Of course, Gansey was not on time for his reading. The appointment time came and went. No Gansey. And, perhaps more disappointingly, no phone call from Adam. Blue pulled aside the curtains to glance up and down the street, but there was nothing but normal after-work traffic. Maura made excuses.
“Maybe he wrote down the wrong time,” she said.
Blue didn’t think he’d written down the wrong time.
Ten more minutes slouched by. Maura said, “Maybe he had car trouble.”
Blue didn’t think he had car trouble.
Calla retrieved the novel she’d been reading and started upstairs. Her voice carried down toward them. “That reminds me. You need to get that belt looked at on the Ford. I see a breakdown in your future. Next to that sketchy furniture store. A very ugly man with a cell phone will stop and be overly helpful.”
It was possible she really did see a breakdown in Maura’s future, but it was also possible she was being hyperbolic. In any case, Maura made a note on the calendar.
“Maybe I accidentally told him tomorrow afternoon instead of today,”
Maura said.
Persephone murmured, “That is always possible,” and said, “Perhaps I will make a pie.” Blue looked anxiously to Persephone. Pie making was a lengthy and loving process, and Persephone did not like to be interrupted during it. She wouldn’t begin a pie if she really thought Gansey’s arrival would interrupt her.
Maura eyed Persephone as well before retrieving a bag of yellow squash and a stick of butter from the fridge. Now Blue knew precisely how the rest
of the day was going to go. Persephone would make something sweet. Maura would make something with butter. Eventually, Calla would reappear and make something involving sausage or bacon. It was how every evening went if a meal hadn’t been planned in advance.
Blue didn’t think that Maura had told Gansey tomorrow afternoon instead of today. What she thought was that Gansey had looked at the clock on his Mercedes-Benz’s dashboard or Aston Martin’s radio and had decided that the reading interfered with his rock climbing or racquetball. And then he’d blown it off, just like Adam had blown off calling her. She couldn’t really be surprised. They’d done exactly what she expected from raven boys.
Just as Blue was getting ready to sulk upstairs with her needles and her homework, Orla howled from the Phone Room, her wordless wail eventually resolving itself into words: “There is a 1973 Camaro in front of the house! It matches my nails!”
The last time Blue had seen Orla’s nails, they’d been a complicated paisley pattern. She wasn’t exactly sure what a 1973 Camaro looked like, but she was sure that if it was paisley, it must be impressive. She was also certain that Orla must be on the phone, or she would’ve been down here ogling.
“Well, here we go,” Maura said, abandoning her squash in the sink. Calla reappeared in the kitchen, exchanging a sharp look with Persephone.
Blue’s stomach dropped to her feet.
Gansey. That’s all there is.
The doorbell rang.
“Are you ready?” Calla asked Blue.
Gansey was the boy she either killed or fell in love with. Or both. There was no being ready. There just was this: Maura opening the door.
There were three boys in the doorway, backlit by the evening sun as Neeve had been so many weeks ago. Three sets of shoulders: one square, one built, one wiry.
“Sorry that I’m late,” said the boy in front, with the square shoulders. The scent of mint rolled in with him, just as it had in the churchyard. “Will it be a
problem?”
Blue knew that voice.
She reached for the railing of the stairs to keep her balance as President Cell Phone stepped into the hallway.
Oh no. Not him. All this time she’d been wondering how Gansey might
die and it turned out she was going to strangle him. At Nino’s, the blare of the music had drowned out the finer points of his voice and the odor of garlic had overwhelmed the scent of mint.
But now that she put two and two together, it seemed obvious.
In their hallway, he looked slightly less presidential, but only because the heat had made him messily roll up the sleeves of his button-down shirt and remove his tie. His dusty brown hair was mussed, too, in that way that Virginia warmth always managed. But the watch was still there, large enough to knock out bank robbers, and he still had that handsome glow. The glow that meant that not only had he never been poor, but his father hadn’t, nor his father’s father, nor his father’s father’s father. She couldn’t tell if he was actually tremendously good-looking or merely tremendously wealthy.
Perhaps they were the same thing.
Gansey. This was Gansey.
And that meant that the journal belonged to him.
That meant that Adam belonged to him.
“Well,” Maura said. It was clear her curiosity overruled all rules of scheduling. “It’s not too late. Come into the reading room. Can I get some names?”
