Blue snickered. “What happened to the Polish guy?”
“I assume he’s singing his way across Russia now. He was going left to right. West-to-east, I mean.”
“What was Poland like?”
“Prettier than you’re thinking. So pretty.”
She paused. “I’d like to go, one day.”
He didn’t give himself time to doubt the wisdom of saying it out loud before he replied, “I know how to get there, if you want company.”
After a long pause, Blue said, in a different voice, “I’m going to go sing myself to sleep. See you tomorrow. If you want company.”
The phone went quiet. It was never enough, but it was something. Gansey opened his eyes.
Noah sat against the doorjamb of the kitchen-bathroom-laundry. When Gansey thought about it, he thought that possibly he had been sitting there for a long time.
There was nothing inherently guilty about the moment except that Gansey burned with guilt and thrill and desire and the nebulous feeling of being truly known. It was on the inside of him, and the inside was all Noah ever really paid attention to.
The other boy wore a knowing expression.
“Don’t tell the others,” Gansey said.
“I’m dead,” Noah replied. “Not stupid.”
22
I’m very angry at you,” Piper said, voice very close. Greenmantle was lying on top of the replacement rental, his arms crossed over his chest and his knees close together, thinking about early medieval burial positions.
“I know,” Greenmantle replied, opening his eyes. The sky overhead was jeeringly blue. “What about now?”
“The blood draw people were here today and you weren’t. I told you to be here.”
“I was here.” He had spent the first hour after coming home lying on his face. A small percentage of medieval bodies were buried such; historians thought they were the graves of suicides or witches, though really, historians were such Guesser McGuessers, him the biggest of them all.
“You didn’t answer when I called!”
“It doesn’t change the fact that I was here.”
“Was I supposed to come look for you on the car? Why are you even out here?”
“I’m having a creative block,” Greenmantle said.
“About what?”
He rolled over to face her. She stood beside the car, wearing a dress that looked like it would take a wearying number of steps to remove. She was also holding a small animal with a jeweled collar. It had no hair apart from a long, silky tuft that grew from its head, the precise same shade of blond that Piper sported.
“What is that?” Greenmantle asked. He deeply suspected it was the physical manifestation of his bad mood.
“Otho.”
He sat up. The rental car sighed noisily. “Is it a cat? A rodent? What species, pray?”
“Otho is a Chinese crested.”
“Chinese crested what?”
“Don’t be a dick.”
Because Greenmantle had humans to pant and follow him around with mindless fidelity, he had never felt the urge to get a dog, but when he was younger, he had sometimes imagined acquiring a canine with a fringey tail and legs. The kind that picked up ducks, whatever kind that was. Otho looked as if ducks might pick him up instead. “Is it going to get bigger? Or grow hair? Where did it come from?”
“I ordered it.”
“From the Internet?”
Piper rolled her eyes at his innocence. “Why is it you’re having a creative block again?”
“I need to find Mr. Gray’s psychic girlfriend, but it turns out no one knows where she is. She disappeared right when he screwed me over.” Greenmantle slid off the car. Carefully. He was stiff from his aerial burial. “How am I supposed to destroy what he needs when it’s already gone? They reported her missing and everything. I stole the report and it said that apparently she told her family she was ‘underground.’ ”
He had not stolen the report. He had paid someone to steal the report. But the story sounded better with him as the hero.
Piper said, “Underground? Psychic? That is relevant to my interests.”
“Why?”
“While you were out frittering, I did things,” she said. “Follow me.”
She led him through the garage and through a door that he had been unaware existed and up into the house itself. The stairs emerged in the hallway by the bedroom. She asked, “Didn’t you read any of Mr. Gray’s reports?”
He stared at her to indicate that he didn’t understand the question.
She said, slowly, as if he was an idiot, “When he was here looking for this stupid thing for you. Did you read what he wrote back to you? About tracking it?”
“Oh, those. Of course not.”
“Then why did you ask him to send them? There were a million.”
“I just wanted him to feel busy and watched. There’s nothing like paperwork to make a man feel oppressed. Why?”
Piper opened a closet door to reveal a collection of parcels branded with shipping labels bearing her name. Presumably Otho had arrived in one of them. “I read them in the bath. Then I read those other reports from the other barely literate thugs you hired. And then I read the news.”
Greenmantle didn’t care for the concept of her reading the Gray Man’s letters while naked. He opened one box and peered inside. “What are these?”
“Knee pads,” she said, and put them on to demonstrate. She was obnoxiously pleased with herself. “That horrible man talked about these underground psychic energy lines here that were interfering with his search because they were so strong. I thought, stronger is better. I thought, I would like to see whatever this is that is so strong because I am bored out of my mind. And how hard can they be to find? So I ordered these things.”
“Knee pads?”
“I’m not interested in cracking a patella while wandering around underground. Doesn’t it seem to you, Colin, like the Gray Man’s crazy psychic bimbo might be in the same place as these crazy psychic lines? Lucky for you, I bought some knee pads for you, too.”
He was so impressed with her ingenuity. He should not have been, really, because Piper was a very ingenious creature. It was just that she didn’t normally use her powers for good, and when she did, they usually weren’t pointed at him. It was just, he hadn’t thought she really liked him.
Because she was so saucily pleased with herself, he didn’t have the heart to tell her that he would have rather paid someone else to go underground to look for the Gray Man’s girlfriend. And the dress, it turned out, had a hidden zipper, and came off very easily. Piper left the knee pads on.