At her name, Blue reappeared, stepping over a log and back into the clearing. She said, "Noah’s throwing up."

"Why is he doing that?" Gansey asked. "Is he sick?"

"I’ll ask him," she replied. "As soon as he’s finished puking."

Gansey winced.

"I think you’ll find that Gansey prefers the word vomiting. Or evacuating," Ronan said brightly.

"I think retching is the most specific word, in this case," Blue corrected pointedly.

"Retching!" said Ronan without concern; this, finally, was something he knew something about. "Where is he? Noah!" He pushed away from the Mustang and started back the way that Blue had come.

Blue noticed the dowsing rod in Gansey’s hands. "Was that in the car? A dowsing rod!"

He shouldn’t have been surprised she knew what it was; even if she wasn’t psychic, her mother was, and this was technically a tool of the trade. "The trunk."

"But that means that someone else was looking for the ley line!"

On the other side of the Mustang, Adam drew his fingers through the pollen on the side of the car. He looked disquieted. "And they decided it was more important than their car."

Gansey glanced up at the trees around them, then back at the expensive car. In the distance, he heard the low voices of Ronan and Noah. "I think we’d better go. I think we need more information."

Chapter 27

As Blue got ready to go out the following Sunday morning, she was officially conflicted. Sundays were dog-walking days. Actually, Sundays and Thursdays were dog-walking days, but Blue had begged off the previous two weeks to spend time with the boys, so it felt like it had been a long time since she’d seen her dogs-by-proxy. The problem was that she was running distinctly low on money, and moreover, guilt at disobeying Maura was finally beginning to weigh on her. It had gotten so that she couldn’t look her mother in the eye over dinner, but it was impossible, now, to imagine giving up the boys. She had to find a way to reconcile the two.

But first, she had to walk the dogs.

On the way out to Willow Ridge, the phone in the kitchen rang and Blue, a glass of cloudy apple juice in one hand and the laces of a high-top sneaker in the other, grabbed it.

"Hello?"

"I’d like to speak to Blue, please, if she’s in."

It was Gansey’s unmistakable, polite voice, the one he used to turn straw into gold. Clearly, he had known what he risked calling here, and clearly, he had been prepared to speak to someone other than Blue about it. Despite her growing suspicion that her secrecy couldn’t last, she wasn’t sure how she felt about the fact that he could’ve blown her cover.

"Blue is getting ready to go walk other people’s dogs," she said, setting down the juice and tugging on the sneaker, phone shoved between her ear and shoulder. "And it’s a good thing you got her and not someone else."

"I was prepared for that eventuality," Gansey said. It was strange to hear him over the phone; his voice didn’t quite sound like his face looked. "Still, I’m glad I caught you. How are you doing? Well, I trust?"

He doesn’t mean to be condescending, Blue told herself. She told herself several times. "You trust right."

"Brilliant. Look. Adam’s working today and Ronan’s at church with his brothers, but I’d like to go out and just … look around." He added, quickly, "Not to the woods. I was thinking maybe to that church on your map. Do you want to …"

He faltered. Gansey was faltering? It took Blue a moment of his silence to realize that he was asking if she wanted to go with him. It took her another moment to realize that she’d never been anywhere with him without the other boys.

"I have to walk dogs."

"Oh," Gansey replied, sounding deflated. "Well, okay."

"But it’ll only take an hour."

"Oh," he repeated, about fourteen shades brighter. "Shall I pick you up, then?"

Blue glanced furtively over her shoulder toward the living room. "Oh no — I’ll, uh, meet you in the parking lot."

"Brilliant," he said again. "Top shelf. I think this’ll be interesting. See you in an hour."

Top shelf? Gansey without Adam — Blue wasn’t certain how this would work. Despite Adam’s tentative interest in her, the boys seemed to act as a unit, a single, multiheaded entity. To see any of them without the presence of the others felt a little … dangerous.

But there wasn’t an option of not going with Gansey. She wanted to explore as much as he did.

No sooner had Blue hung up than she heard her name being called.

"Bloo-OOOO-oooooo, my child, my child, come in here!"

This was Maura’s voice, and the sing-song rhythm to it was highly ironic. With a sinking sensation, Blue followed it into the living room, where she found Maura, Calla, and Persephone drinking what Blue suspected were screwdrivers. When she walked into the room, the women all looked up at her with indolent smiles. A pack of lionesses.

Blue raised her eyebrows at the cocktails. The morning light through the windows turned the drinks a brilliant, translucent yellow. "It’s only ten o’clock."

Calla reached out, enclosing Blue’s wrist with her fingers, and dragged her onto the mint green love seat. Her glass was already mostly empty. "It’s a Sunday. What else would we do?"

