The Raven Boys (19 page)

Noah stood in the doorway to his room, his face pathetic and long-suffering. “Make it stop,” he said.

Ronan’s room was sacred, and yet here Gansey was, twice in the same week, pushing the door open. He found the lamp on and Ronan hunched on the bed, wearing only boxers. Six months before, Ronan had gotten the intricate black tattoo that covered most of his back and snaked up his neck, and now the monochromatic lines of it were stark in the claustrophobic lamplight, more real than anything else in the room. It was a peculiar tattoo, both vicious and lovely, and every time Gansey saw it, he saw something different in the pattern. Tonight, nestled in an inked glen of wicked, beautiful flowers, was a beak where before he’d seen a scythe.

The ragged sound cut through the apartment again.

“What fresh hell is this?” Gansey asked pleasantly. Ronan was wearing headphones as usual, so Gansey stretched forward far enough to tug them down around his neck. Music wailed faintly into the air.

Ronan lifted his head. As he did, the wicked flowers on his back shifted and hid behind his sharp shoulder blades. In his lap was the half-formed raven, its head tilted back, beak agape.

“I thought we were clear on what a closed door meant,” Ronan said. He held a pair of tweezers in one hand.

“I thought we were clear that night was for sleeping.”

Ronan shrugged. “Perhaps for you.”

“Not tonight. Your pterodactyl woke me. Why is it making that sound?”

In response, Ronan dipped the tweezers into a plastic baggy on the blanket in front of him. Gansey wasn’t certain he wanted to know what the gray substance was in the tweezers’ grasp. As soon as the raven heard the rustle of the bag, it made the ghastly sound again — a rasping squeal that became a gurgle as it slurped down the offering. At once, it inspired both Gansey’s compassion and his gag reflex.

“Well, this is not going to do,” he said. “You’re going to have to make it stop.”

“She has to be fed,” Ronan replied. The raven gargled down another bite. This time it sounded a lot like vacuuming potato salad. “It’s only every two hours for the first six weeks.”

“Can’t you keep her downstairs?”

In reply, Ronan half-lifted the little bird toward him. “You tell me.”

Gansey disliked having his kindness appealed to, especially when it had to war with his desire for sleep. There was, of course, no way that he would force the raven downstairs. It looked bite-sized and improbable. He wasn’t certain if it was extremely cute or appallingly ugly, and it bothered him that it managed to be both.

From behind him, Noah said, sounding pitiful, “I don’t like that thing in here. It reminds me of …”

He trailed off, as he often did, and Ronan pointed the tweezers at him. “Hey, man. Stay out of my room.”

“Shut up,” Gansey told both of them. “That includes you, bird.”

“Chainsaw.”

Noah withdrew, but Gansey remained. For several minutes, he watched the raven slurp down gray slime while Ronan cooed at her. He was not the Ronan that Gansey had grown accustomed to, but neither was he the Ronan that Gansey had first met. It was clear now that the instrument wailing from the headphones was the Irish pipes. Gansey couldn’t remember the last time Ronan had listened to Celtic music. Niall Lynch’s music. All at once, he, too, missed Ronan’s charismatic father. But more than that, he missed the Ronan that had existed when Niall Lynch had still been alive. This boy in front of him now, fragile bird in his hands, seemed like a compromise.

After a space, Gansey asked, “What did the psychic mean, Ronan? Earlier. About your father.”

Ronan didn’t lift his head, but Gansey watched the muscles in his back tighten, stretched as if they were suddenly carrying weight. “That’s a very Declan question.”

Gansey considered this. “No. No, I don’t think it is.”

“She was just full of shit.”

Gansey considered this, too. “No, I don’t think she was.”

Ronan found his music player next to him on the bed and paused it. When he replied, his voice was pitchless and naked. “She’s one of those chicks who gets inside your head and fucks around with parts. She said it because she knew it would cause problems.”

“Like what?”

