Because the name of the man who’d called Neeve all those months ago was a rather peculiar one that Blue, by now, knew quite well: Barrington Whelk.
Behind them, the single stair creaked again. Persephone said something that was a bit like ahem.
"That was still a little sinister," Calla said, turning.
Persephone’s hands were clasped before her. "I have two pieces of bad news." She turned to Blue. "First of all, your raven boys are here, and one of them seems to have broken his thumb on a gun."
Behind Persephone, there was another creak as a second person climbed the stairs. Blue and Calla both twitched a little as Neeve appeared beside Persephone, her gaze eternal and unwavering.
"Secondly," Persephone added, "Neeve and Maura came home early."
Chapter 35
The kitchen was quite full. It had never been a large kitchen to start with, and by the time three boys, four women, and one Blue were in it, it felt like it hadn’t been made with enough floor. Adam was polite, helping Persephone make tea for everyone in the room, though he had to keep asking, Where are the mugs? And now where are the spoons? What about the sugar? Ronan more than made up for Adam’s calm, though — he took up enough room for three people with his restless pacing. Orla came down for the gossip but stared so admiringly at Ronan that Calla yelled at her to leave and give everyone more space.
Neeve and Gansey sat at the breakfast table. Adam and Ronan looked just as they had when Blue had seen them last, but Gansey’s eyes were different. She spent a minute too long trying to figure out what was different — it was a combination, she decided, between them being a little brighter, and the skin around them a little tighter.
His arm stretched out across the table in front of him. His thumb was splinted.
"Could someone cut this hospital bracelet off?" he asked. There was something gallant and hectic about the deliberately offhand way he asked it. "I feel like an invalid. Please."
Handing him a pair of scissors, Persephone remarked, "Blue, I did tell you about putting your thumb outside of your fist if you were going to hit someone."
"You didn’t tell me to tell him," Blue retorted.
"Okay," Maura said from the doorway, rubbing her forehead with her fingers. "There are a few things going on here, obviously. Someone just tried to kill you." This was to Gansey. "You two are telling me that your friend was killed by the man who just tried to kill him." This was to Ronan and Adam. "You three are telling me that Neeve had a phone call with the man who killed your friend and just now tried to kill Gansey." This was to Blue, Persephone, and Calla. "And you’re telling me that you’ve had nothing to do with him since that phone call."
This last one was to Neeve. Though Maura had spoken to each of them, they all kept looking at Neeve.
"And you let them go through my things," Neeve replied.
Blue expected her mother to look chastened, but instead Maura seemed to grow taller. "And with good reason, obviously. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me the truth. If you wanted to play around on the corpse road, why didn’t you just ask? How do you know I would have said no? Instead, you pretended like you were actually committed to —"
She paused and looked at Blue.
Blue finished, "To finding Butternut."
"Oh, God," Maura said. "Calla, this is your fault, isn’t it?"
"No," Blue said. She had to try very hard to pretend that the boys weren’t all looking at her in order to say this. "I think I can be mad here, too. Why didn’t you just tell me that you didn’t really know my father and you had me without getting married? Why is that a big secret?"
"I never said I didn’t really know him," Maura replied, voice hollow. She had an expression on her face that Blue didn’t like; it was a little too emotional.
Blue looked at Persephone instead. "How do you know I wouldn’t have just been happy with the truth? I don’t care if my father was a deadbeat named Butternut. It doesn’t change anything right now."
"His name wasn’t really Butternut, was it?" Gansey asked Adam in a low voice.
Neeve’s voice, mild as always, cut through the kitchen. "I think this has all been oversimplified. I was spending time looking for Blue’s father. It’s just not all I was looking at."
Calla snapped, "Then why all the secretive behavior?"
Neeve looked very pointedly at Gansey’s splinted thumb. "It is the sort of discovery that lends itself to danger. Surely you all feel the pull of secrecy as well, or you would have shared everything you knew with Blue."
"Blue is not psychic," Maura said crisply. "Most of what we didn’t pass along were things that would only be meaningful while doing a reading or scrying into the corpse road."
"You also didn’t tell me," Gansey said. He was looking at his thumb, his eyebrows pulled together. Suddenly, Blue realized what looked different about him: He was wearing a pair of wire-framed glasses. They were the thin, subdued sort of glasses that you usually didn’t notice until they were pointed out. They made him look at once older and more serious, or maybe that was just his expression in general at the moment. Though she would never, ever tell him, she preferred this Gansey to the wind-tossed, effortlessly handsome one. He went on, "At the reading, when I asked about the ley line, you withheld that information from me."
Now Maura looked a little chastised. "How was I supposed to know what you would do with it? So, where is this man now? Barrington? Is that really his name?"
"Barrington Whelk," Adam and Ronan replied in unison. They exchanged a wry look.
"At the hospital, the police told me they’re looking for him. Henrietta police and state police," Gansey said. "But they said he wasn’t at his house and that it looked like he’d packed."
"I believe he’s what you call on the lam," Ronan said.
"Do you think he still has interest in you?" Maura asked.
Gansey shook his head. "I don’t know if he ever cared about me. I don’t think he had a plan. He wanted the journal. He wants Glendower."
"But he doesn’t know where Glendower is?"
"No one does," Gansey replied. "I have a colleague" — Ronan sniggered when Gansey used the word colleague, but Gansey pressed on — "in the UK who told me about the ritual that Whelk used Noah for. It’s possible he’ll try it again in a different place. Like Cabeswater."