"Sorry that I’m late," said the boy in front, with the square shoulders. The scent of mint rolled in with him, just as it had in the churchyard. "Will it be a problem?"
Blue knew that voice.
She reached for the railing of the stairs to keep her balance as President Cell Phone stepped into the hallway.
Oh no. Not him. All this time she’d been wondering how Gansey might die and it turned out she was going to strangle him. At Nino’s, the blare of the music had drowned out the finer points of his voice and the odor of garlic had overwhelmed the scent of mint.
But now that she put two and two together, it seemed obvious.
In their hallway, he looked slightly less presidential, but only because the heat had made him messily roll up the sleeves of his button-down shirt and remove his tie. His dusty brown hair was mussed, too, in that way that Virginia warmth always managed. But the watch was still there, large enough to knock out bank robbers, and he still had that handsome glow. The glow that meant that not only had he never been poor, but his father hadn’t, nor his father’s father, nor his father’s father’s father. She couldn’t tell if he was actually tremendously good-looking or merely tremendously wealthy. Perhaps they were the same thing.
Gansey. This was Gansey.
And that meant that the journal belonged to him.
That meant that Adam belonged to him.
"Well," Maura said. It was clear her curiosity overruled all rules of scheduling. "It’s not too late. Come into the reading room. Can I get some names?"
Because of course President Cell Phone had brought most of his posse from Nino’s, everyone but the smudgy boy. They filled the hallway to overflowing, somehow, the three of them, loud and male and so comfortable with one another that they allowed no one else to be comfortable with them. They were a pack of sleek animals armored with their watches and their Top-Siders and the expensive cut of their uniforms. Even the sharp boy’s tattoo, cutting up the knobs of his spine above his collar, was a weapon, somehow slicing at Blue.
"Gansey," President Cell Phone said again, pointing to himself. "Adam. Ronan. Where do you want us? There?"
He pointed a hand toward the reading room, palm flat, like he was directing traffic.
"In there," Maura agreed. "This is my daughter, by the way. She’ll be present for the reading, if you don’t mind."
Gansey’s eyes found Blue. He’d been smiling politely, but now his face froze in the middle of the smile.
"Hi, again," he said. "This is awkward."
"You’ve met?" Maura shot a poisonous look at Blue. Blue felt unfairly persecuted.
"Yes," Gansey replied, with dignity. "We had a discussion about alternative professions for women. I didn’t realize she was your daughter. Adam?"
He shot a nearly as poisonous look at Adam, whose eyes were large. Adam was the only one not in uniform, and his palm was spread across his chest as if his fingers would cover his faded Coca-Cola T-shirt.
"I didn’t know, either!" Adam said. If Blue had known he was coming, she might not have worn her baby blue top with the feathers sewn into the collar. He was staring at it. To Blue, he said, again, "I didn’t know, I swear."
"What happened to your face?" Blue asked.
Adam shrugged ruefully. Either he or Ronan smelled like a parking garage. His voice was self-deprecating. "Do you think it makes me look tougher?"
What it did was make him look was more fragile and dirty, somehow, like a teacup unearthed from the soil, but Blue didn’t say that.
Ronan said, "It makes you look like a loser."
"Ronan," said Gansey.
"I need everyone to sit down!" shouted Maura.
It was such an alarming thing to hear Maura shout that nearly everyone did, sinking or throwing themselves into the mismatched furniture in the reading room. Adam rubbed a hand over his cheekbone as if he could remove the bruise from it. Gansey sat in an armchair at the head of the table, his hands stretched over either arm like chairman of the board, one eyebrow raised as he looked at Steve Martin’s framed face.
Only Calla and Ronan remained standing, and they regarded each other warily.
It still felt like there had never been this many people in the house, which was utterly untrue. It was possibly true that there had never been this many men in the house before. Certainly never this many raven boys.
Blue felt as if their very presence robbed something from her. They’d made her family dingy just by coming here.
"It is," Maura said, "too damn loud in here." The way she said it, though, holding one finger to her pulse, just under her jawbone, told Blue that it was not their voices that were too loud. It was something she was hearing inside her head. Persephone, too, was wincing.
"Do I need to leave?" Blue asked, though that was the last thing she wanted.
Gansey, misunderstanding, immediately asked her, "Why would you have to leave?"
"She makes things louder for us," Maura said. She was frowning over all of them as if she was trying to make sense of it. "And you three are … very loud already."
Blue’s skin was hot. She could imagine herself heating like an electrical conduit, sparks from all parties traveling through her. What could these raven boys have going on under their skins that could deafen her mother? Was it all of them in conjunction, or was it merely Gansey, his energy screaming out the count-down to his death?
