The Raven Boys

And he left out all the parts about magic and the ley line.

"That’s crazy," Ashley said. Her eyes were locked on the journal. "Why do you think he’s here?"

There were two possible versions of this answer. One was grounded merely in history and was infinitely suitable for general consumption. The other added divining rods and magic to the equation. Some days, some rotten days, Adam believed the former, and only barely. But being Gansey’s friend meant that more often he hoped for the latter. This was where Ronan, much to Adam’s dissatisfaction, excelled: His belief in the supernatural explanation was unwavering. Adam’s faith was imperfect.

Ashley, either because she was transient or because she’d been deemed skeptical, got the historical version. In his best professor voice, Gansey explained a bit about Welsh place names in the area, fifteenth-century artifacts found buried in Virginia soil, and historical support for an early, pre-Columbus Welsh landing in America.

Midway through the lecture, Noah — Monmouth Manufacturing’s reclusive third resident — emerged from the meticulous room directly next to the office Ronan had claimed as his bedroom. Noah’s bed shared the tiny space with a piece of mysterious equipment Adam guessed was some sort of printing press.

Noah, stepping farther into the room, didn’t so much smile at Ashley as goggle at her. He wasn’t the best with new people.

"That’s Noah," Declan said. He said it in a way that confirmed Adam’s assumption: Monmouth Manufacturing and the boys who lived in it were a tourist stop for Declan and Ashley, a conversation piece for a later dinner.

Noah extended his hand.

"Oh! Your hand is cold." Ashley cupped her fingers against her shirt to warm them.

"I’ve been dead for seven years," Noah said. "That’s as warm as they get."

Noah, unlike his pristine room, always seemed a little grubby. There was something out of place about his clothing, his mostly combed-back fair hair. His unkempt uniform always made Adam feel a little less like he stuck out. It was hard to feel like part of the Aglionby crowd when standing next to Gansey, whose crisp-as-George-Washington white collared shirt alone cost more than Adam’s bicycle (anyone who said you couldn’t tell the difference between a shirt from the mall and a shirt made by a clever Italian man had never seen the latter), or even Ronan, who had spent nine hundred dollars on a tattoo merely to piss off his brother.

Ashley’s obliging giggle was cut off as Ronan’s bedroom door opened. A cloud like there would never be sun again crossed Declan’s face.

Ronan and Declan Lynch were undeniably brothers, with the same dark brown hair and sharp nose, but Declan was solid where Ronan was brittle. Declan’s wide jaw and smile said, Vote for me while Ronan’s buzzed head and thin mouth warned that this species was poisonous.

"Ronan," Declan said. On the phone with Adam earlier, he had asked, When will Ronan not be available? "I thought you had tennis."

"I did," Ronan replied.

There was a moment of silence, where Declan considered what he wanted to say in front of Ashley, and Ronan enjoyed the effect that awkward silence had on his brother. The two elder Lynch brothers — there were three total at Aglionby — had been at odds for as long as Adam had known them. Unlike most of the world, Gansey preferred Ronan to his elder brother Declan, and so the lines had been drawn. Adam suspected Gansey’s preference was because Ronan was earnest even if he was horrible, and with Gansey, honesty was golden.

Declan waited a second too long to speak, and Ronan crossed his arms over his chest. "You’ve got quite the guy here, Ashley. You’ll have a great night with him and then some other girl can have a great night with him tomorrow."

A fly buzzed against a windowpane far above their heads. Behind Ronan, his door, covered with photocopies of his speeding tickets, drifted closed.

Ashley’s mouth didn’t make an O so much as a sideways D. A second too late, Gansey punched Ronan in the arm.

"He’s sorry," Gansey said.

Ashley’s mouth was slowly closing. She blinked at the map of Wales and back to Ronan. He’d chosen his weapon well: only the truth, untempered by kindness.

"My brother is —" said Declan. But he didn’t finish. There wasn’t anything he could say that Ronan hadn’t already proven. He said, "We’re going now. Ronan, I think you need to reconsider your —" But again, he had no words to end the sentence. His brother had taken all the catchy ones.

Declan snagged Ashley’s hand, jerking her attention away and toward the apartment door.

"Declan," Gansey started.

"Don’t try to make this better," Declan warned. As he pulled Ashley out into the tiny stairwell and down the stairs, Adam heard the beginnings of damage control: He has problems, I told you, I tried to make sure he wouldn’t be here, he’s the one who found Dad, it messed him up, let’s go get seafood instead, don’t you think we look like lobster tonight? We do.

The moment the apartment door was closed, Gansey said, "Come on, Ronan."

Ronan’s expression was still incendiary. His code of honor left no room for infidelity, for casual relationships. It wasn’t that he didn’t condone them; he couldn’t understand them.

"So he’s a man-whore. It’s not your problem," Gansey said. Ronan was not really Gansey’s problem, either, in Adam’s opinion, but they’d had this argument before.

One of Ronan’s eyebrows was raised, sharp as a razor.

