gansey in motion

[mintly]

Blue had always imagined the procession of spirits to be an orderly thing, but this spirit wandered, hesitant. It was a young man in slacks and a sweater, hair rumpled. He was not quite transparent, but he wasn’t quite there, either. His figure was as murky as dirty water, his face indistinct. There was no identifying feature to him apart from his youth. He was so young — that was the hardest part to get used to.

As Blue watched, he paused and put his fingers to the side of his nose and his temple. It was such a strangely living gesture that Blue felt a little sick. Then he stumbled forward, as if jostled from behind.
...
She asked, feeling a little foolish, “What’s your name?” He didn’t seem to hear her. Without a twitch of acknowledgment, he began to move again, slow and bewildered, toward the church door. Is this how we make our way to death? Blue wondered. A stumbling fade­out instead of a self­aware finale? As Neeve began again to call out questions to the others, Blue made her way toward the wanderer. “Who are you?” she called from a safe distance, as he dropped his forehead into his hands. His form had no outline at all, she saw now, and his face was truly featureless. There was nothing about him, really, that made him human shaped, but still, she saw a boy. There was something telling her mind what he was, even if it wasn’t telling her eyes. There was no thrill in seeing him, as she had thought there would be. All she could think was, He will be dead within a year. How did Maura bear it?
Blue stole closer. She was close enough to touch him as he began to walk again, but still he made no sign of seeing her. This near to him, her hands were freezing. Her heart was freezing. Invisible spirits with no warmth of their own sucked at her energy, pulling goose bumps up her arms. The young man stood on the threshold of the church and Blue knew, just knew, that if he stepped into the church, she would lose the chance to get his name. “Please,” Blue said, softer than before. She reached out a hand and touched the very edge of his not­there sweater. Cold flooded through her like dread. She tried to steady herself with what she’d always been told: Spirits drew all their energy from their surroundings. All she was feeling was him using her to stay visible. But it still felt a lot like dread. She asked, “Will you tell me your name?” He faced her and she realized with shock that he wore an Aglionby sweater.
“Gansey,” he said. Though his voice was quiet, it wasn’t a whisper. It was a real voice spoken from someplace almost too far away to hear. Blue couldn’t stop staring at his mussed hair, the suggestion of staring eyes, the raven on his sweater. His shoulders were soaked, she saw, and the rest of his clothing rain spattered, from a storm that hadn’t happened yet. This close, she could smell something minty that she wasn’t sure was unique to him or unique to spirits. He was so real. When it finally happened, when she finally saw him, it didn’t feel like magic at all. It felt like looking into the grave and seeing it look back at her.
“Is that all?” she whispered. Gansey closed his eyes.
“That’s all there is.” He fell to his knees — a soundless gesture for a boy with no real body. One hand splayed in the dirt, fingers pressed to the ground.

***

Gansey stripped off his sweater and threw it in the back of the Camaro. The tiny back of the car was a cluttered marriage of everyday things — a chemistry textbook, a Frappuccino­ stained notebook, a half­zipped CD binder with naked discs slithering out across the seat — and the supplies he’d acquired during his eighteen months in Henrietta. Rumpled maps, computer printouts, ever­present journal, flashlight, willow stick. When Gansey plucked a digital recorder out of the mess, a pizza receipt (one large deep­dish, half sausage, half avocado) fluttered to the seat, joining a half­dozen receipts identical except for the date.

***

This was just an occupational hazard of looking for an invisible energy line. It was ... well, invisible. And possibly hypothetical, but Gansey refused to consider that notion.
In seventeen years of life, he’d already found dozens of things people hadn’t known could be found, and he fully intended to add the ley line, the tomb, and the tomb’s royal occupant to that list of items. A museum curator in New Mexico had once told Gansey, Son, you have an uncanny knack for discovering oddities. An astonished Roman historian commented, You look under rocks no one else thinks to pick up, slick. And a very old British professor had said, The world turns out its pockets for you, boy. The key, Gansey found, was that you had to believe that they existed; you had to realize they were part of something bigger. Some secrets only gave themselves up to those who’d proven themselves worthy.
The way Gansey saw it was this: If you had a special knack for finding things, it meant you owed the world to look.