Because of course President Cell Phone had brought most of his posse from Nino’s, everyone but the smudgy boy. They filled the hallway to overflowing, somehow, the three of them, loud and male and so comfortable with one another that they allowed no one else to be comfortable with them.
They were a pack of sleek animals armored with their watches and their Top- Siders and the expensive cut of their uniforms. Even the sharp boy’s tattoo, cutting up the knobs of his spine above his collar, was a weapon, somehow slicing at Blue.
“Gansey,” President Cell Phone said again, pointing to himself. “Adam.
Ronan. Where do you want us? There?”
He pointed a hand toward the reading room, palm flat, like he was directing traffic.
“In there,” Maura agreed. “This is my daughter, by the way. She’ll be present for the reading, if you don’t mind.”
Gansey’s eyes found Blue. He’d been smiling politely, but now his face froze in the middle of the smile.
“Hi, again,” he said. “This is awkward.”
“You’ve met?” Maura shot a poisonous look at Blue. Blue felt unfairly persecuted.
“Yes,” Gansey replied, with dignity. “We had a discussion about alternative professions for women. I didn’t realize she was your daughter.
Adam?”
He shot a nearly as poisonous look at Adam, whose eyes were large.
Adam was the only one not in uniform, and his palm was spread across his chest as if his fingers would cover his faded Coca-Cola T-shirt.
“I didn’t know, either!” Adam said. If Blue had known he was coming, she might not have worn her baby blue top with the feathers sewn into the collar. He was staring at it. To Blue, he said, again, “I didn’t know, I swear.”
“What happened to your face?” Blue asked.
Adam shrugged ruefully. Either he or Ronan smelled like a parking garage. His voice was self-deprecating. “Do you think it makes me look tougher?”
What it did was make him look was more fragile and dirty, somehow, like a teacup unearthed from the soil, but Blue didn’t say that.
Ronan said, “It makes you look like a loser.”
“Ronan,” said Gansey.
“I need everyone to sit down!” shouted Maura.
It was such an alarming thing to hear Maura shout that nearly everyone did, sinking or throwing themselves into the mismatched furniture in the reading room. Adam rubbed a hand over his cheekbone as if he could remove the bruise from it. Gansey sat in an armchair at the head of the table, his hands stretched over either arm like chairman of the board, one eyebrow raised as he looked at Steve Martin’s framed face.
Only Calla and Ronan remained standing, and they regarded each other warily.
It still felt like there had never been this many people in the house, which was utterly untrue. It was possibly true that there had never been this many men in the house before. Certainly never this many raven boys.
Blue felt as if their very presence robbed something from her. They’d made her family dingy just by coming here.
“It is,” Maura said, “too damn loud in here.” The way she said it, though, holding one finger to her pulse, just under her jawbone, told Blue that it was not their voices that were too loud. It was something she was hearing inside
her head. Persephone, too, was wincing.
“Do I need to leave?” Blue asked, though that was the last thing she wanted.
Gansey, misunderstanding, immediately asked her, “Why would you have to leave?”
“She makes things louder for us,” Maura said. She was frowning over all of them as if she was trying to make sense of it. “And you three are … very loud already.”
Blue’s skin was hot. She could imagine herself heating like an electrical conduit, sparks from all parties traveling through her. What could these raven boys have going on under their skins that could deafen her mother? Was it all of them in conjunction, or was it merely Gansey, his energy screaming out the count-down to his death?
“What do you mean, very loud?” Gansey asked. He was, Blue thought, very clearly the ringleader of this little pack. They all kept looking to him for their cues of how to interpret the situation.
“I mean that there is something about your energies that is very …”
Maura trailed off, losing interest in her own explanation. She turned to Persephone. Blue recognized the look exchanged between them. It was, What is going on? “How do we even do this?”
The way she asked it, distracted and vague, made Blue’s stomach clench with nerves. Her mother was undone. For the second time, a reading seemed to be pushing her to a place she wasn’t comfortable with.
“One at a time?” Persephone suggested, her voice nearly inaudible.
Calla said, “One-offs. You’ll have to, or some of them will have to leave.
They’re just too noisy.”
Adam and Gansey glanced at each other. Ronan picked at the leather straps around his wrist.
“What is a one-off?” Gansey asked. “How is it different from a regular reading?”
