Blue Lily, Lily Blue (14 page)

She didn’t remember what she dreamed, only that it was about her mother, and when she woke up, she could have hit something. She remembered when she had visited Adam one afternoon that summer and he’d kicked a box — that was how angry she was. Only it didn’t seem to be worth kicking anything when there wasn’t anyone around to see her do it. She lay there and told herself to go back to sleep, but instead,

she got angrier. She was tired of Persephone and Calla and her mother withholding information because Blue wasn’t psychic. Of not being able to daydream of fancy colleges because she wasn’t rich. Of not being able to hold Gansey’s hand because they couldn’t hurt Adam’s feelings and not being able to kiss Gansey’s mouth because she didn’t want to kill him. She was tired of knowing that he was going to die and being afraid that her mother would, too.

She threw off her blankets and angrily got dressed and angrily stormed into the phone room.
Orla sat there, painting her nails at one o’clock in the morning.
Blue froze in the doorway, intention written on her face. “What?” Orla said. “Go ahead.”
Blue didn’t move.
“Oh please. I’m not going to stop you. I was just trying to keep you from breaking your heart, but whatever, go do it,” Orla said.
Blue stepped across the room and picked up the phone, glancing at Orla again suspiciously. Her cousin had returned to painting tiny mandalas on her nails. She didn’t pretend not to be listening, but looked otherwise untroubled.
Blue called Gansey.
He picked up at once. “I wasn’t sleeping.”
“I know,” she replied. “Come get me.”

There was something unfamiliar about him when he arrived in the Pig. Something ferocious about his eyes, some sort of bite in his faint smile. Something altogether hectic and unsettled. She stood on the ledge of his smile and looked over the edge.

This wasn’t the Gansey she’d seen in the kitchen earlier; this was the Gansey she secretly called at night.
He didn’t ask where she wanted to go. They were not allowed to speak of this, so they said nothing at all.
The Camaro idled on the silent late-night street. She climbed in and slammed the door.
Gansey — heedless, wild Gansey — tore into another gear as soon as they were out of the neighborhood. He sent the car hurtling from stoplight to stoplight and then, when he got to the empty highway, he let the car frantically climb in speed, his hand a fist over the gearshift.
They were driving east, toward the mountains.
Blue turned on the radio and messed with Gansey’s music until she found something worth playing loudly. Then she wrestled down her window so that the air screamed over her. It was too cold for that, really, but Gansey reached in the backseat without taking his eyes off the road and dragged his overcoat to the front. She put it on, shivering when the silk lining chilled her bare legs. The collar smelled of him.
They didn’t speak.
The radio tripped and waltzed. The car roared. The wind buffeted inside the cab. Blue put her hand on top of Gansey’s and held it, white-knuckled. There wasn’t another soul on the road but them.
They drove to the mountains— up, up, and through the pass.
The peaks were black and forbidding in the half-light of the headlights, and when they reached the very highest point in the pass, Gansey’s fingers tightened beneath hers as he downshifted and hurtled the car around a U-turn back the way they had come.
They sped back to Henrietta, past eerily vacant parking lots of shops, past silent townhomes, past Aglionby, past downtown, past Henrietta. At the other side of town, he slid around a corner to the new, unused bypass: four pristine lanes of streetlight-lined road from nowhere to nowhere.
He pulled over here, and he took his coat from her, and they switched places. She slid the seat up as close to the wheel as it would go and stalled the car, and stalled it again. He put his hand on her knee, fingers on skin, lifeline touching bone, and kept her from letting the clutch out too quickly. The engine revved, strong and sure, and the car surged forward.
They didn’t speak.
The streetlights striped through the windshield as she made a pass up one side of the road, then turned and went the other way, again and again. The car was fearsome and willing — too much, too fast, everything all at once. The gearshift knocked under her fist when they were still and the gas pedal stuck and then surged when they were moving. Cool air from an underdash vent whispered night air over her bare legs; heat from the thrumming engine burned the tops of her feet.
The sound: The sound alone was a monster, amplified when she could feel it vibrating in the gearshift, tugging at the steering wheel, roaring through her feet.
She was afraid of it until she hit the gas, and then her heart was pounding too hard to remember being afraid.
The Camaro was like Gansey tonight: terrifying and thrilling, willing to do whatever she asked.
She was bolder with each turn. For all its noise and posturing, the Pig was a generous teacher. It did not mind that Blue was a very short girl who had never driven a stick before. It did what it could.
She could not forget Gansey’s hand on her knee.
She pulled over.
She had thought it was such a simple thing to avoid kissing someone when she’d been with Adam. Her body had never known what to do. Now it knew. Her mouth didn’t care that it was cursed.
She turned to Gansey.
“Blue,” he warned, but his voice was chaotic. This close, his throat was scented with mint and wool sweater and vinyl car seat, and Gansey, just Gansey.
She said, “I just want to pretend. I want to pretend that I could.”
He breathed out.
What was a kiss without a kiss?
It was a tablecloth tugged from beneath a party service. Everything jumbled against everything else in just a few chaotic moments. Fingers in hair, hands cupping necks, mouths dragged on cheeks and chins in dangerous proximity.
They stopped, noses mashed against each other in the strange way that closeness required. She could feel his breath in her mouth.
“Maybe it wouldn’t hurt if I kiss you,” he whispered. “Maybe it’s only if you kiss me.”
They both swallowed at the same time, and the spell was broken. They both laughed, again at the same time, shakily.
“And then we never speak of it again,” Gansey said, mocking himself softly, and Blue was so glad of it, because she had played the words from that night over and over in her mind and wanted to know he had, too. Gently he tucked her hair behind her ears — this was a fool’s errand, because it had never been behind her ears to begin with and wouldn’t stay. But he did it again and again, and then he took out two mint leaves and put one in his mouth and one in hers.
She couldn’t tell if it was very late or if it had become very early.
And now the catastrophic joy was wearing off and reality was sinking back in. She could see now that he was very nearly that boy that she’d seen in the churchyard.
Tell him.

