"Sure you did," Blue said. She was wondering if it was a coincidence that there was so much Latin in her life at the moment. Gansey was beginning to rub off on her, because coincidences no longer seemed so coincidental.
"Probably," Maura agreed after a moment. "So, look. This is what I know. I think your father has something to do with Cabeswater or the ley line. Way back before you were born, Calla and Persephone and I were messing around with things we probably shouldn’t have been messing around with —"
"Drugs?"
"Rituals. Are you messing around with drugs?"
"No. But maybe rituals."
"Drugs might be better."
"I’m not interested in them. Their effects are proven — where’s the fun in that? Tell me more."
Maura tapped a rhythm on her stomach as she stared up. Blue had copied a poem onto the ceiling just above her, and it was possible she was trying to read it. "Well, he appeared after this ritual. I think he was trapped in Cabeswater, and we released him."
"You didn’t ask?"
"We didn’t … have that sort of relationship."
"I don’t want to know what sort it was, actually, if it didn’t involve talking."
"We did talk. He was a really decent person," Maura said. "He was very kind. People bothered him. He thought we should be more concerned with the world around us and how our actions would affect things years down the road. I liked that part of him. It wasn’t preachy, just who he was."
"Why are you telling me this?" Blue asked, because she was a little distressed to see the unsteady press of Maura’s lips against each other.
"You said you wanted to know about him. I was telling you about him, because you’re a lot like him. He would’ve liked to see your room with all the shit you’ve put on the walls."
"Gee, thanks," Blue said. "So why did he leave?"
Right after she asked the question, she realized it may have been too blunt.
"He didn’t leave," Maura said. "He disappeared. Right when you were born."
"That’s called leaving."
"I don’t think he did it on purpose. Well, I did, at first. But now I’ve been thinking about it and learning more about Henrietta and I think … you’re a very strange child. I’ve never met anybody who makes psychics hear things better. I’m not exactly sure we didn’t accidentally do another ritual when you were born. I mean, a ritual where you being born was the final bit. It might have gotten him stuck back in there."
Blue said, "You think this is my fault!"
"Don’t be ridiculous," Maura said, sitting up. Her hair was all frazzled from lying on it. "You were only a baby — how could anything be your fault? I just thought maybe that was what happened. That was why I called Neeve about looking for him. I wanted you to understand why I called her."
"Do you even really know her?"
Maura shook her head. "Pft. We didn’t grow up together, but we’ve gotten together a few times over the years, just a day or two here or there. We’ve never been friends, much less real sisters. But her reputation … I never thought it would get weird like it has."
Footsteps moved softly in the hallway, and then Persephone stood in the doorway. Maura sighed and looked down at her lap, as if she’d been expecting this.
"I don’t mean to interrupt. But in either three or seven minutes," Persephone said, "Blue’s raven boys are going to pull down the street and sit in front of the house while they try to find a way to convince her to sneak out with them."
Her mother rubbed the skin between her eyebrows. "I know."
Blue’s heart raced. "That seems awfully specific."
Persephone and her mother exchanged a quick glance.
"That’s another thing I wasn’t quite truthful about," Maura said. "Sometimes Persephone, Calla, and I are very good with specifics."
"Only sometimes," Persephone echoed. Then, a little sadly, "More and more often, it seems."
"Things are changing," Maura said.
Another silhouette appeared at the doorway. Calla said, "Also, Neeve still hasn’t come back. And she scuttled the car. It won’t start."
Outside the window, they all heard the sound of a car pulling up in front of the house. Blue looked at her mother entreatingly.
Instead of replying, her mother looked at Calla and Persephone. "Tell me we’re wrong."
Persephone said in her soft way, "You know I can’t tell you that, Maura."
Maura stood up. "You go with them. We’ll take care of Neeve. I hope you know how big this thing is, Blue."
Blue said, "I have an inkling."
Chapter 44
There are trees, and then there are trees at night. Trees after dark become colorless and sizeless and moving things. When Adam got to Cabeswater, it felt like a living being. The wind through the leaves was like the bellows of an exhaled breath and the hiss of the rain on the canopy like a sucked-in sigh. The air smelled like wet soil.
Adam cast a flashlight beam into the edge of the trees. The light barely penetrated the woods, swallowed by the fitful spring rain that was beginning to soak his hair.
I wish I could’ve done this in the daytime, Adam thought.
He didn’t have a phobia of the dark. A phobia meant that the fear was irrational, and Adam suspected there was plenty to be afraid of in Cabeswater after the sun had gone down. At least, he reasoned, if Whelk is here and using a flashlight, I’ll see him.
It was a cold comfort, but Adam had come too far to turn back. He cast another glance around himself — one always felt observed here — and then he stepped over the invisible gurgle of the tiny creek, into the woods.
