The Raven Boys (5 page)

“Everyone else,” said Maura, “had breakfast a very long time ago.”

The stairs creaked as Neeve returned. “Wrong number,” she said in her affectless way. “Do you get many?”

“We’re one number off from a gentlemen escort company,” Maura replied.

“Ah,” Neeve said. “That explains it. Blue,” she added, as she settled back down at the table again, “if you’d like, I can try to see what killed him.”

This got both Maura’s and Blue’s attention in a hurry.

“Yes,”
Blue said.

Maura started to reply, then merely pressed her lips back together.

Neeve asked, “Do we have any grape juice?”

Puzzled, Blue went to the fridge and held up a jug questioningly. “Cran-grape?”

“That will work fine.”

Maura, her face still complicated, reached into the cupboard and drew out a dark blue salad bowl. She set it in front of Neeve, not gently.

“I won’t be responsible for anything that you see,” Maura said.

Blue asked, “What? What is that supposed to mean?”

Neither of them answered.

With a soft smile on her soft face, Neeve poured the juice into the bowl until it reached the edge. Maura turned off the light switch. The outside suddenly seemed vivid in comparison to the dim kitchen. The April-bright trees pressed against the windows of the breakfast area, green leaf upon green leaf upon glass, and Blue was suddenly very aware of being surrounded by trees, of having a sense of being in the middle of a still wood.

“If you are going to watch, please be quiet,” Neeve remarked, looking at no one in particular. Blue jerked out a chair and sat. Maura leaned on the counter and crossed her arms. It was rare to see Maura upset but not doing something about it.

Neeve asked, “What was his name again?”

“He only said
Gansey
.” She felt self-conscious saying his name. Somehow the idea that she would have a hand in his life or his death made his nominal existence in this kitchen her responsibility.

“That’s enough.”

Neeve leaned over the bowl, her lips moving, her dark reflection moving slowly in the bowl. Blue kept thinking of what her mother had said:

I won’t be responsible for anything that you see.

It made this thing they did seem bigger than it usually felt. Further away from a trick of nature and closer to a religion.

Finally, Neeve murmured. Though Blue couldn’t hear any particular meaning in the wordless sound, Maura looked abruptly triumphant.

“Well,” Neeve said. “This is a thing.”

She said it like, “This is a
thing
,” and Blue already knew how that turned out.

“What did you see?” Blue asked. “How did he die?”

Neeve didn’t take her eyes off Maura. She was asking a question, somehow, at the same time that she answered. “I saw him. And then he disappeared. Into absolutely nothing.”

Maura flipped her hands. Blue knew the gesture well. Her mother had used it to end many an argument after she’d delivered a winning line. Only this time the winning line had been delivered by a bowl of cran-grape juice, and Blue had no idea what it meant.

Neeve said, “One moment he was there, and the next, he didn’t exist.”

“It happens,” Maura said. “Here in Henrietta. There is some place — or places — that I can’t see. Other times, I see” — and here she
didn’t
look at Blue in such a way that Blue noticed that her mother was trying hard not to look at her — “things I wouldn’t expect.”

Now Blue was recalling the countless times her mother had insisted that they stay in Henrietta, even as it became more expensive to live here, even when opportunities to go to other towns opened up. Blue had once intercepted a set of e-mails on her mother’s computer; one of Maura’s male clients had ardently begged Maura to bring Blue “and whatever else you cannot live without” to his row house in Baltimore. In the reply, Maura had sternly informed him that this was not a possibility, for many reasons, chief of which that she would not leave Henrietta and least of which that she didn’t know if he was an ax murderer. He had e-mailed back only a sad-face smiley. Blue always wondered what became of him.

“I would like to know what you saw,” Blue said. “What is ‘nothing’?”

Neeve said, “I was following the boy we saw last night to his death. I felt it was close, chronologically, but then he disappeared into someplace I couldn’t see. I don’t know how to explain it. I thought it was me.”

“It’s not,” Maura said. When she saw that Blue was still curious, she explained, “It’s like when there’s no picture on the television but you can tell it’s still on. That’s what it looks like. I’ve never seen someone go into it before, though.”

“Well, he went into it.” Neeve pushed the bowl away from her. “You said that’s not all. What else will that show me?”

Maura said, “Channels that don’t show up on basic cable.”

Neeve tapped her beautiful fingers on the table, just once, and then she said, “You didn’t tell me about this before.”

“It didn’t seem relevant,” Maura replied.

“A place where young men can disappear seems quite relevant. Your daughter’s skill also seems quite relevant.” Neeve leveled her eternal gaze on Maura, who pushed off the counter and turned away.

“I have work this afternoon,” Blue said finally, when she realized that the conversation had perished. The reflection of the leaves outside rippled slowly in the bowl, a forest still, but darkly.

“Are you really going to work in that?” Maura asked.

Blue looked at her clothing. It involved a few thin layering shirts, including one she had altered using a method called
shredding
. “What’s wrong with it?”

Maura shrugged. “Nothing. I always wanted an eccentric daughter. I just never realized how well my evil plans were working. How late do you work?”

“Seven. Well, probably later. Cialina is supposed to work until seven thirty but she’s been saying all week that her brother got her tickets for
Evening
and if only someone would take over the last half hour …”

“You could say no. What’s
Evening
? Is that the one where all the girls die with hatchets?”

“That’s the one.” As Blue slurped down her yogurt, she spared a quick glance at Neeve, who was still frowning at the bowl of juice, pushed just out of her reach. “Okay, I’m out.”

She pushed back her chair. Maura was quiet in that heavy way that was louder than talking. Blue took her time tossing her yogurt into the trash can and dropping her spoon into the sink beside her mother, then she turned to go upstairs for her shoes.

