Blue Lily, Lily Blue (13 page)

esse heated up two bowls of SpaghettiOs in the small kitchen while Blue sat on a piece of old furniture that was both a stool and a chair. He seemed even more like a giant in

this small room; all of the furniture was doll furniture beside him. Behind him, the malevolent dark pressed against the window above the kitchen sink. Blue was glad of this yellow-toned oasis. She wasn’t ready to drive home through this night, especially now that she’d be doing it alone. Noah had vanished, and she wasn’t honestly certain if she was ready for him to reappear again.

The microwave beeped. Jesse explained as he placed the bowl in front of her that it wasn’t really the cave that was cursed; it was something in the cave.

“And it kills Dittleys,” Blue said, “and does terrible things to my friend.”
“YOUR DEAD FRIEND,” Jesse noted, sitting down opposite her at the tiny drop-leaf table. The mirror lay between them, facedown.
“That’s not his fault. Why didn’t you say you could see him?”
“I DIDN’T SAY I COULD SEE YOU, EITHER.”
“But I’m not dead,” Blue pointed out.
“BUT YOU ARE PRETTY SHORT.”
She let it pass. She ate a SpaghettiO. It wasn’t great, but it was polite to eat it. “What’s in the cave that makes it cursed?”
“SLEEPERS,” he replied.
This was relevant to Blue’s interests.
“THERE ARE THINGS SLEEPING UNDER THESE MOUNTAINS. SOME OF THEM YOU WANT TO STAY SLEEPING.”
“Do I?”
He nodded.
“Why would I want such a thing?”
He ate his SpaghettiOs.
“Don’t tell me I’ll understand when I’m older. I’m old already.”
“DIDN’T YOU SEE YOUR FRIEND?”
She had. She had indeed.
With a sigh, he fetched a big book of photographs — the Dittley family album. It was the kind of experience Blue always suspected would be charming and intriguing, an insightful and secret peek into another’s family past.
It was not that. It was very boring. But in between the stories of birthdays that went as you’d imagine and fishing trips that happened as fishing trips do, another story appeared: a family living at the mouth of a cave where something slept so restlessly that it peered out through mirrors and through eyes and fuzzed through speakers and sometimes made children tear wallpaper off the walls or wives rip out handfuls of their own hair. This restless sleeper got louder and louder through a generation until finally, a Dittley went into the cave and gave himself to the dark. Later, the rest of the family took out his bones and enjoyed another few decades of peace and quiet.
And then there were some more photos about the Dittleys building a car port.
“And you’re supposed to be next?” Blue asked. “Who will take over after you?”
“MY SON, I RECKON.”
Blue didn’t mention there was no evidence of anyone else in the house, but he must’ve picked up on it, because he added, “WIFE AND THE KIDS LEFT FIVE YEARS AGO, BUT THEY’LL BE BACK AFTER THE CURSE IS FED.”
She was so startled by all of this that she ate all of the SpaghettiOs without thinking too hard about it. “I’ve never met someone else with a curse.”
“WHAT’S YOURS ?”
“If I kiss my true love, he’ll die.”
Jesse nodded as if to say
yep, that’s a good one.
“Okay, but why don’t you just go? Sell this house and someone else can deal with the wallpaper and stuff?”
He shrugged — it was a mighty shrug. “THIS IS HOME.”
“Right, but home could be on the other side of Henrietta,” Blue persisted. “You could always just drive by this place and say
whoo hello house with bleeding walls see ya later!
Problem, solved.”
He took her bowl and dumped it in the sink. He didn’t seem offended, but he also clearly didn’t agree with her, so he wasn’t going to comment on it any further.
“Also, when w —” Blue began, only to be interrupted by a furious pounding. It sounded like it was coming from everywhere. Curse? Noah? She pointed at the mirror in a questioning way. Jesse shook his head and said, “FRONT DOOR.”
He wiped his hands on a dish towel that looked like it needed to be wiped on something else, before heading to the front door. Blue heard it open, and then a murmur of voices that rose and fell.
