The Raven Boys

"Are," Noah said.

"Were," Ronan said. "You don’t go to classes."

"Neither do you," Noah replied.

"And he’s about to be a were, too," Adam broke in.

"Okay!" Blue shouted, her hands in the air. She was starting to feel a deep sensation of cold, as Noah pulled energy from her. The last thing she wanted to do was to get completely drained, like she had at the churchyard. "The police said you’d been missing seven years. Does that seem right?"

Noah blinked at her, vague and alarmed. "I don’t … I can’t …"

Blue held her hand out.

"Take it," she said. "When I’m at readings with my mom, and she needs to get focused, she holds my hand. Maybe it will help."

Hesitant, Noah reached out. When he laid his palm against hers, she was shocked by how chilled it was. It was not merely cold, but somehow empty as well, skin without a pulse.

Noah, please don’t die for real.

He let out a heaving sigh. "God," he said.

And his voice sounded different from before. Now it sounded closer to the Noah she knew, the Noah who had passed as one of them. Blue knew she wasn’t the only one to notice it, because Adam and Ronan exchanged sharp glances.

She watched his chest rise and fall, his breaths becoming more even. She hadn’t really noticed, before, if he’d been breathing at all.

Noah shut his eyes. He still held the carved bone loosely in his other hand, rested palm up on his Top-Siders. "I can remember my grades, the date on them — seven years ago."

Seven years. The police had been right. They were talking with a boy who had been dead for seven years.

"The same year Gansey was stung by hornets," Adam said softly. Then he said, "‘You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.’"

"Coincidence," Ronan said, because it wasn’t.

Noah’s eyes were still closed. "It was supposed to do something to the ley line. I don’t remember what he said it was supposed to do."

"Wake it up," Adam suggested.

Noah nodded, his eyelids still pressed closed. Blue’s entire arm felt chilled and numb. "Yeah, that. I didn’t care. It was always his deal, and I was just going along with him because it was something to do. I didn’t know he was going to …"

"This is the ritual Gansey was talking about," Adam said to Ronan. "Someone did try it. With a sacrifice as the symbolic way to touch the ley line. You were the sacrifice, weren’t you, Noah? Someone killed you for this."

"My face," Noah said softly, and he turned his head away, pressing his ruined cheek into his shoulder. "I can’t remember when I stopped being alive."

Blue shuddered. The late afternoon light bathing the boys and the floor was spring, but it felt like winter in her bones.

"But it didn’t work," Ronan said.

"I almost woke up Cabeswater," Noah whispered. "We were close enough to do that. It wasn’t for nothing. But I’m glad he never found that. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know where it is."

Blue shivered unconsciously, a product of both Noah’s cold hand in hers and the horror of the story. She wondered if this was what it felt like for her mother and her aunts and her mother’s friends when they were doing a séance or a reading.

Do they hold hands with dead people?

She had thought dead was something more permanent, or at least something more obviously not alive. But Noah seemed unable to be either.

Ronan said, "Okay, it’s time to stop f**king around. Who did it, Noah?"

In Blue’s grip, Noah’s hand trembled.

"Seriously, man. Spill it. I’m not asking you for notes. I’m asking who smashed your head in."

When Ronan said it, there was something angry and honorable about it, but it was an anger that included Noah, too, that somehow made him culpable.

There was humiliation in his voice when Noah answered, "We were friends."

Adam said, rather more ferocious than he’d been a moment before, "A friend wouldn’t kill you."

"You don’t understand," Noah whispered. Blue was afraid that he would disappear. This, she understood, had been a secret, carried inside him for seven years, and he still didn’t want to confess it. "He was upset. He’d lost everything. If he’d been thinking straight, I don’t think he would’ve … he didn’t mean to … we were friends like — are you afraid of Gansey?"

The boys didn’t answer; they didn’t have to. Whatever Gansey was to them, it was bulletproof. Again, though, Blue saw the shame flit across Adam’s expression. Whatever had transpired between the two of them in his vision, it was still worrying at him.

"Come on, Noah. A name." This was Ronan, head cocked, keen as his raven. "Who killed you?"

Lifting his head, Noah opened his eyes. He took his hand out of Blue’s and put it in his lap. The air was frigid around all of them. The raven was hunched far down into Ronan’s lap, and he held one hand over the top of her, protectively.

Noah said, "But you already know."

Chapter 33

It was dark by the time Gansey left his parents’ house. He was full of the restless, dissatisfied energy that always seemed to move into his heart after he visited home these days. It had something to do with the knowledge that his parents’ house wasn’t truly home anymore — if it had ever been — and something to do with the realization that they hadn’t changed; he had.

Gansey rolled down the window and stuck his hand out as he drove. The radio had stopped working again and so the only music was the engine; the Camaro was louder after dark.

The conversation with Pinter gnawed at Gansey. Bribery. So that’s what it had come to. He thought this feeling inside him was shame. No matter how hard he tried, he kept becoming a Gansey.

But how else was he supposed to keep Ronan in Aglionby and at Monmouth? He went over the talking points for his future conversation with Ronan, and all of them sounded like things Ronan wouldn’t listen to. Was it so hard for him to go to class? How hard could it be to make it through just another year of school?

He still had a half hour to go until he got to Henrietta. At a tiny town that consisted only of an artificially bright gas station, Gansey got caught at a traffic light that turned red for invisible cross traffic.