The Raven Boys

"I was listening to what I’d recorded while I was driving back. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then: my voice. Then the Pig stopped."

"Coincidence?" Ronan asked. "I think not."

It was meant to be sarcastic. Gansey had said I don’t believe in coincidences so often that he no longer needed to.

Gansey asked, "Well, what do you think?"

"Holy grail, finally," Ronan replied, too sarcastic to be any use at all.

But the fact was this: Gansey had spent the last four years working with the thinnest scraps of evidence possible and the barely heard voice was all the encouragement he needed. His eighteen months in Henrietta had used some of the sketchiest scraps of all as he searched for a ley line — a perfectly straight, supernatural energy path that connected spiritual places — and the elusive tomb he hoped lay along its path. This was just an occupational hazard of looking for an invisible energy line. It was … well, invisible.

And possibly hypothetical, but Gansey refused to consider that notion. In seventeen years of life, he’d already found dozens of things people hadn’t known could be found, and he fully intended to add the ley line, the tomb, and the tomb’s royal occupant to that list of items.

A museum curator in New Mexico had once told Gansey, Son, you have an uncanny knack for discovering oddities. An astonished Roman historian commented, You look under rocks no one else thinks to pick up, slick. And a very old British professor had said, The world turns out its pockets for you, boy. The key, Gansey found, was that you had to believe that they existed; you had to realize they were part of something bigger. Some secrets only gave themselves up to those who’d proven themselves worthy.

The way Gansey saw it was this: If you had a special knack for finding things, it meant you owed the world to look.

"Hey, is that Whelk?" Ronan asked.

A car had slowed considerably as it passed them, affording them a glimpse of its overly curious driver. Gansey had to agree that the driver did look a lot like their resentful Latin teacher, an Aglionby alumnus by the unfortunate name of Barrington Whelk. Gansey, owing to his official title of Richard "Dick" Campbell Gansey III, was fairly immune to posh names, but even he had to admit there wasn’t much forgivable about Barrington Whelk.

"Hey, don’t stop and help or anything," Ronan snapped after the car. "Hey, runt. What went down with Declan?"

This last part was directed at Adam as he climbed out of the BMW with Ronan’s phone still in hand. He offered it to Ronan, who shook his head disdainfully. Ronan despised all phones, including his own.

Adam said, "He’s coming by at five tonight."

Unlike Ronan, Adam’s Aglionby sweater was secondhand, but he’d taken great care to be certain it was impeccable. He was slim and tall, with dusty hair unevenly cropped above a fine-boned, tanned face. He was a sepia photograph.

"Joy," Gansey replied. "You’ll be there, right?"

"Am I invited?" Adam could be peculiarly polite. When he was uncertain about something, his Southern accent always made an appearance, and it was in evidence now.

Adam never needed an invitation. He and Ronan must’ve fought. Unsurprising. If it had a social security number, Ronan had fought with it.

"Don’t be stupid," Gansey replied, and graciously accepted the grease-splotched fast-food bag that Adam offered. "Thanks."

"Ronan got it," Adam said. In matters of money, he was quick to assign credit or blame.

Gansey looked to Ronan, who lounged against the Camaro, absently biting one of the leather straps on his wrist. Gansey said, "Tell me there’s no sauce on this burger."

Dropping the strap from his teeth, Ronan scoffed. "Please."

"No pickle, either," Adam said, crouching behind the car. He’d not only brought two small containers of fuel additive, but also a rag to place between the gas can and his khakis; he made the entire process look commonplace. Adam tried so hard to hide his roots, but they came out in the smallest of gestures.

Now Gansey grinned, the warmth of discovery starting to course through him. "So, pop quiz, Mr. Parrish. Three things that appear in the vicinity of ley lines?"

"Black dogs," Adam said indulgently. "Demonic presences."

"Camaros," Ronan inserted.

Gansey continued as if he hadn’t spoken. "And ghosts. Ronan, queue up the evidence if you would."

The three of them stood there in the late morning sun as Adam screwed the fuel-tank lid back on and Ronan rewound the player. Yards and yards away, over the mountains, a red-tailed hawk screamed thinly. Ronan pressed PLAY again and they listened to Gansey say his name into thin air. Adam frowned distantly, listening, the warm day reddening his cheeks.

It could have been any one of the mornings in the last year and a half. Ronan and Adam would make up by the end of the day, his teachers would forgive him for missing class, then he and Adam and Ronan and Noah would go out for pizza, four against Declan.

Adam said, "Try the car, Gansey."

Leaving the door hanging open, Gansey crashed onto the driver’s seat. In the background, Ronan played the recording again. For some reason, from this distance, the sound of the voices made the hair on his arms stand slowly. Something inside him said that this unconscious speech meant the start of something different, although he didn’t know what yet.

"Come on, Pig!" snarled Ronan. Someone laid on their horn as they blew by on the highway.

