You aren’t sleeping,” Persephone said as she woke Blue, “so would you come help us?”
Blue opened her eyes. Her mouth was pasted shut. A fan in the corner of the room rotated back and forth, drying sweat on the backs of her knees. Persephone knelt on the edge of her bed, draping a crimped pale cloud of hair around Blue’s face. She smelled of roses and masking tape. The sky outside was black and blue. “I was.”
In her tiny voice, Persephone pointed out, “But you aren’t now.”
There was absolutely no point in arguing with her; it was like fighting with a cat. Also, it wasn’t strictly untrue. With an irritable stretch, she kicked Persephone off her bed and tossed off her sheet. Together they padded down the midnight stairs into the musty glow of the kitchen. Maura and Calla were already there, hunched over the table like a pair of conspirators, heads close together. The fake Tiffany lamp above them painted the backs of their heads in purple and orange. The night pressed in the glass door at their back; Blue could see the familiar, comforting silhouette of the beech tree in the yard.
At the sound of Blue’s footfalls, Maura looked up. “Oh, good.”
Blue gave her mother a heavy look. “Do I have time to make myself some tea?”
Maura flapped her hand. By the time Blue joined them at the table with her cup, all three women were drawn over a single object, one blond head, one brunette, one black. Three people but one entity.
Blue shivered a little as she sat down.
“Oh, mint tea,” Calla said meaningfully, ruining the mood.
Rolling her eyes, Blue asked, “What is it I’m helping with?”
They opened their ranks enough for her to see what they clustered around: a cell phone. It was cupped in Calla’s hand; clearly they’d been trying to get her reading on it.
“This is Mr. Gray’s,” Maura said. “Will you help us?”
Wearily, Blue placed her hand on Calla’s shoulder.
“No,” Maura said. “Not like that. We’re trying to figure out how to access his email.”
“Oh.” She accepted the phone. “Kids these days.”
“I know, right?”
Blue thumbed through the screens. Though she had no cell phone of her own, she had handled them plenty, and this was the same model as Gansey’s. It took no particular skill to open Mr. Gray’s email. She handed it back.
The three women leaned in.
“Did you steal that?” Blue asked.
There was no answer. Their necks were all craned, looking.
“Shall I light some orris? And celery?”
Persephone blinked up, her black eyes a little far away. “Oh, yes, please.”
With a yawn, Blue pushed up from the table and prepared a little plate of celery seed and orris root from the cabinet. She used one of the candles on the counter to light it. Or sort of light it. The mixture smoked and popped, the celery seeds twitching like popcorn and the orris root smelling of burning violets. The smoke of them was meant to clarify psychic impressions.
She set the plate down on the table between them. It had begun to smell a little like fireworks. “So why are you going through his phone?”
“We all knew he was looking for something,” Maura replied. “We just didn’t know what. Now we know what.”
“And what is that?”
“Your snake boy,” Calla said. “Only he doesn’t know it’s a boy.”
Maura said, “He calls it the Greywaren and says it’s to take things out of dreams. You’re going to have to be careful, Blue. I think that family is all tangled up in something messy.”
Something messy that involved Ronan’s father being beaten to death with a tire iron. That part Blue already knew.
“Do you think he’s dangerous to Ronan?” Blue remembered Declan Lynch’s battered face. “I mean, if he finds out that the Greywaren is a he and not an it?”
Calla said, “Absolutely” at the same time that Maura said, “Probably not.”
Persephone and Calla shot looks at Maura.
“I’ll take that as a maybe,” Blue said.
At that moment, the phone leapt from the table surface. All four of them jumped. Blue was the first to calm; it was only ringing. Or rather, buzzing and vibrating its way across the table.
“Write down the number!” Calla called, but she must’ve been talking to herself, because she already was.
In a small voice, Persephone said, “It’s a Henrietta number. Do you want to pick it up?”
Maura shook her head. After a moment, a voicemail buzzed through. “That we’ll listen to, though. Uh. Blue? Make it work?”
Shaking her head, Blue swiped the phone and thumbed to the voicemail. She handed it to Maura.
“Oh,” Maura said, listening. “It’s him. Do I push this button to call him back —? Yes.” She waited as the phone rang and then — “Ah, hello, Mr. Gray.”
Blue loved that voice of her mother’s, except for when it was being used on her. It was her authoritative, cheerful voice, the one that said she had all of the cards. Only now she was using it on a hit man whose phone she had just stolen. Blue couldn’t decide if this was delightfully cheeky or incredibly foolish.
“Well, you didn’t think I was going to answer a call on your phone, did you? That would be awfully rude. Did you get home all right? Oh, yes, you can have it back now. I’m sorry if you needed it. Did you — oh.”
Whatever the Gray Man had said immediately shut Maura up. She dropped her eyes from the others and sucked her upper lip between her teeth. The tips of her ears were pink. She listened for a moment, swatting Calla and Persephone back.
“Well,” she said finally. “Any time. I’d say that you should call first, but — well. You know. I have your phone. Ha. All right. All right. Don’t sleep on your back. All the swords will go through to the other side. Yep, that’s my professional advice.”
Maura pressed end.
“What did he say?” Blue demanded.
“That we might as well just ask him which valuables we wanted from him next so he could plan for their absence,” Maura said.
Calla’s lips pursed. “Is that all?”
Maura busied herself moving the phone from her left hand to her right and back to her left. “Oh, just that he had a nice time at dinner.”
Blue burst out, “But you haven’t forgotten Butternut.”
Her mother didn’t protest the name, for once. She said, “I never do.”