The Raven Boys

"Lynch!" the call came again. "I’m going to f**k you up."

Ronan still didn’t look up. He adjusted the strap on his shoulder and continued stalking across the grass.

"What’s that about?" Gansey demanded.

"Some people don’t take losing very well," Ronan replied.

"Was that Kavinsky? Don’t tell me you’ve been racing again."

"Don’t ask me, then."

Gansey contemplated if he could give Ronan a curfew. Or if he should quit rowing to spend more time with him on Fridays — he knew that was when Ronan got into trouble with the BMW. Maybe he could convince Ronan to …

Ronan adjusted the strap on his shoulder again, and this time, Gansey took a closer look at it. The bag it belonged to was distinctly larger than his usual, and he handled it gingerly, as if it might spill.

Gansey asked, "Why are you carrying that bag? Oh my God, you have that bird in there, don’t you."

"She has to be fed every two hours."

"How do you know?"

"Jesus, the Internet, Gansey." Ronan pulled open the door to Borden House; as soon as they breached the threshold, everything within sight was covered with navy blue carpet.

"If you get caught with that thing —" But Gansey couldn’t think of a suitable threat. What was the punishment for smuggling a live bird into classes? He wasn’t certain there was precedent. He finished, instead, "If it dies in your bag, I forbid you to throw it out in a classroom."

"She," Ronan corrected. "It’s a she."

"I’d buy that if it had any defining sexual characteristics. It had better not have bird flu or something." But he wasn’t thinking about Ronan’s raven. He was thinking about Adam not being in class.

Ronan and Gansey took their usual seats in the back of the navy-carpeted classroom. At the front of the room, Whelk was writing verbs on the board.

When Gansey and Ronan had come in, Whelk had stopped writing mid-word: internec — Though there was no reason to think Whelk cared about their conversation, Gansey had the strange idea that the lifted piece of chalk in Whelk’s hand was because of them, that the Latin teacher had stopped writing merely to listen in. Adam’s suspicion really was beginning to rub off on him.

Ronan caught Whelk’s eye and held it in an unfriendly sort of way. Despite his interest in Latin, Ronan had declared their Latin teacher a socially awkward shitbird earlier in the year and further clarified that he didn’t like him. Because he despised everyone, Ronan wasn’t a good judge of character, but Gansey had to agree that there was something discomfiting about Whelk. A few times, Gansey had tried to hold a conversation with him about Roman history, knowing full well the effect an enthusiastic academic conversation could have on an otherwise listless grade. But Whelk was too young to be a mentor and too old to be a peer, and Gansey couldn’t find an angle.

Ronan kept staring at Whelk. He was good at staring. There was something about his stare that took something from the other person.

The Latin teacher flicked his glance awkwardly away from them. Having dealt with Whelk’s curiosity, Ronan asked, "What are you going to do about Parrish?"

"I guess I’m going to go by there after class. Right?"

"He’s probably sick."

They looked at each other. We’re already making excuses for him, Gansey thought.

Ronan peered inside his bag again. In the darkness, Gansey just caught a glimpse of the raven’s beak. Usually, Gansey would’ve basked once more in the odds of Ronan of finding a raven, but at the moment, with Adam missing, his quest didn’t feel like magic; it felt like years spent piecing together coincidences, and all he had made from it was a strange cloth — too heavy to carry, too light to do any good at all.

"Mr. Gansey, Mr. Lynch?"

Whelk had managed to suddenly manifest beside their desks. Both boys looked up at him. Gansey, polite. Ronan, hostile.

"You seem to have an extremely large bag today, Mr. Lynch," Whelk said.

"You know what they say about men with large bags," Ronan replied. "Ostendes tuum et ostendam meus?"

Gansey had no idea what Ronan had just said, but he was certain from Ronan’s smirk that it wasn’t entirely polite.

Whelk’s expression confirmed Gansey’s suspicion, but he merely rapped on Ronan’s desk with his knuckles and moved off.

"Being a shit in Latin isn’t the way to an A," Gansey said.

Ronan’s smile was golden. "It was last year."

At the front of the room, Whelk began class.

Adam never showed.

Chapter 13

"Mom, why is Neeve here?" Blue asked.

Like her mother, she was standing on the kitchen table. The moment she’d come back from school, Maura had enlisted her help for changing the bulbs in the badly designed stained-glass creation that hung over the table. The complicated process required at least three hands and tended to be left until most of the bulbs had burned out. Blue hadn’t minded helping. She needed something to keep her mind off Gansey’s looming appointment. And off Adam’s failure to call. When she thought about giving him her number the night before, she felt weightless and uncertain.

"She’s family," Maura replied grimly. She savagely gripped the fixture’s chain as she wrestled with a stubborn bulb.

"Family that comes home in the middle of the night?"

Maura shot Blue a dark look. "You were born with larger ears than I remember. She’s just helping me look for something while she’s here."

The front door opened. Neither of them thought anything of it, as both Calla and Persephone were about the house somewhere. Calla was less likely, as she was an irascible, sedentary creature of habit, but Persephone tended to get caught in odd drafts and blow around.

Adjusting her grip on the stained glass, Blue asked, "What sort of something?"

"Blue."

"What sort of something?"

"A someone," Maura said, finally.

"What sort of someone?"

But before her mother had time to reply, they heard a man’s voice:

"That is a strange way to run a business."

They both turned slowly. Blue’s arms had been lifted for so long they felt rubbery when she lowered them. The owner of the voice stood in the doorway to the front hall, his hands in his pockets. He was not old, maybe mid-twenties, with a shock of black hair. He was handsome in a way that required a bit of work from the viewer. All of his facial features seemed just a little too large for his face.