Blue Lily, Lily Blue (22 page)

’m here,” Blue said, whirling in the door of 300 Fox Way. She was sweaty and irritable and nervous, torn between hoping for a false alarm and hoping it was important enough to

Calla met her in the hall as she dropped her bag by the door. “Come here and help Adam.”
“What’s wrong with Adam!”
“Nothing,” Calla snapped. “Besides the usual. He’s looking for Persephone!”
They reached the reading room door. Inside, Adam sat at the head of the reading room table. He was very still, and his eyes were closed. In front of him was the black scrying bowl from Maura’s room. The only light was from three flickering candles. Blue’s stomach did something unpleasant.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” she said. “Last time —”
“I know. He told me,” Calla said. “But he’s willing to risk it. And it’ll be better with three of us.”
“Why is he looking for Persephone?”
“He thinks something’s wrong with her.”
“Where is she? Did she tell you where she went?”
Calla gave Blue a withering look. Of course. Persephone never told anyone anything.
“Okay,” Blue said.
Calla closed the reading room doors behind her and pointed for Blue to sit beside Adam.
Adam opened his eyes. She wasn’t sure what to ask him, and he just shook his head a little, like he was angry at himself or Persephone or the world.
Calla sat opposite and took one of Adam’s hands. She ordered Blue, “You take the other. I’ll ground him, and you’ll amplify him.”
Blue and Adam exchanged a look. They had not held hands since their breakup. She slid her hand across the table and he linked his fingers through hers. Gingerly. Not pushing the issue. Blue closed her fingers around his hand.
Adam said, “I’m . . .”
He stopped. He was looking at the scrying bowl out of the corner of his eye, not dead-on.
“You’re what?” Calla said.
He finished, “I’m trusting you guys.”
Blue held his hand a little tighter. Calla said, “We won’t let you fall.”
The bowl shimmered darkly, and he looked into it.
He looked and looked, the candles flickering, and Blue felt the precise moment his body released his soul, because the candles went strange in the reflections and his fingers went limp in hers.
Blue looked sharply to Calla, but Calla merely remained as she was, his light hand lying in her dark one, her chin tilted up, her eyes cut over to Adam watchfully.
His lips moved, like he was mumbling to himself, but no sound came out.
Blue thought of how she amplified his scrying, forcing him further down into the ether. Adam wandered now, traveling out from his body, unwinding the thread that tied him back to it. Calla hung on to the thread, but Blue pushed on him.
Adam’s eyebrows furrowed. His lips parted. His eyes were utterly black — the black of the mirrored scrying bowl. Every so often, the three twisted flames reflected in the bowl appeared in his irises. Only sometimes there was two in one eye and only one in the other, or three in one, and none in the other, or three in both, and then blackness.
“No,” whispered Adam. His voice sounded unlike his own. Blue was reminded terribly of the night she had stumbled upon Neeve scrying in the roots of the beech tree.
Again Blue looked to Calla.
Again Calla remained still and watchful.
“Maura?” Adam called. “Maura?”
Only it was Persephone’s voice coming out of Adam’s mouth.
I can’t do this
, Blue thought suddenly. Her heart couldn’t manage it, being afraid.
Calla’s other hand reached across the table to take Blue’s. They were joined in a circle around the scrying bowl.
Adam’s breathing hitched and slowed.
Not again.
Blue felt Calla’s body shifting as she gripped Adam’s hand tighter.
“No,” he said again, and this was his own voice.
The flames were huge in his eyes.
Then they went back to black.
He didn’t breathe.
The room was silent for one beat. Two beats. Three beats. The candles went out in the scrying bowl.
“PERSEPHONE! ”
he shouted.
“Now,” Calla said, releasing Blue’s hand. “Let go of him!” Blue released his hand, but nothing happened.
“Cut him off,” Calla snarled. “I know you can. I’ll pull him back!”
As Calla used her free hand to press a thumb to the center of Adam’s forehead, Blue frantically imagined what she had done to pull the plug on Noah back in Monmouth. Only it had been one thing to do it while Noah threw things about. It was another thing to do it as she watched Adam’s still chest and his empty eyes. Another thing as his shoulders sagged and his face fell into Calla’s waiting hands just before he slumped into the scrying bowl.
He’s trusting us. He never trusts anyone, and he’s trusting us.
He’s trusting
you
, Blue.
She jumped out of her chair and put up her walls. She tried to visualize the white light pouring down to strengthen them, but it was hard when she could see Adam’s body sprawled limply across the end of the reading table. Calla slapped his face.
“Come on, you bastard! Remember your body!”
Blue turned her back on the scene.
She closed her eyes.
And she did it.
There was silence.
Then the overhead lights came on and Adam’s voice said, “She’s here.”
Blue spun.
“What do you mean,
here
?” Calla demanded.
“Here,” Adam said. He shoved out of his chair. “Upstairs.” “But we checked her room,” Calla said.
“Not in her room.” Adam waved a hand impatiently. “The highest — where’s the highest place?”
“The attic,” Blue said. “Why would she be up there? Gwenllian —?”
“Gwenllian’s in the tree in the backyard,” Calla said. “She’s singing at some birds who hate her.”
“Are there mirrors?” Adam asked. “Some place she would go to look for Maura?”
Calla swore.
She tore open the attic door and charged up first, Blue and Adam close on her heels. At the top of the stairs, she said, “No.”
Blue jumped past her.
In between Neeve’s two mirrors was a pile of lace, canvas, and —
Persephone.
Adam hurried forward, but Calla seized his arm. “No, you idiot. You can’t reach between them! Blue, stop!”
“I can,” Blue replied. She slid to kneel beside Persephone. She was collapsed in a way that was clearly unintentional. She was on her knees with her arms bent behind her and her chin hitched up, caught on the feet of one of the mirrors. Her black eyes stared into nothing.
“We’ll get her back,” Adam said.
But Calla was already crying.
Blue, unconcerned with dignity, dragged Persephone out by her armpits. She was light and unresisting.
They would pull her back, just as Adam said.
Calla sank to her knees and covered her face.
“Stop it,” snapped Blue, voice cracking. “Get over here and help.”
She took Persephone’s hand. It was as cold as the cave walls.
Adam stood with his arms wrapped around himself, a question in his eyes.
Blue already knew the answer, but she couldn’t say it.
Calla did: “She’s dead.”

