The Raven Boys

by Maggie Stiefvater

Page 11

 

  "Quite some eyes on her. " It was an expression his dad used all the time, a family catchphrase for someone nosy.

  Adam asked, "Do you think she’s really here for Declan?"

  "Why else would she be here?"

  "Glendower," Adam replied immediately.

  Gansey laughed, but Adam didn’t. "Really, why else?"

  Instead of answering, Adam twisted his hand and released the rubber ball. He’d chosen his trajectory carefully: The ball bounced off the greasy asphalt once, struck one of the Camaro’s tires, and arced high in the air, disappearing in the black. He stepped forward in time for it to slap in his palm. Gansey made an approving noise.

  Adam said, "I don’t think you should talk to people about it anymore. "

  "It’s not a secret. "

  "Maybe it should be. "

  Adam’s uneasiness was contagious, but logically, there was nothing to support suspicion. For four years, Gansey had been searching for Glendower, freely admitting this fact to all and any who showed interest, and he’d never seen the slightest evidence of anyone else sharing his precise quest. He had to admit, however, that the suggestion of that possibility gave him a peculiarly unpleasant feeling.

  He said, "It’s all out there, Adam. Pretty much everything I’ve done is public record. It’s too late for it to be a secret. It was too late years ago. "

  "Come on, Gansey," Adam said with some heat. "Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel …?"

  "Feel what?" Gansey despised fighting with Adam, and somehow this felt like a fight.

  Unsuccessfully, Adam struggled to put his thoughts into words. Finally, he replied: "Observed. "

  Across the parking lot, Noah had finally emerged from Nino’s and he slouched toward them. In the Camaro, Ronan’s silhouetted form lay back in the seat, head tilted as if he slept. Close by, Gansey could smell roses and grass mowed for the first time that year, and farther away, he smelled damp earth coming to life beneath last year’s fallen leaves, and water running over rocks in mountain crooks where humans never walked. Perhaps Adam was right. There was something pregnant about the night, he thought, something out of sight opening its eyes.

  This time, when Adam dropped the ball, it was Gansey’s hand that reached out to snap it up.

  "Do you think there would be any point to someone spying on us," Gansey said, "if we weren’t on the right track?"

  Chapter 8

  By the time Blue made her slow way outside, weariness had extinguished her anxiety. She sucked in a huge breath of the cool night air. It didn’t even seem like it could be the same substance that filtered through Nino’s air-conditioning vents.

  She tilted her head back to look at the stars. Here, on the edge of downtown, there weren’t enough streetlights to obliterate the stars completely. Ursa Major, Leo, Cepheus. Her breaths came easier and slower with each familiar constellation she found.

  The chain was cold as Blue unlocked her bike. Across the parking lot, muffled conversations faded in and out. Footsteps scuffed across the asphalt somewhere close behind her. Even when they were quiet, people really were the noisiest animals.

  One day, she would live someplace where she could stand outside her house and see only stars, no streetlights, where she could feel as close as she ever got to sharing her mother’s gift. When she looked at the stars, something tugged at her, something that urged her to see more than stars, to make sense of the chaotic firmament, to pull an image from it. But it never made sense. She only ever saw Leo and Cepheus, Scorpio and Draco. Maybe she just needed more horizon and less city. The only thing was, she didn’t really want to see the future. What she wanted was to see something no one else could see or would see, and maybe that was asking for more magic than was in the world.

  "Excuse me, um, miss — hi. "

  The voice was careful, masculine, and local; the vowels had all the edges sanded off. Blue turned with a lukewarm expression.

  To her surprise, it was Elegant Boy, face gaunter and older in the distant streetlight. He was alone. No sign of President Cell Phone, the smudgy one, or their hostile friend. One hand steadied his bike. The other was tucked neatly in his pocket. His uncertain posture didn’t quite track with the raven-breasted sweater, and she caught a glimpse of a worn bit of seam on the shoulder before he shrugged it under his ear as if he was cold.

  "Hi," Blue said, softer than she would’ve if she hadn’t noticed the fray. She didn’t know what sort of Aglionby boy wore hand-me-down sweaters. "Adam, is it?"

  He gave a jerky, abashed nod. Blue looked at his bike. She didn’t know what sort of Aglionby boy rode a bicycle instead of driving a car, either.

  "I was on my way home," Adam said, "And I thought I recognized you over here. I wanted to say sorry. About what happened earlier. I didn’t tell him to do that and I wanted you to know. "

  It didn’t escape Blue that his slightly accented voice was as nice as his looks. It was all Henrietta sunset: hot front-porch swings and cold iced-tea glasses, cicadas louder than your thoughts. He glanced over his shoulder, then, at the sound of a car on a side street. When he looked back to her, he still wore a wary expression, and Blue saw that this expression — a wrinkle pinched between his eyebrows, mouth tense — was his normal one. It fit his features perfectly, matched up with every line around his mouth and eyes. This Aglionby boy isn’t often happy, she thought.

