Noah blinked at her, vague and alarmed. "I don’t … I can’t …"
Blue held her hand out.
"Take it," she said. "When I’m at readings with my mom, and she needs to get focused, she holds my hand. Maybe it will help."
Hesitant, Noah reached out. When he laid his palm against hers, she was shocked by how chilled it was. It was not merely cold, but somehow empty as well, skin without a pulse.
Noah, please don’t die for real.
He let out a heaving sigh. "God," he said.
And his voice sounded different from before. Now it sounded closer to the Noah she knew, the Noah who had passed as one of them. Blue knew she wasn’t the only one to notice it, because Adam and Ronan exchanged sharp glances.
She watched his chest rise and fall, his breaths becoming more even. She hadn’t really noticed, before, if he’d been breathing at all.
Noah shut his eyes. He still held the carved bone loosely in his other hand, rested palm up on his Top-Siders. "I can remember my grades, the date on them — seven years ago."
Seven years. The police had been right. They were talking with a boy who had been dead for seven years.
"The same year Gansey was stung by hornets," Adam said softly. Then he said, "‘You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.’"
"Coincidence," Ronan said, because it wasn’t.
Noah’s eyes were still closed. "It was supposed to do something to the ley line. I don’t remember what he said it was supposed to do."
"Wake it up," Adam suggested.
Noah nodded, his eyelids still pressed closed. Blue’s entire arm felt chilled and numb. "Yeah, that. I didn’t care. It was always his deal, and I was just going along with him because it was something to do. I didn’t know he was going to …"
"This is the ritual Gansey was talking about," Adam said to Ronan. "Someone did try it. With a sacrifice as the symbolic way to touch the ley line. You were the sacrifice, weren’t you, Noah? Someone killed you for this."
"My face," Noah said softly, and he turned his head away, pressing his ruined cheek into his shoulder. "I can’t remember when I stopped being alive."
Blue shuddered. The late afternoon light bathing the boys and the floor was spring, but it felt like winter in her bones.
"But it didn’t work," Ronan said.
"I almost woke up Cabeswater," Noah whispered. "We were close enough to do that. It wasn’t for nothing. But I’m glad he never found that. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know where it is."
Blue shivered unconsciously, a product of both Noah’s cold hand in hers and the horror of the story. She wondered if this was what it felt like for her mother and her aunts and her mother’s friends when they were doing a séance or a reading.
Do they hold hands with dead people?
She had thought dead was something more permanent, or at least something more obviously not alive. But Noah seemed unable to be either.
Ronan said, "Okay, it’s time to stop fucking around. Who did it, Noah?"
In Blue’s grip, Noah’s hand trembled.
"Seriously, man. Spill it. I’m not asking you for notes. I’m asking who smashed your head in."
When Ronan said it, there was something angry and honorable about it, but it was an anger that included Noah, too, that somehow made him culpable.
There was humiliation in his voice when Noah answered, "We were friends."
Adam said, rather more ferocious than he’d been a moment before, "A friend wouldn’t kill you."
"You don’t understand," Noah whispered. Blue was afraid that he would disappear. This, she understood, had been a secret, carried inside him for seven years, and he still didn’t want to confess it. "He was upset. He’d lost everything. If he’d been thinking straight, I don’t think he would’ve … he didn’t mean to … we were friends like — are you afraid of Gansey?"
The boys didn’t answer; they didn’t have to. Whatever Gansey was to them, it was bulletproof. Again, though, Blue saw the shame flit across Adam’s expression. Whatever had transpired between the two of them in his vision, it was still worrying at him.
"Come on, Noah. A name." This was Ronan, head cocked, keen as his raven. "Who killed you?"
Lifting his head, Noah opened his eyes. He took his hand out of Blue’s and put it in his lap. The air was frigid around all of them. The raven was hunched far down into Ronan’s lap, and he held one hand over the top of her, protectively.
Noah said, "But you already know."
Chapter 33
It was dark by the time Gansey left his parents’ house. He was full of the restless, dissatisfied energy that always seemed to move into his heart after he visited home these days. It had something to do with the knowledge that his parents’ house wasn’t truly home anymore — if it had ever been — and something to do with the realization that they hadn’t changed; he had.
Gansey rolled down the window and stuck his hand out as he drove. The radio had stopped working again and so the only music was the engine; the Camaro was louder after dark.
The conversation with Pinter gnawed at Gansey. Bribery. So that’s what it had come to. He thought this feeling inside him was shame. No matter how hard he tried, he kept becoming a Gansey.
But how else was he supposed to keep Ronan in Aglionby and at Monmouth? He went over the talking points for his future conversation with Ronan, and all of them sounded like things Ronan wouldn’t listen to. Was it so hard for him to go to class? How hard could it be to make it through just another year of school?
