There was a minute of complete blackness. There was no sound, as if the tree and the yard around it were not in Henrietta anymore. Despite the silence, Blue did not feel alone, and it was a terrible feeling.
I am inside a bubble, she thought furiously. I am in a fortress. There is glass all around me. I can see out but nothing can get in. I am untouchable. All of the visuals that Maura had given her to protect herself from psychic attack. It felt like nothing at all against the voice that had come out of Neeve.
But then there was nothing. Her goose bumps had disappeared as quickly as they’d come. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the darkness — though it felt like light leeching back into the world — and she found Neeve, still kneeling by the pool of water.
"Neeve," whispered Blue.
For a moment, nothing happened, and then Neeve lifted her chin and her hands.
Please be Neeve. Please be Neeve.
Blue’s entire body was poised to run.
Then she saw that Neeve’s eyebrows were ordered and firm over her eyes, though her hands were quivering. Blue let out a relieved sigh.
"Blue?" Neeve asked. Her voice was quite normal. Then, with sudden understanding: "Oh. You won’t tell your mother about this, will you?"
Blue stared at her. "I most certainly will! What was that? What were you doing?" Her heart was still going fast and she realized that she was terrified, now that she could think about it.
Neeve took in the broken pentagram, the knocked-over candle, the overturned bowl. "I was scrying."
Her mild voice only infuriated Blue.
"Scrying is what you did earlier. This was not the same thing!"
"I was scrying into that space I saw earlier. I was hoping to make contact with someone who was in it to find out what it was."
Blue’s voice was not nearly as steady as she would’ve liked. "It spoke. It was not you when I came out here."
"Well," Neeve said, sounding a little cross, "that was your fault. You make everything stronger. I wasn’t expecting you to be here, or I would’ve …"
She trailed off and looked at the stub of the candle, her head cocked. It wasn’t a particularly human sort of gesture, and it made Blue remember the nasty chill she had gotten before.
"Would’ve what?" Blue demanded. She was a little cross, too, that she was somehow being blamed for whatever had just happened. "What was that? It said it was on the corpse road. Is that the same thing as a ley line?"
"Of course," Neeve said. "Henrietta’s on a ley line."
That meant that Gansey was right. It also meant Blue knew exactly where the ley line ran, because she’d seen Gansey’s spirit walk along it only a few days earlier.
"It’s why it’s easy to be a psychic here," Neeve said. "The energy is strong."
"Energy, like my energy?" Blue asked.
Neeve did a complicated hand gesture before picking up the candle. She held it upside down in front of her and pinched the wick to be certain it was entirely extinguished. "Energy like your energy. Feeds things. How did you put it? Makes the conversation louder. The lightbulb brighter. Everything that needs energy to stay alive craves it, just like they crave your energy."
"What did you see?" Blue asked. "When you were —?"
"Scrying," Neeve finished for her, though Blue wasn’t at all certain that was how she would’ve finished it. "There’s someone who knows your name there. And there’s someone else who is looking for this thing that you’re looking for."
"That I’m looking for!" Blue echoed, dismayed. There was nothing she was looking for. Unless Neeve was talking about the mysterious Glendower. She recalled that feeling of connection, of feeling tied up in this web of raven boys and sleeping kings and ley lines. Of her mother saying to stay away from them.
"Yes, you know what it is," Neeve replied. "Ah. Everything seems so much clearer now."
Blue thought about that stretching, hungry candle flame, the shifting lights inside the pool of water. She felt cold somewhere very deep inside her. "You haven’t said what that was yet. In the pool."
Neeve looked up then, all of her supplies gathered in her arms. Her gaze was the unbreakable one that could last an eternity.
"That’s because I have no idea," she said.
Chapter 18
Whelk took the liberty of going through Gansey’s locker before school the next day.
Gansey’s locker, one of the few in use, was only a couple doors down from Whelk’s old one, and the feeling of opening it brought back a rush of memory and nostalgia. Once upon a time, this had been him — one of the wealthiest kids at Aglionby, with whichever friends he wanted, whichever Henrietta girls caught his eye, whichever classes he felt like going to. His father had no compunction about making an extra donation here or there to help Whelk pass a class he’d failed to attend for a few weeks. Whelk longed for his old car. The cops here had known his father well; they hadn’t even bothered to pull Whelk over.
And now Gansey was a king here, and he didn’t even know how to use it.
Thanks to Aglionby’s honor code, there were no locks on any of the lockers, allowing Whelk to open Gansey’s without any fuss. Inside, he found several dusty spiral-bound notebooks with only a few pages used in each. In case Gansey decided to come into school two hours early, Whelk left a note in the locker ("Belongings have been removed while we spray for roaches") and then retreated back to one of the unused staff bathrooms to examine his find.
Sitting cross-legged on the pristine but dusty tile beside the sink, what he found was that Richard Gansey III was more obsessed with the ley line than he had ever been. 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.
Outside the bathroom, he heard heels clicking down the hallway. The scent of coffee drifted under the doorway; Aglionby was beginning to stir. Whelk flipped to the next notebook.
This one was not about the ley line. It was all historical stuff about the Welsh king Owen Glendower. Whelk was not interested. He skimmed, skimmed, skimmed, thinking it was unrelated, until he realized the case Gansey was making for tying the two elements together: Glendower and the ley line. Stooge or not, Gansey knew how to sell a story.
Whelk focused on one line.
Whoever wakes Glendower is granted a favor (limitless?) (supernatural?) (some sources say reciprocal/what does that mean?)
