It’s me,” said Gansey.
He turned around so that he was facing his car. The Camaro’s bright orange hood was up, more as a symbol of defeat than for any practical use.
Adam, friend of cars everywhere, might have been able to determine what was wrong with it this time, but Gansey certainly couldn’t. He’d managed to roll to a stop about four feet off the interstate and now the car’s fat tires sat off-kilter on top of lumpy tufts of valley grass. A semitruck roared by without pause; the Camaro rocked in its wake.
On the other end of the phone, his roommate Ronan Lynch replied, “You missed World Hist. I thought you were dead in a ditch.”
Gansey flipped his wrist around to examine his watch. He had missed a lot more than World History. It was eleven o’clock, and already the chilliness of last night seemed improbable. A gnat was stuck in the perspiration on his skin next to the watch-band; he flicked it off. Gansey had camped, once, when he was younger. It had involved tents. Sleeping bags. An idling Range Rover parked nearby for when he and his father lost interest. As an experience, it had not been anything like last night.
He asked, “Did you get notes for me?”
“No,” Ronan replied. “I thought you were dead in a ditch.”
Gansey blew grit off his lips and readjusted the phone against his cheek.
He would’ve gotten notes for Ronan. “The Pig stopped. Come get me.”
A sedan slowed as it passed, the occupants staring out the window.
Gansey was not an unpleasant-looking boy and the Camaro was not too hard on the eyes, either, but this attention had less to do with comeliness and more to do with the novelty of an Aglionby boy broken down by the side of the road in an impudently orange car. Gansey was well aware that there was
nothing little Henrietta, Virginia, preferred over seeing humiliating things happen to Aglionby boys, unless it was seeing humiliating things happen to
their families.
Ronan said, “Come on, man.”
“It’s not like you’re going to class. You know what, it’ll be lunch break anyway.” Then he added, perfunctory, “Please.”
Ronan was silent for a long moment. He was good at silence; he knew it made people uncomfortable. But Gansey was immune from long exposure.
He leaned into the car to see if he had any food in the glove box while he waited for Ronan to speak. Next to an EpiPen, there was a stick of beef jerky, but the jerky had expired two years ago. Possibly it had been there when he’d
bought the car.
“Where are you?” Ronan asked, finally.
“Next to the Henrietta sign on 64. Bring me a burger. And a few gallons of gas.” The car had not run out of gas, but it couldn’t hurt.
Ronan’s voice was acidic. “Gansey.”
“Bring Adam, too.”
Ronan hung up. Gansey stripped off his sweater and threw it in the back of the Camaro. The tiny back of the car was a cluttered marriage of everyday things — a chemistry textbook, a Frappuccino-stained notebook, a half- zipped CD binder with naked discs slithering out across the seat — and the supplies he’d acquired during his eighteen months in Henrietta. Rumpled maps, computer printouts, ever-present journal, flashlight, willow stick.
When Gansey plucked a digital recorder out of the mess, a pizza receipt (one large deep-dish, half sausage, half avocado) fluttered to the seat, joining a half-dozen receipts identical except for the date.
All night he’d sat outside the monstrously modern Church of the Holy Redeemer, recorder running, ears straining, waiting for — something. The atmosphere had been less than magical. Possibly not the best place to try to make contact with the future dead, but Gansey had maintained high hopes for the power of St. Mark’s Eve. It wasn’t that he’d expected to see the dead. All of the sources said that church watchers had to possess “the second sight” and Gansey barely possessed first sight before he put his contacts in. He’d just hoped for — Something. And that was what he had gotten. He just wasn’t quite sure what that something was yet.
The digital recorder in hand, Gansey settled himself against the rear tire to wait, letting the car shield him from the buffeting of passing vehicles. On the other side of the guard rail, a greening field stretched out and down to the trees. Beyond it all rose the mysterious blue crest of the mountains.
