The Raven Boys (14 page)

He felt the old fear creeping slowly out of his lungs.

Don’t panic. You were wrong about Ronan last night. You have to stop this. Death isn’t as close as you think.

Dispirited, Gansey tried the home phone one more time. Nothing. He had to go. Adam must’ve taken his bike, he must’ve had work, he must’ve had errands to run and forgotten to tell him. The rutted drive down to the neighborhood was still empty.

Come on, Adam.

Wiping his palms on his slacks, he put his hands back on the steering wheel and headed for the school.

Gansey didn’t get a chance to see if Adam had made it to Aglionby until third period, when they both had Latin. This was, inexplicably, the only class Ronan never missed. Ronan was head of class in Latin. He studied joylessly but relentlessly, as if his life depended on it. Directly behind him was Adam, Aglionby’s star pupil, otherwise at the top of every class that he took. Like Ronan, Adam studied relentlessly, because his future life
did
depend on it.

For his part, Gansey preferred French. He told Helen there was very little purpose to a language that couldn’t be used to translate a menu, but really, French was just easier for him to learn; his mother spoke a little. He’d originally resigned himself to taking Latin in order to translate historical texts for Glendower research, but Ronan’s proficiency at the language robbed Gansey’s study of any urgency.

Latin was held in Borden House, a small frame house on the other side of the Aglionby campus from Welch Hall, the main academic building. As Gansey strode hurriedly across the center green, Ronan appeared, knocking Gansey’s arm. His eyes looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

Ronan hissed, “Where’s Parrish?”

“He didn’t come in with me today,” Gansey said, mood sinking. Ronan and Adam shared second period. “You haven’t seen him yet?”

“Wasn’t in class.”

Behind Gansey, someone punched his shoulder blade and said,
Gansey boy!
as they trotted by. Gansey halfheartedly lifted three fingers, the signal of the rowing team.

“I tried calling him at the house,” he said.

Ronan replied, “Well, Poor Boy needs a cell.”

A few months earlier, Gansey had offered to buy Adam a cell phone, and by so doing had launched the longest fight they’d ever had, a week of silence that had resolved itself only when Ronan did something more offensive than either of them could accomplish.

“Lynch!”

Gansey looked in the direction of the voice; Ronan didn’t. The owner of the voice was halfway across the green, difficult to identify in the homogenous Aglionby uniform.

“Lynch!” the call came again. “I’m going to fuck you up.”

Ronan still didn’t look up. He adjusted the strap on his shoulder and continued stalking across the grass.

“What’s that about?” Gansey demanded.

“Some people don’t take losing very well,” Ronan replied.

“Was that Kavinsky? Don’t tell me you’ve been racing again.”

“Don’t ask me, then.”

Gansey contemplated if he could give Ronan a curfew. Or if he should quit rowing to spend more time with him on Fridays — he
knew
that was when Ronan got into trouble with the BMW. Maybe he could convince Ronan to …

Ronan adjusted the strap on his shoulder again, and this time, Gansey took a closer look at it. The bag it belonged to was distinctly larger than his usual, and he handled it gingerly, as if it might spill.

Gansey asked, “Why are you carrying that bag? Oh my God, you have that bird in there, don’t you.”

“She has to be fed every two hours.”

“How do you know?”

“Jesus, the Internet, Gansey.” Ronan pulled open the door to Borden House; as soon as they breached the threshold, everything within sight was covered with navy blue carpet.

“If you get caught with that thing —” But Gansey couldn’t think of a suitable threat. What was the punishment for smuggling a live bird into classes? He wasn’t certain there was precedent. He finished, instead, “If it dies in your bag, I forbid you to throw it out in a classroom.”

“She,”
Ronan corrected. “It’s a she.”

“I’d buy that if it had any defining sexual characteristics. It had better not have bird flu or something.” But he wasn’t thinking about Ronan’s raven. He was thinking about Adam not being in class.