Two people appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, with Jesse behind them. Bizarrely, it was Gansey and Calla. It was strange to imagine the two of them traveling anywhere together, and even stranger to wrap her mind around the two of them standing here in the Dittley kitchen. They were very focused on Blue.
Jesse gestured to her in a demonstrative fashion. “SEE?”
Bursting over the threshold, Calla threw out her hand to Blue, palm up. She was spitting acid. “The car keys. Right now. You are not driving that car again until you are eighty and graying. Right now. Hand them over.”
Blue stared. “What? What?”
“You think you can just
go
and not call?”
“You told me no one else needed the car today!”
“And so you thought this meant you didn’t have to call?”
Blue was about to retort about how she was a responsible human being and they didn’t have any reason to be concerned for her whereabouts, but then she saw Gansey’s expression just behind Calla. His fingers lightly touched his temple and his cheekbone, and his eyes looked off at nothing. Blue wouldn’t have been able to interpret it a few months ago, but now she knew him well enough to realize that this meant relief: the unwinding of an anxious spring. He looked genuinely ill. She had worried both of them, badly.
“— half a dozen people looking everywhere for you and had begun to assume you were just dead in a ditch somewhere,” Calla was saying.
“Wait, what? You were
looking
for me?”
“It’s ten p.m.! You left six hours ago, and it wasn’t as if you were going to work, was it? We had no idea! I was this close to calling the police again.”
She let the
again
hang meaningfully. Blue didn’t look at Gansey or Jesse.
“I’m going to call Ronan,” Gansey said quietly, “and tell him he can go back to Monmouth.”
Ronan
had been looking for her, too? It would have been heartwarming, if she’d been in any danger whatsoever.
“I—” Blue realized before she finished the sentence that there was no argument: They were right, and she was wrong. Lamely, she ended, “I didn’t think anyone would notice.”
“Car,” Calla said, “keys.”
Blue meekly handed them over.
“Also, I never want to ride in that boy’s horrible car ever again,” Calla said. “You can ride back with him because I’m too angry to look at your
face
. I will say things I will regret.” She started to storm back out, and then she stopped by Jesse, her nose curled. Their arms had touched; clearly she had just gotten some psychometric impression.
She said, “Oh, it was
you
.”
He tilted his head down to observe her without malice. She stomped around the corner without further niceties or explanation.
“Er,” said Blue, pushing to her feet. “Sorry about this.” “DON’T MENTION IT.”
“Thanks for the SpaghettiOs. So, about the cave?” “YOU STILL WANT TO GO IN IT AFTER THAT?” “Like you said, it only kills Dittleys.”
“THE
CURSE
ONLY KILLS DITTLEYS. THE CAVE MIGHT KILL OTHERS.”
“I’m willing to take my chances, if you’re willing to let us.”
Jesse scratched his chest again. “FAIR IS FAIR, I GUESS.”
They shook on it, Blue’s hand minuscule in his.
“YOU DID GOOD WORK, ANT,” he said.
Gansey stepped in then, putting his phone neatly into his pocket, fetching out his keys instead. There was still something stretched thin about his expression. He looked, in fact, like he had in the cave, his face streaked and unfamiliar. It was so strange to see him without his Richard Campbell Gansey III guise on in public that Blue couldn’t stop staring at his face. No — it wasn’t his face. It was the way he stood, his shoulders shrugged, chin ducked, gaze from below uncertain eyebrows.
“SHE WAS ALL RIGHT,” Jesse assured him.
“My head knew that,” Gansey said. “But the rest of me didn’t.”

can’t believe you aren’t dead somewhere,” Ronan told Blue. “You should be dead somewhere.”
It was perhaps a sign of Gansey’s irritation over the situation that he didn’t correct Ronan on this front.

