The Raven Boys

"I don’t know," he said. He pulled out his keys and swatted Ronan’s hand away when he snatched for them. It would be a cold, cold day in a Virginia summer when Ronan was allowed to drive his car. He’d seen what Ronan did to his own car and the idea of what he’d do with a few dozen more horsepower at his command was unthinkable. "But I intend to find out. Come on, let’s go."

"Go? Where?" Blue asked.

"Prison," Gansey said agreeably. The other two boys were already jostling her toward the Pig. He felt high as a kite, euphoric. "The dentist. Someplace awful."

"I have to be back by …" But she trailed off. "I don’t know when. Sometime reasonable?"

"What’s reasonable?" Adam asked, and Ronan laughed.

"We’ll get you back before you turn into a pumpkin." Gansey was about to add Blue to the end of this statement, but it felt strange to call her that. "Is Blue a nickname?"

Beside the Camaro, Blue’s eyebrows got suddenly pointy.

Hurriedly, Gansey added, "Not that it’s not a cool name. Just that it’s … unusual."

"Weird-ass." This was from Ronan, but he said it as he chewed absently on one of the leather straps on his wrist, so the effect was minimized.

Blue replied, "Unfortunately, it’s nothing normal. Not like Gansey."

He smiled tolerantly at her. Rubbing his smooth chin with its recently assassinated chin hairs, he studied her. She barely came up to Ronan’s shoulder, but she was every bit as big as he, every bit as present. Gansey had a sense of incredible rightness, then, with everyone assembled by the Pig. Like Blue, not the ley line, was the missing piece that he’d been needing all these years, like the search for Glendower wasn’t truly underway until she was part of it. She was right like Ronan had been right, like Adam had been right, like Noah had been right. When each of them had joined him, he’d felt a rush of relief, and in the helicopter, he’d felt exactly the same way when he’d realized it was her voice on the recorder.

Of course, she could still walk away.

She won’t, he thought. She has to feel it, too.

He said, "I’ve always liked the name Jane."

Blue’s eyes widened. "Ja — what? Oh! No, no. You can’t just go around naming people other things because you don’t like their real name."

"I like Blue just fine," Gansey said. He didn’t believe she was really offended; her face didn’t look like it had at Nino’s when they’d first met, and her ears were turning pink. He thought, possibly, he was getting a little better at not offending her, although he couldn’t seem to stop teasing her. "Some of my favorite shirts are blue. However, I also like Jane."

"I’m not answering to that."

"I didn’t ask you to." Opening the door of the Camaro, he pushed the driver seat forward. Adam obediently climbed in the back.

Blue pointed at Gansey. "I’m not answering to that."

But she got in. Ronan retrieved his MP3 player from the BMW before getting into the passenger seat, and even though the Pig’s aftermarket CD player wasn’t really working, Ronan kicked the dash until a loudly obnoxious electronic track came on. Gansey tugged open the driver’s side door. Really, he should be making Ronan do his homework before Aglionby kicked him out. But instead, he shouted for Noah one last time and then climbed into the car.

"Your sense of what constitutes cool music is frightful," he told Ronan.

From the backseat, Blue shouted, "Does it always smell like gasoline?"

"Only when it’s running!" Gansey called back.

"Is this thing safe?"

"Safe as life."

Adam shouted, "Where are we going?"

"Gelato. Also, Blue’s going to tell us how she knew where the ley line was," Gansey said. "We’re going to strategize and decide what the next move is and we’re going to pick Blue’s brain about energy. Adam, you’re going to tell me everything you remember about time and ley lines, and Ronan, I want you to tell me again what you’d found out about dreamtime and song lines. Before we go back there again, I want to find out everything we can about making sure it’s safe."

But that wasn’t what happened. What happened was they drove to Harry’s and parked the Camaro next to an Audi and a Lexus and Gansey ordered flavors of gelato until the table wouldn’t hold any more bowls and Ronan convinced the staff to turn the overhead speakers up and Blue laughed for the first time at something Gansey said and they were loud and triumphant and kings of Henrietta, because they’d found the ley line and because it was starting, it was starting.

Chapter 25

Gansey, energized, set the boys out on Glendower-related tasks for the next three days, and to Adam’s surprise, Blue managed to come along for each of them. Though she never said as much, it was clear she was keeping them a secret, because she never contacted the boys by phone or met up with them near 300 Fox Way. Despite their lack of formal planning and psychic ability, they all had schedules largely dictated by school, so they managed to meet up to explore with remarkable precision.

Exploring, however, did not include going back to the strange wood. Instead, they spent time at the courthouse, finding out who owned the land underneath the raven. Looking up microfiche in the Henrietta library, trying to determine if the strange wood had a name. Discussing the history of Glendower. Marking the ley line on the map, measuring how wide it seemed to be. Tramping around in fields, turning over rocks, making circles of stones and measuring the energy that came from them.

They also ate a lot of cheap food from convenience stores; this was Blue’s fault. After that first triumphant gelato party, Blue insisted on paying for all of her food herself, which limited where they could eat. She despised when any of the boys tried to buy food for her, but she seemed to hate it the most when Gansey offered.

At one store, Gansey had started to pay for Blue’s potato chips and she’d snatched them away.

"I don’t want you to buy me food!" Blue said. "If you pay for it, then it’s like I’m … be — be —"

"Beholden to me?" Gansey suggested pleasantly.

"Don’t put words in my mouth."

"It was your word."

"You assumed it was my word. You can’t just go around assuming."

"But that is what you meant, isn’t it?"