"I have to go walk dogs," Blue said.

From her blue-striped chair across the room, Maura sipped her screwdriver and made a wild face. "Oh, Persephone. You make them with far too much vodka."

"My hand always slips," Persephone said sadly from a wicker bench in front of the window.

When Blue started to rise, Maura said, a thinly veiled iron behind her tone, "Sit with us a moment, Blue. Talk to us about yesterday. And the day before. And the day before. And — oh, let’s just talk about these past few weeks."

Blue realized then that Maura was furious. She had seen her furious only a few times before, and having it directed at her made her skin go instantly clammy.

"Well, I was …" She trailed off. A lie seemed pointless.

"I’m not your dungeon master," interrupted Maura. "I’m not going to bolt you in your room or send you to a convent, for crying out loud. So you can just stop all the sneaking around stuff right now."

"I wasn’t —"

"You were. I have been your mother since you’ve been born and I promise you, you were. So I take it you and Gansey get along, then?" Maura’s expression was annoyingly knowing.

"Mom."

"Orla told me about his muscle car," Maura continued. Her voice was still angry and artificially bright. The fact that Blue was well aware that she’d earned it made the sting of it even worse. "You aren’t planning on kissing him, are you?"

"Mom, that will never happen," Blue assured her. "You did meet him, didn’t you?"

"I wasn’t sure if driving an old, loud Camaro was the male equivalent of shredding your T-shirts and gluing cardboard trees to your bedroom walls."

"Trust me," Blue said. "Gansey and I are nothing like each other. And they aren’t cardboard. They’re repurposed canvas."

"The environment breathes a sigh of relief." Maura attempted another sip of her drink; wrinkling her nose, she shot a glare at Persephone. Persephone looked martyred. After a pause, Maura noted, in a slightly softer voice, "I’m not entirely happy that you’re getting in a car without air bags."

"Our car doesn’t have air bags," Blue pointed out.

Maura picked a long strand of Persephone’s hair from the rim of her glass. "Yes, but you always take your bike."

Blue stood up. She suspected that the green fuzz of the sofa was now adhered to the back of her leggings. "Can I go now? Am I in trouble?"

"You are in trouble. I told you to stay away from him and you didn’t," Maura said. "I just haven’t decided what to do about it yet. My feelings are hurt. I’ve consulted with several people who tell me that I’m within my rights to feel hurt. Do teenagers still get grounded? Did that only happen in the eighties?"

"I’ll be very angry if you ground me," Blue said, still wobbly from her mother’s unfamiliar displeasure. "I’ll probably rebel and climb out my window with a bedsheet rope."

Her mother rubbed a hand over her face. Her anger had completely burned itself out. "You’re well into it, aren’t you? That didn’t take long."

"If you don’t tell me not to see them, I don’t have to disobey you," Blue suggested.

"This is what you get, Maura, for using your DNA to make a baby," Calla said.

Maura sighed. "Blue, I know you’re not an idiot. It’s just, sometimes smart people do dumb things."

Calla growled, "Don’t be one of them."

"Persephone?" asked Maura.

In her small voice, Persephone said, "I have nothing to add." After a moment of consideration, she added, however, "If you are going to punch someone, don’t put your thumb inside your fist. It would be a shame to break it."

"Okay," Blue said hurriedly. "I’m out."

"You could at least say sorry," Maura said. "Pretend like I have some power over you."

Blue wasn’t sure how to reply to this. Maura had all sorts of control of Blue, but it wasn’t usually the sort that came with ultimatums or curfew. So she just said, "I’m sorry. I should’ve told you I was going to do what you didn’t want me to do."

Maura said, "That was not as satisfying as I imagined it would be."

Calla caught Blue’s wrist again, and for a moment Blue was worried that Calla would sense the level of strangeness surrounding Gansey’s quest. But she merely swallowed the last of her drink before purring, "What with all this running around, don’t forget our movie night on Friday, Blue."

"Our — movie — night —" Blue repeated.

Calla’s eyebrows hardened. "You promised."

For a shapeless moment, Blue tried to remember when she had ever talked about a movie night with Calla, and then she realized what this was really about: the conversation from days and days ago. About tossing Neeve’s room.

"I forgot that was this week," Blue replied.

Maura swirled her drink, which still looked mostly full. She always preferred watching other people drink to doing it herself. "Which movie?"

"Even Dwarfs Started Small," Calla replied immediately. "In the original German: Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen."

Maura winced, though Blue couldn’t tell if it was at the movie or at Calla’s accent. She said, "Just as well. Neeve and I are out that evening."

Calla raised an eyebrow and Persephone picked at a string on her lace stockings.

"What are you doing?" Blue asked. Looking for my father? Scrying in pools?