Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“The others what?”

He hadn’t realized she was still in the room. “Oh, I was just thinking about how I saw one of Niall Lynch’s sons today.”

“Was he a bastard, too?” Piper asked. Niall Lynch had been responsible for seven moderately unpleasant and four extremely unpleasant months in their collective lives.

“Probably. God, but he looked just like that f**ker. I can’t wait to fail him. I wonder if he knows who I am. I wonder if I should tell him.”

“You are such a sadist,” she said carelessly.

He knocked his knuckles on the counter. “I’m going to go see which jaw those cows have teeth on.”

“Bottom. I saw it on Animal Planet.”

“I’m going anyway.”

As he tried to remember which door led to the mudroom, he heard her say something to him, but he didn’t catch it. He’d already dialed the number of a Belgian contact who was supposed to be looking into a fifteenth-century belt buckle that gave the wearer bad dreams. It was taking this guy forever to run it down. Too bad he couldn’t put the Gray Man on it; he’d been the best. Right up until he’d betrayed Greenmantle, of course.

He wondered how long it would take the Gray Man to come to him.

11

When Gansey and Ronan arrived at 300 Fox Way after school, Calla was being attacked in the living room by a man dressed entirely in gray. Blue, Persephone, and the furniture lurked against the walls. The man stood in perfect fighting form, legs a little wider than his shoulders, one foot forward. He had a solid grip on one of her hands. In Calla’s other hand she held a Manhattan, which she was trying not to spill.

The Gray Man was smiling thinly. He had extraordinary teeth.

The boys had entered without knocking, familiarly, and now Gansey eased his messenger bag to the old buckled floorboards and stood in the doorway to the living room. He wasn’t sure if the situation required intervention. The Gray Man was a (possibly retired) hit man. Nothing to be trifled with.

But still, if Calla wanted help, surely she would’ve put her drink down. Surely Blue would not be merely eating yogurt.

“Show me again,” Calla said. “I didn’t see it, I don’t think.”

“I’ll do it a little harder,” Mr. Gray replied, “but I don’t want to actually break your arm.”

“You were nowhere close,” she assured him. “Put your back into it.”

She sipped her Manhattan. He clasped her hand and wrist again, his skin pale against hers, and swiftly turned her entire arm. Her shoulder tipped downward sharply; she snatched at her drink and cackled. “That one I felt.”

“Now do it to me,” Mr. Gray said. “I’ll hold your drink.”

Putting his hands in his pockets, Gansey leaned against the doorjamb, watching. He knew instinctively that the dreadful news he carried was the sort of burden that would only get heavier once shared. He allowed himself a moment before the storm, letting the atmosphere of the house do its usual work on him. Unlike Monmouth Manufacturing, 300 Fox Way was cramped with extraneous people and whimsical objects. It hummed with conversation, music, telephones, old appliances. It was impossible to forget that all of these women were plugged into the past and tapped into the future, connected to everything in the world and to one another.

Gansey didn’t so much visit as get absorbed.

He loved it. He wanted to be a part of this world, even though he understood there were endless reasons why he could never be. Blue was the natural result of a home like this: confident, strange, credulous, curious. And here he was: neurotic, rarified, the product of something else entirely.

“What else?” Calla asked.

“I can show you how to unhinge my jaw, if you like,” Mr. Gray said kindly.

“Oh, yes, that — well, there is Richard Gansey the Third,” Calla said, catching sight of him. “And the snake. Where is Coca-Cola?”

“Work,” Gansey said. “He couldn’t get off.”

Persephone waved vaguely from behind a tall, light pink drink. Blue didn’t wave. She had seen Gansey’s expression.

“Does the name Colin Greenmantle mean anything to you?” Gansey asked Mr. Gray, though he already knew the answer.

Handing Calla her drink, the Gray Man wiped his palms on his slacks. The excellent teeth had vanished. “Colin Greenmantle was my employer.”

“He’s our new Latin teacher.”

“Oh, dear,” said Persephone. “Would you like a drink?”

Gansey realized she was talking to him. “Oh, no, thank you.”

“I need another one,” she said. “I’m making one for you, too, Mr. Gray.”

The Gray Man crossed to the window. His car, an unsubtle white Mitsubishi with an enormous spoiler, was parked outside, and both he and Ronan studied it pensively. After a very long moment, the Gray Man said, “He’s the man who asked me to kill Ronan’s father.”

Gansey knew that he could not be hurt by the casualness of the statement — Mr. Gray was a hit man, Niall Lynch had been his mark, he had not known Ronan then, and ethically Mr. Gray’s profession was probably no worse than a professional mercenary — but it did not change that Ronan’s father was dead. He reminded himself that the Gray Man had merely been the uncaring weapon. Greenmantle was the hand that wielded it.

Ronan, silent to this point, said, “I’m going to kill him.”

Gansey had a sudden, terrible vision of it: Ronan’s hands painted with blood, his eyes blank and unknowable, a corpse at his feet. It was a savage and unshakeable image, made worse because Gansey had seen enough of the pieces separately to know accurately how they’d appear added together.

The Gray Man turned swiftly.

“You will not,” he said, with as much force as Gansey had ever heard from him. “Do you hear me? You cannot.”

“Oh, can’t I?” Ronan asked. His voice was low and dangerous; infinitely more threatening than if he’d snarled his response.

“Colin Greenmantle is untouchable,” the Gray Man said. He spread his fingers wide, hand hanging in the air. “He is a spider clinging in a web. Every leg touches a thread, and if anything happens to the spider, hell rains down.”

Ronan said, “I already lived through hell.”

“You have no idea what hell is,” the Gray Man said, but not unkindly. “Do you think you’re the first son to want revenge? Do you think your father was the first he had killed? And yet Greenmantle is alive and untouched. Because we all know how it works. Before coming down here from Boston, he would have attached sixteen little threads to people like me, to computer programs, to bank accounts. The spider dies, the web twitches, suddenly your accounts are wiped clean, your younger brother becomes an amputee, your older brother dies behind the wheel of a car in D.C., Mrs. Gansey’s campaign immolates over faked scandalous photos, Adam’s scholarship vanishes, Blue loses an eye —”