It was remarkably easy to disobey Maura.

Maura Sargent had very little experience disciplining children, and Blue had very little experience being disciplined, so there was nothing to stop Blue from going with Adam when he met her in front of the house. She didn’t even feel guilty, yet, because she had no practice in that, either. Really, the most remarkable thing about the entire situation was how hopeful she felt, against all odds. She was going against her mother’s wishes, meeting with a boy, meeting with a raven boy. She should’ve been dreading it.

But it was very difficult to imagine Adam as a raven boy as he greeted her, his hands neatly in his pockets, scented with the dusty odor of mown grass. His bruise was older and therefore more dreadful looking.

“You look nice,” he said, walking with her down the sidewalk.

She was uncertain if he was being serious. She wore heavy boots she’d found at the Goodwill (she’d attacked them with embroidery thread and a very sturdy needle) and a dress she’d made a few months earlier, constructed from several different layers of green fabric. Some of them striped. Some of them crochet. Some of them transparent. It made Adam look quite conservative, like she was abducting him. They did not, Blue mused with a bit of unease, look anything like a couple.

“Thanks,” she replied. Then, fast, before she could lose her nerve, “Why did you want my number?”

Adam kept walking, but he didn’t look away. He seemed shy until he didn’t. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Blue replied. Her cheeks felt a little warm, but she was well into this conversation and she couldn’t back down now. “Because I know you’re going to think I feel bad about it, and I don’t.”

“All right.”

“Because I’m not pretty. Not in the way that Aglionby boys seem to like.”

“I go to Aglionby,” Adam said.

Adam did not seem to go to Aglionby like other boys went to Aglionby.

“I think you’re pretty,” he said.

When he said it, she heard his Henrietta accent for the first time that day: a long vowel and pretty like it rhymed with biddy. In a nearby tree, a cardinal went wheek. wheek. wheek. Adam’s sneakers scuffed on the sidewalk. Blue considered what he had said, and then she considered it some more.

“Pshaw,” she said finally. She felt like when she’d first read his card with the flowers. Weirdly undone. It was like his words had spun tight some sort of thread between them, and she felt like she ought to somehow ease the tension. “But thanks. I think you’re pretty, too.”

He laughed his surprised laugh.

“I have another question,” Blue said. “Do you remember the last thing my mother said to Gansey?”

His rueful face made it clear that he did.

“Right.” Blue took a deep breath. “She said she wouldn’t help. But I didn’t.”

After he’d called, she’d hastily scrawled an unspecific map to the unnamed church where she’d sat with Neeve on St. Mark’s Eve. It was just a few scratched parallel lines to indicate the main road, some spidery named cross streets, and finally, a square labeled only THE CHURCH.

She handed Adam this map, unimpressive on a wrinkled piece of notebook paper. Then, from her bag, she handed him Gansey’s journal.

Adam stopped walking. Blue, a few feet ahead of him, waited as he frowned at the things in his hands. He held the journal very carefully, like it was important to him, or perhaps like it was important to someone who was important to him. Desperately she wanted him to both trust her and respect her, and she could tell from his face that she didn’t have much time to accomplish either.

“Gansey left that at Nino’s,” she said quickly. “The book. I know I should’ve given it back at the reading, but my mom … well, you saw her. She doesn’t normally — she isn’t normally like that. I didn’t know what to think. Here’s the thing. I want to be in on this thing, that you guys are doing. Like, if there really is something supernatural going on, I want to see it. That’s all.”

Adam merely asked, “Why?”

With him, there was never any option but the truth, said as simply as possible. She didn’t think he would stand for anything else. “I’m the only person in my family who’s not psychic. You heard my mom; I just make things easier for people who are psychic. If magic exists, I just want to see it. Just once.”

“You’re as bad as Gansey,” Adam said, but he didn’t sound as if he thought that was very bad at all. “He doesn’t need anything but to know it’s real.”

He tilted the notebook paper this way and that. Blue was instantly relieved; she hadn’t realized how still he’d been until he’d begun to move again, and now it was like tension had been bled out of the air.

“That’s the way to the corpse ro — the ley line,” she explained, pointing at her scratchy map. “The church is on the ley line.”

“You’re sure?”

Blue gave him a deeply withering look. “Look, either you’re going to believe me or not. You’re the one who asked me along. ‘Exploring’!”

Adam’s face melted into a grin, an expression so unlike his usual one that his features needed to completely shift to accommodate it. “So you don’t do anything quiet, do you?”

The way he said it, she could tell that he was impressed with her in the way that men were usually impressed with Orla. Blue very much liked that, especially since she hadn’t had to do anything other than be herself to earn it. “Nothing worth doing.”

“Well,” he said, “I think you’ll find I do pretty much everything quiet. If you can be all right with that, I guess we’ll be fine.”

 

It turned out that she had walked or biked past Gansey’s apartment every single day of the year, on the way to school and to Nino’s. As they walked toward the massive warehouse, she spotted the fiendishly orange glint of the Camaro in the overgrown parking lot and, only a hundred yards away, a glistening navy blue helicopter.

