Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Holes in the ground were, in Greenmantle’s opinion, the very best place to throw dog crap into. He swiped the EMF reader across the wall with one hand and a geophone with the other. He would have gotten an identical amount of insight if he’d been holding a flare and a ukulele. “What I’m going to do is hire a billion million minions to come look in caves for this woman, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just eviscerate her daughter in front of the Gray Man instead.”

“Minions! I don’t want a million minions tramping around down here. I want to explore my psychic connections without all that grunting going on.”

“Your psychic connections!” He felt her glaring at him; the skin on the back of his neck was melting. “Fine, I’ll tell them to be tactful.”

“You know what? You should let me have two of them, to help me in my life goals.”

“What?”

“I could call them and pretend to be you. Hi, thugman, this is Colin, could you do me a solid?” She did a passable job of his voice, if slightly too nasal and in love with itself. She stopped short, legs apart, blond hair billowing around her like a caving photo shoot. For a strange, slipping moment, Greenmantle thought that he’d found her in the cave and was bringing her back to the light, and then he remembered the bag of dog shit and how they’d gotten here. He thought that this cave was probably full of carbon monoxide. He was probably dying.

Piper asked, “Did you hear that?”

“The sound of you mocking me?”

She didn’t reply. She was frowning down the tunnel, her chin lifted, her eyebrows pushed together as if she were listening. He thought about someone sleeping. He thought about waking them up.

“The sound of my love?” he tried.

She still didn’t reply. She was still listening.

“The sound of you creeping me the hell out?”

But really he was creeping himself out.

Finally, she turned back to him. She did not look as if she had heard the sound of his love. She said, “I definitely need two of your minions. Let’s get back to a cell phone signal.”

He was very happy to oblige. He never wanted to see a cave again.

34

Gansey might have found Gwenllian, but Blue had to live with her. All of the women of 300 Fox Way had to, actually. It was like living with a natural disaster, or a feral child, or a feral natural child disaster.

For starters, she didn’t sleep. She shouted at Calla that she had had enough sleep for one thousand lifetimes and that she intended to spend the rest of this one awake, and then proceeded to do just that. At small hours of the morning, Blue would wake and hear her clogging around in the attic above her room.

Then there was her manner of dress. Her supernatural awareness inside the tomb had given her just enough exposure to the changing outside world to not be shocked by the existence of cars or befuddled by the English language, but not enough to award her any social customs. So she wore what she wanted to wear (Blue could at least respect the motivation, if not the outcome), which was always a dress, sometimes two or three on top of each other, sometimes backward. This often involved stealing clothing from other people’s closets. Blue was spared only because she was so much shorter.

There were problems with mealtimes, too: For Gwenllian, every time was mealtime. She seemed to have neither sense of fullness nor taste, and would often combine foods in manners that struck Blue as problematic. She didn’t believe in telling people how to live their lives (well, maybe a little), but it was hard to stand by and watch Gwenllian spread peanut butter on a cold hot dog.

And there was the crazy part. Forty percent of what came out of her mouth came out in song, and the rest was a varied mixture of chanting, screaming, mocking, and creepy whisper. She climbed on the roof, she talked to the tree in the backyard, and she stood on furniture. She often put things in her hair for later retrieval, and then seemed to forget they were there. In very short order, her enormous tangle of hair became a vertical repository for pencils, leaves, tissues, and matches.

“We could cut it,” Orla suggested at one point.

Persephone said, “I do not think that is a decision one human can make for another human.”

Orla asked, “Even if that other human looks like a hobo?”

It was a point on which Blue and Orla agreed.

The worst part of it was that Gansey had offered to take her away — kept offering to take her away — and Persephone insisted Gwenllian stay with them.

“It takes longer than a weekend to undo centuries of damage,” Persephone said.

“Centuries of damage are being incurred in just a weekend,” Calla replied.

“She’s a very gifted psychic,” Persephone said mildly. “Eventually she will earn her keep.”

“And pay for my therapy,” Blue added.

“Good one,” Orla said. To reward Blue for her excellent comeback, she painted Blue’s fingernails to match the Pig, a polish color, she informed Blue, that was called Belligerent Candy.

Gansey kept trying to talk with Gwenllian, but she was always sassily deferential when he came to the house.

On top of that, Gansey had some sort of school commitment that he was cagey about, Ronan and Adam kept vanishing places together, and Noah couldn’t or wouldn’t come into 300 Fox Way.

Blue was feeling a little as if she had been locked into a madhouse.

Mom, it’s time for you to come home.

The Gray Man came over midweek, much to her gratitude.

“It’s me,” he called down the hallway as he stepped inside. Blue could see him from her homework post at the kitchen table; he was tidy and dangerous looking in a gray shirt and slacks. He looked more optimistic than the last time she had seen him.

Gwenllian, who was examining the roaring vacuum cleaner but not vacuuming with it, spotted him, too. “Hello, handsome sword! Have you killed anyone today?”

“One sword knows another,” he told her mildly, placing his car keys in his pocket. “Have you killed anyone?”

She was so delighted that she turned off the vacuum cleaner so that her insane smile could be the loudest thing in the hall.

“Mr. Gray, leave her alone and come get a cup of tea,” Blue called from the kitchen table. “You’ll make her start singing again.”

The Gray Man glanced over his shoulder at Gwenllian as he came into the kitchen and did as Blue instructed, taking a few minutes to find a tea more likely to provoke sanguinity than loose stools.

“I have been employed by your friends Mr. Parrish and Mr. Lynch,” he said as he sat down opposite Blue. So this is where those two were going! He tapped one of her algebra problems until she dragged it back to her and reworked it correctly. “They have a plan for Greenmantle, and it seems quite promising.”