His arm stretched out across the table in front of him. His thumb was splinted.
"Could someone cut this hospital bracelet off?" he asked. There was something gallant and hectic about the deliberately offhand way he asked it. "I feel like an invalid. Please."
Handing him a pair of scissors, Persephone remarked, "Blue, I did tell you about putting your thumb outside of your fist if you were going to hit someone."
"You didn’t tell me to tell him," Blue retorted.
"Okay," Maura said from the doorway, rubbing her forehead with her fingers. "There are a few things going on here, obviously. Someone just tried to kill you." This was to Gansey. "You two are telling me that your friend was killed by the man who just tried to kill him." This was to Ronan and Adam. "You three are telling me that Neeve had a phone call with the man who killed your friend and just now tried to kill Gansey." This was to Blue, Persephone, and Calla. "And you’re telling me that you’ve had nothing to do with him since that phone call."
This last one was to Neeve. Though Maura had spoken to each of them, they all kept looking at Neeve.
"And you let them go through my things," Neeve replied.
Blue expected her mother to look chastened, but instead Maura seemed to grow taller. "And with good reason, obviously. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me the truth. If you wanted to play around on the corpse road, why didn’t you just ask? How do you know I would have said no? Instead, you pretended like you were actually committed to —"
She paused and looked at Blue.
Blue finished, "To finding Butternut."
"Oh, God," Maura said. "Calla, this is your fault, isn’t it?"
"No," Blue said. She had to try very hard to pretend that the boys weren’t all looking at her in order to say this. "I think I can be mad here, too. Why didn’t you just tell me that you didn’t really know my father and you had me without getting married? Why is that a big secret?"
"I never said I didn’t really know him," Maura replied, voice hollow. She had an expression on her face that Blue didn’t like; it was a little too emotional.
Blue looked at Persephone instead. "How do you know I wouldn’t have just been happy with the truth? I don’t care if my father was a deadbeat named Butternut. It doesn’t change anything right now."
"His name wasn’t really Butternut, was it?" Gansey asked Adam in a low voice.
Neeve’s voice, mild as always, cut through the kitchen. "I think this has all been oversimplified. I was spending time looking for Blue’s father. It’s just not all I was looking at."
Calla snapped, "Then why all the secretive behavior?"
Neeve looked very pointedly at Gansey’s splinted thumb. "It is the sort of discovery that lends itself to danger. Surely you all feel the pull of secrecy as well, or you would have shared everything you knew with Blue."
"Blue is not psychic," Maura said crisply. "Most of what we didn’t pass along were things that would only be meaningful while doing a reading or scrying into the corpse road."
"You also didn’t tell me," Gansey said. He was looking at his thumb, his eyebrows pulled together. Suddenly, Blue realized what looked different about him: He was wearing a pair of wire-framed glasses. They were the thin, subdued sort of glasses that you usually didn’t notice until they were pointed out. They made him look at once older and more serious, or maybe that was just his expression in general at the moment. Though she would never, ever tell him, she preferred this Gansey to the wind-tossed, effortlessly handsome one. He went on, "At the reading, when I asked about the ley line, you withheld that information from me."
Now Maura looked a little chastised. "How was I supposed to know what you would do with it? So, where is this man now? Barrington? Is that really his name?"
"Barrington Whelk," Adam and Ronan replied in unison. They exchanged a wry look.
"At the hospital, the police told me they’re looking for him. Henrietta police and state police," Gansey said. "But they said he wasn’t at his house and that it looked like he’d packed."
"I believe he’s what you call on the lam," Ronan said.
"Do you think he still has interest in you?" Maura asked.
Gansey shook his head. "I don’t know if he ever cared about me. I don’t think he had a plan. He wanted the journal. He wants Glendower."
"But he doesn’t know where Glendower is?"
"No one does," Gansey replied. "I have a colleague" — Ronan sniggered when Gansey used the word colleague, but Gansey pressed on — "in the UK who told me about the ritual that Whelk used Noah for. It’s possible he’ll try it again in a different place. Like Cabeswater."
"I think we should wake it up," Neeve said.
Again, everyone stared at her. She seemed unperturbed, a sea of calm, hands folded in front of her.
"Excuse me?" Calla demanded. "I’m pretty sure I heard it involved a dead body."
Neeve cocked her head. "Not necessarily. A sacrifice isn’t always death."
Gansey looked dubious. "Even assuming that is true, Cabeswater is a bit of a strange place. What would the rest of the ley line be like if we woke it up?"
"I’m not sure. I can tell you right now that it will be woken, though," Neeve said. "I don’t even need my scrying bowl to see that." She turned on Persephone. "Do you disagree?"
Persephone held her mug in front of her face, hiding her mouth. "No, that’s what I see as well. Someone will wake it in the next few days."