The swirl of wind was still rising, flapping papers and knocking over stacks of books. The Dog was barking from behind the closed door of Noah’s old room. Goose bumps rippled on Blue’s skin, and her limbs felt heavy.
“Noah, stop,” Gansey said.
But he didn’t. The door to the apartment rattled.
Blue said, “Noah, I’m asking you now.”
He wasn’t attending, or there wasn’t enough of the true Noah to attend.
Standing up on her wobbly legs, Blue began to use all of the protective visualizations she’d been taught by her mother. She imagined herself inside an unbreakable glass ball; she could see out, but no one could touch her. She imagined white light piercing the stormy clouds, the roof, the darkness of Noah, finding Blue, armoring her.
Then she pulled the plug on the battery that was Blue Sargent.
The room went still. The papers settled. The light flickered once more and then strengthened. She heard a little gasp of a sob, and then absolute quiet.
Gansey looked shocked.
Noah sat in the middle of the floor, papers all around him, a mint plant spilling dirt by his hand. He was all hunched over and shadowless, his form slight and streaky, barely visible at all. He was crying again.
In a very small voice, he told Blue, “You said I could use your energy.”
She knelt in front of him. She wanted to hug him, but he wasn’t really there. Without her energy, he was a paper-thin boy, he was a skull, he was air in the shape of Noah. “Not like that.”
He whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
He covered his face, and then he was gone.
Gansey said, “That was impressive, Jane.”
That night, Blue leaned against the spreading beech tree in her backyard, her eyes cast up to the stars and her fingers touching the chilly, smooth bark of one of the roots. The kitchen light through the sliding door seemed far away.
That was impressive, Jane.
Although Blue was perfectly aware of the positive effects of her ability, she had never really considered the opposite. And yet Noah would have destroyed Monmouth Manufacturing if she hadn’t cut herself off from him.
The stars winked through the beech leaves. She’d read that new stars tended to form in pairs. Binary stars, orbiting in close proximity, only becoming single stars when their partner was smashed off them by another pair of wildly spinning new stars. If she pretended hard enough, she could see the multitude of pairs clinging to each other in the destructive and creative gravity of their constellations.
Impressive.
Maybe she was a little impressed. Not by pulling the plug on a dead boy — that seemed sad, nothing to brag about. But because she’d learned something about herself today, and she’d thought there was nothing left there to discover.
The stars moved slowly above her, an array of possibilities, and for the first time in a long time, she felt them mirrored in her heart.
Calla opened the sliding door. “Blue?”
“What?”
“If you’re done gallivanting for the day, I could use your body,” Calla said. “I have a reading.”
Blue raised her eyebrows. Maura only asked for her help during important readings, and Calla never asked, period. Curiosity rather than obedience pulled Blue to her feet. “This late? Now?”
“I’m asking now, aren’t I?”
Once inside, Calla fussed over the reading room and called for Persephone so many times that Orla screamed back that some people were trying to conduct phone calls and Jimi shouted, “Is it something I can help with?”
All of the fuss made Blue strangely nervous. At 300 Fox Way, readings happened so often that they ordinarily felt both perfunctory and unmagical. But this felt like chaos. This felt like anything could happen.
The doorbell rang.
“PERSEPHONE, I TOLD YOU,” Calla roared. “Blue, get that. I’ll be in the reading room. Bring him in there.”
When Blue opened the front door, she discovered an Aglionby student standing in the glow of the porch light. Moths fluttered around his head. He wore salmon-colored pants and white Top-Siders and boasted flawless skin and tousled hair.
Then her eyes adjusted and she realized that he was too old to be a raven boy. Quite a bit too old; it was hard to imagine how she would have thought it before even for a moment.
Blue scowled at his shoes and then at his face. Although everything about him had been cultivated to impress, she found him less impressive than she might have a few months before. “Hola.”
“Howdy,” he replied, with a cheery smile full of unsurprisingly straight teeth. “I’m here for a probing of my future. I expect the timing is still good?”
“You expect right, sailor. Come in.”
In the reading room, Calla had been joined by Persephone. They sat on one side of the table like a jury. The man stood across from them, idly drumming his fingers on a chair back.
“Sit,” intoned Calla.
“Any old chair,” Persephone added mildly.
“Not any old chair,” Calla said. She pointed. “That one.”
He sat opposite, his bright eyes all over the room as he did, his body dynamic. He looked like a person who got things done. Blue couldn’t decide if he was handsome or if his demeanor was fooling her into believing him so.
He asked, “Well, how does this work? Do I pay you up front or do you decide how much it is after you see how complicated my future is?”
“Any old time,” Persephone said.
“No,” Calla said. “Now. Fifty.”
He parted with the bills without malice. “Could I get a receipt? Business expense. That is a fantastic portrait of Steve Martin over there, by the way. Behold how its eyes follow you around the room.”
“Blue, would you get the receipt?” Persephone asked.
Blue, lingering by the door, went for a business card to write the amount on. When she returned, Persephone was saying to Calla, “Oh, we will have to use just yours. I don’t have mine.”
“Don’t have yours!” Calla replied incredulously. “What happened to them?”
“Coca-Cola shirt has them.”
With a mighty snort, Calla retrieved her tarot cards and instructed the man on how to shuffle them. She finished, “Then you pass them back to me, facedown, and I’ll draw them.”
He began.
“As you shuffle them, you should be thinking about what you’d like to know,” Persephone added in her small voice. “That will focus the reading quite a bit.”
“Good, good,” he replied, shuffling the cards more aggressively. He glanced up at Blue. Then, without warning, he flipped the deck so that the cards were faceup. He fanned them out, eyes darting over the selection.
This was not how Calla had instructed him.
Something in Blue’s nerves tingled a warning.
“So, if the question is ‘How can I make this happen?’ ” — he plucked a card free and set it on the table — “that’s a good start, right?”
There was dead silence.
The card was the three of swords. It depicted a bloody heart stabbed with the aforementioned three swords. Gore dripped down the blades. Maura called it “the heartbreak card.”
Blue needed no psychic perception to feel the threat oozing from it.