Blue Lily, Lily Blue (18 page)

ack at the apartment, Adam stood in the shower for a very long time. For once, the part of his brain that calculated how much a long, hot shower might cost was silent. He

stood in the water until it had gone tepid. After he got out and dressed, it occurred to him, belatedly, that Ronan might have been upset by the dream itself, not by watching himself die. He had gone to sleep intending to get evidence of murder, and had woken with blood on his hands. Adam knew that the night horrors only came to Ronan when he had a nightmare. Ronan must have known what would be waiting for him, but still, he’d charged in willingly when Adam had asked him.

Probably Adam should see if he was all right. Surely he would still be there.
But Adam stayed where he was, thinking about the other Ronan. The dead one. The strangest part was that the moment had been Adam’s vision from the tree in Cabeswater, but turned inside out. Not Gansey dying, but Ronan. So had that vision been wrong? Had he changed his future already? Or was there more to come?
There was a knock on the apartment door.
Probably Ronan. Although, it would be uncommonly unlike him to be the first to admit wrongdoing.
The knock came again, more insistent.
Adam checked to make sure his hands were no longer bloody, and then he opened the door.
It was his father.
He opened the door.
It was his father.
He opened the door.
It was his father.
“Aren’t you going to ask me to come in?” his father was saying.
Adam’s body wasn’t his, and so, with a little wonder, he watched himself step back to allow Robert Parrish to enter his apartment.
How narrow-shouldered he was beside this other man. It was hard to see where he’d come from without a close look at their faces. Then one could see how Robert Parrish wore Adam’s thin, fine lips. Then it wasn’t hard to see the same fair hair, spun from dust, and the wrinkle between the eyebrows, formed by wariness. It was actually not a difficult thing at all to see that one had sired the other.
Adam couldn’t remember what he had been thinking about before he opened the door.
“So this is where you’re keeping yourself,” said Robert Parrish. He peered at the thrift-store shelf, the makeshift nightstand, the mattress on the floor. Adam was a thing standing out of the way.
“It seems like you and I have a date together soon,” added his father. He stopped to stand directly in front of Adam. “You gonna look in my face when I talk to you, or you gonna keep looking at that shelf?”
Adam was going to keep looking at that shelf.
“Okay, then. Look, I know we had some words, but I think you might as well call this thing off. Your mother’s real upset, and it’s going to look pretty ridiculous on the day of it.”
Adam was pretty sure that his father was not allowed to be here. He didn’t remember everything that had happened after he’d pressed charges, but he did think it had involved a temporary restraining order. At the time, he thought he remembered finding it comforting, a memory that seemed foolish now. His father had beaten him for years before being caught, and a punch was a bigger act than a trespass. He could call the police afterward, of course, and report his father’s violation; he wasn’t certain if they would penalize his father, but the adult side of Adam thought that it seemed like a good thing to get on the record. All of that, though, would come after these minutes that he still had to live through.
He did not want to get hit.
It was a strange realization. It wasn’t that Adam had ever gotten used to being struck. Pain was a wondrous thing that way; it always worked. But back when he’d lived at home, he’d gotten used to the
idea
of that sort of intimate violence. Now, though, enough days had passed that he had stopped expecting it, which made the sudden possibility of it somehow more intolerable.
He did not want to get hit.
He would do what he needed to do to not get hit.
Anticipation trembled in his hands.
Cabeswater is not the boss of you
, Persephone’s voice said.

“Adam, I’m being real decent here, but you’re trying my patience sorely,” his father told him. “At least pretend like you heard what I said.”

“I heard,” Adam replied.
“Sass. Nice.”
Just because it tantrums doesn’t mean it’s more right than you.
To the shelf, Adam said, “I think you should go.” He felt cowardly and boneless.
“So that’s how it’s going to be?”
That was how it was going to be.
“You should know, then, that you’re going to look like a fool

in that courtroom, Adam,” Robert Parrish said. “People know me and they know what kind of man I am. You and I both know this is just a pathetic cry for attention, and everyone else will, too. It’s too easy to look at you and see what kind of shit you’ve become. Don’t think I don’t know where this comes from. You prancing around with those entitled bitch-boys.”

