Why the church?” Blue asked from the passenger seat of the Camaro. She’d never ridden in the front before, and in the passenger seat, the sensation of the car being a few thousand parts flying in uneasy formation was even more pronounced.
Gansey, installed comfortably behind the wheel with expensive sunglasses and Top-Siders, took his time answering. “I don’t know. Because it’s on the line, but it’s not as … whatever Cabeswater is. I have to think more about Cabeswater before we go back.”
“Because it’s like we’re going into someone’s house.” Blue tried not to look at Gansey’s boat shoes; she felt better about him as a person if she pretended he wasn’t wearing them.
“Exactly! That’s exactly what it feels like.” He pointed at her like he pointed at Adam when Adam made a comment he approved of. Then he put his hand back on the gearshift knob to stop its rattling.
Blue found it a thrilling idea, actually, that the trees were thinking creatures, that they could speak. That they knew her.
“Turn here!” Blue ordered, as Gansey nearly passed the ruined church.
With a broad smile, he hauled on the wheel and dropped down a few gears.
With only a few protesting rubber noises, they made it into the overgrown drive. As they did, the glove box fell open and shot its contents onto Blue’s lap.
“Why do you even have this car?” she asked. Gansey shut off the engine, but her legs still felt like they vibrated in time with it.
“Because it is a classic,” he replied primly. “Because it’s unique.”
“But it’s a piece of crap. Don’t they make unique classics that don’t —”
Blue demonstrated her point by unsuccessfully shoving the door to the glove
box shut a few times. Now, as she reinserted the box’s contents and slammed the door shut, it once again ejected its contents onto her legs.
“Oh, they do,” Gansey said, and she thought she detected a bit of an edge to his voice. Not anger, really, but irony. He put a mint leaf in his mouth and climbed out of the car.
Blue replaced the car’s registration and an ancient strip of beef jerky in the glove box, and then she inspected the other object that had fallen into her lap. It was an EpiPen — a syringe meant to restart someone’s heart in the case of a severe allergic reaction. Unlike the beef jerky, its expiration date
was current.
“Whose is this?” she asked.
Gansey was already out of the car, holding the EMF reader and stretching as if he’d been in the car for hours instead of thirty minutes. She noticed that he had impressive arm muscles, probably related to the Aglionby rowing team sticker she’d noticed on the glove box. Glancing over his shoulder at her, he replied, dismissive, “Mine. You’ve got to jimmy that latch to the right, then it’ll shut.”
She did as he recommended and, sure enough, the glove box latched, the EpiPen safely replaced inside.
On the other side of the car, Gansey tipped his head back to look at the storm clouds: living things, moving towers. In the very deep distance, they were nearly the same color as the blue edge of the mountains. The road they’d come in on was a dappled blue-green river twisting back toward town.
The indirect light of the sun was peculiar: nearly yellow, thick with humidity.
Apart from the birds, there was no sound but the slow, faraway growl of thunder.
“I hope the weather holds,” he remarked.
He strode over to the ruined church. This, Blue had discovered, was how Gansey got places — striding. Walking was for ordinary people.
Standing beside him, Blue found the church eerier in the daylight, as she always did. Growing inside the ruined walls among collapsed bits of roof, knee-high grass and trees as tall as her strove toward the sunlight. There was no evidence there had ever been any pews, or any congregation. There was something bleak and meaningless about it: death with no afterlife.
She remembered standing here with Neeve, all those weeks ago. She wondered if Neeve really was looking for her father, and if she was, what she
intended to do with him if she found him. She thought about the spirits walking into the church and she wondered if Gansey — Gansey said, “I feel like I’ve been here before.”
Blue didn’t know how to answer. She’d already told him one half-truth about St. Mark’s Eve, and she wasn’t sure it was right to tell him the other half. Moreover, she wasn’t sure it felt true. Standing next to him in his very alive state, she couldn’t imagine that he would be dead in less than a year. He was wearing a teal polo shirt, and it seemed impossible that someone in a teal polo shirt could perish of anything other than heart disease at age eighty-six, possibly at a polo match.
Blue asked, “What’s your magic-o-meter doing right now?”
Gansey turned it toward her. His knuckles were pale, bone pressed through skin. Red lights flashed across the surface of the meter.
He said, “It’s pegged. Same as in the wood.”
