Blue clutched her backpack straps. Her mother and her friends were strange, yes, but they knew they were strange. They knew when they were saying something weird. Neeve didn’t seem to have that filter.

She replied finally, "He’d been dead a long time."

Neeve shrugged. "There’ll be more before it’s done."

Lost for words, Blue just slowly shook her head.

"I’m just warning you," Neeve said. "Watch for the devil. When there’s a god, there’s always a legion of devils."

Chapter 31

For the first time ever, Adam wasn’t happy to have a day off from Aglionby. With Friday a scheduled teacher workday, Gansey had reluctantly gone to his parents’ for his mother’s belated birthday, Ronan was drinking and boorish in his room, and Adam was left studying at Gansey’s desk at Monmouth Manufacturing in his absence. The public school had classes as normal, but he could always hope that Blue would come over when she was done.

The apartment felt oppressive without anyone else in the main room. Part of Adam wanted to lure Ronan out of his room for company, but most of him realized that Ronan was, in his unappealing and unspoken way, grieving for Noah. So Adam remained at Gansey’s desk, scratching at some Latin homework, aware that the light that came in the windows didn’t seem to light the floorboards as well as it ordinarily did. The shadows shifted and clung. Adam smelled the mint plant on Gansey’s desk, but he also smelled Noah — that combination of his deodorant and soap and sweat.

"Noah," Adam said to the empty apartment. "Are you here? Or are you out haunting Gansey?"

There was no response.

He looked down at his paper. The Latin verbs looked nonsensical, a made-up language. "Can we fix it, Noah? Whatever’s made you like this, instead of like you were before?"

Adam jumped at a crash directly beside the desk. It took him a moment to realize that Gansey’s mint plant had been swept to the floor. A single triangle of the clay pot had fractured, and lay beside a dusting of soil.

"That’s not going to help," Adam said calmly, but he was shaken. He wasn’t sure, however, what would help. After they’d discovered Noah’s bones, Gansey had called the police to find out more, but they hadn’t learned much — only that Noah had been missing for seven years. As always, Adam had urged reticence, and this time, Gansey had listened, withholding their discovery of the Mustang from the police. The car would lead them to Cabeswater, and that was too complicated, too public.

When a knock came at the door, Adam didn’t answer right away, thinking it was Noah again. But then the knock came once more, and this time, Declan’s voice: "Gansey!"

With a sigh, Adam climbed to his feet, replacing the mint plant before going to open the door. Declan stood on the threshold in neither his Aglionby uniform nor his internship suit, and he seemed like a different person in his jeans, even if they were impeccably dark and expensive. He looked younger than Adam normally thought of him.

"Declan. Hi."

"Where’s Gansey?" Declan demanded.

"Not here."

"Oh, come on."

Adam didn’t like to be accused of lying. He usually had better ways of getting what he wanted. "He went home for his mother’s birthday."

"Where’s my brother?"

"Not here."

"Now you are lying."

Adam shrugged. "Yeah. I am."

Declan started past him, but Adam held out his arm, blocking the door. "Now’s really not a good time. And Gansey said it wasn’t a good idea for you two to talk without him around. I think he’s right."

Declan didn’t step back. His chest pressed into Adam’s arm. Adam knew only this: There was no way that Declan could speak to Ronan right now. Not if Ronan had been drinking, not if Declan was already angry. Without Gansey here, there was sure to be a fight. That was the only thing that was important.

"You’re not going to fight me, are you?" Adam asked, as if he wasn’t nervous. "I thought that was Ronan’s thing, not yours."

It worked better than Adam could have imagined; Declan immediately fell back a step. Reaching into his back pocket, Declan withdrew a folded envelope. Adam recognized the Aglionby crest on the return address.

"He’s getting kicked out," Declan said, stuffing the envelope toward Adam. "Gansey promised me he would turn his grades around. Well, that hasn’t happened. I trusted Gansey, and he let me down. When he gets back, let him know he’s gotten my brother kicked out."

This was more than Adam could stand.

"Oh no," he said. He hoped Ronan was listening. "Ronan did that all by himself. I don’t know when you both are going to see that only Ronan can keep himself in Aglionby. Some day, he has to pick for himself. Until then, you’re both wasting your time."

But no matter how true, there was no argument that Adam Parrish could present in his Henrietta accent that would move someone like Declan.

Adam refolded the envelope. Gansey was going to be sick over this. For a brief, brief moment, Adam considered not sharing the letter until it was too late, but then he knew he didn’t have it in him. "I’ll make sure this gets to him."

"He’s moving out," Declan said. "Remind Gansey of that. No Aglionby, no Monmouth."

Then you’ve killed him, Adam thought, because he couldn’t imagine Ronan living under a roof with his brother. He couldn’t imagine Ronan living under a roof without Gansey, period. But all he said was, "I’ll tell him."

Declan retreated down the stairs, and a moment later, Adam heard his car pull out of the parking lot.

