The Raven Boys (41 page)

“That is very hard to say, Jane. Suffice to say the ley lines are even more powerful than Gansey and I had anticipated. They may be magic, they may be science, but they are undoubtedly energy. My colleague stepped quite easily out of his skin. I was certain I’d lost him; I didn’t think a man could bleed that much without perishing. Oh, when you tell Gansey all this, don’t tell him that. The boy has quite a thing about death, and I don’t like to upset him.”

Blue hadn’t noticed Gansey having a “thing” about death, but she agreed not to tell him.

“But you’ve still not said what you
tried
,” Blue pointed out.

“Oh, haven’t I?”

“Nope. Which means we might do it by accident, if we don’t know.”

Malory chuckled. It was a sound a lot like sucking just the whipped cream off hot chocolate. “Indeed you’re right. It was quite logical, really, and it was based on one of Gansey’s ideas from long ago, to tell you the truth. We set up a new stone circle using stones we found to have excellent energy readings — that’s dowsing terms, of course, Jane, I don’t know how well you know all these things but it’s nice to see a girl involved with all this; ley lines tend to be a man’s game and it’s nice to hear a lady like yourself —”

“Yes,” Blue agreed. “It’s great. I’m enjoying myself. So, you set up a stone circle?”

“Oh yes, right. We set seven stones in a circle on what we hoped was the center of the ley line and we twiddled them about in position until we had a quite high energy reading in the middle. Sort of like positioning a prism, I think, to focus the light.”

“And that’s when your partner’s skin came off?”

“Round about then. He was taking a reading in the middle and he — I’m sad to say I cannot remember exactly what he said, as I was so overcome by what came after — but he made some sort of light remark or joke or what-have-you — you know how young people are, Gansey himself can be quite one for the levity —”

Blue wasn’t certain that Gansey
was
quite one for the levity, but she made a mental note to look out for it in the future.

“— and he said something about losing his skin or shedding his skin or something like that. And apparently these things are quite literal. I’m not certain how his
words
triggered any sort of reaction, and I don’t think we’ve woken this line, at least not properly, but there it is. Disappointing, really.”

“Apart from your partner living to tell the tale,” Blue said.

Malory said, “Well,
I’m
the one who’s having to tell it.”

She thought this was a joke. In any case, she laughed and didn’t feel bad about it. Then she thanked Malory, exchanged niceties with him, and hung up.

“Noah?” she asked the room, because Noah had disappeared. There was no reply, but outside, she heard car doors slamming and voices.

Blue replayed the phrase in her head:
My colleague stepped quite easily out of his skin
. Blue
didn’t
have a “thing” with death and even she thought it painted a rather horrible and vivid image in her mind.

A moment later, she heard the door clap shut on the first floor and feet stomping up the stairs.

Gansey was first into the room, and he clearly hadn’t expected to find anyone there, because his features hadn’t been arranged at all to disguise his misery. When he saw Blue, he immediately managed to pull a cordial smile from somewhere.

And it was so very convincing. She had seen his face just a second before, but even having seen his expression, it was hard to remind herself that the smile was false. Why a boy with a life as untroubled as Gansey’s would have needed to learn how to build such a swift and convincing false front of happiness was beyond her.

“Jane,” he said, and she thought she heard a little of his unhappiness in his bright voice, even if his face no longer betrayed it. “Sorry you had to let yourself in.”

Noah’s voice and nothing more manifested at Blue’s ear, a cold, cold whisper:
They fought
.

Adam and Ronan came in then. Ronan was bent double with a duffel bag and backpack on his back, and Adam carried a dented Froot Loops box with a Transformer poking out of the top.

“Nice Transformer,” Blue said. “Is that the police car one?”

Adam looked at Blue, unsmiling, as if he didn’t really see her. Then, a moment too late, he replied, “Yes.”

Ronan, still weighed down with the luggage, headed across the floor toward Noah’s room, saying “Ha. Ha. Ha” in time with his footsteps. It was the kind of laughing that came from being the only person laughing.

“This guy called,” Blue said. She held up the piece of paper where she’d jotted his name. The place she’d written it made it look like the doodled cat was calling it out.

“Malory,” Gansey said with less than his usual enthusiasm. As Adam carried the box after Ronan, he watched his back with narrowed eyes. It wasn’t until Noah’s door closed behind them that Gansey tore his eyes away and looked at Blue. The apartment felt empty without the others, like they’d gone into another world instead of another room.

Gansey asked, “What did he want?”

“He tried the ritual on the ley line and he said it went wrong and his other person — his, uh, colleague? — got hurt.”

“Hurt how?”

“Just hurt. Badly hurt. By energy,” Blue said.

With force, Gansey kicked off his shoes. One flew over his miniature Henrietta and the other made it all the way to the side of his desk. It slammed off the old wood and slid to the ground. Under his breath, Gansey said,
“Yee haw.”

Blue said, “You seem upset.”

“Do I?” he asked.

“What did you and Adam fight about?”

Gansey cast a glance at Noah’s closed door. “How did you know?” he asked wearily. He threw himself on his unmade bed.

“Please,” Blue said, because even if Noah hadn’t told her, she would’ve known.

He muttered something into his bedsheets and waved a hand at the air. Blue crouched by the bed and leaned on her arms at the head of it.

“What now? With a lot less pillow in your mouth this time?”

