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.
