The Raven Boys (25 page)

A
s soon as the helicopter had touched down, Gansey leapt from the cabin and strode into the thigh-high grass as if he owned the place, Ronan by his side. Through the open door of the helo, Blue heard him say Noah’s name to the phone before repeating the GPS coordinates for the field. He was energized and powerful, a king in his castle.

Blue, on the other hand, was a little slower. For a multitude of reasons, her legs felt a little gelled after flying. She wasn’t sure if not telling Gansey the entire truth about St. Mark’s Eve was the right decision, and she was worried about Ronan trying to speak to her again.

It smelled wonderful in the middle of this field, though — all grass and trees and, somewhere, water, and lots of it. Blue thought she might live here quite happily. Beside her, Adam shielded his eyes. He looked at home here, his hair the same colorless brown as the tips of old grass, and he looked more handsome than Blue remembered. She thought about how Adam had taken her hand earlier, and considered how much she’d like for him to do it again.

With some surprise, Adam said, “Those lines are pretty invisible from here.” He was right, of course. Though Blue had just seen the raven as they touched down beside it, whatever geographical feature had made the shape was now completely hidden. “I still hate flying. Sorry about Ronan.”

“The flying part wasn’t bad,” Blue said. Actually, aside from Ronan, she had kind of liked it — the sense of floating in a very noisy bubble where all directions were possible. “I thought it would be worse. You sort of have to give up control, don’t you, and then it’s okay. Now, Ronan …”

“He’s a pit bull,” Adam said.

“I know some really nice pit bulls.” One of the dogs Blue walked each week was a cow-printed pit bull with as nice a smile as you could hope for in a canine.

“He’s the kind of pit that makes the evening news. Gansey’s trying to retrain him.”

“How noble.”

“It makes him feel better about being Gansey.”

Blue didn’t doubt it. “Sometimes he’s very condescending.”

Adam looked at the ground. “He doesn’t mean to be. It’s all that blue blood in his veins.”

He was about to say something else when a shout interrupted him.

“ARE YOU LISTENING, GLENDOWER? I AM COMING TO FIND YOU!”
Gansey’s voice, ebullient and ringing, echoed off the tree-covered slopes around the field. Adam and Blue found him standing in the middle of a clear, pale path, his arms stretched out and his head tilted back as he shouted into the air. Adam’s mouth made the soundless shape of a laugh.

Gansey grinned at them both. He was hard to resist in this form: glowing with rows and rows of white teeth, a college brochure in the making.

“Oyster shells,” he said, leaning to pick up one of the pale objects that made up the path. The fragment was pure white, the edges blunt and worn. “That’s what makes up the raven. Like they use for roads down in the tidewater area. Oyster shells on bare rock. What do you think of
that
?”

“I think that’s a lot of oyster shells to bring from the coast,” Adam replied. “I also think Glendower would’ve come from the coast, too.”

Gansey pointed at Adam by way of a reply.

Blue put her hands on her hips. “So you think they put Glendower’s body on a boat in Wales, sailed over to Virginia, then brought him up to the mountains. Why?”

“Energy,” Gansey replied. Rummaging in his bag, he removed a small black box that looked a lot like a very small car battery.

Blue asked, “What’s that? It looks expensive.”

He twiddled with switches on the side as he explained, “An electromagnetic-frequency meter. It monitors energy levels. Some people use them for ghost hunting. It’s supposed to have a high reading when you’re near a spirit. But it’s also supposed to read high when you’re near an energy source. Like a ley line.”

She scowled at the gadget. A box to register magic seemed to insult both the box holder and magic. “And of course you have an electromagnorific button thing. Everyone has one of them.”

Gansey held the meter above his head as if he were calling aliens. “You find it not normal?”

She could tell that he very much wanted her to say that he wasn’t normal, so she replied, “Oh, I’m sure it’s quite normal in
some
circles.”

He looked a little hurt, but most of his attention was on the meter, which showed two faint red lights. He remarked, “I’d like to be in those circles. So, like I said, energy. One of the other names for the ley line is corpse —”

“Corpse road,” Blue interrupted. “I know.”

He looked pleased and magnanimous, as if she were a prize pupil. “So school me. You probably know better than I.”