Gansey strapped his journal closed. "That doesn’t work on me. She had nothing to do with you and Declan." He said you and Declan like it was a physical object, something you could pick up and look underneath. "You treated her badly. You made the rest of us look bad."

Ronan looked chastened, but Adam knew better. Ronan wasn’t sorry for his behavior; he was only sorry that Gansey had been there to see him. What lived between the Lynch brothers was dark enough to hide anyone else’s feelings.

But surely Gansey knew that as well as Adam. He ran his thumb back and forth across his bottom lip, a habit he never seemed to notice and Adam never bothered to point out. Catching Adam’s gaze, he said, "Christ, now I feel dirty. Come on. Let’s go to Nino’s. We’ll get pizza and I’ll call that psychic and the whole goddamn world will sort itself out."

This was why Adam could forgive that shallow, glossy version of Gansey he’d first met. Because of his money and his good family name, because of his handsome smile and his easy laugh, because he liked people and (despite his fears to the contrary) they liked him back, Gansey could’ve had any and all of the friends that he wanted. Instead he had chosen the three of them, three guys who should’ve, for three different reasons, been friendless.

"I’m not coming," Noah said.

"Need some more alone time?" Ronan asked.

"Ronan," Gansey interjected. "Set your weapons to stun, will you? Noah, we won’t make you eat. Adam?"

Adam glanced up, distracted. His mind had wandered from Ronan’s bad behavior to Ashley’s interest in the journal, and he was wondering if it was more than the ordinary curiosity people possessed when faced with Gansey and his obsessive accessories. He knew Gansey would find him overly suspicious, unnecessarily propiertary of a search Gansey was more than willing to share with most people.

But Gansey and Adam sought Glendower for different reasons. Gansey longed for him like Arthur longed for the grail, drawn by a desperate but nebulous need to be useful to the world, to make sure his life meant something beyond champagne parties and white collars, by some complicated longing to settle an argument that waged deep inside himself.

Adam, on the other hand, needed that royal favor.

And that meant they needed to be the ones to wake Glendower. They needed to be the ones to find him first.

"Parrish," Gansey repeated. "Come on."

Adam made a face. He felt it would take more than pizza to improve Ronan’s character.

But Gansey was already grabbing the car keys to the Pig and stepping around his miniature Henrietta. Even though Ronan was snarling and Noah was sighing and Adam was hesitating, he didn’t turn to verify that they were coming. He knew they were. In three different ways, he’d earned them all days or weeks or months before, and when it came to it, they’d all follow him anywhere.

"Excelsior," said Gansey, and shut the door behind them.

Chapter 5

Barrington Whelk was feeling less than sprightly as he slouched down the hall of Whitman House, the Aglionby admin building. It was five P.M., the school day well over, and he’d only left his town house in order to pick up homework that had to be graded before the next day. Afternoon light spilled in the tall, many-paned windows to his left; on the right was a hum of voices from the staff offices. These old buildings looked like museums at this time of day.

"Barrington, I thought you were out today. You look terrible. You sick?"

Whelk didn’t immediately formulate an answer. For all intents and purposes, he was still out. The question asker was Jonah Milo, the well-scrubbed eleventh- and twelfth-grade English teacher. Despite an affinity for plaid and thin-legged corduroy pants, Milo wasn’t unbearable, but Whelk didn’t care to discuss his absence from class this morning with him. St. Mark’s Eve was beginning to have a sheen of tradition for him, one that involved spending most of the night getting smashed before falling asleep on his kitchenette floor just before dawn. This year he’d had the forethought to request St. Mark’s Day off. Teaching Latin to Aglionby boys was punishment enough. Teaching it with a hangover was excruciating.

Finally, Whelk merely held up the grubby stack of handwritten homework assignments as answer. Milo’s widened his eyes at the sight of the name written on the topmost paper.

"Ronan Lynch! Is that his homework?"

Flipping the stack around to read the name on the front, Whelk agreed that it was. As he did, a few boys on their way to crew team practice crashed past, pushing him into Milo. The students probably didn’t even realize they were being disrespectful; Whelk was barely older than they were, and his dramatically large features made him look younger. It was still easy to mistake him for one of the students.

Milo disentangled himself from Whelk. "How do you get him to come to class?"

The mere mention of Ronan Lynch’s name had scraped something raw inside Whelk. Because it was never Ronan by himself, it was Ronan as part of the inseparable threesome: Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey, and Adam Parrish. All of the boys in his class were affluent, confident, arrogant, but the three of them, more than anyone else, reminded him of what he’d lost.

Whelk struggled to remember if Ronan had ever missed a class with him. The days of the school year blurred together, one long and unending day that began with Whelk parking his crappy car next to the beautiful Aglionby cars, shouldering his way past laughing, thoughtless boys, standing in front of a room of students who were glassy-eyed at best and derisive at worst. And at the end of the day Whelk, alone and haunted, never, ever able to forget that he was once one of them.