The Raven King (The Raven Boys #4)(34)
Uneasily, Maura said, “Remember the frogs, though.”
A few years before, Blue had caught two tree frogs while out performing neighbourly errands. She’d triumphantly set up a makeshift terrarium for them in one of Jimi’s largest iced tea pitchers. As soon as she’d gone to school, Maura had immediately divined – through ordinary channels, not psychic ones – that these tree frogs were in for a slow death if tended by a young Blue Sargent. She had set them free in the backyard and thus began one of the largest arguments she and her daughter had yet or since had.
“Fine,” Calla hissed. “We won’t free any ghosts while she’s at a toga party.”
“I don’t want to go.”
Both Maura and Calla jumped.
Of course Noah was standing beside them. His shoulders were slumped and his eyebrows tipped upward. Under it all were threads and black, dust and absence. His words were soft and slurred. “Not yet.”
“You don’t have much time, boy,” Calla told him.
“Not yet,” Noah repeated. “Please.”
“No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do,” Maura said.
Noah shook his head sadly. “They … already have. They … will again. But this … I want to do it for me.”
He held his hand out to Calla, palm up, as if he were a beggar. It was a gesture that reminded Calla of another dead person in her life, one who still hung sadness and guilt around her neck, even after two decades. In fact, now that she considered it, the gesture was too perfectly accurate, the wrist too limply similar, the fingers too delicately and intentionally sprawled, an echo of Calla’s memories —
“I’m a mirror,” Noah said bleakly, responding to her thoughts. He stared at his feet. “Sorry.”
He started to drop his hand, but Calla was finally moved to a reluctant and genuine compassion. She took his cool fingers.
Immediately a blow smashed into her face.
She should have expected it, but still, she barely had time to recover when the next came. Fear spewed up, then the pain, and then another blow – Calla nimbly blocked this one. She did not need to relive Noah’s entire murder.
She moved around it and found … nothing. Ordinarily, her psychometry worked exceptionally well on the past, digging through all recent events to any strong distant events. But Noah was so decayed that his past was mostly gone. All that remained were thready cobwebs of memories. There was more kissing – how did Calla’s day end up involving living through so many Sargents with so many tongues in their mouths? There was Ronan, appearing far more kind through Noah’s memories. There was Gansey, courageous and solid in ways Noah clearly envied. And Adam – Noah was afraid of him, or for him. This fear tangled through images of him in increasingly dark threads. Then there was the future, spreading out with thinner and thinner images and —
Calla took her hand away from Noah and stared at him. For once, she had nothing clever to say.
“OK, kid,” she said finally. “Welcome to the house. You can stay here as long as you can.”
Although Gansey liked Henry Cheng, agreeing to go to a party of his felt like a strange shift in power. It was not that he felt threatened by Henry in any way – both Henry and Gansey were kings in their respective territories – but it felt more loaded to meet Henry on his own turf rather than on the neutral ground of Aglionby Academy. The four Vancouver kids all lived off-campus in Litchfield House, and parties there were unheard of. It was an exclusive club. Undeniably Henry’s. To dine in fairyland was to be forced to stay there for ever or to pine for it once you left, and all that.
Gansey wasn’t sure he was in a position to be making new friends.
Litchfield House was an old Victorian on the opposite edge of downtown from Monmouth. In the damp, cooling night, it rose out of curls of mist, turrets and shingles and porches, every window lit with a tiny electric candle. The driveway was double-parked with four fancy cars, and Henry’s silver Fisker was an elegant ghost on the kerb in front, right behind a dutiful-looking old sedan.
Blue was in a terrible mood. Something had clearly happened while she was on shift, but Gansey’s attempts to prise it from her had established only that it was neither about the toga party nor him. Now, she was the one driving the Pig, which had a threefold benefit. For starters, Gansey couldn’t imagine anyone whose mood wouldn’t be marginally lifted by driving a Camaro. Second, Blue said she never got a chance to practise driving in Fox Way’s communal vehicle. And third, most importantly, Gansey was outrageously and eternally driven to distraction by the image of her behind the wheel of his car. Ronan and Adam weren’t with them, so there was no one to catch them in what felt like an incredibly indecent act.
He had to tell them.
Gansey wasn’t sure he was in a position to be falling in love, but he’d done it anyway. He didn’t quite grasp the mechanics of it. He understood his friendship with Ronan and Adam – they both represented qualities that he both lacked and admired, and they liked the versions of himself that he also liked. That was true of his friendship with Blue, too, but it was more than that. The better he got to know her, the more it felt like he did when he was swimming. There stopped being dissonant versions of him. There was only Gansey, now, now, now.
Blue paused the Pig at the quiet stop sign opposite Litchfield House’s corner, assessing the parking situation.