As before, his accent was the broad, glorious old Virginia accent, and Blue’s words felt clumsy beside him.

“I just know that the dead travel in straight lines,” she said. “That they used to carry corpses in straight lines to churches to bury them. Along what you call the ley line. It was supposed to be really bad to take them any other route than the way they’d choose to travel as a spirit.”

“Right,” he said. “So it stands to reason there’s something about the line that fortifies or protects a corpse. The soul. The …
animus
. The quiddity of it.”

“Gansey, seriously,” Adam interrupted, to Blue’s relief. “Nobody knows what quiddity is.”

“The
whatness
, Adam. Whatever it is that makes a person what they are. If they removed Glendower from the corpse road, I think the magic that keeps him asleep would be disrupted.”

She said, “Basically, you mean he would die for good if he was removed from the line.”

“Yes,” Gansey said. The blinking lights on his machine had begun to flash more heavily, leading them over the raven’s beak and toward the tree line where Ronan already stood. Blue lifted her arms up so the heads of the grass wouldn’t hit the backs of her hands; it was up to her waist in some places.

She asked, “And why not just leave him in Wales? Isn’t that where they want him to wake up and be a hero?”

“It was an uprising, and he was a traitor to the English crown,” Gansey said. The easy way that he began the story, at once striding through grass and eyeing the EMF reader, let Blue know that he had told it many times before. “Glendower fought the English for years, and it was ugly, all struggle between noble families with mixed allegiances. The Welsh resistance failed. Glendower disappeared. If the English had known where he was, dead or alive, there’s no way they’d treat his body the way the Welsh wanted it treated. Haven’t you heard of being hung, drawn, and quartered?”

Blue asked, “Is it as painful as conversations with Ronan?”

Gansey cast a glance over to Ronan, who was a small, indistinct form by the trees. Adam audibly swallowed a laugh.

“Depends on if Ronan is sober,” Gansey answered.

Adam asked, “What is he doing, anyway?”

“Peeing.”

“Trust Lynch to deface a place like this five minutes after getting here.”

“Deface? Marking his territory.”

“He must own more of Virginia than your father, then.”

“I don’t think he’s ever used an indoor toilet, now that I consider it.”

This all seemed very manly and Aglionby to Blue, this calling of one another by last names and bantering about outdoor urinary habits. It also seemed like it could go on for a long time, so she interrupted, changing the subject back to Glendower. “They’d really go to all this trouble to hide his body?”

Gansey said, “Well, Ned Kelly.”

He delivered the nonsensical statement so matter-of-factly that Blue felt abruptly stupid, as if maybe the public school system really
was
lacking.

Then Adam said, with a glance toward Blue, “Nobody knows who Ned Kelly is, either, Gansey.”

“Really?” Gansey asked, so innocently startled by this that it was clear that Adam had been right before — he hadn’t meant to be condescending. “He was an Australian outlaw. When the British caught him, they did awful things with his body. I think the chief of police used his head as a paperweight for a while. Just think what Glendower’s enemies would do to him! If the Welsh wanted a shot at Glendower being resurrected, they would’ve wanted his body unmolested.”

“Why the mountains, then?” Blue insisted. “Why isn’t he right on the shore?”

This seemed to remind Gansey of something, because instead of replying to her, he turned to Adam. “I called Malory about that ritual, to see if he’d tried it. He said he didn’t think it could be performed just anywhere on the ley line. He guessed it had to be done on the ‘heart’ of it, where the most energy is. I’m thinking that someplace like that is also where they’d want Glendower.”

Adam turned to Blue. “What about
your
energy?”

The question took her by surprise. “What?”

“You said that you made things louder for other psychics,” Adam said. “Is that about energy?”

Blue was absurdly pleased that he remembered, and also absurdly pleased that he’d replied to her instead of Gansey, who was now swatting gnats out of his eyes and waiting for her response.

“Yes,” she said. “I guess I make things that need energy stronger. I’m like a walking battery.”

“You’re the table everyone wants at Starbucks,” Gansey mused as he began to walk again.

Blue blinked. “What?”

