"Please," Blue said, because even if Noah hadn’t told her, she would’ve known.

He muttered something into his bedsheets and waved a hand at the air. Blue crouched by the bed and leaned on her arms at the head of it.

"What now? With a lot less pillow in your mouth this time?"

Gansey didn’t turn his head, so his voice remained muffled. "My words are unerring tools of destruction, and I’ve come unequipped with the ability to disarm them. Can you believe I’m only alive because Noah died? What a fine sacrifice that was, what a fine contribution to the world I am." He made another little twirling hand gesture without removing his face from his pillow. It was probably meant to make it look as if he was merely joking. He went on, "Oh, I know I’m being self-pitying. Ignore me. So Malory thinks it is a bad idea to wake the ley line? Of course he does. I enjoy dead ends hugely."

"You are being self-pitying." But Blue sort of liked it. She’d never seen anything like the real Gansey for so long at one time. It was too bad he had to be miserable to make it happen.

"I’m nearly done. You don’t have much more of this to bear."

"I like you better this way."

For some reason, admitting this made her face go hot right away; she was very glad that he still had his face pressed into his pillow and the other boys were still in Noah’s room.

"Crushed and broken," Gansey said. "Just the way women like ’em. Did he say this guy was badly hurt?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, that’s off." He rolled over onto his back so that he was looking at Blue upside down where she leaned on his bed. "It’s not worth the risk."

"I thought you said you needed to find Glendower."

"I do," Gansey said. "They don’t."

"So you’ll do it yourself?"

"No, I’ll find another way. I would love to have the ley line’s power pointing giant arrows to where he is, but I’ll just keep plodding along the old way. What sort of hurt was this guy?"

Blue made a noncommittal noise, remembering Malory’s exhortation to spare him the details.

"Blue. What sort?" His gaze was unflinching, as if staring were easier when their faces were upside down to each other.

"He said something about losing his skin and then, apparently, his skin came off. Malory didn’t want me to tell you that."

Gansey’s mouth pursed. "He still remembers when I … never mind. His skin came right off? That’s grim."

"What’s grim?" asked Adam, coming across the floor.

Ronan, taking in Blue’s posture and Gansey below, observed, "If you spit, Blue, it would land right in his eye."

Gansey moved to the opposite side of the bed with surprising swiftness, glancing at Adam and away again as quickly. "Blue said Malory tried to wake the line and the man with him got seriously hurt. So we’re not doing it. Not right now."

Adam said, "I don’t care about the risk."

Ronan picked his teeth. "Me neither."

"You have nothing to lose," Gansey said, pointing at Adam. He looked at Ronan. "And you don’t care if you live or die. That makes you both bad judges."

"You have nothing to gain," Blue pointed out. "That makes you an equally bad judge. But I think I agree. I mean, look at what happened to your British friend."

"Thank you, Jane, for being the voice of reason," Gansey said. "Do not look at me like that, Ronan. Since when did we decide waking up the ley line is the only way to find Glendower?"

"We don’t have time to find another way," Adam insisted. "If Whelk wakes it up, he’ll get an advantage. Plus, he speaks Latin. What if the trees know? If he finds Glendower, he gets the favor, and he gets away with killing Noah. Game over, bad guy takes all."

All trace of vulnerability had vanished from Gansey’s countenance as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. "It’s a bad idea, Adam. Find me a way to do it without hurting someone, and I’m for it. Until then — we wait."

"We don’t have time," Adam said. "Persephone said someone will wake the ley line in just a few days."

Gansey stood up. "Adam, what’s happening now is that someone on the other side of the world has no skin because he fooled around with the ley line. We’ve seen Cabeswater. This isn’t a game. It’s very real and very powerful and we’re not screwing with it."

He held Adam’s gaze for a long, long moment. There was something unfamiliar in Adam’s expression, something that made Blue think that she didn’t really know him at all.

In her mind, Blue imagined him handing the single tarot card to her mother, and as she remembered how Maura had interpreted the two of swords, she thought, sadly, My mother is very good at what she does.

"Sometimes," Adam said, "I don’t know how you live with yourself."

Chapter 40

Barrington Whelk was not pleased with Neeve. For starters, since getting in the car, she had done nothing but eat hummus and crackers, and the combination of the garlic odor and cracker chewing was incredibly aggravating. The thought that she was filling his driver’s seat with crumbs was one of the more troubling ones he’d had in a week of extremely troubling thoughts. Also, the very first thing she had done after they exchanged hellos was to use her Taser on him. This was followed by the ignominy of being tied up in the back of his own car.

It is not enough that I should have to put up with a shitty car, Whelk thought. Now I’m going to die in it.

