Blue Lily, Lily Blue (5 page)

lue arrived at Monmouth Manufacturing before anyone else. She knocked to be sure, and then let herself in. Immediately, she was enveloped with the comfortable

scent of the room: the faded library-smell of old books, the cool odor of mint, the must-and-rust scent of century-old brick and ancient pipes, the note of funk from the heap of dirty laundry against the wall.

“Noah?” Her voice was small in the huge expanse. She dropped her backpack on the desk chair. “Are you here? It’s okay, I’m not upset. You can use my energy if you need.”

There was no answer. The space was turning gray and blue as one of the strange flash thunderstorms roiled over the mountains, filling the floor-to-ceiling windows of the warehouse with clouds. The sharp afternoon shadows behind the stacks of books mutated and diffused. The room felt heavy, sleepy.

Blue peered into the dark gathering at the far-above peak of the roof. “Noah? I just want to talk about what happened.”
She put her head in the door of Noah’s room. Malory’s things occupied it currently, and it smelled mannish and evergreen. One of his bags was open and Blue could see that it was entirely filled with books. This struck her as impractical and Gansey-like and made her feel a bit more benevolent toward the professor.
Noah was not there.
She checked the bathroom, which was also sort of the laundry room and kitchen. The doors hung open on a small stacked washer-dryer unit; socks draped over the sink’s edge, either drying or flung. A small fridge lurked dangerously close to the toilet. A length of rubber tubing strangled a showerhead above a grimy drain; the shower curtain was strung from the ceiling with fishing line. Blue was disturbed by the number of chip bags that were reachable from the toilet. A dark red tie on the floor pointed a jagged line toward the exit.
Some foreign impulse urged Blue to pick up any of the mess, any single component, to improve upon the disaster.
She did not.
She backed out.
Ronan’s room was forbidden, but she looked inside anyway. His raven’s cage sat with its door ajar, impeccably and incongruously clean. His room was filled not so much with filth, but clutter: shovels and swords leaned in the corners, speakers and printers piled by the wall. And bizarre objects in between: an old suitcase with vines trailing out of it, a potted tree that seemed to be humming to itself, a single cowboy boot in the middle of the floor. A mask hung high on the wall, eyes wide, mouth gaping. It was blackened, as if by fire, and the edges were badly bitten, as if by a saw. Something that looked suspiciously like a tire track ran over one of its eyes. The mask made Blue think of words like
survivor
and
destroyer
.
She didn’t like it.
A crash behind Blue made her leap — but it was only the apartment door opening. Guilt had amplified the sound.
Blue darted out of Ronan’s room. Gansey and Malory trailed in slowly, deep in conversation. The Dog sulked behind them, excluded by virtue of not speaking English.
“Of course Iolo Goch would make sense as a companion,” Gansey was saying, sloughing off his jacket. “Him or Gruffudd Llwyd, I suppose. But — no, it’s impossible. He died in Wales.”
“But are we sure?” Malory asked. “Do we know where he was buried? That he
was
buried?”
“Or if he was just made into nightgowns, you mean?” Gansey caught sight of Blue then, and he rewarded her with his best smile — not his polished one, but the more foolish number that meant he was excited. “Hallo, Jane. Tell me what Iolo Goch means to you.”