"What do you mean, very loud?" Gansey asked. He was, Blue thought, very clearly the ringleader of this little pack. They all kept looking to him for their cues of how to interpret the situation.
"I mean that there is something about your energies that is very …" Maura trailed off, losing interest in her own explanation. She turned to Persephone. Blue recognized the look exchanged between them. It was, What is going on? "How do we even do this?"
The way she asked it, distracted and vague, made Blue’s stomach clench with nerves. Her mother was undone. For the second time, a reading seemed to be pushing her to a place she wasn’t comfortable with.
"One at a time?" Persephone suggested, her voice nearly inaudible.
Calla said, "One-offs. You’ll have to, or some of them will have to leave. They’re just too noisy."
Adam and Gansey glanced at each other. Ronan picked at the leather straps around his wrist.
"What is a one-off?" Gansey asked. "How is it different from a regular reading?"
Calla spoke to Maura as if he hadn’t said anything at all. "It doesn’t matter what they want. It is what it is. Take it or leave it."
Maura’s finger was still pressed under her jaw. She told Gansey, "A one-off is where you each draw just one card from a deck of tarot cards, and we interpret."
Gansey and Adam shared some sort of private conversation with their eyes. It was the sort of thing Blue was used to transpiring between her mother and Persephone or Calla, and she hadn’t thought anyone else really capable of it. It also made her feel strangely jealous; she wanted something like that, a bond strong enough to transcend words.
Adam’s head jerked a nod in response to whatever Gansey’s unspoken statement might have been, and Gansey said, "Whatever you’re comfortable with."
Persephone and Maura momentarily debated, though it didn’t seem like they’d be comfortable with anything at the moment.
"Wait," Persephone said as Maura produced her deck of cards. "Have Blue deal it."
It wasn’t the first time Blue had been asked to deal the cards. Sometimes, at difficult or important readings, the women wanted Blue to touch the deck first, to hone whatever messages the cards might contain. This time, she was overly aware of the boys’ attention as she took the cards from her mother. For the boys’ benefit, she shuffled the deck in a slightly theatrical fashion, moving cards from one hand to another. She was very good at card tricks that didn’t involve any psychic talent whatsoever. As the boys, impressed, watched the cards fly back and forth, Blue mused that she would make an excellent fake psychic.
No one volunteered immediately to go first, so she offered the deck to Adam. He met her gaze and held it for a moment. There was something forceful and intentional about the gesture, more aggressive than he’d been the night he approached her.
Selecting a card, Adam presented it to Maura.
"Two of swords," she said. Blue was over-aware of her mother’s Henrietta accent, suddenly rural and uneducated sounding to her ear. Was that how Blue sounded?
Maura continued, "You’re avoiding a hard choice. Acting by not acting. You’re ambitious, but you feel like someone’s asking something of you you’re not willing to give. Asking you to compromise your principles. Someone close to you, I think. Your father?"
"Brother, I think," Persephone said.
"I don’t have a brother, ma’am," Adam replied. But Blue saw his eyes dart to Gansey.
"Do you want to ask a question?" Maura asked.
Adam considered. "What’s the right choice?"
Maura and Persephone conferred. Maura replied, "There isn’t a right one. Just one you can live with. There might be a third option that will suit you better, but right now, you’re not seeing it because you’re so involved with the other two. I’d guess from what I’m seeing that any other path would have to do with you going outside those other two options and making your own option. I’m also sensing you’re a very analytical thinker. You’ve spent a lot of time learning to ignore your emotions, but I don’t think this is a time for that."
"Thanks," Adam said. It wasn’t quite the right thing to say, but it wasn’t entirely wrong, either. Blue liked how polite he was. It seemed different than Gansey’s politeness. When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away.
It seemed right to leave Gansey for last, so Blue moved on to Ronan, though she was a little afraid of him. Something about him dripped venom, even though he hadn’t spoken. Worst of all, in Blue’s opinion, was that there was something about his antagonism that made her want to court his favor, to earn his approval. The approval of someone like him, who clearly cared for no one, seemed like it would be worth more.
To offer the deck to Ronan, Blue had to stand, because he still stood by the doorway near Calla. They looked ready to box.
When Blue fanned the cards, he scanned the women in the room and said, "I’m not taking one. Tell me something true first."
"Beg your pardon?" Calla said stiffly, answering for Maura.
Ronan’s voice was glass, cold and brittle. "Everything you’ve told him could apply to anybody. Anybody with a pulse has doubts. Anybody alive has argued with their brother or their father. Tell me something no one else can tell me. Don’t toss a playing card at me and spoon feed me some Jungian bullshit. Tell me something specific."
Blue’s eyes narrowed. Persephone stuck out her tongue slightly, a habit born of uncertainty, not impudence. Maura shifted with annoyance. "We don’t do specif —"