Gansey, energized, set the boys out on Glendower-related tasks for the next three days, and to Adam’s surprise, Blue managed to come along for each of them. Though she never said as much, it was clear she was keeping them a secret, because she never contacted the boys by phone or met up with them near 300 Fox Way. Despite their lack of formal planning and psychic ability, they all had schedules largely dictated by school, so they managed to meet up to explore with remarkable precision.
Exploring, however, did not include going back to the strange wood.
Instead, they spent time at the courthouse, finding out who owned the land underneath the raven. Looking up microfiche in the Henrietta library, trying to determine if the strange wood had a name. Discussing the history of Glendower. Marking the ley line on the map, measuring how wide it seemed to be. Tramping around in fields, turning over rocks, making circles of stones and measuring the energy that came from them.
They also ate a lot of cheap food from convenience stores; this was Blue’s fault. After that first triumphant gelato party, Blue insisted on paying for all of her food herself, which limited where they could eat. She despised when any of the boys tried to buy food for her, but she seemed to hate it the most when Gansey offered.
At one store, Gansey had started to pay for Blue’s potato chips and she’d snatched them away.
“I don’t want you to buy me food!” Blue said. “If you pay for it, then it’s like I’m … be — be —”
“Beholden to me?” Gansey suggested pleasantly.
“Don’t put words in my mouth.”
“It was your word.”
“You assumed it was my word. You can’t just go around assuming.”
“But that is what you meant, isn’t it?”
She scowled. “I’m done with this conversation.”
Then Blue had bought her own chips, though it was clear the price was dear to her and nothing to Gansey. Adam was proud of her.
After the first day, too, Noah came with them, and this also pleased Adam, because Noah and Blue got along well. Noah was a good bellwether for people. He was so shy and awkward and invisible that he could be easily ignored or made fun of. Blue was not only kind to him, but actually seemed to get along with him. Strangely enough, this relieved Adam, who felt like Blue’s presence among them was largely his doing. He now so rarely made decisions without Gansey or Ronan or Noah that he doubted his judgment when he acted alone.
The days slid easily by with the five of them doing everything but returning to the strange pool and the dreaming tree. Gansey kept saying, We need more information.
Adam told Blue, “I think he’s afraid of it.”
He knew he was. The ever-pervasive vision he’d had in the tree kept creeping into his thoughts. Gansey dead, dying, because of him. Blue looking at Adam, shocked. Ronan, crouched beside Gansey, his face miserable, snarling, Are you happy now, Adam? Is this what you wanted?
Was it a dream? Was it a prophecy?
Gansey told Adam, “I don’t know what it is.”
Historically, this phrase had been a very good way of losing Adam’s respect. The only way to counteract admitting to not knowing something was to immediately follow it with the words but I’ll find out. Adam didn’t give people much time to find out: only as much time as he’d give himself. But Gansey never let him down. They’d find out what it was. Only — Adam wasn’t sure, this time, that he wanted to know.
By the end of the second week, the boys had settled into a routine of waiting for Blue at the end of the school day, then setting off into whatever mission Gansey had assigned them. It was an overcast spring day that felt more like fall, cold and damp and steel gray.
While they waited, Ronan decided to finally take up the task of teaching Adam how to drive a stick shift. For several minutes, it seemed to be going well, as the BMW had an easy clutch, Ronan was brief and to the point with
his instruction, and Adam was a quick study with no ego to get in the way.
From a safe vantage point beside the building, Gansey and Noah huddled and watched as Adam began to make ever quicker circles around the parking lot. Every so often their hoots were audible through the open windows of the BMW.
Then — it had to happen eventually — Adam stalled the car. It was a pretty magnificent beast, as far as stalls went, with lots of noise and death spasms on the part of the car. From the passenger seat, Ronan began to swear at Adam. It was a long, involved swear, using every forbidden word possible, often in compound-word form. As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry.
It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn’t swear.
Ronan finished with, “For the love of … Parrish, take some care, this is not your mother’s 1971 Honda Civic.”
Adam lifted his head and said, “They didn’t start making the Civic until ’73.”
There was a flash of fangs from the passenger seat, but before Ronan truly had time to strike, they both heard Gansey call warmly, “Jane! I thought you’d never show up. Ronan is tutoring Adam in the ways of manual transmissions.”
Blue, her hair pulled every which way by the wind, stuck her head in the driver’s side window. The scent of wildflowers accompanied her presence.
As Adam catalogued the scent in the mental file of things that made Blue attractive, she said brightly, “Looks like it’s going well. Is that what that smell is?”
Without replying, Ronan climbed out of the car and slammed the door.
Noah appeared beside Blue. He looked joyful and adoring, like a Labrador retriever. Noah had decided almost immediately that he would do anything for Blue, a fact that would’ve needled Adam if it had been anyone other than Noah.
