His arm stretched out across the table in front of him. His thumb was splinted.
"Could someone cut this hospital bracelet off?" he asked. There was something gallant and hectic about the deliberately offhand way he asked it. "I feel like an invalid. Please."
Handing him a pair of scissors, Persephone remarked, "Blue, I did tell you about putting your thumb outside of your fist if you were going to hit someone."
"You didn’t tell me to tell him," Blue retorted.
"Okay," Maura said from the doorway, rubbing her forehead with her fingers. "There are a few things going on here, obviously. Someone just tried to kill you." This was to Gansey. "You two are telling me that your friend was killed by the man who just tried to kill him." This was to Ronan and Adam. "You three are telling me that Neeve had a phone call with the man who killed your friend and just now tried to kill Gansey." This was to Blue, Persephone, and Calla. "And you’re telling me that you’ve had nothing to do with him since that phone call."
This last one was to Neeve. Though Maura had spoken to each of them, they all kept looking at Neeve.
"And you let them go through my things," Neeve replied.
Blue expected her mother to look chastened, but instead Maura seemed to grow taller. "And with good reason, obviously. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me the truth. If you wanted to play around on the corpse road, why didn’t you just ask? How do you know I would have said no? Instead, you pretended like you were actually committed to —"
She paused and looked at Blue.
Blue finished, "To finding Butternut."
"Oh, God," Maura said. "Calla, this is your fault, isn’t it?"
"No," Blue said. She had to try very hard to pretend that the boys weren’t all looking at her in order to say this. "I think I can be mad here, too. Why didn’t you just tell me that you didn’t really know my father and you had me without getting married? Why is that a big secret?"
"I never said I didn’t really know him," Maura replied, voice hollow. She had an expression on her face that Blue didn’t like; it was a little too emotional.
Blue looked at Persephone instead. "How do you know I wouldn’t have just been happy with the truth? I don’t care if my father was a deadbeat named Butternut. It doesn’t change anything right now."
"His name wasn’t really Butternut, was it?" Gansey asked Adam in a low voice.
Neeve’s voice, mild as always, cut through the kitchen. "I think this has all been oversimplified. I was spending time looking for Blue’s father. It’s just not all I was looking at."
Calla snapped, "Then why all the secretive behavior?"
Neeve looked very pointedly at Gansey’s splinted thumb. "It is the sort of discovery that lends itself to danger. Surely you all feel the pull of secrecy as well, or you would have shared everything you knew with Blue."
"Blue is not psychic," Maura said crisply. "Most of what we didn’t pass along were things that would only be meaningful while doing a reading or scrying into the corpse road."
"You also didn’t tell me," Gansey said. He was looking at his thumb, his eyebrows pulled together. Suddenly, Blue realized what looked different about him: He was wearing a pair of wire-framed glasses. They were the thin, subdued sort of glasses that you usually didn’t notice until they were pointed out. They made him look at once older and more serious, or maybe that was just his expression in general at the moment. Though she would never, ever tell him, she preferred this Gansey to the wind-tossed, effortlessly handsome one. He went on, "At the reading, when I asked about the ley line, you withheld that information from me."
Now Maura looked a little chastised. "How was I supposed to know what you would do with it? So, where is this man now? Barrington? Is that really his name?"
"Barrington Whelk," Adam and Ronan replied in unison. They exchanged a wry look.
"At the hospital, the police told me they’re looking for him. Henrietta police and state police," Gansey said. "But they said he wasn’t at his house and that it looked like he’d packed."
"I believe he’s what you call on the lam," Ronan said.
"Do you think he still has interest in you?" Maura asked.
Gansey shook his head. "I don’t know if he ever cared about me. I don’t think he had a plan. He wanted the journal. He wants Glendower."
"But he doesn’t know where Glendower is?"
"No one does," Gansey replied. "I have a colleague" — Ronan sniggered when Gansey used the word colleague, but Gansey pressed on — "in the UK who told me about the ritual that Whelk used Noah for. It’s possible he’ll try it again in a different place. Like Cabeswater."
"I think we should wake it up," Neeve said.
Again, everyone stared at her. She seemed unperturbed, a sea of calm, hands folded in front of her.
"Excuse me?" Calla demanded. "I’m pretty sure I heard it involved a dead body."
Neeve cocked her head. "Not necessarily. A sacrifice isn’t always death."
Gansey looked dubious. "Even assuming that is true, Cabeswater is a bit of a strange place. What would the rest of the ley line be like if we woke it up?"
"I’m not sure. I can tell you right now that it will be woken, though," Neeve said. "I don’t even need my scrying bowl to see that." She turned on Persephone. "Do you disagree?"
Persephone held her mug in front of her face, hiding her mouth. "No, that’s what I see as well. Someone will wake it in the next few days."