She rolled the mint leaf over and over her tongue. She felt shivery with cold or fatigue.
“Did you ever think of stopping before you found him?” she asked.
He looked bemused.
“Don’t give me that face,” she said. “I know that you have to find him. I’m not asking you to tell me why. I get that. But as it gets riskier, have you ever thought of stopping?”
He held her gaze, but his eyes had gone far away, pensive. He was weighing it, maybe, the cost of this quest versus his undying need to see his king. Then he was focused on her again.
He shook his head.
She slouched back and sighed big enough to make her lips go
blbbphhbbbt.
“Well, okay.”
“Are you afraid? Is that what you’re asking?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she replied.
“It’s okay if you are,” Gansey said. “This is only mine, in the end, and I don’t expect anyone else —”
“Don’t. Be. Stupid.” It was ridiculous; she didn’t even know if it was the search for Glendower that would kill him — any old hornet would do. She couldn’t tell him. Maura was right — it would just ruin the days he had left. Adam was right, too. They needed to find Glendower and ask for Gansey’s life. But how could she know this huge thing about him and not
tell
him? “We should go back.”
Now he exhaled, but he didn’t disagree. The clock in the Camaro didn’t work, but it had to be dangerously close to morning. They switched places; Blue curled again in his coat, feet up on the seat. As she tugged the collar up to cover her mouth and nose, she let herself imagine that this place was rightfully hers. That somehow Adam and Ronan already knew and were already okay with it. That her lips carried no threat. That Gansey was not going to die, that he wasn’t going to leave for Yale or Princeton, that all that mattered was that he had given her his coat with its wheatgrass and mint on the collar.
As they headed back in to downtown, they spotted a shiny vehicle, undoubtedly a raven boy car, pulled over by the side of the road. It was glittering and astronomical in the streetlights.
The ugly feeling of reality nudged Blue again.
“What’s this —?” Gansey said.
“One of yours,” she replied.
Gansey pulled up alongside and motioned for Blue to roll down her window.
An equally astronomical and glittering black-haired boy sat behind the wheel of the other car.
“You’re a chick,” he said to her, puzzled.
“Twenty points!” Blue replied tensely. “Heck, have thirty, because it’s late and I’m feeling generous.”
“Cheng. What’s going on?” Gansey said, leaning forward to see past her. His voice had changed immediately to his raven boy one, which made Blue suddenly annoyed to be seen in a car with him. It was like her anger from before had not been properly extinguished and now it only took the knowledge that she was a girl in a car with an Aglionby prince to reignite it.
Henry Cheng leapt out of his car to lean in the passenger window. Blue was distinctly uncomfortable to be this close to his sharp cheekbones.
He said, “I don’t know. It stopped.”
“Stopped how?” Gansey asked.
Henry replied, “It made a noise. I stopped it. It seemed angry. I don’t know. I don’t want to die. I have my whole future ahead of me. Do you know anything about cars?”
“Not electric ones. What kind of noise did you say it made?”
“One I don’t want to hear again. I can’t break it. I broke the last one and my father was
pissed
.”
“Do you want a ride back?”
“No, I want your phone. Mine’s dead and I can’t walk by the road or I’ll get raped by the locals.” Henry kneed the side of the Camaro and said, “Man, this is the way to do it. American muscle you can hear from a mile away. I’m not very good at this WASP thing. You, on the other hand, are a champion — only I think you have it backward. It’s supposed to be hanging with chicks during the day, boys at night. That’s what my
halmeoni
used to say, anyway.”
There was something terrible about the entire exchange. Blue couldn’t decide if it was because it didn’t require her, or because it was between two extremely rich boys, or because it was a concrete reminder that she had broken one of her most important rules. (Stay away from Aglionby boys.) She felt like a dusty and ordinary accessory. Or worse. She just felt — bad.
She mutely passed Gansey’s phone to Henry.
As the other boy returned to his shiny spacecraft to place the call, she said to Gansey, “I don’t like when your voice sounds like that, FYI.”
“Like what?”
She knew it wasn’t nice to say it, but her mouth said it anyway. “Your fake voice.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The one you do with them,” she said. “With the other Aglionby bastards.”
“Henry’s all right,” Gansey said.
“Oh, whatever, ‘raped by the locals’?”
“That was a joke.”
“Ha ha ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. It’s a joke when someone like
him
says it, because he doesn’t have to actually worry about it. It’s just so typical.”
“I don’t understand why you’re being this way. He’s actually a little like you —”
Blue scoffed. “Oh
ho
!” She knew she was being over-the-top, but she couldn’t seem to stop. It was just something about their handsome faces and handsome hair and handsome cars and easy confidence with one another.
“I just think it’s probably a good thing that we can’t really — we’ll never —”
“Oh, is it?” Gansey asked, dangerously polite. “Why is that?”
“We’re just not in the same place, is all. We have very different priorities. We’re too far apart. It wouldn’t actually work.”
“Two seconds ago we were nearly kissing,” he said, “and now it’s all off because we stopped to let a guy use my phone?”
“It was never
on
!” She felt as furious as she had when she first woke up. More.
“Is this because I didn’t agree that Henry was a bastard? I’m trying to see things from your point of view, but I am having a very difficult time. Something about my voice?”
“Never mind. Forget it. Just take me home,” Blue said. Now she was really regretting — everything. She wasn’t even sure where her argument had taken her, only that now she couldn’t back down. “After he gives your phone back.”
Gansey studied her. She expected to see her anger mirrored on his face, but instead, his expression had cleared. It wasn’t happy, exactly, but he no longer looked confused. He asked, “When are you going to tell me what this is really about?”
This made her heave a great shuddered breath that was close to tears. “Never.”