Calla spoke to Maura as if he hadn’t said anything at all. “It doesn’t matter what they want. It is what it is. Take it or leave it.”
Maura’s finger was still pressed under her jaw. She told Gansey, “A one- off is where you each draw just one card from a deck of tarot cards, and we interpret.”
Gansey and Adam shared some sort of private conversation with their
eyes. It was the sort of thing Blue was used to transpiring between her mother and Persephone or Calla, and she hadn’t thought anyone else really capable of it. It also made her feel strangely jealous; she wanted something like that, a bond strong enough to transcend words.
Adam’s head jerked a nod in response to whatever Gansey’s unspoken statement might have been, and Gansey said, “Whatever you’re comfortable with.”
Persephone and Maura momentarily debated, though it didn’t seem like they’d be comfortable with anything at the moment.
“Wait,” Persephone said as Maura produced her deck of cards. “Have Blue deal it.”
It wasn’t the first time Blue had been asked to deal the cards. Sometimes, at difficult or important readings, the women wanted Blue to touch the deck first, to hone whatever messages the cards might contain. This time, she was overly aware of the boys’ attention as she took the cards from her mother. For the boys’ benefit, she shuffled the deck in a slightly theatrical fashion, moving cards from one hand to another. She was very good at card tricks that didn’t involve any psychic talent whatsoever. As the boys, impressed, watched the cards fly back and forth, Blue mused that she would make an excellent fake psychic.
No one volunteered immediately to go first, so she offered the deck to Adam. He met her gaze and held it for a moment. There was something forceful and intentional about the gesture, more aggressive than he’d been the night he approached her.
Selecting a card, Adam presented it to Maura.
“Two of swords,” she said. Blue was over-aware of her mother’s Henrietta accent, suddenly rural and uneducated sounding to her ear. Was that how Blue sounded?
Maura continued, “You’re avoiding a hard choice. Acting by not acting.
You’re ambitious, but you feel like someone’s asking something of you you’re not willing to give. Asking you to compromise your principles.
Someone close to you, I think. Your father?”
“Brother, I think,” Persephone said.
“I don’t have a brother, ma’am,” Adam replied. But Blue saw his eyes dart to Gansey.
“Do you want to ask a question?” Maura asked.
Adam considered. “What’s the right choice?”
Maura and Persephone conferred. Maura replied, “There isn’t a right one.
Just one you can live with. There might be a third option that will suit you better, but right now, you’re not seeing it because you’re so involved with the other two. I’d guess from what I’m seeing that any other path would have to do with you going outside those other two options and making your own option. I’m also sensing you’re a very analytical thinker. You’ve spent a lot of time learning to ignore your emotions, but I don’t think this is a time for that.”
“Thanks,” Adam said. It wasn’t quite the right thing to say, but it wasn’t entirely wrong, either. Blue liked how polite he was. It seemed different than Gansey’s politeness. When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away.
It seemed right to leave Gansey for last, so Blue moved on to Ronan, though she was a little afraid of him. Something about him dripped venom, even though he hadn’t spoken. Worst of all, in Blue’s opinion, was that there was something about his antagonism that made her want to court his favor, to earn his approval. The approval of someone like him, who clearly cared for no one, seemed like it would be worth more.
To offer the deck to Ronan, Blue had to stand, because he still stood by the doorway near Calla. They looked ready to box.
When Blue fanned the cards, he scanned the women in the room and said, “I’m not taking one. Tell me something true first.”
“Beg your pardon?” Calla said stiffly, answering for Maura.
Ronan’s voice was glass, cold and brittle. “Everything you’ve told him could apply to anybody. Anybody with a pulse has doubts. Anybody alive has argued with their brother or their father. Tell me something no one else can tell me. Don’t toss a playing card at me and spoon feed me some Jungian bullshit. Tell me something specific.”
Blue’s eyes narrowed. Persephone stuck out her tongue slightly, a habit born of uncertainty, not impudence. Maura shifted with annoyance. “We don’t do specif —”
Calla interrupted. “A secret killed your father and you know what it was.”
The room went deadly silent. Both Persephone and Maura were staring at Calla. Gansey and Adam were staring at Ronan. Blue was staring at Calla’s hand.
Maura often called on Calla to do joint tarot readings, and Persephone sometimes called on her to interpret her dreams, but very rarely did anyone ask Calla to use one of her strangest gifts: psychometry. Calla had an uncanny ability to hold an object and sense its origin, feel its owner’s thoughts, and see places the thing had been.
