The Raven Boys

"Each," Blue added.

Calla coughed into her first.

Gansey’s face cleared and he handed Maura sixty dollars. Quite obviously this was more what he’d been expecting to pay, and now the world was right again.

It was Adam, though, who Blue noticed then. He was looking at her, sharp-eyed, and she felt transparent and guilty. Not only about overcharging, but about Maura’s lie. Blue had seen Gansey’s spirit walk the corpse road and she had known his name before he walked in this door. Like her mother, she’d said nothing. So she was complicit.

"I’ll show you out," Maura said. She was clearly eager to see them on the other side of the door. For a moment, it looked as if Gansey felt the same, but then he stopped. He paid an undue amount of attention to his wallet as he folded it and reinserted it into his pocket, and then he looked up to Maura and made a firm line of his mouth.

"Look, we’re all adults here," he started.

Calla made a face as if she disagreed.

Gansey squared his shoulders and continued, "So I think we deserve the truth. Tell me you know something but you don’t want to help me, if that’s what’s going on, but don’t lie to me."

It was a brave thing to say, or an arrogant one, or maybe there was not enough of a difference between the two things to matter. Every head in the room swung to Maura.

She said, "I know something but I don’t want to help you."

For the second time that day, Calla looked delighted. Blue’s mouth was open. She closed it.

Gansey, however, just nodded, no more or less distressed than when Blue had retorted back to him at the restaurant. "All right, then. No, no, you can stay put. We’ll let ourselves out."

And just like that, they did, Adam sending Blue a last look that she couldn’t easily interpret. A second later, the Camaro revved high, and the tires squealed out Gansey’s true feelings. Then the house was quiet. It was a sucked-out silence, like the raven boys had taken all the sound in the neighborhood with them.

Blue whirled on her mother. "Mom." She was going to say something else, but all that she could manage was again, louder, "Mom!"

"Maura," Calla said, "that was very rude." Then she added, "I liked it."

Maura turned to Blue as if Calla hadn’t spoken. "I don’t want you to ever see him again."

Indignant, Blue cried, "Whatever happened to ‘children should never be given orders’?"

"That was before Gansey." Maura flipped around the Death card, giving Blue a long time to stare at the skull inside the helmet. "This is the same as me telling you not to walk in front of a bus."

Several comebacks riffled through Blue’s head before she found one that she wanted. "Why? Neeve didn’t see me on the corpse road. I’m not going to die in the next year."

"First of all, the corpse road is a promise, not a guarantee," Maura replied. "Second of all, there are other terrible fates besides death. Shall we talk about dismemberment? Paralysis? Endless psychological trauma? There is something really wrong with those boys. When your mother says don’t walk in front of a bus, she has a good reason."

From the kitchen, Persephone’s soft voice called, "If someone had stopped you from walking in front of a bus, Maura, Blue wouldn’t be here."

Maura shot a frown in her direction, then swept her hand across the reading table as if she were clearing it of crumbs. "The best-case scenario here is that you make friends with a boy who’s going to die."

"Ah," said Calla, in a very, very knowing way. "Now I see."

"Don’t psychoanalyze me," her mother said.

"I already have. And I say again, ‘ah.’"

Maura sneered uncharacteristically, and then asked Calla, "What did you see when you touched that other boy? The raven boy?"

"They’re all raven boys," Blue said.

Her mother shook her head. "No, he’s more raven than the others."

Calla rubbed her fingertips together, as if she was wiping the memory of Ronan’s tattoo from them. "It’s like scrying into that weird space. There’s so much coming out of him, it shouldn’t be possible. Do you remember that woman who came in who was pregnant with quadruplets? It was like that, but worse."

"He’s pregnant?" Blue asked.

"He’s creating," Calla said. "That space is creating, too. I don’t know how to say it any better than that."

Blue wondered what sort of creating they meant. She was always creating things — taking old things and cutting them up and making them better things. Taking things that already existed and transforming them into something else. This, she felt, was what most people meant when they called someone creative.

But she suspected that wasn’t how Calla meant it. She suspected that what Calla meant was the true meaning of creative: to make a thing where before there was none.

Maura caught Blue’s expression. She said, "I’ve never told you to do anything before, Blue. But I’m telling you now. Stay away from them."

Chapter 16

The night following the reading, Gansey woke to a completely unfamiliar sound and fumbled for his glasses. It sounded a little like one of his roommates was being killed by a possum, or possibly the final moments of a fatal cat fight. He wasn’t certain of the specifics, but he was sure death was involved.

Noah stood in the doorway to his room, his face pathetic and long-suffering. "Make it stop," he said.

Ronan’s room was sacred, and yet here Gansey was, twice in the same week, pushing the door open. He found the lamp on and Ronan hunched on the bed, wearing only boxers. Six months before, Ronan had gotten the intricate black tattoo that covered most of his back and snaked up his neck, and now the monochromatic lines of it were stark in the claustrophobic lamplight, more real than anything else in the room. It was a peculiar tattoo, both vicious and lovely, and every time Gansey saw it, he saw something different in the pattern. Tonight, nestled in an inked glen of wicked, beautiful flowers, was a beak where before he’d seen a scythe.

The ragged sound cut through the apartment again.

"What fresh hell is this?" Gansey asked pleasantly. Ronan was wearing headphones as usual, so Gansey stretched forward far enough to tug them down around his neck. Music wailed faintly into the air.

Ronan lifted his head. As he did, the wicked flowers on his back shifted and hid behind his sharp shoulder blades. In his lap was the half-formed raven, its head tilted back, beak agape.