ansey woke up in a terrible mood. He was still tired — he had lost hours of sleep to playing and replaying the events inside the car, trying to decide if he had been

wrong or right or if it even mattered— and it was drizzling, and Malory was whistling, and Noah was cracking pool balls against each other, and Ronan was pouring breakfast cereal from the box into his mouth, and Gansey’s favorite yellow sweater smelled too doggy to bear another wearing, and the Pig flooded and wouldn’t start, and so now they were headed off to get Blue and Adam in the soulless Suburban and a brown sweater that looked exactly on the outside like Gansey felt on the inside.

This cave wasn’t going to be anything but a cave, like they always were, so Gansey would have been fine staying in Monmouth for another four hours of sleep and doing it another day.

“It might as well be Wales out there with all this rain,” Malory said, not sounding very pleased about it. Beside him, Adam was silent, expression troubled in a way Gansey hadn’t seen in a while.

Blue, too, was sullenly quiet, with bags under her eyes to match Gansey’s. Last night his coat collar had still been scented with her hair; now, he kept turning his head in hopes of catching it, but like everything else in the wretched day, it had gone muted and dusty.

At the Dittley farm, Malory, the dog, and Jesse settled in the house (Malory, unhopeful: “I don’t suppose you have any tea?” Jesse: “DO YOU WANT EARL GREY OR DARJEELING?” Malory: “Oh, sweet heavens!”) and the teens trekked across the damp field to the cave.