Now, Calla pulled her hand away; she’d reached to touch Ronan’s tattoo right where it met his collar. His face was turned just slightly, looking to where her fingers had been.
There might have only been Ronan and Calla in the room. He was a head taller than her already, but he looked young beside her, like a lanky wildcat not yet up to weight. She was a lioness.
She hissed, “What are you?”
Ronan’s smile chilled Blue. There was something empty in it.
“Ronan?” Gansey asked, concern in his voice.
“I’m waiting in the car.” Without further comment, Ronan left, slamming the door hard enough that the dishes in the kitchen rattled.
Gansey turned an accusatory gaze on Calla. “His father’s dead.”
“I know,” Calla said. Her eyes were slits.
Gansey’s voice was cordial enough to pass straight through polite and on to rude. “I don’t know how you found out, but that’s a pretty lousy thing to throw at a kid.”
“At a snake, you mean,” Calla snarled back. “And what is it you came for, if you didn’t believe we could do what we’re charging you for? He asked for a specific. I gave him a specific. I’m sorry it wasn’t puppies.”
“Calla,” Maura said, at the same time that Adam said, “Gansey.”
Adam murmured something directly into Gansey’s ear and then leaned back. A bone moved at Gansey’s jawline. Blue saw him shift back into President Cell Phone; she hadn’t been aware, before, that he’d been anything else. Now she wished she’d been paying better attention, so she could’ve seen what was different about him.
Gansey said, “I’m sorry. Ronan is blunt, and he wasn’t comfortable coming here in the first place. I wasn’t trying to insinuate that you were less than genuine. Can we continue?”
He sounded so old, Blue thought. So formal in comparison to the other boys he’d brought. There was something intensely discomfiting about him, akin to how she felt compelled to impress Ronan. Something about Gansey
made her feel so strongly other that it was as if she had to guard her emotions against him. She could not like him, or whatever it was about these boys that drowned out her mother’s psychic abilities and filled the room to overflowing would overwhelm her.
“You’re fine,” Maura said, though she looked at glowering Calla when she said it.
As Blue moved to where Gansey sat, she caught a glimpse of his car at the curb: a flash of impossible orange, the sort of orange Orla would definitely paint her nails. It was not exactly what she’d have expected an Aglionby boy to drive — they liked new, shiny things, and this was an old, shiny thing — but it was clearly a raven boy’s car nonetheless. And just then, Blue had a falling sensation, like things were happening too fast for her to properly absorb them. There was something odd and complicated about all of these boys, Blue thought — odd and complicated in the way that the journal was odd and complicated. Their lives were somehow a web, and she had somehow managed to do something to get herself stuck in the very edge of it.
Whether that something had been done in the past or was going to be done in the future seemed irrelevant. In this room with Maura and Calla and Persephone, time felt circular.
She stopped in front of Gansey. This close, she again caught the scent of mint, and that made Blue’s heart trip unsteadily.
Gansey looked down at the fanned deck of cards in her hands. When she saw him like that, she saw the bend of his shoulders and the back of his head, and she piercingly remembered his spirit, the boy she’d been afraid she’d fall in love with. That shade hadn’t worn any of the effortless, breezy confidence of this raven boy in front of her.
What happens to you, Gansey? she wondered. When do you become that person?
Gansey looked up at her, and there was a crease between his eyebrows. “I don’t know how to choose. Could you pick a card for me? Will that work?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Blue saw Adam shifting in his chair, frowning.
Persephone answered from behind Blue. “If you want it to.”
“It’s about intention,” Maura added.
“I want you to,” he said. “Please.”
Blue fanned the cards across the table; they slithered loosely over the
finish. She let her fingers float above them. Once, Maura had told her that the correct cards sometimes felt warm or tingly when her fingers were near them.
For Blue, of course, each card felt identical. One, however, had slid farther than the others, and that was the one she chose.
As she flipped it over, she let out a little helpless laugh.
The page of cups looked back at Blue with her own face. It felt like someone was laughing at her, but she had no one to blame for the selection of the card but herself.
When Maura saw it, her voice went still and remote. “Not that one. Make him choose another.”
“Maura,” said Persephone mildly, but Maura just waved her hand,
dismissing her.