Blue surveyed their surroundings. In all likelihood, all of this was private property, even the ground the church was on, but the area behind the church looked more remote. “If we go that way, it seems less like we’ll be shot for trespassing. We can’t be low profile because of your shirt.”
“Aquamarine is a wonderful color, and I won’t be made to feel bad for wearing it,” Gansey said. But his voice was a bit thin, and he glanced back at the church again. Just then he looked younger than she’d ever seen him, his eyes narrowed, hair messed up, features unstudied. Young and, strangely enough, afraid.
Blue thought: I can’t tell him. I can never tell him. I have to just try to stop it from happening.
Then Gansey, suddenly charming again, flipped a hand in the direction of her purple tunic dress. “Lead the way, Eggplant.”
She found a stick to poke at the ground for snakes before they set off through the grass. The wind smelled like rain, and the ground rumbled with thunder, but the weather held. The machine in Gansey’s hands blinked red constantly, only flickering to orange when they stepped too far away from the
invisible line.
“Thanks for coming, Jane,” Gansey said.
Blue shot him a dirty look. “You’re welcome, Dick.”
He looked pained. “Please don’t.”
This genuine expression robbed all of the glee of using his real name. She
kept walking.
“You’re the only one who doesn’t seem fazed by this,” he said after a moment. “It’s not that I’m accustomed to it, but I’ve run across some unusual things before and I guess I just … but Ronan and Adam and Noah all seem … nonplussed.”
Blue pretended she knew what nonplussed meant. “I live with this, though. I mean, my mother is a psychic. All her friends are psychics. This is — well, it’s not like it’s normal. But it’s how I always thought it would feel to be them. You know, to see things that other people don’t.”
“I spent years trying to get it to do this,” Gansey admitted. There was something about the timbre of his voice that surprised Blue. It wasn’t until he spoke again she realized he was using the tone she’d heard him use with Adam. “I’ve spent eighteen months trying to find the Henrietta line.”
“Was it what you expected?”
“I don’t know what I expected. I’d read all about the effects of the line but I never thought it would be so pronounced. So … I never expected the trees. I never expected it to happen so fast, either. I’m used to getting one clue every month, and then beating that dead horse until another one comes along. Not this.” He paused, his smile wide and benevolent. “This is all down to you. Putting us on the line, finally. I could kiss you.”
Though he was obviously joking, Blue skittered to the side.
“What was that for?”
She asked, “Do you believe in psychics?”
“Well, I went to one, didn’t I?”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Lots of people go to psychics just for a laugh.”
“I went because I believe. Well, I believe in ones that are good at what they do. I just think there’s quite a lot of hooey you have to wade through to get to them. Why?”
Blue viciously stabbed the ground with her snake stick. “Because my mom’s told me, ever since I was born, that if I kiss my true love, he’ll die.”
Gansey laughed.
“Don’t laugh, you —” Blue was going to say bastard but it felt too strong and she lost the nerve.
“Well, it’s just a very precautionary-sounding sort of thing, isn’t it? Don’t date or you’ll go blind. Kiss your true love and he bites it.”
“It’s not just her!” Blue protested. “Every psychic or medium I’ve ever met tells me the same thing. Besides, my mom’s not like that. She wouldn’t just play around with something like that. It’s not pretend.”
“Sorry,” Gansey said, realizing she was genuinely annoyed with him. “I was being a dick again. Do you know how he’s supposed to die, this unlucky
guy?”
Blue shrugged.
“Ah. Devil’s in the details, I guess. So you just kiss nobody, in a precautionary way?” He watched her nod. “That seems grim, Jane. I won’t lie.”
She shrugged again. “I don’t usually tell people. I don’t know why I told you. Don’t tell Adam.”
Gansey’s eyebrows spiked up toward his hairline. “It’s like that, is it?”
Her face went instantly hot. “No. I mean … No. No. It’s just, because it’s not — because I don’t know — I would rather play it safe.”
Blue fantasized that time had begun again with them getting out of the car and her instead striking up a conversation about the weather or which classes he was taking. It didn’t seem like her face would ever stop burning.
Gansey’s voice, when he replied, was a little rough. “Well, if you killed
Adam, I’d be quite upset.”
“I’ll do my best not to.”