On the dusty toe of his shoe, Gansey drew the arcing shape of the promised supernatural energy line that had led him here. As the mountain breeze rushed over his ears, it sounded like a hushed shout — not a whisper, but a loud cry from almost too far away to hear.
The thing was, Henrietta looked like a place where magic could happen.
The valley seemed to whisper secrets. It was easier to believe that they wouldn’t give themselves up to Gansey rather than that they didn’t exist at
all.
Please just tell me where you are.
His heart hurt with the wanting of it, the hurt no less painful for being difficult to explain.
Ronan Lynch’s shark-nosed BMW pulled in behind the Camaro, its normally glossy charcoal paint dusted green with pollen. Gansey felt the bass of the stereo in his feet a moment before he made out the tune. When he stood up, Ronan was just opening his door. In the passenger seat was Adam Parrish, the third member of the foursome that made up Gansey’s closest friends. The knot of Adam’s tie was neat above the collar of his sweater. One slender hand pressed Ronan’s thin cell phone tightly to his ear.
Through the open car door, Adam and Gansey exchanged the briefest of looks. Adam’s knitted eyebrows asked, Did you find anything? and Gansey’s widened eyes replied, You tell me.
Adam, frowning now, spun the volume knob down on the stereo and said something into the phone.
Ronan slammed the car door — he slammed everything — before heading to the trunk. He said, “My dick brother wants us to meet him at Nino’s tonight. With Ashley.”
“Is that who’s on the phone?” Gansey asked. “What’s Ashley?”
Ronan hefted a gas can from the trunk, making little effort to keep the greasy container from contacting his clothing. Like Gansey, he wore the Aglionby uniform, but, as always, he managed to make it look as disreputable as possible. His tie was knotted with a method best described as contempt and his shirt-tails were ragged beneath the bottom of his sweater. His smile was
thin and sharp. If his BMW was shark-like, it had learned how from him.
“Declan’s latest. We’re meant to look pretty for her.”
Gansey resented having to play nicely with Ronan’s older brother, a senior at Aglionby, but he understood why they had to. Freedom in the Lynch family was a complicated thing, and at the moment, Declan held the keys to it.
Ronan traded the fuel can for the digital recorder. “He wants to do it tonight because he knows I have class.”
The fuel-tank lid for the Camaro was located behind the spring-loaded license plate, and Ronan watched silently as Gansey simultaneously wrestled with the lid, the gas can, and the license plate.
“You could have done this,” Gansey told him. “Since you don’t care about crapping up your shirt.”
Unsympathetic, Ronan scratched at an old, brown scab beneath the five knotted leather bands he wore around his wrist. Last week, he and Adam had taken turns dragging each other on a moving dolly behind the BMW, and they both still had the marks to show it.
“Ask me if I found something,” Gansey said.
Sighing, Ronan twitched the recorder toward Gansey. “Did you find anything?”
Ronan didn’t sound very interested, but that was part of the Ronan Lynch brand. It was impossible to tell how deep his disinterest truly was.
Fuel was leeching slowly into Gansey’s expensive chinos, the second pair he’d ruined in a month. It wasn’t that he meant to be careless — as Adam told him again and again, “Things cost money, Gansey” — it was just that he never seemed to realize the consequences of his actions until too late.
“Something. I recorded about four hours of audio and there’s — something.
But I don’t know what it means.” He gestured to the recorder. “Give it a whirl.”
Turning to stare out over the interstate, Ronan pressed PLAY. For a moment there was merely silence, broken only by icy-sounding shrills of
crickets. Then, Gansey’s voice: “Gansey,” it said.
There was a long pause. Gansey rubbed a finger slowly along the pocked chrome of the Camaro’s bumper. It was still strange to hear himself on the recording, with no memory of saying the words.
Then, as if from very far away, a female voice, the words hard to make
out: “Is that all?”
Ronan’s eyes darted to Gansey, wary.
