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But it wasn’t an easy thing to leave the Parrish household in the middle of the night. The consequences of getting caught could leave physical evidence, and it was getting too warm for long sleeves. Gansey felt wretched for asking this of him.
:(
Six months ago, the only time it had ever mattered, Noah had found Ronan in an introspective pool of his own blood, and so he was exempt from ever having to look again. Noah hadn’t gone with Gansey to the hospital afterward,
and Adam had been caught trying to sneak out, so it was only Gansey who’d been with Ronan when they stitched his skin whole again. It had been a long time ago, but also, it was no time at all.
He wasn’t naive; he carried no illusions that he’d ever recover the Ronan Lynch he’d known before Niall died. But he didn’t want to lose the Ronan Lynch he had now.
“When I told you I didn’t want you getting drunk at Monmouth, I didn’t mean I wanted you drunk somewhere else.”
Ronan slowly sat up, still holding his cargo close. Another whuff of alcohol-laced breath drifted toward Gansey. “Raven.” There was a long pause as Ronan regarded his hand. “Maybe a crow. But I doubt it. I … yeah, seriously doubt it. Corvus corax.”
In his mind, he imagined that it was the magnetic pulse of the ley line itself, somehow invited into his body through Czerny’s death.
Sleep deprivation made his life an imaginary thing, his days a ribbon floating aimlessly in water.
He had no idea what had become of Czerny’s soul or spirit or whatever you wanted to call what had been Czerny, but if Whelk had been cursed with whispering voices merely by his part in the ritual, Czerny’s fate must’ve been worse.
It was in the papers the next day, the catastrophic crash of the Whelk family fortune. Both of Whelk’s girlfriends left him. Well, the second one was technically Czerny’s, so perhaps that didn’t count. The whole thing was all very public. The Virginia playboy, heir to the Whelk fortune, suddenly evicted from his Aglionby dorm, relieved of his social life, freed from any hope of his Ivy League future, watching his car being loaded onto a truck and his room emptied of speakers and furniture.
“Does this make you white trash now?” he’d asked.
Gansey contemplated if he could give Ronan a curfew. Or if he should quit rowing to spend more time with him on Fridays — he knew that was when Ronan got into trouble with the BMW. Maybe he could convince Ronan to …
Despite his interest in Latin, Ronan had declared their Latin teacher a socially awkward shitbird earlier in the year and further clarified that he didn’t like him. Because he despised everyone, Ronan wasn’t a good judge of character, but Gansey had to agree that there was something discomfiting about Whelk.
if she looked closely at the coin, she could see a shape in it. Three curving lines, a long, beaked triangle. The shape from the churchyard, from Maura’s unmindful drawing, from the journal.
Calla’s card, beside Persephone’s, was also the knight of pentacles. It was unusual for two decks to agree exactly. Even stranger was to see that Maura’s card was also the knight of pentacles. Three cold-eyed knights surveyed the land before them.
in this reading. Like the knight of pentacles, it was tripled. Three young people holding a cup of full of potential, all wearing Blue’s face. Maura’s expression was dark, dark, dark.
“Blue, if you ever see that man again, you just walk the other way.” “No,” Calla corrected. “Kick him in the nuts. Then run the other way.”
“I’m going to see a friend.” “The mean one, or the white trash one?” “Helen.” She replied, “Sorry. I meant Captain Frigid or Trailer-Park Boy.” “Helen.” Adam didn’t live in a trailer park, technically, since every house was a double-wide.
Gansey knew what this meant, this failure to immediately come out from beneath the car, and anger and guilt drew his chest tight. The most frustrating thing about the Adam situation was that Gansey couldn’t control it. Not a single piece of it.
A bruise spread over his cheekbone, red and swelling as a galaxy. A darker one snaked over the bridge of his nose.
Gansey knew he had to make a difference, had to make a bigger mark on the world because of the head start he’d been given, or he was the worst sort of person out there.
If I let you cover for me, then I’m yours. I’m his now, and then I’ll be yours.”
It struck Gansey harder than he thought it would. Some days, all that grounded him was the knowledge that his and Adam’s friendship existed in a place that money couldn’t influence. Anything that spoke to the contrary hurt Gansey more than he would have admitted out loud. With precision, he asked, “Is that what you think of me?”