Adam asked, “Are you really bringing that bird into a cave?” “Yes, Parrish,” Ronan replied, “I believe I am.”
There was no way to ask Blue about the night before. He was too dull-edged to analyze it anymore. He just wanted

Gansey remained in a bad mood as they applied their caving equipment and checked and double-checked their flashlights. Blue had acquired a used set of coveralls from somewhere and the sheer effort of not looking at her in them was taking what little concentration he could dredge up.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, he thought. It wasn’t supposed to be crammed in between school events and Congressional tasks. It shouldn’t have been a murky fall day, too humid for the season. It should have been a day where he had slept enough to properly
feel
things. It wasn’t supposed to be any of the things that it was, and instead, it was all of them.

This was not, he thought as they descended, even how the cavern was supposed to look. Of course Glendower was underground — of course Gansey had known that he would have to be
buried
— but somehow he had imagined it lighter. This was just a hole in the ground like the rest. Dirt walls pressing in close, clawed and chiseled out when they grew too narrow to admit a coffin. A rabbit hole, down and down.

This was not how it had looked in his vision, back when he’d stood in Cabeswater’s vision tree. But perhaps that hadn’t been the truth.

Ronan was right in front of him.
“Stop what?”
“Oh, come on.”
Ronan didn’t reply; they kept walking. They had only made

They came to a slow and stuttering halt. Adam had stopped, and that had jerked Ronan to a stop, which had stopped Blue, and then, finally, Gansey. Chainsaw flapped up, wings grazing the close cavern walls. She came to rest on Ronan’s shoulder again, her head pitched low and wary. She frantically cleaned her beak on his shirt.

