Ashley’s obliging giggle was cut off as Ronan’s bedroom door opened. A cloud like there would never be sun again crossed Declan’s face.
Ronan and Declan Lynch were undeniably brothers, with the same dark brown hair and sharp nose, but Declan was solid where Ronan was brittle. Declan’s wide jaw and smile said, Vote for me while Ronan’s buzzed head and thin mouth warned that this species was poisonous.
"Ronan," Declan said. On the phone with Adam earlier, he had asked, When will Ronan not be available? "I thought you had tennis."
"I did," Ronan replied.
There was a moment of silence, where Declan considered what he wanted to say in front of Ashley, and Ronan enjoyed the effect that awkward silence had on his brother. The two elder Lynch brothers — there were three total at Aglionby — had been at odds for as long as Adam had known them. Unlike most of the world, Gansey preferred Ronan to his elder brother Declan, and so the lines had been drawn. Adam suspected Gansey’s preference was because Ronan was earnest even if he was horrible, and with Gansey, honesty was golden.
Declan waited a second too long to speak, and Ronan crossed his arms over his chest. "You’ve got quite the guy here, Ashley. You’ll have a great night with him and then some other girl can have a great night with him tomorrow."
A fly buzzed against a windowpane far above their heads. Behind Ronan, his door, covered with photocopies of his speeding tickets, drifted closed.
Ashley’s mouth didn’t make an O so much as a sideways D. A second too late, Gansey punched Ronan in the arm.
"He’s sorry," Gansey said.
Ashley’s mouth was slowly closing. She blinked at the map of Wales and back to Ronan. He’d chosen his weapon well: only the truth, untempered by kindness.
"My brother is —" said Declan. But he didn’t finish. There wasn’t anything he could say that Ronan hadn’t already proven. He said, "We’re going now. Ronan, I think you need to reconsider your —" But again, he had no words to end the sentence. His brother had taken all the catchy ones.
Declan snagged Ashley’s hand, jerking her attention away and toward the apartment door.
"Declan," Gansey started.
"Don’t try to make this better," Declan warned. As he pulled Ashley out into the tiny stairwell and down the stairs, Adam heard the beginnings of damage control: He has problems, I told you, I tried to make sure he wouldn’t be here, he’s the one who found Dad, it messed him up, let’s go get seafood instead, don’t you think we look like lobster tonight? We do.
The moment the apartment door was closed, Gansey said, "Come on, Ronan."
Ronan’s expression was still incendiary. His code of honor left no room for infidelity, for casual relationships. It wasn’t that he didn’t condone them; he couldn’t understand them.
"So he’s a man-whore. It’s not your problem," Gansey said. Ronan was not really Gansey’s problem, either, in Adam’s opinion, but they’d had this argument before.
One of Ronan’s eyebrows was raised, sharp as a razor.
Gansey strapped his journal closed. "That doesn’t work on me. She had nothing to do with you and Declan." He said you and Declan like it was a physical object, something you could pick up and look underneath. "You treated her badly. You made the rest of us look bad."
Ronan looked chastened, but Adam knew better. Ronan wasn’t sorry for his behavior; he was only sorry that Gansey had been there to see him. What lived between the Lynch brothers was dark enough to hide anyone else’s feelings.
But surely Gansey knew that as well as Adam. He ran his thumb back and forth across his bottom lip, a habit he never seemed to notice and Adam never bothered to point out. Catching Adam’s gaze, he said, "Christ, now I feel dirty. Come on. Let’s go to Nino’s. We’ll get pizza and I’ll call that psychic and the whole goddamn world will sort itself out."
This was why Adam could forgive that shallow, glossy version of Gansey he’d first met. Because of his money and his good family name, because of his handsome smile and his easy laugh, because he liked people and (despite his fears to the contrary) they liked him back, Gansey could’ve had any and all of the friends that he wanted. Instead he had chosen the three of them, three guys who should’ve, for three different reasons, been friendless.
"I’m not coming," Noah said.
"Need some more alone time?" Ronan asked.
"Ronan," Gansey interjected. "Set your weapons to stun, will you? Noah, we won’t make you eat. Adam?"
