As soon as the helicopter had touched down, Gansey leapt from the cabin and strode into the thigh-high grass as if he owned the place, Ronan by his side. Through the open door of the helo, Blue heard him say Noah’s name to the phone before repeating the GPS coordinates for the field. He was energized and powerful, a king in his castle.
Blue, on the other hand, was a little slower. For a multitude of reasons, her legs felt a little gelled after flying. She wasn’t sure if not telling Gansey the entire truth about St. Mark’s Eve was the right decision, and she was worried about Ronan trying to speak to her again.
It smelled wonderful in the middle of this field, though — all grass and trees and, somewhere, water, and lots of it. Blue thought she might live here quite happily. Beside her, Adam shielded his eyes. He looked at home here, his hair the same colorless brown as the tips of old grass, and he looked more handsome than Blue remembered. She thought about how Adam had taken her hand earlier, and considered how much she’d like for him to do it again.
With some surprise, Adam said, “Those lines are pretty invisible from here.” He was right, of course. Though Blue had just seen the raven as they touched down beside it, whatever geographical feature had made the shape was now completely hidden. “I still hate flying. Sorry about Ronan.”
“The flying part wasn’t bad,” Blue said. Actually, aside from Ronan, she had kind of liked it — the sense of floating in a very noisy bubble where all directions were possible. “I thought it would be worse. You sort of have to give up control, don’t you, and then it’s okay. Now, Ronan …”
“He’s a pit bull,” Adam said.
“I know some really nice pit bulls.” One of the dogs Blue walked each week was a cow-printed pit bull with as nice a smile as you could hope for in
a canine.
“He’s the kind of pit that makes the evening news. Gansey’s trying to
retrain him.”
“How noble.”
“It makes him feel better about being Gansey.”
Blue didn’t doubt it. “Sometimes he’s very condescending.”
Adam looked at the ground. “He doesn’t mean to be. It’s all that blue blood in his veins.”
He was about to say something else when a shout interrupted him.
“ARE YOU LISTENING, GLENDOWER? I AM COMING TO FIND YOU!” Gansey’s voice, ebullient and ringing, echoed off the tree-covered slopes around the field. Adam and Blue found him standing in the middle of a clear, pale path, his arms stretched out and his head tilted back as he shouted into the air. Adam’s mouth made the soundless shape of a laugh.
Gansey grinned at them both. He was hard to resist in this form: glowing with rows and rows of white teeth, a college brochure in the making.
“Oyster shells,” he said, leaning to pick up one of the pale objects that made up the path. The fragment was pure white, the edges blunt and worn.
“That’s what makes up the raven. Like they use for roads down in the tidewater area. Oyster shells on bare rock. What do you think of that?”
“I think that’s a lot of oyster shells to bring from the coast,” Adam replied. “I also think Glendower would’ve come from the coast, too.”
Gansey pointed at Adam by way of a reply.
Blue put her hands on her hips. “So you think they put Glendower’s body on a boat in Wales, sailed over to Virginia, then brought him up to the mountains. Why?”
“Energy,” Gansey replied. Rummaging in his bag, he removed a small black box that looked a lot like a very small car battery.
Blue asked, “What’s that? It looks expensive.”
He twiddled with switches on the side as he explained, “An electromagnetic-frequency meter. It monitors energy levels. Some people use them for ghost hunting. It’s supposed to have a high reading when you’re near a spirit. But it’s also supposed to read high when you’re near an energy source. Like a ley line.”
She scowled at the gadget. A box to register magic seemed to insult both the box holder and magic. “And of course you have an electromagnorific
button thing. Everyone has one of them.”
Gansey held the meter above his head as if he were calling aliens. “You find it not normal?”
She could tell that he very much wanted her to say that he wasn’t normal, so she replied, “Oh, I’m sure it’s quite normal in some circles.”
He looked a little hurt, but most of his attention was on the meter, which showed two faint red lights. He remarked, “I’d like to be in those circles. So, like I said, energy. One of the other names for the ley line is corpse —”
“Corpse road,” Blue interrupted. “I know.”
He looked pleased and magnanimous, as if she were a prize pupil. “So school me. You probably know better than I.”
