"What’s this?" Gansey studied Adam’s erratic handwriting. His letters always looked like they were running from something. "A number for a psychic?"
"If you didn’t find anything last night, this was going to be next. Now you have something to ask them about."
Gansey considered. Psychics tended to tell him he had money coming his way and that he was destined for great things. The first one he knew was always true and the second one he was afraid might be. But maybe with this new clue, with a new psychic, they’d have something else to say.
"Okay," he agreed. "So what am I asking them?"
Adam handed him the digital recorder. He knocked the top of the Camaro once, twice, pensive.
"That seems obvious," he answered. "We find out who you were talking to."
Chapter 3
Mornings at 300 Fox Way were fearful, jumbled things. Elbows in sides and lines for the bathroom and people snapping over tea bags placed into cups that already had tea bags in them. There was school for Blue and work for some of the more productive (or less intuitive) aunts. Toast got burned, cereal went soggy, the refrigerator door hung open and expectant for minutes at a time. Keys jingled as car pools were hastily decided.
Partway through breakfast, the phone would begin to ring and Maura would say, "That’s the universe calling for you on line two, Orla" or something like that, and Jimi or Orla or one of the other aunts or half aunts or friends would fight over who had to pick it up on the upstairs phone. Two years ago, Blue’s cousin Orla had decided that a call-in psychic line would be a lucrative addition and, after some brief skirmishes with Maura about public image, Orla won. "Winning" involved Orla waiting until Maura was at a conference over a weekend to secretively set up the line, and it was not so much a sore spot as the memory of a sore spot. Calls started coming in around seven A.M., and some days a dollar a minute felt more worth it than others.
Mornings were a sport. One that Blue liked to think she was getting better at.
But the day after the church watch, Blue didn’t have to worry about battling for the bathroom or trying to make a bag lunch while Orla dropped toast butter-side down. When she woke up, her normally morning-bright room had the breath-held dimness of afternoon. In the next room over, Orla was talking to either her boyfriend or to one of the psychic hotline callers. With Orla, it was difficult to tell the difference between the two sorts of calls. Both of them left Blue thinking she ought to shower afterward.
Blue took over the bathroom uncontested, where she gave most of her attention to her hair. Her dark hair was cut in a bob, long enough to plausibly pull back but short enough that it required an assembly of clips to do so successfully. The end result was a spiky, uneven ponytail populated by escaped chunks and mismatched clips; it looked eccentric and unkempt. Blue had worked hard to get it that way.
"Mom," she said as she jumped down the crooked stairs. Maura was at the kitchen counter making a mess of some kind of loose tea. It smelled appalling.
Her mother didn’t turn around. On the counter on either side of her were green, oceanic drifts of loose herbs. "You don’t have to run everywhere."
"You do," Blue retorted. "Why didn’t you wake me up for school?"
"I did," Maura said. "Twice." Then, to herself, "Dammit."
From the table, Neeve’s mild voice said, "Do you need my help with that, Maura?" She sat at the table with a cup of tea, looking plump and angelic as always, no sign of having lost any sleep the night before. Neeve stared at Blue, who tried to avoid eye contact.
"I’m perfectly capable of making a damn meditation tea, thank you," Maura said. To Blue, she added, "I told the school you had the flu. I emphasized that you were vomiting. Remember to look peaked tomorrow."
Blue pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. She’d never missed class the day after the church watch. Been sleepy, perhaps, but never wasted like last night.
"Was it because I saw him?" she asked Neeve, lowering her hands. She wished that she couldn’t remember the boy so clearly. Or rather, the idea of him, his hand sprawled on the ground. She wished she could un-see it. "Is that why I slept so long?"
"It’s because you let fifteen spirits walk through your body while you chatted with a dead boy," Maura replied tersely, before Neeve could speak. "From what I’ve heard, anyway. Christ, is this what these leaves are supposed to smell like?"
Blue turned to Neeve, who continued to sip her tea with a sanguine air. "Is that true? Is it because spirits walked through me?"
"You did let them draw energy from you," Neeve replied. "You have quite a lot, but not that much."
Blue had two immediate thoughts about this. One was I have quite a lot of energy? and the other was I think I am annoyed. It was not as if she had intentionally allowed the spirits to draw power from her.
"You should teach her to protect herself," Neeve told Maura.
"I have taught her some things. I’m not an entirely wretched mother," Maura said, handing Blue a cup of tea.
Blue said, "I’m not trying this. It smells awful." She retrieved a cup of yogurt from the fridge. Then, in solidarity with her mother, she told Neeve, "I’ve never had to protect myself at the church watch before."
Neeve mused, "That’s surprising. You amplify energy fields so much, I’m surprised they don’t find you, even here."
"Oh, stop," Maura said, sounding irritable. "There is nothing frightening about dead people."
Blue was still seeing Gansey’s ghostly posture, defeated and bewildered. She said, "Mom, the church-watch spirits — can you ever prevent their deaths? By warning them?"
The phone rang then. It shrilled twice and kept going, which meant Orla was still on the line with the other caller.
"Damn Orla!" Maura said, though Orla wasn’t around to hear it.
"I’ll get it," Neeve said.
"Oh, but —" Maura didn’t finish what she was going to say. Blue wondered if she was thinking that Neeve normally worked for a lot more than a dollar a minute.
"I know what you’re thinking," her mother said, after Neeve had left the kitchen. "Most of them die from heart attacks and cancer and other things that just can’t be helped. That boy is going to die."
Blue was beginning to feel a phantom of the sensation she’d felt before, that strange grief. "I don’t think an Aglionby boy will die from a heart attack. Why do you bother telling your clients?"