The Raven Boys

"I’ll show you out," Maura said. She was clearly eager to see them on the other side of the door. For a moment, it looked as if Gansey felt the same, but then he stopped. He paid an undue amount of attention to his wallet as he folded it and reinserted it into his pocket, and then he looked up to Maura and made a firm line of his mouth.

"Look, we’re all adults here," he started.

Calla made a face as if she disagreed.

Gansey squared his shoulders and continued, "So I think we deserve the truth. Tell me you know something but you don’t want to help me, if that’s what’s going on, but don’t lie to me."

It was a brave thing to say, or an arrogant one, or maybe there was not enough of a difference between the two things to matter. Every head in the room swung to Maura.

She said, "I know something but I don’t want to help you."

For the second time that day, Calla looked delighted. Blue’s mouth was open. She closed it.

Gansey, however, just nodded, no more or less distressed than when Blue had retorted back to him at the restaurant. "All right, then. No, no, you can stay put. We’ll let ourselves out."

And just like that, they did, Adam sending Blue a last look that she couldn’t easily interpret. A second later, the Camaro revved high, and the tires squealed out Gansey’s true feelings. Then the house was quiet. It was a sucked-out silence, like the raven boys had taken all the sound in the neighborhood with them.

Blue whirled on her mother. "Mom." She was going to say something else, but all that she could manage was again, louder, "Mom!"

"Maura," Calla said, "that was very rude." Then she added, "I liked it."

Maura turned to Blue as if Calla hadn’t spoken. "I don’t want you to ever see him again."

Indignant, Blue cried, "Whatever happened to ‘children should never be given orders’?"

"That was before Gansey." Maura flipped around the Death card, giving Blue a long time to stare at the skull inside the helmet. "This is the same as me telling you not to walk in front of a bus."

Several comebacks riffled through Blue’s head before she found one that she wanted. "Why? Neeve didn’t see me on the corpse road. I’m not going to die in the next year."

"First of all, the corpse road is a promise, not a guarantee," Maura replied. "Second of all, there are other terrible fates besides death. Shall we talk about dismemberment? Paralysis? Endless psychological trauma? There is something really wrong with those boys. When your mother says don’t walk in front of a bus, she has a good reason."

From the kitchen, Persephone’s soft voice called, "If someone had stopped you from walking in front of a bus, Maura, Blue wouldn’t be here."

Maura shot a frown in her direction, then swept her hand across the reading table as if she were clearing it of crumbs. "The best-case scenario here is that you make friends with a boy who’s going to die."

"Ah," said Calla, in a very, very knowing way. "Now I see."

"Don’t psychoanalyze me," her mother said.

"I already have. And I say again, ‘ah.’"

Maura sneered uncharacteristically, and then asked Calla, "What did you see when you touched that other boy? The raven boy?"

"They’re all raven boys," Blue said.

Her mother shook her head. "No, he’s more raven than the others."

Calla rubbed her fingertips together, as if she was wiping the memory of Ronan’s tattoo from them. "It’s like scrying into that weird space. There’s so much coming out of him, it shouldn’t be possible. Do you remember that woman who came in who was pregnant with quadruplets? It was like that, but worse."

"He’s pregnant?" Blue asked.

"He’s creating," Calla said. "That space is creating, too. I don’t know how to say it any better than that."

Blue wondered what sort of creating they meant. She was always creating things — taking old things and cutting them up and making them better things. Taking things that already existed and transforming them into something else. This, she felt, was what most people meant when they called someone creative.

But she suspected that wasn’t how Calla meant it. She suspected that what Calla meant was the true meaning of creative: to make a thing where before there was none.

Maura caught Blue’s expression. She said, "I’ve never told you to do anything before, Blue. But I’m telling you now. Stay away from them."

Chapter 16

The night following the reading, Gansey woke to a completely unfamiliar sound and fumbled for his glasses. It sounded a little like one of his roommates was being killed by a possum, or possibly the final moments of a fatal cat fight. He wasn’t certain of the specifics, but he was sure death was involved.

Noah stood in the doorway to his room, his face pathetic and long-suffering. "Make it stop," he said.

Ronan’s room was sacred, and yet here Gansey was, twice in the same week, pushing the door open. He found the lamp on and Ronan hunched on the bed, wearing only boxers. Six months before, Ronan had gotten the intricate black tattoo that covered most of his back and snaked up his neck, and now the monochromatic lines of it were stark in the claustrophobic lamplight, more real than anything else in the room. It was a peculiar tattoo, both vicious and lovely, and every time Gansey saw it, he saw something different in the pattern. Tonight, nestled in an inked glen of wicked, beautiful flowers, was a beak where before he’d seen a scythe.

The ragged sound cut through the apartment again.

"What fresh hell is this?" Gansey asked pleasantly. Ronan was wearing headphones as usual, so Gansey stretched forward far enough to tug them down around his neck. Music wailed faintly into the air.