Gansey turned the key. The engine turned over once, paused for the briefest of moments — and then roared to deafening life. The Camaro lived to fight another day. The radio was even working, playing the Stevie Nicks song that always sounded to Gansey like it was about a one-winged dove. He tried one of the french fries they’d brought him. They were cold.

Adam leaned into the car. "We’ll follow you back to the school. It’ll get you back, but it’s not done yet," he said. "There’s still something wrong with it."

"Great," Gansey replied, loudly, to be heard over the engine. In the background, the BMW pumped out a nearly inaudible bass line as Ronan dissolved what was left of his heart in electronic loops. "So, suggestions?"

Reaching into his pocket, Adam retrieved a piece of paper and offered it to him.

"What’s this?" Gansey studied Adam’s erratic handwriting. His letters always looked like they were running from something. "A number for a psychic?"

"If you didn’t find anything last night, this was going to be next. Now you have something to ask them about."

Gansey considered. Psychics tended to tell him he had money coming his way and that he was destined for great things. The first one he knew was always true and the second one he was afraid might be. But maybe with this new clue, with a new psychic, they’d have something else to say.

"Okay," he agreed. "So what am I asking them?"

Adam handed him the digital recorder. He knocked the top of the Camaro once, twice, pensive.

"That seems obvious," he answered. "We find out who you were talking to."

Chapter 3

Mornings at 300 Fox Way were fearful, jumbled things. Elbows in sides and lines for the bathroom and people snapping over tea bags placed into cups that already had tea bags in them. There was school for Blue and work for some of the more productive (or less intuitive) aunts. Toast got burned, cereal went soggy, the refrigerator door hung open and expectant for minutes at a time. Keys jingled as car pools were hastily decided.

Partway through breakfast, the phone would begin to ring and Maura would say, "That’s the universe calling for you on line two, Orla" or something like that, and Jimi or Orla or one of the other aunts or half aunts or friends would fight over who had to pick it up on the upstairs phone. Two years ago, Blue’s cousin Orla had decided that a call-in psychic line would be a lucrative addition and, after some brief skirmishes with Maura about public image, Orla won. "Winning" involved Orla waiting until Maura was at a conference over a weekend to secretively set up the line, and it was not so much a sore spot as the memory of a sore spot. Calls started coming in around seven A.M., and some days a dollar a minute felt more worth it than others.

Mornings were a sport. One that Blue liked to think she was getting better at.

But the day after the church watch, Blue didn’t have to worry about battling for the bathroom or trying to make a bag lunch while Orla dropped toast butter-side down. When she woke up, her normally morning-bright room had the breath-held dimness of afternoon. In the next room over, Orla was talking to either her boyfriend or to one of the psychic hotline callers. With Orla, it was difficult to tell the difference between the two sorts of calls. Both of them left Blue thinking she ought to shower afterward.

Blue took over the bathroom uncontested, where she gave most of her attention to her hair. Her dark hair was cut in a bob, long enough to plausibly pull back but short enough that it required an assembly of clips to do so successfully. The end result was a spiky, uneven ponytail populated by escaped chunks and mismatched clips; it looked eccentric and unkempt. Blue had worked hard to get it that way.

"Mom," she said as she jumped down the crooked stairs. Maura was at the kitchen counter making a mess of some kind of loose tea. It smelled appalling.

Her mother didn’t turn around. On the counter on either side of her were green, oceanic drifts of loose herbs. "You don’t have to run everywhere."

"You do," Blue retorted. "Why didn’t you wake me up for school?"

"I did," Maura said. "Twice." Then, to herself, "Dammit."

From the table, Neeve’s mild voice said, "Do you need my help with that, Maura?" She sat at the table with a cup of tea, looking plump and angelic as always, no sign of having lost any sleep the night before. Neeve stared at Blue, who tried to avoid eye contact.

"I’m perfectly capable of making a damn meditation tea, thank you," Maura said. To Blue, she added, "I told the school you had the flu. I emphasized that you were vomiting. Remember to look peaked tomorrow."

Blue pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. She’d never missed class the day after the church watch. Been sleepy, perhaps, but never wasted like last night.

"Was it because I saw him?" she asked Neeve, lowering her hands. She wished that she couldn’t remember the boy so clearly. Or rather, the idea of him, his hand sprawled on the ground. She wished she could un-see it. "Is that why I slept so long?"

"It’s because you let fifteen spirits walk through your body while you chatted with a dead boy," Maura replied tersely, before Neeve could speak. "From what I’ve heard, anyway. Christ, is this what these leaves are supposed to smell like?"

Blue turned to Neeve, who continued to sip her tea with a sanguine air. "Is that true? Is it because spirits walked through me?"

"You did let them draw energy from you," Neeve replied. "You have quite a lot, but not that much."

Blue had two immediate thoughts about this. One was I have quite a lot of energy? and the other was I think I am annoyed. It was not as if she had intentionally allowed the spirits to draw power from her.