An insect was buzzing against the window, the sort of buzz-tap that came from an insect with some size to it. He thought about his EpiPen, far away in the glove box of the car, too far away to be a useful antidote if it was needed. The insect was probably a fly or a stink bug or yet another crane fly, but the longer he lay there, the more he considered the idea that it could be a wasp or a bee.
It probably wasn’t.
But he opened his eyes. Gansey climbed softly from the bed, bending to retrieve a shoe that lay on its side. Walking cautiously to the window, he searched for the sound of the insect. The shadow of the telescope was an elegant monster on the floor beside him.
Though the sound of buzzing had died away, it only took him a moment to find the insect on the window: a wasp, crawling up the narrow wooden frame of the window, swiveling back and forth. Gansey didn’t move. He watched it climb and pause, climb and pause. The streetlights outside made a faint shadow of its legs, its curved body, the fine, insubstantial point of the stinger.
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?"
Ronan’s voice was just behind him, the timbre of it strange and initially unrecognizable. Gansey didn’t turn around. The wasp had just twitched its wings, nearly lifting off.
"Shit, man!" Ronan said. There were three footsteps, very close together, the floor creaking like a shot, and then the shoe was snatched from Gansey’s hand. Ronan shoved him aside and brought down the shoe on the window so hard that the glass should’ve broken. After the wasp’s dry body had fallen to the floorboard, Ronan sought it out in the darkness and smashed it once more.
"Shit," Ronan said again. "Are you stupid?"
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.
"What did you want?" he asked.
"What?" Ronan demanded.
"You came out for something."
Ronan chucked the wasp’s small body into the waste basket by the desk. The trash was overflowing with crumpled papers, so the body bounced out and forced him to find a better crevice for it. "I can’t even remember."
Gansey merely stood and waited for Ronan to say something else. Ronan fussed over the wasp for another few moments before he said anything, and when he finally did, he didn’t look at Gansey. "What’s this about you and Parrish leaving?"
It wasn’t what Gansey had expected. He wasn’t sure how to speak without hurting Ronan. He couldn’t lie to him.
"You tell me what you heard, and I’ll tell you what’s real."
"Noah told me," Ronan said, "that if you left, Parrish was going with you."
He had let jealousy sneak into his voice, and that made Gansey’s response cooler than it might have been. Gansey tried not to play favorites. "And what else did Noah have to say?"
With visible effort, Ronan pulled himself back, sorted himself out. None of the Lynch brothers liked to appear anything other than intentional, even if it was intentionally cruel. Instead of answering, he asked, "Do you not want me to come?"
Something stuck in Gansey’s chest. "I would take all of you anywhere with me."
The moonlight made a strange sculpture of Ronan’s face, a stark portrait incompletely molded by a sculptor who had forgotten to work in compassion. He did his smoker’s inhale, heavy on the intake through the nostrils, light on the exhale through his prison of teeth.
After a pause, he said, "The other night. There’s something —"
But then he stopped without saying anything else. It was a full stop, the sort that Gansey associated with secrets and guilt. It was the stop that happened when you’d made up your mind to confess, but your mouth betrayed you in the end.
"There’s what?"
Ronan muttered something. He shook the wastebasket.
"There’s what, Ronan?"
He said, "This thing with Chainsaw and the psychic woman, and just, with Noah, and I just think there’s something strange going on."
Gansey couldn’t keep the exasperation from his voice. "‘Strange’ doesn’t help me. I don’t know what ‘strange’ means."
"I don’t know, man, this sounds crazy to me. I don’t know what to tell you. I mean strange like your voice on that recorder," Ronan replied. "Strange like the psychic’s daughter. Things feel bigger. I don’t know what I’m saying. I thought you would believe me, of all people."
"I don’t even know what you’re asking me to believe."
Ronan said, "It’s starting, man."
Gansey crossed his arms. He could see the dark black wing of the dead wasp pressed against the mesh of the wastebasket. He waited for Ronan to elaborate, but all the other boy said was, "I catch you staring at a wasp again, though, I’m going to let it kill you. Screw that."
Without waiting for a reply, he turned away and retreated back to his room.
Slowly, Gansey picked up his shoe from where Ronan had left it. When he straightened, he realized Noah had drifted from his room to stand near Gansey. His anxious gaze flickered from Gansey to the wastebasket. The wasp’s body had slipped down several inches, but it was still visible.
"What?" Gansey asked. Something about Noah’s uneasy face reminded him of the frightened faces surrounding him, hornets on his skin, the sky blue as death above him. A long, long time ago, he’d been given another chance, and lately, the weight of needing to make it matter felt heavier.
He looked away from Noah, out the wall of windowpanes. Even now, it seemed to Gansey that he could feel the aching presence of the nearby mountains, like the space between him and the peaks was a tangible thing. It was as excruciating as the imagined sleeping countenance of Glendower.
Ronan was right. Things felt bigger. He may not have found the line, or the heart of the line, but something was happening, something was starting.
Noah said, "Don’t throw it away."
Chapter 17
Several days later, Blue woke up sometime well before dawn.