Adam glanced up, distracted. His mind had wandered from Ronan’s bad behavior to Ashley’s interest in the journal, and he was wondering if it was more than the ordinary curiosity people possessed when faced with Gansey and his obsessive accessories. He knew Gansey would find him overly suspicious, unnecessarily propiertary of a search Gansey was more than willing to share with most people.
But Gansey and Adam sought Glendower for different reasons. Gansey longed for him like Arthur longed for the grail, drawn by a desperate but nebulous need to be useful to the world, to make sure his life meant something beyond champagne parties and white collars, by some complicated longing to settle an argument that waged deep inside himself.
Adam, on the other hand, needed that royal favor.
And that meant they needed to be the ones to wake Glendower. They needed to be the ones to find him first.
"Parrish," Gansey repeated. "Come on."
Adam made a face. He felt it would take more than pizza to improve Ronan’s character.
But Gansey was already grabbing the car keys to the Pig and stepping around his miniature Henrietta. Even though Ronan was snarling and Noah was sighing and Adam was hesitating, he didn’t turn to verify that they were coming. He knew they were. In three different ways, he’d earned them all days or weeks or months before, and when it came to it, they’d all follow him anywhere.
"Excelsior," said Gansey, and shut the door behind them.
Chapter 5
Barrington Whelk was feeling less than sprightly as he slouched down the hall of Whitman House, the Aglionby admin building. It was five P.M., the school day well over, and he’d only left his town house in order to pick up homework that had to be graded before the next day. Afternoon light spilled in the tall, many-paned windows to his left; on the right was a hum of voices from the staff offices. These old buildings looked like museums at this time of day.
"Barrington, I thought you were out today. You look terrible. You sick?"
Whelk didn’t immediately formulate an answer. For all intents and purposes, he was still out. The question asker was Jonah Milo, the well-scrubbed eleventh- and twelfth-grade English teacher. Despite an affinity for plaid and thin-legged corduroy pants, Milo wasn’t unbearable, but Whelk didn’t care to discuss his absence from class this morning with him. St. Mark’s Eve was beginning to have a sheen of tradition for him, one that involved spending most of the night getting smashed before falling asleep on his kitchenette floor just before dawn. This year he’d had the forethought to request St. Mark’s Day off. Teaching Latin to Aglionby boys was punishment enough. Teaching it with a hangover was excruciating.
Finally, Whelk merely held up the grubby stack of handwritten homework assignments as answer. Milo’s widened his eyes at the sight of the name written on the topmost paper.
"Ronan Lynch! Is that his homework?"
Flipping the stack around to read the name on the front, Whelk agreed that it was. As he did, a few boys on their way to crew team practice crashed past, pushing him into Milo. The students probably didn’t even realize they were being disrespectful; Whelk was barely older than they were, and his dramatically large features made him look younger. It was still easy to mistake him for one of the students.
Milo disentangled himself from Whelk. "How do you get him to come to class?"
The mere mention of Ronan Lynch’s name had scraped something raw inside Whelk. Because it was never Ronan by himself, it was Ronan as part of the inseparable threesome: Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey, and Adam Parrish. All of the boys in his class were affluent, confident, arrogant, but the three of them, more than anyone else, reminded him of what he’d lost.
Whelk struggled to remember if Ronan had ever missed a class with him. The days of the school year blurred together, one long and unending day that began with Whelk parking his crappy car next to the beautiful Aglionby cars, shouldering his way past laughing, thoughtless boys, standing in front of a room of students who were glassy-eyed at best and derisive at worst. And at the end of the day Whelk, alone and haunted, never, ever able to forget that he was once one of them.
When did this become my life?
Whelk shrugged. "I don’t remember him skipping."
"You have him with Gansey, though, don’t you?" Milo asked. "That explains it. Those two are tight as ticks."
It was a strange, old expression, one that Whelk hadn’t heard since his own days at Aglionby, when he, too, had been tight as ticks with his roommate Czerny. He felt a hollowness inside him, like he was hungry, like he should’ve stayed home and drank more to commemorate this miserable day.
He swam back to the present, looking at the attendance sheet the substitute teacher had left. "Ronan was in class today, but Gansey wasn’t. Not in mine, anyway."