As before, his accent was the broad, glorious old Virginia accent, and Blue’s words felt clumsy beside him.
“I just know that the dead travel in straight lines,” she said. “That they used to carry corpses in straight lines to churches to bury them. Along what you call the ley line. It was supposed to be really bad to take them any other route than the way they’d choose to travel as a spirit.”
“Right,” he said. “So it stands to reason there’s something about the line that fortifies or protects a corpse. The soul. The … animus. The quiddity of it.”
“Gansey, seriously,” Adam interrupted, to Blue’s relief. “Nobody knows what quiddity is.”
“The whatness, Adam. Whatever it is that makes a person what they are.
If they removed Glendower from the corpse road, I think the magic that keeps him asleep would be disrupted.”
She said, “Basically, you mean he would die for good if he was removed from the line.”
“Yes,” Gansey said. The blinking lights on his machine had begun to flash more heavily, leading them over the raven’s beak and toward the tree line where Ronan already stood. Blue lifted her arms up so the heads of the grass wouldn’t hit the backs of her hands; it was up to her waist in some places.
She asked, “And why not just leave him in Wales? Isn’t that where they want him to wake up and be a hero?”
“It was an uprising, and he was a traitor to the English crown,” Gansey said. The easy way that he began the story, at once striding through grass and
eyeing the EMF reader, let Blue know that he had told it many times before.
“Glendower fought the English for years, and it was ugly, all struggle between noble families with mixed allegiances. The Welsh resistance failed.
Glendower disappeared. If the English had known where he was, dead or alive, there’s no way they’d treat his body the way the Welsh wanted it treated. Haven’t you heard of being hung, drawn, and quartered?”
Blue asked, “Is it as painful as conversations with Ronan?”
Gansey cast a glance over to Ronan, who was a small, indistinct form by the trees. Adam audibly swallowed a laugh.
“Depends on if Ronan is sober,” Gansey answered.
Adam asked, “What is he doing, anyway?”
“Peeing.”
“Trust Lynch to deface a place like this five minutes after getting here.”
“Deface? Marking his territory.”
“He must own more of Virginia than your father, then.”
“I don’t think he’s ever used an indoor toilet, now that I consider it.”
This all seemed very manly and Aglionby to Blue, this calling of one another by last names and bantering about outdoor urinary habits. It also seemed like it could go on for a long time, so she interrupted, changing the subject back to Glendower. “They’d really go to all this trouble to hide his
body?”
Gansey said, “Well, Ned Kelly.”
He delivered the nonsensical statement so matter-of-factly that Blue felt abruptly stupid, as if maybe the public school system really was lacking.
Then Adam said, with a glance toward Blue, “Nobody knows who Ned Kelly is, either, Gansey.”
“Really?” Gansey asked, so innocently startled by this that it was clear that Adam had been right before — he hadn’t meant to be condescending.
“He was an Australian outlaw. When the British caught him, they did awful things with his body. I think the chief of police used his head as a paperweight for a while. Just think what Glendower’s enemies would do to him! If the Welsh wanted a shot at Glendower being resurrected, they would’ve wanted his body unmolested.”
“Why the mountains, then?” Blue insisted. “Why isn’t he right on the shore?”
This seemed to remind Gansey of something, because instead of replying
to her, he turned to Adam. “I called Malory about that ritual, to see if he’d tried it. He said he didn’t think it could be performed just anywhere on the ley line. He guessed it had to be done on the ‘heart’ of it, where the most energy is. I’m thinking that someplace like that is also where they’d want Glendower.”
Adam turned to Blue. “What about your energy?”
The question took her by surprise. “What?”
“You said that you made things louder for other psychics,” Adam said.
“Is that about energy?”
Blue was absurdly pleased that he remembered, and also absurdly pleased that he’d replied to her instead of Gansey, who was now swatting gnats out of his eyes and waiting for her response.
“Yes,” she said. “I guess I make things that need energy stronger. I’m like a walking battery.”
“You’re the table everyone wants at Starbucks,” Gansey mused as he
began to walk again.
Blue blinked. “What?”
Over his shoulder, Gansey said, “Next to the wall plug.” He pressed the EMF reader into the side of a tree and observed both objects with great interest.