“Blue,” Maura said finally. “I don’t have to tell you not to kiss anyone, right?”

A
dam Parrish had been Gansey’s friend for eighteen months, and he knew that certain things came along with that friendship. Namely, believing in the supernatural, tolerating Gansey’s troubled relationship with money, and co-existing with Gansey’s other friends. The former two were problematic only when they took time away from Aglionby, and the latter was only problematic when it was Ronan Lynch.

Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn’t know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.

Sometimes Adam wondered if Ronan had been like
Ronan
before the Lynch brothers’ father had died, but only Gansey had known him then. Well, Gansey and Declan, but Declan seemed incapable of handling his brother now — which was why he’d been careful to schedule his visit while Ronan was in class.

Outside of 1136 Monmouth, Adam waited on the second-story landing with Declan and his girlfriend. Girlfriend, in fluttering white silk, looked a lot like Brianna, or Kayleigh, or whoever Declan’s last girlfriend had been. They all had blond, shoulder-length hair and eyebrows that matched Declan’s dark leather shoes. Declan, wearing the suit that his senior-year political internship required, looked thirty. Adam wondered if he would look that official in a suit, or if his childhood would betray him and render him ridiculous.

“Thanks for meeting us,” Declan said.

Adam replied, “No problem.”

Really, the reason he had agreed to walk with Declan and Girlfriend from Aglionby had nothing to do with kindness and everything to do with a nagging hunch. Lately, Adam had felt as if someone had been …
looking in
on their search for the ley line. He wasn’t quite sure how to put this feeling into concrete terms. It was a stare caught out of the corner of his eye, a set of scuffed footprints in the stairwell that didn’t seem to belong to any of the boys, a library clerk telling him an arcane text had been checked out by someone else right after he had returned it. He didn’t want to trouble Gansey with it until he was certain, though. Things seemed to weigh heavily enough on Gansey as it was.

It wasn’t that Adam wondered if Declan was spying on them. Adam knew he was, but he believed that had everything to do with Ronan and nothing to do with the ley line. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to do a bit of observation.

Currently, Girlfriend was glancing around in the furtive way that was more noticeable for its furtiveness. 1136 Monmouth was a hungry-looking brick factory, gutted and black-eyed, growing out of an overgrown lot that took up nearly all of a block. A clue to the building’s original identity was painted on the eastern side of the building:
MONMOUTH MANUFACTURING
. But for all their research, neither Gansey nor Adam had been able to figure out precisely what Monmouth had manufactured. Something that had required twenty-five-foot ceilings and wide open spaces; something that had left moisture stains on the floor and gouges in the brick walls. Something that the world no longer needed.

At the top of the second-floor staircase, Declan whispered all this knowledge into Girlfriend’s ear, and she giggled nervously, as if it were a secret. Adam watched the way Declan’s lip barely brushed the bottom of Girlfriend’s earlobe as he spoke to her; he looked away just as Declan glanced up.

Adam was very good at watching without being watched. Only Gansey ever seemed to catch him at it.

Girlfriend pointed out the cracked window toward the lot below; Declan followed her gaze to the black, angry curves Gansey and Ronan had left doing donuts. Declan’s expression hardened; even if they were all Gansey’s doing, he’d assume it was Ronan.

Adam had knocked already, but he knocked again — one long, two short, his signal. “It will be messy,” he apologized.

This was more for the benefit of Declan’s girlfriend than it was for Declan, who knew full well what state the apartment would be in. Adam suspected Declan somehow found the mess charming to outsiders; Declan was calculating, if anything. His goal was Ashley’s virtue, and every step of tonight would have been planned with that in mind, even this brief stop at Monmouth Manufacturing.

There was still no answer.

“Should I call?” Declan asked.

Adam tried the knob, which was locked, and then jimmied it with his knee, lifting the door on its hinges a bit. It swung open. Girlfriend made a noise of approval, but the success of the break-in had more to do with the door’s failings than Adam’s strengths.

They stepped into the apartment and Girlfriend tipped her head back, back, back. The high ceiling soared above them, exposed iron beams holding up the roof. Gansey’s invented apartment was a dreamer’s laboratory. The entire second floor, thousands of square feet, spread out before them. Two of the walls were made up of old windows — dozens of tiny, warped panes, except for a few clear ones Gansey had replaced — and the other two walls were covered with maps: the mountains of Virginia, of Wales, of Europe. Marker lines arced across each of them. Across the floor, a telescope peered at the western sky; at its feet lay piles of arcane electronics meant to measure magnetic activity.

And everywhere, everywhere, there were books. Not the tidy stacks of an intellectual attempting to impress, but the slumping piles of a scholar obsessed. Some of the books weren’t in English. Some of the books were dictionaries for the languages that some of the other books were in. Some of the books were actually
Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Editions.

Adam felt the familiar pang. Not jealousy, just
wanting
. One day, he’d have enough money to have a place like this. A place that looked on the outside like Adam looked on the inside.

A small voice within Adam asked whether he would ever look this grand on the inside, or if it was something you had to be born into. Gansey was the way he was because he had lived with money when he was small, like a virtuoso placed at a piano bench as soon as he could sit. Adam, a latecomer, a usurper, still stumbled over his clumsy Henrietta accent and kept his change in a cereal box under his bed.

Beside Declan, Girlfriend held her hands to her chest in an unconscious reaction to masculine nakedness. In this case, the naked party was not a person, but a thing: Gansey’s bed, nothing but two mattresses on a bare metal frame, sitting baldly in the middle of the room, barely made. It was somehow intimate in its complete lack of privacy.