The kitchen at 300 Fox Way seethed with bodies. Malory, Gansey, Ronan, and Adam were at the kitchen table. Persephone floated near the sink. Calla leaned broodily on the counter. Orla kept appearing in a doorway to steal peeks at Ronan before being shooed away. This claustrophobic, urgent night reminded Adam instead of a night many months before, after Gansey had broken his thumb and nearly gotten shot, after they’d discovered Noah was dead. Things had only just begun to change.

Adam discreetly checked the oven clock. He’d asked to come into the trailer factory two hours late in order to meet with the others tonight, and he wanted to make sure he didn’t go over.

Blue asked, “Professor Malory, would you like some tea?” Malory looked relieved. “I would love a cup of tea.” “Do you prefer, er, fruity or footy?” she asked. “If you were

to have one or another in tea form?”
He considered. “Footy.”
“Bold choice,” Blue said. “Anyone else?”
Several heads shook. Adam and Gansey had both been victimized by the beverages of 300 Fox Way. The teas here were harvested from the yard or collected from the farmers’ market, chopped and mixed by hand, and then placed in bags labeled with either the predominant ingredient or the intended effect. Some of them were easier to drink recreationally than others.

Calla said, “I went straight to bourbon.”
She and Persephone toasted.
As Blue prepared tea and brought water to the Dog,

Gansey said, “All right, here’s the deal. We’ve found another cave, and anecdotally, someone is sleeping in it. It’s time to decide what to do.”

“There’s no decision,” Ronan said. “We go in.”
“You say that because you didn’t see Noah today,” Blue told him as she set a mug down in front of Malory. “That one doesn’t have any hallucinogenic effects, but you might experience some euphoria.”
Gansey said, “Nothing I have ever drank here has ever made me experience anything close to euphoria.”
“You’ve never had that one,” she said. “Anyway, Noah was a pretty scary thing. Jesse, the man who owns the cave, says there’s a curse.” She outlined the curse.
“Why doesn’t he just move?” Adam asked.
“Out of his family
home
?” Ronan asked, sounding both shitty and earnest.
“
Home
is putting it strongly,” Gansey said. “I saw this place.”
“You.” Blue pointed at him. “Shut up before you say something offensive. There’s something else you should know. One of the women here foretold Jesse’s death earlier this year. She didn’t know him, but she knew his name.”
Adam’s head jerked up. Not because this was shocking information, but because Blue’s voice had changed just a little bit, and Persephone and Calla were busily knocking back their drinks and not looking at each other all of a sudden. Adam, a secretive animal, was acutely tuned to other people’s secrets. So he wasn’t sure why there would be anything clandestine about the foretold death of a stranger, but he knew that Blue Sargent was telling a partial truth.
“Wait, wait,” Gansey said. “So you’re telling me that not only does this Jesse Dittley believe there’s a curse on this place, but actually, he is right, and he’s going to die.”
“
Or
he’s going to die because of something we do,” Blue insisted. “That’s why I brought it up. I feel we should make decisions responsibly.”
“You guys have a death list?” Ronan broke in. “That is fucking dark. Am I on it?”
“Some days, I wish,” Blue said.
“Can I see it?” Adam asked.
“What?”
“Can I see the list?”
Blue turned away to make herself a cup of tea. “I don’t have it. Mom took it with her. I just remembered his name. I mean, I thought it was a girl, with an
ie
at the end, but the Dittley part was memorable.”
Calla raised one sharp eyebrow, but said nothing.
Ah
, Adam thought with grim and sudden certainty.
Here it is. So one of us is on it.

“Never mind that,” Gansey said. “Time’s wasting and Adam has to go soon. The point is, are we going into this cave on Saturday?”

