Blue couldn’t sleep that night. She couldn’t stop waiting for the sound of the front door. Some ingrained, foolish part of her couldn’t believe that her mother would not come home before school began tomorrow. Her mother always had an answer for everything, even if it was wrong, and Blue had taken for granted that she would be unchanging as everything else turned sideways.
Blue missed her.
She went to the hall and listened. Outside, Orla was conducting a midnight chakra clearing with a few ardent clients. Downstairs, Calla angrily watched television alone. On her floor, she heard nothing, nothing — and then a series of short, purposeful sighs from Persephone’s room at the end of the hall.
When she knocked, Persephone said in her tiny voice, “You might as well.”
Inside, the lamplight reached only to a shoddy little desk and the end of Persephone’s high, elderly twin bed. Persephone sat cross-legged in the Victorian desk chair, her enormous nimbus of curly hair lit golden by the single bulb. She worked away at an old sweater.
As Blue climbed onto the worn mattress, several bobbins of thread raced down to nestle against her bare feet. She tugged her oversized shirt down over her knees and watched Persephone for a few minutes. She seemed to be adding length to the sleeves by sewing on mismatching cuffs. Every so often, she sighed as if she were annoyed with herself or the sweater.
“Is that yours?” Blue asked.
“Is what mine?” Persephone followed her eyes to the sweater. “Oh. Oh, no. I mean, it was. Once. But you see I’m changing it.”
“For someone with giant long arms?”
Persephone held out the garment to verify if this was the case. “Yes.”
Blue slowly lined up the thread by color on the bed beside her. “Do you think Mom went looking for Butternut?”
“Your father. Artemus,” Persephone corrected. Or clarified. Butternut was not really Blue’s father’s name — it was a pet name Maura had apparently given him in Ye Olde Days. “I think that’s oversimplifying it. But yes, that is one of the reasons why she went.”
“I thought she had the hots for Mr. Gray.”
Persephone considered. “The problem with your mother, Blue, is she likes to touch things. We told her that Artemus was in the past. He made his choices long before you, I said. But no, she had to keep touching it! How can you expect something to heal if you keep poking?”
“Sooooo she’s … gone … to … get … him?”
“Oh, no!” Persephone said with a little laugh. “I don’t think that would — no. As you said, she has the hots for Mr. Gray. Do young people really say that anymore?”
“I just said it. I’m young.”
“Ish.”
“Are you asking me or not? Either you accept my authority on this point or we move on.”
“We move on. But it is up to her, you know, if she wants to go looking for him. She never gets to be all on her own, and this is her chance to have some time to herself.”
Maura did not strike Blue as a time to herself person, but maybe that had been the problem. “So you’re saying we shouldn’t keep looking for her.”
“How should I know?”
“You’re a psychic! You charge people to tell their future! Look into the future!”
Persephone gazed at Blue with her all-black eyes until she felt a little bad about her outburst, and then Persephone added, “Maura went into Cabeswater. That’s not the future. Besides, if she had wanted help, she would have asked. Probably.”
“If I had paid you,” Blue said dangerously, “I would be asking for my money back right now.”
“Fortunate that you didn’t pay me, then. Does this look even to you?” Persephone held up the sweater. The two sleeves were nothing alike.
With a rather blasted pshaw! Blue leapt off the bed and stormed out of the room. She heard Persephone call, “Sleep is brain food!” as she headed down the hall.
Blue was not comforted. She did not feel in any way as if she had just had a meaningful exchange with a human.
Instead of going to her bedroom, she crept into the dim Phone/Sewing/Cat Room and sat beside the psychic hotline, folding her bare legs beneath her. The window, ajar, let in the chilly air. The streetlight through the leaves cast familiar, living shadows over the bins of sewing materials. Snatching a pillow from the chair, Blue rested it on top of her goose-bumped legs before picking up the handset. She listened to make sure there was a dial tone and not psychic activity on the other end.
Then she called Gansey.
It rang twice, three times, and then: “Hello?”
He sounded boyish and ordinary. Blue asked, “Did I wake you up?”
She heard Gansey fumble for and scrape up his wireframes.
“No,” he lied, “I was awake.”
“I called you by accident anyway. I meant to call Congress, but your number is one off.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, because yours has 6-6-5 in it.” She paused. “Get it?”
“Oh, you.”
“6-6-5. One number different. Get it?”
“Yeah, I got it.” He was quiet for a minute then, though she heard him breathing. “I didn’t know you could call hell, actually.”
“You can call in,” Blue said. “The thing is that you can’t call out.”
“I imagine you could send letters, though.”
“Never with enough postage.”
“No, faxes,” Gansey corrected himself. “Pretend I didn’t say letters. Faxes is funnier.”
Blue laughed into the pillow. “Okay, that was all.”
“All what?”
“All I had to say.”
“I’ve learned a lot. I’m glad you misdialed.”
“Well. Easy mistake to make,” she said. “Might do it again.”
A very, very long pause. She opened her mouth to fill it, then changed her mind and didn’t. She was shivering again, even though she wasn’t cold with the pillow on her legs.
“Shouldn’t,” Gansey said finally. “But I hope you do.”
The following morning, Gansey and Malory went out to investigate the ley line. Adam agreed to join them, which surprised Gansey. It wasn’t that the two of them had been fighting. It was that they’d been … not fighting. Not talking. Not anything. Gansey had kept going on the same road he always had, and Adam had taken a fork onto a second road.
But for the moment, at least, they were headed in the same direction. Goal: Find another entrance to the raven cave. Method: Retrace steps from previous ley line searches. Resources: Roger Malory.
It was a good time of year to show off the town. Henrietta and her environs were a paint box of colors. Green hayfields, golden cornfields, yellow sycamores, orange oaks, periwinkle mountains, cerulean cloudless sky. The freshly paved road was black and snaking and inviting. The air was crisp and breathable and insistent on action.
The three of them moved quickly until Malory’s attention was caught and held at their fourth stop of the morning, Massanutten Mountain. It was not the most mystical of locales. Neighborhoods bubbled from its sides and a ski resort crowned it. Gansey found it coarse, tourist and student fodder, but if he’d said it out loud, Adam would’ve torn out his throat in a minute for being elitist.