For a moment, the silence was uneven and uncomfortable, and then he said, his voice more ordinary, “Thanks for telling me. I mean, trusting me with something like that.”
Relieved, Blue replied, “Well, you told me about how you felt about Ronan and Adam and the nonplussing thing. Only, I still want to know … Why are you looking? For Glendower?”
He smiled ruefully, and for a moment, Blue was afraid that he was about to switch over to flippant, glossy Gansey, but in the end, he just said, “It’s a difficult story to summarize.”
“You’re in a pre–Ivy League high school. Try.”
“All right. Where to start? Maybe — you saw my EpiPen. It’s for bee stings. I’m allergic. Badly.”
Blue stopped in her tracks, alarmed. Hornets nested on the ground, and this was prime territory for them: quiet areas close to trees. “Gansey! This is the countryside. Where bees live!”
He made a dismissive gesture, as if eager to be off this particular subject.
“Keep poking things with your stick and it’ll be okay.”
“My stick! All week we’ve been walking in the woods! That seems awfully —”
“Cavalier?” Gansey suggested. “The truth is that there’s not even really a point having an EpiPen. The last they told me was that it would only work if I got stung once, and even then, they don’t know. I was four the first time I had to go to a hospital for a sting, and the reactions only got worse after that. It is what it is. It’s this or live in a bubble.”
Blue thought about the Death card, and how her mother hadn’t actually interpreted it for Gansey. It was possible, she thought, that the card hadn’t been about Gansey’s foretold tragedy at all, but rather about his life — how he walked side by side with death everyday.
With her stick, Blue thwacked the ground ahead of them. “Okay, go on.”
Gansey sucked in his lips and then released them. “Well, seven years ago, I was at a dinner party with my parents. I can’t remember what it was for. I think one of my dad’s friends had gotten the party nomination.”
“For … Congress?”
The ground beneath their feet or the air around them vibrated with thunder.
“Yeah. I don’t remember. You know how you sometimes don’t remember everything right? Ronan says that memories are like dreams. You never remember how you got to the front of the classroom with no clothes on.
Anyway, the party was dull — I was nine or ten. It was all little black dresses and red ties and any sort of food you wanted, as long as it was shrimp. A few of us kids started to play hide-and-seek. I remember thinking I was too old to play hide-and-seek, but there was nothing else to do.”
Blue and he entered a narrow copse of trees, sparse enough that grass grew between them instead of brambles. This Gansey, this story-telling Gansey, was a different person altogether from any of the other versions of him she’d encountered. She couldn’t not listen.
“It was hot as Hades. It was spring, but it had suddenly decided it was summer. Virginia spring. You know how that is. Heavy, somehow. There was no shade in the backyard, but there was this great forest that bounded it.
Dark and green and blue. Like diving into a lake. In I went, and it was fantastic. Only five minutes and I couldn’t see the house.”
Blue stopped poking the ground. “Did you get lost?”
Gansey shook his head a little.
“I stepped on a nest.” His eyes were narrowed in that way people do when they’re trying hard to appear casual, but it was obvious this story was anything but casual to him. “Hornets, like you said. They nest on the ground.
I don’t have to tell you. But I didn’t know back then. The first thing I felt was a little prickle on my sock. I thought I’d stepped on a thorn — there were a ton of them, those green, whip-shaped ones — but then I felt another. They
were just such small hurts, you know?”
Blue felt a little sick.
He continued, “But then I felt one on my hand, and by the time I jumped away, I saw them. All over my arms.”
Somehow, he’d managed to take her there, to put her in that moment of discovery. Blue’s heart felt dragged down, snared with venom.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“I knew I was dead. I knew I was dead before I started to feel everything start to go wrong in my body. Because I’d been to the hospital for just one sting, and this was, like, a hundred. They were in my hair. They were in my
ears, Blue.”
She asked, “Were you scared?”
He didn’t have to answer. She saw it in the hollow of his eyes.
“What happened?”
“I died,” he said. “I felt my heart stop. The hornets didn’t care. They were still stinging me, even though I was dead.”
Gansey stopped. He said, “This is the difficult part.”
“Those are my favorite,” Blue replied. The trees were quiet around them; the only sound was the growl of thunder. After a pause, she added, a little ashamed, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be … but my whole life is the ‘difficult part.’ Nobody believes in what my family does. I’m not going to laugh.”
