The Raven Boys (35 page)

Blue plucked at the hem on her dress, but she didn’t look away from him. “I don’t know what to say when you say things like that.”

“You can tell me if you want me to keep saying them.”

She was torn by the desire to encourage him and the fear of where it would lead. “I like when you say things like that.”

Adam asked, “But what?”

“I didn’t say
but
.”

“You meant to. I heard it.”

She looked at his face, fragile and strange under the bruise. It was easy to read him as shy or uncertain, she thought, but he really wasn’t either.
Noah
was. But Adam was just quiet. He wasn’t lost for words; he was observing.

But knowing those things about him didn’t help her answer the question: Should she tell him about the danger of a kiss? It had been so much easier to tell Gansey, when it felt like it didn’t really matter. The last thing she wanted to do was to scare Adam off by tossing around phrases like
true love
right after she’d met him. But if she
didn’t
say anything, there was a chance that he might steal a kiss and then they’d both be in trouble.

“I like it when you say those things,
but
— I’m afraid you’ll kiss me,” Blue admitted. Already this seemed like an untenable path to set off on. When he didn’t immediately say anything, she hurried on, “We’ve just met. And I … I’m … I’m
very young
.”

Halfway through, she lost her nerve to explain the prediction, but she wasn’t sure what part of her felt this was a better confession to blurt out.
I’m very young.
She winced.

“That seems …” Adam sought words. “Very sensible.”

The precise adjective Neeve had found for Blue that very first week. So she truly was sensible. This was distressing. She felt like she’d done so much work to appear as eccentric as possible, and still, when it came down to it, she was
sensible
.

Both Adam and Blue looked up at the sound of footsteps crossing the floor toward them. It was Ronan, holding something under his arm. He cautiously lowered himself until he sat cross-legged beside Adam and then sighed heavily, as if he had been part of the conversation to this point and it tired him. Blue was equal parts relieved and disappointed at his presence effectively ending any more talk about kissing.

“Do you want to hold her?” Ronan asked.

That was when Blue discovered that the thing that Ronan was holding was alive. For a brief moment, Blue was actually incapable of doing anything but contemplating the irony that one of the raven boys actually possessed a raven. By then, it was clear that Ronan had decided the answer was no.

“What are you doing?” Blue asked as he withdrew his hand. “I want to.”

She wasn’t exactly sure that she did — the raven was not quite done-looking — but it was a matter of principle. She realized, again, that she was trying to impress Ronan only because he was impossible to impress, but she comforted herself that at least all she was doing in pursuit of his approval was holding a baby bird. Ronan carefully bundled the raven into her cupped palms. The little bird felt like she weighed nothing at all, and her skin and feathers felt humid where they’d been in contact with Ronan’s hands. The raven tipped her huge head back and goggled at Blue and then Adam, beak cracked.

“What’s her name?” Blue asked. Holding her was frightening and lovely; she was such a small, tenuous little life, her pulse tapping rapidly against Blue’s skin.

Adam answered witheringly, “Chainsaw.”

The raven opened her beak wide, goggling even more than before.

“She wants you again,” Blue said, because it was clear that she did. Ronan accepted the bird and stroked the feathers on the back of her head.

“You look like a super villain with your familiar,” Adam said

Ronan’s smile cut his face, but he looked kinder than Blue had ever seen him, like the raven in his hand was his heart, finally laid bare.

They all heard a door open on the other side of the room. Adam and Blue looked at each other. Ronan ducked his head, just a little, as if he was waiting for a blow.

No one said anything as Noah settled down in the gap left between Ronan and Blue. He looked as Blue remembered him, his shoulders hunched forward and his hands restlessly moving from place to place. The ever-present smudge on his face was clearly where his cheek had been smashed in. The longer she stared at him, the more certain she became that she was at once seeing his dead body and his live one. That smudge was her brain’s way of reconciling those facts.

Adam was the first to say something.

“Noah,” he said. He lifted his fist.

After a pause, Noah bumped knuckles with him. Then he rubbed the back of his neck.

“I’m feeling better,” he said, as if he’d been ill instead of dead. The things from the box were still spread out all over the floor between them; he began to sort through them. He picked up something that looked like a carved bit of bone; it must’ve had a larger pattern on it once, but now all that was left was something that looked like the edge of an acanthus leaf and possibly some raised scrolling. Noah held it against his throat like an amulet. His eyes were averted from either of the other two boys, but his knee touched Blue’s.

“I want you to know,” Noah said, pressing the carved bone against his Adam’s apple, hard, as if it would squeeze the words from him, “I was …
more
… when I was alive.”

Adam chewed his lip, looking for a response. Blue thought she knew what he meant, though. Noah’s resemblance to the crookedly smiling photo on the driver’s license Gansey had discovered was akin to a photocopy’s resemblance to an original painting. She couldn’t imagine the Noah she knew driving that tricked-out Mustang.

“You’re enough now,” Blue said. “I missed you.”

With a wan smile, Noah reached over and petted Blue’s hair, just like he used to. She could barely feel his fingers.

Ronan said, “Hey, man. All those times you wouldn’t give me notes because you said I should go to my classes. You
never
went to classes.”

“But you
did
, didn’t you, Noah?” Blue interrupted, thinking of the Aglionby badge they’d found with his body. “You were an Aglionby student.”

“Are,” Noah said.

“Were,”
Ronan said. “You don’t go to classes.”

“Neither do you,” Noah replied.

“And he’s about to be a
were
, too,” Adam broke in.

“Okay!”
Blue shouted, her hands in the air. She was starting to feel a deep sensation of cold, as Noah pulled energy from her. The last thing she wanted to do was to get completely drained, like she had at the churchyard. “The police said you’d been missing seven years. Does that seem right?”

