This was his third secret.
1
Theoretically, Blue Sargent was probably going to kill one of these boys.
“Jane!” The shout came from across the hill. It was directed toward Blue, although Jane was not her real name. “Hurry up!”
As the only non-clairvoyant in a very psychic family, she’d had her future told again and again, and each time it said she would kill her true love if she tried to kiss him. Moreover, it had been foretold this was the year she’d fall in love. And both Blue and her clairvoyant half-aunt Neeve had seen one of the boys walking along the invisible corpse road this April, which meant he was supposed to die in the next twelve months. It all added up to a fearful equation.
At the moment, that particular boy, Richard Campbell Gansey III, looked pretty unkillable. In the humid wind at the top of the wide green hill, an ardently yellow polo shirt flapped against his chest and a pair of khaki shorts slapped his gloriously tanned legs. Boys like him didn’t die; they got bronzed and installed outside public libraries. He held a hand toward Blue as she climbed the hill from the car, a gesture that looked less like encouragement and more like he was directing air traffic.
“ Jane. You’ve got to see this!” His voice was full of the honeybaked accent of old Virginia money.
As Blue staggered up the hill, telescope on her shoulder, she mentally tested the danger level: Am I in love with him yet?
Gansey galloped down the hill to snatch the telescope from her.
“This isn’t that heavy,” he told her, and strode back the way he’d come.
She did not think she was in love with him. She hadn’t been in love before, but she was still pretty sure she’d be able to tell. Earlier in the year, she had had a vision of kissing him, and she could still picture that quite easily. But the sensible part of Blue, which was usually the only part of her, thought that had more to do with Richard Campbell Gansey III having a nice mouth than any blossoming romance.
Anyway, if fate thought it could tell her who to fall for, fate had another thing coming.
Gansey added, “I would’ve thought you had more muscles. Don’t feminists have big muscles?”
Decidedly not in love with him.
“Smiling when you say that doesn’t make it funny,” Blue said.
As the latest step in his quest to find the Welsh king Owen Glendower, Gansey had been requesting hiking permission from local landowners. Each lot crossed the Henrietta ley line — an invisible, perfectly straight energy line that connected spiritually significant places— and circled Cabeswater, a mystical forest that straddled it. Gansey was certain that Glendower was hidden somewhere within Cabeswater, sleeping away the centuries. Whoever woke the king was supposed to be granted a favor — something that had been on Blue’s mind recently. It seemed to her that Gansey was the only one who really needed it. Not that Gansey knew he was supposed to be dead in a few months. And not that she was about to tell him.
If we find Glendower soon, Blue thought, surely we can save Gansey.
The steep climb brought them to a vast, grassy crest that arched above the forested foothills. Far, far below was Henrietta, Virginia. The town was flanked by pastures dotted with farmhouses and cattle, as small and tidy as a model railroad layout. Everything but the soaring blue mountain range was green and shimmery with the summer heat.
But the boys were not looking at the scenery. They stood in a close circle: Adam Parrish, gaunt and fair; Noah Czerny, smudgy and slouching; and Ronan Lynch, ferocious and dark. On Ronan’s tattooed shoulder perched his pet raven, Chainsaw. Although her grip was careful, there were finely drawn lines from her claws on either side of the strap of his black muscle T. They all eyed something Ronan held in his hands. Gansey cavalierly tossed the telescope into the buoyant field grass and joined them.
Adam allowed Blue into their circle as well, his eyes meeting hers for a moment. As always, his features intrigued Blue. They were not quite conventionally handsome, but they were interesting. He had the typical Henrietta prominent cheekbones and deepset eyes, but his version of them was more delicate. It made him seem a little alien. A little impenetrable.
I’m picking this one, Fate , she thought ferociously. Not Richard Gansey
III. You can’t tell me what to do.
Adam’s hand glided over her bare elbow. The touch was a whisper in a language she didn’t speak very well.
“Open it up,” he ordered Ronan. His voice was dubious.
“Doubting Thomas,” Ronan sneered, but without much vitriol. The tiny model plane in his hand spanned the same breadth as his fingers. It was formed of pure white, featureless plastic, almost ludicrously lacking in detail: a plane-shaped thing. He opened the battery hatch on the bottom. It was empty.
“Well, it’s impossible, then,” Adam said. He picked off a grasshopper that had hurled itself onto his collar. Everyone in the group watched him do it. Since he’d performed a strange ritual bargain the month before, they’d been scrutinizing all of his movements. If Adam noticed this extra attention, he didn’t indicate it. “It won’t fly if it has no battery and no engine.”
Now Blue knew what this thing was. Ronan Lynch, keeper of secrets, fighter of men, devil of a boy, had told them all that he could take objects out of his dreams. Example A: Chainsaw. Gansey had been excited; he was the sort of boy who didn’t necessarily believe everything, but wanted to. But Adam, who had only gotten this far in life by questioning every truth presented to him, had wanted proof.
“ ‘It won’t fly if it has no battery and no engine,’ ” Ronan mimicked in a higher-pitched version of Adam’s faint Henrietta drawl. “Noah: the controller.”
Noah scuffled in the clumpy grass for the radio controller. Like the plane, it was white and shiny, all the edges rounded. His hands looked solid around it. Though he had been dead for quite a while and by all rights should appear more ghostly, he was always rather living-looking when standing on the ley line.
“What’s supposed to go inside the plane, if not a battery?” Gansey asked.
Ronan said, “I don’t know. In the dream it was little missiles, but I guess they didn’t come with.”
Blue snarled a few seed heads off the tall grass. “Here.”
“Good thinking, maggot.” Ronan stuffed them into the hatch. He reached for the controller, but Adam intercepted it and shook it by his ear.
“This doesn’t even weigh anything,” he said, dropping the controller into Blue’s palm.