  "Well, that’s nice of you," she said. "But it’s not you that needed to apologize. "

  Adam said, "I can’t let him take all the blame. I mean, he was right. I did want to talk to you. But I didn’t want to just — try to pick you up. "

  This was where she ought to brush him off. But she was stymied by his blush at the table; his honest expression; his newly minted, uncertain smile. His face was just strange enough that she wanted to keep looking at it.

  The fact was that she’d never been flirted with by someone who she wanted to succeed at it.

  Don’t do it! warned the voice inside Blue.

  But she asked, "And what is it you wanted to do?"

  "Talk," he said. In his local accent, it was a long word and it seemed less of a synonym for speak than it was for confess. She couldn’t help but look at the thin, pleasant line of his mouth. He added, "I guess I could have just saved a lot of trouble by coming up to talk to you in the first place. Other people’s ideas always seem to get me into more trouble. "

  Blue was about to tell him how Orla’s ideas got everyone into trouble at her house, too, but then she realized he would say something else and then she would reply and it could go on all night. Something about Adam told her that this was a boy she could have a conversation with. Out of nowhere, Maura’s voice was in Blue’s head. I don’t have to tell you not to kiss anyone, right?

  And just like that, Blue was done. She was, as Neeve pointed out, a sensible girl. Even the very best outcome here could only end in torment. She blew out a breath.

  "It wasn’t about what he was saying about you, anyway. It was that he offered me money," she said, putting her foot on the bike pedal. The thing was not to imagine what it would’ve been like to stay and talk. When Blue didn’t have enough money for something, the worst thing in the world was to imagine what it would’ve been like to have whatever the something was.

  Adam sighed, as if he recognized her retreat. "He doesn’t know. He’s stupid about money. "

  "And you aren’t?"

  He just leveled her with a very steady look. It wasn’t an expression that left room for folly.

  Blue tipped her head back, staring up at the stars. It was strange to imagine how quickly they wheeled across the sky: a vast movement too far away for her to detect. Leo, Leo Minor, Orion’s Belt. If she had been her mother or her aunts or her cousins, scrying up through the heavens, would she see what she ought to say to Adam?

  She asked, "Are you coming back to Nino’s?"

  "Am I invited?"

  She smiled in reply. It felt like a
very dangerous thing, that smile, like something Maura wouldn’t be pleased with.

  Blue had two rules: Stay away from boys, because they’re trouble, and stay away from raven boys, because they were bastards.

  But those rules didn’t seem to apply to Adam. Fumbling in her pocket, she pulled out a tissue and wrote her name and the phone number for 300 Fox Way on it. Heart thumping, she folded it up and handed it to him.

  Adam said only, "I’m glad I came back. " Turning his long self around, he began to push his dolefully squeaking bike back the way he’d come.

  Blue pressed her fingers to her face.

  I gave a boy my number.

  I gave a raven boy my number.

  Hugging her arms around herself, she imagined a future argument with her mother. Giving someone your number doesn’t mean you’re going to kiss him.

  Blue jumped when the rear door of the restaurant cracked open. But it was only Donny, his expression clearing when he saw her. In his hand was a tantalizingly fat leather-bound book that Blue knew instantly. She’d seen it in President Cell Phone’s hands.

  Donny asked, "Do you know who left this behind? Is it yours?"

  Meeting him halfway across the lot, Blue accepted the journal and flipped it open. The journal didn’t immediately choose a page to open to; it was so well-worn and well-stuffed that every page claimed seniority. It finally split down the middle, obeying gravity instead of use.

  The page it opened to was a mishmash of yellowed clippings from books and newspapers. Red pen underlined a few phrases, added commentary in the margins (Luray Caverns count as spiritual place? crows = ravens?), and jotted a neatly boxed list titled "Welsh-Influenced Place Names Near Henrietta. " Blue recognized most of the towns listed. Welsh Hills, Glen Bower, Harlech, Machinleth.

  "I didn’t really read it," Donny said. "I just wanted to see if there was a name in there to return it. But then I saw that it was — well, it’s your stuff. "

  By this, he meant it was what he expected of a psychic’s daughter.

  "I think I know who it belongs to," Blue said. She had no immediate thought other than wanting to spend more time flipping through its pages. "I’ll take it. "

  After Donny had returned inside the restaurant, she flipped the journal back open. Now she had time to marvel at the sheer density of it. Even if the content hadn’t immediately caught her, the feel of the thing would have. There were so many of the clippings she’d noticed before that the journal wouldn’t stay book-shaped unless tied shut with leather wrappings. Pages and pages were devoted to these ripped and scissored excerpts, and there was an undeniable tactile pleasure to browsing. Blue ran her fingers over the varied surfaces. Creamy, thick artist paper with a slender, elegant font. Thin, browning paper with spidery serif. Slick, utilitarian white stock with an artless modern type. Ragged-edged newspaper in a brittle shade of yellow.

  Then there were the notes, made with a half-dozen different pens and markers, but all in the same business-like hand. They circled and pointed and underlined very urgently. They made bulleted lists and eager exclamation points in the margins. They contradicted one another and referred to one another in third person. Lines became cross-hatching became doodles of mountains became squirrelly tire tracks behind fast-looking cars.