Noah blinked at her, vague and alarmed. “I don’t … I can’t …”

Blue held her hand out.

“Take it,” she said. “When I’m at readings with my mom, and she needs to get focused, she holds my hand. Maybe it will help.”

Hesitant, Noah reached out. When he laid his palm against hers, she was shocked by how chilled it was. It was not merely cold, but somehow empty as well, skin without a pulse.

Noah, please don’t die for real.

He let out a heaving sigh. “God,” he said.

And his voice sounded different from before. Now it sounded closer to the Noah she knew, the Noah who had passed as one of them. Blue knew she wasn’t the only one to notice it, because Adam and Ronan exchanged sharp glances.

She watched his chest rise and fall, his breaths becoming more even. She hadn’t really noticed, before, if he’d been breathing at all.

Noah shut his eyes. He still held the carved bone loosely in his other hand, rested palm up on his Top-Siders. “I can remember my grades, the date on them — seven years ago.”

Seven years. The police had been right. They were talking with a boy who had been dead for seven years.

“The same year Gansey was stung by hornets,” Adam said softly. Then he said,
“‘You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.’”

“Coincidence,” Ronan said, because it wasn’t.

Noah’s eyes were still closed. “It was supposed to do something to the ley line. I don’t remember what he said it was supposed to do.”

“Wake it up,” Adam suggested.

Noah nodded, his eyelids still pressed closed. Blue’s entire arm felt chilled and numb. “Yeah, that. I didn’t care. It was always his deal, and I was just going along with him because it was something to do. I didn’t know he was going to …”

“This is the ritual Gansey was talking about,” Adam said to Ronan. “Someone
did
try it. With a sacrifice as the symbolic way to touch the ley line. You were the sacrifice, weren’t you, Noah? Someone killed you for this.”

“My face,” Noah said softly, and he turned his head away, pressing his ruined cheek into his shoulder. “I can’t remember when I stopped being alive.”

Blue shuddered. The late afternoon light bathing the boys and the floor was spring, but it felt like winter in her bones.

“But it didn’t work,” Ronan said.

“I almost woke up Cabeswater,” Noah whispered. “We were close enough to do that. It wasn’t for nothing. But I’m glad he never found that. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know where it is.”

Blue shivered unconsciously, a product of both Noah’s cold hand in hers and the horror of the story. She wondered if this was what it felt like for her mother and her aunts and her mother’s friends when they were doing a séance or a reading.

Do they hold hands with dead people?

She had thought
dead
was something more permanent, or at least something more obviously not alive. But Noah seemed unable to be either.

Ronan said, “Okay, it’s time to stop fucking around. Who did it, Noah?”

In Blue’s grip, Noah’s hand trembled.

“Seriously, man. Spill it. I’m not asking you for notes. I’m asking who smashed your head in.”

When Ronan said it, there was something angry and honorable about it, but it was an anger that included Noah, too, that somehow made him culpable.

There was humiliation in his voice when Noah answered, “We were friends.”

Adam said, rather more ferocious than he’d been a moment before, “A friend wouldn’t kill you.”

“You don’t understand,” Noah whispered. Blue was afraid that he would disappear. This, she understood, had been a secret, carried inside him for seven years, and he still didn’t want to confess it. “He was upset. He’d lost everything. If he’d been thinking straight, I don’t think he would’ve … he didn’t mean to … we were friends like — are you afraid of Gansey?”

The boys didn’t answer; they didn’t have to. Whatever Gansey was to them, it was bulletproof. Again, though, Blue saw the shame flit across Adam’s expression. Whatever had transpired between the two of them in his vision, it was still worrying at him.

“Come on, Noah. A name.” This was Ronan, head cocked, keen as his raven. “Who killed you?”

Lifting his head, Noah opened his eyes. He took his hand out of Blue’s and put it in his lap. The air was frigid around all of them. The raven was hunched far down into Ronan’s lap, and he held one hand over the top of her, protectively.

Noah said, “But you already know.”

I
t was dark by the time Gansey left his parents’ house. He was full of the restless, dissatisfied energy that always seemed to move into his heart after he visited home these days. It had something to do with the knowledge that his parents’ house wasn’t truly home anymore — if it had ever been — and something to do with the realization that they hadn’t changed; he had.

Gansey rolled down the window and stuck his hand out as he drove. The radio had stopped working again and so the only music was the engine; the Camaro was louder after dark.

The conversation with Pinter gnawed at Gansey. Bribery. So that’s what it had come to. He thought this feeling inside him was shame. No matter how hard he tried, he kept becoming a Gansey.

But how else was he supposed to keep Ronan in Aglionby and at Monmouth? He went over the talking points for his future conversation with Ronan, and all of them sounded like things Ronan wouldn’t listen to. Was it so hard for him to go to class? How
hard
could it be to make it through just another year of school?

He still had a half hour to go until he got to Henrietta. At a tiny town that consisted only of an artificially bright gas station, Gansey got caught at a traffic light that turned red for invisible cross traffic.

All Ronan had to do was go to class, do the reading, get the grade. And then he was free and he had his money from Declan and he could do whatever the hell he wanted.

Gansey checked his phone. No signal. He wanted to talk to Adam.

The breeze through the open window scented the interior of the car with leaves and water, growing things and secret things. More than anything, Gansey wanted to spend more time in Cabeswater, but class would take up much of the coming week — there could be no cutting for either of them after the talk with Pinter — and after school, he had to drag Ronan through his homework. The world was opening up in front of Gansey and Noah needed him and Glendower seemed like a possibility again, and instead of going out there and seizing the chance, Gansey had to babysit.
Damn
Ronan.