The desk lamp flickered.
The temperature dropped.
Blue saw Gansey’s eyes widen behind a cloud of his own breath.
“Noah,” Blue warned. Her head felt swimmy as Noah robbed her of energy. She caught a whiff, strangely, of the old-carpet smell of the guidance counselor’s office, and then the living, green scent of Cabeswater. “This isn’t you!”
The swirl of wind was still rising, flapping papers and knocking over stacks of books. The Dog was barking from behind the closed door of Noah’s old room. Goose bumps rippled on Blue’s skin, and her limbs felt heavy.
“Noah, stop,” Gansey said.
But he didn’t. The door to the apartment rattled.
Blue said, “Noah, I’m asking you now.”
He wasn’t attending, or there wasn’t enough of the true Noah to attend.
Standing up on her wobbly legs, Blue began to use all of the protective visualizations she’d been taught by her mother. She imagined herself inside an unbreakable glass ball; she could see out, but no one could touch her. She imagined white light piercing the stormy clouds, the roof, the darkness of Noah, finding Blue, armoring her.
Then she pulled the plug on the battery that was Blue Sargent.
The room went still. The papers settled. The light flickered once more and then strengthened. She heard a little gasp of a sob, and then absolute quiet.
Gansey looked shocked.
Noah sat in the middle of the floor, papers all around him, a mint plant spilling dirt by his hand. He was all hunched over and shadowless, his form slight and streaky, barely visible at all. He was crying again.
In a very small voice, he told Blue, “You said I could use your energy.”
She knelt in front of him. She wanted to hug him, but he wasn’t really there. Without her energy, he was a paper-thin boy, he was a skull, he was air in the shape of Noah. “Not like that.”
He whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
He covered his face, and then he was gone.
Gansey said, “That was impressive, Jane.”
That night, Blue leaned against the spreading beech tree in her backyard, her eye
s cast up to the stars and her fingers touching the chilly, smooth bark of one of the roots. The kitchen light through the sliding door seemed far away.
That was impressive, Jane.
Although Blue was perfectly aware of the positive effects of her ability, she had never really considered the opposite. And yet Noah would have destroyed Monmouth Manufacturing if she hadn’t cut herself off from him.
The stars winked through the beech leaves. She’d read that new stars tended to form in pairs. Binary stars, orbiting in close proximity, only becoming single stars when their partner was smashed off them by another pair of wildly spinning new stars. If she pretended hard enough, she could see the multitude of pairs clinging to each other in the destructive and creative gravity of their constellations.
Impressive.
Maybe she was a little impressed. Not by pulling the plug on a dead boy — that seemed sad, nothing to brag about. But because she’d learned something about herself today, and she’d thought there was nothing left there to discover.
The stars moved slowly above her, an array of possibilities, and for the first time in a long time, she felt them mirrored in her heart.
Calla opened the sliding door. “Blue?”
“What?”
“If you’re done gallivanting for the day, I could use your body,” Calla said. “I have a reading.”
Blue raised her eyebrows. Maura only asked for her help during important readings, and Calla never asked, period. Curiosity rather than obedience pulled Blue to her feet. “This late? Now?”
“I’m asking now, aren’t I?”
Once inside, Calla fussed over the reading room and called for Persephone so many times that Orla screamed back that some people were trying to conduct phone calls and Jimi shouted, “Is it something I can help with?”
All of the fuss made Blue strangely nervous. At 300 Fox Way, readings happened so often that they ordinarily felt both perfunctory and unmagical. But this felt like chaos. This felt like anything could happen.
The doorbell rang.
“PERSEPHONE, I TOLD YOU,” Calla roared. “Blue, get that. I’ll be in the reading room. Bring him in there.”
When Blue opened the front door, she discovered an Aglionby student standing in the glow of the porch light. Moths fluttered around his head. He wore salmon-colored pants and white Top-Siders and boasted flawless skin and tousled hair.
Then her eyes adjusted and she realized that he was too old to be a raven boy. Quite a bit too old; it was hard to imagine how she would have thought it before even for a moment.
Blue scowled at his shoes and then at his face. Although everything about him had been cultivated to impress, she found him less impressive than she might have a few months before. “Hola.”
“Howdy,” he replied, with a cheery smile full of unsurprisingly straight teeth. “I’m here for a probing of my future. I expect the timing is still good?”
“You expect right, sailor. Come in.”
In the reading room, Calla had been joined by Persephone. They sat on one side of the table like a jury. The man stood across from them, idly drumming his fingers on a chair back.
“Sit,” intoned Calla.
“Any old chair,” Persephone added mildly.
“Not any old chair,” Calla said. She pointed. “That one.”
He sat opposite, his bright eyes all over the room as he did, his body dynamic. He looked like a person who got things done. Blue couldn’t decide if he was handsome or if his demeanor was fooling her into believing him so.
He asked, “Well, how does this work? Do I pay you up front or do you decide how much it is after you see how complicated my future is?”
“Any old time,” Persephone said.
“No,” Calla said. “Now. Fifty.”
He parted with the bills without malice. “Could I get a receipt? Business expense. That is a fantastic portrait of Steve Martin over there, by the way. Behold how its eyes follow you around the room.”
“Blue, would you get the receipt?” Persephone asked.