Which one of us?
Malory perked up. “Now would be a good time to point out that I will not be going into any caverns. I am happy to lend support from a location the sun is able to reach.”
“Of course we’re going in,” Ronan said. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“Risk,” Gansey replied. “I can’t stress how strongly unwilling I am to put anyone in this room in danger.”
“Also, rabbits, remember there’s more than one sleeper,” Calla pointed out. “Three of them. One is for you to wake, and one is for you to
not
wake.”
“And the one in the middle?” Ronan asked.
In her small voice, Persephone said, “These things just really always sound better in threes.”
“Jesse also said that some things shouldn’t be woken,” Blue added, discreetly not allowing Adam to catch her eye. “So, yes, risk.”
More than one of us?
“We went into the cave in Cabeswater,” Ronan said. “The risk was the same. Maybe worse because we were clueless going in.”
Maybe, Adam thought, it was Blue herself on the list. Maybe that was why she hid it from them all.
“Well, I agree with Ronan,” Blue said, “but I’m also biased, because I want to find Mom and that’s worth the risk for me.”
Adam thought about his sessions with Persephone. Would she have bothered to teach him if she knew he was going to die? She was looking at him now, black-eyes solid, as if challenging him to call out the secrets.
“There’s something else we should talk about,” Gansey began, hesitant. “And that’s what we’ll do if this
is
Glendower. If there’s a favor when we wake him. I don’t know for sure if there’s only one, or multiple, and we should know what we’re going to say in either scenario. You guys don’t have to answer now, but think about it.”
There had been a time when all Adam had thought about was the promise of that favor. But now he had only a year of school ahead of him and he was no longer under his father’s roof and he could see a way out without Glendower’s help. All that was left was to be asked to be free of Cabeswater.
And he wasn’t sure he wanted that.
Gansey and Ronan were muttering about something else, Malory pitching in, but Adam couldn’t focus on it anymore. He knew he wasn’t wrong about Blue’s caginess. He knew it in the same way that he knew when it was Cabeswater who woke him from his sleep and when he knew where he needed to go to repair the ley line. He knew it like truth.
He looked at his watch. “If we’ve decided, I have to go.”
He did not. He had a little bit of time. But this couldn’t wait. The supposition was growing inside him.
“Already?” Gansey asked, but not disbelievingly. “How rotten. Oh, well.”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “But I’ve got this weekend and a bunch of days off after. Blue, could you help me get this thing out of the car?”
“What thing?”
He lied swiftly and proficiently. “The stuff you wanted. I can’t believe you don’t remember. The, the — fabric.”
Persephone was still looking at him.
Blue shook her head, but at herself, not at him; rueful at her own lack of memory. She pushed off the counter as he fistbumped Gansey and nodded to Malory and Ronan. He did his best throughout the parting to hold himself casually, though he felt charged with the unspoken secret. Together they headed back out the front door and down the dark walk to where his car was parked on the curb behind the glorious Camaro.
Out here, it was quiet and cool, the dry leaves rattling together like someone shushing a crowd.
“I don’t remembe —” began Blue, and then broke off when Adam grabbed her arm and pulled her close.
“Which one of us, Blue?”
“Hey, don’t —!” She wrenched her arm free, but she didn’t step back.
“Which of us is on that list?”
She gazed studiously off into the distance, her eyes on a car on a far-off cross street. She didn’t answer, but she didn’t insult him by saying he was wrong, either.
“Blue.”
She didn’t look at him.
He stepped around her so that she couldn’t
not
look at him. “Blue, which one of us?”
Her face was unfamiliar, all mirth scrubbed from it. She wasn’t crying. Her eyes were worse than crying, though. He wondered how long she had been carrying this. His heart was thudding. He’d gotten it right. One of them was supposed to die.

I don’t want to die, not now —
“Blue.”
She said, “You won’t be able to unknow it.”
“I have to know,” Adam said. “Don’t you get it? That will be

the favor. That’s what I’ll ask for. I need to know so we can make that what we ask, if there’s only one.”
She merely held his gaze.
“Gansey,” Adam said.
She closed her eyes.
Of course. Of course he would be taken from them.
His mind supplied the image: Gansey convulsing on the ground, covered in blood, Ronan crumpled beside him in grief. It had been months since Cabeswater showed him the vision, but he had not forgotten it. Nor had he forgotten how, in the vision, it had been Adam’s fault.
His heart was a grave.
If it’s your fault
, Adam thought,
you can stop it.