She was unsurprised when his voice came from behind her instead of from the other side of the door. When she turned, she seemed to see his legs first, and then, slowly, the rest of him. She still wasn’t sure he was actually all there, or if he had been there all along — it was hard to make a decision about existence and Noah these days.
She allowed him to pet her hair with his icy fingers.
"Not so spiky as usual," he said sadly.
"I didn’t get much sleep. I need sleep for quality spikes. I’m glad to see you."
Noah crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, then put his hands in his pockets, then removed them. "I only ever feel normal when you’re around. I mean, normal like I was before they found my body. That still wasn’t like what I was when I was …"
"I don’t believe that you were really that different when you were alive," Blue told him. But it was true that she still couldn’t reconcile this Noah with that abandoned red Mustang.
"I think," Noah said cautiously, remembering, "that I was worse then."
This line of discussion seemed in danger of making him vanish, so Blue asked quickly, "Where are the others?"
"Gansey and Adam are getting Adam’s stuff so he can move in," Noah said. "Ronan went to the library."
"Move in! I thought he said … wait — Ronan went where?"
With lots of pauses and sighs and staring off into the trees, Noah described the previous night’s events to her, ending with, "If Ronan had gotten arrested for punching Adam’s dad, he would’ve been out of Aglionby no matter what happened. No way they’d let an assault charge ride. But Adam pressed charges so Ronan would get off the hook. ’Course that means Adam has to move out because his dad hates him now."
"But that’s awful," Blue said. "Noah, that’s awful. I didn’t know about Adam’s dad."
"That’s the way he wanted it."
A place for leaving. She remembered how Adam had referred to his home. And now, of course, she remembered his awful bruises and a dozen comments between the boys that had seemed inexplicable at the time, all veiled references to his home life. Her first thought was a strangely unpleasant one — that she hadn’t been a good enough friend for Adam to share this with her. But it was fleeting, and replaced almost immediately with the horrific realization that Adam had no family. Who would she be without hers?
She asked, "Okay, wait, so why is Ronan at the library?"
"Cramming," Noah said. "For an exam on Monday."
It was the nicest thing Blue had ever heard of Ronan doing.
The phone rang then, clearly audible through the floor above them.
"You should pick that up!" Noah said abruptly. "Hurry!"
Blue had lived too long with the women at 300 Fox Way to question Noah’s intuition. Jogging quickly to keep up with him, she followed him into the stairwell and then up the stairs to the doorway. It was locked. Noah made a series of incomprehensible gestures, more agitated than she’d seen him.
He burst out, "I could do it if —"
If he had more energy, Blue thought. She touched his shoulder at once. Immediately fortified by her energy, Noah leaned against the latch, wiggling the lock open and throwing the door free. She hurled herself at the phone.
"Hello?" she gasped into the receiver. The phone on the desk was an old-fashioned black rotary number, completely in keeping with Gansey’s love of the bizarre and barely functional. Knowing him, it was possible he had a landline merely to justify having this particular phone on his desk.
"Oh, hello, dear," said an unfamiliar voice at the other end of the line. Already she could hear a significant accent. "Is Richard Gansey there?"
"No," replied Blue. "But I can take a message."
This, she felt, had been her role in life so far.
Noah prodded her with a cold finger. "Tell him who you are."
"I’m working with Gansey," Blue added. "On the ley line."
"Oh!" said the voice. "Well. How lovely to meet you. What did you say your name was? I’m Roger Malory."
He was doing something extremely complicated with his r’s that made him difficult to understand.
"Blue. My name’s Blue Sargent."
"Blair?"
"Blue."
"Blaize?"
Blue sighed. "Jane."
"Oh, Jane! I thought that you were saying Blue for some reason. It’s nice to meet you, Jane. I’m afraid I have bad news for Gansey. Would you let him know that I attempted that ritual with a colleague — that chap from Surrey I mentioned before, endearing man, really, with terrible breath, though — and it just didn’t go very well. My colleague, he will be all right, the doctors just say it will be a few weeks before the skin heals. The grafts are working splendidly, they say."
"Wait," Blue said. She grabbed the closest piece of paper from Gansey’s desk; it looked like a bit of calculus or something. He’d already doodled a cat attacking a man on it, so she figured it was safe to use. "I’m writing this all down. This is the ritual to wake the ley line, right? What exactly went wrong?"
"That is very hard to say, Jane. Suffice to say the ley lines are even more powerful than Gansey and I had anticipated. They may be magic, they may be science, but they are undoubtedly energy. My colleague stepped quite easily out of his skin. I was certain I’d lost him; I didn’t think a man could bleed that much without perishing. Oh, when you tell Gansey all this, don’t tell him that. The boy has quite a thing about death, and I don’t like to upset him."
