The Raven Boys (15 page)

Persephone said, in a kind voice, “Have a seat,” and Calla said, in an unkind one, “What is it you want to know?”

The man dropped into a seat. Maura took the chair opposite from him at the table, with Calla and Persephone (and Persephone’s hair) on either side of her. Blue was, as always, just a little apart.

“I would rather not say,” the man said. “Maybe you’ll tell me.”

Calla’s plum smile was positively fiendish. “Maybe.”

Maura slid her deck of cards across the table to the man and told him to shuffle them. He did so with proficiency and little self-consciousness. When he was done, Persephone and Calla did the same.

“You’ve been to a reading before,” Maura noted.

He made only a vaguely grumbling noise of assent. Blue could see he thought that any information would let them fake the reading. Still, she didn’t think he was a skeptic. He was merely skeptical of
them
.

Maura slid her deck back from the man. She’d had her deck for as long as Blue had been paying attention, and the edges were fuzzy with handling. They were a standard tarot deck, only as impressive as she made them. She selected ten cards and laid them out. Calla did the same with her slightly crisper deck — she’d replaced them a few years ago after an unfortunate incident had made her lose her taste for her previous deck. The room was quiet enough to hear the rustle of their cards against the uneven, pocked surface of the reading table.

Persephone held her cards in her long, long hands, eyeing the man for a pregnant moment. Finally, she contributed only two cards, one at the beginning of the spread and one at the end. Blue loved watching Persephone lay down her cards; the limpid turn of her wrist and the
swick
of the card always made it seem like a sleight of hand or a ballet movement. Even the cards themselves seemed more otherworldly. Persephone’s cards were slightly larger than Maura’s and Calla’s, and the art on them was curious. Spidery lines and smudgy backgrounds suggested the figures on each card; Blue had never seen another deck like it. Maura had told Blue once that it was hard to ask Persephone questions that you didn’t absolutely need the answer to, so Blue had never found out where the deck had come from.

Now that the cards were laid out, Maura, Calla, and Persephone studied the shape of them. Blue struggled to see over their huddled heads. She tried to ignore that, this close to the man, he had the overpowering chemical scent of a manly shower gel. The sort that normally came in a black bottle and was called something like SHOCK or EXCITE or BLUNT TRAUMA.

Calla was the first to speak. She flipped the three of swords around for the man to look at. On her card, the three swords stabbed into a dark, bleeding heart the color of her lips. “You’ve lost someone close to you.”

The man looked at his hands. “I have lost …” he started, then considered before finishing, “… many things.”

Maura pursed her lips. One of Calla’s eyebrows edged toward her hair. They darted glances at each other. Blue knew them both well enough to interpret the looks. Maura’s asked,
What do you think?
Calla’s said,
This is off.
Persephone’s said nothing.

Maura touched the edge of the five of pentacles. “Money’s a concern,” she noted. On her card, a man with a crutch limped through snow under a stained-glass window while a woman held a shawl beneath her chin.

She added, “Because of a woman.”

The man’s gaze was unflinching. “My parents had considerable resources. My father was implicated in a business scandal. Now they’re divorced and there is no money. Not for me.”

It was a strangely unpleasant way to put it. Relentlessly factual.

Maura wiped her palms on her slacks. She gestured to another card. “And now you’re in a tedious job. It’s something you’re good at but tired of.”

His lips were thin with the truth of it.

Persephone touched the first card she had drawn. The knight of pentacles. An armored man with cold eyes surveyed a field from the back of a horse, a coin in his hand. Blue thought if she looked closely at the coin, she could see a shape in it. Three curving lines, a long, beaked triangle. The shape from the churchyard, from Maura’s unmindful drawing, from the journal.

But no, when she looked harder, it was just a faintly drawn, five-pointed star. The pentacle for which the card was named.

Persephone finally spoke. In her small, precise voice, she told the man, “You’re looking for something.”

The man’s head jerked toward her.

Calla’s card, beside Persephone’s, was also the knight of pentacles. It was unusual for two decks to agree exactly. Even stranger was to see that Maura’s card was also the knight of pentacles. Three cold-eyed knights surveyed the land before them.

Three again.

Calla said bitterly, “You’re willing to do whatever it takes to find it. You’ve been working at it for years.”

“Yes,”
the man snapped, surprising them all with the ferocity of his response. “But how much longer? Will I find it?”

The three women scanned the cards again, looking for an answer to his question. Blue looked, too. She might not have had the sight, but she knew what the cards were supposed to mean. Her attention moved from the Tower, which meant his life was about to change dramatically, to the last card in the reading, the page of cups. Blue glanced at her frowning mother. It wasn’t that the page of cups was a negative card; in fact, it was the card Maura always said she thought represented Blue when she was doing a reading for herself.

You’re the page of cups,
Maura had told her once.
Look at all that potential she holds in that cup. Look, she even looks like you.

And there was not just one page of cups in this reading. Like the knight of pentacles, it was tripled. Three young people holding a cup of full of potential, all wearing Blue’s face. Maura’s expression was dark, dark, dark.

Blue’s skin prickled. Suddenly, she felt as if there was no end to the fates she was tied to. Gansey, Adam, that unseeable place in Neeve’s scrying bowl, this strange man sitting beside her. Her pulse was racing.

Maura stood up so quickly that her chair keeled back against the wall.

“The reading’s done,” she snapped.

Persephone’s gaze wandered up to Maura’s face, bewildered, and Calla looked confused but delighted at the appearance of conflict. Blue didn’t recognize her mother’s face.

“Excuse me?” the man asked. “The other cards —”

“You heard her,” Calla said, all acid. Blue didn’t know if Calla was also uneasy, or if she was merely backing Maura up. “The reading’s over.”