Czerny had never cared about the ultimate outcome of the ley line search. At first, Whelk hadn’t, either. The appeal had merely been the riddle of it. Then one 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.
The ley line was raw, uncontrollable, inexplicable energy. The stuff of legends.
Whoever controlled the ley line would be more than rich. Whoever controlled the ley line would be something that the other Aglionby boys could only hope to aspire to.
Czerny still hadn’t cared, not really. He was the most mild, ambitionless creature Whelk had ever seen, which was probably why Whelk liked to hang out with him so much. Czerny didn’t have a problem being no better than the other Aglionby students. He was content to trot along after Whelk. 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?
"Glendower," Whelk said out loud, trying it out. The word echoed off the bathroom walls, hollow and metallic. He wondered what Gansey — strange, desperate Gansey — was thinking he’d ask for as a favor.
Climbing up off the bathroom floor, Whelk picked up all the notebooks. It would only take a few minutes to copy them in the staff room, and if anyone asked, he’d tell them Gansey had asked him to.
Glendower.
If Whelk found him, he’d ask for what he’d wanted all along: to control the ley line.
Chapter 19
The following afternoon, Blue walked barefoot to the street in front of 300 Fox Way and sat on the curb to wait for Calla beneath the blue-green trees. All afternoon Neeve had been locked up in her room and Maura had been doing angel-card readings for a group of out-of-towners on a writing retreat. So Blue had taken all afternoon to contemplate what to do about finding Neeve in the backyard. And what to do involved Calla.
She was just getting restless when Calla’s carpool pulled up at the curb.
"Are you putting yourself out with the trash?" Calla asked as she climbed out of the vehicle, which was blue-green like everything else in the day. She wore a strangely respectable dress with dubiously funky rhinestone sandals. Making a lackadaisical hand motion at the driver, she turned to Blue as the car drove away.
"I need to ask you a question," Blue said.
"And it’s a question that sounds better next to a trash can? Hold this." Calla wrestled one of her bags off her arm and onto Blue’s. She smelled of jasmine and chili peppers, which meant she’d had a bad day at work. Blue wasn’t entirely certain what Calla did for a living, but she knew it had something to do with Aglionby, paperwork, and cursing at students, often on weekends. Whatever her job description was, it involved rewarding herself with burritos on bad days.
Calla began to stomp up the walk toward the front door.
Blue trailed helplessly after her, lugging the bag. It felt like it had books or bodies in it. "The house is full."
Only one of Calla’s eyebrows was paying any attention. "It’s always full."
They were nearly at the front door. Inside, every room was occupied with aunts and cousins and mothers. The sound of Persephone’s angry PhD music was already audible. The only chance for privacy was outside.
Blue said, "I want to know why Neeve’s here."
Calla stopped. She looked at Blue over her shoulder.
"Well, excuse you," she replied, not very pleasantly. "I’d like to know the cause of climate change, too, but no one’s telling me that."
Clutching Calla’s bag like a hostage, Blue insisted, "I’m not six anymore. Maybe everyone else can see what they need to see in a pack of cards, but I’m tired of being left in the dark."
Now she had both of Calla’s eyebrows’ interest.
"Damn straight," Calla agreed. "I wondered when you were going to go all rebellious on us. Why aren’t you asking your mother?"
"Because I’m angry at her for telling me what to do."
Calla shifted her weight. "Take another bag. What is it you propose?"
Blue accepted another bag; this one was dark brown, and managed to have corners. There seemed to be a box in it. "That you just tell me?"
Using one of her newly freed hands, Calla tapped a finger on her lip. Both her lips and the nail she used to tap were deeply indigo, the color of octopus ink, the color of the deepest shadows in the rocky front yard. "The only thing is, I’m not sure that what we’ve been told is the truth."
Blue felt a little lurch at that. The idea of lying to Calla or Maura or Persephone seemed ludicrous. Even if they didn’t know the truth, they’d hear a lie. But there did seem to be something secretive about Neeve, about her scrying after hours, where she thought it likely no one would see her.
Calla said, "She was supposed to be here looking for someone."
"My father," Blue guessed.
Calla didn’t say yes but she didn’t say no, either. Instead, she replied, "But I think it’s become something else for her, now that she’s been here in Henrietta for a while."
They regarded each other for a moment, co-conspirators.
"My proposition is different, then," Blue said, finally. She tried to arch her eyebrow to match Calla’s, but it felt a bit lacking. "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? It had certainly been dramatic when she’d touched Ronan’s tattoo. If she handled Neeve’s things, they might get some concrete answers.
"Take this bag," Calla said, handing Blue the last of them. This one was the smallest of all, made of blood-red leather. It was impossibly heavy. While Blue worked out how to hold it with the others, Calla crossed her arms and tapped her indigo-nailed fingers on her upper arms.
"She’d have to be out of her room for at least an hour," Calla said. "And Maura would have to be otherwise occupied."
Calla had once observed that Maura had no pets because her principles took too much time to take care of. Maura was a big believer in many things, one of them personal privacy.
"But you will do it?"
"I’ll find out more today," Calla said. "About their schedules. What’s this?" Her attention had shifted to a car pulling up at the end of the walk. Both Calla and Blue tilted their heads to read the magnetic sign on the passenger door: FLOWERS BY ANDI! The driver rummaged in the backseat of her car for a full two minutes before heading up the walk with the world’s smallest flower arrangement. Her fluffed bangs were larger than the flowers.
"It’s hard to find this place!" the woman said.
Calla pursed her lips. She had a pure and fiery hatred for anything that could be classified as small talk.