***

They stepped into the apartment and Girlfriend tipped her head back, back, back. The high ceiling soared above them, exposed iron beams holding up the roof. Gansey’s invented apartment was a dreamer’s laboratory. The entire second floor, thousands of square feet, spread out before them. Two of the walls were made up of old windows — dozens of tiny, warped panes, except for a few clear ones Gansey had replaced — and the other two walls were covered with maps: the mountains of Virginia, of Wales, of Europe. Marker lines arced across each of them. Across the floor, a telescope peered at the western sky; at its feet lay piles of arcane electronics meant to measure magnetic activity. And everywhere, everywhere, there were books. Not the tidy stacks of an intellectual attempting to impress, but the slumping piles of a scholar obsessed. Some of the books weren’t in English. Some of the books were dictionaries for the languages that some of the other books were in. Some of the books were actually Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Editions.

***

Beside Declan, Girlfriend held her hands to her chest in an unconscious reaction to masculine nakedness. In this case, the naked party was not a person, but a thing: Gansey’s bed, nothing but two mattresses on a bare metal frame, sitting baldly in the middle of the room, barely made. It was somehow intimate in its complete lack of privacy.
Gansey himself sat at an old desk with his back to them, gazing out an east­-facing window and tapping a pen. His fat journal lay open near him, the pages fluttering with glued ­in book passages and dark with notes. Adam was struck, as he occasionally was, by Gansey’s agelessness: an old man in a young body, or a young man in an old man’s life. “It’s us,” Adam said. When Gansey didn’t reply, Adam led the way to his oblivious friend. Girlfriend made a variety of noises that all began with the letter O. With a variety of cereal boxes, packing containers, and house paint, Gansey had built a knee­high replica of the town of Henrietta in the center of the room, and so the three visitors were forced to walk down Main Street in order to reach the desk. Adam knew the truth: These buildings were a symptom of Gansey’s insomnia. A new wall for every night awake. Adam stopped just beside Gansey. The area around him smelled strongly of mint from the leaf he chewed absently. Adam tapped the earbud in Gansey’s right ear and his friend startled. Gansey jumped to his feet. “Why, hello.”

***

“You’re Aglionby, right? This place is crazy. Why don’t you live on the school grounds?” Ashley asked.
“Because I own this building,” Gansey said. “It’s a better investment than paying for dorm housing. You can’t sell your dorm after you’re done with school. And where did that money go? Nowhere.” Dick Gansey III hated to be told that he sounded like Dick Gansey II, but right then, he did. Both of them could trot out logic on a nice little leash, wearing a smart plaid jacket, when they wanted to.

***

“Have you heard of the legends of sleeping kings? The legends that heroes like Llewellyn and Glendower and Arthur aren’t really dead, but are instead sleeping in tombs, waiting to be woken up?”
Ashley blinked vapidly, then said, “Sounds like a metaphor.” Perhaps she wasn’t as dumb as they’d thought.
“Maybe so,” Gansey said. He made a grandiose gesture to the maps on the wall, covered with the ley lines he believed Glendower had traveled along. Sweeping up the journal behind him, he paged through maps and notes as examples. “I think Glendower’s body was brought over to the New World. Specifically, here. Virginia. I want to find where he’s buried.” To Adam’s relief, Gansey left out the part about how he believed the legends that said Glendower was still alive, centuries later. He left out the part about how he believed the eternally sleeping Glendower would grant a favor to whoever woke him. He left out the part about how it haunted him, this need to find this long­-lost king. He left out the midnight phone calls to Adam when he couldn’t sleep for obsessing about his search. He left out the microfiche and the museums, the newspaper features and the metal detectors, the frequent flier miles and the battered foreign language phrase books. And he left out all the parts about magic and the ley line.

