The Raven Boys

"Quite some eyes on her." It was an expression his dad used all the time, a family catchphrase for someone nosy.

Adam asked, "Do you think she’s really here for Declan?"

"Why else would she be here?"

"Glendower," Adam replied immediately.

Gansey laughed, but Adam didn’t. "Really, why else?"

Instead of answering, Adam twisted his hand and released the rubber ball. He’d chosen his trajectory carefully: The ball bounced off the greasy asphalt once, struck one of the Camaro’s tires, and arced high in the air, disappearing in the black. He stepped forward in time for it to slap in his palm. Gansey made an approving noise.

Adam said, "I don’t think you should talk to people about it anymore."

"It’s not a secret."

"Maybe it should be."

Adam’s uneasiness was contagious, but logically, there was nothing to support suspicion. For four years, Gansey had been searching for Glendower, freely admitting this fact to all and any who showed interest, and he’d never seen the slightest evidence of anyone else sharing his precise quest. He had to admit, however, that the suggestion of that possibility gave him a peculiarly unpleasant feeling.

He said, "It’s all out there, Adam. Pretty much everything I’ve done is public record. It’s too late for it to be a secret. It was too late years ago."

"Come on, Gansey," Adam said with some heat. "Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel …?"

"Feel what?" Gansey despised fighting with Adam, and somehow this felt like a fight.

Unsuccessfully, Adam struggled to put his thoughts into words. Finally, he replied: "Observed."

Across the parking lot, Noah had finally emerged from Nino’s and he slouched toward them. In the Camaro, Ronan’s silhouetted form lay back in the seat, head tilted as if he slept. Close by, Gansey could smell roses and grass mowed for the first time that year, and farther away, he smelled damp earth coming to life beneath last year’s fallen leaves, and water running over rocks in mountain crooks where humans never walked. Perhaps Adam was right. There was something pregnant about the night, he thought, something out of sight opening its eyes.

This time, when Adam dropped the ball, it was Gansey’s hand that reached out to snap it up.

"Do you think there would be any point to someone spying on us," Gansey said, "if we weren’t on the right track?"

Chapter 8

By the time Blue made her slow way outside, weariness had extinguished her anxiety. She sucked in a huge breath of the cool night air. It didn’t even seem like it could be the same substance that filtered through Nino’s air-conditioning vents.

She tilted her head back to look at the stars. Here, on the edge of downtown, there weren’t enough streetlights to obliterate the stars completely. Ursa Major, Leo, Cepheus. Her breaths came easier and slower with each familiar constellation she found.

The chain was cold as Blue unlocked her bike. Across the parking lot, muffled conversations faded in and out. Footsteps scuffed across the asphalt somewhere close behind her. Even when they were quiet, people really were the noisiest animals.

One day, she would live someplace where she could stand outside her house and see only stars, no streetlights, where she could feel as close as she ever got to sharing her mother’s gift. When she looked at the stars, something tugged at her, something that urged her to see more than stars, to make sense of the chaotic firmament, to pull an image from it. But it never made sense. She only ever saw Leo and Cepheus, Scorpio and Draco. Maybe she just needed more horizon and less city. The only thing was, she didn’t really want to see the future. What she wanted was to see something no one else could see or would see, and maybe that was asking for more magic than was in the world.

"Excuse me, um, miss — hi."

The voice was careful, masculine, and local; the vowels had all the edges sanded off. Blue turned with a lukewarm expression.

To her surprise, it was Elegant Boy, face gaunter and older in the distant streetlight. He was alone. No sign of President Cell Phone, the smudgy one, or their hostile friend. One hand steadied his bike. The other was tucked neatly in his pocket. His uncertain posture didn’t quite track with the raven-breasted sweater, and she caught a glimpse of a worn bit of seam on the shoulder before he shrugged it under his ear as if he was cold.

"Hi," Blue said, softer than she would’ve if she hadn’t noticed the fray. She didn’t know what sort of Aglionby boy wore hand-me-down sweaters. "Adam, is it?"

He gave a jerky, abashed nod. Blue looked at his bike. She didn’t know what sort of Aglionby boy rode a bicycle instead of driving a car, either.

"I was on my way home," Adam said, "And I thought I recognized you over here. I wanted to say sorry. About what happened earlier. I didn’t tell him to do that and I wanted you to know."

It didn’t escape Blue that his slightly accented voice was as nice as his looks. It was all Henrietta sunset: hot front-porch swings and cold iced-tea glasses, cicadas louder than your thoughts. He glanced over his shoulder, then, at the sound of a car on a side street. When he looked back to her, he still wore a wary expression, and Blue saw that this expression — a wrinkle pinched between his eyebrows, mouth tense — was his normal one. It fit his features perfectly, matched up with every line around his mouth and eyes. This Aglionby boy isn’t often happy, she thought.

"Well, that’s nice of you," she said. "But it’s not you that needed to apologize."

Adam said, "I can’t let him take all the blame. I mean, he was right. I did want to talk to you. But I didn’t want to just — try to pick you up."

This was where she ought to brush him off. But she was stymied by his blush at the table; his honest expression; his newly minted, uncertain smile. His face was just strange enough that she wanted to keep looking at it.

The fact was that she’d never been flirted with by someone who she wanted to succeed at it.

Don’t do it! warned the voice inside Blue.

But she asked, "And what is it you wanted to do?"

"Talk," he said. In his local accent, it was a long word and it seemed less of a synonym for speak than it was for confess. She couldn’t help but look at the thin, pleasant line of his mouth. He added, "I guess I could have just saved a lot of trouble by coming up to talk to you in the first place. Other people’s ideas always seem to get me into more trouble."