Okay. I’m ready — Gansey’s voice caught, just a little. Blue, kiss me.
Shaken, Blue opened her eyes for real, and now she saw the darkness of the cavity around her and smelled the dark, rotten scent of the tree again. Her guts were twisted with the ghostly grief and desire she’d felt in the vision. She was sick and embarrassed, and when she stepped out of the tree, she couldn’t look at Gansey.
"Well?" Gansey asked.
She said, "It’s … something."
When she didn’t elucidate further, he took her place in the tree.
It had seemed so very real. Was this the future? Was this an alternate future? Was this just a waking dream? She couldn’t imagine falling in love with Gansey, of all people, but in that vision, it had seemed not just plausible, but indisputable.
As Gansey turned inside the cavity, Adam took her arm and dragged her closer. He wasn’t gentle, but Blue didn’t think he meant to be rough. She did startle, though, when he wiped her face with the heel of his other hand; she had been crying real tears.
"I want you to know," Adam whispered furiously, "I would never do that. It wasn’t real. I’d never do that to him."
His fingers were tight on her arm, and she felt him shaking. Blue blinked at Adam, wiping her cheeks dry. It took her a moment to realize that he must have seen something entirely different than she had.
But if she asked him what he had seen, she’d have to tell him what she saw.
Ronan was staring at them, raw, as if he knew what had happened in the tree, even without attempting it himself.
A few feet away in the cavity, Gansey’s head was bowed. He looked like a statue in a church, his hands clasped in front of him. There was something very ancient about him just then, with the tree arched over him and his eyelids rendered colorless in the shadows. He was himself, but he was something else, too — that something that Blue had first seen in him at the boys’ reading, that sense of otherness, of something more, seemed to radiate from that still portrait of Gansey enshrined in the dark tree.
Adam’s face was turned away, and now, now, Blue knew what his expression was: shame. Whatever he had seen in his vision in the hollowed tree, he was certain Gansey was seeing it, too, and he couldn’t bear it.
Gansey’s eyes flicked open.
"What did you see?" Blue asked.
He cocked his head. It was a slow, dreamlike gesture.
Gansey said, "I saw Glendower."
Chapter 24
As Adam had warned, it had not taken two seconds to explore the raven cut into the ground, follow the creek into the woods, watch the fish change colors, discover a hallucinatory tree, and return to Helen.
According to Gansey’s watch, it had taken seven minutes.
Helen had been furious. When Gansey told her that seven minutes was a miracle, and really, they should’ve been gone forty, it had caused such an argument that Ronan, Adam, and Blue had removed their headphones to allow the siblings to duke it out. Without the headphones, of course, the three of them in the rear seat were robbed of the power of speech. It should have created an awkward silence, but instead, it was easier without words.
"It’s impossible," Blue said, the moment the helicopter had left the lot quiet enough to speak. "Time couldn’t have stopped while we were in the woods."
"Not impossible," Gansey replied, crossing the parking lot to the building. He ripped open the door to Monmouth’s first floor and shouted up into the dim stairwell, "Noah, are you home?"
"It’s true," Adam said. "According to ley-line theory, time can be a fluid thing right on the line."
It was one of the more commonly reported effects of ley lines, especially in Scotland. In Scottish folklore, there was a long-held myth that travelers could be "pixy-led," or led astray by territorial fairies. Hikers would set out along a straight trail only to find themselves inexplicably lost, standing in a location they had no recollection of walking to, yards or miles away from their starting point, their watch showing minutes before or hours after they’d left. Like they’d tripped on a wrinkle in space/time.
The ley line’s energy playing tricks.
"What about that thing in the tree?" Blue asked. "Was that a hallucination? A dream?"
Glendower. It was Glendower. Glendower. Glendower.
Gansey couldn’t stop seeing it. He felt excited, or scared, or both.