Blue pulled her thoughts from Ronan’s mask and Noah and school. “A chest cold?”
“Glendower’s closest poet,” Gansey corrected. “Also, very funny.”
“Did you find anything?” she asked.
“Absolutely nothing,” he replied, but he sounded cheerful about it.
Malory lowered his mass onto the leather couch. The Dog lay on top of him. It didn’t seem as if it would be very comfortable; the Dog draped over the professor like a slip cloth over a chair. But Malory merely closed his eyes and stroked him in an uncharacteristic show of affection. “Gansey, I perish for a cup of tea. Can such a thing could be had in this place? I cannot possibly hope to survive this jet lag without a cup of tea.” “I got tea just for you,” Gansey said. “I’ll make some.”
“Please not with loo water,” Malory called after him, not opening his eyes. The dog kept lying on him.
For an overwhelming moment, Blue was afraid she was going to be unable to prevent herself from asking what the Dog was for. Instead, she followed Gansey back to the kitchen-bathroomlaundry.
He rummaged through the cluttered shelves. “We were just talking about the mechanics of bringing Glendower over here. The books say he traveled with mages — are they the ones who put him to sleep? Did he
want
it? Was he sleeping before he left, or did he fall asleep here?”
It suddenly seemed like a lonesome thing to be buried a sea away from your home, like being shot off into space. “Iolo Goch was one of the mages?”
“No, just a poet. You heard Malory in the car. They were very poetlitical — poet — political.” Gansey laughed at his own stumble. “
Poets
were
political
. I know that’s not really a tongue twister. I’ve been listening to Malory all day. P-p-political. Poets. Iolo composed these really flattering poems about Glendower’s past prowess and his house and lands. His family. And such. Oh, what am I even looking for here?”
He paused to locate a tiny microwave. He examined the interior of a mug before filling it. Pulling a mint leaf from his pocket to suck on, he spoke around it as the water heated. “Really, if Glendower were Robin Hood, Iolo Goch would have been. . . that other guy.”
“Maid Marian,” Blue said. “Little John.”
Gansey pointed at her. “Like Batman and Robin. But he died in Wales. Are we to believe he returned to Wales after leaving Glendower here? No. I reject it.”
Blue loved this ponderous, scholarly Gansey, too involved with facts to consider how he appeared on the outside. She asked, “Glendower had a wife, right?”
“Died in the Tower of London.”
“Siblings?”
“Beheaded.”
“Children?”
“A million of them, but most imprisoned and dead, or just plain dead. He lost his entire family in the uprising.”
“Poet it is, then!”
Gansey asked, “Have you ever heard that rumor that if you boil water in the microwave it will explode when you touch it?”
“Has to be pure,” she replied. “Distilled water. Regular water won’t explode because of the minerals. You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”
A roaring sound interrupted them, sudden and complete. Blue started, but Gansey just cast his eyes upward. “It’s rain on the roof. Must be dumping.”
He turned, mug in hand, and suddenly they were an inch apart. She could smell the mint in his mouth. She saw his throat move as he swallowed.
She was furious at her body for betraying her, for wanting him differently than any of the other boys, for refusing to listen to her insistence that they were just friends.
“How was your first day of school, Jane?” he asked, voice different than before.