Part of Adam was still there with his father, but most of him was retreating. The better part of him. That Adam, the magician, was no longer in his apartment. That Adam walked through trees, running his hand along the moss-covered stones.

“Court’s gonna see right through that. And you know what you’re going to be then? In the papers as that kid who wanted to put his hardworking daddy in jail.”

The leaves rustled, close and protective, pressing up against his ears, curled in his fists. They didn’t mean to frighten. They only ever tried to speak his language and get his attention. It was not fearsome Cabeswater’s fault that Adam had already been a fearful boy when he’d made the bargain.

“You think they’re really gonna look at you and see an abused kid? Do you even know what abuse is? That judge will’ve heard enough stories to know a whopper. He’s not gonna blink an eye.”

The branches leaned toward Adam, curling around him protectively, a thicket with thorns pointed outward. It had tried, before, to cling to his mind, but now it knew to surround his body. He’d asked to be separate, and Cabeswater had listened.
I know you are not the same as him
, Adam said.
But in my head, everything is always so tangled. I am such a damaged thing.

“So we’re back where we started, you and me, when I came here. You can call off that hearing quick as you please, and this all goes away.”

The rain splattered down through the leaves, turning them upside down, trickling onto Adam.
“And look at you, and I’ve just been
talking
to you. Practicing for your day in court? At least pretend like I haven’t been talking to a wall. What the
hell
—?”
The braying note in his father’s voice brought Adam rushing back to himself. One hand was poised in the air, as if he had meant to touch Adam, or had already, and was withdrawing.
In the meat of his palm, a small thorn protruded. A thread of blood trembled from the wound, bright as a miracle.
Plucking the thorn free, his father regarded Adam, this thing he had made. He was silent for a long moment, and then something registered in his face. It wasn’t quite fear, but it was uncertainty. His son was before him, and he did not know him.
I am unknowable.
Robert Parrish began to speak, but then he didn’t. Now he had seen something in Adam’s face or eyes, or felt something in that thorn that pricked him, or maybe, like Adam, he could now smell the scent of a damp forest floor in the apartment.
“You’re going to be a fool in that courtroom,” his father said finally. “Are you going to say anything?”
Adam was not going to say anything.
His father slammed the door behind him as he left.
Adam stood there for a long moment. He wiped the heel of his hand over his right eye and cheek, then dried it on his slacks.
He climbed back into his bed and closed his eyes, hands balled to his chest, scented with mist and with moss.
When he closed his eyes, Cabeswater was still waiting for him.

he thing that amazes me,” Greenmantle mused aloud, “is that there are some people who actually do this as a form of leisure. People who trade vacation days for this

experience. It dazzles, really. I have absolutely no idea where we are. I’m assuming you’d have said something if we were lost and/ or were going to die down here.”

The Greenmantles were in a cave: wife, husband, dog, an American cave family. Piper had discovered that Otho, when left alone, ate through the bathroom doors of rental homes, so he now minced ahead of her. The cave was dark and armpit-scented. Greenmantle had done a perfunctory amount of research on caving before setting out this afternoon. He’d discovered that caves were supposed to be vessels of natural untouched beauty.