"Oh, that’s probably because of that St. Mark’s Day hoopla he was talking about," Milo said.
This got Whelk’s attention. No one knew that today was St. Mark’s Day. No one celebrated St. Mark’s Day, not even St. Mark’s mother. Only Whelk and Czerny, treasure hunters and troublemakers, cared about its existence.
Whelk said, "Beg pardon?"
"I don’t know what all’s going on," Milo replied. One of the other teachers said hi to him on the way out of the staff room, and Milo looked over his shoulder to reply. Whelk imagined grabbing Milo’s arm, forcing his attention back his way. It took all of his effort to wait instead. Turning back around, Milo seemed to sense Whelk’s interest, because he added, "He hasn’t talked to you about it? He wouldn’t shut up about it yesterday. It’s that ley line stuff he’s always on about."
Ley line.
If no one knew about St. Mark’s Day, truly no one knew about ley lines. Certainly no one in Henrietta, Virginia. Certainly not one of Aglionby’s richest pupils. Definitely not in conjunction with St. Mark’s Day. This was Whelk’s quest, Whelk’s treasure, Whelk’s teen years. Why was Richard Gansey III talking about it?
With the words ley line spoken aloud, a memory was conjured: Whelk in a dense wood, sweat collected on his upper lip. He was seventeen and shivering. Every time his heart beat, red lines streaked in the corners of his vision, the trees darkening with his pulse. It made the leaves seem like they were all moving, though there was no wind. Czerny was on the ground. Not dead, but dying. His legs still pedaled on the uneven surface beside his red car, making drifts of fallen leaves behind him. His face was just … done. In Whelk’s head, unearthly voices hissed and whispered, words blurred and stretched together.
"Some sort of energy source or something," Milo said.
Whelk was suddenly afraid that Milo could see the memory on him, could hear the inexplicable voices in his head, incomprehensible but nonetheless present ever since that failed day.
Whelk schooled his features, though what he was really thinking was: If someone else is looking here, I must have been right. It must be here.
"What did he say he was doing with the ley line?" he asked with studied calm.
"I don’t know. Ask him about it. I’m sure he’d love to talk your ear off about it." Milo looked over his shoulder as the secretary joined them in the hall, her bag on her arm, her jacket in her hand. Her eyeliner was smudged after a long day in the office.
"We talking about Gansey the third and his New Age obsession?" the secretary asked. She had a pencil stuck in her hair to keep it up and Whelk stared at the stray strands that wound up around the lead. It was clear to him from the way she stood that she secretly found Milo attractive, despite the plaid and the corduroy and the beard. She asked, "Do you know how much Gansey senior is worth? I wonder if he knows what his kid spends all his time on. Man, sometimes these entitled little bastards make me want to slit my wrists. Jonah, are you coming with me for a smoke break or not?"
"I quit," said Milo. He cast a quick, uneasy glance from the secretary to Whelk, and Whelk knew he was thinking about how much Whelk’s father had been worth, once upon a time, and how little he was worth now, long after the trials had left the front pages of the newspapers. All the junior faculty and the admin staff hated the Aglionby boys, hated them for what they had and what they stood for, and Whelk knew they were all secretly pleased that he had fallen down among their ranks.
"How about you, Barry?" the secretary asked. Then she answered her own question: "No, you don’t smoke, you’re too pretty for that. Oh well, I’ll go myself."
Milo turned to go as well.
"Feel better," he said kindly, although Whelk had never said he was sick.
The voices in Whelk’s head were a roar, but for once, his own thoughts had drowned them out.
"I think I do already," said Whelk.
It was possible that Czerny’s death wasn’t for nothing after all.
Chapter 6
Blue wouldn’t really describe herself as a waitress. After all, she also taught penmanship to third graders, made wreaths for the Society for Ladies of Perpetual Health, walked dogs that belonged to inhabitants of Henrietta’s poshest condo complex, and replaced bedding plants for the elderly ladies of their neighborhood. Really, being a waitress at Nino’s was the least of things she did. But the hours were flexible, it was the most legitimate-looking entry on her already bizarre résumé, and it certainly paid the best.