“It is,” Maura said, “too damn loud in here.” The way she said it, though, holding one finger to her pulse, just under her jawbone, told Blue that it was not their voices that were too loud. It was something she was hearing inside her head. Persephone, too, was wincing.
continued, “You’re avoiding a hard choice. Acting by not acting. You’re ambitious, but you feel like someone’s asking something of you you’re not willing to give. Asking you to compromise your principles. Someone close to you, I think. Your father?” “Brother, I think,” Persephone said. “I don’t have a brother, ma’am,” Adam replied. But Blue saw his eyes dart to Gansey.
“A secret killed your father and you know what it was.”
Maura often called on Calla to do joint tarot readings, and Persephone sometimes called on her to interpret her dreams, but very rarely did anyone ask Calla to use one of her strangest gifts: psychometry. Calla had an uncanny ability to hold an object and sense its origin, feel its owner’s thoughts, and see places the thing
He selected one, then flipped it over to show the room. It was the page of cups.
“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
But more than that, he missed the Ronan that had existed when Niall Lynch had still been alive. This boy in front of him now, fragile bird in his hands, seemed like a compromise.
Two narratives coexisted in his head. One was the real image: the wasp climbing up the wood, oblivious to his presence. The other was a false image, a possibility: the wasp whirring into the air, finding Gansey’s skin, dipping the stinger into him, Gansey’s allergy making it a deadly weapon.
Long ago, his skin had crawled with hornets, their wings beating even when his heart hadn’t. His throat was tight and full.
Gansey didn’t know how to describe how it felt, to see death crawling inches from him, to know that in a few seconds, he could have gone from “a promising student” to “beyond saving.” He turned to Ronan, who had painstakingly picked up the wasp by a broken wing, so that Gansey wouldn’t step on it.
“Do you not want me to come?” Something stuck in Gansey’s chest. “I would take all of you anywhere with me.”
“This thing with Chainsaw and the psychic woman, and just, with Noah, and I just think there’s something strange going on.”
But Neeve didn’t reply. When Blue looked closer, she saw that Neeve’s eyes were unfocused. It was her eyebrows that really did it for Blue; they had no expression to them somehow. Even more vacuous than Neeve’s eyes were those formless eyebrows, waiting for input, drawn in two straight, neutral lines.
But it didn’t look like meditation. It looked like … a ritual. Her mother didn’t do rituals. Maura had once told a client hotly, I am not a witch. And once she had said sadly to Persephone, I am not a witch. But perhaps Neeve was.
bowl. “I was scrying.” Her mild voice only infuriated Blue. “Scrying
what you did earlier. This was not the same thing!”
“There’s someone who knows your name there. And there’s someone else who is looking for this thing that you’re looking for.”
Whelk took the liberty of going through Gansey’s locker before school the next
Something about the entire research process seemed … frantic. What is wrong with this kid? Whelk wondered, and then immediately afterward felt strange that he had grown old enough to think of Gansey as a kid.
Whoever wakes Glendower is granted a favor (limitless?) (supernatural?) (some sources say reciprocal/what does that mean?)
afternoon Czerny and Whelk, standing in the middle of what seemed to be a naturally formed circle of magnetically charged stones, had experimentally pushed one of the stones out of place. The resulting sizzle of energy had knocked them both off their feet and created a faint apparition of what looked like a woman.
These days, when Whelk was trying to comfort himself, he told himself that Czerny was a sheep, but sometimes he slipped and remembered him as loyal instead. They didn’t have to be different things, did they?
If Whelk found him, he’d ask for what he’d wanted all along: to control the ley line.
“We go through Neeve’s stuff. You hold it, and I’ll stand next to you.” Calla’s mouth became very small. Her psychometric reflections were often vague, but with Blue beside her, making her gift stronger?
I hope you still want me to call. — Adam
“Blue, if you get to know him —” Calla started. She was standing half-in, half-out of the doorway. “You’d better guard your heart. Don’t forget that he’s going to die.”
He’d let his five o’clock shadow become a multiday shadow, probably to spite Gansey’s inability to grow facial hair. Now he looked like the sort of person women would hide their purses and babies from.