Gansey lifted his finger: Wait. Murmured voices, quieter than before, hissed from the recorder, nothing clear about them except the cadence: questions and answers. And then his disembodied voice spoke out of the
recorder again: “That’s all there is.”
Ronan cast a glance back over to Gansey beside the car, doing what Gansey thought of as his smoker breath: long inhale through flared nostrils, slow exhale through parted lips.
Ronan did not smoke. He preferred his habits with hangovers.
He stopped the recorder and said, “You’re dripping gas on your pants, geezer.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me what was happening when I recorded that?”
Ronan didn’t ask. He just kept looking at Gansey, which was the same thing.
“Nothing was happening. That’s what. I was staring at a parking lot full of bugs that shouldn’t be alive when it’s this cold overnight, and there was nothing.”
Gansey hadn’t really been sure if he’d pick up anything in the parking lot, even if he was in the right place. According to the ley hunters he’d spoken to, the ley line sometimes transmitted voices across its length, throwing sounds hundreds of miles and dozens of years from when they’d first been heard. A sort of audio haunting, an unpredictable radio transmission where nearly anything on the ley line could be a receiver: a recorder, a stereo, a pair of well-tuned human ears. Lacking any psychic ability, Gansey had brought the recorder, as the noises were often only audible when played back. The strange thing in all this was not the other voices on the player. The strange thing was Gansey’s voice: Gansey was quite certain he was not a spirit.
“I didn’t say anything, Ronan. All night long, I didn’t say anything. So
what’s my voice doing on the recorder?”
“How did you know it was there?”
“I was listening to what I’d recorded while I was driving back. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then: my voice. Then the Pig stopped.”
“Coincidence?” Ronan asked. “I think not.”
It was meant to be sarcastic. Gansey had said I don’t believe in coincidences so often that he no longer needed to.
Gansey asked, “Well, what do you think?”
“Holy grail, finally,” Ronan replied, too sarcastic to be any use at all.
But the fact was this: Gansey had spent the last four years working with the thinnest scraps of evidence possible and the barely heard voice was all the encouragement he needed. His eighteen months in Henrietta had used some of the sketchiest scraps of all as he searched for a ley line — a perfectly straight, supernatural energy path that connected spiritual places — and the elusive tomb he hoped lay along its path. This was just an occupational hazard of looking for an invisible energy line. It was … well, invisible.
And possibly hypothetical, but Gansey refused to consider that notion. In seventeen years of life, he’d already found dozens of things people hadn’t known could be found, and he fully intended to add the ley line, the tomb, and the tomb’s royal occupant to that list of items.
A museum curator in New Mexico had once told Gansey, Son, you have an uncanny knack for discovering oddities. An astonished Roman historian commented, You look under rocks no one else thinks to pick up, slick. And a very old British professor had said, The world turns out its pockets for you, boy. The key, Gansey found, was that you had to believe that they existed; you had to realize they were part of something bigger. Some secrets only gave themselves up to those who’d proven themselves worthy.
The way Gansey saw it was this: If you had a special knack for finding things, it meant you owed the world to look.
“Hey, is that Whelk?” Ronan asked.
A car had slowed considerably as it passed them, affording them a glimpse of its overly curious driver. Gansey had to agree that the driver did look a lot like their resentful Latin teacher, an Aglionby alumnus by the unfortunate name of Barrington Whelk. Gansey, owing to his official title of Richard “Dick” Campbell Gansey III, was fairly immune to posh names, but even he had to admit there wasn’t much forgivable about Barrington Whelk.
“Hey, don’t stop and help or anything,” Ronan snapped after the car.
“Hey, runt. What went down with Declan?”
This last part was directed at Adam as he climbed out of the BMW with Ronan’s phone still in hand. He offered it to Ronan, who shook his head disdainfully. Ronan despised all phones, including his own.
Adam said, “He’s coming by at five tonight.”
