The Raven Boys

Neeve had come to stand just behind her. She replied, "Not yet."

Gansey was nearly gone now, fading into the church, or the church fading into him.

Blue’s voice was breathier than she would have liked. "Why — why can I see him?"

Neeve glanced over her shoulder, either because there were more spirits coming or because there weren’t — Blue couldn’t tell. By the time she looked back, Gansey had vanished entirely. Already Blue felt warmth returning to her skin, but something behind her lungs felt icy. A dangerous, sucking sadness seemed to be opening up inside her: grief or regret.

"There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve, Blue. Either you’re his true love," Neeve said, "or you killed him."

Chapter 2

It’s me," said Gansey.

He turned around so that he was facing his car. The Camaro’s bright orange hood was up, more as a symbol of defeat than for any practical use. Adam, friend of cars everywhere, might have been able to determine what was wrong with it this time, but Gansey certainly couldn’t. He’d managed to roll to a stop about four feet off the interstate and now the car’s fat tires sat off-kilter on top of lumpy tufts of valley grass. A semitruck roared by without pause; the Camaro rocked in its wake.

On the other end of the phone, his roommate Ronan Lynch replied, "You missed World Hist. I thought you were dead in a ditch."

Gansey flipped his wrist around to examine his watch. He had missed a lot more than World History. It was eleven o’clock, and already the chilliness of last night seemed improbable. A gnat was stuck in the perspiration on his skin next to the watch-band; he flicked it off. Gansey had camped, once, when he was younger. It had involved tents. Sleeping bags. An idling Range Rover parked nearby for when he and his father lost interest. As an experience, it had not been anything like last night.

He asked, "Did you get notes for me?"

"No," Ronan replied. "I thought you were dead in a ditch."

Gansey blew grit off his lips and readjusted the phone against his cheek. He would’ve gotten notes for Ronan. "The Pig stopped. Come get me."

A sedan slowed as it passed, the occupants staring out the window. Gansey was not an unpleasant-looking boy and the Camaro was not too hard on the eyes, either, but this attention had less to do with comeliness and more to do with the novelty of an Aglionby boy broken down by the side of the road in an impudently orange car. Gansey was well aware that there was nothing little Henrietta, Virginia, preferred over seeing humiliating things happen to Aglionby boys, unless it was seeing humiliating things happen to their families.

Ronan said, "Come on, man."

"It’s not like you’re going to class. You know what, it’ll be lunch break anyway." Then he added, perfunctory, "Please."

Ronan was silent for a long moment. He was good at silence; he knew it made people uncomfortable. But Gansey was immune from long exposure. He leaned into the car to see if he had any food in the glove box while he waited for Ronan to speak. Next to an EpiPen, there was a stick of beef jerky, but the jerky had expired two years ago. Possibly it had been there when he’d bought the car.

"Where are you?" Ronan asked, finally.

"Next to the Henrietta sign on 64. Bring me a burger. And a few gallons of gas." The car had not run out of gas, but it couldn’t hurt.

Ronan’s voice was acidic. "Gansey."

"Bring Adam, too."

Ronan hung up. Gansey stripped off his sweater and threw it in the back of the Camaro. The tiny back of the car was a cluttered marriage of everyday things — a chemistry textbook, a Frappuccino-stained notebook, a half-zipped CD binder with naked discs slithering out across the seat — and the supplies he’d acquired during his eighteen months in Henrietta. Rumpled maps, computer printouts, ever-present journal, flashlight, willow stick. When Gansey plucked a digital recorder out of the mess, a pizza receipt (one large deep-dish, half sausage, half avocado) fluttered to the seat, joining a half-dozen receipts identical except for the date.

All night he’d sat outside the monstrously modern Church of the Holy Redeemer, recorder running, ears straining, waiting for — something. The atmosphere had been less than magical. Possibly not the best place to try to make contact with the future dead, but Gansey had maintained high hopes for the power of St. Mark’s Eve. It wasn’t that he’d expected to see the dead. All of the sources said that church watchers had to possess "the second sight" and Gansey barely possessed first sight before he put his contacts in. He’d just hoped for —

Something. And that was what he had gotten. He just wasn’t quite sure what that something was yet.

The digital recorder in hand, Gansey settled himself against the rear tire to wait, letting the car shield him from the buffeting of passing vehicles. On the other side of the guard rail, a greening field stretched out and down to the trees. Beyond it all rose the mysterious blue crest of the mountains.

On the dusty toe of his shoe, Gansey drew the arcing shape of the promised supernatural energy line that had led him here. As the mountain breeze rushed over his ears, it sounded like a hushed shout — not a whisper, but a loud cry from almost too far away to hear.

The thing was, Henrietta looked like a place where magic could happen. The valley seemed to whisper secrets. It was easier to believe that they wouldn’t give themselves up to Gansey rather than that they didn’t exist at all.

Please just tell me where you are.