“Like you asking me questions like Declan would,” Ronan said. He offered the raven another gray mass, but she just stared up at him, transfixed. “Making me think about things I don’t want to think about. Those sorts of problems. Among others. What’s going on with your face, by the way?”

Gansey rubbed his chin, rueful. His skin felt reluctantly stubbled. He knew he was being diverted, but he allowed it. “Is it growing?”

“Dude, you aren’t really going to do that beard thing, are you? I thought you were joking. You know that stopped being cool in the fourteenth century or whenever it was that Paul Bunyan lived.” Ronan looked over his shoulder at him. He was sporting the five o’clock shadow that he was capable of growing at any time of the day. “Just stop. You look mangy.”

“It’s irrelevant. It’s not growing. I’m doomed to be a man-child.”

“If you keep saying things like ‘man-child,’ we’re done,” Ronan said. “Hey, man. Don’t let it get you down. Once your balls drop, that beard’ll come in great. Like a fucking rug. You eat soup, it’ll filter out the potatoes. Terrier style. Do you have hair on your legs? I’ve never noticed.”

Gansey didn’t dignify any of this with a response. With a sigh, he pushed off the wall and pointed at the raven. “I’m going back to bed. Keep that thing quiet. You so owe me, Lynch.”

“Whatever,” Ronan said.

Gansey retreated to his bed, though he didn’t lie down. He reached for his journal, but it wasn’t there; he’d left it at Nino’s the night of the fight. He thought about calling Malory, but he didn’t know what he wanted to ask. Something inside him felt like the night, hungry and wanting and black. He thought about the dark eyeholes of the skeletal knight on the Death card.

An insect was buzzing against the window, the sort of buzz-tap that came from an insect with some size to it. He thought about his EpiPen, far away in the glove box of the car, too far away to be a useful antidote if it was needed. The insect was probably a fly or a stink bug or yet another crane fly, but the longer he lay there, the more he considered the idea that it could be a wasp or a bee.

It probably wasn’t.

But he opened his eyes. Gansey climbed softly from the bed, bending to retrieve a shoe that lay on its side. Walking cautiously to the window, he searched for the sound of the insect. The shadow of the telescope was an elegant monster on the floor beside him.

Though the sound of buzzing had died away, it only took him a moment to find the insect on the window: a wasp, crawling up the narrow wooden frame of the window, swiveling back and forth. Gansey didn’t move. He watched it climb and pause, climb and pause. The streetlights outside made a faint shadow of its legs, its curved body, the fine, insubstantial point of the stinger.

Two narratives coexisted in his head. One was the real image: the wasp climbing up the wood, oblivious to his presence. The other was a false image, a possibility: the wasp whirring into the air, finding Gansey’s skin, dipping the stinger into him, Gansey’s allergy making it a deadly weapon.

Long ago, his skin had crawled with hornets, their wings beating even when his heart hadn’t.

His throat was tight and full.

“Gansey?”

Ronan’s voice was just behind him, the timbre of it strange and initially unrecognizable. Gansey didn’t turn around. The wasp had just twitched its wings, nearly lifting off.

“Shit, man!” Ronan said. There were three footsteps, very close together, the floor creaking like a shot, and then the shoe was snatched from Gansey’s hand. Ronan shoved him aside and brought down the shoe on the window so hard that the glass should’ve broken. After the wasp’s dry body had fallen to the floorboard, Ronan sought it out in the darkness and smashed it once more.

“Shit,” Ronan said again. “Are you stupid?”

Gansey didn’t know how to describe how it felt, to see death crawling inches from him, to know that in a few seconds, he could have gone from “a promising student” to “beyond saving.” He turned to Ronan, who had painstakingly picked up the wasp by a broken wing, so that Gansey wouldn’t step on it.

“What did you want?” he asked.

“What?” Ronan demanded.

“You came out for something.”

Ronan chucked the wasp’s small body into the waste basket by the desk. The trash was overflowing with crumpled papers, so the body bounced out and forced him to find a better crevice for it. “I can’t even remember.”