Unlike Ronan, Adam’s Aglionby sweater was secondhand, but he’d taken great care to be certain it was impeccable. He was slim and tall, with dusty hair unevenly cropped above a fine-boned, tanned face. He was a sepia photograph.
“Joy,” Gansey replied. “You’ll be there, right?”
“Am I invited?” Adam could be peculiarly polite. When he was uncertain about something, his Southern accent always made an appearance, and it was in evidence now.
Adam never needed an invitation. He and Ronan must’ve fought.
Unsurprising. If it had a social security number, Ronan had fought with it.
“Don’t be stupid,” Gansey replied, and graciously accepted the grease- splotched fast-food bag that Adam offered. “Thanks.”
“Ronan got it,” Adam said. In matters of money, he was quick to assign credit or blame.
Gansey looked to Ronan, who lounged against the Camaro, absently biting one of the leather straps on his wrist. Gansey said, “Tell me there’s no sauce on this burger.”
Dropping the strap from his teeth, Ronan scoffed. “Please.”
“No pickle, either,” Adam said, crouching behind the car. He’d not only brought two small containers of fuel additive, but also a rag to place between the gas can and his khakis; he made the entire process look commonplace.
Adam tried so hard to hide his roots, but they came out in the smallest of gestures.
Now Gansey grinned, the warmth of discovery starting to course through him. “So, pop quiz, Mr. Parrish. Three things that appear in the vicinity of ley lines?”
“Black dogs,” Adam said indulgently. “Demonic presences.”
“Camaros,” Ronan inserted.
Gansey continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “And ghosts. Ronan, queue up the evidence if you would.”
The three of them stood there in the late morning sun as Adam screwed the fuel-tank lid back on and Ronan rewound the player. Yards and yards away, over the mountains, a red-tailed hawk screamed thinly. Ronan pressed PLAY again and they listened to Gansey say his name into thin air. Adam frowned distantly, listening, the warm day reddening his cheeks.
It could have been any one of the mornings in the last year and a half.
Ronan and Adam would make up by the end of the day, his teachers would forgive him for missing class, then he and Adam and Ronan and Noah would
go out for pizza, four against Declan.
Adam said, “Try the car, Gansey.”
Leaving the door hanging open, Gansey crashed onto the driver’s seat. In the background, Ronan played the recording again. For some reason, from this distance, the sound of the voices made the hair on his arms stand slowly.
Something inside him said that this unconscious speech meant the start of something different, although he didn’t know what yet.
“Come on, Pig!” snarled Ronan. Someone laid on their horn as they blew by on the highway.
Gansey turned the key. The engine turned over once, paused for the briefest of moments — and then roared to deafening life. The Camaro lived to fight another day. The radio was even working, playing the Stevie Nicks song that always sounded to Gansey like it was about a one-winged dove. He tried one of the french fries they’d brought him. They were cold.
Adam leaned into the car. “We’ll follow you back to the school. It’ll get you back, but it’s not done yet,” he said. “There’s still something wrong with it.”
“Great,” Gansey replied, loudly, to be heard over the engine. In the background, the BMW pumped out a nearly inaudible bass line as Ronan dissolved what was left of his heart in electronic loops. “So, suggestions?”
Reaching into his pocket, Adam retrieved a piece of paper and offered it to him.
“What’s this?” Gansey studied Adam’s erratic handwriting. His letters always looked like they were running from something. “A number for a psychic?”
“If you didn’t find anything last night, this was going to be next. Now you have something to ask them about.”
Gansey considered. Psychics tended to tell him he had money coming his way and that he was destined for great things. The first one he knew was always true and the second one he was afraid might be. But maybe with this new clue, with a new psychic, they’d have something else to say.
“Okay,” he agreed. “So what am I asking them?”
Adam handed him the digital recorder. He knocked the top of the Camaro
once, twice, pensive.
“That seems obvious,” he answered. “We find out who you were talking to.”