His heart hurt with the wanting of it, the hurt no less painful for being difficult to explain.

Ronan Lynch’s shark-nosed BMW pulled in behind the Camaro, its normally glossy charcoal paint dusted green with pollen. Gansey felt the bass of the stereo in his feet a moment before he made out the tune. When he stood up, Ronan was just opening his door. In the passenger seat was Adam Parrish, the third member of the foursome that made up Gansey’s closest friends. The knot of Adam’s tie was neat above the collar of his sweater. One slender hand pressed Ronan’s thin cell phone tightly to his ear.

Through the open car door, Adam and Gansey exchanged the briefest of looks. Adam’s knitted eyebrows asked, Did you find anything? and Gansey’s widened eyes replied, You tell me.

Adam, frowning now, spun the volume knob down on the stereo and said something into the phone.

Ronan slammed the car door — he slammed everything — before heading to the trunk. He said, "My dick brother wants us to meet him at Nino’s tonight. With Ashley."

"Is that who’s on the phone?" Gansey asked. "What’s Ashley?"

Ronan hefted a gas can from the trunk, making little effort to keep the greasy container from contacting his clothing. Like Gansey, he wore the Aglionby uniform, but, as always, he managed to make it look as disreputable as possible. His tie was knotted with a method best described as contempt and his shirt-tails were ragged beneath the bottom of his sweater. His smile was thin and sharp. If his BMW was shark-like, it had learned how from him. "Declan’s latest. We’re meant to look pretty for her."

Gansey resented having to play nicely with Ronan’s older brother, a senior at Aglionby, but he understood why they had to. Freedom in the Lynch family was a complicated thing, and at the moment, Declan held the keys to it.

Ronan traded the fuel can for the digital recorder. "He wants to do it tonight because he knows I have class."

The fuel-tank lid for the Camaro was located behind the spring-loaded license plate, and Ronan watched silently as Gansey simultaneously wrestled with the lid, the gas can, and the license plate.

"You could have done this," Gansey told him. "Since you don’t care about crapping up your shirt."

Unsympathetic, Ronan scratched at an old, brown scab beneath the five knotted leather bands he wore around his wrist. Last week, he and Adam had taken turns dragging each other on a moving dolly behind the BMW, and they both still had the marks to show it.

"Ask me if I found something," Gansey said.

Sighing, Ronan twitched the recorder toward Gansey. "Did you find anything?"

Ronan didn’t sound very interested, but that was part of the Ronan Lynch brand. It was impossible to tell how deep his disinterest truly was.

Fuel was leeching slowly into Gansey’s expensive chinos, the second pair he’d ruined in a month. It wasn’t that he meant to be careless — as Adam told him again and again, "Things cost money, Gansey" — it was just that he never seemed to realize the consequences of his actions until too late. "Something. I recorded about four hours of audio and there’s — something. But I don’t know what it means." He gestured to the recorder. "Give it a whirl."

Turning to stare out over the interstate, Ronan pressed PLAY. For a moment there was merely silence, broken only by icy-sounding shrills of crickets. Then, Gansey’s voice:

"Gansey," it said.

There was a long pause. Gansey rubbed a finger slowly along the pocked chrome of the Camaro’s bumper. It was still strange to hear himself on the recording, with no memory of saying the words.

Then, as if from very far away, a female voice, the words hard to make out: "Is that all?"

Ronan’s eyes darted to Gansey, wary.

Gansey lifted his finger: Wait. Murmured voices, quieter than before, hissed from the recorder, nothing clear about them except the cadence: questions and answers. And then his disembodied voice spoke out of the recorder again:

"That’s all there is."

Ronan cast a glance back over to Gansey beside the car, doing what Gansey thought of as his smoker breath: long inhale through flared nostrils, slow exhale through parted lips.

Ronan did not smoke. He preferred his habits with hangovers.

He stopped the recorder and said, "You’re dripping gas on your pants, geezer."

"Aren’t you going to ask me what was happening when I recorded that?"

Ronan didn’t ask. He just kept looking at Gansey, which was the same thing.

"Nothing was happening. That’s what. I was staring at a parking lot full of bugs that shouldn’t be alive when it’s this cold overnight, and there was nothing."

Gansey hadn’t really been sure if he’d pick up anything in the parking lot, even if he was in the right place. According to the ley hunters he’d spoken to, the ley line sometimes transmitted voices across its length, throwing sounds hundreds of miles and dozens of years from when they’d first been heard. A sort of audio haunting, an unpredictable radio transmission where nearly anything on the ley line could be a receiver: a recorder, a stereo, a pair of well-tuned human ears. Lacking any psychic ability, Gansey had brought the recorder, as the noises were often only audible when played back. The strange thing in all this was not the other voices on the player. The strange thing was Gansey’s voice: Gansey was quite certain he was not a spirit.

"I didn’t say anything, Ronan. All night long, I didn’t say anything. So what’s my voice doing on the recorder?"

"How did you know it was there?"