lue had never believed in death until then.
Not in a real way.
It happened to other people, other families, in

other places. It happened in hospitals or automobile crashes or battle zones. It happened— now she remembered Gansey’s words outside Gwenllian’s tomb — with ceremony. With some announcement of itself.

It didn’t just happen in the attic on a sunny day while she was sitting in the reading room. It didn’t just
happen
, in only a moment, an irreversible moment.

It didn’t happen to people she had always known. But it did.
And there would now forever be two Blues: the Blue that was

ansey arrived at 300 Fox Way after the ambulance had left, not because of a lack of haste, but because of a lack of communication. It took twenty-four calls from

Adam to Ronan’s cell phone before Ronan could be persuaded to pick up, and then it took Ronan a bit of doing to track down Gansey on campus. Malory was still out and about with the Dog somewhere, prowling Virginia in the Suburban, but he would be fine not knowing for a while.

Persephone was dead.
Gansey couldn’t believe it, not because he could not believe in the nearness of death— he could not
stop
believing in the nearness of death— but because he would not have expected
Persephone
to do something as mortal as dying. There had been something immutable about the three women in 300 Fox Way— Maura, Persephone, and Calla were the trunk from which all of the branches sprang.
We must find Maura
, he thought as he climbed from the Camaro and started up the walk, Ronan dogging his steps with his hands shoved in pockets, Chainsaw flapping grimly from branch to branch to follow.
Because if Persephone can die, there is nothing to stop Maura from dying, too.
Adam sat on the dappled shade of the front step, eyes blank, a wrinkle between his eyebrows. Gansey’s mother used to press her thumb to that place between Richard Gansey III’s brows and rub the frown out; she still did it to Gansey II. He felt the urge to do it now as Adam tipped his face up.
“I found her,” Adam said, “and it didn’t do any good at all.”
He needed Gansey to say it was all right, and even though it was not all right, Gansey found his voice and said, “You did your best. Calla told me on the phone. She’s proud of you. It’s not going to feel any better now, Parrish. Don’t expect it to.”
Adam, freed, nodded miserably and looked at his feet.
“Where’s Blue?”
Adam blinked. He clearly didn’t know.
“I’m going in,” Gansey said as Ronan sat down on the step beside Adam. As Gansey shut the door behind him, he heard Adam say, “I don’t want to talk,” and Ronan reply, “The fuck would I talk about?”
He found Calla and Jimi and Orla and two other young women he didn’t recognize in the kitchen. Gansey had meant to begin with
I’m sorry for your loss
or something polite, something that would make sense outside of this kitchen, but in this context, all of it felt more false than usual.
Instead, he said, “I’m going into the cave. We are.”
It was impossible, but it didn’t much matter. Everything was impossible. He waited for Calla to say that it was a bad idea, but she didn’t.
A small part of him still wished that she would: the part that could feel small legs crawling over the back of his neck.
Coward.
He had spent a long time learning to put that in the back of his mind, and he did it now.
“I’m going with you,” Calla said, her knuckles tight around a glass. “Enough of this flying solo nonsense. I’m so angry I could . . .”
She hurled the glass to the kitchen floor; it splintered at Orla’s feet. Orla stared at it and then at Gansey, her expression apologetic, but Gansey had lived with Ronan’s grief for long enough to recognize it.
“There!” Calla shouted. “That’s what it’s like. Just destroyed for no purpose!”
“I’ll get a vacuum,” Jimi said.
“I’ll get a Valium,” Orla said.
Calla stormed into the backyard.
Gansey retreated and crept up the stairs to the Phone/ Sewing/Cat Room. It was the only place he’d been on the second floor, and the only other place he knew to look for Blue. She was not in there, though, nor in the adjacent room that was clearly her bedroom. He found her instead in a room at the end of the hall that seemed to be Persephone’s; it smelled like her, and everything was odd and clever in it.