He exhaled slowly. “I heard a voice. It was a whisper. I won’t forget what it said. It said: ‘You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.’”
Blue was very quiet. The air pressed on them.
“I told Helen. She said it was a hallucination.” Gansey brushed a hanging vine from his face. The brush was getting thicker here, the trees closer. They
probably needed to turn back. His voice was peculiar. Formal and certain. “It was not a hallucination.”
This was the Gansey who had written the journal. The truth of it, the magic of it, possessed her.
She asked, “And that’s enough to make you spend your life looking for Glendower?”
Gansey replied, “Once Arthur knew the grail existed, how could he not look for it?”
Thunder growled beneath them again, the hungry snarl of an invisible beast.
Blue said, “That’s not really an answer.”
He didn’t look at her. He replied, voice terrible, “I need to, Blue.”
Every light on the EMF reader went out.
Equal parts relieved to be back on safe ground and disappointed not to pry deeper into the real Gansey, Blue touched the machine. “Did we step off the line?”
They retreated several yards, but the machine didn’t turn back on.
“Is the battery dead?” she suggested.
“I don’t know how to check.” Gansey switched it off and then on again.
Blue stretched out her hand for the reader. The moment she took it from him, the lights burst red. Solid red, no blinking. She turned from side to side.
Orange to her left. Red to her right.
They met each other’s eyes.
“Take it back,” Blue said.
But as soon as Gansey touched the EMF reader, the lights went dead again. When the thunder came this time, seductive and simmering, she felt like it started something inside her trembling that didn’t stop after the sound had died.
“I keep thinking there must be a logical explanation,” Gansey said. “But there hasn’t been all week.”
Blue thought there probably was a logical explanation, and she thought it was this: Blue made things louder. Only she had no idea what she was amplifying at the moment.
The air shuddered again as thunder grumbled. There was no sign of the sun now. All that was left was the heavy green air around them.
He asked, “Where is it steering us?”
Letting the solid red light lead them, Blue stepped hesitantly through the trees. They had only made it a few yards when the machine went dead again.
No amount of switching hands or manipulation would encourage it to flicker again.
They stood with the machine between them, heads bowed close, looking
silently at the dark face of it.
Blue asked, “What now?”
Gansey stared down between their feet, directly below the machine. “Step back. There’s —”
“Oh my gosh,” Blue said, jerking away from Gansey. Then, again: “Oh my —”
But she couldn’t finish the sentence, because she had just stepped off something that looked an awful lot like a human arm bone. Gansey was the first to crouch, brushing away the leaves from the bone. Sure enough, beneath the first arm bone was a second. A filthy watch encircled the wrist bone.
Everything looked fake, a skeleton in the woods.
This can’t be happening.
“Oh no.” Blue breathed. “Don’t touch it. Fingerprints.”
But the corpse was long beyond fingerprints. The bones were clean as a museum piece, the flesh long since rotted off, and there were only threads remaining of whatever the person had worn. Picking carefully at leaves, Gansey uncovered the entire skeleton. It lay crumpled, one leg crooked up, arms sprawled to either side of its skull, a freeze-frame of tragedy. Time had spared strange elements and taken others: the watch was there, but the hand was not. The shirt was gone, but a tie remained, rippled over the hills and valleys of the collapsed rib bones. The shoes were dirty but unchanged from exposure. The socks, too, were preserved inside the leather shoes, ankle- height bags of foot bones.
The skull’s cheek was smashed in. She wondered if that was how the person had died.
“Gansey,” Blue said, voice flat. “This was a kid. This was a kid from Aglionby.”
She pointed at his rib cage. Crooked between two bare ribs was an Aglionby patch, the synthetic fibers of the embroidery impervious to the weather.
They stared at each other over the body. Lightning lit the sides of their
faces. Blue was very aware of the skull beneath Gansey’s skin, his cheekbones so close to the surface, high and square like those on the Death
card.
“We should report it,” she said.
“Wait,” he replied. It only took him a moment to find the wallet beneath the hip bone. It was good leather, spattered and bleached, but mostly unmolested. Gansey flipped it open, eyeing the multicolored edges of credit cards that lined one side. He spotted the top edge of a driver’s license and thumbed it out.
Blue heard Gansey’s breath catch in naked shock.
The face on the driver’s license was Noah’s.
