The Raven Boys

"I think we should wake it up," Neeve said.

Again, everyone stared at her. She seemed unperturbed, a sea of calm, hands folded in front of her.

"Excuse me?" Calla demanded. "I’m pretty sure I heard it involved a dead body."

Neeve cocked her head. "Not necessarily. A sacrifice isn’t always death."

Gansey looked dubious. "Even assuming that is true, Cabeswater is a bit of a strange place. What would the rest of the ley line be like if we woke it up?"

"I’m not sure. I can tell you right now that it will be woken, though," Neeve said. "I don’t even need my scrying bowl to see that." She turned on Persephone. "Do you disagree?"

Persephone held her mug in front of her face, hiding her mouth. "No, that’s what I see as well. Someone will wake it in the next few days."

"And I do not think you want it to be Mr. Whelk," Neeve went on. "Whoever wakes up the corpse road will be favored by the corpse road. Both the one who sacrifices and the one who is sacrificed."

"Favored like Noah is favored?" Blue interrupted. "He doesn’t seem very lucky."

"From what I’ve heard here, he was living a physical life in an apartment with these boys," Neeve remarked. "That seems far preferable to a traditional spirit’s existence. I would count that as favorable."

Gansey ran a pensive finger over his lower lip. He said, "I’m not certain about this. Noah’s favor is also tied to the ley line, isn’t it? When his body was moved, he lost a lot of his presence. If one of us did the ritual, would we be tied to the ley line the same way, even if the sacrifice didn’t involve death? There’s too much we don’t know. It’s more practical to stop Whelk from performing the ritual again. We could just give the location of Cabeswater to the police."

"NO."

Both Neeve and Maura said it at once. Neeve, however, won for overall impressiveness by pairing her outburst with leaping from her chair.

"I thought you went to Cabeswater," she said.

"We did."

"Didn’t you feel that place? Do you want it destroyed? How many people do you want tramping through it? Does it seem like a place that can exist full of tourists? It’s … holy."

"What I’d like," Gansey said, "is to neither send the police to Cabeswater nor wake the ley line. I would like to find out more about Cabeswater, and then I’d like to find Glendower."

"What about Whelk?" Maura asked.

"I don’t know," he admitted. "I just don’t want to bother with him at all."

Several exasperated faces turned on Gansey. Maura said, "Well, he’s not going to just go away because you don’t want to deal with him."

"I didn’t say it was possible," Gansey replied, not looking up from his splint. "I just said that it was what I would like."

It was a naive answer, and he knew it.

Gansey continued, "I’m going back to Cabeswater. He took my journal, but I’m not letting him take Glendower, too. I’m not going to stop looking just because he’s looking, too. And I’m going to fix Noah. Somehow."

Blue looked at her mother, who was just watching, her arms crossed. And she said, "I’ll help you."

Chapter 36

"The buck stops here," Ronan said, pulling up the hand brake. "Home shit home."

In the dark, the Parrish family’s double-wide was a dreary gray box, two windows illuminated. A silhouette at the kitchen window drew aside the curtains to look at the BMW. He and Adam were alone in the car; Gansey had driven the Camaro from the hospital to Fox Way, so he drove it back to Monmouth as well. It was a comfortable enough arrangement; Adam and Ronan weren’t in a fight at the moment, and both of them were too startled by the day’s events to start a new one.

Adam reached in the back for his messenger bag, the one gift he’d ever permitted Gansey to give him, and only because he didn’t need it. "Thanks for the ride."

Another silhouette, distinctly Adam’s father, had joined the first at the window. Adam’s stomach curdled. He tightened his fingers around the strap of his bag, but he didn’t get out.

"Man, you don’t have to get out here," Ronan said.

Adam didn’t comment on that; it wasn’t helpful. Instead he asked, "Don’t you have homework to do?"

But Ronan, as the inventor of sly remarks, was impervious to them. His smile was ruthless in the glow from the dash. "Yes, Parrish. I believe I do."

Still Adam didn’t get out. He didn’t like the agitation of his father’s silhouette. But, it was unwise to loiter in the car — especially this car, an undeniably Aglionby car — flaunting his friendships.

"Do you think they’ll arrest Whelk before class tomorrow?" Ronan asked. "Because if they do, I’m not doing the reading."

"If he shows up for class," Adam replied, "I think that the reading will be the least of his concerns."

There was quiet, and then Ronan said, "I better go feed the bird."

But he looked down at the gearshift instead, eyes unfocused. He said, "I keep thinking about what would’ve happened if Whelk had shot Gansey today."

Adam hadn’t let himself dwell on that possibility. Every time his thoughts came close to touching on the near miss, it opened up something dark and sharp edged inside him. It was hard to remember what life at Aglionby had been like before Gansey. The distant memories seemed difficult, lonely, more populated with late nights where Adam sat on the steps of the double-wide, blinking tears out of his eyes and wondering why he bothered. He’d been younger then, only a little more than a year ago. "But he didn’t."

"Yeah," said Ronan.

"Lucky you taught him that hook."

"I never taught him to break his thumb."

"That’s Gansey for you. Only learns enough to be superficially competent."

"Loser," Ronan agreed, and he was himself again.

Adam nodded, steeling himself. "See you tomorrow. Thanks again."

Ronan looked away from the house, out across the black field. His hand worked on the steering wheel; something was frustrating him, but with Ronan, there was no telling if it was still Whelk or something else entirely. "No problem, man. See you tomorrow."

With a sigh, Adam climbed out. He knocked on the top of the BMW, and Ronan pulled slowly away. Above him, the stars were brutal and clear.