Adam shook his head at Blue. To Gansey, he said, “I’m saying that she could maybe turn a regular part of the ley line into a doable place for the ritual. Wait, are we going in the woods? What about Helen?”
“It hasn’t been two seconds,” Gansey said, although it clearly had been.
“That’s an interesting idea about the energy. Though — can your battery get drained? By things other than conversations about prostitution?”
She didn’t dignify this comment with an immediate response. Instead, she thought about how her mother had said there was nothing to fear from the dead, and how Neeve had seemed disbelieving. The church watch had obviously taken something from her; maybe there were worse consequences that she had yet to discover.
“Well, this is interesting,” Gansey remarked. He straddled a tiny stream at the very edge of the trees. It was really just water that had bubbled up from an underground source, soaking the grass. Gansey’s attention was focused entirely on the EMF reader he held directly above the water. The meter was pegged.
“Helen,” Adam said warningly. Ronan had rejoined them, and both boys looked in the direction of the helicopter.
“I said this is interesting,” Gansey repeated.
“And I said Helen.”
“Just a couple of yards.”
“She’ll be angry.”
Gansey’s expression was baleful, and Blue could see immediately that
Adam wouldn’t hold out against it.
“I did tell you,” Adam said.
The stream trickled sluggishly out of the woods from between two diamond-barked dogwoods. With Gansey in the lead, they all followed the water into the trees. Immediately, the temperature dropped several degrees.
Blue hadn’t realized how much insect noise there was in the field until it was replaced by occasional birdsong under the trees. This was a beautiful, old wood, all massive oak and ash trees finding footing among great slabs of cracked stone. Ferns sprang from rocks and verdant moss grew up the sides of the tree trunks. The air itself was scented with green and growing and water. The light was golden through the leaves. Everything was alive, alive.
She breathed. “This is lovely.”
It was for Adam, not Gansey, but she saw Gansey glance over his shoulder at her. Beside him, Ronan was curiously muted, something about his posture defensive.
“What are we even looking for?” Adam asked.
Gansey was a bloodhound, the EMF reader leading him along the widening stream. The moving water had become too wide to straddle, and now it ran in a bed of pebbles and sharp fragments of rock and, strangely enough, a few of the oyster shells. “What we’re always looking for.”
Adam warned, “Helen is going to hate you.”
“She’ll text me if she gets too mad,” Gansey said. To demonstrate, he slid his phone out of his pocket. “Oh — there’s no signal.”
Given their location in the mountains, the lack of signal was unsurprising, but Gansey stopped short. While the four of them made an uneven circle, he thumbed through the screens on his phone. In his other hand, the EMF reader glowed solid red. His voice sounded a little strange when he asked, “Is anyone else wearing a watch?”
Weekends were not generally days of precise timing for Blue, so she was
not, and Ronan had only his few knotted leather strands around his arm.
Adam lifted his wrist. He wore a cheap-looking watch with a grubby band.
“I am,” he said, adding ruefully, “but it doesn’t seem to be working.”
Without speaking, Gansey turned the face of his phone to them. It was set to the clock function, and it took Blue a moment to realize that none of the hands were moving. For a long moment the four of them just looked at the three still hands on the phone’s clock face. Blue’s heart marked off every second the clock didn’t.
“Is it —” Adam started, and then stopped. He tried again, “Is it because the power is being affected from the energy of the line?”
Ronan’s voice was cutting. “Affecting your watch? Your windup watch?”
“It’s true,” Gansey answered. “My phone’s still on. So’s the reader. It’s only that the time has … I wonder if …”
But there were no answers, and they all knew it.
“I want to go on,” Gansey said. “Just a little farther.”
He waited to see if they would stop him. No one said anything, but as Gansey set off again, clambering over the top of a slab of stone, Ronan beside him, Adam glanced at Blue. His expression asked, Are you okay?
She was okay, but in the way she’d been okay before the helicopter. It was not that she was scared of flashing lights on the EMF reader or Adam’s watch refusing to work, but she hadn’t gotten out of bed in the morning expecting to encounter a place where possibly time didn’t work.
Blue stretched her hand out.
Adam took it without hesitation, like he’d been waiting for her to offer it.
