"People find pennies," Gansey replied. "Or car keys. Or four-leaf clovers."
"And ravens," Ronan said. "You’re just jealous ’cause" — at this point, he had to stop to regroup his beer-sluggish thoughts — "you didn’t find one, too."
The bird had just crapped between Ronan’s fingers onto the pew beside him. Holding the fledgling in one hand, Ronan used a church bulletin to scrape the majority of the mess off the wood. He offered the soiled paper to Gansey. The weekly prayer requests were spattered with white.
Gansey only took the paper because he didn’t trust Ronan to bother finding a place to throw it out. With some distaste, he asked, "What if I implement a no-pets policy at the apartment?"
"Well, hell, man," Ronan replied, with a savage smile, "you can’t just throw out Noah like that."
It took Gansey a moment to realize that Ronan had made a joke, and by then, it was too late to laugh. In any case, he knew he was going to let the bird return with them to Monmouth Manufacturing, because he saw the possessive way Ronan held it. Already the raven looked up at him, beak cracked hopefully, dependent.
Gansey relented. "Come on. We’re going back. Get up."
As Ronan unsteadily climbed to his feet, the raven hunched down in his hands, becoming all beak and body, no neck. He said, "Get used to some turbulence, you little bastard."
"You can’t name it that."
"Her name’s Chainsaw," replied Ronan, without looking up. Then: "Noah. You’re creepy as hell back there."
In the deep, shadowed entrance of the church, Noah stood silently. For a second, all that seemed to be visible was his pale face; his dark clothing invisible and his eyes chasms into someplace unknowable. Then he stepped into the light and he was rumpled and familiar as always.
"I thought you weren’t coming," Gansey said.
Noah’s gaze traveled past them to the altar, then up to the dark, unseeable ceiling. He said, with typical bravery, "The apartment was creepy."
"Freak," Ronan remarked, but Noah seemed unconcerned.
Gansey pulled open the door to the sidewalk. No sign of Adam. Guilt for calling him out for a false alarm was beginning to settle in. Though … he wasn’t entirely certain it was a false alarm. Something had happened, even if he wasn’t yet sure what. "Where did you say you found that bird again?"
"In my head." Ronan’s laugh was a sharp jackal cry.
"Dangerous place," commented Noah.
Ronan stumbled, all his edges blunted by alcohol, and the raven in his hands let out a feeble sound more percussive than vocal. He replied, "Not for a chain saw."
Back out in the hard spring night, Gansey tipped his head back. Now that he knew that Ronan was all right, he could see that Henrietta after dark was a beautiful place, a patchwork town embroidered with black tree branches.
A raven, of all the birds for Ronan to turn up with.
Gansey didn’t believe in coincidences.
Chapter 10
Whelk was not sleeping.
Back when he was an Aglionby boy, sleep had come easy — and why shouldn’t it have? Like Czerny and the rest of his classmates, he slept two or four or six hours on weekdays, up late, up early, and then performed marathon sleeping sessions on the weekend. And when he did sleep, it was hours of easy, dreamless sleep. No — he knew that was false. Everyone dreamed, only some forgot.
Now, however, he rarely closed his eyes for longer than a few hours at a stretch. He rolled in his bedsheets. He sat bolt upright, woken by whispers. He nodded off on his leather couch, the only piece of furniture the government hadn’t seized. His sleep patterns and energy seemed dictated by something larger and more powerful than himself, ebbing and flowing like an uneven tide. Attempts to chart it left him frustrated: He seemed more wakeful at the full moon and after thunderstorms, but beyond that, it was difficult to predict. 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.
It was nearly a full moon and it had not been long since it rained, so Whelk was awake.