***

Unlike most of the world, Gansey preferred Ronan to his elder brother Declan, and so the lines had been drawn. Adam suspected Gansey’s preference was because Ronan was earnest even if he was horrible, and with Gansey, honesty was golden.

***

He ran his thumb back and forth across his bottom lip, a habit he never seemed to notice and Adam never bothered to point out. Catching Adam’s gaze, he said, “Christ, now I feel dirty. Come on. Let’s go to Nino’s. We’ll get pizza and I’ll call that psychic and the whole goddamn world will sort itself out.” This was why Adam could forgive that shallow, glossy version of Gansey he’d first met. Because of his money and his good family name, because of his handsome smile and his easy laugh, because he liked people and (despite his fears to the contrary) they liked him back, Gansey could’ve had any and all of the friends that he wanted. Instead he had chosen the three of them, three guys who should’ve, for three different reasons, been friendless.

***

Gansey and Adam sought Glendower for different reasons. Gansey longed for him like Arthur longed for the grail, drawn by a desperate but nebulous need to be useful to the world, to make sure his life meant something beyond champagne parties and white collars, by some complicated longing to settle an argument that waged deep inside himself. Adam, on the other hand, needed that royal favor. And that meant they needed to be the ones to wake Glendower. They needed to be the ones to find him first.

***

Even though Ronan was snarling and Noah was sighing and Adam was hesitating, he didn’t turn to verify that they were coming. He knew they were. In three different ways, he’d earned them all days or weeks or months before, and when it came to it, they’d all follow him anywhere. “Excelsior,” said Gansey, and shut the door behind them.

***

Looking up, he peered over his shoulder, probably looking for the evil, not­-a-­prostitute waitress. Part of Gansey felt guilty for botching Adam’s chances with her. The other part felt he’d possibly saved Adam from having his spinal cord ripped out and devoured. It was possible, Gansey thought, that he’d once again been oblivious about money. He hadn’t meant to be offensive but, in retrospect, it was possible he had been. This was going to eat at him all evening. He vowed, as he had a hundred times before, to consider his words better.

***

This was a real fight, not for show, and it played in fast­forward. Someone would be unconscious before Gansey had time to cry havoc, and he just didn’t have time to take someone to the ER tonight. Gansey sprang, seizing Ronan’s arm in mid­swing. Ronan still had fingers hooked inside Declan’s mouth, though, and Declan already had a fist flying from behind, like a violent embrace. So it was Gansey who got Declan’s blow. Something wet misted his arm. He was fairly certain it was spit, but it was possible it was blood. He shouted a word he’d learned from his sister, Helen. Ronan had Declan by the knot of his burgundy tie, and Declan gripped the back of his brother’s skull with one white-knuckled hand. Gansey might as well have not been there. With a neat flick of his wrist, Ronan smacked Declan’s head off the driver’s side door of the Volvo. It made a sick, wet sound. Declan’s hand fell away.
Gansey seized the opportunity to propel Ronan about five feet away. Jerking in his grip, Ronan jackrabbited his legs on the pavement. He was unbelievably strong. “Quit it,” Gansey panted. “You’re ruining your face.” Ronan twisted, all muscle and adrenaline. Declan, his suit looking more bedraggled than any suit ought to look, started back toward them. He had a hell of a bruise rising on his temple, but he looked ready to go again. There was no way of telling what had set them off — a new home nurse for their mother, a poor grade at school, an unexplained credit card bill. Maybe just Ashley. Across the lot, the manager of Nino’s emerged from the front entrance. It wouldn’t be long before the cops were called. Where was Adam? “Declan,” Gansey said, voice full of warning, “if you come back over here, I swear ...”
With a jerk of his chin, Declan spit blood at the pavement. His lip was bleeding, but his teeth were still good. “Fine. He’s your dog, Gansey. You leash him. Keep him from getting kicked out of Aglionby. I wash my hands of him.”
“I wish,” snarled Ronan. His entire body was rigid underneath Gansey’s hand. He wore his hatred like a cruel second skin. Declan said,
“You’re such a piece of shit, Ronan. If Dad saw —” and this made Ronan burst forward again. Gansey clamped arms around Ronan’s chest and dragged him away.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong, Declan,” Gansey said. His ear throbbed where it had been boxed. He could feel Ronan’s pulse crashing in his arm where he restrained him. His vow to consider his words more carefully came back to him, and so he framed the rest of the statement in his head before saying it out loud. “But you are not Niall Lynch, and you won’t ever be. And you’d get ahead a lot faster if you stopped trying.” Gansey released Ronan. Ronan didn’t move, though, and neither did Declan, as if by saying their father’s name, Gansey had cast a spell. They wore matching raw expressions. Different wounds inflicted by the same weapon. “I’m only trying to help,” Declan said finally, but he sounded defeated. There was a time, a few months ago, when Gansey would’ve believed him.