Ronan lifted his head. As he did, the wicked flowers on his back shifted and hid behind his sharp shoulder blades. In his lap was the half-formed raven, its head tilted back, beak agape.

"I thought we were clear on what a closed door meant," Ronan said. He held a pair of tweezers in one hand.

"I thought we were clear that night was for sleeping."

Ronan shrugged. "Perhaps for you."

"Not tonight. Your pterodactyl woke me. Why is it making that sound?"

In response, Ronan dipped the tweezers into a plastic baggy on the blanket in front of him. Gansey wasn’t certain he wanted to know what the gray substance was in the tweezers’ grasp. As soon as the raven heard the rustle of the bag, it made the ghastly sound again — a rasping squeal that became a gurgle as it slurped down the offering. At once, it inspired both Gansey’s compassion and his gag reflex.

"Well, this is not going to do," he said. "You’re going to have to make it stop."

"She has to be fed," Ronan replied. The raven gargled down another bite. This time it sounded a lot like vacuuming potato salad. "It’s only every two hours for the first six weeks."

"Can’t you keep her downstairs?"

In reply, Ronan half-lifted the little bird toward him. "You tell me."

Gansey disliked having his kindness appealed to, especially when it had to war with his desire for sleep. There was, of course, no way that he would force the raven downstairs. It looked bite-sized and improbable. He wasn’t certain if it was extremely cute or appallingly ugly, and it bothered him that it managed to be both.

From behind him, Noah said, sounding pitiful, "I don’t like that thing in here. It reminds me of …"

He trailed off, as he often did, and Ronan pointed the tweezers at him. "Hey, man. Stay out of my room."

"Shut up," Gansey told both of them. "That includes you, bird."

"Chainsaw."

Noah withdrew, but Gansey remained. For several minutes, he watched the raven slurp down gray slime while Ronan cooed at her. He was not the Ronan that Gansey had grown accustomed to, but neither was he the Ronan that Gansey had first met. It was clear now that the instrument wailing from the headphones was the Irish pipes. Gansey couldn’t remember the last time Ronan had listened to Celtic music. Niall Lynch’s music. All at once, he, too, missed Ronan’s charismatic father. But more than that, he missed the Ronan that had existed when Niall Lynch had still been alive. This boy in front of him now, fragile bird in his hands, seemed like a compromise.

After a space, Gansey asked, "What did the psychic mean, Ronan? Earlier. About your father."

Ronan didn’t lift his head, but Gansey watched the muscles in his back tighten, stretched as if they were suddenly carrying weight. "That’s a very Declan question."

Gansey considered this. "No. No, I don’t think it is."

"She was just full of shit."

Gansey considered this, too. "No, I don’t think she was."

Ronan found his music player next to him on the bed and paused it. When he replied, his voice was pitchless and naked. "She’s one of those chicks who gets inside your head and fucks around with parts. She said it because she knew it would cause problems."

"Like what?"

"Like you asking me questions like Declan would," Ronan said. He offered the raven another gray mass, but she just stared up at him, transfixed. "Making me think about things I don’t want to think about. Those sorts of problems. Among others. What’s going on with your face, by the way?"

Gansey rubbed his chin, rueful. His skin felt reluctantly stubbled. He knew he was being diverted, but he allowed it. "Is it growing?"

"Dude, you aren’t really going to do that beard thing, are you? I thought you were joking. You know that stopped being cool in the fourteenth century or whenever it was that Paul Bunyan lived." Ronan looked over his shoulder at him. He was sporting the five o’clock shadow that he was capable of growing at any time of the day. "Just stop. You look mangy."

"It’s irrelevant. It’s not growing. I’m doomed to be a man-child."

"If you keep saying things like ‘man-child,’ we’re done," Ronan said. "Hey, man. Don’t let it get you down. Once your balls drop, that beard’ll come in great. Like a fucking rug. You eat soup, it’ll filter out the potatoes. Terrier style. Do you have hair on your legs? I’ve never noticed."

Gansey didn’t dignify any of this with a response. With a sigh, he pushed off the wall and pointed at the raven. "I’m going back to bed. Keep that thing quiet. You so owe me, Lynch."

"Whatever," Ronan said.

Gansey retreated to his bed, though he didn’t lie down. He reached for his journal, but it wasn’t there; he’d left it at Nino’s the night of the fight. He thought about calling Malory, but he didn’t know what he wanted to ask. Something inside him felt like the night, hungry and wanting and black. He thought about the dark eyeholes of the skeletal knight on the Death card.

An insect was buzzing against the window, the sort of buzz-tap that came from an insect with some size to it. He thought about his EpiPen, far away in the glove box of the car, too far away to be a useful antidote if it was needed. The insect was probably a fly or a stink bug or yet another crane fly, but the longer he lay there, the more he considered the idea that it could be a wasp or a bee.