Blue, lingering by the door, went for a business card to write the amount on. When she returned, Persephone was saying to Calla, “Oh, we will have to use just yours. I don’t have mine.”
“Don’t have yours!” Calla replied incredulously. “What happened to them?”
“Coca-Cola shirt has them.”
With a mighty snort, Calla retrieved her tarot cards and instructed the man on how to shuffle them. She finished, “Then you pass them back to me, facedown, and I’ll draw them.”
He began.
“As you shuffle them, you should be thinking about what you’d like to know,” Persephone added in her small voice. “That will focus the reading quite a bit.”
“Good, good,” he replied, shuffling the cards more aggressively. He glanced up at Blue. Then, without warning, he flipped the deck so that the cards were faceup. He fanned them out, eyes darting over the selection.
This was not how Calla had instructed him.
Something in Blue’s nerves tingled a warning.
“So, if the question is ‘How can I make this happen?’ ” — he plucked a card free and set it on the table — “that’s a good start, right?”
There was dead silence.
The card was the three of swords. It depicted a bloody heart stabbed with the aforementioned three swords. Gore dripped down the blades. Maura called it “the heartbreak card.”
Blue needed no psychic perception to feel the threat oozing from it.
The psychics stared at the man. With a cool curl in her stomach, Blue realized that they hadn’t seen this coming.
Calla growled, “What’s your game?”
He kept smiling his cheery, congenial smile. “Here’s the question: Is there another one of you? One that looks more like that one?” He pointed at Blue, whose stomach turned over unpleasantly once more.
Mom.
“Go to hell,” Calla burst out.
He nodded. “That’s what I thought. You expecting her anytime soon? I’d love to have a chat with her in particular.”
“Hell,” Persephone said. “I actually agree in this case. Insofar as going there is concerned.”
What does this man want with Mom?
Blue frantically memorized everything about him so that she could describe him later.
The man stood, sweeping up the three of swords. “You know what? I’m keeping this. Thanks for the info.”
As he turned to go, Calla started after him, but Persephone put a single finger on Calla’s arm, stopping her.
“No,” Persephone said softly. The front door closed. “That one’s not to be touched.”
Adam was reading and re-reading his first-quarter schedule when Ronan hurled himself into the desk beside him.
They were the only two in the navy-carpeted classroom; Adam had arrived very early to Borden House. It seemed wrong that the first day of school should carry the same emotional weight as the anxious afternoon in the cave of ravens, but there was no denying that the gleeful and anticipatory jitter in his veins now was as pronounced as those breathless minutes when birds sang around them.
One more year, and he had done it.
The first day was the easiest, of course. Before it had really all begun: the homework and the sports, the school-wide dinners and the college counseling, the exams and the extra credit. Before Adam’s night job and studying until three A.M. conspired to destroy him.
He read his schedule again. It bristled with classes and extracurriculars. It looked impossible. Aglionby was a hard school: harder for Adam, though, because he had to be the best.
Last year, Barrington Whelk had stood at the front of this room and taught them Latin. Now he was dead. Adam knew that he had seen Whelk die, but he couldn’t seem to remember what the event had actually looked like — though he could, if he tried hard enough, imagine what it should have looked like.
Adam closed his eyes for a moment. In the quiet of the empty classroom,
he could hear the rustling of leaves against yet more leaves.
“I can’t take it,” Ronan said.
Adam opened his eyes. “Take what?”
Take sitting, apparently. Ronan went to the whiteboard and began to write. He had furious handwriting.
“Malory. He’s always complaining about his hips or his eyes or the government or — oh, and that dog. It’s not like he’s blind or crippled or anything.”
“Why couldn’t he have something normal like a raven?”
Ronan ignored this. “And he got up three times in the night to piss. I think he has a tumor.”
Adam said, “You don’t sleep anyway.”
“Not anymore.” Ronan’s dry-erase marker squeaked in protest as he jabbed down Latin words. Although Ronan wasn’t smiling and Adam didn’t know some of the vocabulary, Adam was certain it was a dirty joke. For a moment, he watched Ronan and tried to imagine that he was a teacher instead of a Ronan. It was impossible. Adam couldn’t decide if it was how he’d shoved up his sleeves or the apocalyptic way he had tied his tie.
“He knows everything,” Ronan said in a casual way.
Adam didn’t immediately reply, though he knew what Ronan meant, because he also found the professor’s omniscience uncomfortable. When he thought harder about the source of the unpleasantness — the idea of Malory spending a year with fifteen-year-old Gansey — he had to admit that it was not paranoia, but jealousy.
“He’s older than I expected,” Adam said.
“Oh, God, the oldest,” Ronan replied at once, as if he had been waiting for Adam to mention it. “He never chews with his mouth shut.”
A floorboard popped. Immediately, Ronan put down his marker. One couldn’t open the front door of Borden House without making the floor creak two rooms over. So both boys knew what the noise meant: School was under way.
“Well,” Ronan said, sounding nasty and unhappy, “here we go, cowboy.”
Returning to his desk, he threw his feet up on it. This was forbidden, of course. He crossed his arms, tilted his chin back, closed his eyes. Instant insolence. This was the version of himself he prepared for Aglionby, for his older brother, Declan, and sometimes, for Gansey.