The Raven Boys (42 page)

A
fter leaving Monmouth Manufacturing, Blue returned home and retreated to the far side of the beech in the backyard to try to do homework. But she found herself spending less time solving for
x
and more time solving for
Noah
or
Gansey
or
Adam
. She’d given up and leaned back by the time Adam appeared. He stepped into the dim green shadow of the tree from the house side.

“Persephone said you were out here.” He just hung there at the edge of the shadow.

Blue thought about saying
I’m so sorry about your dad
, but instead she just stretched out a hand toward him. Adam gave an unsteady sigh of the sort that she could see from six feet away. Wordlessly, he sat beside her and then laid his head on her lap, his face in his arms.

Startled, Blue didn’t immediately react, other than to glance over her shoulder to make certain that the tree hid them from the house. She felt a little like she’d been approached by a wild animal, and she was at once flattered by its trust and worried that she’d scare it away. After a moment, she carefully stroked a few fine, dusty strands of his hair while she looked at the back of his neck. It made her chest hum to touch him and smell the dust-and-oil scent of him.

“Your hair is the color of dirt,” she said.

“It knows where it came from.”

“That’s funny,” Blue noted, “because then mine should be that color, too.”

His shoulders moved in response. After a moment, he said, “Sometimes I’m afraid he’ll never really understand me.”

She ran a finger along the back of his ear. It felt dangerous and thrilling, but not as dangerous and thrilling as it would have been to touch him while he was looking at her.

“I’m only going to say this once, and then I’m going to be done with it,” she said. “But I think you’re awfully brave.”

He was quiet for a long, long moment. A car whirred through the neighborhood. The wind moved through the beech leaves, turning them upside down in a way that meant rain later.

Without lifting his head, Adam said, “I’d like to kiss you now, Blue, young or not.”

Blue’s fingers stopped moving.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said.

He pulled himself free of her, sitting just a few inches away. His expression was bleak, nothing like when he’d wanted to kiss her before. “I’m already all hurt up.”

Blue didn’t think this was really about kissing her, and that made her cheeks burn. It wasn’t supposed to be a kiss at all, but if it had, it definitely shouldn’t be like this. She said, “There’s still worse than what you’ve got.”

Something about this made him swallow and turn his face away. His hands were limp in his lap.
If I’d been anybody else in the world,
she thought,
this would’ve been my first kiss.
She wondered what it would’ve been like to kiss this hungry, desolate boy.

Adam’s eyes moved, following the shifting light through the leaves above. He didn’t look at her when he said, “I don’t remember how your mother said I was supposed to solve my problem. At the reading. The choice I couldn’t make.”

Blue sighed.
This
was what all this was really about, and she had known it all along, even if he hadn’t. “‘Make a third option,’ she said. Next time you should bring a notebook.”

“I don’t remember her saying the part about the notebook.”

“That’s because it was me saying that part, right now. Next time you get your cards read, take notes. That way you can compare it to what actually happens and you’ll know if the psychic is a good one.”

Now he looked at her, but she wasn’t sure if he was really
looking
at her. “I’ll do that.”

“I’ll save you the trouble this time, though,” Blue added, tilting her head back as he climbed to his feet. Her fingers and skin longed for the boy she’d held hands with days before, but he didn’t seem to be the boy standing before her. “My mother’s a good one.”

Shoving his hands in his pockets, he rubbed his cheek on his shoulder. “So you think I should listen to her?”

“No, you should listen to me.”

Adam’s hastily constructed smile was thin enough to break. “And what do you say?”

Blue was suddenly afraid for him. “Keep being brave.”

There was blood everywhere.

Are you happy now, Adam?
Ronan snarled. He knelt beside Gansey, who convulsed in the dirt. Blue stared at Adam, and the horror in her face was the worst thing. It was his fault. Ronan’s face was wild with loss.
Is this what you wanted?

At first, when Adam opened his eyes from the gory dream, his limbs tingling from the adrenaline of it, he wasn’t sure where he was. He felt like he levitated; the space around him was all wrong, too little light, too much space overhead, no sound of his breath coming back at him from the walls.

Then he remembered where he was, in Noah’s room with its close walls and soaring ceilings. A new wave of misery washed over him, and he could identify its source very precisely: homesickness. For uncountable minutes, Adam lay there awake, reasoning with himself. Logically, Adam knew that he had nothing to miss, that he effectively had Stockholm syndrome, identifying with his captors, considering it a kindness when his father
didn’t
hit him. Objectively, he knew that he was abused. He knew the damage went deeper than any bruise he’d ever worn to school. He could endlessly dissect his reactions, doubt his emotions, wonder if he, too, would grow up to hit his own kid.

But lying in the black of the night, all he could think was,
My mother will never speak to me again. I’m homeless.

The specter of Glendower and the ley line hung in Adam’s mind. They seemed closer than ever before, but the possibility of a successful outcome also felt more tenuous than ever before. Whelk was out there, and he’d been searching for this for even longer than Gansey. Surely, left to his own devices, he’d find what he wanted sooner than they would.

We need to wake up the ley line.