Over his shoulder, Gansey said, “Next to the wall plug.” He pressed the EMF reader into the side of a tree and observed both objects with great interest.

Adam shook his head at Blue. To Gansey, he said, “I’m
saying
that she could maybe turn a regular part of the ley line into a doable place for the ritual. Wait, are we going in the woods? What about Helen?”

“It hasn’t been two seconds,” Gansey said, although it clearly had been. “That’s an interesting idea about the energy. Though — can your battery get drained? By things other than conversations about prostitution?”

She didn’t dignify this comment with an immediate response. Instead, she thought about how her mother had said there was nothing to fear from the dead, and how Neeve had seemed disbelieving. The church watch had obviously taken
something
from her; maybe there were worse consequences that she had yet to discover.

“Well, this is interesting,” Gansey remarked. He straddled a tiny stream at the very edge of the trees. It was really just water that had bubbled up from an underground source, soaking the grass. Gansey’s attention was focused entirely on the EMF reader he held directly above the water. The meter was pegged.

“Helen,” Adam said warningly. Ronan had rejoined them, and both boys looked in the direction of the helicopter.

“I said
this is interesting
,” Gansey repeated.

“And I said
Helen
.”

“Just a couple of yards.”

“She’ll be angry.”

Gansey’s expression was baleful, and Blue could see immediately that Adam wouldn’t hold out against it.

“I did
tell
you,” Adam said.

The stream trickled sluggishly out of the woods from between two diamond-barked dogwoods. With Gansey in the lead, they all followed the water into the trees. Immediately, the temperature dropped several degrees. Blue hadn’t realized how much insect noise there was in the field until it was replaced by occasional birdsong under the trees. This was a beautiful, old wood, all massive oak and ash trees finding footing among great slabs of cracked stone. Ferns sprang from rocks and verdant moss grew up the sides of the tree trunks. The air itself was scented with green and growing and water. The light was golden through the leaves. Everything was alive, alive.

She breathed. “This is lovely.”

It was for Adam, not Gansey, but she saw Gansey glance over his shoulder at her. Beside him, Ronan was curiously muted, something about his posture defensive.

“What are we even looking for?” Adam asked.

Gansey was a bloodhound, the EMF reader leading him along the widening stream. The moving water had become too wide to straddle, and now it ran in a bed of pebbles and sharp fragments of rock and, strangely enough, a few of the oyster shells. “What we’re always looking for.”

Adam warned, “Helen is going to hate you.”

“She’ll text me if she gets too mad,” Gansey said. To demonstrate, he slid his phone out of his pocket. “Oh — there’s no signal.”

Given their location in the mountains, the lack of signal was unsurprising, but Gansey stopped short. While the four of them made an uneven circle, he thumbed through the screens on his phone. In his other hand, the EMF reader glowed solid red. His voice sounded a little strange when he asked, “Is anyone else wearing a watch?”

Weekends were not generally days of precise timing for Blue, so she was not, and Ronan had only his few knotted leather strands around his arm. Adam lifted his wrist. He wore a cheap-looking watch with a grubby band.

“I am,” he said, adding ruefully, “but it doesn’t seem to be working.”

Without speaking, Gansey turned the face of his phone to them. It was set to the clock function, and it took Blue a moment to realize that none of the hands were moving. For a long moment the four of them just looked at the three still hands on the phone’s clock face. Blue’s heart marked off every second the clock didn’t.

“Is it —” Adam started, and then stopped. He tried again, “Is it because the power is being affected from the energy of the line?”

Ronan’s voice was cutting. “Affecting your watch? Your windup watch?”

“It’s true,” Gansey answered. “My phone’s still on. So’s the reader. It’s only that the time has … I wonder if …”

But there were no answers, and they all knew it.

“I want to go on,” Gansey said. “Just a little farther.”

He waited to see if they would stop him. No one said anything, but as Gansey set off again, clambering over the top of a slab of stone, Ronan beside him, Adam glanced at Blue. His expression asked,
Are you okay?

She
was
okay, but in the way she’d been okay before the helicopter. It was not that she was scared of flashing lights on the EMF reader or Adam’s watch refusing to work, but she hadn’t gotten out of bed in the morning expecting to encounter a place where possibly time didn’t work.