Page 8 of The Raven King(The Raven Cycle 4)
This was all that was left.
That was the truth.
Blue’s body was a riot of shivers. She had kissed this. This thin, cold memory of a human.
Because it was only energy, it read her memories as easily as her words. She felt it haunt her thoughts and then pass out the other side.
It hissed, “I said I was sorry.”
She took a deep breath. “I said there was nothing to be sorry for.”
And she meant it.
Blue didn’t care that he — it — Noah — was strange and decaying and frightening. She knew that he — it — Noah — was strange and decayed and frightened, and she knew that she loved him anyway.
She hugged it. Him. Noah. She didn’t care if he wasn’t quite human anymore. She would keep calling whatever this was Noah for as long as it wanted to be called Noah. And she was glad that he could read her thoughts in that moment, because she wanted him to know how thoroughly she believed that.
Her body went icily cold as she let Noah draw energy from her, her arms tight around his neck.
“Don’t tell the others,” he said. When she stepped back, he’d pulled his boyish face over his features again.
“Do you need to go?” Blue asked. She meant go forever, but she couldn’t say it out loud.
He whispered, “Not yet.”
Blue wiped a tear from her face with the heel of her hand, and he wiped a tear from her other cheek with the heel of his. His chin dimpled in that way that comes before tears, but she put her fingers against it and it resolved.
They were wheeling toward the end of something, and they both knew it.
“Good,” said Gwenllian. “I hate liars and cowards.”
Without pause, she began to climb the tree once more. Blue turned back to Noah, but he was gone. Possibly he had gone before Gwenllian had spoken; just as with his arrival, it was hard to tell the exact moment of his leaving. Blue’s brain had already rewritten all of the seconds around his disappearance.
Blue’s school suspension felt like a faded dream. What was real? This was real.
The kitchen window groaned open, and Jimi shouted out, “Blue! Your boys are out front, looking like they’re fixing to bury a body.”
Again? Blue thought.
When Blue climbed into Gansey’s black Suburban, she discovered that Ronan was already installed in the backseat, his head freshly shaven, boots up on the seat, dressed for a brawl. His presence in the backseat instead of in his usual passenger-seat throne suggested that trouble was afoot. Adam — in a white T-shirt and a pair of clean work coveralls rolled down to the waist — had his seat instead. Gansey sat behind the wheel, wearing both his Aglionby uniform and an electric expression that startled Blue. It was wide-awake and glittering, a match struck just behind his eyes. She’d seen this vivid Gansey before, but usually only when they were alone.
“Hello, Jane,” he said, and his voice was as bright and intense as his eyes. It was hard not to be captured by this Gansey; he was both powerful and worrisome in his tension.
Don’t stare — too late. Adam had caught her at it. She averted her eyes and busied herself tugging up her thigh-highs. “Heya.”
Gansey asked, “Do you have time to run an errand with us? Do you have work? Homework?”
“No homework. I got suspended,” Blue replied.
“Get the fuck out,” Ronan said, but with admiration. “Sargent, you asshole.”
Blue reluctantly allowed him to bump fists with her as Gansey eyed her meaningfully in the rearview mirror.
Adam swiveled the other way in his seat — to the right, instead of to the left, so that he was peering around the far side of the headrest. It made him look as if he were hiding, but Blue knew it was just because it turned his hearing ear instead of his deaf ear toward them. “For what?”
“Emptying another student’s backpack over his car. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“I do,” Ronan said.
“Well, I don’t. I’m not proud of it.”
Ronan patted her leg. “I’ll be proud for you.”
Blue cast a withering look in his direction, but she felt grounded for the first time that day. It was not that the women in 300 Fox Way weren’t her family — they were where her roots were buried, and nothing could diminish that. It was just that there was something newly powerful about this assembled family in this car. They were all growing up and into each other like trees striving together for the sun. “So what’s happening?”
“If you can believe it,” Gansey said, still in his chilly, superpolite tone that meant he was annoyed, “I was originally planning on coming over to talk to Artemus about Glendower. But Ronan has decided to change all that. He has different ideas for our afternoon. More important uses of our time.”
Ronan leaned forward. “Tell me, Dad, are you mad that I fucked up, or are you just mad that I skipped school?”
Gansey said, “I think those both count as fuckups, don’t you?”
“Oh, don’t,” Ronan retorted. “It just sounds vulgar when you say it.”
As Gansey sent the vehicle off from the curb at a brisk speed, Adam gave Blue a knowing look. His expression said, Yes, they’ve been at this awhile. Blue was strangely grateful for this nonverbal exchange. After their fractious breakup (had they even been dating?), Blue had reconciled herself to Adam being too hurt or uncomfortable to be good friends with her. But he was trying. And she was trying. And it seemed to be working.
Except that she was in love with his best friend and hadn’t told him.
Blue’s feeling of calm immediately dissolved, replaced by the exact same sensation that she had experienced right before she had shaken out Holtzclaw’s backpack over the hood of his car. All emotions fuzzing to white.
She really needed to find some coping mechanisms.
“GANSEY BOY!”
They all startled at the cry through Gansey’s open window. They’d pulled up to the stoplight adjacent to Aglionby’s main gate; a group of students stood on the sidewalk holding placards. Gansey reluctantly offered the group a three-fingered salute, which provoked further cries of Whoop, whoop, whoop!
The sight of all the boys in their uniforms immediately provoked an unpleasant emotion in Blue. It was a long-held, multiheaded sensation formed from judgment, experience, and envy, and she did
n’t care for it. It wasn’t that she necessarily thought that her negative opinions on raven boys were wrong. It was just that knowing Gansey, Adam, Ronan, and Noah complicated what she did with those opinions. It had been a lot more straightforward when she’d just assumed that she could despise them all from the thin air of the moral high ground.
Blue craned her neck, trying to see what the signs said, but none of the boys were doing a very good job pointing them toward the road. She wondered if Blue Sargent, Aglionby student, would have been Blue Sargent, placard holder. “What are they protesting?”
“Life,” replied Adam drily.
She realized then that she recognized one of the students standing on the sidewalk. He had an unforgettable tuft of styled black hair and a pair of high-top sneakers that could only have looked more expensive if they had been wrapped in dollar bills.
Henry Cheng.
She’d been on a secret date with Gansey the last time she’d seen him. She didn’t remember the fine details, only that his electric super car had broken down by the side of the road, that he’d made a joke that she didn’t find funny, and that he had reminded her of all the ways Gansey was not like her. It had not been a good end to the date.
Henry clearly remembered her, too, because he gave her a wide smile before pointing two fingers at his eyes and then hers.
Her already mixed feelings were joined by yet more mixed feelings.
“What do you call it when you say ‘you’ to mean everyone in general?” Blue asked, leaning forward, eyes still on him.
“Universal you,” Gansey replied. “I think.”
“Yes,” Adam said.
“What a bunch of fancy posers,” Ronan said. It was hard to tell if he meant Gansey and Adam with their grammar prowess or the Aglionby students standing outside with their hand-lettered placards.
“Oh, sure,” Gansey said, still cold and annoyed. “God forbid young men display their principles with futile but public protests when they could be skipping school and judging other students from the backseat of a motor vehicle.”