He said in a low voice, just for her, “My heart is beating like crazy right now.”
Strangely enough, it was not his fingers twined in hers that affected Blue the strongest, it was where his warm wrist pressed against hers above their hands.
I need to tell him he can’t kiss me, she thought.
But not yet. Right now, she wanted to feel his skin pressed against hers, both of their pulses rapid and uncertain.
Hand in hand, they climbed after Gansey. The trees grew even larger, some of them grown together into trunks like castles, turreted and huge. The canopy soared high overhead, rustling and reverent. Everything was green, green, green. Somewhere ahead, water splashed.
For one brief moment, Blue thought she heard music.
“Noah?”
Gansey’s voice sounded forlorn. He’d stopped by a mighty beech tree and now he searched around himself. Catching up to him, Blue realized he’d stopped by the shore of a mountain pool that fed the stream they’d been following. The pool was only a few inches deep and perfectly clear. The water was so transparent that it begged to be touched.
“I thought I heard —” Gansey broke off. His eyes dropped to where Adam held Blue’s hand. Again, his face was somehow puzzled by the fact of their hand-holding. Adam’s grip tightened, although she didn’t think he meant for it to.
This was a wordless discussion, too, though she didn’t think either of the boys knew what they were trying to say.
Gansey turned to the pool of water. In his hand, the EMF reader had gone dark. Crouching, he hovered his free hand over the water. His fingers were spread wide, millimeters from the surface. Beneath his hand, the water shifted and darkened, and Blue realized that there were a thousand tiny fish just underneath. They flashed silver and then black as they moved, clinging to the
faint shadow he cast.
Adam asked, “How are there fish here?”
The stream they’d followed into the woods was far too shallow for fish, and above them, the pool seemed to be fed by rainfall from higher up the mountain. Fish didn’t come from the sky.
Gansey replied, “I don’t know.”
The fish tumbled and coursed over one another, ceaselessly moving, tiny enigmas. Again, Blue thought she heard music, but when she looked at Adam, she thought perhaps it had just been the sound of his breathing.
Gansey looked up to them, and she saw in his face that he loved this place. His bald expression held something new: not the raw delight of finding the ley line or the sly pleasure of teasing Blue. She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness. It was the way she felt when she looked at the stars.
Just like that, he was a little bit closer to the Gansey that Blue had seen in the churchyard, and she found she couldn’t bear to look at him.
Instead, she pulled her hand free from Adam to go to the beech tree
Gansey stood beside. Carefully, she stepped over the exposed knots of the beech’s roots, and then she laid her palm on its smooth, gray bark. Like the tree behind her house, this beech’s bark was as cold as winter and oddly comforting.
“Adam.” This was Ronan’s voice, and she heard Adam’s footsteps moving cautiously and slowly around the edge of the pool toward it. The sound of snapping branches became softer as he moved farther away.
“I don’t think these fish are real,” Gansey said softly.
It was such a ridiculous thing to say that Blue turned to look at him again.
He was tipping his hand back and forth as he watched the water.
“I think they’re here because I thought they ought to be here,” Gansey said.
Blue replied sarcastically, “Okay, God.”
He twisted his hand again; she saw the fish’s forms flash in the water once more. Hesitant, he went on: “At the reading, what was it that the one woman said? With the hair? She said it was about — perception — no, intention.”
“Persephone. Intention is for cards,” Blue said. “That’s for a reading, for letting someone into your head, to see patterns in the future and the past. Not for fish. How could intention work on a fish? Life isn’t negotiable.”
He asked, “What color were the fish when we arrived?”
They’d been black and silver, or at least they had looked it in the reflection. Gansey, she was certain, was reaching for signs of inexplicable magic, but she wasn’t going to be swayed so easily. Blue and brown could look black or silver, depending on the light. Nonetheless, she joined him, crouching in the moist dirt beside the pool. The fish were all dark and indistinct in the shadow of his hand.
“I was watching them and wondering how they’d gotten here and then I remembered that there was a kind of trout that often live in smaller creeks,”
Gansey said. “Wild brook trout, I think they’re called. I thought, that would make a little more sense. Maybe they were introduced by man, somehow, in this pool, or a pool farther up the stream. That’s what I was thinking. Brook trout are silver on top and red on the bottom.”