Mom’s gone. Noah exploded. I’m not going to college. I don’t want to go home where everything is strange, and I don’t want to go back to school where everything is normal.

“Oh, you know, public school,” she said, not meeting his eyes. She concentrated instead on Gansey’s neck, which was right at eye level, and on how his collar didn’t lay quite flat against his skin all the way around because of his Adam’s apple. “We just watched cartoons all day.”

She’d meant it to be wry, but she didn’t think it quite worked. “We’ll find her,” he said, and her chest twinged again. “I don’t know if she wants to be found.”
“Fair enough. Jane, if —” He stopped and swirled the tea. “I

hope Malory doesn’t want any milk. I completely forgot.” She wished she could still evoke that Blue who despised him.
She wished she knew if Adam would feel terrible about this. She
wished she knew if fighting this feeling would make Gansey’s
foretold end destroy her any less.
She shut the microwave. Gansey left the room.
Back on the sofa, Malory viewed the tea as a man would view
a death sentence.
“What else?” Gansey asked kindly.
Malory shoved the Dog off him. “I’d like a new hip. And
better weather. Ah — however. This is your home and I know
that I’m an outsider, so far be it from me to chastise or generally
overstep. That being said, were you aware there was someone
under . . . ?”
He indicated the storm-dark area beneath the pool table. If
Blue squinted, she could make out a form in the black.
“Noah,”
Gansey said. “Come out at once.”
“No,” Noah replied.
“Well! I see you two know each other and all is well,” Malory
said, in the voice of someone who sensed trouble coming and
hadn’t brought an umbrella. “I will be in my room nursing my
jet lag.”
After he had retreated, Blue said with exasperation, “Noah! I
called and called for you.”
Noah remained where he was, arms hugged around his body.
He looked markedly less alive than he had earlier; there was
something smudgy about his eyes, something uncertain about
his edges. It was kind of hard to look at the place where Noah
stopped and the shadow below him began. Something unpleasant happened in Blue’s throat when she tried to make out what
was off about his face.
“I’m tired of it,” Noah said.
“Tired of what?” Gansey asked, voice kind.
“Decaying.”
He had been crying. That was what was wrong with his face,
Blue realized. Nothing supernatural.
“Oh, Noah,” she said, crouching down.
“What can I do?” Gansey asked. “We. What can we do?” Noah shrugged in a watery way.
Blue was suddenly desperately afraid that Noah might want
to actually die. This seemed like something most ghosts wanted —
to be laid to rest. It was a dreadful notion, a forever good-bye.
Her selfishness warred mightily with every bit of ethics she had
ever learned from the women of her family.
Blast.
She had to.
She asked, “Do you want us to find a way to, um, to prop
erly, to lay . . .”
Before she’d even finished, Noah started shaking his head.
He hugged his legs closer. “No. Nonono.”
“You don’t have to be ashamed,” Blue said, because it sounded
like what her mother would have said. She was certain her mother
would have added something comforting about the afterlife, but
she was unable, this time, to sound comforting when she herself
wanted to be comforted. Lamely, she finished, “You don’t have
to be afraid.”
“You don’t know!” Noah said, vaguely hysterical. “You
don’t know!”
She stretched out a hand. “Okay, hey —”
Noah repeated, “You don’t know!”
“We can talk this out,” Gansey said, as if a decaying soul was
something that could be solved through conversation. “You don’t know! You don’t know!”
Noah was standing. It was impossible, because there was not
room beneath the pool table for him to stand. But he was somehow
escaping on either side, surrounding Gansey and Blue. The maps
fluttered frantically against the green surface. A flock of dust wads
tumbled from beneath the table and raced down the streets of
Gansey’s miniature model of Henrietta. The desk lamp flickered. The temperature dropped.
Blue saw Gansey’s eyes widen behind a cloud of his own
breath.
“Noah,” Blue warned. Her head felt swimmy as Noah robbed
her of energy. She caught a whiff, strangely, of the old-carpet smell of guidance counselor’s office, and then the living, green
scent of Cabeswater. “This isn’t you!”
The swirl of wind was still rising, flapping papers and knocking over stacks of books. The Dog was barking from behind the
closed door of Noah’s old room. Goose bumps rippled on Blue’s
skin, and her limbs felt heavy.
“Noah,
stop
,” Gansey said.
But he didn’t. The door to the apartment rattled. Blue said, “Noah, I’m asking you now.”
He wasn’t attending, or there wasn’t enough of the true Noah
to attend.
Standing up on her wobbly legs, Blue began to use all of the
protective visualization she’d been taught by her mother. She
imagined herself inside an unbreakable glass ball; she could see
out, but no one could touch her. She imagined white light piercing the stormy clouds, the roof, the darkness of Noah, finding
Blue, armoring her.
Then she pulled the plug on the battery that was Blue
Sargent.
The room went still. The papers settled. The light flickered
once more and then strengthened. She heard a little gasp of a sob,
and then absolute quiet.
Gansey looked shocked.
Noah sat in the middle of the floor, papers all around him,
a mint plant spilling dirt by his hand. He was all hunched over
and shadowless, his form slight and streaky, barely visible at all.
He was crying again.
In a very small voice, he told Blue, “You said I could use
your energy.”
She knelt in front of him. She wanted to hug him, but he
wasn’t really there. Without her energy, he was a paper-thin boy,
he was a skull, he was air in the shape of Noah. “Not like that.” He whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
He covered his face, and then he was gone.
Gansey said, “That was impressive, Jane.”

hat night, Blue leaned against the spreading beech tree in her backyard, her eyes cast up to the stars and her fingers touching the chilly, smooth bark of one of the

roots. The kitchen light through the sliding door seemed far away.
That was impressive, Jane.
Although Blue was perfectly aware of the positive effects of

her ability, she had never really considered the opposite. And yet Noah would have destroyed Monmouth Manufacturing if she hadn’t cut herself off from him.

The stars winked through the beech leaves. She’d read that new stars tended to form in pairs. Binary stars, orbiting in close proximity, only becoming single stars when their partner was smashed off them by another pair of wildly spinning new stars. If she pretended hard enough, she could see the multitude of pairs clinging to each other in the destructive and creative gravity of their constellations.