“Another one,” she insisted.
“What’s wrong with that one?” Gansey asked.
“It has Blue’s energy on it,” Maura said. “It wasn’t meant to be yours.
You’ll have to pick it yourself.”
Persephone moved her mouth back and forth, but she didn’t say anything.
Blue replaced the card and shuffled the deck with less drama than before.
When she offered the cards to him, Gansey turned his face away like he was pulling a raffle winner. His fingers grazed the edges of the cards, contemplative. He selected one, then flipped it over to show the room.
It was the page of cups.
He looked at the face on the card, and then at Blue’s face, and Blue knew that he’d seen the similarity.
Maura leaned forward and snatched the card from his fingers. “Pick another one.”
“Now why?” Gansey said. “What’s wrong with that card? What does it mean?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Maura replied. “It’s just not yours.”
Now, for the first time, Blue saw an edge of true aggravation to Gansey’s expression, and it made her like him a little better. So there was something below the raven boy exterior, maybe. Flippantly, Gansey snagged another card, clearly finished with this exercise. With flourish, he turned the card
over and slapped it on the table.
Blue swallowed.
Maura said, “That’s your card.”
On the card on the table was a black knight astride a white horse. The knight’s helmet was lifted so that it was obvious that his face was a bare skull dominated by eyeless sockets. The sun set beyond him, and below his horse’s hooves lay a corpse.
Outside the windows behind them, a breeze hissed audibly through the trees.
“Death.” Gansey read the bottom of the card. He didn’t sound surprised or alarmed. He just read the word like he would read eggs or Cincinnati.
“Great job, Maura,” Calla said. Her arms were crossed firmly over her chest. “You going to interpret that for the kid?”
“Possibly we should just give him a refund,” Persephone suggested, although Gansey had not paid yet.
“I thought that psychics didn’t predict death,” Adam said quietly. “I read that the Death card was only symbolic.”
Maura and Calla and Persephone all made vague noises. Blue, utterly aware of the truth of Gansey’s fate, felt ill. Aglionby boy or not, he was only her age, and he obviously had friends who cared for him and a life that involved a very orange car, and it was hideous to know he’d be dead in less than twelve months.
“Actually,” Gansey said, “I don’t care about that.”
Every pair of eyes in the room was on him as he stood the card on its end to study it.
“I mean, the cards are very interesting,” he said. He said the cards are very interesting like someone would say this is very interesting to a very strange sort of cake that they didn’t quite want to finish. “And I don’t want to discount what you do. But I didn’t really come here to have my future told to me. I’m quite okay with finding that out for myself.”
He cast a quick glance at Calla at this, obviously realizing that he was walking a fine line between “polite” and “Ronan.”
“Really, I came because I was hoping to ask you a question about energy,” Gansey continued. “I know you deal with energy work, and I’ve been trying to find a ley line I think is near Henrietta. Do you know anything
about that?”
The journal!
“Ley line?” Maura repeated. “Maybe. I don’t know if I know it by that name. What is it?”
Blue was a little stunned. She’d always thought her mother was the most truthful person around.
“They’re straight energy lines that crisscross the globe,” Gansey explained. “They’re supposed to connect major spiritual places. Adam thought you might know about them because you deal with energy.”
It was obvious that he meant the corpse road, but Maura didn’t offer any information. She just pressed her lips together and looked at Persephone and Calla. “Does that ring a bell to you two?”
Persephone pointed a finger straight in the air and then said, “I forgot about my pie crust.”
She withdrew from the room. Calla said, “I’d have to think about it. I’m not good with specifics.”
There was a faint, amused smile on Gansey’s face that meant he knew they were lying. It was a strangely wise expression; once again Blue got the sense that he seemed older than the boys he’d brought with him.
“I’ll look into it,” Maura said. “If you leave your number, I can give you a call if I find out anything about it.”
Gansey replied, coolly polite, “Oh, that’s quite all right. How much for the reading?”
Standing, Maura said, “Oh, just twenty.”
Blue thought this was criminal. Gansey clearly had spent more than twenty dollars on the laces for his Top-Siders.
He frowned at Maura over the top of his open wallet. There were a lot of bills in it. They could’ve been ones, but Blue doubted it. She could also see his driver’s license through a clear window; not closely enough to make out the details, but close enough to see that the name printed on it looked a lot
longer than just Gansey. “Twenty?”