It turned out they were just holes in the ground. He felt caves had been extremely oversold.
“We’re not going to die down here,” Piper said. “I have book club on Tuesday.”
“Book club! You’ve only been here two weeks and you’re in a book club.”
“What else am I supposed to do while you’re out finding yourself? Just
hang around
the house, getting fat, I suppose? Don’t say ‘talk to your little friends on the phone’ because I’ll put this pickax through your right eye.”
“What’s the book?”
Piper pointed the flashlight at the ceiling and then the damp floor. Both the flashlight beam and Piper’s lip curled in disgust. “I don’t remember the title. Something about citrus. It’s a literary memoir of a young woman coming of age on an orange plantation set against a backdrop of war and subversive class struggle with possible religious undertones or something like that. Don’t say ‘I’d rather die.’”
“I didn’t say anything,” Greenmantle replied, although he had indeed been considering “I’d rather die” as a candidate to further the conversation. He preferred spy thrillers that involved dashing men who were slightly over thirty darting in and out of high-technology shadows while driving fast cars and making important phone calls. He held up the EMF reader in his hand to see if he could vary the degree of flashing going on across its face. He could not.
Otho had stopped to relieve himself; Piper flicked out a plastic baggie.
“This is pointless. Did you just put that shit in your bag?”
“I saw a spot on ABC about how ecotourism is denuding caves,” she informed him. “That face? The one you’re wearing now? Is part of the problem. You are part of the problem.”
Holes in the ground were, in Greenmantle’s opinion, the very best place to throw dog crap into. He swiped the EMF reader across the wall with one hand and a geophone with the other. He would have gotten an identical amount of insight if he’d been holding a flare and a ukulele. “What I’m going to do is hire a billion million minions to come look in caves for this woman, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just eviscerate her daughter in front of the Gray Man instead.”
“Minions! I don’t want a million minions tramping around down here. I want to explore my psychic connections without all that grunting going on.”
“Your psychic connections!” He felt her glaring at him; the skin on the back of his neck was melting. “Fine, I’ll tell them to be tactful.”
“You know what? You should let me have two of them, to help me in my life goals.”
“What?”
“I could call them and pretend to be you.
Hi, thugman, this is Colin could you do me a solid?
” She did a passable job of his voice, if slightly too nasal and in love with itself. She stopped short, legs apart, blond hair billowing around her like a caving photo shoot. For a strange, slipping moment, Greenmantle thought that he’d found her in the cave and was bringing her back to the light, and then he remembered the bag of dog shit and how they’d gotten here. He thought that this cave was probably full of carbon monoxide. He was probably dying.
Piper asked, “Did you hear that?”
“The sound of you mocking me?”
She didn’t reply. She was frowning down the tunnel, her chin lifted, her eyebrows pushed together as if she were listening. He thought about someone sleeping. He thought about waking them up.
“The sound of my love?” he tried.
She still didn’t reply. She was still listening.
“The sound of you creeping me the hell out?”
But really he was creeping himself out.
Finally, she turned back to him. She did not look as if she had heard the sound of his love. She said, “I definitely need two of your minions. Let’s get back to a cell phone signal.”
He was very happy to oblige. He never wanted to see a cave again.

ansey might have found Gwenllian, but Blue had to live with her. All of the women of 300 Fox Way had to, actually. It was like living with a natural disaster, or a

For starters, she didn’t sleep. She shouted at Calla that she had had enough sleep for one thousand lifetimes and that she intended to spend the rest of this one awake, and then proceeded to do just that. At small hours of the morning, Blue would wake and hear her clogging around in the attic above her room.

Then there was her matter of dress. Her supernatural awareness inside the tomb had given her just enough exposure to the changing outside world to not be shocked by the existence of cars or befuddled by the English language, but not enough to award her any social customs. So she wore what she wanted to wear (Blue could at least respect the motivation, if not the outcome), which was always a dress, sometimes two or three on top of each other, sometimes backward. This often involved stealing clothing from other people’s closets. Blue was spared only because she was so much shorter.

There were problems with mealtimes, too: For Gwenllian, every time was mealtime. She seemed to have neither sense of fullness nor taste, and would often combine foods in manners that struck Blue as problematic. She didn’t believe in telling people how to live their lives (well, maybe a little), but it was hard to stand by and watch Gwenllian spread peanut butter on a cold hot dog.

And there was the crazy part. Forty percent of what came out of her mouth came out in song, and the rest was a varied mixture of chanting, screaming, mocking, and creepy whisper. She climbed on the roof, she talked to the tree in the backyard, and she stood on furniture. She often put things in her hair for later retrieval, and then seemed to forget they were there. In very short order, her enormous tangle of hair became a vertical repository for pencils, leaves, tissues, and matches.