Her room was cluttered with jagged shadows from the hall night-light. As they had every night since the reading, thoughts about Adam’s elegant features and the memory of Gansey’s bowed head crowded into her mind as soon as sleep relinquished its hold. Blue couldn’t help replaying the chaotic episode over and over in her mind. Calla’s volatile response to Ronan, Adam and Gansey’s private language, the fact that Gansey was not just a spirit on the corpse road. But it wasn’t just the boys that she was concerned with, though, sadly, it didn’t seem likely that Adam would ever call now. No, the thing that seized her the most was the idea that her mother had forbidden her to do something. It pinched like a collar.
Blue pushed off the covers. She was getting up.
She bore a grudging fondness for the weird architecture of 300 Fox Way; it was a sort of halfhearted affection born of nostalgia more than any real feeling. But her feelings for the yard behind the house were anything but mixed. A great, spreading beech tree sheltered the entire backyard. Its beautiful, perfectly symmetrical canopy stretched from one fence line to the other, so dense that it tinted even the hottest summer day a lush green. Only the heaviest rain could penetrate the leaves. Blue had a satchelful of memories of standing by the massive, smooth trunk in the rain, hearing it hiss and tap and scatter across the canopy without ever reaching the ground. Standing under the beech tree, it felt like she was the beech, like the rain rolled off her leaves and off the bark, smooth as skin against her own.
With a little sigh, Blue made her way down to the kitchen. She pushed open the back door, using two hands to close it silently behind her. After dark, the yard was its own world, private and dim. The high wooden fence, covered with messy honeysuckle, blocked out the lights from neighboring back porches, and the inscrutable canopy of the beech blocked the moonlight. Ordinarily, she would have had to wait several long minutes for her eyes to adjust to the relative dark, but not tonight.
Tonight, an eerie, uncertain light flickered on the trunk of the tree. Blue hesitated just outside the door, trying to make sense of the sputtering light as it shifted on the pale, gray bark. Laying a hand against the side of the house — it was still warm from the heat of the day — she leaned forward. From here, she saw a candle around the other side of the tree, nestled in the bare snake-roots of the beech. A tremulous flame vanished and lengthened and vanished again.
Blue took a step off the cracked brick patio, then another, glancing behind her again to see if anyone watched from the house. Whose project was this? A few feet away from the candle was another tangle of smooth-skinned roots, and a pool of black water had gathered in them. The water reflected the flickering light, like another candle beneath the black surface.
Blue held her breath tight inside her as she took another step.
In a loose sweater and broom skirt, Neeve knelt near the candle and the little root-pool. With her pretty hands folded in her lap, she was as motionless as the tree itself and as dark as the sky overhead.
Blue’s breath came out in a rush when she first saw Neeve, and then, lifting her eyes to Neeve’s barely visible face, her breath jerked out of her once more, as if the surprise were fresh again.
"Oh," Blue breathed. "I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were here."
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.
Blue’s first thought was something medical — weren’t there seizures where the symptom was just sitting there? What were those called? — but then she thought of the bowl of cran-grape juice on the kitchen table. It was far more likely that she’d interrupted some sort of meditation.
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. Blue wasn’t certain what the rules were in this situation.
"Who’s there?" asked Neeve.
But it was not Neeve’s voice. It was something deeper and farther away.
A nasty little shiver ran up Blue’s arms. Somewhere in the tree above, a bird hissed. At least Blue thought it was a bird.
"Come into the light," said Neeve.
The water moved in the roots, or maybe it was merely the moving reflection of the solitary candle. As Blue cast her gaze wider, she saw a five-pointed star marked around the beech tree. One point was the candle, and another the pool of dark water. An unlit candle marked the third point and an empty bowl the fourth. For a moment, Blue thought that she was mistaken, that it was not a five-pointed star after all. But then she realized: Neeve was the final point.
"I know you are there," not-Neeve said, in the voice that sounded like dark places, far away from the sun. "I can smell you."
Something crawled very slowly up the back of Blue’s neck, on the inside of her skin. It was such a hideously real creep that she was badly tempted to slap it or scratch it.
She wanted to go inside and pretend she had not come out, but she didn’t want to leave Neeve behind if something —
Blue didn’t want to think it, but she did.
She didn’t want to leave Neeve behind if something had her.
"I am here," Blue said.
The candle flame stretched very, very long.
Not-Neeve asked, "What is your name?"
It occurred to Blue that she wasn’t exactly certain that Neeve’s mouth moved when she spoke. It was hard to look at her face.
"Neeve," Blue lied.
"Come where I can see you."
There was definitely something moving in the little black pool. The water was reflecting colors that were not in the candle. They shifted and moved in a pattern completely unlike the movement of the flame.
Blue shivered. "I am invisible."
"Ahhhhhhh," sighed not-Neeve.
"Who are you?" Blue asked.
The candle flame reached tall, tall, thin to the point of breaking. It reached not for the sky but for Blue.
"Neeve," said not-Neeve.
There was something crafty now, to the dark voice. Something knowing and malicious, something that made Blue want to look over her shoulder. But she couldn’t look away from that candle, because she was afraid the flame would touch her if she turned away.
"Where are you?" Blue asked.
"On the corpse road," not-Neeve growled.
Blue became aware that her breath clouded in front of her. Goose bumps pricked her arms, fast and painful. In the half-light of the candle, she saw that Neeve’s breath was visible, too.
The cloud of Neeve’s breath parted over the pool, like something physical was rising from the water to break the path of it.
Rushing forward, Blue kicked over the empty bowl, knocked over the unlit candle, scuffed dirt in the direction of the black pool.
The candle went out.