“Each,” Blue added.
Calla coughed into her first.
Gansey’s face cleared and he handed Maura sixty dollars. Quite obviously this was more what he’d been expecting to pay, and now the world was right again.
It was Adam, though, who Blue noticed then. He was looking at her, sharp-eyed, and she felt transparent and guilty. Not only about overcharging, but about Maura’s lie. Blue had seen Gansey’s spirit walk the corpse road and she had known his name before he walked in this door. Like her mother,
she’d said nothing. So she was complicit.
“I’ll show you out,” Maura said. She was clearly eager to see them on the other side of the door. For a moment, it looked as if Gansey felt the same, but then he stopped. He paid an undue amount of attention to his wallet as he folded it and reinserted it into his pocket, and then he looked up to Maura and made a firm line of his mouth.
“Look, we’re all adults here,” he started.
Calla made a face as if she disagreed.
Gansey squared his shoulders and continued, “So I think we deserve the truth. Tell me you know something but you don’t want to help me, if that’s what’s going on, but don’t lie to me.”
It was a brave thing to say, or an arrogant one, or maybe there was not enough of a difference between the two things to matter. Every head in the room swung to Maura.
She said, “I know something but I don’t want to help you.”
For the second time that day, Calla looked delighted. Blue’s mouth was open. She closed it.
Gansey, however, just nodded, no more or less distressed than when Blue had retorted back to him at the restaurant. “All right, then. No, no, you can stay put. We’ll let ourselves out.”
And just like that, they did, Adam sending Blue a last look that she couldn’t easily interpret. A second later, the Camaro revved high, and the tires squealed out Gansey’s true feelings. Then the house was quiet. It was a sucked-out silence, like the raven boys had taken all the sound in the neighborhood with them.
Blue whirled on her mother. “Mom.” She was going to say something else, but all that she could manage was again, louder, “Mom!”
“Maura,” Calla said, “that was very rude.” Then she added, “I liked it.”
Maura turned to Blue as if Calla hadn’t spoken. “I don’t want you to ever see him again.”
Indignant, Blue cried, “Whatever happened to ‘children should never be given orders’?”
“That was before Gansey.” Maura flipped around the Death card, giving Blue a long time to stare at the skull inside the helmet. “This is the same as me telling you not to walk in front of a bus.”
Several comebacks riffled through Blue’s head before she found one that
she wanted. “Why? Neeve didn’t see me on the corpse road. I’m not going to die in the next year.”
“First of all, the corpse road is a promise, not a guarantee,” Maura replied. “Second of all, there are other terrible fates besides death. Shall we talk about dismemberment? Paralysis? Endless psychological trauma? There is something really wrong with those boys. When your mother says don’t walk in front of a bus, she has a good reason.”
From the kitchen, Persephone’s soft voice called, “If someone had stopped you from walking in front of a bus, Maura, Blue wouldn’t be here.”
Maura shot a frown in her direction, then swept her hand across the reading table as if she were clearing it of crumbs. “The best-case scenario here is that you make friends with a boy who’s going to die.”
“Ah,” said Calla, in a very, very knowing way. “Now I see.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” her mother said.
“I already have. And I say again, ‘ah.’”
Maura sneered uncharacteristically, and then asked Calla, “What did you see when you touched that other boy? The raven boy?”
“They’re all raven boys,” Blue said.
Her mother shook her head. “No, he’s more raven than the others.”
Calla rubbed her fingertips together, as if she was wiping the memory of Ronan’s tattoo from them. “It’s like scrying into that weird space. There’s so much coming out of him, it shouldn’t be possible. Do you remember that woman who came in who was pregnant with quadruplets? It was like that, but
worse.”
“He’s pregnant?” Blue asked.
“He’s creating,” Calla said. “That space is creating, too. I don’t know how to say it any better than that.”
Blue wondered what sort of creating they meant. She was always creating things — taking old things and cutting them up and making them better things. Taking things that already existed and transforming them into something else. This, she felt, was what most people meant when they called someone creative.
But she suspected that wasn’t how Calla meant it. She suspected that what Calla meant was the true meaning of creative: to make a thing where before there was none.
Maura caught Blue’s expression. She said, “I’ve never told you to do
anything before, Blue. But I’m telling you now. Stay away from them.”