***

Gansey and Ronan were left standing next to each other in the strange dim light of the parking lot. A block away, a dog barked balefully, three times. Ronan touched his pinkie finger to his eyebrow to check for blood, but there was none, just a raised, angry bump.
“Fix it,” Gansey said. He wasn’t entirely sure that whatever Ronan had done, or failed to do, was easily corrected, but he was sure that it must be corrected. The only reason Ronan was allowed to stay at Monmouth Manufacturing was because his grades were acceptable. “Whatever it is. Don’t let him be right.”
Ronan said, low, just for Gansey, “I want to quit.”
“One more year.”
“I don’t want to do this for another year.” He kicked a piece of gravel under the Camaro. Now his voice did rise, but only in ferocity, not in volume. “Another year, and then I get strangled with a necktie like Declan? I’m not a damn politician, Gansey. I’m not a banker.” Gansey wasn’t, either, but it didn’t mean he wanted to leave school.
The pain in Ronan’s voice meant he couldn’t have any in his when he said, “Just graduate, and do whatever you want.” The trust funds from their fathers had ensured that neither of them had to work for a living, ever, if they didn’t choose to. They were extraneous parts in the machine that was society, a fact that sat differently on Ronan’s shoulders than Gansey’s. Ronan looked angry, but he was in the mood where he was going to look angry no matter what.
“I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what the hell I am.” He got into the Camaro.
“You promised me,” Gansey said through the open car door. Ronan didn’t look up.
“I know what I did, Gansey.”
“Don’t forget.”

***

Gansey let out his breath. Tonight, he didn’t have it in him to talk to the police on Ronan’s behalf. Tell me I’m doing the right thing with Ronan. Tell me this is how to find the old Ronan. Tell me I’m not ruining him by keeping him away from Declan. But Adam had already told Gansey he thought Ronan needed to learn to clean up his own messes. It was only Gansey who seemed afraid that Ronan would learn to live in the dirt.