He sat in a T-shirt and boxers in front of the computer screen, operating the mouse with the unprincipled and dubious productivity of the fatigued. All in a rush, the countless voices invaded his head, whispering and hissing. They sounded like the static that buzzed over phone lines in the vicinity of the ley line. Like the wind before a storm front. Like the trees themselves conspiring. As always, Whelk couldn’t pick out any words, and he couldn’t understand the conversation. But he did understand one thing: Something strange had just happened in Henrietta, and the voices couldn’t stop talking about it.
For the first time in years, Whelk retrieved his old county maps from his tiny hall closet. He had no table and the counter-top was cluttered with opened packages of microwave lasagna and plates with stale bread crusts on them, so he spread the maps out in the bathroom instead. A spider in the bathtub skidded out of his way when he flattened a map against the surface.
Czerny, you’re in a better place than me, I think.
But he didn’t really believe that. 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.
Whelk stood back and crossed his arms, studying the dozens of marks and notations he’d made on the maps over the course of his search. Czerny’s impossible handwriting, always in red, noted energy levels along the possible path of the ley line. Back then, it had been a game, a treasure hunt. A play for glory. Was it true? It didn’t matter. It was an expensive exercise in strategy with the East Coast as the playing field. Looking for patterns, Whelk had painstakingly drawn circles around areas of interest on one of the topographical maps. A circle around an old copse of ash trees where the energy levels were always high. A circle around a ruined church that wildlife seemed to avoid. A circle around the place Czerny had died.
Of course, he had drawn the circle before Czerny had died. The place, a sinister group of oak trees, had been notable because of old words carved into one of the trunks. Latin. It seemed incomplete, difficult to translate, and Whelk’s best guess was "the second road." The energy levels were promising there, though, if inconsistent. Surely this, then, was on the ley line.
Czerny and Whelk had returned a half-dozen times, taking readings (next to the circle, there were six different numbers in Czerny’s handwriting), digging in the dirt for possible artifacts, watching overnight for signs of supernatural activity. Whelk had constructed his most complicated and sensitive dowsing rod yet, two metal wires bent at a ninety-degree angle and inserted into a metal tube handle so that they could swing freely. They’d dowsed the area around it, trying to establish for certain the path of the line.
But it remained spotty, coming in and out of focus like a distant radio station. The lines needed to be woken, to have their frequencies honed, the volume turned up. Czerny and Whelk made plans to attempt the ritual in the oak grove. They weren’t quite sure of the process, though. All Whelk could find out was that the line loved reciprocity and sacrifice, but that was frustratingly vague. No other information presented itself, so they kept pushing it off. Over winter break. Spring break. End of the school year.
Then Whelk’s mother had called and told Whelk that his father had been arrested for unethical business practices and income tax evasion. It turned out the company had been trading with war criminals, a fact his mother knew and Whelk had guessed, and the FBI had been watching for years. Overnight, the Whelks lost everything.
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.
The last time Whelk had looked at this map had been as he stood in his dorm room, realizing that the only thing he had left was the ten-dollar bill in his pocket. None of his credit cards meant anything anymore.
Czerny had pulled up in his red Mustang. He hadn’t gotten out of the car.
"Does this make you white trash now?" he’d asked. Czerny didn’t really have a sense of humor. He just sometimes said things that happened to be funny. Whelk, standing in the wreckage of his life, didn’t laugh this time.
The ley line wasn’t a game anymore.
"Unlock your door," Whelk had told him. "We’re doing the ritual."
Chapter 11
One hour and twenty-three minutes before Blue’s alarm was supposed to go off for school, she was woken by the front door closing. Gray dawn light filtered in her bedroom window, making diffuse shadows of the leaves pressed against the glass. She tried not to resent her lost one hour and twenty-three minutes of sleep.
Footsteps started up the staircase. Blue caught the sound of her mother’s voice.
"… was up waiting for you."
"Some things are better done at night." This was Neeve. Though her voice was smaller than Maura’s, it was crisper, somehow, and carried well. "Henrietta is quite a place, isn’t it?"
"I didn’t ask you to look at Henrietta," Maura replied, in a stage whisper. She sounded — protective.