Blue permitted Noah to pet the crazy tufts of her hair, something Adam would have also liked to do, but felt would mean something far different coming from him.
“Okay, let’s go,” Gansey said. He was being theatrical about it, flipping open his journal, checking his watch, waiting for someone to ask him where
they were going.
Through the car window, Adam asked, “Where today?”
Gansey swept up a backpack from the ground. “The wood.”
Blue and Adam looked at each other, startled.
“Time,” Gansey said grandly, striding past them toward the Camaro, “is wasting.”
Blue jumped back as Adam scrambled from the driver’s seat of the BMW. She hissed to him, “Did you know this?”
“I didn’t know anything.”
“We have to be back in three hours,” Ronan said. “I just fed Chainsaw but she’ll need it again.”
“This,” Gansey replied, “is precisely why I didn’t want to have a baby with you.”
They bundled into the car with the comfort of routine, climbing into the Camaro though all logic suggested they take the BMW instead. Ronan and Gansey scuffled briefly over his keys (Gansey won, as he won everything).
Adam, Blue, and Noah climbed into the tiny backseat, in that order. Noah shrank up the side of the car, trying desperately not to touch Blue. Adam didn’t take quite so much care. For the first ten minutes on the first day, Adam had been polite, but it quickly become clear that Blue didn’t mind
when his leg touched hers.
Adam was all right with that.
Everything was the same as before, but for some reason, Adam’s heart was thumping. New spring leaves, jerked from the trees by the suddenly cold wind, scurried across the lot. He saw goose bumps through the loopy crocheted cardigan Blue wore. She reached to take a handful of both his shirt and Noah’s, and tugged them both to her like blankets.
“You’re always cold, though, Noah,” she said.
“I know,” he replied, bleak.
Adam wasn’t certain what came first with Blue — her treating the boys as friends, or them all becoming friends. It seemed to Adam that this circular way to build relationships required a healthy amount of self-confidence to undertake. And it was a strange sort of magic that it felt like she’d always been hunting for Glendower with them.
With his shoulder pressed against Blue’s crocheted one, Adam leaned forward between the two front seats and asked, “Gansey, don’t we have any
heat?”
“If it starts.”
The engine was turning over, over, over, over. Adam felt cold enough for his teeth to chatter, though there was no way that the temperature was that low. He was cold on the inside. He ordered, “Gas. Give it more gas.”
“That is with gas.”
Ronan punched Gansey’s right leg down, his palm on Gansey’s knee. The engine wailed high and caught. Gansey drily thanked Ronan for his assistance.
“Your heart,” Blue said in Adam’s ear. “I can feel it in your arm. Are you nervous?”
“It’s just,” he replied, “I’m not sure where we’re going.”
Because they were traveling by Camaro, not by helicopter, it took longer to get to the coordinates Gansey had marked in his journal. When they arrived, parking the car at an empty vacation cabin and walking the rest of the way, they found the woods had a far different character under a cloudy sky. The raven was stark and dead among the grass, bony white shells in the foliage.
The trees at the forest’s edge seemed taller than before, giants even among the towering mountain trees. Everything was in shadow on the sunless day, but the stretch of scrubby grass at the edge of the forest seemed darker still.
Adam’s heart was still a flighty thing. He had to confess to himself that until now he probably had never really believed Gansey’s supernatural explanation for the ley line, not in a way that he’d really internalized. Now, it was real. Magic existed, and Adam didn’t know how much that changed the world.
For a long moment, they all silently stared into the woods as if facing an adversary. Gansey rubbed a finger over his lip. Blue clutched her arms around herself, jaw clenched with the cold. Even Ronan seemed disquieted.
Only Noah looked as he always did, his arms loose, shoulders hunched.
“I feel watched,” Blue said finally.
Gansey replied, “High EMF readings can do that. Haunting cases have often come down to old, exposed wiring. High readings can make you feel watched. Unnerved. Nauseous, suspicious. It plays with the hardwiring of your brain.”
Noah tipped his head far back to look at the slowly moving tops of the trees. It was the opposite of Adam’s instinct, which was to search between the trunks of the trees for movement.
“But,” Adam added, “it can go the other way, too. High readings can give spirits the power they need to manifest, right? So you are more likely to be watched or haunted even as you’re feeling watched or haunted.”
Gansey said, “And of course water can reverse that, too. Makes EMF and energy into positive feelings.”
“Hence,” Ronan chipped in, not to be outdone, “all the healing springs crap out there.”
Blue rubbed her arms. “Well, the water’s in there, not out here. Are we going in?”
The trees sighed. Gansey narrowed his eyes.
“Are we invited?” Adam asked.
“I think,” Noah replied, “you invite yourself.”
He was the first to step in. Ronan muttered angrily, probably because Noah — Noah — had more courage than any of them. He plunged in after him.
“Wait.” Gansey looked at his watch. “It’s 4:13. We need to remember that later.” He followed Noah and Ronan in.