***

In his hand was a tantalizingly fat leather­-bound book that Blue knew instantly. She’d seen it in President Cell Phone’s hands. Donny asked, “Do you know who left this behind? Is it yours?” Meeting him halfway across the lot, Blue accepted the journal and flipped it open. The journal didn’t immediately choose a page to open to; it was so well-worn and well-­stuffed that every page claimed seniority. It finally split down the middle, obeying gravity instead of use. The page it opened to was a mishmash of yellowed clippings from books and newspapers. Red pen underlined a few phrases, added commentary in the margins (Luray Caverns count as spiritual place? crows = ravens?), and jotted a neatly boxed list titled “Welsh­Influenced Place Names Near Henrietta.” Blue recognized most of the towns listed. Welsh Hills, Glen Bower, Harlech, Machinleth. ... “I think I know who it belongs to,” Blue said. She had no immediate thought other than wanting to spend more time flipping through its pages. “I’ll take it.” After Donny had returned inside the restaurant, she flipped the journal back open. Now she had time to marvel at the sheer density of it. Even if the content hadn’t immediately caught her, the feel of the thing would have. There were so many of the clippings she’d noticed before that the journal wouldn’t stay book­-shaped unless tied shut with leather wrappings. Pages and pages were devoted to these ripped and scissored excerpts, and there was an undeniable tactile pleasure to browsing. Blue ran her fingers over the varied surfaces. Creamy, thick artist paper with a slender, elegant font. Thin, browning paper with spidery serif. Slick, utilitarian white stock with an artless modern type. Ragged­edged newspaper in a brittle shade of yellow. Then there were the notes, made with a half-­dozen different pens and markers, but all in the same business­like hand. They circled and pointed and underlined very urgently. They made bulleted lists and eager exclamation points in the margins. They contradicted one another and referred to one another in third person. Lines became cross­-hatching became doodles of mountains became squirrelly tire tracks behind fast­looking cars. ... Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-­printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it. A familiar shape stood out from the rest of the doodles. Three intersecting lines: a long, beaked triangle. It was the same shape Neeve had drawn in the churchyard dust. The same shape her mother had drawn on the steamed shower door. Blue flattened the page to get a better look. This section was on ley lines: “mystical energy roads that connect spiritual places.” Throughout the journal, the writer had doodled the three lines again and again, along with a sickly­ looking Stonehenge, strangely elongated horses, and a labeled sketch of a burial mound. There was no explanation of the symbol. It couldn’t be a coincidence. There was no way this journal could possibly belong to that presidential raven boy. Someone must’ve given it to him. Maybe, she thought, it’s Adam’s. He gave her the same sensation as the journal did: the sense of magic, of possibility, of anxious danger. That same feeling as when Neeve had said that a spirit touched her hair. Blue thought, I wish you had been Gansey. But as soon as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true. Because whoever Gansey was, he didn’t have long to live.

***

Six months ago, the only time it had ever mattered, Noah had found Ronan in an introspective pool of his own blood, and so he was exempt from ever having to look again. Noah hadn’t gone with Gansey to the hospital afterward, and Adam had been caught trying to sneak out, so it was only Gansey who’d been with Ronan when they stitched his skin whole again. It had been a long time ago, but also, it was no time at all. Sometimes, Gansey felt like his life was made up of a dozen hours that he could never forget.

***

“When I told you I didn’t want you getting drunk at Monmouth, I didn’t mean I wanted you drunk somewhere else.” Ronan, with only a little slurring, replied, “Pot calling the kettle black.” With dignity, Gansey said, “I drink. I do not get drunk.”

***

That was what it came down to. Fourteen minutes to make a fifteen-­minute drive to school, and Adam not waiting. He felt the old fear creeping slowly out of his lungs. Don’t panic. You were wrong about Ronan last night. You have to stop this. Death isn’t as close as you think.

***

“When is Mom’s birthday?” Helen asked. Gansey was simultaneously pleased to hear her voice and annoyed to be bothered by something so trivial. For the most part, he and his sister got along well; Gansey siblings were a rare and complicated species, and they didn’t have to pretend to be something they weren’t around each other. “You’re the wedding planner,” Gansey said as a dog ripped out of nowhere. It barked furiously, trying to bite the Camaro’s tires. “Shouldn’t dates be your realm of expertise?” “That means you don’t remember,” Helen replied. “And I’m not a wedding planner anymore. Well. Part­-time. Well. Full-­time, but not every day.” Helen did not need to be anything. She didn’t have careers, she had hobbies that involved other people’s lives. “I do remember,” he said tensely. “It’s May tenth.”

***

Under the old carport behind the house, he found Adam lying beneath an old Bonneville pulled up onto ramps, initially invisible in the cool blue shadows. An empty oil pan protruded from under the car. There was no sound coming from beneath the car, and Gansey suspected that Adam wasn’t working so much as avoiding being in the house. “Hey, tiger,” Gansey said. Adam’s knees bent as if he were going to scoot himself out from under the car, but then he didn’t. “What’s up?” he said flatly. Gansey knew what this meant, this failure to immediately come out from beneath the car, and anger and guilt drew his chest tight. The most frustrating thing about the Adam situation was that Gansey couldn’t control it. Not a single piece of it.