"It is difficult not to. It shouts," Neeve said. Her next words were lost in the sound of a creaking stair.
Maura’s reply was obscured as she, too, started to climb the stairs, but it sounded like, "I would prefer if you left Blue out of this."
Blue went very still.
Neeve said, "I’m only telling you what I’m finding. If he vanished at the same time that … possible they’re linked. Do you not want her to know who he is?"
Another stair groaned. Blue thought, Why can’t they talk without creaking up the stairs at the same time!
Maura snapped, "I don’t see how that would be easier for anyone."
Neeve murmured a reply.
"This is already getting out of hand," her mother said. "It was barely more than typing his name into a search engine, and now …"
Blue strained her ears. It felt like she hadn’t heard her mother use a masculine pronoun for quite a long time, with the exception of Gansey.
It was possible, Blue thought after a long moment, that Maura meant Blue’s father. None of the awkward conversations Blue had attempted with her mother had ever gotten her any information about him, just nonsensical humorous replies (He is Santa Claus. He was a bank robber. He’s currently in orbit.) that changed every time she asked. In Blue’s head, he was a dashing heroic figure who’d had to vanish because of a tragic past. Possibly to a witness protection program. She liked to imagine him stealing a glimpse of her over the backyard fence, proudly watching his strange daughter daydream under the beech tree.
Blue was awfully fond of her father, considering she’d never met him.
Somewhere in the depths of the house, a door closed, and then there was once more the sort of night-silence that is hard to disturb. After a long moment, Blue reached over to the plastic bin that served as her nightstand and retrieved the journal. She rested a hand on the cool leather cover. The surface of it felt like the cool, smooth bark of the beech tree behind the house. As when she touched the beech tree, she felt at once comforted and anxious: reassured and driven to action.
Henrietta is quite a place, Neeve had said. The journal seemed to agree. A place for what, she wasn’t sure.
Blue didn’t mean to fall asleep, but she did, for another hour and twelve minutes. It wasn’t her alarm that woke her this time, either. It was a single thought shouted in her brain:
Today is the day Gansey comes for his reading.
Embroiled in the daily routine of getting ready for school, the conversation between Maura and Neeve seemed more commonplace than it had before. But the journal was still as magical. Sitting on the edge of her bed, Blue touched one of the quotes.
The king sleeps still, under a mountain, and around him is assembled his warriors and his herds and his riches. By his right hand is his cup, filled with possibility. On his breast nestles his sword, waiting, too, to wake. Fortunate is the soul who finds the king and is brave enough to call him to wakefulness, for the king will grant him a favor, as wondrous as can be imagined by a mortal man.
She closed the pages. It felt as if there were a larger, terribly curious Blue inside her that was about to bust out of the smaller, more sensible Blue that held her. For a long moment she let the journal rest on her legs, the cover cool against her palms.
A favor.
If she had a favor, what would she ask? To not have to worry about money? To know who her father had been? To travel the world? To see what her mother saw?
The thought rang through her brain again:
Today is the day Gansey comes for his reading.
What will he be like?
Maybe, if she was standing before that sleeping king, she’d ask the king to save Gansey’s life.
"Blue, I hope you’re awake!" Orla screamed from downstairs. Blue needed to leave soon if she was to make the bike trip to school on time. In a few weeks, it would be an uncomfortably hot ride.
Possibly, she would ask a sleeping king for a car.
I wish I could just cut class today.
It wasn’t that Blue dreaded high school; it just felt like … a holding pattern. And it wasn’t as if she was bullied; it hadn’t taken her very long to discover that the weirder she looked on the outside — the more she let other kids realize that she wasn’t like them, from the very beginning — the less likely she was to be picked on or ignored. The fact was, by the time she got to high school, being weird and proud of it was an asset. Suddenly cool, Blue could’ve happily had any number of friends. And she had tried. But the problem with being weird was that everyone else was normal.