She hadn’t really believed the part about the helicopter. Not in a way that prepared her for seeing an actual, life-sized helicopter, sitting there in the lot, looking normal, like someone would park an SUV.

Blue stopped in her tracks and breathed, “Whew.”

“I know,” Adam said.

And here, again, was Gansey, and again Blue had a strange shock of reconciling the image of him as a spirit and the reality of him beside a helicopter.

“Finally!” he shouted, jogging out toward them. He was still wearing those idiotic Top-Siders she’d noticed at the reading, this time paired with cargo shorts and a yellow polo shirt that made it look as if he were prepared for any sort of emergency, so long as the emergency involved him falling onto a yacht. In his hand he held a container of organic apple juice.

He pointed his no-pesticides juice at Blue. “Are you coming with?”

Just as at the reading, Blue felt cheap and small and stupid just by being in his presence. Clipping her Henrietta vowels as best as she could, she answered, “Coming along in the helicopter you just happen to have at your beck and call, you mean?”

Gansey slung a burnished leather backpack over his burnished cotton shoulders. His smile was gracious and inclusive, as if her mother hadn’t recently refused to assist him in any way, as if she hadn’t just been borderline rude. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Behind him, the helicopter began to roar to life. Adam stretched out the journal to Gansey, who looked startled. Just a tiny bit of his composure slid, enough for Blue to see once more that it was part of his President Cell Phone mask.

“Where was it?” yelled Gansey.

And he had to yell. Now that it was running, the blades of the helicopter didn’t so much roar as scream. Air beat against Blue’s ears, more feeling than sound.

Adam pointed at Blue.

“Thanks,” Gansey shouted back. It was a default answer, she saw; he fell back onto his powerful politeness when he was taken by surprise. Also, he was still watching Adam, taking his cues from him as to how he should react to her. Adam nodded, once, briefly, and the mask slipped just a little more. Blue wondered if the President Cell Phone demeanor ever vanished completely when he was around his friends. Maybe the Gansey she’d seen in the churchyard was what lay beneath.

That was a sobering thought.

The air rumbled around them. Blue felt like her dress would fly away. She asked, “Is this thing safe?”

“Safe as life,” Gansey replied. “Adam, we’re behind schedule! Blue, if you’re coming, tighten your liberty bodice and come on.” As he ducked to approach the helicopter, his shirt, too, flapped against his back.

Blue was suddenly a little nervous. It wasn’t that she was scared, exactly. It was just that she hadn’t psychologically prepared herself for leaving the ground with a bunch of raven boys when she’d woken up this morning. The helicopter, for all its size and noise, seemed like a pretty insubstantial thing to trust her life to, and the boys felt like strangers. Now, it felt like she was truly disobeying Maura.

“I’ve never flown,” she confessed to Adam, a shout to be heard over the whine of the helicopter.

“Ever?” Adam shouted back.

She shook her head. He put his mouth right against her ear so that she could hear him. He smelled like summer and cheap shampoo. She felt a tickle go all the way from her belly button to her feet.

“I’ve flown once,” he replied. His breath was hot on her skin. Blue was paralyzed; all she could think was This is how close a kiss is. It felt every bit as dangerous as she’d imagined. He added, “I hated it.”

A moment passed, both of them motionless. She needed to tell him that he couldn’t kiss her — just in case he was her true love — but how could she? How could she tell a boy that before she even knew if he wanted to kiss her at all?

She felt him take her hand. His palm was sweaty. He really did hate flying.

At the door to the helicopter, Gansey looked back over his shoulder at them, his smile complicated when he saw them holding hands.

“I hate this,” Adam shouted at Gansey. His cheeks were red.

“I know,” Gansey yelled back.

Inside the helicopter, there was room for three passengers on a bench seat in the back, and one in a utilitarian seat beside the pilot. The interior would have resembled the backseat of a really big car if the seat belts hadn’t had five-point fasteners that looked like they belonged in an X-wing fighter. Blue didn’t like to think why passengers had to be strapped down so securely; possibly they were expecting people to be bounced against the walls.

Ronan, the raven boy who was more raven boy than the others, was already installed in a window seat. He didn’t smile when he looked up. Adam, punching Ronan’s arm, took the middle seat, while Blue took the remaining window seat. As she toyed with the seat belt straps, Gansey leaned into the cabin to knock knuckles with Adam.

A few minutes later, when Gansey climbed into the front seat beside the pilot, she saw that he was grinning, effusive and earnest, incredibly excited to be going wherever they were going. It was nothing like his previous, polished demeanor. It was some private joy that she managed to be in on by virtue of being in the helicopter and, just like that, Blue was excited, too.

Adam leaned toward her as if he was about to say something, but ultimately, he just shook his head, smiling, like Gansey was a joke that was too complicated to explain.

In front, Gansey turned to the pilot, who surprised Blue a little — a young woman with an impressively straight nose, her brown hair swept into a beautiful knot, headphones clamping down any loose strands. She seemed to find Blue and Adam’s proximity far more interesting than Gansey had.

The pilot shouted at Gansey, “Aren’t you going to introduce us, Dick?”

Gansey made a face.

“Blue,” he said, “I’d like you to meet my sister, Helen.”