The Raven Boys

Stepping forward, leaning over the hood of the car, Ronan pressed his finger to the windshield, and while they watched, he wrote:

REMEMBERED

A realization that even if you had discovered the future, it really didn’t change how you lived in the present. They were truth, but they weren’t all of the truth.

The way Gansey saw it was this: If you had a special knack for finding things, it meant you owed the world to look

Not the currently dead, but the spirits of those who would die in the next twelve months

One, stay away from boys, because they were trouble. And two, stay away from Aglionby boys, because they were bastards

After they’d finished covering the last of the bones, they stood quietly inside the ruined walls. Blue stared at Gansey, in particular, his hands in his pockets, his head tilted down toward where they had just interred Noah. It felt like no time and all the time in the world since she’d seen his spirit walk this very path.

Gansey. That’s all there is.

She wouldn’t, she vowed, be the one to kill him.

“Can we go home? This place is so creepy.”

Euphoric, they all spun. Noah, rumpled and familiar, was framed in the arched doorway of the church, more solid than Blue remembered ever seeing him. Solid in form, anyway. He peered around the crumbled walls with a timorous expression.

Later, they dug him up. At the mouth of the access road, Ronan lounged beside his BMW with its hood ajar, acting as both roadblock and look out. Adam operated the backhoe Gansey had rented for the occasion. And Gansey transferred Noah’s bones to a duffel bag while Blue shone the flashlight over them to be certain they were all there. Adam reburied the empty casket, leaving a fresh grave identical to the one they’d begun with.

When they ran back to the BMW, giddy and breathless with their crime, Ronan told Gansey, “This will all come out and bite you in the ass, you know, when you’re running for Congress.”

“Shut up and drive, Lynch.”

They reburied his bones at the old ruined church, which was Blue’s idea.

“No one will bother them here,” she said, “And we know it’s on the ley line. And it’s holy ground.”

And slowly their lives found an equilibrium, though it didn’t seem they’d ever return to normal. The ley line was awake and Noah was all but gone. Magic was real, Glendower was real, and something was starting.

“Jane, not to be blunt, but this is a funeral,” Gansey said to Blue as she made her way across the field toward them. He and Ronan looked like groomsmen in their impeccable black suits.

Blue, lacking any black wardrobe options, had hastily stitched a few yards of cheap black lace over a green T-shirt she’d converted into a dress a few months earlier. She hissed furiously, “This was all the better I could do!”

“Like Noah cares,” Ronan said.

“Did you bring something else for later?” Gansey asked.

“I’m not an idiot. Where’s Adam?”

Gansey said, “He’s at work. He’s coming later.”

Noah’s bones were being buried in the Czerny family plot in a remote valley graveyard. His newly dug grave lay near the edge of the long, sloping graveyard on the side of a rocky hill. A tarp covered the fresh heap of dirt from grieving eyes. Noah’s family stood right next to the hole. The man and the two girls wept, but the woman stared off into the trees, dry-eyed. Blue didn’t have to be a psychic, though, to see how sad the woman was. Sad and proud.

Noah’s voice, cool and barely there, whispered in her ear. “Please say something to them.”

Blue didn’t reply, but she turned her head in the direction of his voice. She could nearly feel him, standing just behind her shoulder, breath on her neck, hand pressed anxiously to her arm.

“You know I can’t,” she replied in a low voice.

“You have to.”

“I would look like a crazy person. What good would it do? What could I possibly say?”

Noah’s voice was faint but desperate. His distress hummed through her. “Please.”

Blue closed her eyes.

“Tell her I’m sorry I drank her birthday schnapps,” Noah whispered.

God, Noah!

“What are you doing?” Gansey reached out and caught her arm as she started toward the grave.

“Humiliating myself!” She tugged free. As Blue approached Noah’s family, she rehearsed ways to make herself sound less insane, but she didn’t like any of them. She’d been with her mother often enough to suspect how this would go. Noah, only for you … She eyed the sad, proud woman.