The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(95)

“You’re the one dealing with creepy things. Running with people who use time more than once.”

Blue thought about how Gansey had cheated death on the ley line, and how he seemed to be old and young at the same time. “Gansey?”

“Glendower! Hand me that other thing you’ve got there.”

Blue traded the wheel for the shield boss. Calla held it for a long while. Then she sat up and reached for Blue’s hand. She began to hum a little as she ran her fingers over the ravens on the boss. It was an archaic, haunted sort of tune, and it made Blue clasp her free arm around herself.

“They were dragging him at this point,” Calla said. “The horses had died. The men were very weak. It wouldn’t stop raining. They meant to bury this with him, but it was too heavy. They left it behind.”

Left it behind.

The echo felt deliberate. Gansey would not abandon the Camaro unless he was under duress; Glendower’s men wouldn’t abandon his shield without similar distress.

“But it is Glendower’s? Is he close?” Blue felt a little kick to her heart.

“Close and far is like already happened and not happened yet,” Calla replied.

Blue tired of the enigmatic psychic talk. She insisted, “But they had no horses. So it’s only as far as they could go on foot.”

“People,” Calla said, “can walk a long way if they have to.”

She got up and returned the shield boss to Blue. She smelled like she’d been boxing. She sighed very noisily.

“Calla?” Blue asked suddenly. “Are you one of those people who reuses time? You and Mom and Persephone?”

By way of answer, Calla answered, “Have you ever felt like there is something different about you? Like there is something more?”

Blue’s heart jumped inside her again. “Yes!”

Calla removed the keys to the Fox Way car from her pocket. “Good. Everyone should feel that way. Here. Take these. You’re driving home. You need the practice.”

Blue could get nothing more out of her. They bade Mike farewell (Don’t drive that wheel too fast, now!), put Blue’s bike in the trunk, and drove rather slowly home. As Blue attempted to park in front of the house without hitting a small three-colored car already parked on the curb, Calla clucked.

“Well,” she remarked. “Trouble looks good today.”

This was because Adam Parrish was waiting on their front step.





Adam sat awkwardly on the edge of Blue’s bed. It felt strange to have so easily gained access to a girl’s bed-room. If you knew Blue at all, the room was unsurprising — canvas silhouettes of trees stuck to the walls, leaves hanging in chains from the ceiling fan, a bird with a talk bubble reading WORMS FOR ALL painted above a shelf cluttered with buttons and about nine different pairs of scissors. Against the wall, Blue self-consciously taped up the drooping branch on one of the trees.

No time, no time.

He squeezed his eyes shut for just a second. He waited for her to stop messing over the trees so they could talk. She kept fiddling. He felt his pulse simmering inside him.

He stood up. He couldn’t sit any longer.

Blue stopped abruptly. She leaned on her hands against the wall, expression watchful.

Adam had intended to begin the conversation with a persuasive statement on why Gansey’s conservative approach to the quest was wrong, but that wasn’t what he said. Instead, he said, “I want to know why you won’t kiss me, and I don’t want a lie this time.”

There was silence. A rotating fan in the corner moved over both of them. The tips of the branches fluttered. The leaves spiraled.

Blue demanded, “That’s what you came here for?”

She was mad. Adam was glad of it. It was worse to be the only person angry.

When he didn’t answer, she kept going, voice ever angrier, “That’s the first conversation you want to have after coming back from D.C.?”

“What does it matter where I came from?”

“Because if I was Ronan or Noah, we’d be talking about — about how the party went. We’d be talking about where you disappeared to and what you wanted to do about that and I don’t know, real things. Not whether or not you got to kiss me!”

Adam thought it was the most irrelevant response ever, and she still hadn’t answered his question. “Ronan and Noah aren’t my girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend!” Blue repeated, and he felt a disconnected thrill to hear her say the word. “How about friend-friend?”

“I thought we were friend-friends.”

“Are we? Friends talk. You go walking to the Pentagon and I find out from Gansey! Your dad’s a jerk and I find out from Gansey! Noah knows everything. Ronan knows everything.”

“They don’t know everything. They know what they were there for. Gansey knows because he was there.”

“Yeah, and why wasn’t I?”

“Why would you be?”

“Because you’d invited me,” Blue said.

The world tilted. He blinked; it straightened. “But there wasn’t any reason for you to be there.”

“Right, sure. Because there’s no girls in politics! I have no interest. Voting? What? I forgot my apron. I think I ought to be in the kitchen right now, actually. My rolling pin —”