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

by Maggie Stiefvater

It was on the inside of him, and the inside was all Noah ever really paid attention to. The other boy wore a knowing expression. “Don’t tell the others,” Gansey said. “I’m dead,” Noah replied. “Not stupid.”

“Blue,” he said. She was so relieved. But then he added, “Lily.” “Noah —” “Lily. Blue.”

“WIFE AND THE KIDS LEFT FIVE YEARS AGO, BUT THEY’LL BE BACK AFTER THE CURSE IS FED.” She was so startled by all of this that she ate all of the SpaghettiOs without thinking too hard about it. “I’ve never met someone else with a curse.” “WHAT’S YOURS?” “If I kiss my true love, he’ll die.” Jesse nodded as if to say yep, that’s a good one.

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.

“I’m going to call Ronan,” Gansey said quietly, “and tell him he can go back to Monmouth.” Ronan had been looking for her, too? It would have been heartwarming, if she’d been in any danger whatsoever.

There was still something stretched thin about his expression. He looked, in fact, like he had in the cave, his face streaked and unfamiliar. It 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.

“My head knew that,” Gansey said. “But the rest of me didn’t.”

“That one doesn’t have any hallucinogenic effects, but you might experience some euphoria.” Gansey said, “Nothing I have ever drank here has ever made me experience anything close to euphoria.”

“You.” Blue pointed at him. “Shut up before you say something offensive.

but he knew that Blue Sargent was telling a partial truth.

“You guys have a death list?” Ronan broke in. “That is fucking dark. Am I on it?” “Some days, I wish,” Blue said. “Can I see it?” Adam asked. “What?” “Can I see the list?” Blue turned away to make herself a cup of tea. “I don’t have it. Mom took it with her. I just remembered his name. I mean, I thought it was a girl, with an ie at the end, but the Dittley part was memorable.”

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

“Which one of us, Blue?”

“Blue, which one of us?” Her face was unfamiliar, all mirth scrubbed from it. She wasn’t crying. Her eyes were worse than crying, though. He wondered how long she had been carrying this. His heart was thudding. He’d gotten it right. One of them was supposed to die. I don’t want to die, not now — “Blue.”

“I have to know,” Adam said. “Don’t you get it? That will be the favor. That’s what I’ll ask for. I need to know so we can make that what we ask, if there’s only one.” She merely held his gaze. “Gansey,” Adam said. She closed her eyes. Of course. Of course he would be taken from them.

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

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.

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.

Blue put her hand on top of Gansey’s and held it, white-knuckled. There wasn’t another soul on the road but them.

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.

The Camaro was like Gansey tonight: terrifying and thrilling, willing to do whatever she asked.

She could not forget Gansey’s hand on her knee.

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?

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 t...

“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 bo...

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.

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.

“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.”

“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.

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.”

Gansey 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

There was no way to ask Blue about the night before. He was too dull-edged to analyze it anymore. He just wanted to know. Were they still fighting?

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.

“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.

Blue’s heart was still charging from when the coffin lid had fallen and when the woman had slithered out. It wasn’t that she wanted Gansey to be the boss of her, but she was relieved that he was going to at least be the boss of this moment, while she convinced her pulse to slow.

“YOU REALLY ARE A VERY GOOD KIND OF ANT.”

“Blue lily, lily blue, you and I.” Both Blue and Calla scowled at the eerily familiar words. This woman must have been the one who had possessed Noah, just as she had possessed Chainsaw. Blue hoped this skill didn’t extend beyond dream birds and dead boys.

“YOU TWO,” roared Calla. Both Adam and Ronan winced. “Go to the store and get some supplies for her.” Adam and Ronan exchanged a wide-eyed look. Adam’s look said, What does that mean? and Ronan’s said, I don’t care; let’s get out of here before she changes her mind. Gansey frowned after them as they scrambled to the front door.

“You should tell me what you’ve found out about Greenmantle,” Ronan said, “so that I can get started on my dreaming.” Adam picked himself up before he got driven over. “When?” Ronan grinned.

“I feel uncomfortable all the time, Jane,” Malory said. “That’s what the Dog is for. The Dog is a psychiatric dog. The Dog is trained so that if the Dog senses I am having anxiety, he does something to improve the situation. Such as sit beside me, or lie on my chest, or place my hand in his mouth.”

“Wait, did you say you could see auras?” “Jane, I didn’t expect you to be judgmental, of all people.” Blue was well familiar with the idea of auras — energy fields that surrounded all living objects.

“Because when people are too close to me, their auras touch me, and if too many auras touch me, it confuses me and makes me what doctors have foolishly called anxious.

“Hold on. What? I missed something in here.” “Her aura is like yours — it’s blue,” he said. “The clairvoyant aura!” “Is it?” She was going to be extremely annoyed if this was how she had gotten her name — like naming a puppy Fluffy. “That color of aura belongs to those who can pierce the veil!”

“Despite his mercurial personality, he has a very pleasant and neutral aura. I don’t feel like I am with another person when I am with him. He doesn’t take from me. He is a little louder now, but not very much.”

“What was he like, back then?” “They were glorious days,” Malory replied. Then, after a pause, he added, “Except for when they weren’t. He was smaller then.” The way he said smaller made it seem as if he wasn’t talking about height, and Blue thought she knew what he meant.

She imagined that easy smile Gansey had learned to throw up over his true face. 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 thought of their disagreement in the car the night before with some guilt.

He picked himself up and moved so easily, so quickly. He had done it so many times before England, Jane, and it was old hat to him.”