Blue sat beside the bed, chipping aggressively at the polish on her nails. She looked up at him; the afternoon sunlight came in sharp and strong to land on the side of the mattress behind her, causing her to squint.
“That took forever,” she said.
“My phone was off. I’m sorry.”
She chipped another bit of polish onto the shaggy rug. “I guess there was no point to hurrying anyway.”
Ah, Blue.
“Is Mr. Gray here?” she asked.
“I didn’t see him. Look, I told Calla we were going into the cave. To find Maura.” He corrected, more formally, “Your mother.”
“Oh, seriously! Don’t Richard Gansey on me!” Blue snapped, and then, at once, she began to cry.
It was against the rules, but Gansey crouched down beside her, one of his knees against her back, one against her knees, and hugged her. She curled against him, hands balled up against his chest. He felt a hot tear slip into the dip of his collarbone. He closed his eyes against the sun through the window, burning hot in his sweater, foot falling asleep, elbow grinding into the metal bed frame, Blue Sargent pressed up against him, and he didn’t move.
Help
, he thought. He remembered Gwenllian saying that it was starting, and he could feel it, winding out faster and faster, a ball of thread caught in the wind.
Starting, starting
—
He could not tell who was comforting whom.
“I’m part of the useless new generation,” Blue said finally, the words right on his skin. Desire and dread lay right next to each other in his heart, each sharpening the other. “The computer generation. I keep thinking that I can hit the reset button, restart things.”
He pulled back, wincing through pins and needles, and gave her a mint leaf before sitting back against the bed frame beside her. When he looked up, he realized that Gwenllian stood in the doorway. It was impossible to say how long she’d been there, her arms stretched up above her to the door frame as if she was trying to keep from being pushed into the room.
She waited until she was sure Gansey was looking, and then she sang,

“Queens and kings Kings and queens Blue lily, lily blue Crowns and birds Swords and things Blue lily, lily blue”

“Are you trying to make me angry?” he asked.
“
Are
you angry, knightling?” Gwenllian replied sweetly. She leaned her cheek on her arm, rocking back and forth. “I used to dream of death. I had sung every song I knew so many times while I lay in that box on my face. Every eye! Every eye I could reach I asked to look for me. And what did I get but stupidity and blindness!”
“How did you use other people’s eyes if you’re just like me?” Blue asked. “If you don’t have any psychic powers of your own.”
Gwenllian’s mouth hung in the most dismissive shape possible. “This question! It is like asking how you can smash a nail if you are not a hammer.”
“Whatever,” Blue said. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t really care.”
“Artemus taught me,” Gwenllian said. “When he wasn’t working one-two-three-four my father. Here’s a riddle my love, my love, my love, what grows, my love, my love, my love, from dark, my love, my love, my love, to dark, my love, my love, my love.”
Blue pushed angrily to her feet. “No more games.” “A tree at night,” Gansey said.
Gwenllian stopped rocking on her arms and studied him where he still sat on the floor.
“Much of my father,” she replied. “Much of my father in you. That is Artemus, the tree at night. Your mother looks for him, blue lily? Well, then you should seek my father. Artemus will be as near to him as he is able unless something prevents him. The better to whisper.”
She spat on the floorboards by Gansey.
“I
am
seeking him,” Gansey said. “We’re going underground.”
“Order me to do something for you, little prince-boy,” she told Gansey. “Let’s see your king-mettle.”
“Is that how your father convinced people to do things for him?” he asked.
“No,” Gwenllian said, and looked annoyed about it. “He asked them.”
Even through all of this wrongness, this impossibility, this warmed Gansey. This was right: Glendower should have ruled by request, not by command. This was the king he sought.
“Will you go with us?” he asked.