Blue Lily, Lily Blue
Gansey would probably like it, though. It was one of those places where time seemed irrelevant, especially on an evening like this: dappled light fuzzing through leaves, starlings calling from the close-strung telephone wires, old men in old trucks driving slowly past, all of it looking like it could have happened twenty years before.
“Three,” Persephone said, “is a very strong number.”
Lessons with Persephone were an unpredictable thing. He never knew, going in, what he was going to learn. Sometimes he still hadn’t figured it, going out.
This evening he wanted to ask her about Maura, but it was hard to ask Persephone a question and get an answer when you wanted it. Usually, it worked best if you asked the question right before she was about to say the answer anyway.
“Like three sleepers?”
“Sure,” Persephone replied. “Or three knights.”
“Are there knights?”
She pointed, drawing his attention to a large crow or raven hopping slowly on the other side of the road. It was hard to say if she thought it was significant or just funny. “There were, once. Also, three Jesuses.”
This took Adam a moment. “Oh, God. You mean God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit?”
Persephone twirled a small hand. “I always forget the names. There’s a three-lady-god, too. One’s named War, I think, and another one’s a baby — I don’t know, I forget the details. The three is the important part.”
He was better at playing these games than he used to be. Better at guessing the connections. “You and Maura and Calla.”
Maybe now was the time to bring it up —
She nodded, or rocked, or both. “It’s a stable number, three. Fives and sevens are good, too, but three is the best. Things are always growing to three or shrinking to three. Best to start there. Two is a terrible number. Two is for rivalry and fighting and murder.”
“Or marriage,” Adam said, thinking.
“Same thing,” Persephone replied. “Here is three dollars. Go inside and get me a cherry cola.”
He did so, trying to think, the entire time, how to ask about using his vision to find Maura. With Persephone, it was possible that that was what they had actually been talking about the entire time.
When he returned, he said, suddenly, “This is the last time, isn’t it?”
She continued rocking, but she nodded. “I thought, at first, that you might replace one of us if something ever happened.”
It took him a long time to make the sentence make sense, and when he finally did, the surprise kept him from answering for another minute longer.
“Me?”
“You’re a very good listener.”
“But I’m — I’m —” He couldn’t think of how to finish the sentence. He finally said, “Leaving.”
Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t what he meant.
But Persephone just said, in her tiny voice, “But I see now that it could never be. You’re like me. We’re not really like the others.”
Other what? Humans?
You are unknowable.
He thought of that moment on the mountaintop with him and Blue and Noah. Or in the courtroom, him and Ronan and Gansey.
He wasn’t sure anymore.
“We’re really better in our own company,” Persephone said. “It makes it hard, sometimes, for others, when they can’t understand us.”
She was trying to get him to say something, to make some connection, but he wasn’t sure what. He said, “Don’t tell me Maura is dead.”
She rocked and rocked. Then she stopped and looked at him with her black, black eyes. The sun eased down behind the tree line, making a black lace of the leaves and a white lace of her hair.
Adam’s breath caught. He asked in a low voice, “Can you see your own death?”
“Everyone sees it,” Persephone said mildly. “Most people make themselves stop looking, though.”
“I don’t see my own death,” Adam said. But even as he said it, he felt the corner of the knowledge bite into him. It was now, it was coming, it had already happened. Somewhere, somewhen, he was dying.
“Ah, you see,” she said.
“That’s not the same as knowing how.”
“You didn’t say how.”
What he wanted to say, but couldn’t, because Persephone wouldn’t understand, was that he was afraid. Not of seeing things like this. But of one day not being able to see everything else. The real. The mundane. The … human things.
We’re not really like the others.
But he thought that maybe he was. He thought he must be, because he cared deeply about Maura’s disappearance, and he cared even more deeply about Gansey’s death, and now that he knew about these things, he wanted to do something about them. He needed to. He was Cabeswater, stretching out to others.
He took a shaky breath. “Do you know how Gansey dies?”
Persephone stuck her tongue out, just a little. She didn’t seem to notice she was doing it. Then she said, “Here is three more dollars. Go get yourself a cherry cola.”
He didn’t take the money. He said, “I want to know how long you’ve known about Gansey. From the beginning? From the beginning. You knew it when he walked in the door for the reading! Were you ever going to tell us?”
“I don’t know why I would do such a ridiculous thing. Get your cola.”
Adam still didn’t take the bills. Bracing his hands on the arms of his rocker, he said, “When I find Glendower, I’m asking him for Gansey’s life and that’ll be that.”
Persephone just looked at him.
In his head, Gansey shook and kicked, covered with blood. Only now it was Ronan’s face — Ronan had already died, Gansey was going to die — somewhere, somewhen, was this happening?
He didn’t want to know. He wanted to know.
“Tell me, then!” he said. “Tell me what to do!”
“What do you want me to say?”
Adam leapt out of the chair so quickly that it rocked frantically without him. “Tell me how to save him!”
“For how long?” Persephone asked.
“Stop!” he said. “Stop that! Stop being so — so — zoomed out! I can’t look at the big picture all the time, or what’s the point? Just tell me how I can keep from killing him!”
Persephone cocked her head. “What makes you think you kill him?”
He stared at her. Then went back inside for another cherry cola.