Impressive.
Maybe she was a little impressed. Not by pulling the plug on a dead boy — that seemed sad, nothing to brag about. But because she’d learned something about herself today, and she’d thought there was nothing left there to discover.
The stars moved slowly above her, an array of possibilities, and for the first time in a long time, she felt them mirrored in her heart.
Calla opened the sliding door. “Blue?”
“What?”
“If you’re done gallivanting for the day, I could use your body,” Calla said. “I have a reading.”
Blue raised her eyebrows. Maura only asked for her help during important readings, and Calla never asked, period. Curiosity rather than obedience pulled Blue to her feet. “This late? Now?”
“I’m asking now, aren’t I?”
Once inside, Calla fussed over the reading room and called for Persephone so many times that Orla screamed back that some people were trying to conduct phone calls and Jimi shouted, “Is it something I can help with?”
All of the fuss made Blue strangely nervous. At 300 Fox Way, readings happened so often that they ordinarily felt both perfunctory and unmagical. But this felt like chaos. This felt like anything could happen.
The doorbell rang.
“PERSEPHONE, I TOLD YOU,” Calla roared. “Blue, get that. I’ll be in the reading room. Bring him in there.”
When Blue opened the front door, she discovered an Aglionby student standing in the glow of the porch light. Moths fluttered around his head. He wore salmon-colored pants and white TopSiders and boasted flawless skin and tousled hair.
Then her eyes adjusted and she realized that he was too old to be a raven boy. Quite a bit too old; it was hard to imagine how she would have thought it before for even for a moment.
Blue scowled at his shoes and then at his face. Although everything about him had been cultivated to impress, she found him less impressive than she might have a few months before. “Hola.”
“Howdy,” he replied, with a cheery smile full of unsurprisingly straight teeth. “I’m here for a probing of my future. I expect the timing is still good?”
“You expect right, sailor. Come in.”
In the reading room, Calla had been joined by Persephone. They sat on one side of the table like a jury. The man stood across from them, idly drumming his fingers on a chair back.
“Sit,” intoned Calla.
“Any old chair,” Persephone added mildly.
“Not any old chair,” Calla said. She pointed. “That one.”
He sat opposite, his bright eyes all over the room as he did, his body dynamic. He looked like a person who
got things done
. Blue couldn’t decide if he was handsome or if his demeanor was fooling her into believing him so.
He asked, “Well, how does this work? Do I pay you up front or do you decide how much it is after you see how complicated my future is?”
“Any old time,” Persephone said.
“No,” Calla said. “Now. Fifty.”
He parted with the bills without malice. “Could I get a receipt? Business expense. That is a fantastic portrait of Steve Martin over there, by the way. Behold how its eyes follow you around the room.”
“Blue, would you get the receipt?” Persephone asked.
Blue, lingering by the door, went for a business card to write the amount on. When she returned, Persephone was saying to Calla, “Oh, we will have to use just yours. I don’t have mine.”
“Don’t have yours!” Calla replied incredulously. “What happened to them?”
“Coca-Cola shirt has them.”
With a mighty snort, Calla retrieved her tarot cards and instructed the man on how to shuffle them. She finished, “Then you pass them back to me, facedown, and I’ll draw them.”
He began.
“As you shuffle them, you should be thinking about what you’d like to know,” Persephone added in her small voice. “That will focus the reading quite a bit.”
“Good, good,” he replied, shuffling the cards more aggressively. He glanced up at Blue. Then, without warning, he flipped the deck so that the cards were faceup. He fanned them out, eyes darting over the selection.
This was
not
how Calla had instructed him.
Something in Blue’s nerves tingled a warning.
“So, if the question is ‘How can I make
this
happen?’” — he plucked a card free and set it on the table — “that’s a good start, right?”
There was dead silence.
The card was the three of swords. It depicted a bloody heart stabbed with the aforementioned three swords. Gore dripped down the blades. Maura called it “the heartbreak card.”
Blue needed no psychic perception to feel the threat oozing from it.
The psychics stared at the man. With a cool curl in her stomach, Blue realized that they hadn’t seen this coming.
Calla growled, “What’s your game?”
He kept smiling his cheery, congenial smile. “Here’s the question: Is there another one of you? One that looks more like that one?” He pointed at Blue, whose stomach turned over unpleasantly once more.
Mom.
“Go to hell,” Calla burst out.
He nodded. “That’s what I thought. You expecting her any time soon? I’d love to have a chat with her in particular.”
“Hell,” Persephone said. “I actually agree in this case. Insofar as going there is concerned.”
What does this man want with Mom?
Blue frantically memorized everything about him so that she could describe him later.
The man stood, sweeping up the three of hearts. “You know what? I’m keeping this. Thanks for the info.”
As he turned to go, Calla started after him, but Persephone put a single finger on Calla’s arm, stopping her.
“No,” Persephone said softly. The front door closed. “That one’s not to be touched.”