He still had a half hour to go until he got to Henrietta. At a tiny town that consisted only of an artificially bright gas station, Gansey got caught at a traffic light that turned red for invisible cross traffic.
All Ronan had to do was go to class, do the reading, get the grade. And then he was free and he had his money from Declan and he could do whatever the hell he wanted.
Gansey checked his phone. No signal. He wanted to talk to Adam.
The breeze through the open window scented the interior of the car with leaves and water, growing things and secret things. More than anything, Gansey wanted to spend more time in Cabeswater, but class would take up much of the coming week — there could be no cutting for either of them after the talk with Pinter — and after school, he had to drag Ronan through his homework. The world was opening up in front of Gansey and Noah needed him and Glendower seemed like a possibility again, and instead of going out there and seizing the chance, Gansey had to babysit. Damn Ronan.
The light turned green. Gansey punched the accelerator so hard that the tires squealed and smoked. The Pig exploded off the line. Damn Ronan. Gansey punched his way through the gears, fast, fast, fast. The engine drowned out the pound of his heart. Damn Ronan. The needle climbed on the speedometer, touched the red warning area.
Gansey hit the speed limit. The car had plenty more. The engine did well in this cool air and it was fast and uncomplicated and he wanted badly to see what would happen in the rest of the gears.
He checked himself, heaving a ragged sigh.
If he’d been Ronan, he would’ve kept going. The thing about Ronan was that he had no limits, no fears, no boundaries. If Gansey had been Ronan, he would’ve crushed the gas pedal to the floor until the road or a cop or a tree stopped him. He would cut class tomorrow to go see the forest. He’d tell Ronan it was his problem that he was getting expelled, if he would have cared about him at all.
Gansey didn’t know how to be that person.
Beneath him, the Camaro abruptly shuddered. Gansey let off the gas and stared at all of the badly lit gauges, but nothing stood out to him. A moment later, the car shuddered again and Gansey knew he was done for.
He just had time to find a fairly flat place to pull off when the engine went dead, just as it had on St. Mark’s Day. As he coasted off the abandoned road, he tried the key, but there was nothing.
Gansey allowed himself the meager pleasure of a breathed-out swear word, the very worst he had knowledge of, and then he climbed out of the car and opened the hood. Adam had taught him the basics: changing spark plus, draining oil. If there had been a belt hanging loose or a newly jagged hose end jutting from the bowels of the car, he might have been able to fix it. As it was, the engine was an enigma.
He removed his phone from his back pocket and discovered that he had merely a sliver of reception. Enough to taunt him, but not enough to place a call. Gansey walked around the car a few times, his phone held above his head like Lady Liberty. Nothing.
Somewhat bitterly, Gansey recalled his father’s suggestion that he take the Suburban back.
He wasn’t certain how much distance he’d covered since the gas station at the light, but it felt like he must be closer to the edge of Henrietta. If he started to walk toward town, he might get reception before he found a gas station. Maybe he should just stay put. Sometimes, when the Pig stopped, it would start working again after the engine had cooled down a little.
But he was too restless to sit.
He had barely finished locking the car, however, when headlights pulled in behind the Camaro, blinding him. Turning his face away, Gansey heard a car door slam and footsteps crunch in the loose fill by the highway.
For a blink, the figure in front of him was unfamiliar, a homunculus instead of a man. Then Gansey recognized him.
He said, "Mr. Whelk?"
Barrington Whelk wore a dark-colored jacket and running shoes, and there was something strange and intense about the oversized features of his face. It was as if he needed to ask a question but couldn’t find the words.
He didn’t ask "car trouble?" or "Mr. Gansey?" or any of the things Gansey thought he might say.
Instead, he licked his lips and said, "I want that book of yours. And you’d better give me your cell phone, too."
Gansey thought he must have misheard. He asked, "Excuse me?"
Whelk produced a small, impossibly real-looking handgun from the pocket of his dark jacket. "That book you bring to class. And your cell phone. Hurry up."
It was somehow difficult to process the fact of the gun. It was hard to go from the idea that Barrington Whelk was creepy in a way that was entertaining to joke about with Ronan and Adam to the idea that Barrington Whelk had a gun and was pointing it at Gansey.
"Well." Gansey blinked. "Okay."
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. He preferred his life to nearly all of his possessions, with the possible exception of the Camaro, and Whelk hadn’t asked for that. Gansey handed his cell phone to Whelk.
"My journal’s in the car," he explained.
"Get it." Whelk pointed the pistol at Gansey’s face.
Gansey unlocked the Camaro.
The last time he had seen Whelk, he’d been turning in a quiz about fourth declension Latin nouns.
"Don’t think about trying to take off in that," Whelk said.
It hadn’t occurred to Gansey that if the Camaro had been operating properly, fleeing would’ve been an option.