The Raven Boys

by Maggie Stiefvater

Page 40

 

  "Where do you live?"

  Adam’s mouth was very set. "A place made for leaving. "

  "That’s not really an answer. "

  "It’s not really a place. "

  "And it would be terrible to live here?" She leaned her head back to gaze at the ceiling far above. The entire place smelled dusty, but in the good, old way of a library or a museum.

  "Yes," Adam replied. "When I get out on my own, it will be to someplace I made myself. "

  "And that’s why you go to Aglionby. "

  He leveled that gaze on her. "And that’s why I go to Aglionby. "

  "Even though you’re not rich. "

  He hesitated.

  "Adam, I don’t care," Blue said. Parsed on the most basic level, it wasn’t really the most gutsy sentence ever said, but it felt gutsy to Blue when she said it. "I know other people do, but I don’t. "

  He made a little face, and then inclined his head in the slightest of nods. "Even though I’m not rich. "

  "True confession —" Blue said. "I’m not rich, either. "

  Adam laughed out loud at that, and she discovered that she was starting to really like this laugh that burst out of him and seemed to surprise him every time. She was a little scared of the knowledge that she was starting to like it.

  He said, "Oh. Hey. Come over here. You’ll like this. "

  The floor creaking under him, he led the way past the desk to the windows on the far side. Blue felt a sense of dizzying height here; these massive old factory windows began only a few inches above the old wide floorboards, and the first floor was much taller than the first floor of her house. Crouching, Adam began pawing through a row of cardboard file boxes that were shoved against the windows.

  Eventually he dragged one of the boxes a few inches from the window and gestured for Blue to sit beside him. She did. Adam readjusted his posture so that he was more settled; his knee bone pressed against Blue’s. He was not looking at her, but there was something about his posture that betrayed his awareness of her. She swallowed.

  "These are things that Gansey’s found," Adam said. "Things not cool enough for museums, or things they couldn’t prove were old, or things he didn’t want to give away. "

  "In this box?" Blue asked.

  "In all the boxes. This is the Virginia box. " He tipped it enough that the contents spilled between them, along with a prodigious quantity of dirt.

  "Virginia box, huh? What are the other boxes?"

  There was something of a little boy in his smile. "Wales and Peru and Australia and Montana and other strange places. "

  Blue took a forked stick from the pile. "Is this another dowsing rod?" Though she had never used one, she knew some psychics used them as a tool to focus their intuition and to lead them in the direction of lost items, or dead bodies, or hidden bodies of water. A low-tech version of Gansey’s fancy EMF reader.

  "I guess. Might just be a stick. " Adam showed her an old Roman coin. She used it to scrape some ages-old dust off a tiny sculpted stone dog. The dog was missing a back leg; the jagged wound revealed stone lighter than the rest of the grubby surface.

  "He looks a little hungry," Blue commented. The stylized dog sculpture reminded her of the raven carved into the side of the hill — head bent back, body elongated.

  Adam picked up a stone with a hole in it and looked at her through it. The shape of it perfectly covered the last remnants of his bruise.

  Blue selected a matching stone and looked at him through its matching hole. One side of his face was red with the afternoon light. "Why are these in the box?"

  "Water bored these holes," Adam said. "Seawater. But he found them in the mountains. I think he said they matched some of the stones he found in the UK. "

  He was still looking at her through the hole, the stone making a strange eyeglass. She watched his throat move, and then, he reached out and touched her face.

  "You sure are pretty," he said.

  "It’s the stone," she replied immediately. Her skin felt warm; his fingertip touched just the very edge of her mouth. "It’s very flattering. "

  Adam gently pulled the stone out of her hand and set it on the floorboards between them. Through his fingers he threaded one of the flyaway hairs by her cheek. "My mother used to say, ‘Don’t throw compliments away, so long as they’re free. ’" His face was very earnest. "That one wasn’t meant to cost you anything, Blue. "

  Blue plucked at the hem on her dress, but she didn’t look away from him. "I don’t know what to say when you say things like that. "

  "You can tell me if you want me to keep saying them. "

  She was torn by the desire to encourage him and the fear of where it would lead. "I like when you say things like that. "

  Adam asked, "But what?"

  "I didn’t say but. "

  "You meant to. I heard it. "

  She looked at his face, fragile and strange under the bruise. It was easy to read him as shy or uncertain, she thought, but he really wasn’t either. Noah was. But Adam was just quiet. He wasn’t lost for words; he was observing.

  But knowing those things about him didn’t help her answer the question: Should she tell him about the danger of a kiss? It had been so much easier to tell Gansey, when it felt like it didn’t really matter. The last thing she wanted to do was to scare Adam off by tossing around phrases like true love right after she’d met him. But if she didn’t say anything, there was a chance that he might steal a kiss and then they’d both be in trouble.

