The Raven King (The Raven Boys #4)(2)

Calla stepped into the biting October day to turn the sign beside the letter box to read CLOSED COME BACK SOON! Inside, Jimi, a big believer in herb magick, brought out several small pillows stuffed with mugwort (to enhance the projection of the soul into other planes) and set rosemary to burn over charcoal (for memory and clairvoyance, which are the same thing in two different directions). Orla shook a smouldering bundle of sage over the tarot decks. Maura filled a black-glass scrying bowl. Gwenllian sang a gleeful, nasty little song as she lit a circle of candles and let the blinds down. Calla returned to the reading room with three statues cradled in the crook of her arm.

“It smells like a goddamn Italian restaurant in here,” she told Jimi, who did not pause in her humming as she fanned the smoke and wiggled her large bottom. Calla placed the ferocious statue of Oya by her own chair and the dancing statue of Oshun next to Maura’s. She gripped the third statue: Yemaya, a watery Yoruban goddess who had always stood beside Persephone’s place when she wasn’t standing, on Calla’s bedroom dresser. “Maura, I don’t know where to put Yemaya.”

Maura pointed to Gwenllian, who pointed back. “You said you didn’t want to do this with Adam, so it goes by her.”

“I never said that,” Calla said. “I said he was too close to all this.”

The fact of the matter was that they were all too close to the situation. They’d been too close to the situation for months. They were so close to the situation that it was difficult to tell whether or not they were the situation.

Orla stopped chomping her gum for a moment long enough to ask, “Are we ready?”

“MmmmhmmmhmmmmissBluethoughmmmmhmmmm,” offered Jimi, still humming and swaying.

It was true that Blue’s absence was notable. As a powerful psychic amplifier, she would’ve been useful in a case like this, but they’d agreed in whispers the night before that it was cruel to discuss Gansey’s fate in front of her any more than was strictly necessary. They’d make do with Gwenllian, even though she was half as powerful and twice as difficult.

“We’ll tell her the upshot later,” Maura said. “I think I had better get Artemus out of the pantry.”

Artemus: Maura’s ex-lover, Blue’s biological father, Glendower’s adviser, 300 Fox Way’s closet dweller. He had been retrieved from a magical cave just a little over a week before and in that time had managed to contribute absolutely nothing to their emotional or intellectual resources. Calla found him spineless (she was not wrong). Maura thought him misunderstood (she was not wrong). Jimi reckoned he had the longest nose of any man she’d ever seen (she was not wrong). Orla didn’t believe barricading oneself in a supply closet was a sufficient protection against a psychic who hated you (she was not wrong). Gwenllian was, in fact, the psychic who hated him (she was not wrong).

It took Maura quite a bit of doing to persuade him to leave the pantry, and even after he’d joined them at the table, he did not look at all like he belonged. Some of that was because he was a man, and some of it was because he was much taller than everyone else. But most of it was because he had dark, permanently worried eyes that indicated he had seen the world and it was too much for him. That earnest fear was entirely at odds with the varying degrees of self-confidence carried by the psychics in the room.

Maura and Calla had known him before Blue had been born and both were thinking that Artemus was ever so much less than he had been then. Well, Maura thought ever so much less. Calla merely thought less, as she hadn’t had a very high opinion of him to begin with. But then, lanky men who appeared out of mystical groves had never been her type.

Jimi poured the whiskey.

Orla closed the doors to the reading room.

The women sat.

“What a cluster,” Calla said, by way of opening (she was not wrong).

“He can’t be saved, can he?” Jimi asked. She meant Gansey. She was a little misty-eyed. It was not that she was intensely fond of Gansey, but she was a very sentimental person, and the idea of any young man being cut down in his youth troubled her.

“Mm,” said Maura.

The women all took a drink. Artemus did not. He shot a nervous look at Gwenllian. Gwenllian, always imposing with a nest of towering hair full of pencils and flowers, glared back at him. The heat in her expression should have ignited any alcohol remaining in her shot glass.

Maura asked, “Do we need to stop it, then?”

Orla, the youngest and loudest in the room, laughed in a youthful and loud way. “How exactly would you stop him?”

“I said it, not him,” Maura replied, rather snottily. “I would not pretend to imagine I have any power to stop that boy from searching Virginia for his own grave. But the others.”

Calla put her glass down with force. “Oh, I could stop him. But that’s not the point. It’s everything already in place.”

(Everything already in place: the retired hit man currently sleeping with Maura; his supernatural-obsessed ex-boss currently sleeping in Boston; the creepy entity buried in rocks beneath the ley line; the unfamiliar creatures crawling out of a cave mouth behind an abandoned farmhouse; the ley line’s growing power; the magical sentient forest on the ley line; one boy’s bargain with the magical forest; one boy’s ability to dream things to life; one dead boy who refused to be laid to rest; one girl who supernaturally amplified 90 per cent of the aforementioned list.)