Gansey didn’t turn his head, so his voice remained muffled. “My words are unerring tools of destruction, and I’ve come unequipped with the ability to disarm them. Can you believe I’m only alive because Noah died? What a fine sacrifice that was, what a fine contribution to the world I am.” He made another little twirling hand gesture without removing his face from his pillow. It was probably meant to make it look as if he was merely joking. He went on, “Oh, I know I’m being self-pitying. Ignore me. So Malory thinks it is a bad idea to wake the ley line? Of course he does. I enjoy dead ends hugely.”

“You
are
being self-pitying.” But Blue sort of liked it. She’d never seen anything like the real Gansey for so long at one time. It was too bad he had to be miserable to make it happen.

“I’m nearly done. You don’t have much more of this to bear.”

“I like you better this way.”

For some reason, admitting this made her face go hot right away; she was very glad that he still had his face pressed into his pillow and the other boys were still in Noah’s room.

“Crushed and broken,” Gansey said. “Just the way women like ’em. Did he say this guy was badly hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, that’s off.” He rolled over onto his back so that he was looking at Blue upside down where she leaned on his bed. “It’s not worth the risk.”

“I thought you said you
needed
to find Glendower.”

“I do,” Gansey said. “They don’t.”

“So you’ll do it yourself?”

“No, I’ll find another way. I would love to have the ley line’s power pointing giant arrows to where he is, but I’ll just keep plodding along the old way. What sort of hurt was this guy?”

Blue made a noncommittal noise, remembering Malory’s exhortation to spare him the details.

“Blue. What sort?” His gaze was unflinching, as if staring were easier when their faces were upside down to each other.

“He said something about losing his skin and then, apparently, his skin came off. Malory didn’t want me to tell you that.”

Gansey’s mouth pursed. “He still remembers when I … never mind. His skin came right off? That’s grim.”

“What’s grim?” asked Adam, coming across the floor.

Ronan, taking in Blue’s posture and Gansey below, observed, “If you spit, Blue, it would land right in his eye.”

Gansey moved to the opposite side of the bed with surprising swiftness, glancing at Adam and away again as quickly. “Blue said Malory tried to wake the line and the man with him got seriously hurt. So we’re not doing it. Not right now.”

Adam said, “I don’t care about the risk.”

Ronan picked his teeth. “Me neither.”

“You have nothing to lose,” Gansey said, pointing at Adam. He looked at Ronan. “And you don’t care if you live or die. That makes you both bad judges.”

“You have nothing to gain,” Blue pointed out. “That makes you an equally bad judge. But I think I agree. I mean, look at what happened to your British friend.”

“Thank you, Jane, for being the voice of reason,” Gansey said. “Do not look at me like that, Ronan. Since when did we decide waking up the ley line is the only way to find Glendower?”

“We don’t have time to find another way,” Adam insisted. “If Whelk wakes it up, he’ll get an advantage. Plus, he speaks Latin. What if the trees know? If he finds Glendower, he gets the favor, and he gets away with killing Noah. Game over, bad guy takes all.”

All trace of vulnerability had vanished from Gansey’s countenance as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. “It’s a bad idea, Adam. Find me a way to do it without hurting someone, and I’m for it. Until then — we wait.”

“We don’t have
time
,” Adam said. “Persephone said someone will wake the ley line in just a few days.”

Gansey stood up. “Adam, what’s happening now is that someone on the other side of the world has no skin because he fooled around with the ley line. We’ve
seen
Cabeswater. This isn’t a game. It’s very real and very powerful and
we’re not screwing with it
.”

He held Adam’s gaze for a long, long moment. There was something unfamiliar in Adam’s expression, something that made Blue think that she didn’t really know him at all.

In her mind, Blue imagined him handing the single tarot card to her mother, and as she remembered how Maura had interpreted the two of swords, she thought, sadly,
My mother is very good at what she does.

“Sometimes,” Adam said, “I don’t know how you live with yourself.”

B
arrington Whelk was not pleased with Neeve. For starters, since getting in the car, she had done nothing but eat hummus and crackers, and the combination of the garlic odor and cracker chewing was incredibly aggravating. The thought that she was filling his driver’s seat with crumbs was one of the more troubling ones he’d had in a week of extremely troubling thoughts. Also, the very first thing she had done after they exchanged hellos was to use her Taser on him. This was followed by the ignominy of being tied up in the back of his own car.

It is not enough that I should have to put up with a shitty car,
Whelk thought.
Now I’m going to die in it.

She hadn’t told him she intended to kill him, but Whelk had spent the last forty minutes unable to easily see much but the floor behind the passenger seat. Lying there was a wide, flat clay bowl containing a collection of candles, scissors, and knives. The knives were sizable and sinister, but not a guarantee of imminent murder. The rubber gloves that Neeve wore now, and the extra set inside the bowl, were.

Likewise, Whelk couldn’t be certain they were headed toward the ley line, but from the amount of time Neeve had spent perusing the journal before setting off down the road, he suspected it was a good guess. Whelk was not much for postulation — but he thought his fate was probably meant to be the same as Czerny’s, seven years earlier.

A ritual death, then. A sacrifice, with his blood seeping down through the earth until it reached the sleeping ley line below. Rubbing his tied wrists against each other, he turned his head toward Neeve, who held the wheel with one hand as she ate crackers and hummus with the other. To add insult to injury, she was listening to some kind of trance nature sounds CD on his car’s radio. Perhaps preparing herself for the ritual.

His death on the ley line would, Whelk thought, have a sort of circularity to it.

But Whelk didn’t care for circularity. He cared for his lost car, his lost respect. He cared for the ability to sleep at night. He cared for languages dead long enough that they wouldn’t change on him. He cared for the guacamole his parents’ long-gone chef used to make.

Also, Neeve hadn’t tied him tightly enough.