The Raven Boys (18 page)

As Blue moved to where Gansey sat, she caught a glimpse of his car at the curb: a flash of impossible orange, the sort of orange Orla would definitely paint her nails. It was not exactly what she’d have expected an Aglionby boy to drive — they liked new, shiny things, and this was an old, shiny thing — but it was clearly a raven boy’s car nonetheless. And just then, Blue had a falling sensation, like things were happening too fast for her to properly absorb them. There
was
something odd and complicated about all of these boys, Blue thought — odd and complicated in the way that the journal was odd and complicated. Their lives were somehow a web, and she had somehow managed to do something to get herself stuck in the very edge of it. Whether that something had been done in the past or was going to be done in the future seemed irrelevant. In this room with Maura and Calla and Persephone, time felt circular.

She stopped in front of Gansey. This close, she again caught the scent of mint, and that made Blue’s heart trip unsteadily.

Gansey looked down at the fanned deck of cards in her hands. When she saw him like that, she saw the bend of his shoulders and the back of his head, and she piercingly remembered his spirit, the boy she’d been afraid she’d fall in love with. That shade hadn’t worn any of the effortless, breezy confidence of this raven boy in front of her.

What happens to you, Gansey?
she wondered.
When do you become that person?

Gansey looked up at her, and there was a crease between his eyebrows. “I don’t know how to choose. Could you pick a card for me? Will that work?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Blue saw Adam shifting in his chair, frowning.

Persephone answered from behind Blue. “If you want it to.”

“It’s about intention,” Maura added.

“I want you to,” he said. “Please.”

Blue fanned the cards across the table; they slithered loosely over the finish. She let her fingers float above them. Once, Maura had told her that the correct cards sometimes felt warm or tingly when her fingers were near them. For Blue, of course, each card felt identical. One, however, had slid farther than the others, and that was the one she chose.

As she flipped it over, she let out a little helpless laugh.

The page of cups looked back at Blue with her own face. It felt like someone was laughing at her, but she had no one to blame for the selection of the card but herself.

When Maura saw it, her voice went still and remote. “Not that one. Make him choose another.”

“Maura,” said Persephone mildly, but Maura just waved her hand, dismissing her.

“Another one,” she insisted.

“What’s wrong with that one?” Gansey asked.

“It has Blue’s energy on it,” Maura said. “It wasn’t meant to be yours. You’ll have to pick it yourself.”

Persephone moved her mouth back and forth, but she didn’t say anything. Blue replaced the card and shuffled the deck with less drama than before.

When she offered the cards to him, Gansey turned his face away like he was pulling a raffle winner. His fingers grazed the edges of the cards, contemplative. He selected one, then flipped it over to show the room.

It was the page of cups.

He looked at the face on the card, and then at Blue’s face, and Blue knew that he’d seen the similarity.

Maura leaned forward and snatched the card from his fingers. “Pick another one.”

“
Now
why?” Gansey said. “What’s wrong with that card? What does it mean?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Maura replied. “It’s just not yours.”

Now, for the first time, Blue saw an edge of true aggravation to Gansey’s expression, and it made her like him a little better. So there was something below the raven boy exterior, maybe. Flippantly, Gansey snagged another card, clearly finished with this exercise. With flourish, he turned the card over and slapped it on the table.

Blue swallowed.

Maura said, “
That
’s your card.”

On the card on the table was a black knight astride a white horse. The knight’s helmet was lifted so that it was obvious that his face was a bare skull dominated by eyeless sockets. The sun set beyond him, and below his horse’s hooves lay a corpse.

Outside the windows behind them, a breeze hissed audibly through the trees.

“Death.” Gansey read the bottom of the card. He didn’t sound surprised or alarmed. He just read the word like he would read
eggs
or
Cincinnati
.

“Great job, Maura,” Calla said. Her arms were crossed firmly over her chest. “You going to interpret that for the kid?”

“Possibly we should just give him a refund,” Persephone suggested, although Gansey had not paid yet.

“I thought that psychics didn’t predict death,” Adam said quietly. “I read that the Death card was only symbolic.”

Maura and Calla and Persephone all made vague noises. Blue, utterly aware of the truth of Gansey’s fate, felt ill. Aglionby boy or not, he was only her age, and he obviously had friends who cared for him and a life that involved a very orange car, and it was hideous to know he’d be dead in less than twelve months.

“Actually,” Gansey said, “I don’t care about that.”

Every pair of eyes in the room was on him as he stood the card on its end to study it.

“I mean, the cards are very interesting,” he said. He said
the cards are very interesting
like someone would say
this is very interesting
to a very strange sort of cake that they didn’t quite want to finish. “And I don’t want to discount what you do. But I didn’t really come here to have my future told to me. I’m quite okay with finding that out for myself.”

He cast a quick glance at Calla at this, obviously realizing that he was walking a fine line between “polite” and “Ronan.”

“Really, I came because I was hoping to ask you a question about energy,” Gansey continued. “I know you deal with energy work, and I’ve been trying to find a ley line I think is near Henrietta. Do you know anything about that?”

The journal!

“Ley line?” Maura repeated. “Maybe. I don’t know if I know it by that name. What is it?”

Blue was a little stunned. She’d always thought her mother was the most truthful person around.

“They’re straight energy lines that crisscross the globe,” Gansey explained. “They’re supposed to connect major spiritual places. Adam thought you might know about them because you deal with energy.”

It was obvious that he meant the corpse road, but Maura didn’t offer any information. She just pressed her lips together and looked at Persephone and Calla. “Does that ring a bell to you two?”