***

Adam had plenty of reasons to be indifferent about Gansey’s nebulous anxiety, his questioning of why the universe had chosen him to be born to affluent parents, wondering if there was some greater purpose that he was alive. Gansey knew he had to make a difference, had to make a bigger mark on the world because of the head start he’d been given, or he was the worst sort of person out there.

***

“It means I never get to be my own person. If I let you cover for me, then I’m yours. I’m his now, and then I’ll be yours.” It struck Gansey harder than he thought it would. Some days, all that grounded him was the knowledge that his and Adam’s friendship existed in a place that money couldn’t influence. Anything that spoke to the contrary hurt Gansey more than he would have admitted out loud. With precision, he asked, “Is that what you think of me?” “You don’t know, Gansey,” Adam said. “You don’t know anything about money, even though you’ve got all of it. You don’t know how it makes people look at me and at you. It’s all they need to know about us. They’ll think I’m your monkey.” I am only my money. It is all anyone sees, even Adam.

***

What could these raven boys have going on under their skins that could deafen her mother? Was it all of them in conjunction, or was it merely Gansey, his energy screaming out the count­down to his death? “What do you mean, very loud?” Gansey asked. He was, Blue thought, very clearly the ringleader of this little pack. They all kept looking to him for their cues of how to interpret the situation.

***

“Calla,” Maura said, at the same time that Adam said, “Gansey.” Adam murmured something directly into Gansey’s ear and then leaned back. A bone moved at Gansey’s jawline. Blue saw him shift back into President Cell Phone; she hadn’t been aware, before, that he’d been anything else. Now she wished she’d been paying better attention, so she could’ve seen what was different about him.
Gansey said, “I’m sorry. Ronan is blunt, and he wasn’t comfortable coming here in the first place. I wasn’t trying to insinuate that you were less than genuine. Can we continue?” He sounded so old, Blue thought. So formal in comparison to the other boys he’d brought. There was something intensely discomfiting about him, akin to how she felt compelled to impress Ronan.

***

She stopped in front of Gansey. This close, she again caught the scent of mint, and that made Blue’s heart trip unsteadily. Gansey looked down at the fanned deck of cards in her hands. When she saw him like that, she saw the bend of his shoulders and the back of his head, and she piercingly remembered his spirit, the boy she’d been afraid she’d fall in love with. That shade hadn’t worn any of the effortless, breezy confidence of this raven boy in front of her. What happens to you, Gansey? she wondered. When do you become that person?

***

Something inside him felt like the night, hungry and wanting and black. He thought about the dark eyeholes of the skeletal knight on the Death card. An insect was buzzing against the window, the sort of buzz­-tap that came from an insect with some size to it. He thought about his EpiPen, far away in the glove box of the car, too far away to be a useful antidote if it was needed. The insect was probably a fly or a stink bug or yet another crane fly, but the longer he lay there, the more he considered the idea that it could be a wasp or a bee. It probably wasn’t. But he opened his eyes. Gansey climbed softly from the bed, bending to retrieve a shoe that lay on its side. Walking cautiously to the window, he searched for the sound of the insect. The shadow of the telescope was an elegant monster on the floor beside him. Though the sound of buzzing had died away, it only took him a moment to find the insect on the window: a wasp, crawling up the narrow wooden frame of the window, swiveling back and forth. Gansey didn’t move. He watched it climb and pause, climb and pause. The streetlights outside made a faint shadow of its legs, its curved body, the fine, insubstantial point of the stinger. Two narratives coexisted in his head. One was the real image: the wasp climbing up the wood, oblivious to his presence. The other was a false image, a possibility: the wasp whirring into the air, finding Gansey’s skin, dipping the stinger into him, Gansey’s allergy making it a deadly weapon. Long ago, his skin had crawled with hornets, their wings beating even when his heart hadn’t. His throat was tight and full.
“Gansey?” Ronan’s voice was just behind him, the timbre of it strange and initially unrecognizable. Gansey didn’t turn around. The wasp had just twitched its wings, nearly lifting off. “Shit, man!” Ronan said. There were three footsteps, very close together, the floor creaking like a shot, and then the shoe was snatched from Gansey’s hand. Ronan shoved him aside and brought down the shoe on the window so hard that the glass should’ve broken. After the wasp’s dry body had fallen to the floorboard, Ronan sought it out in the darkness and smashed it once more. “Shit,” Ronan said again. “Are you stupid?” Gansey didn’t know how to describe how it felt, to see death crawling inches from him, to know that in a few seconds, he could have gone from “a promising student”to “beyond saving.” He turned to Ronan, who had painstakingly picked up the wasp by a broken wing, so that Gansey wouldn’t step on it.

