The Raven Boys

Blue, largely against her will, glanced to the booth he pointed to. Three boys sat at it: one was smudgy, just as he said, with a rumpled, faded look about his person, like his body had been laundered too many times. The one who’d hit the light was handsome and his head was shaved; a soldier in a war where the enemy was everyone else. And the third was — elegant. It was not the right word for him, but it was close. He was fine boned and a little fragile looking, with blue eyes pretty enough for a girl.

Despite her better instincts, Blue felt a flutter of interest.

"So?" she asked.

"So would you do me a favor and come over and talk to him?"

Blue used one millisecond of her time to imagine what that might be like, throwing herself at a booth of raven boys and wading through awkward, vaguely sexist conversation. Despite the comeliness of the boy in the booth, it was not a pleasant millisecond.

"What exactly is it you think I’m going to talk to him about?

President Cell Phone looked unconcerned. "We’ll think of something. We’re interesting people."

Blue doubted it. But the elegant boy was rather elegant. And he looked genuinely horrified that his friend was talking to her, which was slightly endearing. For one brief, brief moment that she was later ashamed of and bemused by, Blue considered telling President Cell Phone when her shift ended. But then Donny called her name from the kitchen, and she remembered rules number one and two.

She said, "Do you see how I’m wearing this apron? It means I’m working. For a living."

The unconcerned expression didn’t flag. He said, "I’ll take care of it."

She echoed, "Take care of it?"

"Yeah. How much do you make in an hour? I’ll take care of it. And I’ll talk to your manager."

For a moment, Blue was actually lost for words. She had never believed people who claimed to be speechless, but she was. She opened her mouth, and at first, all that came out was air. Then something like the beginning of a laugh. Then, finally, she managed to sputter, "I am not a prostitute."

The Aglionby boy appeared puzzled for a long moment, and then realization dawned. "Oh, that was not how I meant it. That is not what I said."

"That is what you said! You think you can just pay me to talk to your friend? Clearly you pay most of your female companions by the hour and don’t know how it works with the real world, but … but …" Blue remembered that she was working to a point, but not what that point was. Indignation had eliminated all higher functions and all that remained was the desire to slap him. The boy opened his mouth to protest, and her thought came back to her all in a rush. "Most girls, when they’re interested in a guy, will sit with them for free."

To his credit, the Aglionby boy didn’t speak right away. Instead, he thought for a moment and then he said, without heat, "You said you were working for living. I thought it’d be rude to not take that into account. I’m sorry you’re insulted. I see where you’re coming from, but I feel it’s a little unfair that you’re not doing the same for me."

"I feel you’re being condescending," Blue said.

In the background, she caught a glimpse of Soldier Boy making a plane of his hand. It was crashing and weaving toward the table surface while Smudgy Boy gulped laughter down. The elegant boy held his palm over his face in exaggerated horror, fingers spread just enough that she could see his wince.

"Dear God," remarked Cell Phone boy. "I don’t know what else to say."

"‘Sorry,’" she recommended.

"I said that already."

Blue considered. "Then, ‘bye.’"

He made a little gesture at his chest that she thought was supposed to mean he was curtsying or bowing or something sarcastically gentleman-like. Calla would’ve flipped him off, but Blue just stuffed her hands in her apron pockets.

As President Cell Phone headed back to his table and picked up a fat leather journal that seemed incongruous with the rest of him, the soldier boy let out a derisive laugh and she heard him mimic, "… ‘not a prostitute.’" Beside him, the elegant boy ducked his head. His ears were bright pink.

Not for a hundred dollars, Blue thought. Not for two hundred dollars.

But she had to confess she was a little undone by the blushing ears. It didn’t seem very … Aglionby. Did raven boys get embarrassed?

She’d stared a moment too long. The elegant boy looked up and caught her gaze. His eyebrows were drawn together, remorseful rather than cruel, making her doubt herself.

But then she flushed, hearing again President Cell Phone’s voice saying I’ll take care of it. She shot him a foul look, a real Calla number, and whirled back toward the kitchen.

Neeve had to be wrong. She’d never fall in love with one of them.

Chapter 7

"Tell me again," Gansey asked Adam, "why you think a psychic is a good idea?"

The pizzas had been demolished (no help from Noah), which made Gansey feel better and Ronan feel worse. By the end the meal, Ronan had picked off all his moving-dolly scabs and he would’ve picked off Adam’s as well if he’d let him. Gansey sent him outside to blow off steam and Noah to babysit him.

Now Gansey and Adam stood in line while a woman argued about mushroom topping with the cashier.