"I don’t know," he said. He pulled out his keys and swatted Ronan’s hand away when he snatched for them. It would be a cold, cold day in a Virginia summer when Ronan was allowed to drive his car. He’d seen what Ronan did to his own car and the idea of what he’d do with a few dozen more horsepower at his command was unthinkable. "But I intend to find out. Come on, let’s go."
"Go? Where?" Blue asked.
"Prison," Gansey said agreeably. The other two boys were already jostling her toward the Pig. He felt high as a kite, euphoric. "The dentist. Someplace awful."
"I have to be back by …" But she trailed off. "I don’t know when. Sometime reasonable?"
"What’s reasonable?" Adam asked, and Ronan laughed.
"We’ll get you back before you turn into a pumpkin." Gansey was about to add Blue to the end of this statement, but it felt strange to call her that. "Is Blue a nickname?"
Beside the Camaro, Blue’s eyebrows got suddenly pointy.
Hurriedly, Gansey added, "Not that it’s not a cool name. Just that it’s … unusual."
"Weird-ass." This was from Ronan, but he said it as he chewed absently on one of the leather straps on his wrist, so the effect was minimized.
Blue replied, "Unfortunately, it’s nothing normal. Not like Gansey."
He smiled tolerantly at her. Rubbing his smooth chin with its recently assassinated chin hairs, he studied her. She barely came up to Ronan’s shoulder, but she was every bit as big as he, every bit as present. Gansey had a sense of incredible rightness, then, with everyone assembled by the Pig. Like Blue, not the ley line, was the missing piece that he’d been needing all these years, like the search for Glendower wasn’t truly underway until she was part of it. She was right like Ronan had been right, like Adam had been right, like Noah had been right. When each of them had joined him, he’d felt a rush of relief, and in the helicopter, he’d felt exactly the same way when he’d realized it was her voice on the recorder.
Of course, she could still walk away.
She won’t, he thought. She has to feel it, too.
He said, "I’ve always liked the name Jane."
Blue’s eyes widened. "Ja — what? Oh! No, no. You can’t just go around naming people other things because you don’t like their real name."
"I like Blue just fine," Gansey said. He didn’t believe she was really offended; her face didn’t look like it had at Nino’s when they’d first met, and her ears were turning pink. He thought, possibly, he was getting a little better at not offending her, although he couldn’t seem to stop teasing her. "Some of my favorite shirts are blue. However, I also like Jane."
"I’m not answering to that."
"I didn’t ask you to." Opening the door of the Camaro, he pushed the driver seat forward. Adam obediently climbed in the back.
Blue pointed at Gansey. "I’m not answering to that."
But she got in. Ronan retrieved his MP3 player from the BMW before getting into the passenger seat, and even though the Pig’s aftermarket CD player wasn’t really working, Ronan kicked the dash until a loudly obnoxious electronic track came on. Gansey tugged open the driver’s side door. Really, he should be making Ronan do his homework before Aglionby kicked him out. But instead, he shouted for Noah one last time and then climbed into the car.
"Your sense of what constitutes cool music is frightful," he told Ronan.
From the backseat, Blue shouted, "Does it always smell like gasoline?"
"Only when it’s running!" Gansey called back.
"Is this thing safe?"
"Safe as life."
Adam shouted, "Where are we going?"
"Gelato. Also, Blue’s going to tell us how she knew where the ley line was," Gansey said. "We’re going to strategize and decide what the next move is and we’re going to pick Blue’s brain about energy. Adam, you’re going to tell me everything you remember about time and ley lines, and Ronan, I want you to tell me again what you’d found out about dreamtime and song lines. Before we go back there again, I want to find out everything we can about making sure it’s safe."
But that wasn’t what happened. What happened was they drove to Harry’s and parked the Camaro next to an Audi and a Lexus and Gansey ordered flavors of gelato until the table wouldn’t hold any more bowls and Ronan convinced the staff to turn the overhead speakers up and Blue laughed for the first time at something Gansey said and they were loud and triumphant and kings of Henrietta, because they’d found the ley line and because it was starting, it was starting.