***

Ronan pulled himself back, sorted himself out. Instead of answering, he asked, “Do you not want me to come?” Something stuck in Gansey’s chest. “I would take all of you anywhere with me.”

***

Something about Noah’s uneasy face reminded him of the frightened faces surrounding him, hornets on his skin, the sky blue as death above him. A long, long time ago, he’d been given another chance, and lately, the weight of needing to make it matter felt heavier. He looked away from Noah, out the wall of windowpanes. Even now, it seemed to Gansey that he could feel the aching presence of the nearby mountains, like the space between him and the peaks was a tangible thing. It was as excruciating as the imagined sleeping countenance of Glendower. Ronan was right. Things felt bigger. He may not have found the line, or the heart of the line, but something was happening, something was starting. Noah said, “Don’t throw it away.”

***

Gansey derived a large part of his pleasure from meeting goals, and a large part of that large part was pleased by meeting goals efficiently. There was nothing more efficient than aiming for your destination as the crow flew.

***

“If you’re going to embarrass me, I’ll throw you out and fly myself,” Gansey said from the seat beside her. This was not a true threat. Not only would he not push Helen out at this altitude, he wasn’t legal to fly without her. Also, truth be told, he wasn’t very good at flying a helicopter, despite several lessons. He seemed to lack the important ability to orient himself vertically as well as horizontally, which led to disagreements involving trees. He comforted himself with the knowledge that, at least, he could parallel park very well.

***

He didn’t like to see either of the women in his family disappointed; it ruined perfectly good meals.

***

“I believe that is a man chasing a car,” Gansey said.
“Not that. This.” She pointed to one of the other doodles. “They’re ley lines.” He stretched out a hand for the journal. For a strange, hyperaware moment, he realized how closely she watched him as he took it. He didn’t think it missed her notice how his left hand curved familiarly around the leather binding, how the thumb and finger on his right hand knew just how much pressure to apply to coax the pages to spread where he wanted them to. The journal and Gansey were clearly long­ acquainted, and he wanted her to know. This is me. The real me. He didn’t want to analyze the source of this impulse too hard. He focused on flipping through the journal instead.

***

Gansey had a sense of incredible rightness, then, with everyone assembled by the Pig. Like Blue, not the ley line, was the missing piece that he’d been needing all these years, like the search for Glendower wasn’t truly underway until she was part of it. She was right like Ronan had been right, like Adam had been right, like Noah had been right. When each of them had joined him, he’d felt a rush of relief, and in the helicopter, he’d felt exactly the same way when he’d realized it was her voice on the recorder. Of course, she could still walk away. She won’t, he thought. She has to feel it, too.

***

From the backseat, Blue shouted, “Does it always smell like gasoline?”
“Only when it’s running!” Gansey called back.
“Is this thing safe?”
“Safe as life.”

***

“We have to be back in three hours,” Ronan said. “I just fed Chainsaw but she’ll need it again.”
“This,” Gansey replied, “is precisely why I didn’t want to have a baby with you.”

***