"They deal in energy work," said Adam, just loud enough to be heard over the blaring music. He studied his arm where he’d worried his own scab off. The skin beneath looked a little angry. Looking up, he peered over his shoulder, probably looking for the evil, not-a-prostitute waitress. Part of Gansey felt guilty for botching Adam’s chances with her. The other part felt he’d possibly saved Adam from having his spinal cord ripped out and devoured.

It was possible, Gansey thought, that he’d once again been oblivious about money. He hadn’t meant to be offensive but, in retrospect, it was possible he had been. This was going to eat at him all evening. He vowed, as he had a hundred times before, to consider his words better.

Adam continued, "The ley lines are energy. Energy and energy."

"Matchy matchy," Gansey replied. "If the psychic is for real."

Adam said, "Beggars can’t be choosers."

Gansey looked at the handwritten ticket for the pizza in his hand. According to the bubbly writing, their waitress’s name had been Cialina. She’d included her telephone number, but it was hard to say which boy she’d been hoping to attract. Some of the parties at the table were less dangerous to consort with than others. She clearly hadn’t found him condescending.

Which was probably because she hadn’t heard him speak.

All night. This was going to bother him all night. He said, "I wish we had a sense of how wide the lines were. I don’t know if we’re looking for a thread or a highway, even after all this time. We could’ve been feet away from it and never known."

Adam’s neck might have broken from all the looking around he was doing. There was still no sign of the waitress. He looked tired, up too late too many nights in a row working and studying. Gansey hated seeing him like this, but nothing he thought of in his head sounded like something he could actually say to him. Adam wouldn’t tolerate pity.

"We know they can be dowsed, so they can’t be that narrow," Adam said. He rubbed the back of his hand against his temple.

That was what had brought Gansey to Henrietta in the first place: months of dowsing and research. Later, he’d tried to dowse the line more precisely with Adam. They’d circled the town with a willow divining rod and an electromagnetic-frequency reader, swapping the instruments between the two of them. The machine had spiked strangely a few times, and Gansey had thought he’d felt the divining rod twitch in his hands in time with it, but it might have been wishful thinking by that point.

I could tell him his grades are going to go to hell if he doesn’t cut back on his hours, Gansey thought, looking at the dark skin beneath Adam’s eyes. If he made it about him, Adam wouldn’t interpret it as charity. He considered how to frame it so that it sounded selfish: You’re no good to me if you get mono or something. Adam would see through that in a second.

Instead, Gansey said, "We need a solid point A before we even start thinking about point B."

But they had point A. They even had point B. The problem was just that the points were too large. Gansey had a map torn from a book depicting Virginia with the ley line marked darkly across it. Like the ley-line enthusiasts in the UK, American ley-line seekers determined key spiritual places and drew lines between them until the arc of the ley line became obvious. It seemed like all the work had been done for them already.

But the creators of those maps had never meant for them to be used as road maps; they were too approximate. One of the maps listed merely New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, as possible reference points. Each of those points was miles wide, and even the finest of pencil lines drawn on a map was no narrower than thirty-five feet — even eliminating the possibilities left them with thousands of acres where the ley line could be. Thousands of acres where Glendower could be, if he was along the ley line at all.

"I wonder," Adam mused aloud, "if we could electrify either the rods or the line. Hook up a car battery to them or something."

If you got a loan, you could stop working until after college. No, that would immediately birth an argument. Gansey shook his head a little, more at his own thoughts than at Adam’s comment. He said, "That sounds like either the beginning of a torture session or a music video."

Adam’s searching-for-devil-waitress face had given way to his brilliant-idea face. The fatigue melted away. "Well, amplification. That’s all I was thinking. Something to make it louder and easier to follow."

It wasn’t an awful idea. Last year in Montana, Gansey had interviewed a lightning-strike victim. The boy had been sitting on his ATV in the doorway of a cattle barn when he was struck, and the incident had left him with an inexplicable fear of being indoors and an uncanny ability to follow one of the western ley lines using only a bent bit of radio antenna. For two days, they’d trailed together across fields carved by glaciers and marked by round hay bales higher than their heads, finding hidden water sources and tiny caves and lightning-burned stumps and strangely marked stones. Gansey had tried to convince the boy to come back to the East Coast to perform his same miracle on the ley line there, but the boy’s newly pathological fear of the indoors ruled out all plane and car travel. And it was a long walk.

Still, it wasn’t an entirely useless exercise. It was further proof of the amorphous theory Adam had just described: ley lines and electricity could be linked. Energy and energy.

Matchy matchy.

As he moved up to the counter, Gansey became aware that Noah was lurking at his elbow, looking strained and urgent. Both were typical for Noah, so Gansey was not immediately troubled. He passed a folded-over packet of bills to the cashier. Noah continued to hover.

"Noah, what?" demanded Gansey.