Chapter 25
Gansey, energized, set the boys out on Glendower-related tasks for the next three days, and to Adam’s surprise, Blue managed to come along for each of them. Though she never said as much, it was clear she was keeping them a secret, because she never contacted the boys by phone or met up with them near 300 Fox Way. Despite their lack of formal planning and psychic ability, they all had schedules largely dictated by school, so they managed to meet up to explore with remarkable precision.
Exploring, however, did not include going back to the strange wood. Instead, they spent time at the courthouse, finding out who owned the land underneath the raven. Looking up microfiche in the Henrietta library, trying to determine if the strange wood had a name. Discussing the history of Glendower. Marking the ley line on the map, measuring how wide it seemed to be. Tramping around in fields, turning over rocks, making circles of stones and measuring the energy that came from them.
They also ate a lot of cheap food from convenience stores; this was Blue’s fault. After that first triumphant gelato party, Blue insisted on paying for all of her food herself, which limited where they could eat. She despised when any of the boys tried to buy food for her, but she seemed to hate it the most when Gansey offered.
At one store, Gansey had started to pay for Blue’s potato chips and she’d snatched them away.
"I don’t want you to buy me food!" Blue said. "If you pay for it, then it’s like I’m … be — be —"
"Beholden to me?" Gansey suggested pleasantly.
"Don’t put words in my mouth."
"It was your word."
"You assumed it was my word. You can’t just go around assuming."
"But that is what you meant, isn’t it?"
She scowled. "I’m done with this conversation."
Then Blue had bought her own chips, though it was clear the price was dear to her and nothing to Gansey. Adam was proud of her.
After the first day, too, Noah came with them, and this also pleased Adam, because Noah and Blue got along well. Noah was a good bellwether for people. He was so shy and awkward and invisible that he could be easily ignored or made fun of. Blue was not only kind to him, but actually seemed to get along with him. Strangely enough, this relieved Adam, who felt like Blue’s presence among them was largely his doing. He now so rarely made decisions without Gansey or Ronan or Noah that he doubted his judgment when he acted alone.
The days slid easily by with the five of them doing everything but returning to the strange pool and the dreaming tree. Gansey kept saying, We need more information.
Adam told Blue, "I think he’s afraid of it."
He knew he was. The ever-pervasive vision he’d had in the tree kept creeping into his thoughts. Gansey dead, dying, because of him. Blue looking at Adam, shocked. Ronan, crouched beside Gansey, his face miserable, snarling, Are you happy now, Adam? Is this what you wanted?
Was it a dream? Was it a prophecy?
Gansey told Adam, "I don’t know what it is."
Historically, this phrase had been a very good way of losing Adam’s respect. The only way to counteract admitting to not knowing something was to immediately follow it with the words but I’ll find out. Adam didn’t give people much time to find out: only as much time as he’d give himself. But Gansey never let him down. They’d find out what it was. Only — Adam wasn’t sure, this time, that he wanted to know.
By the end of the second week, the boys had settled into a routine of waiting for Blue at the end of the school day, then setting off into whatever mission Gansey had assigned them. It was an overcast spring day that felt more like fall, cold and damp and steel gray.
While they waited, Ronan decided to finally take up the task of teaching Adam how to drive a stick shift. For several minutes, it seemed to be going well, as the BMW had an easy clutch, Ronan was brief and to the point with his instruction, and Adam was a quick study with no ego to get in the way.
From a safe vantage point beside the building, Gansey and Noah huddled and watched as Adam began to make ever quicker circles around the parking lot. Every so often their hoots were audible through the open windows of the BMW.
Then — it had to happen eventually — Adam stalled the car. It was a pretty magnificent beast, as far as stalls went, with lots of noise and death spasms on the part of the car. From the passenger seat, Ronan began to swear at Adam. It was a long, involved swear, using every forbidden word possible, often in compound-word form. As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn’t swear.