“LIFE IS GREAT,” Jesse admitted. “BUT THE CAVE — ARE YOU WEARING BOOTS? BECAUSE IT IS MUDDY.”
Blue and Mr. Gray assured him they were fine with their current footwear. Retrieving a flashlight for Blue and a floodlight and a shotgun for himself, Jesse led the three of them across the dark field to the building that housed the cave. As they grew closer, Blue thought she smelled something familiar. It was not the earthy scent of the wet field or the smoky scent of the fall night. It was metallic and close, damp and stagnant. It was the smell, Blue realized, of the cave of ravens.
“WATCH YOUR STEP.”
“What am I watching for?” Mr. Gray asked.
“THAT IS THE RIGHT QUESTION.”
Jesse minced as best a Dittley could mince to the door. He handed the floodlight to Blue as he unlocked the padlock.
“STAND BACK.”
She stood back.
“BACKER THAN THAT.”
She stood back farther. The Gray Man stepped in front of her. Only enough to block an assault, not her view.
Jesse Dittley kicked in the door. It was a slow-motion kick because his leg was so long — there was a considerable lag between when he began to swing his leg and when his foot actually hit the door. Blue wondered what that was called. A leg roundhouse, or something.
The door opened.
“YUP,” said Jesse as something shot toward him.
It was a terrible something.
Blue was a fairly open-minded human, she thought, willing to accept that there was a good bit of the world that was outside her understanding and knowledge. She knew, academically, that just because something looked scary didn’t mean that it wanted to hurt you.
But this something wanted to hurt them.
It wasn’t even malevolence. It was that sometimes something was on your side, and sometimes it was not, and this was not. Whatever humans were, this was against.
The sensation of being undone buffeted them, and then something charged through the doorway.
The Gray Man took an enormous black handgun from his jacket and shot the thing three times in each of its heads. It fell to the ground. There was not much in the way of heads left.
“THAT SEEMED EXCESSIVE,” Jesse said.
“Yes,” agreed the Gray Man.
Blue was glad that it was dead and then felt bad that she felt glad that it was dead. It was easier to be generous about it now that it wasn’t trying to unwind the core of her existence.
Jesse closed the door and locked it again.
“THAT HAS BEEN MY WEEK.”
She looked at the strange, jointless body, vaguely wormish, glittering rainbow scales in the beam of her flashlight. She couldn’t decide if it was ugly or beautiful or just unlike anything she had seen before. “Have there been a lot of them?”
“ENOUGH.”
“Have you seen any of these before?” Mr. Gray asked.
“NOT TILL NOW. DON’T ALWAYS LOOK THIS WAY, EITHER. SOME OF THEM DON’T WANT TO KILL YOU. SOME OF THEM ARE JUST OLD THINGS. THEY DO GET IN THE HOUSE, THOUGH.”
“Why are they coming out?” Blue asked.
“TOLD YOU THE CAVE WAS CURSED.”
“But we took her out!”
“RECKON SHE WAS THE ONE KEEPING THEM DOWN. CAVE LOVES A SACRIFICE.”
They all regarded the body for several long minutes.
Mr. Gray said, “Shall we dispose of it?”
“NAH. CROWS WILL EAT WHAT’S LEFT.”
Blue said, “This seems pretty bad.” She wanted to offer to help, but what could they do? Put Gwenllian back?
The Gray Man tucked his gun away. He looked displeased by this entire turn of events. Blue wondered if he was thinking about hiding body parts in a cave that already seemed to be full of bodies, and then she wondered if he was thinking about Maura in a cave with these creatures, and as soon as she thought about it herself, her expression mirrored the Gray Man’s.
“THERE, THERE, LITTLE ANT,” Jesse said. “RECKON SHE GUARDED THE CAVE FOR HER TIME. NOW IT’S MY TURN.”
35
That night, Gwenllian’s laugh announced her presence at the doorway to Blue’s bedroom. It was poor timing; Blue was in a terrible mood because it was time for Maura to come back or for her to go find Maura or something. She would go to the cave of ravens herself. She would battle monsters in Dittley’s cave and charge to the middle of the earth looking for her. She made plans and broke them and rewrote them, a new one every second.
Gwenllian laughed again, meaningfully. It was her version of clearing her throat. With a sigh, Blue rolled over. She found the other woman treasuring a spoon of something that looked terribly like it might be mayonnaise.
“Are you running away, little blue lily?”
“Not yet,” Blue replied, narrowing her eyes at Gwenllian to see if there was a deeper meaning. In the background, she heard Calla and Persephone fighting in Persephone’s room. Well, really, Calla was fighting, and Persephone was saying nothing. She continued, “Look, there’s no nice way to ask this, so I’m just going to put it out there: Do you think you might grow out of the crazy any time soon? Because I have a lot of questions about my father, and my mother’s missing, and trying to do crime scene via sing-along is starting to stress me out.”
“You begin to sound like your princeling, little lily,” Gwenllian said. “And I’m not sure that’s your place. Which is to say, carry on. I’m all for ranks of usurping women.”
Blue let this pass. Gwenllian had already proven herself extremely gifted at finding each person’s one weakness and then leaning on it casually. “I just want my mother back. And please stop calling me that. My name’s Blue.”
“Lily,” Gwenllian added.
“Please —”
“Lily.”
“— stop.”
“Blue,” Gwenllian finished with some triumph. She finished whatever was left on the spoon. Possibly it was hair conditioner. “Come to my room and I will show you how we’re the same, you and I and I and you.”
With a sigh, Blue rolled out of her bed and followed Gwenllian up to the dim attic. Even now, after the sun had gone down, it was several degrees warmer than the house, which made it feel small and close, like a jacket.
Blue had cleaned up nearly all of the evidence Neeve had left behind, and Persephone and Calla had picked over the rest. The only sizable remains were two large mirrors that stood facing each other in the dormer.
Gwenllian led Blue directly to them, careful not to stand between them. She pet Blue’s hair with both hands, like she was smoothing a wig, and then used her hands to turn Blue’s head to the mirror on the left.