Adam opened the envelope and slowly read the letter inside. With a sigh, he returned to the desk and picked up the phone that sat beside the now-broken mint pot. He dialed from memory.

"Gansey?"

Several hours away, Gansey was just losing interest in his mother’s birthday. Adam’s call had spoiled any buoyancy left in his mood, and it hadn’t taken long after that for Helen and Gansey’s mother to become engaged in a full-on politely disappointed conversation that they both pretended wasn’t over Helen’s non-glass glassware. During a particularly tense non-exchange, Gansey put his hands in his pockets and walked out to his father’s garage.

Ordinarily, home — a sprawling, Cotswold-stone mansion outside of Washington, D.C. — had a sort of nostalgic comfort to it, but today, Gansey had no patience for it. All he could think about was Noah’s skeleton and Ronan’s terrible grades and the trees speaking Latin.

And Glendower.

Glendower, lying in his fine armor, barely illuminated in the darkness of his tomb. In Gansey’s vision in the tree, he had seemed so real. Gansey had touched the dusted surface of the armor, run his fingers over the spearhead that lay beside him, blown dust off the cup curled in Glendower’s armored right hand. He’d moved to the helmet and hovered his hands over it. This was the moment he’d been waiting for, the uncovering, the waking.

And that was when the vision had ended.

Gansey had always felt as if there were two of him: the Gansey who was in control, able to handle any situation, able to talk to anyone, and then, the other, more fragile Gansey, strung out and unsure, embarrassingly earnest, driven by naive longing. That second Gansey loomed inside him now, more than ever, and he didn’t like it.

He punched the key code (Helen’s birthday) into the pad by the garage door. The garage, as large as the house, was all stone and wood and arched ceilings, a stable housing several thousand horses tucked away under hoods.

Like Dick Gansey III, Dick Gansey II also adored old cars, but unlike Dick Gansey III, all of the elder Gansey’s cars had been returned to elegant perfection by teams of restoration experts who were familiar with terms like rotisserie and Barrett-Jackson. Most had been imported from Europe and many had right-hand drive or came with owner’s manuals in foreign languages. And most important, his father’s cars were all famous in some way: They’d been owned by a celebrity or been part of a movie shoot or had once been involved in a collision with a historical figure.

Gansey settled on a Peugeot the color of vanilla ice cream that had probably been owned by Lindbergh or Hitler or Marilyn Monroe. Leaning back in the seat, his feet resting on the pedals, Gansey thumbed through the cards in his wallet and eventually dialed the school guidance counselor, Mr. Pinter. While the phone rang, he conjured up that in-control version of himself that he knew lurked inside.

"Mr. Pinter? I’m sorry to call you after hours," Gansey said. He ran his pile of business and credit cards over the steering wheel. The interior of the entire car reminded him a lot of his mother’s kitchen mixer. The gearshift looked like it might make a serviceable meringue when it wasn’t moving the car from first to second. "This is Richard Gansey."

"Mr. Gansey," Pinter said. He took a very long time to say the syllables, during which Gansey imagined him struggling to put a face to the name. Pinter was a tidy, motivated man that Gansey called "very traditional" and Ronan deemed "a cautionary tale."

"I’m calling on behalf of Ronan Lynch."

"Ah."

Pinter didn’t need any time to put a face to that name. "Well, I can’t really discuss the specifics of Mr. Lynch’s imminent expulsion —"

"With all due respect, Mr. Pinter," Gansey interrupted, fully aware that he was not allotting any due respect to him by so doing, "I’m not sure you’re aware of our specific situation."

He scratched the back of his head with a credit card while he explained Ronan’s fragile emotional state, the agonizing trials of sleepwalking, the affirming joys of Monmouth Manufacturing, and the strides they’d made since Ronan came to live with him. Gansey concluded with a thesis statement of just how successful he was certain Ronan Lynch would be, once he found a way to patch the hemorrhaging, Niall-Lynch-shaped hole in his heart.

"I’m not entirely convinced that Mr. Lynch’s future success is the kind that Aglionby nurtures," Pinter said.

"Mr. Pinter," Gansey protested, although he was inclined to agree with him on this point. He spun the knob on the window crank. "Aglionby has an incredibly varied and complex student body. It’s one of the reasons why my parents selected it for me."

Really, it had been four hours of Google and a persuasive phone call with his father, but Pinter didn’t need to know that.

"Mr. Gansey, I appreciate your concern for your frie —"

"Brother," Gansey interrupted. "Really, I’ve come to see him as a brother. And to my parents, he’s a son. In every sense of the word. Emotionally, practically, fiscally."

Pinter didn’t say anything.

"Last time he visited, my father thought the Aglionby library looked a little sparse in the nautical history department," Gansey said. He stuck the credit card in the air vents to see how far it would go before meeting resistance. He had to grab the card before it disappeared in the bowels of the car. "He remarked that it looked like an, oh, thirty-thousand-dollar-sized gap in the funding."