“Get out of my house,” Maura said. Then, with an obvious attempt at solicitude, “Now. Thank you. Good-bye.”

Calla moved aside for Maura to whirl past her to the front door. Maura pointed over the threshold.

Rising to his feet, the man said, “I’m incredibly insulted.”

Maura didn’t reply. As soon as he was clear of the doorway, she slammed the door shut behind him. The dishes in the cupboards rattled once again.

Calla had moved to the window. She drew the curtains aside and leaned her forehead against the glass to watch him leave.

Maura paced back and forth beside the table. Blue thought of asking a question, then stopped, then started again. Then stopped. It seemed wrong to ask a question if no one else was.

Persephone said, “What an unpleasant young man.”

Calla let the curtains drift shut. She remarked, “I got his license plate number.”

“I hope he
never
finds what he’s looking for,” Maura said.

Retrieving her two cards from the table, Persephone said, a little regretfully, “He’s trying awfully hard. I rather think he’ll find
something
.”

Maura whirled toward Blue. “Blue, if you ever see that man again, you just walk the other way.”

“No,” Calla corrected. “Kick him in the nuts. Then
run
the other way.”

H
elen, Gansey’s older sister, called right as Gansey got to the Parrishes’ dirt road. Accepting phone calls in the Pig was always tricky. The Camaro was a stick shift, to start with, and as loud as a semitruck, to end with, and in between those two things were a host of steering problems, electrical interferences, and grimy gearshift knobs. The upshot was that Helen was barely audible and Gansey nearly drove into the ditch.

“When is Mom’s birthday?” Helen asked. Gansey was simultaneously pleased to hear her voice and annoyed to be bothered by something so trivial. For the most part, he and his sister got along well; Gansey siblings were a rare and complicated species, and they didn’t have to pretend to be something they weren’t around each other.

“You’re the wedding planner,” Gansey said as a dog ripped out of nowhere. It barked furiously, trying to bite the Camaro’s tires. “Shouldn’t dates be your realm of expertise?”

“That means you don’t remember,” Helen replied. “And I’m not a wedding planner anymore. Well. Part-time. Well. Full-time, but not every day.”

Helen did not
need
to be anything. She didn’t have careers, she had hobbies that involved other people’s lives.

“I do remember,” he said tensely. “It’s May tenth.” A lab mix tied in front of the first house bayed dolorously as he passed. The other dog continued to worry at his tires, a snarl ascending with the engine note. Three kids in sleeveless shirts stood in one of the yards shooting milk jugs with BB guns; they shouted
Hey, Hollywood!
and affably aimed guns at the Pig’s tires. They pretended to hold phones by their ears. Gansey felt a peculiar stab at the three of them, their camaraderie, their belonging, products of their surroundings. He wasn’t sure if it was pity or envy. Everywhere was dust.

Helen asked, “Where are you? You sound like you’re on the set of a Guy Ritchie movie.”

“I’m going to see a friend.”

“The mean one, or the white trash one?”

“Helen.”

She replied, “Sorry. I meant Captain Frigid or Trailer-Park Boy.”

“Helen.”

Adam didn’t live in a trailer park, technically, since every house was a double-wide. Adam had told him that the last of the single-wide trailers had been taken out a few years ago, but he had said it ironically, like even he knew that doubling the size of the trailers didn’t change much.

“Dad calls them worse things,” Helen said. “Mom said one of your weird New Age books was delivered to the house yesterday. Are you coming home anytime soon?”

“Maybe,” Gansey said. Somehow seeing his parents always reminded him of how little he’d accomplished, how similar he and Helen were, how many red ties he owned, how he was slowly growing up to be everything Ronan was afraid of becoming. He pulled in front of the light blue double-wide where the Parrishes lived. “Maybe for Mom’s birthday. I have to go. Things might get ugly.”

The cell phone speaker made Helen’s laugh a hissing, pitchless thing. “Listen to you, sounding all badass. I bet you’re just listening to a CD called ‘The Sounds of Crime’ while you cruise for chicks outside the Old Navy in your Camaro.”

“Bye, Helen,” said Gansey. He clicked
END
and climbed out.

Fat, shiny carpenter bees swooped at his head, distracted from their work of destroying the stairs. After he knocked, he looked out across the flat, ugly field of dead grass. The idea that you had to pay for the beauty in Henrietta should have occurred to him before then, but it hadn’t. No matter how many times Adam told him he was foolish about money, he couldn’t seem to get any wiser about it.

There is no spring here
, Gansey realized, and the thought was unexpectedly grim.

Adam’s mother answered his knock. She was a shadow of Adam — the same elongated features, the same wide-set eyes. In comparison to Gansey’s mother, she seemed old and hard-edged.

“Adam’s out back,” she said, before he could ask her anything. She glanced to him and away, not holding his gaze. Gansey never failed to be amazed at how Adam’s parents reacted to the Aglionby sweater. They knew everything they needed to about him before he even opened his mouth.

“Thanks,” Gansey said, but the word felt like sawdust in his mouth, and in any case, she was already closing the door.

Under the old carport behind the house, he found Adam lying beneath an old Bonneville pulled up onto ramps, initially invisible in the cool blue shadows. An empty oil pan protruded from under the car. There was no sound coming from beneath the car, and Gansey suspected that Adam wasn’t working so much as avoiding being in the house.

“Hey, tiger,” Gansey said.

Adam’s knees bent as if he were going to scoot himself out from under the car, but then he didn’t.

“What’s up?” he said flatly.

Gansey knew what this meant, this failure to immediately come out from beneath the car, and anger and guilt drew his chest tight. The most frustrating thing about the Adam situation was that Gansey couldn’t control it. Not a single piece of it. He dropped a notebook on the worktable. “Those are notes from today. I couldn’t tell them you were sick. You missed too much last month.”