Adam’s heart pounded. Blue stretched out her hand, and he took it. Don’t
crush her fingers, he thought.
And they went in.
Under the canopy, it was even dimmer than in the field. The shadows beneath fallen trees were flat black, and the trunks were painted in chocolate, charcoal, onyx.
“Noah,” whispered Gansey. “Noah, where did you go?”
Noah’s voice came from behind them. “I didn’t go anywhere.”
Adam spun, still clutching Blue’s hand, but there was nothing there but branches quivering in the faint breeze.
“What did you see?” Gansey asked. When Adam turned back, Noah was standing just ahead of Gansey.
Plays with the hardwiring of your brain.
“Nothing.”
Ronan, a hunched black shape a few yards off, asked, “Where are we going?”
Anywhere but that tree, Adam thought. I don’t want to see that again.
Gansey poked in the dirt for signs of the stream they’d followed before.
“Back the same way, I guess. Proper experiment re-creates the conditions, doesn’t it? The creek’s shallower this time, though. Harder to see. It wasn’t far, was it?”
They had only been walking along the shallow stream bed for a few minutes, however, when it became apparent that the landscape was unfamiliar. The trees were tall, thin, and spindly, all slanted as if from some great wind. Great crags of rock shoved up from the poor soil. There was no sign of the streambed, the pool, the dreaming tree.
“We’ve been misdirected,” Gansey said.
His tone was at once blunt and accusatory, as if the wood itself had done it.
“Also,” Blue pointed out, dropping Adam’s hand, “did you notice the trees?”
It took Adam a moment to realize what she meant. A few of the leaves that clung to the branches were still pale yellow, but now it was the yellow of fall, not spring. Most of the leaves that surrounded them were the dusky red- green of shifting autumn. The leaf litter at their feet was brown and orange, leaves killed by the early frost of a winter that shouldn’t be near.
Adam was torn by wonder and anxiety.
“Gansey,” he said, “what time do you have?”
Gansey twisted his wrist. “It’s 5:27 P.M. Second hand’s still running.”
In a little over an hour, they’d walked through two seasons. Adam caught Blue’s eye. She just shook her head. What else was there to do?
“Gansey!” Noah called. “There’s writing over here!”
On the other side of a rock outcropping, Noah stood by a great block of chin-height stone. Its face was sheared and cracked, striated with lines like Gansey’s ley sketches. Noah pointed at a few dozen words painted low on the rock. Whatever ink the author had used, it was worn and uneven: black in
some places, deep plum in others.
“What language is that?” Blue asked.
Adam and Ronan answered as one: “Latin.”
Ronan crouched swiftly by the rock.
“What does it say?” Gansey asked.
Ronan’s eyes darted back and forth as he scanned the text. Unexpectedly,
he smirked. “It’s a joke. This first part. The Latin is pretty crappy.”
“A joke?” Gansey echoed. “About what?”
“You wouldn’t find it funny.”
The Latin was difficult, and Adam gave up trying to read it. Something about the letters, however, disturbed him. He couldn’t put his finger on it.
The very shape of them … Warily, he asked, “Why is there a joke written on a random stone?”
The mirth had run out of Ronan’s face. He touched the words, traced the letters. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell.
“Ronan?” asked Gansey.
“There’s a joke,” Ronan answered finally, not looking away from the words, “in case I didn’t recognize my own handwriting.”
This, Adam realized, was what had distressed him about the words. Now that it had been pointed out, it was obvious that the handwriting was Ronan’s.
It was just so out of context, painted on this rock with an arcane pigment, smudged and worn by the weather.
“I don’t understand,” Ronan said. He kept tracing and retracing the letters. He was badly shaken.
Gansey rallied. He couldn’t bear to see any of his number rattled. Voice firm, like he was certain, like he was lecturing on world history, he said, “We saw before how the ley line played with time. We can see it right now on my watch. It’s flexible. You haven’t been here before, Ronan, but it doesn’t mean you didn’t come here later. Minutes later. Days, years, leave yourself a message, write a joke so you’d believe it was you. Knowing there was a chance time might fold you here to find it.”
Well done, Gansey, Adam thought. Gansey had crafted his explanation to steady Ronan, but Adam, too, felt more reasonable. They were explorers, scientists, anthropologists of historical magic. This was what they wanted.
Blue asked, “Then what does it say after the joke?”
“Arbores loqui latine,” Ronan replied. “The trees speak Latin.”
It was meaningless, a riddle perhaps, but nonetheless, Adam felt the hairs of his neck crawl. They all glanced at the trees that surrounded them; they were fenced by one thousand different shades of green fastened to a million wind-blown claws.
“And the last line?” Gansey asked. “That last word doesn’t look like Latin.”
“Nomine appellant,” Ronan read. “Call it by name.” He paused.
“Cabeswater.”