Adam’s head was a jumble of thoughts: the last time his father had hit him, the Pig pulling up beside him with Gansey inside, Ronan’s doppelganger at the cash register on that day when he decided he must go to Aglionby, Ronan’s fist slamming into his father’s face. He was full of so many wants, too many to prioritize, and so they all felt desperate. To not have to work so many hours, to get into a good college, to look right in a tie, to not still be hungry after eating the thin sandwich he’d brought to work, to drive the shiny Audi that Gansey had stopped to look at with him once after school, to go home, to have hit his father himself, to own an apartment with granite countertops and a television bigger than Gansey’s desk, to belong somewhere, to go home, to go home, to go home.

If they woke the ley line, if they found Glendower, he could still have those things. Most of them.

But again, he saw Gansey’s wounded form, and he saw, too, Gansey’s wounded face from earlier today, when they’d fought. There just wasn’t a way that Adam would put Gansey in peril.

But there also wasn’t any way that he was going to let Whelk slide in and take what they’d worked so hard for.
Wait!
Gansey could always afford to wait. Adam couldn’t.

He was decided, then. Creeping quietly around the room, Adam put things in his bag. It was hard to predict what he would need. Adam slid the gun from beneath the bed and looked at it for a long moment, a black, sinister shape on the floorboards. Earlier, Gansey had seen him unpacking it.

“What’s
that
?” he’d demanded, horrified.

“You know what it is,” Adam had replied. It was Adam’s father’s gun, and though he wasn’t sure his father would ever use it on his mother, he wasn’t taking the chance.

Gansey’s anxiety over the gun had been palpable. It was possible, Adam thought, that it was because of Whelk sticking one in his face. “I don’t want it in here.”

“I can’t sell it,” Adam had said. “I already thought of that. But I can’t, legally. It’s registered in his name.”

“Surely there’s a way to get rid of it. Bury it.”

“And have some kid find it?”

“I don’t want it in here.”

“I’ll find a way to get rid of it,” Adam had promised. “But I can’t leave it there. Not now.”

Adam didn’t want to bring it along with him tonight, not really.

But he didn’t know what he’d need to sacrifice.

He checked the safety and put it in the bag. Climbing to his feet, he turned toward the door and just managed to stifle a sound. Noah stood directly in front of him, hollow eyes on level with Adam’s eyes, smashed cheek on level with Adam’s ruined ear, breathless mouth inches from Adam’s sucked-in breath.

Without Blue there to make him stronger, without Gansey there to make him human, without Ronan there to make him belong, Noah was a frightening thing.

“Don’t throw it away,” Noah whispered.

“I’m trying not to,” Adam replied, picking up his messenger bag. The gun in it made it feel unnaturally weighted.
I checked the safety, didn’t I? I did. I know I did.

When he straightened, Noah was already gone. Adam walked through the black, frigid air where he had just been and opened the door. Gansey was crumpled on his bed, earbuds in, eyes closed. Even with the hearing gone in his left ear, Adam could hear the tinny sound of the music, whatever Gansey had played in order to keep himself company, to lure himself to sleep.

I’m not betraying him
, Adam thought.
We’re still doing this together. Only, when I come back, we’ll be equals.

His friend didn’t stir as he let himself out of the door. As he left, the only sound he heard was the whisper of the night wind through the trees of Henrietta.

G
ansey woke in the night to find the moon full on his face.

Then, when he opened his eyes again, waking properly, he realized there was no moon — the few lights of Henrietta reflected a dull purple off the low cloud cover and the windows were spattered with raindrops.

There was no moon, but something like a light had woken him. He thought he heard Noah’s voice, distantly. The hairs on his arms slowly prickled.

“I can’t understand you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. Can you say it louder, Noah?”

The hair on the back of his neck rose as well. A cloud of his breath hung in the suddenly cold air in front of his mouth.

Noah’s voice said: “Adam.”

Gansey scrambled out of bed, but it was too late. Adam was not in Noah’s old room. His things were scattered about. He’d packed, he’d gone. But no — his clothing stayed behind. He hadn’t meant to leave for good.

“Ronan, get up,” Gansey said, shoving open Ronan’s door. Without waiting for a response, he moved to the stairwell and pushed out onto the landing to look out the broken window that overlooked the parking lot. Outside, the rain misted down, a fine spray that just made halos around the distant house lights. Somehow, he already knew what he’d find, but still, the reality was a jolt: The Camaro was missing from the lot. It would’ve been easier for Adam to hot-wire than Ronan’s BMW. The roar of the engine starting was probably what had woken Gansey in the first place, the moonlight merely a memory of the last time he’d been woken.

“Man, Gansey, what?” Ronan asked. He stood in the doorway to the stairwell, scrubbing his hand over the back of his head.

Gansey didn’t want to say it. If he said it out loud, it was real, it had really happened, Adam had really done it. It wouldn’t have hurt if it was Ronan; this was the sort of thing he’d expect from Ronan. But it was Adam.
Adam.

I did tell him, right? I did say that we were to wait. It’s not that he didn’t understand me.

Gansey tried several different ways to think of the situation, but there wasn’t any way he could paint it that made it hurt less. Something kept fracturing inside him.

“What’s going on?” The tone of Ronan’s voice had changed.

There was nothing left but to say it.

“Adam’s gone to wake the ley line.”