Ronan and Gansey took their usual seats in the back of the navy-carpeted classroom. At the front of the room, Whelk was writing verbs on the board.

When Gansey and Ronan had come in, Whelk had stopped writing mid-word:
internec
— Though there was no reason to think Whelk cared about their conversation, Gansey had the strange idea that the lifted piece of chalk in Whelk’s hand was because of them, that the Latin teacher had stopped writing merely to listen in. Adam’s suspicion really was beginning to rub off on him.

Ronan caught Whelk’s eye and held it in an unfriendly sort of way. Despite his interest in Latin, Ronan had declared their Latin teacher a socially awkward shitbird earlier in the year and further clarified that he didn’t like him. Because he despised everyone, Ronan wasn’t a good judge of character, but Gansey had to agree that there was something discomfiting about Whelk. A few times, Gansey had tried to hold a conversation with him about Roman history, knowing full well the effect an enthusiastic academic conversation could have on an otherwise listless grade. But Whelk was too young to be a mentor and too old to be a peer, and Gansey couldn’t find an angle.

Ronan kept staring at Whelk. He was good at staring. There was something about his stare that took something from the other person.

The Latin teacher flicked his glance awkwardly away from them. Having dealt with Whelk’s curiosity, Ronan asked, “What are you going to do about Parrish?”

“I guess I’m going to go by there after class. Right?”

“He’s probably sick.”

They looked at each other.
We’re already making excuses for him
, Gansey thought.

Ronan peered inside his bag again. In the darkness, Gansey just caught a glimpse of the raven’s beak. Usually, Gansey would’ve basked once more in the odds of Ronan of finding a raven, but at the moment, with Adam missing, his quest didn’t feel like magic; it felt like years spent piecing together coincidences, and all he had made from it was a strange cloth — too heavy to carry, too light to do any good at all.

“Mr. Gansey, Mr. Lynch?”

Whelk had managed to suddenly manifest beside their desks. Both boys looked up at him. Gansey, polite. Ronan, hostile.

“You seem to have an extremely large bag today, Mr. Lynch,” Whelk said.

“You know what they say about men with large bags,” Ronan replied. “
Ostendes tuum et ostendam meus?
”

Gansey had no idea what Ronan had just said, but he was certain from Ronan’s smirk that it wasn’t entirely polite.

Whelk’s expression confirmed Gansey’s suspicion, but he merely rapped on Ronan’s desk with his knuckles and moved off.

“Being a shit in Latin isn’t the way to an A,” Gansey said.

Ronan’s smile was golden. “It was last year.”

At the front of the room, Whelk began class.

Adam never showed.

M
om, why is Neeve here?” Blue asked.

Like her mother, she was standing on the kitchen table. The moment she’d come back from school, Maura had enlisted her help for changing the bulbs in the badly designed stained-glass creation that hung over the table. The complicated process required at least three hands and tended to be left until most of the bulbs had burned out. Blue hadn’t minded helping. She needed something to keep her mind off Gansey’s looming appointment. And off Adam’s failure to call. When she thought about giving him her number the night before, she felt weightless and uncertain.

“She’s family,” Maura replied grimly. She savagely gripped the fixture’s chain as she wrestled with a stubborn bulb.

“Family that comes home in the middle of the night?”

Maura shot Blue a dark look. “You were born with larger ears than I remember. She’s just helping me look for something while she’s here.”

The front door opened. Neither of them thought anything of it, as both Calla and Persephone were about the house somewhere. Calla was less likely, as she was an irascible, sedentary creature of habit, but Persephone tended to get caught in odd drafts and blow around.

Adjusting her grip on the stained glass, Blue asked, “What sort of something?”

“Blue.”

“What sort of something?”

“A some
one
,” Maura said, finally.

“What sort of
someone
?”

But before her mother had time to reply, they heard a man’s voice:

“That is a strange way to run a business.”