  "I like it when you say those things, but — I’m afraid you’ll kiss me," Blue admitted. Already this seemed like an untenable path to set off on. When he didn’t immediately say anything, she hurried on, "We’ve just met. And I … I’m … I’m very young. "

  Halfway through, she lost her nerve to explain the prediction, but she wasn’t sure what part of her felt this was a better confession to blurt out. I’m very young. She winced.

  "That seems …" Adam sought words. "Very sensible. "

  The precise adjective Neeve had found for Blue that very first week. So she truly was sensible. This was distressing. She felt like she’d done so much work to appear as eccentric as possible, and still, when it came down to it, she was sensible.

  Both Adam and Blue looked up at the sound of footsteps crossing the floor toward them. It was Ronan, holding something under his arm. He cautiously lowered himself until he sat cross-legged beside Adam and then sighed heavily, as if he had been part of the conversation to this point and it tired him. Blue was equal parts relieved and disappointed at his presence effectively ending any more talk about kissing.

  "Do you want to hold her?" Ronan asked.

  That was when Blue discovered that the thing that Ronan was holding was alive. For a brief moment, Blue was actually incapable of doing anything but contemplating the irony that one of the raven boys actually possessed a raven. By then, it was clear that Ronan had decided the answer was no.

  "What are you doing?" Blue asked as he withdrew his hand. "I want to. "

  She wasn’t exactly sure that she did — the raven was not quite done-looking — but it was a matter of principle. She realized, again, that she was trying to impress Ronan only because he was impossible to impress, but she comforted herself that at least all she was doing in pursuit of his approval was holding a baby bird. Ronan carefully bundled the raven into her cupped palms. The little bird felt like she weighed nothing at all, and her skin and feathers felt humid where they’d been in contact with Ronan’s hands. The raven tipped her huge head back and goggled at Blue and then Adam, beak cracked.

  "What’s her name?" Blue asked. Holding her was frightening and lovely; she was such a small, tenuous little life, her pulse tapping rapidly against Blue’s skin.

  Adam answered witheringly, "Chainsaw. "

  The raven opened her beak wide, goggling even more than before.

  "She wants you again," Blue said, because it was clear that she did. Ronan
accepted the bird and stroked the feathers on the back of her head.

  "You look like a super villain with your familiar," Adam said

  Ronan’s smile cut his face, but he looked kinder than Blue had ever seen him, like the raven in his hand was his heart, finally laid bare.

  They all heard a door open on the other side of the room. Adam and Blue looked at each other. Ronan ducked his head, just a little, as if he was waiting for a blow.

  No one said anything as Noah settled down in the gap left between Ronan and Blue. He looked as Blue remembered him, his shoulders hunched forward and his hands restlessly moving from place to place. The ever-present smudge on his face was clearly where his cheek had been smashed in. The longer she stared at him, the more certain she became that she was at once seeing his dead body and his live one. That smudge was her brain’s way of reconciling those facts.

  Adam was the first to say something.

  "Noah," he said. He lifted his fist.

  After a pause, Noah bumped knuckles with him. Then he rubbed the back of his neck.

  "I’m feeling better," he said, as if he’d been ill instead of dead. The things from the box were still spread out all over the floor between them; he began to sort through them. He picked up something that looked like a carved bit of bone; it must’ve had a larger pattern on it once, but now all that was left was something that looked like the edge of an acanthus leaf and possibly some raised scrolling. Noah held it against his throat like an amulet. His eyes were averted from either of the other two boys, but his knee touched Blue’s.

  "I want you to know," Noah said, pressing the carved bone against his Adam’s apple, hard, as if it would squeeze the words from him, "I was … more … when I was alive. "

  Adam chewed his lip, looking for a response. Blue thought she knew what he meant, though. Noah’s resemblance to the crookedly smiling photo on the driver’s license Gansey had discovered was akin to a photocopy’s resemblance to an original painting. She couldn’t imagine the Noah she knew driving that tricked-out Mustang.

  "You’re enough now," Blue said. "I missed you. "

  With a wan smile, Noah reached over and petted Blue’s hair, just like he used to. She could barely feel his fingers.

  Ronan said, "Hey, man. All those times you wouldn’t give me notes because you said I should go to my classes. You never went to classes. "

  "But you did, didn’t you, Noah?" Blue interrupted, thinking of the Aglionby badge they’d found with his body. "You were an Aglionby student. "

  "Are," Noah said.

  "Were," Ronan said. "You don’t go to classes. "

  "Neither do you," Noah replied.

  "And he’s about to be a were, too," Adam broke in.

  "Okay!" Blue shouted, her hands in the air. She was starting to feel a deep sensation of cold, as Noah pulled energy from her. The last thing she wanted to do was to get completely drained, like she had at the churchyard. "The police said you’d been missing seven years. Does that seem right?"