Blue felt a little sick.
He continued, "But then I felt one on my hand, and by the time I jumped away, I saw them. All over my arms."
Somehow, he’d managed to take her there, to put her in that moment of discovery. Blue’s heart felt dragged down, snared with venom.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"I knew I was dead. I knew I was dead before I started to feel everything start to go wrong in my body. Because I’d been to the hospital for just one sting, and this was, like, a hundred. They were in my hair. They were in my ears, Blue."
She asked, "Were you scared?"
He didn’t have to answer. She saw it in the hollow of his eyes.
"What happened?"
"I died," he said. "I felt my heart stop. The hornets didn’t care. They were still stinging me, even though I was dead."
Gansey stopped. He said, "This is the difficult part."
"Those are my favorite," Blue replied. The trees were quiet around them; the only sound was the growl of thunder. After a pause, she added, a little ashamed, "Sorry. I didn’t mean to be … but my whole life is the ‘difficult part.’ Nobody believes in what my family does. I’m not going to laugh."
He exhaled slowly. "I heard a voice. It was a whisper. I won’t forget what it said. It said: ‘You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.’"
Blue was very quiet. The air pressed on them.
"I told Helen. She said it was a hallucination." Gansey brushed a hanging vine from his face. The brush was getting thicker here, the trees closer. They probably needed to turn back. His voice was peculiar. Formal and certain. "It was not a hallucination."
This was the Gansey who had written the journal. The truth of it, the magic of it, possessed her.
She asked, "And that’s enough to make you spend your life looking for Glendower?"
Gansey replied, "Once Arthur knew the grail existed, how could he not look for it?"
Thunder growled beneath them again, the hungry snarl of an invisible beast.
Blue said, "That’s not really an answer."
He didn’t look at her. He replied, voice terrible, "I need to, Blue."
Every light on the EMF reader went out.
Equal parts relieved to be back on safe ground and disappointed not to pry deeper into the real Gansey, Blue touched the machine. "Did we step off the line?"
They retreated several yards, but the machine didn’t turn back on.
"Is the battery dead?" she suggested.
"I don’t know how to check." Gansey switched it off and then on again.
Blue stretched out her hand for the reader. The moment she took it from him, the lights burst red. Solid red, no blinking. She turned from side to side. Orange to her left. Red to her right.
They met each other’s eyes.
"Take it back," Blue said.
But as soon as Gansey touched the EMF reader, the lights went dead again. When the thunder came this time, seductive and simmering, she felt like it started something inside her trembling that didn’t stop after the sound had died.
"I keep thinking there must be a logical explanation," Gansey said. "But there hasn’t been all week."
Blue thought there probably was a logical explanation, and she thought it was this: Blue made things louder. Only she had no idea what she was amplifying at the moment.
The air shuddered again as thunder grumbled. There was no sign of the sun now. All that was left was the heavy green air around them.
He asked, "Where is it steering us?"
Letting the solid red light lead them, Blue stepped hesitantly through the trees. They had only made it a few yards when the machine went dead again. No amount of switching hands or manipulation would encourage it to flicker again.
They stood with the machine between them, heads bowed close, looking silently at the dark face of it.
Blue asked, "What now?"
Gansey stared down between their feet, directly below the machine. "Step back. There’s —"
"Oh my gosh," Blue said, jerking away from Gansey. Then, again: "Oh my —"
But she couldn’t finish the sentence, because she had just stepped off something that looked an awful lot like a human arm bone. Gansey was the first to crouch, brushing away the leaves from the bone. Sure enough, beneath the first arm bone was a second. A filthy watch encircled the wrist bone. Everything looked fake, a skeleton in the woods.
This can’t be happening.
"Oh no." Blue breathed. "Don’t touch it. Fingerprints."
But the corpse was long beyond fingerprints. The bones were clean as a museum piece, the flesh long since rotted off, and there were only threads remaining of whatever the person had worn. Picking carefully at leaves, Gansey uncovered the entire skeleton. It lay crumpled, one leg crooked up, arms sprawled to either side of its skull, a freeze-frame of tragedy. Time had spared strange elements and taken others: the watch was there, but the hand was not. The shirt was gone, but a tie remained, rippled over the hills and valleys of the collapsed rib bones. The shoes were dirty but unchanged from exposure. The socks, too, were preserved inside the leather shoes, ankle-height bags of foot bones.
The skull’s cheek was smashed in. She wondered if that was how the person had died.
"Gansey," Blue said, voice flat. "This was a kid. This was a kid from Aglionby."
She pointed at his rib cage. Crooked between two bare ribs was an Aglionby patch, the synthetic fibers of the embroidery impervious to the weather.
They stared at each other over the body. Lightning lit the sides of their faces. Blue was very aware of the skull beneath Gansey’s skin, his cheekbones so close to the surface, high and square like those on the Death card.
"We should report it," she said.
"Wait," he replied. It only took him a moment to find the wallet beneath the hip bone. It was good leather, spattered and bleached, but mostly unmolested. Gansey flipped it open, eyeing the multicolored edges of credit cards that lined one side. He spotted the top edge of a driver’s license and thumbed it out.
Blue heard Gansey’s breath catch in na**d shock.
The face on the driver’s license was Noah’s.
Chapter 29
At eight P.M., Gansey called Adam at the trailer factory.
"I’m coming to get you," he said, and hung up.
He didn’t say it was important, but this was the first time he’d ever asked for Adam to leave work, so it had to be.