"And I do not think you want it to be Mr. Whelk," Neeve went on. "Whoever wakes up the corpse road will be favored by the corpse road. Both the one who sacrifices and the one who is sacrificed."
"Favored like Noah is favored?" Blue interrupted. "He doesn’t seem very lucky."
"From what I’ve heard here, he was living a physical life in an apartment with these boys," Neeve remarked. "That seems far preferable to a traditional spirit’s existence. I would count that as favorable."
Gansey ran a pensive finger over his lower lip. He said, "I’m not certain about this. Noah’s favor is also tied to the ley line, isn’t it? When his body was moved, he lost a lot of his presence. If one of us did the ritual, would we be tied to the ley line the same way, even if the sacrifice didn’t involve death? There’s too much we don’t know. It’s more practical to stop Whelk from performing the ritual again. We could just give the location of Cabeswater to the police."
"NO."
Both Neeve and Maura said it at once. Neeve, however, won for overall impressiveness by pairing her outburst with leaping from her chair.
"I thought you went to Cabeswater," she said.
"We did."
"Didn’t you feel that place? Do you want it destroyed? How many people do you want tramping through it? Does it seem like a place that can exist full of tourists? It’s … holy."
"What I’d like," Gansey said, "is to neither send the police to Cabeswater nor wake the ley line. I would like to find out more about Cabeswater, and then I’d like to find Glendower."
"What about Whelk?" Maura asked.
"I don’t know," he admitted. "I just don’t want to bother with him at all."
Several exasperated faces turned on Gansey. Maura said, "Well, he’s not going to just go away because you don’t want to deal with him."
"I didn’t say it was possible," Gansey replied, not looking up from his splint. "I just said that it was what I would like."
It was a naive answer, and he knew it.
Gansey continued, "I’m going back to Cabeswater. He took my journal, but I’m not letting him take Glendower, too. I’m not going to stop looking just because he’s looking, too. And I’m going to fix Noah. Somehow."
Blue looked at her mother, who was just watching, her arms crossed. And she said, "I’ll help you."
Chapter 36
"The buck stops here," Ronan said, pulling up the hand brake. "Home shit home."
In the dark, the Parrish family’s double-wide was a dreary gray box, two windows illuminated. A silhouette at the kitchen window drew aside the curtains to look at the BMW. He and Adam were alone in the car; Gansey had driven the Camaro from the hospital to Fox Way, so he drove it back to Monmouth as well. It was a comfortable enough arrangement; Adam and Ronan weren’t in a fight at the moment, and both of them were too startled by the day’s events to start a new one.
Adam reached in the back for his messenger bag, the one gift he’d ever permitted Gansey to give him, and only because he didn’t need it. "Thanks for the ride."
Another silhouette, distinctly Adam’s father, had joined the first at the window. Adam’s stomach curdled. He tightened his fingers around the strap of his bag, but he didn’t get out.
"Man, you don’t have to get out here," Ronan said.
Adam didn’t comment on that; it wasn’t helpful. Instead he asked, "Don’t you have homework to do?"
But Ronan, as the inventor of sly remarks, was impervious to them. His smile was ruthless in the glow from the dash. "Yes, Parrish. I believe I do."
Still Adam didn’t get out. He didn’t like the agitation of his father’s silhouette. But, it was unwise to loiter in the car — especially this car, an undeniably Aglionby car — flaunting his friendships.
"Do you think they’ll arrest Whelk before class tomorrow?" Ronan asked. "Because if they do, I’m not doing the reading."
"If he shows up for class," Adam replied, "I think that the reading will be the least of his concerns."
There was quiet, and then Ronan said, "I better go feed the bird."
But he looked down at the gearshift instead, eyes unfocused. He said, "I keep thinking about what would’ve happened if Whelk had shot Gansey today."
Adam hadn’t let himself dwell on that possibility. Every time his thoughts came close to touching on the near miss, it opened up something dark and sharp edged inside him. It was hard to remember what life at Aglionby had been like before Gansey. The distant memories seemed difficult, lonely, more populated with late nights where Adam sat on the steps of the double-wide, blinking tears out of his eyes and wondering why he bothered. He’d been younger then, only a little more than a year ago. "But he didn’t."
"Yeah," said Ronan.
"Lucky you taught him that hook."
"I never taught him to break his thumb."
"That’s Gansey for you. Only learns enough to be superficially competent."
"Loser," Ronan agreed, and he was himself again.
Adam nodded, steeling himself. "See you tomorrow. Thanks again."
Ronan looked away from the house, out across the black field. His hand worked on the steering wheel; something was frustrating him, but with Ronan, there was no telling if it was still Whelk or something else entirely. "No problem, man. See you tomorrow."