Persephone said, “I do not think that is a decision one human can make for another human.”
Orla asked, “Even if that other human looks like a hobo?”
It was a point on which Blue and Orla agreed.
The worst part of it was that Gansey had offered to take her away —
kept
offering to take her away — and Persephone insisted Gwenllian stay with them.
“It takes longer than a weekend to undo centuries of damage,” Persephone said.
“Centuries of damage are being incurred in just a weekend,” Calla replied.
“She’s a very gifted psychic,” Persephone said mildly. “Eventually she will earn her keep.”
“And pay for my therapy,” Blue added.
“Good one,” Orla said. To reward Blue for her excellent comeback, she painted Blue’s fingernails to match the Pig, a polish color, she informed Blue, that was called
Belligerent Candy.
Gansey kept trying to talk with Gwenllian, but she was always sassily deferential when he came to the house.
On top of that, Gansey had some sort of school commitment that he was cagey about, Ronan and Adam kept vanishing places together, and Noah couldn’t or wouldn’t come into 300 Fox Way.
Blue was feeling a little as if she had been locked into a madhouse.
Mom, it’s time for you to come home.

The Gray Man came over midweek, much to her gratitude. “It’s me,” he called down the hallway as he stepped inside.
Blue could see him from her homework post at the kitchen table;
he was tidy and dangerous looking in a gray shirt and slacks. He
looked more optimistic than the last time she had seen him. Gwenllian, who was examining the roaring vacuum cleaner
but not vacuuming with it, spotted him, too. “Hello, handsome
sword! Have you killed anyone today?”
“One sword knows another,” he told her mildly, placing his
car keys in his pocket. “Have
you
killed anyone?”
She was so delighted that she turned off the vacuum cleaner
so that her insane smile could be the loudest thing in the hall. “Mr. Gray, leave her alone and come get a cup of tea,” Blue
called from the kitchen table. “You’ll make her start singing
again.”
The Gray Man glanced over his shoulder at Gwenllian as he
came into the kitchen and did as Blue instructed, taking a few
minutes to find a tea more likely to provoke sanguinity than
loose stools.
“I have been employed by your friends Mr. Parrish and Mr.
Lynch,” he said as he sat down opposite Blue.
So this is where those
two were going!
He tapped one of her algebra problems until she
dragged it back to her and reworked it correctly. “They have a
plan for Greenmantle, and it seems quite promising.” “What is it?”
“I would rather not tell you, as it is better the fewer people know it. Also, it is not polite table conversation,” Mr. Gray
said. “I have a question for you. Your cursed cave. Do you
think it is the sort of place you could hide a body? Or at least
part of one?”
Blue narrowed her eyes. “There was lots of room in that cave
for lots of things. Whose body? Which part?”
Gwenllian instantly manifested in the kitchen, dragging the
vacuum cleaner behind her like a reluctantly walked dog. “What
about the curse, lily?”
“I thought
you
were the curse,” Blue replied.
“Probably,” Gwenllian said carelessly. “What else is there
but I? I’m known to Welshmen free, lovely Gwen, lovely Gwen,
from Gower to Anglesey, lovely Gwen, oh Gwen the dead!” Blue said, “I told you she would start singing.”
But the Gray Man just raised his eyebrows. “Weapons and
poetry go hand in hand.”
Gwenllian drew herself up. “What a
cunning
weapon you are.
A poet is how I ended up in that cave.”
“Is it a good story?” the Gray Man asked.
“Oh, it is the finest.”
Blue watched the exchange with a bit of awe. Somewhere
there was a lesson in this.
The Gray Man took a sip of his tea. “You should sing it
for us.”
And unbelievably, she did.
She sang a furious little song about Glendower’s poet Iolo
Goch, and how he whispered war in her father’s ear (she whispered this part into Blue’s ear) and so, as blood soaked into the
ground of Wales, Gwenllian did her level best to stab him to
death.
“Was he sleeping?” the Gray Man asked with professional
interest.