“What?”
Ronan demanded, flicking thumb and finger in the raven’s direction.
“Singing,” Adam said.
“I’m not doing anything.”
Adam had his fingers pressed against one of his ears. “I know now — I know it’s not you.”
“You
think
?”
“No,” Adam said, voice thin. “I know it’s not you because I’m hearing it in my deaf ear.”
A little chill scurried across Gansey’s skin.
“What is it singing?” Blue asked.
Chainsaw’s beak parted. In a trilling, sideways little voice completely unlike her coarse raven voice, she sang, “All maidens young and fair, listen to your fathers —”
“Stop that,” Ronan shouted. Not to Chainsaw, but to the cave.
But this was not Cabeswater, and whatever it was did not attend to Ronan Lynch.
Chainsaw kept singing — a feat made more terrible because she never closed her beak. It was as if she was merely a speaker for some sound inside herself. “The men of all his land, they listened to their fathers —”
Ronan shouted again, “Whoever you are, stop that! She’s
mine
.”
Chainsaw broke off to laugh.
It was a high, cunning laugh, as much a song as the song.
“Jesus Christ,” Gansey said, to hide the sound of every hair on his body standing up and both of his testicles retreating.
“Chainsaw,” Ronan snapped.
Her attention darted to him. She peered at him, head cocked, something unfamiliar and intense about her. She had gotten large, her inked feathers ruffled round her throat, her beak savage and expressive. Right then, it was impossible to forget that she was actually a dream creature, not a true raven, and that the workings of her mind were the same mysterious stuff of Ronan Lynch, or of Cabeswater. For a dreadful second, too fast for Gansey to say anything, he thought she was about to stab at Ronan with that fierce beak of hers.
But she merely clicked her beak, and then she took flight down the passage ahead of them.
“Chainsaw!” Ronan called, but she disappeared into the black. “
Damn
it. Untie me.”
“No,” Adam and Blue said at once.
“No,” agreed Gansey, firmer. “I don’t even know if we should keep going. I’m not interested in feeding ourselves to a cave.”
Chainsaw’s defection felt wrong, too. Turned sideways, somehow, or inside out. Everything seemed
unpredictable
— which was in itself strange, because it had to mean that everything to this point had been predictable. No — inevitable.
Now it felt like anything could happen.
Ronan’s gaze was still focused down the dark passage, his eyes searching for Chainsaw and not finding her. He sneered, “You can stay if you’re too afraid.”
Gansey knew Ronan too well to let the barb sting. “It’s not myself I’m afraid for, Lynch. Reel it in.”
“I think it’s just trying to frighten us,” Blue pointed out, quite sensibly. “If it really wanted to hurt us, it could have.”
He thought of Chainsaw’s beak, poised so close to Ronan’s eye.
“Adam?” Gansey called down to the end of the line. “Verdict? ”
Adam was quiet as he weighed the options. His face was strange and delicate in the sharp light of Gansey’s head beam. Swiftly, and without explanation, he reached out to touch the cavern wall. Although he was
not
a dream thing, he was now one of Cabeswater’s things, and it was hard not to see it in the way his fingers spidered across the wall and in the blackness of his eyes as they gazed at nothing.
Blue said, “Is he also . . .”
Possessed.
None of them wanted to say it.
Ronan lifted a finger to his lips.
Adam seemed to
listen
to the walls —
who is this person, is he still your friend, what did he give to Cabeswater, what does he become, why does terror grow so much better away from the sun —
and then he said, cautiously, “I vote we go on. I think the frightening is a side effect, not the intention. I think Chainsaw is meant to lure us in.”
So they went on.
Down, and down, a more crooked path than the cavern in Cabeswater. That passage had clearly been worn by water, while this one seemed unnatural, clawed out instead of formed. Ahead of them, Chainsaw cawed. It was a strange, daytime sound to hear from the blackness ahead.
“Chainsaw?” Ronan called, voice rough.
“Kerah! ”
came the reply, from not too far away. This was the bird’s special name for Ronan.
“Thank goodness,” Blue said.
Gansey, at the head, spotted her first, clinging to a ledge in the rock wall, scrabbling with one foot and flapping a little to keep her position. She didn’t flee as he approached, and when he held out his arm to her, she flew to him, landing heavily. She seemed no worse the wear for her possession. He half-turned. “Here’s your bird, Lynch.”
Ronan’s voice was odd. “And there’s your tomb, Gansey.”
He was looking past Gansey.
Gansey turned. They stood at a stone door. It could have been a door to many things, but it was not. It was a carved tomb door— a stone armored knight with hands crossed over his breast. His head rested on two ravens, his feet, on fleurs-de-lis. He held a shield. Glendower’s shield, with three ravens.
But this was wrong.
It was not wrong because this was not how Gansey would have expected Glendower’s tomb to look. It was wrong because it was not supposed to happen this way, on this day, when his eyes hurt from sleeplessness and it drizzled outside and it was a cave they had only found a few days before.
It was supposed to be a clue, and then another clue, and then another clue.
It was not supposed to be thirty minutes of walking and a tomb door, just like that.
But it was.
“It can’t be,” Adam said, finally, from the back.
“Do we just — push it open?” Blue asked. She, too, sounded uncertain. This was not how it worked. It was the looking, not the finding.
“I feel peculiar about this,” Gansey said finally. “It feels wrong for there to be no . . . ceremony.”
Be excited.
He turned back to the tomb door as the others drew close. Withdrawing his phone, he took several photos. Then, after a pause, he typed in some location notes as well.
“God, Gansey,” Ronan said, but it had made Gansey feel a little better about himself.
Carefully, he touched the seam around the effigy of the knight. The rock was cool, solid, real; his fingers came away dusted. This was happening. “I don’t think it’s sealed. I think it’s just wedged in. Leverage, maybe?”
Adam ran a finger along the edge. “Not much. It’s not in very tightly.”
