Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3)

by Maggie Stiefvater

“Also g, I don’t want to do school anymore.” “Well, you’re not quitting, so I’m sorry for your loss.” “I didn’t say I was quitting. I just have a very low level of job satisfaction right now. Morale is low. The troops don’t want to go to community college.”

This is the list of names.” “Are you all right?” “Oh, yeah, I just have, this, eyelid in my eye or something,” Blue said, wiping her right eye.

He stood up and stretched. “Helm sceal cenum, ond a þæs heanan hyge hord unginnost.” “Does that mean ‘I’m going to be a hero’?” He smiled and said, “ ‘A coward’s heart is no prize, but the man of valor deserves his shining helmet.’ ” “So, what I said,” she replied. “Basically.”

Because Blue had no cell phone, there was no way for him to break the rules and call her. Instead, he had begun to instead lie in his bed each night, eyes closed, hand resting on his phone, waiting to see if she was going to call him from the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room at her house. Stop it, he told himself. Stop wanting it —

Jealousy had ruined Ronan for the first several months of Adam’s introduction into their group; this would hurt him more than that.

“Gansey, come on,” Henry said. “They’ll listen to you. Your vote counts double because you’re a Caucasian with great hair. You’re Aglionby’s golden boy. The only way you could score more points is if your mom gets that seat.”

“Democracy’s a farce,” Ronan said, and Adam smirked, a private, small thing that was inherently exclusionary. An expression, in fact, that he could’ve very well learned from Ronan.

He couldn’t figure how Ronan had learned to be fierce in this protected place.

As they moved through the old barn, Adam felt Ronan’s eyes glance off him and away, his disinterest practiced but incomplete. Adam wondered if anyone else noticed. Part of him wished they did and immediately felt bad, because it was vanity, really: See, Adam Parrish is wantable, worthy of a crush, not just by anyone, someone like Ronan, who could want Gansey or anyone else and chose Adam for his hungry eyes.

Adam considered Ronan’s admiration of him. Someone like him treating someone like Adam as someone worthy —

Again, he imagined Ronan here on his own, so hopeful for a change that he would have noted such a subtle difference. It was far more dedication than he had thought Ronan Lynch capable of. Lonesome.

“I hear if you want magic done,” he said, “you ask a magician.”

There was nothing inherently guilty about the moment except that Gansey burned with guilt and thrill and desire and the nebulous feeling of being truly known.

“Don’t tell the others,” Gansey said. “I’m dead,” Noah replied. “Not stupid.”

but then she saw Gansey’s expression just behind Calla. His fingers lightly touched his temple and his cheekbone, and his eyes looked off at nothing. Blue wouldn’t have been able to interpret it a few months ago, but now she knew him well enough to realize that this meant relief: the unwinding of an anxious spring. He looked genuinely ill. She had worried both of them, badly.

Ronan had been looking for her, too? It would have been heartwarming, if she’d been in any danger whatsoever.

“I —” Blue realized before she finished the sentence that there was no argument: They were right, and she was wrong. Lamely, she ended, “I didn’t think anyone would notice.”

my angel :(

was so strange to see him without his Richard Campbell Gansey III guise on in public that Blue couldn’t stop staring at his face. No — it wasn’t his face. It was the way he stood, his shoulders shrugged, chin ducked, gaze from below uncertain eyebrows. “SHE WAS ALL RIGHT,” Jesse assured him. “My head knew that,” Gansey said. “But the rest of me didn’t.”

Adam, a secretive animal, was acutely tuned to other people’s secrets. So he wasn’t sure why there would be anything clandestine about the foretold death of a stranger, but he knew that Blue Sargent was telling a partial truth.

Ah, Adam thought with grim and sudden certainty. Here it is. So one of us is on it.

She said, “You won’t be able to unknow it.”

She merely held his gaze. “Gansey,” Adam said. She closed her eyes. Of course. Of course he would be taken from them.

His heart was a grave. If it’s your fault, Adam thought, you can stop it.

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. Over and over, she heard Adam guess the truth: Gansey.

Blue called Gansey. He picked up at once. “I wasn’t sleeping.” “I know,” she replied. “Come get me.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Ronan, tell me now if I have to leash you, because I will,” Gansey said.

Her body was crushed against his. Ronan was crushed against Adam on the other side of him.

“Let’s leave her,” Ronan said. Gansey replied, “If we abandoned people in caves because they were crazy, you’d still be back in Cabeswater. Give me your knife.”

Jesse scratched his chest. “YOU REALLY ARE A VERY GOOD KIND OF ANT.” They shook hands.

Earlier that year, when Blue had first met the boys, there had been a moment when she had been suddenly struck by how she was being drawn into their tangled lives. Now she realized that she had never been drawn in. She had been there all along, together with this woman, and all the other women at Fox Way, and maybe even Malory and his Dog. They were not creating a mess. They were just slowly illuminating the shape of it.

because, strangely enough, Ronan knew a great deal about how Adam worked.

With shame, she recalled how she had once wondered what would have made a boy like him, a boy with everything, ever learn such a skill. How unfair she’d been to assume love and money would preclude pain and hardship.

She recalled one charged night on the side of a mountain, looking down at Henrietta lit like a fairy village. Home, he’d said, like it pained him. Like he couldn’t believe it.

Gansey put a mint leaf in his mouth; it was impossible to not think of the night before, when he’d put one in hers.

A statue of Mary — probably Mary? — held its hands out to him, but that was because she didn’t know him. Then again, she entreated Ronan, too, and she probably did know him.

Adam finally sat down on one of the pews. Laying his cheek against the smooth back of it, he looked at Ronan.

When he wasn’t trying to look like an asshole, his face looked very different, and for a tilting moment, Adam felt the startling inequality of their relationship: Ronan knew Adam, but Adam wasn’t sure he knew Ronan, after all.

“Yeah, good. Good. Look, maybe you should go, though. To the apartment, and I’ll meet you after I’m done.” “Why?” Ronan said, “Not everything in my head is a great thing, Parrish, believe it or not. I told you. And when I’m bringing something back from a dream, sometimes I can’t bring back only one thing.” “I’ll risk it.” “At least give me some room.”

“Stop watching me,” Ronan said, though his eyes were closed. “Whatever. I’m going to ask Cabeswater for the phone.” “See you on the other side.”

His words were short, clipped. He was trying not to look like he cared about watching himself die. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe this happened all the time. What a fool Adam was to think he knew anything about Ronan Lynch.

How appropriate it was that Ronan, left to his own devices, manifested beautiful cars and beautiful birds and tenderhearted brothers, while Adam, when given the power, manifested a filthy string of perverse murders.

This was just Ronan wanting to shout where someone could hear him. Adam felt it whittling away at his temper, not because he believed Ronan was angry at him, but because he was tired of Ronan thinking this was the only way to show he was upset.

It wasn’t quite fear, but it was uncertainty. His son was before him, and he did not know him. I am unknowable.

Blue wondered if she would have the courage to stab someone if she thought it would save lives.

Both Blue and Mr. Gray enjoyed a laugh, and then were briefly silent as they realized it had been too long since they had been in the company of someone with their precise sense of humor, i.e., Maura Sargent.

“You begin to sound like your princeling, little lily,” Gwenllian said.