She hadn’t told him she intended to kill him, but Whelk had spent the last forty minutes unable to easily see much but the floor behind the passenger seat. Lying there was a wide, flat clay bowl containing a collection of candles, scissors, and knives. The knives were sizable and sinister, but not a guarantee of imminent murder. The rubber gloves that Neeve wore now, and the extra set inside the bowl, were.

Likewise, Whelk couldn’t be certain they were headed toward the ley line, but from the amount of time Neeve had spent perusing the journal before setting off down the road, he suspected it was a good guess. Whelk was not much for postulation — but he thought his fate was probably meant to be the same as Czerny’s, seven years earlier.

A ritual death, then. A sacrifice, with his blood seeping down through the earth until it reached the sleeping ley line below. Rubbing his tied wrists against each other, he turned his head toward Neeve, who held the wheel with one hand as she ate crackers and hummus with the other. To add insult to injury, she was listening to some kind of trance nature sounds CD on his car’s radio. Perhaps preparing herself for the ritual.

His death on the ley line would, Whelk thought, have a sort of circularity to it.

But Whelk didn’t care for circularity. He cared for his lost car, his lost respect. He cared for the ability to sleep at night. He cared for languages dead long enough that they wouldn’t change on him. He cared for the guacamole his parents’ long-gone chef used to make.

Also, Neeve hadn’t tied him tightly enough.

Chapter 41

After leaving Monmouth Manufacturing, Blue returned home and retreated to the far side of the beech in the backyard to try to do homework. But she found herself spending less time solving for x and more time solving for Noah or Gansey or Adam. She’d given up and leaned back by the time Adam appeared. He stepped into the dim green shadow of the tree from the house side.

"Persephone said you were out here." He just hung there at the edge of the shadow.

Blue thought about saying I’m so sorry about your dad, but instead she just stretched out a hand toward him. Adam gave an unsteady sigh of the sort that she could see from six feet away. Wordlessly, he sat beside her and then laid his head on her lap, his face in his arms.

Startled, Blue didn’t immediately react, other than to glance over her shoulder to make certain that the tree hid them from the house. She felt a little like she’d been approached by a wild animal, and she was at once flattered by its trust and worried that she’d scare it away. After a moment, she carefully stroked a few fine, dusty strands of his hair while she looked at the back of his neck. It made her chest hum to touch him and smell the dust-and-oil scent of him.

"Your hair is the color of dirt," she said.

"It knows where it came from."

"That’s funny," Blue noted, "because then mine should be that color, too."

His shoulders moved in response. After a moment, he said, "Sometimes I’m afraid he’ll never really understand me."

She ran a finger along the back of his ear. It felt dangerous and thrilling, but not as dangerous and thrilling as it would have been to touch him while he was looking at her.

"I’m only going to say this once, and then I’m going to be done with it," she said. "But I think you’re awfully brave."

He was quiet for a long, long moment. A car whirred through the neighborhood. The wind moved through the beech leaves, turning them upside down in a way that meant rain later.

Without lifting his head, Adam said, "I’d like to kiss you now, Blue, young or not."

Blue’s fingers stopped moving.

"I don’t want to hurt you," she said.

He pulled himself free of her, sitting just a few inches away. His expression was bleak, nothing like when he’d wanted to kiss her before. "I’m already all hurt up."

Blue didn’t think this was really about kissing her, and that made her cheeks burn. It wasn’t supposed to be a kiss at all, but if it had, it definitely shouldn’t be like this. She said, "There’s still worse than what you’ve got."

Something about this made him swallow and turn his face away. His hands were limp in his lap. If I’d been anybody else in the world, she thought, this would’ve been my first kiss. She wondered what it would’ve been like to kiss this hungry, desolate boy.

Adam’s eyes moved, following the shifting light through the leaves above. He didn’t look at her when he said, "I don’t remember how your mother said I was supposed to solve my problem. At the reading. The choice I couldn’t make."

Blue sighed. This was what all this was really about, and she had known it all along, even if he hadn’t. "‘Make a third option,’ she said. Next time you should bring a notebook."

"I don’t remember her saying the part about the notebook."

"That’s because it was me saying that part, right now. Next time you get your cards read, take notes. That way you can compare it to what actually happens and you’ll know if the psychic is a good one."

Now he looked at her, but she wasn’t sure if he was really looking at her. "I’ll do that."

"I’ll save you the trouble this time, though," Blue added, tilting her head back as he climbed to his feet. Her fingers and skin longed for the boy she’d held hands with days before, but he didn’t seem to be the boy standing before her. "My mother’s a good one."