Blue hadn’t noticed Gansey having a "thing" about death, but she agreed not to tell him.
"But you’ve still not said what you tried," Blue pointed out.
"Oh, haven’t I?"
"Nope. Which means we might do it by accident, if we don’t know."
Malory chuckled. It was a sound a lot like sucking just the whipped cream off hot chocolate. "Indeed you’re right. It was quite logical, really, and it was based on one of Gansey’s ideas from long ago, to tell you the truth. We set up a new stone circle using stones we found to have excellent energy readings — that’s dowsing terms, of course, Jane, I don’t know how well you know all these things but it’s nice to see a girl involved with all this; ley lines tend to be a man’s game and it’s nice to hear a lady like yourself —"
"Yes," Blue agreed. "It’s great. I’m enjoying myself. So, you set up a stone circle?"
"Oh yes, right. We set seven stones in a circle on what we hoped was the center of the ley line and we twiddled them about in position until we had a quite high energy reading in the middle. Sort of like positioning a prism, I think, to focus the light."
"And that’s when your partner’s skin came off?"
"Round about then. He was taking a reading in the middle and he — I’m sad to say I cannot remember exactly what he said, as I was so overcome by what came after — but he made some sort of light remark or joke or what-have-you — you know how young people are, Gansey himself can be quite one for the levity —"
Blue wasn’t certain that Gansey was quite one for the levity, but she made a mental note to look out for it in the future.
"— and he said something about losing his skin or shedding his skin or something like that. And apparently these things are quite literal. I’m not certain how his words triggered any sort of reaction, and I don’t think we’ve woken this line, at least not properly, but there it is. Disappointing, really."
"Apart from your partner living to tell the tale," Blue said.
Malory said, "Well, I’m the one who’s having to tell it."
She thought this was a joke. In any case, she laughed and didn’t feel bad about it. Then she thanked Malory, exchanged niceties with him, and hung up.
"Noah?" she asked the room, because Noah had disappeared. There was no reply, but outside, she heard car doors slamming and voices.
Blue replayed the phrase in her head: My colleague stepped quite easily out of his skin. Blue didn’t have a "thing" with death and even she thought it painted a rather horrible and vivid image in her mind.
A moment later, she heard the door clap shut on the first floor and feet stomping up the stairs.
Gansey was first into the room, and he clearly hadn’t expected to find anyone there, because his features hadn’t been arranged at all to disguise his misery. When he saw Blue, he immediately managed to pull a cordial smile from somewhere.
And it was so very convincing. She had seen his face just a second before, but even having seen his expression, it was hard to remind herself that the smile was false. Why a boy with a life as untroubled as Gansey’s would have needed to learn how to build such a swift and convincing false front of happiness was beyond her.
"Jane," he said, and she thought she heard a little of his unhappiness in his bright voice, even if his face no longer betrayed it. "Sorry you had to let yourself in."
Noah’s voice and nothing more manifested at Blue’s ear, a cold, cold whisper: They fought.
Adam and Ronan came in then. Ronan was bent double with a duffel bag and backpack on his back, and Adam carried a dented Froot Loops box with a Transformer poking out of the top.
"Nice Transformer," Blue said. "Is that the police car one?"
Adam looked at Blue, unsmiling, as if he didn’t really see her. Then, a moment too late, he replied, "Yes."
Ronan, still weighed down with the luggage, headed across the floor toward Noah’s room, saying "Ha. Ha. Ha" in time with his footsteps. It was the kind of laughing that came from being the only person laughing.
"This guy called," Blue said. She held up the piece of paper where she’d jotted his name. The place she’d written it made it look like the doodled cat was calling it out.
"Malory," Gansey said with less than his usual enthusiasm. As Adam carried the box after Ronan, he watched his back with narrowed eyes. It wasn’t until Noah’s door closed behind them that Gansey tore his eyes away and looked at Blue. The apartment felt empty without the others, like they’d gone into another world instead of another room.
Gansey asked, "What did he want?"
"He tried the ritual on the ley line and he said it went wrong and his other person — his, uh, colleague? — got hurt."
"Hurt how?"
"Just hurt. Badly hurt. By energy," Blue said.
With force, Gansey kicked off his shoes. One flew over his miniature Henrietta and the other made it all the way to the side of his desk. It slammed off the old wood and slid to the ground. Under his breath, Gansey said, "Yee haw."
Blue said, "You seem upset."
"Do I?" he asked.
"What did you and Adam fight about?"
Gansey cast a glance at Noah’s closed door. "How did you know?" he asked wearily. He threw himself on his unmade bed.