He thought about the fact of the three sleepers, one to be woken, one to stay asleep. Would they know if this was the one to leave undisturbed? Surely — because if it was Maura’s job to not wake this sleeper, there would be signs of her here.
But he didn’t know. There wasn’t a way to know.
Everything about this day was tinged by indecision and uncertainty.
Suddenly, the wall exploded in.
As dust swirled in the air and they fell back, coughing, Blue said,
“Ronan Lynch!”
Ronan rebalanced in the midst of the slowly clearing cloud; he had kicked the tomb door in.
“That,” he said thinly, to no one in particular, “was for taking my bird.”
“Ronan, tell me now if I have to leash you, because I will,” Gansey said. Ronan immediately scoffed, but Gansey pointed at him. “I’m serious. This is not yours alone. If this is a tomb, someone has been buried here, and you’re going to give that person respect. Do not. Make me. Ask you. Again. For that matter, if any of us thinks they won’t be able to contain themselves going forward, I suggest we turn around and come back another day or the party in question waits out here.”
Ronan simmered.
“Don’t, Lynch,” Gansey said. “I’ve done this for seven years, and this is the first time I’ll have to leave a place looking worse because I’ve been there. Don’t make me wish I’d come without you.”
This, finally, made it through the steel to Ronan’s heart. His head ducked.
In they went.
It was like they had walked back in the past.
The entire room was carved and painted. The colors were unfaded by the sun: royal blue; berry purple; ruddy, bloody red. The carvings were sectioned into windows or arcades, bounded by lilies and ravens, columns and pillars. Saints looked down, watchful and regal. Martyrs were speared and shot, burned and impassioned. Carved hounds chased hares chased hounds again. On the wall hung a pair of gauntlets, a helmet, a breastplate.
It was too much.
“Jesus,” breathed Gansey. He stretched his fingers to touch the breastplate and then found he couldn’t. He drew his hand back.
He was not ready for it to be over.
He was ready for it to be over.
In the middle of the tomb was a stone coffin, waist-high, the sides heavily carved. A stone effigy of Glendower lay on top, his helmeted head pillowed on three carved ravens.
Do you remember saving my life?
Blue said, “Look at all the birds.”
She trailed her flashlight over the walls and coffin. Everywhere, the beam found feathers. Wings garnishing the coffin. Beaks plucking fruit. Ravens sparring over shields.
The light landed on Adam’s face. His eyes were narrowed and wary. Beside him, Ronan looked strangely hostile, Chainsaw hunched down on his shoulder. Blue took Gansey’s phone from his pocket and took photos of the walls, the coffin, Gansey.
Gansey’s eyes dragged back to the coffin. Glendower’s coffin.
Is this really happening?
Everything was sideways, mirrored, not exactly as he’d imagined it.
He said, “What are we doing?”
“I think between all of us, we should be able to leverage the lid off,” Adam replied.
But that wasn’t what Gansey meant. He meant:
What are
we
doing? We, of all people?
With a little, unfunny laugh, Blue said, “My hands are clammy.”
They stood shoulder to shoulder. Gansey counted down, a breathless three-two-one, and then they strained. Unsuccessfully. It was like they were trying to shift the cavern itself.
“It’s not even wiggling,” Gansey said.
“Let’s try the other side.”
As they moved to the other side and lifted, fingers barely finding purchase, lid unmoving, Gansey could not help but think of the old fairy tales. He imagined this wasn’t an ordinary weight holding the lid down; rather, it was unworthiness. They had not proven themselves in some way, and so Glendower was barred from them still.
He was relieved, somehow. That, at least, felt right.
“They didn’t have heavy lifting equipment,” Ronan said.
“But they could’ve had ropes and pulleys,” Blue noted. “Or more people. Move over, I can’t get my other hand on it.”
“I’m not sure it’ll make a difference,” Gansey said, but they all pushed closer together. Her body was crushed against his. Ronan was crushed against Adam on the other side of him.
There was silence except for their breathing.
Blue said “Three, two —” and they lifted as one.
The lid came off, suddenly weightless in comparison. It shifted and slid rapidly away.
“Grab it!” Blue gasped. Then, as Gansey started forward, “No, wait, don’t!”
There was a sick, wrenching sound as the lid scraped diagonally off the opposite side of the coffin and careened to the floor. It came to rest with a smaller, but more destructive sound, like a fist hitting bone.
“It’s cracked,” Adam said.
They drew closer. A coarse cloth hid the interior of the coffin from view.
This is not right.
Suddenly, Gansey felt deadly calm. This moment was so opposite to how his vision had portrayed it that his anxiety vanished. In its wake was nothing at all. He whisked the cloth free.
None of them moved.
At first he didn’t understand what he was looking at. The shape of it was alien; he couldn’t put it together.
“He’s facedown?” Blue suggested, but hesitantly.
Because of course that was what it was, now that she’d said it. A figure in a dark surcoat, purple or red, shoulder blades jutted toward them. A mass of dark hair, more than Gansey had expected, darker than he would’ve expected. His hands were bound behind his back.
Bound?
Bound.
Something uneasy spasmed inside Gansey.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Adam flicked the flashlight over the length of the coffin. Glendower’s surcoat was hitched, exposing pale legs. Bound at the knee. Facedown, hands tied, knees tied. This was how they buried witches. Suicides. Criminals. Prisoners. Gansey’s hand hovered, pulled away. It wasn’t that his courage had left him; his certainty had.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
Adam swept the flashlight again.
Blue said, “Ah . . .” and then changed her mind.
The hair moved.
“Jesus shit
Mary fuck
,” said Ronan.
“Rats?” Adam suggested, a suggestion so hideous that both Gansey and Blue recoiled. Then the hair moved again, and a terrible sound issued from inside the coffin. A scream?
A
laugh
.
The shoulders jerked, shifting the body in the coffin so that the head could turn to see them. As Gansey caught a glimpse of the face, his heart sped and then stopped. He was relieved and horrified.
It wasn’t Glendower.
He said, “It’s a woman.”