And it was bright.
Jerking his chin down, eyes squeezed shut, he shielded his face with his own flashlight. His eyelids burned red with the difference from black to light. Slowly, he opened them again. All around him, the forest glowed with afternoon light. Dusty gold shafts pierced the canopy and made dapples of the insubstantial brook to his left. In the slanting light, the leaves were made yellow, brown, pink. The furred lichen on the trees was a murky orange.
The skin of his hand in front of him had become rose and tan. The air moved slowly around his body, somehow tangible, gold flaked, every dust mote a lantern.
There was no sign of night, and there was no sign of anyone else in the trees.
Overhead, a bird called, the first that he remembered hearing in the wood. It was a long, clarion song, just four or five notes. It was like a sound the hunting horns made in the fall. Away, away, away. It both awed him and saddened him, Cabeswater’s brand of bittersweet beauty.
This place should not exist, Adam thought, and at once, he hastily thought the opposite. Cabeswater had become bright just as Adam had wished that it wouldn’t be dark, just as it had changed the color of the fish in the pool as soon as Gansey had thought it would be better if they were red. Cabeswater was as literal as Ronan was. He didn’t know if he could think it into nonexistence, and he didn’t want to find out.
He needed to guard his thoughts.
Switching off the flashlight, Adam dropped it into his bag and moved along the tiny creek they’d first followed. The rain had swelled it, so the creek was easier to follow toward its source, wending a way through newly flattened grasses down the mountain.
Ahead, Adam saw slowly moving reflections on the tree trunks, the strong, slanting afternoon light mirroring off the mysterious pool they’d found the first day. He was nearly there.
He stumbled. His foot had turned on something unforgiving and unexpected.
What is this?
At his feet was an empty, wide-mouthed bowl. It was a glistening, ugly purple, strange and man-made in this place.
Puzzled, Adam’s eyes slid from the dry bowl at his feet to another bowl about ten feet away, equally conspicuous among the pink and yellow leaves on the ground. The second bowl was identical to the one at his feet, only it was full to the brim with a dark liquid.
Adam was again struck by how out of place this clearly man-made thing was in the middle of these trees. Then he was puzzled again when he realized that the surface of the bowl was undisturbed and perfect; no leaves or silt or twigs or insects marred the black liquid. Which meant the bowl had been filled only recently.
Which meant —
The adrenaline hit his system a second before he heard a voice.
Tied in the back of the car, it had been hard for Whelk to know when he should make his play for freedom. The fact was, Neeve clearly had a plan, which was far more than Whelk could say of himself. And it seemed extremely unlikely that she’d try to kill him until she’d set up the finer details of the ritual. So Whelk allowed himself to be driven in his own car, now reeking of garlic and full of crumbs, to the edge of the woods. Neeve was not brave enough to take his car off-road — a fact for which he was very grateful — so she parked it in a little gravel turn-around and made them both walk the rest of the way. It was not yet dark, but still, Whelk stumbled over hummocks of field grass on the way.
"Sorry," Neeve said. "I did look on Google Maps for a closer place to park."
Whelk, who was annoyed by absolutely everything about Neeve, from her soft, fluffy hands to her crinkled broom skirt to her curled hair, replied, without much civility, "Why are you bothering to apologize? Aren’t you planning on killing me?"
Neeve winced. "I wish you wouldn’t say it like that. You’re meant to be a sacrifice. Being a sacrifice is quite a fine thing, with a lovely tradition behind it. Besides, you deserve it. It’s fair."
Whelk said, "If you kill me, does that mean that someone else ought to kill you in fairness? Down the road?"
He tripped over another clump of grass, and this time, Neeve did not apologize or answer his questions. Instead, she fixed a gaze of interminable length on him. It was not so much keenly penetrating as exhaustively extensive. "For a brief time, Barrington, I’ll admit that I was feeling slight regret over choosing you. You seemed very pleasant until I Tasered you."
It’s a hard thing to hold a civil conversation after recalling that one party has used a Taser on the other, so both of them finished the walk in silence. It was a strange feeling for Whelk to be back inside the woods where he’d last seen Czerny alive. He’d thought that woods were woods and he wouldn’t be affected by returning, especially at a different time of the day. But something about the atmosphere immediately took him back to that moment, the skateboard in his hand, the sad question gasped in Czerny’s dying sounds.
The whispers hissed and popped in his head, like a fire just getting underway, but Whelk ignored them.
He missed his life. He missed everything about it: the carelessness, the extravagant Christmases at home, the gas pedal beneath his foot, free time that felt like a blessing instead of an empty curse. He missed skipping classes and taking classes and spray-painting the Henrietta sign on I-64 after getting astonishingly drunk on his birthday.
He missed Czerny.