Gwenllian laughed for about a minute. Then she said, “It
was at dinner. What a lovely meal he would’ve been!” Then she spit in the Gray Man’s tea, but it seemed to have
more to do with Iolo Goch than Mr. Gray.
He sighed and pushed the cup away. “So they sentenced you
to that cave.”
“It was that or hanging! And I chose hanging, so they gave
me the false grave instead.”
Blue squinted at Gwenllian, trying to imagine her as she had
been six centuries before. A young woman, Orla’s age, the daughter of a nobleman, a witch in an age when witches were not always
the best thing to be. Surrounded by war, and doing her best to
stop it.
Blue wondered if she would have to courage to stab someone
if she thought it would save lives.
Gwenllian dragged the vacuum cleaner back into the hall
without any sort of good-bye.
“Gwenllian and vacuum, exit stage right,” Blue said. The Gray Man pushed his tea even farther away. “Do you think you might have time to show me this cave you pulled her
from? Just so I know where it is, as an option?”
The idea of leaving the house was incredibly appealing. It
wouldn’t be a bad thing to see Jesse again, either. And although
she was annoyed that Adam and Ronan hadn’t trusted her with
whatever their Greenmantle plan was, she wanted to be helpful
anyway. “Possibly. Will you feed me?”
“I won’t even spit in it.”
Blue warned Calla that she was leaving the house with a hit
man, and then Mr. Gray took her to the downtown drugstore
for a tuna fish sandwich (best tuna fish in town
!
) before driving out of Henrietta. The car zoomed and darted through the
darkness in a way that seemed slightly out of the Gray Man’s
control.
“This car is really terrible,” Blue said.
This was allowed, as the car was not really Mr. Gray’s. It was
a hand-me-down white Mitsubishi of the sort that young men
with big dreams and egos normally drove. It sported a custom
license plate that read thief.
“It grows on you,” Mr. Gray said. He paused. “Like a cancer.” “Buh dum
pa
.”
Both Blue and Mr. Gray enjoyed a laugh, and then were
briefly silent as they realized it had been too long since they had
been in the company of someone with their precise sense of
humor, i.e., Maura Sargent. In the background, the Kinks played
gently, the sound of Mr. Gray’s soul.
“I keep waiting for things to go back to normal,” Blue admitted. “But I know now that that’s not going to happen, even when
Mom comes back.” She meant
if
, but she said
when
.
“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a fan of normal,” the Gray
Man said. He slowed slightly as the headlights illuminated the
eyes of three deer standing by the side of the road.
It was warming to be so
known
. She said, “I’m not, really, but
I was used to it, I guess. It’s boring, but at least it’s not scary. Do
you ever get scared? Or are you too badass for that?”
He looked amused, but also like a badass, sitting quietly and
efficiently behind the wheel of the car.
“In my experience,” the Gray Man said, “the badasses are the
most scared. I just avoid being
inappropriately
frightened.” Blue thought this seemed like a reasonable goal. After a
pause, she said, “You know, I like you.”
He glanced over at her. “I do, too.”
“Like me or like you? The grammar was unspecific.” The two of them enjoyed another laugh and the presence of
someone else with their precise sense of humor.
“Oh, here it is,” Blue said. “Don’t pass it.”
The Dittley farm was mostly dark as they pulled down the
driveway, with only the kitchen window lit up. For a moment,
Blue thought perhaps Jesse had left to win back his wife and son
and dog. But then she saw his big silhouette pull aside the curtain
to observe their headlights pulling up to the house.
He came to the door at once.
“Howdy,” Blue said. “I came to impose on you and maybe
show Mr. Gray your cave, if that’s okay.”
He let them in. “YOUR BREATH SMELLS LIKE
TUNA FISH.”
“Should I have brought you some?” she asked.
“I ONLY EAT SPAGHETTIOS.” He shook hands with the Gray Man, who introduced himself as Mr. Gray. Then Jesse leaned and Blue stood on tiptoes and they hugged, because that
seemed right.