They both turned slowly. Blue’s arms had been lifted for so long they felt rubbery when she lowered them. The owner of the voice stood in the doorway to the front hall, his hands in his pockets. He was not old, maybe mid-twenties, with a shock of black hair. He was handsome in a way that required a bit of work from the viewer. All of his facial features seemed just a little too large for his face.

Maura glanced at Blue, an eyebrow lifted. Blue lifted one shoulder in response. He didn’t seem like he was here to murder them or steal any portable electronics.

“And that,” her mother said, releasing the beleaguered light fixture, “is a very strange way to enter someone’s home.”

“I’m sorry,” the young man said. “There is a sign out front saying this is a place of business.”

There was indeed a sign out front, hand-painted — though Blue didn’t know by whose hand — that read
PSYCHIC
. And, beneath that:

“By appointment only,” Maura told the man. She grimaced into the kitchen. Blue had left a basket of clean laundry by the kitchen counter and one of her mother’s mauve lacy bras sat on top in full view. Blue refused to feel guilty. It wasn’t as if she had expected men to be wandering through the kitchen.

The man said, “Well then, I’d like to make an appointment.”

A voice from the doorway to the stairs made all three of them turn.

“We could do a triple reading for you,” Persephone said.

She stood at the base of the stairs, small and pale and made largely of hair. The man stared at her, though Blue wasn’t certain if this was because he was considering Persephone’s proposal or because Persephone was quite a lot to take in at first glance.

“What,” the man asked finally, “is that?”

It took Blue a moment to realize that he meant “triple reading” rather than Persephone. Maura jumped off the table, landing with enough force that the glasses in the cabinet rattled. Blue climbed down more respectfully. She was, after all, holding a box of lightbulbs.

Maura explained, “It’s when three of us — Persephone, Calla, and I — read your cards at the same time and compare our interpretations. She doesn’t offer that to just anyone, you know.”

“Is it more expensive?”

“Not if you change that one stubborn bulb,” Maura said, wiping her hands off on her jeans.

“Fine,” said the man, but he sounded vexed about it.

Maura gestured for Blue to give a lightbulb to the man, and then she said, “Persephone, would you get Calla?”

“Oh dear,” Persephone said in a small voice — and Persephone’s voice was already quite small, so her small voice was indeed tiny — but she turned and went up the stairs. Her bare feet were soundless as she did.

Maura eyed Blue, asking a question with her expression. Blue shrugged an agreement.

“My daughter, Blue, will be in the room, if you don’t mind. She makes the reading more clear.”

With a disinterested glance at Blue, the man climbed onto the table, which creaked a bit under the weight. He grunted as he tried to twist the stubborn bulb.

“Now you see the problem,” Maura said. “What is your name?”

“Ah,” he said, giving the bulb a jerk. “Can we leave this anonymous?”

Maura said, “We’re psychics, not strippers.”

Blue laughed, but the man didn’t. She thought this was rather unfair of him; maybe it was in slightly poor taste, but it was funny.

The kitchen abruptly lightened as the new bulb screwed into place. Without comment, he stepped onto a chair and then to the floor.

“We’ll be discreet,” Maura promised. She gestured for him to follow her.

In the reading room, the man looked around with clinical interest. His gaze passed over the candles, the potted plants, the incense burners, the elaborate dining room chandelier, the rustic table that dominated the room, the lace curtains, and finally landed on a framed photograph of Steve Martin.

“Signed,” Maura said with some pride, noticing his attention. Then: “Ah, Calla.”

Calla blew into the room, her eyebrows quite angry at being disturbed. She was wearing lipstick in a dangerous shade of plum, which made her mouth a small, pursed diamond under her pointy nose. Calla gave the man a lacerating look that plumbed the depths of his soul and found it wanting. Then she plucked her deck of cards from a shelf by Maura’s head and flopped into a chair at the end of the table. Behind her, Persephone stood in the doorway, her hands clasping and unclasping each other. Blue slid hastily into a chair at the end of the table. The room seemed a lot smaller than it had a few minutes before. This was mostly Calla’s fault.