After the house had gone quiet, Blue got into bed and pulled the blanket over her face. Sleep was nowhere. Her mind was full of Adam’s dull expression, Ronan’s invented Camaro, and Gansey’s breath on her cheek.
Her mind took the memory of mint and spun it into a related memory of him, one that Gansey didn’t have yet: the first time she had ever seen him. Not at Nino’s when he asked her out on Adam’s behalf. But that night in the churchyard when all of the spirits of the future dead walked past. One year — that was the longest that any of those spirits had. They would all be dead before the next St. Mark’s Eve.
She had seen her first spirit: a boy in an Aglionby sweater, the shoulders of it spattered darkly with rain.
“What’s your name?”
“Gansey.”
She couldn’t make it untrue.
Downstairs, Calla’s voice suddenly swelled angrily. “Well, I will break the damn thing myself if I find you using it again.”
“Tyrant!” Maura shot back.
Persephone’s voice murmured amiably, too low for eavesdropping.
Blue closed her eyes, tight. She saw Gansey’s spirit. One hand braced in the dirt. She felt his breath. His hands pressed into her back.
Sleep didn’t come.
A few amorphous minutes later, Maura knocked the pads of her fingers on Blue’s open door. “Sleeping?”
“Always,” Blue replied.
Her mother climbed into Blue’s narrow bed. She jerked at the pillow until Blue allowed her a few inches of it. Then she lay down behind Blue, mother and daughter like spoons in a drawer. Blue closed her eyes again, inhaling the soft clove scent of her mother and the fading mint of Gansey.
After a moment, Maura asked, “Are you crying?”
“Only a little.”
“Why?”
“Generalized sadness.”
“Are you sad? Did something bad happen?”
“Not yet.”
“Ah, Blue.” Her mother wrapped her arms around her and breathed into the hair at the base of Blue’s neck. Blue thought about what Gansey had said, about being wealthy in love. And she thought about Adam, still collapsed on their sofa downstairs. If he had no one to wrap their arms around him when he was sad, could he be forgiven for letting his anger lead him?
Blue asked, “Are you crying?”
“Only a little,” her mother said, and inhaled snottily and unbecomingly.
“Why?”
“Generalized sadness.”
“Are you sad? Did something bad happen?”
“Not yet. A long time ago.”
“Those are the opposite,” Blue said.
Maura sniffed again. “Not really.”
Blue wiped her eyes with her pillowcase. “Tears don’t become us.”
Her mother wiped her eyes on the shoulder of Blue’s T-shirt. “You’re right. What becomes us?”
“Action.”
Maura laughed softly under her breath.
How terrible it would be, Blue thought, her mind on Adam again, to not have a mother who loved you?
“Yes,” she agreed. “How wise you are, Blue.”
On the other side of Henrietta, the Gray Man answered his phone. It was Greenmantle.
Without any particular preamble, he said, “Dean Allen.”
The Gray Man, phone in one hand, book in the other, didn’t immediately respond. He set his tattered edition of Anglo-Saxon riddles facedown on the side table. The television prattled in the background; one spy met another on a bridge. They were exchanging hostages. They’d been told to come alone. They hadn’t come alone.
It was taking an unexpectedly long period of time for the Gray Man to register the meaning of Greenmantle’s words. Then, once that had sunk in, it took him even longer to understand why Greenmantle was saying them.
“That’s right,” Greenmantle said. “The mystery’s gone. It wasn’t that hard to figure out who you were. Turns out Anglo-Saxon poetry is a very small field. Even at the undergrad level. And you know how well I do with undergrads.”
The Gray Man hadn’t been Dean Allen for a very long time. It was harder than one might expect to abandon an identity, but the Gray Man was more patient and devoted than most. Usually, one traded one identity for another, but the Gray Man wanted to be no one. Nowhere.
He touched the weathered spine of the riddle book.
ic eom wr?tlic wiht on gewin sceapen
Greenmantle added, “So, I want it.”
(I am a beautiful thing, shaped for fighting)
“I don’t have it.”
“Sure, Dean, sure.”
“Don’t call me that.”
nelle ic unbunden ?nigum hyran
nymte searos?led
“Why not? It’s your name, isn’t it?”
(Unstrung I obey no man; only when skillfully tied —)
The Gray Man said nothing.
“So you’re not going to change your story, Dean?” Greenmantle asked. “And yet you’re going to keep taking my calls. So that means you know where it is, but you don’t have it yet.”
For so many years he’d buried that name. Dean Allen wasn’t supposed to exist. There was a reason he’d given it up.
“Tell you what,” Greenmantle said. “I tell you what. You get the Greywaren and call me by the Fourth of July with your flight confirmation number back here. Or I tell your brother where you are.”
Hold still, Dean.
Logic swam away from the Gray Man. Very quietly, he said, “I told you about him in confidence.”
“I paid you in confidence. Turns out he’s eager to know where you are,” Greenmantle said. “We had a chat, Dean. Says he lost touch with you in the middle of a conversation he’s been wanting to finish.”
The Gray Man turned off the television, but voices still hummed in the background.
“Dean,” Greenmantle said. “You there?”
No. Not really. Color was draining from the walls.
“Do we have an agreement?”
No. Not really. A weapon didn’t come to an agreement with the hand that held it.
“Two days is plenty of time, Dean,” Greenmantle said. “See you on the other side.”