Blue Lily, Lily Blue

He’s trusting you, Blue.

She jumped out of her chair and put up her walls. She tried to visualize the white light pouring down to strengthen them, but it was hard when she could see Adam’s body sprawled limply across the end of the reading table. Calla slapped his face.

“Come on, you bastard! Remember your body!”

Blue turned her back on the scene.

She closed her eyes.

And she did it.

There was silence.

Then the overhead lights came on and Adam’s voice said, “She’s here.”

Blue spun.

“What do you mean, here?” Calla demanded.

“Here,” Adam said. He shoved out of his chair. “Upstairs.”

“But we checked her room,” Calla said.

“Not in her room.” Adam waved a hand impatiently. “The highest — where’s the highest place?”

“The attic,” Blue said. “Why would she be up there? Gwenllian —?”

“Gwenllian’s in the tree in the backyard,” Calla said. “She’s singing at some birds who hate her.”

“Are there mirrors?” Adam asked. “Some place she would go to look for Maura?”

Calla swore.

She tore open the attic door and charged up first, Blue and Adam close on her heels. At the top of the stairs, she said, “No.”

Blue jumped past her.

In between Neeve’s two mirrors was a pile of lace, canvas, and —

Persephone.

Adam hurried forward, but Calla seized his arm. “No, you idiot. You can’t reach between them! Blue, stop!”

“I can,” Blue replied. She slid to kneel beside Persephone. She was collapsed in a way that was clearly unintentional. She was on her knees with her arms bent behind her and her chin hitched up, caught on the feet of one of the mirrors. Her black eyes stared into nothing.

“We’ll get her back,” Adam said.

But Calla was already crying.

Blue, unconcerned with dignity, dragged Persephone out by her armpits. She was light and unresisting.

They would pull her back, just as Adam said.

Calla sank to her knees and covered her face.

“Stop it,” snapped Blue, voice cracking. “Get over here and help.”

She took Persephone’s hand. It was as cold as the cave walls.

Adam stood with his arms wrapped around himself, a question in his eyes.

Blue already knew the answer, but she couldn’t say it.

Calla did: “She’s dead.”

42

Blue had never believed in death until then.

Not in a real way.

It happened to other people, other families, in other places. It happened in hospitals or automobile crashes or battle zones. It happened — now she remembered Gansey’s words outside Gwenllian’s tomb — with ceremony. With some announcement of itself.

It didn’t just happen in the attic on a sunny day while she was sitting in the reading room. It didn’t just happen, in only a moment, an irreversible moment.

It didn’t happen to people she had always known.

But it did.

And there would now forever be two Blues: the Blue that was before, and the Blue that was after. The one who didn’t believe, and the one who did.

43

Gansey arrived at 300 Fox Way after the ambulance had left, not because of a lack of haste, but because of a lack of communication. It took twenty-four calls from Adam to Ronan’s cell phone before Ronan could be persuaded to pick up, and then it took Ronan a bit of doing to track down Gansey on campus. Malory was still out and about with the Dog somewhere, prowling Virginia in the Suburban, but he would be fine not knowing for a while.

Persephone was dead.

Gansey couldn’t believe it, not because he could not believe in the nearness of death — he could not stop believing in the nearness of death — but because he would not have expected Persephone to do something as mortal as dying. There had been something immutable about the three women in 300 Fox Way — Maura, Persephone, and Calla were the trunk from which all of the branches sprang.

We must find Maura, he thought as he climbed from the Camaro and started up the walk, Ronan dogging his steps with his hands shoved in pockets, Chainsaw flapping grimly from branch to branch to follow. Because if Persephone can die, there is nothing to stop Maura from dying, too.

Adam sat on the dappled shade of the front step, eyes blank, a wrinkle between his eyebrows. Gansey’s mother used to press her thumb to that place between Richard Gansey III’s brows and rub the frown out; she still did it to Gansey II. He felt the urge to do it now as Adam tipped his face up.

“I found her,” Adam said, “and it didn’t do any good at all.”

He needed Gansey to say it was all right, and even though it was not all right, Gansey found his voice and said, “You did your best. Calla told me on the phone. She’s proud of you. It’s not going to feel any better now, Parrish. Don’t expect it to.”

Adam, freed, nodded miserably and looked at his feet.

“Where’s Blue?”

Adam blinked. He clearly didn’t know.

“I’m going in,” Gansey said as Ronan sat down on the step beside Adam. As Gansey shut the door behind him, he heard Adam say, “I don’t want to talk,” and Ronan reply, “The f**k would I talk about?”

He found Calla and Jimi and Orla and two other young women he didn’t recognize in the kitchen. Gansey had meant to begin with I’m sorry for your loss or something polite, something that would make sense outside of this kitchen, but in this context, all of it felt more false than usual.

Instead, he said, “I’m going into the cave. We are.”

It was impossible, but it didn’t much matter. Everything was impossible. He waited for Calla to say that it was a bad idea, but she didn’t.

A small part of him still wished that she would: the part that could feel small legs crawling over the back of his neck.

Coward.

He had spent a long time learning to put that in the back of his mind, and he did it now.

“I’m going with you,” Calla said, her knuckles tight around a glass. “Enough of this flying solo nonsense. I’m so angry I could …”

She hurled the glass to the kitchen floor; it splintered at Orla’s feet. Orla stared at it and then at Gansey, her expression apologetic, but Gansey had lived with Ronan’s grief for long enough to recognize it.

“There!” Calla shouted. “That’s what it’s like. Just destroyed for no purpose!”