Persephone pointed a finger straight in the air and then said, “I forgot about my pie crust.”

She withdrew from the room. Calla said, “I’d have to think about it. I’m not good with specifics.”

There was a faint, amused smile on Gansey’s face that meant he knew they were lying. It was a strangely wise expression; once again Blue got the sense that he seemed older than the boys he’d brought with him.

“I’ll look into it,” Maura said. “If you leave your number, I can give you a call if I find out anything about it.”

Gansey replied, coolly polite, “Oh, that’s quite all right. How much for the reading?”

Standing, Maura said, “Oh, just twenty.”

Blue thought this was criminal. Gansey clearly had spent more than twenty dollars on the laces for his Top-Siders.

He frowned at Maura over the top of his open wallet. There were a lot of bills in it. They could’ve been ones, but Blue doubted it. She could also see his driver’s license through a clear window; not closely enough to make out the details, but close enough to see that the name printed on it looked a lot longer than just
Gansey
. “Twenty?”

“Each,” Blue added.

Calla coughed into her first.

Gansey’s face cleared and he handed Maura sixty dollars. Quite obviously this was more what he’d been expecting to pay, and now the world was right again.

It was Adam, though, who Blue noticed then. He was looking at her, sharp-eyed, and she felt transparent and guilty. Not only about overcharging, but about Maura’s lie. Blue had seen Gansey’s spirit walk the corpse road and she had known his name before he walked in this door. Like her mother, she’d said nothing. So she was complicit.

“I’ll show you out,” Maura said. She was clearly eager to see them on the other side of the door. For a moment, it looked as if Gansey felt the same, but then he stopped. He paid an undue amount of attention to his wallet as he folded it and reinserted it into his pocket, and then he looked up to Maura and made a firm line of his mouth.

“Look, we’re all adults here,” he started.

Calla made a face as if she disagreed.

Gansey squared his shoulders and continued, “So I think we deserve the truth. Tell me you know something but you don’t want to help me, if that’s what’s going on, but don’t lie to me.”

It was a brave thing to say, or an arrogant one, or maybe there was not enough of a difference between the two things to matter. Every head in the room swung to Maura.

She said, “I know something but I don’t want to help you.”

For the second time that day, Calla looked delighted. Blue’s mouth was open. She closed it.

Gansey, however, just nodded, no more or less distressed than when Blue had retorted back to him at the restaurant. “All right, then. No, no, you can stay put. We’ll let ourselves out.”

And just like that, they did, Adam sending Blue a last look that she couldn’t easily interpret. A second later, the Camaro revved high, and the tires squealed out Gansey’s true feelings. Then the house was quiet. It was a sucked-out silence, like the raven boys had taken all the sound in the neighborhood with them.

Blue whirled on her mother.
“Mom.”
She was going to say something else, but all that she could manage was again, louder,
“Mom!”

“Maura,” Calla said, “that was very rude.” Then she added, “I liked it.”

Maura turned to Blue as if Calla hadn’t spoken. “I don’t want you to ever see him again.”

Indignant, Blue cried, “Whatever happened to ‘children should never be given orders’?”

“That was before Gansey.” Maura flipped around the Death card, giving Blue a long time to stare at the skull inside the helmet. “This is the same as me telling you not to walk in front of a bus.”

Several comebacks riffled through Blue’s head before she found one that she wanted. “Why? Neeve didn’t see
me
on the corpse road.
I’m
not going to die in the next year.”

“First of all, the corpse road is a promise, not a guarantee,” Maura replied. “Second of all, there are other terrible fates besides death. Shall we talk about dismemberment? Paralysis? Endless psychological trauma? There is something really wrong with those boys. When your mother says don’t walk in front of a bus, she has a good reason.”

From the kitchen, Persephone’s soft voice called, “If someone had stopped you from walking in front of a bus, Maura, Blue wouldn’t be here.”

Maura shot a frown in her direction, then swept her hand across the reading table as if she were clearing it of crumbs. “The best-case scenario here is that you make friends with a boy who’s going to die.”

“Ah,” said Calla, in a very, very knowing way. “Now I see.”

“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” her mother said.

“I already have. And I say again, ‘ah.’”

Maura sneered uncharacteristically, and then asked Calla, “What did you see when you touched that other boy? The raven boy?”

“They’re all raven boys,” Blue said.

Her mother shook her head. “No, he’s more raven than the others.”

Calla rubbed her fingertips together, as if she was wiping the memory of Ronan’s tattoo from them. “It’s like scrying into that weird space. There’s so much coming out of him, it shouldn’t be possible. Do you remember that woman who came in who was pregnant with quadruplets? It was like that, but worse.”

“He’s pregnant?” Blue asked.

“He’s creating,” Calla said. “That space is creating, too. I don’t know how to say it any better than that.”

Blue wondered what sort of creating they meant.
She
was always creating things — taking old things and cutting them up and making them better things. Taking things that already existed and transforming them into something else. This, she felt, was what most people meant when they called someone
creative
.

But she suspected that wasn’t how Calla meant it. She suspected that what Calla meant was the true meaning of creative: to make a thing where before there was none.

Maura caught Blue’s expression. She said, “I’ve never told you to do anything before, Blue. But I’m telling you now. Stay away from them.”

T
he night following the reading, Gansey woke to a completely unfamiliar sound and fumbled for his glasses. It sounded a little like one of his roommates was being killed by a possum, or possibly the final moments of a fatal cat fight. He wasn’t certain of the specifics, but he was sure death was involved.