The Raven Boys

Gansey’s eyes found Blue. He’d been smiling politely, but now his face froze in the middle of the smile.

"Hi, again," he said. "This is awkward."

"You’ve met?" Maura shot a poisonous look at Blue. Blue felt unfairly persecuted.

"Yes," Gansey replied, with dignity. "We had a discussion about alternative professions for women. I didn’t realize she was your daughter. Adam?"

He shot a nearly as poisonous look at Adam, whose eyes were large. Adam was the only one not in uniform, and his palm was spread across his chest as if his fingers would cover his faded Coca-Cola T-shirt.

"I didn’t know, either!" Adam said. If Blue had known he was coming, she might not have worn her baby blue top with the feathers sewn into the collar. He was staring at it. To Blue, he said, again, "I didn’t know, I swear."

"What happened to your face?" Blue asked.

Adam shrugged ruefully. Either he or Ronan smelled like a parking garage. His voice was self-deprecating. "Do you think it makes me look tougher?"

What it did was make him look was more fragile and dirty, somehow, like a teacup unearthed from the soil, but Blue didn’t say that.

Ronan said, "It makes you look like a loser."

"Ronan," said Gansey.

"I need everyone to sit down!" shouted Maura.

It was such an alarming thing to hear Maura shout that nearly everyone did, sinking or throwing themselves into the mismatched furniture in the reading room. Adam rubbed a hand over his cheekbone as if he could remove the bruise from it. Gansey sat in an armchair at the head of the table, his hands stretched over either arm like chairman of the board, one eyebrow raised as he looked at Steve Martin’s framed face.

Only Calla and Ronan remained standing, and they regarded each other warily.

It still felt like there had never been this many people in the house, which was utterly untrue. It was possibly true that there had never been this many men in the house before. Certainly never this many raven boys.

Blue felt as if their very presence robbed something from her. They’d made her family dingy just by coming here.

"It is," Maura said, "too damn loud in here." The way she said it, though, holding one finger to her pulse, just under her jawbone, told Blue that it was not their voices that were too loud. It was something she was hearing inside her head. Persephone, too, was wincing.

"Do I need to leave?" Blue asked, though that was the last thing she wanted.

Gansey, misunderstanding, immediately asked her, "Why would you have to leave?"

"She makes things louder for us," Maura said. She was frowning over all of them as if she was trying to make sense of it. "And you three are … very loud already."

Blue’s skin was hot. She could imagine herself heating like an electrical conduit, sparks from all parties traveling through her. What could these raven boys have going on under their skins that could deafen her mother? Was it all of them in conjunction, or was it merely Gansey, his energy screaming out the count-down to his death?

"What do you mean, very loud?" Gansey asked. He was, Blue thought, very clearly the ringleader of this little pack. They all kept looking to him for their cues of how to interpret the situation.

"I mean that there is something about your energies that is very …" Maura trailed off, losing interest in her own explanation. She turned to Persephone. Blue recognized the look exchanged between them. It was, What is going on? "How do we even do this?"

The way she asked it, distracted and vague, made Blue’s stomach clench with nerves. Her mother was undone. For the second time, a reading seemed to be pushing her to a place she wasn’t comfortable with.

"One at a time?" Persephone suggested, her voice nearly inaudible.

Calla said, "One-offs. You’ll have to, or some of them will have to leave. They’re just too noisy."

Adam and Gansey glanced at each other. Ronan picked at the leather straps around his wrist.

"What is a one-off?" Gansey asked. "How is it different from a regular reading?"

Calla spoke to Maura as if he hadn’t said anything at all. "It doesn’t matter what they want. It is what it is. Take it or leave it."

Maura’s finger was still pressed under her jaw. She told Gansey, "A one-off is where you each draw just one card from a deck of tarot cards, and we interpret."

Gansey and Adam shared some sort of private conversation with their eyes. It was the sort of thing Blue was used to transpiring between her mother and Persephone or Calla, and she hadn’t thought anyone else really capable of it. It also made her feel strangely jealous; she wanted something like that, a bond strong enough to transcend words.

Adam’s head jerked a nod in response to whatever Gansey’s unspoken statement might have been, and Gansey said, "Whatever you’re comfortable with."

Persephone and Maura momentarily debated, though it didn’t seem like they’d be comfortable with anything at the moment.

"Wait," Persephone said as Maura produced her deck of cards. "Have Blue deal it."

It wasn’t the first time Blue had been asked to deal the cards. Sometimes, at difficult or important readings, the women wanted Blue to touch the deck first, to hone whatever messages the cards might contain. This time, she was overly aware of the boys’ attention as she took the cards from her mother. For the boys’ benefit, she shuffled the deck in a slightly theatrical fashion, moving cards from one hand to another. She was very good at card tricks that didn’t involve any psychic talent whatsoever. As the boys, impressed, watched the cards fly back and forth, Blue mused that she would make an excellent fake psychic.

No one volunteered immediately to go first, so she offered the deck to Adam. He met her gaze and held it for a moment. There was something forceful and intentional about the gesture, more aggressive than he’d been the night he approached her.

Selecting a card, Adam presented it to Maura.

"Two of swords," she said. Blue was over-aware of her mother’s Henrietta accent, suddenly rural and uneducated sounding to her ear. Was that how Blue sounded?

Maura continued, "You’re avoiding a hard choice. Acting by not acting. You’re ambitious, but you feel like someone’s asking something of you you’re not willing to give. Asking you to compromise your principles. Someone close to you, I think. Your father?"

"Brother, I think," Persephone said.