Gansey merely stood and waited for Ronan to say something else. Ronan fussed over the wasp for another few moments before he said anything, and when he finally did, he didn’t look at Gansey. “What’s this about you and Parrish leaving?”

It wasn’t what Gansey had expected. He wasn’t sure how to speak without hurting Ronan. He couldn’t lie to him.

“You tell me what you heard, and I’ll tell you what’s real.”

“Noah told me,” Ronan said, “that if you left, Parrish was going with you.”

He had let jealousy sneak into his voice, and that made Gansey’s response cooler than it might have been. Gansey tried not to play favorites. “And what else did Noah have to say?”

With visible effort, Ronan pulled himself back, sorted himself out. None of the Lynch brothers liked to appear anything other than intentional, even if it was intentionally cruel. Instead of answering, he asked, “Do you not want me to come?”

Something stuck in Gansey’s chest. “I would take all of you anywhere with me.”

The moonlight made a strange sculpture of Ronan’s face, a stark portrait incompletely molded by a sculptor who had forgotten to work in compassion. He did his smoker’s inhale, heavy on the intake through the nostrils, light on the exhale through his prison of teeth.

After a pause, he said, “The other night. There’s something —”

But then he stopped without saying anything else. It was a full stop, the sort that Gansey associated with secrets and guilt. It was the stop that happened when you’d made up your mind to confess, but your mouth betrayed you in the end.

“There’s what?”

Ronan muttered something. He shook the wastebasket.

“There’s
what
, Ronan?”

He said, “This thing with Chainsaw and the psychic woman, and just, with Noah, and I just think there’s something strange going on.”

Gansey couldn’t keep the exasperation from his voice. “‘Strange’ doesn’t help me. I don’t know what ‘strange’ means.”

“I don’t know, man, this sounds crazy to me. I don’t know what to tell you. I mean strange like your voice on that recorder,” Ronan replied. “Strange like the psychic’s daughter. Things feel bigger. I don’t know what I’m saying. I thought you would believe me, of all people.”

“I don’t even know what you’re asking me to believe.”

Ronan said, “It’s starting, man.”

Gansey crossed his arms. He could see the dark black wing of the dead wasp pressed against the mesh of the wastebasket. He waited for Ronan to elaborate, but all the other boy said was, “I catch you staring at a wasp again, though, I’m going to let it kill you. Screw that.”

Without waiting for a reply, he turned away and retreated back to his room.

Slowly, Gansey picked up his shoe from where Ronan had left it. When he straightened, he realized Noah had drifted from his room to stand near Gansey. His anxious gaze flickered from Gansey to the wastebasket. The wasp’s body had slipped down several inches, but it was still visible.

“What?” Gansey asked. Something about Noah’s uneasy face reminded him of the frightened faces surrounding him, hornets on his skin, the sky blue as death above him. A long, long time ago, he’d been given another chance, and lately, the weight of needing to make it matter felt heavier.

He looked away from Noah, out the wall of windowpanes. Even now, it seemed to Gansey that he could feel the aching presence of the nearby mountains, like the space between him and the peaks was a tangible thing. It was as excruciating as the imagined sleeping countenance of Glendower.

Ronan was right. Things felt bigger. He may not have found the line, or the heart of the line, but something was happening, something was starting.

Noah said, “Don’t throw it away.”

S
everal days later, Blue woke up sometime well before dawn.

Her room was cluttered with jagged shadows from the hall night-light. As they had every night since the reading, thoughts about Adam’s elegant features and the memory of Gansey’s bowed head crowded into her mind as soon as sleep relinquished its hold. Blue couldn’t help replaying the chaotic episode over and over in her mind. Calla’s volatile response to Ronan, Adam and Gansey’s private language, the fact that Gansey was not just a spirit on the corpse road. But it wasn’t just the boys that she was concerned with, though, sadly, it didn’t seem likely that Adam would ever call now. No, the thing that seized her the most was the idea that her mother had forbidden her to do something. It pinched like a collar.

Blue pushed off the covers. She was getting up.