“Okay,” she said.
Gansey’s outstretched hand was very still. “Tell me there were no red fish in this pool when we arrived.”
When she didn’t answer, he looked at her. She shook her head. There’d
definitely been no red.
He pulled his hand back quickly.
The tiny school of fish darted and leapt for cover, but not before Blue saw that every one of them was silver and red.
Not a little red, but bright red, sunset red, red as a dream. Like they had never been any other color.
“I don’t understand,” Blue said. Something in her ached, though, like she did understand, but couldn’t put words to it, wrap her thoughts around it. She felt like she was a part of a dream this place was having, or it was a part of a
dream of hers.
“I don’t, either.”
They both turned their head at the same time then, at the sound of a voice from their left.
“Was that Adam?” Blue asked. It seemed strange that she had to ask, but nothing felt very definite.
Again they heard Adam’s voice, more clearly this time. He and Ronan stood on the other side of the pool. Just behind him was an oak tree. A man- sized rotten cavity gaped blackly in its trunk. In the pool at his feet was a reflection of both Adam and the tree, the mirror image colder and more distant than reality.
Adam rubbed his arms fiercely, as if chilled. Ronan stood beside him, looking over his shoulder at something Blue couldn’t see.
“Come here,” Adam said. “And stand in there. And tell me if I’m losing my mind.” His accent was pronounced, which Blue was beginning to learn meant that he was too bothered to hide it.
Blue peered at the cavity. Like all holes in trees, it looked moist and uneven and black, the fungus in the bark still working away at enlarging the crater. The edges of the entrance were jagged and thin, making the tree’s
continued survival seem miraculous.
“Are you okay?” Gansey asked.
“Close your eyes,” Adam told him. His arms were crossed, his hands gripping his biceps. The way he was breathing reminded Blue of what it felt like to wake after a nightmare, heart pounding, breath snagging, legs aching from a chase you never really ran. “After you stand in there, I mean.”
“Did you go in there?” Gansey asked Ronan, who shook his head.
“He’s the one who pointed it out,” Adam said.
Ronan said, flat as a board, “I’m not going in there.” When he said it, it sounded like principle instead of cowardice, like his refusal to take a card at
the reading.
“I don’t mind,” Blue said. “I’ll go.”
It was hard for her to imagine being intimidated when surrounded by a tree, no matter how strange the forest around it might be. Stepping into the cavity, she turned so that she faced the outside world. The air inside the cavity smelled damp and close. It was warm, too, and although Blue knew it must be because of the rotting process, it made the tree seem as warm- blooded as her.
In front of her, Adam’s arms were still gripped around himself. What does he think will happen in here?
She closed her eyes. Almost at once, she could smell rain — not the scent of rain coming, but the living, shifting odor of a storm currently waging, the wide-open scent of a breeze moving through water. Then she became aware that something was touching her face.
When she opened her eyes, she was both in her body and watching it, nowhere near the cavity of the tree. The Blue that was before her stood inches away from a boy in an Aglionby sweater. There was a slight stoop to his posture, and his shoulders were spattered darkly with rain. It was his fingers that Blue felt on her face. He touched her cheeks with the backs of his fingers.
Tears coursed down the other Blue’s face. Through some strange magic, Blue could feel them on her face as well. She could feel, too, the sick, rising misery she’d felt in the churchyard, the grief that felt bigger than her. The other Blue’s tears seemed endless. One drop slid after another, each following an identical path down her cheeks.
The boy in the Aglionby sweater leaned his forehead against Blue’s. She felt the pressure of his skin against hers, and suddenly she could smell mint.
It’ll be okay, Gansey told the other Blue. She could tell that he was afraid.
It’ll be okay.
Impossibly, Blue realized that this other Blue was crying because she loved Gansey. And that the reason Gansey touched her like that, his fingers so careful with her, was because he knew that her kiss could kill him. She could feel how badly the other Blue wanted to kiss him, even as she dreaded
it. Though she couldn’t understand why, her real, present day memories in the tree cavity were clouded with other false memories of their lips nearly touching, a life this other Blue had already lived.
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.”