“I JUST TOOK SOME GIRL SCOUT COOKIES OUT
OF THE FREEZER.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Blue said. “As you smelled, we just ate.” “I’ll take one,” the Gray Man interjected. “If they’re Thin
Mints.”
Jesse fetched them. “NOTHING FOR YOU, ANT?” She said, “How about a glass of water and an exciting update
about how great your life is now that we’ve taken the crazy person out of your cave?”
“LIFE IS GREAT,” Jesse admitted. “BUT THE CAVE —
ARE YOU WEARING BOOTS? BECAUSE IT IS MUDDY.” Blue and Mr. Gray assured him they were fine with their current footwear. Retrieving a flashlight for Blue and a floodlight
and a shotgun for himself, Jesse led the three of them across the
dark field to the building that housed the cave. As they grew
closer, Blue thought she smelled something familiar. It was not
the earthy scent of the wet field or the smoky scent of the fall
night. It was metallic and close, damp and stagnant. It was the
smell, Blue realized, of the cave of ravens.
“WATCH YOUR STEP.”
“What am I watching for?” Mr. Gray asked.
“THAT IS THE RIGHT QUESTION.”
Jesse minced as best a Dittley could mince to the door. He
handed the floodlight to Blue as he unlocked the padlock. “STAND BACK.”
She stood back.
“BACKER THAN THAT.”
She stood back farther. The Gray Man stepped in front of
her. Only enough to block an assault, not her view.
Jesse Dittley kicked in the door. It was a slow-motion kick
because his leg was so long — there was a considerable lag
between when he began to swing his leg and when his foot actually hit the door. Blue wondered what that was called. A leg
roundhouse, or something.
The door opened.
“YUP,” said Jesse as
something
shot toward him.
It was a terrible something.
Blue was a fairly open-minded human, she thought, willing
to accept that there was a good bit of the world that was outside
her understanding and knowledge. She knew, academically, that
just because something looked scary didn’t mean that it wanted
to hurt you.
But this
something
wanted to hurt them.
It wasn’t even malevolence. It was that sometimes something
was on your side, and sometimes it was not, and this was not.
Whatever humans were for, this was against.
The sensation of being
undone
buffeted them, and then something charged through the doorway.
The Gray Man took an enormous black handgun from his
jacket and shot the thing three times in each of its heads. It fell
to the ground. There was not much in the way of heads left. “THAT SEEMED EXCESSIVE,” Jesse said.
“Yes,” agreed the Gray Man.
Blue was glad that it was dead and then felt bad that she felt
glad that it was dead. It was easier to be generous about it now
that it wasn’t trying to unwind the core of her existence. Jesse closed the door and locked it again.
“THAT HAS BEEN MY WEEK.”
She looked at the strange, jointless body, vaguely wormish,
glittering rainbow scales in the beam of her flashlight. She
couldn’t decide if it was ugly or beautiful or just unlike anything
she had seen before. “Have there been a lot of them?” “ENOUGH.”
“Have you seen any of these before?” Mr. Gray asked. “NOT TILL NOW. DON’T ALWAYS LOOK THIS
WAY, EITHER. SOME OF THEM DON’T WANT TO
KILL YOU. SOME OF THEM ARE JUST OLD THINGS.
THEY DO GET IN THE HOUSE, THOUGH.” “Why are they coming out?” Blue asked.
“TOLD YOU THE CAVE WAS CURSED.”
“But we took her out!”
“RECKON SHE WAS THE ONE KEEPING THEM
DOWN. CAVE LOVES A SACRIFICE.”
They all regarded the body for several long minutes. Mr. Gray said, “Shall we dispose of it?”
“NAH. CROWS WILL EAT WHAT’S LEFT.” Blue said, “This seems pretty bad.” She wanted to offer to
help, but what could they do? Put Gwenllian back?
The Gray Man tucked his gun away. He looked displeased
by this entire turn of events. Blue wondered if he was thinking
about hiding body parts in a cave that already seemed to be
full of bodies, and then she wondered if he was thinking about Maura in a cave with these creatures, and as soon as she thought
about it herself, her expression mirrored the Gray Man’s. “THERE, THERE, LITTLE ANT,” Jesse said. “RECKON
SHE GUARDED THE CAVE FOR HER TIME. NOW IT’S
MY TURN.”