“I wouldn’t know.” Blue tried not to sound resentful, but she was. She hadn’t expected Artemus to fill a gaping hole in her heart, but she also hadn’t expected him to merely shut himself away in a closet.
Blowing a credible smoke ring through the dried leaves, Gwenllian shoved off the trunk and allowed herself to slide to a lower branch. “Your little shrub dweller of a father is not a very easy thing to know, oh blue lily, lily blue. But then again, that thing down there now is not easy to know, either, is it?”
“What thing – Noah? Noah is not a thing!”
“We came across a bird in a bush, a bird in a bush, a bird in a bush,” Gwenllian sang. She slipped down, and then down again, enough to dangle her boots at Blue’s eye level. “And thirty of its friends! You were feeling pretty alive-oh, little dead thing, between the two of us, weren’t you? Lily blue with her mirror-power, and lily gwen with her mirror-power, and you in the middle remembering life?”
It was annoying to realize that Gwenllian was probably right: This effervescent, lively Noah had almost certainly been made possible only by bookended psychic batteries. It was also annoying to see that Gwenllian had completely murdered Noah’s good mood. He had ducked his head so that nothing but the whorl of his cowlick was visible.
Blue glared up. “You’re horrible.”
“Thanks.” Gwenllian plunged to the ground with a great, flapping leap and stubbed out her cigarette on the beech’s trunk. It left a black mark that Blue felt mirrored on her soul.
She scowled at Gwenllian. Blue was very short and Gwenllian was very tall, but Blue very much wanted to scowl at Gwenllian and Gwenllian seemed intent on being scowled at, so they made it work. “What do you want me to say? That he’s dead? What’s the point of rubbing that in?”
Gwenllian leaned close enough that their noses brushed. Her words came out in a clove-scented whisper: “Have you ever solved a riddle you weren’t asked?”
Calla thought that Gwenllian had begun singing and riddling as a result of being buried alive for six hundred years. But looking at her gleefully bright eyes now, remembering how she’d been buried for trying to stab Owen Glendower’s poet to death, Blue also thought there was a very credible chance that Gwenllian had always been this way.
“There is no solving Noah,” Blue replied, “except by having him … pass on. And he doesn’t want that!”
Gwenllian cackled. “Want and need are different things, my pet.” She nudged the back of Noah’s head with a lifted boot. “Show her what you’ve been hiding, dead thing.”
“You don’t have to do anything she says, Noah.” Blue said it so quickly that she knew at once that she both believed Gwenllian and feared the truth of him.
They all knew that Noah’s existence was a fragile one, subject to the whims of the ley line and the location of his physical remains. And Blue and Gansey in particular had seen firsthand how Noah seemed to be having a harder and harder time coping with the vagaries of being dead. What Blue already knew of Noah was scary. If there was worse, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
Noah sighed. “It’s what you deserve. Just … I’m sorry, Blue.”
Nerves started to patter inside her. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“Yeah,” he said in a small voice, “there is. Don’t … just … OK.”
Gwenllian stepped back to give him room to stand. He did, slowly, stiffly, turning his back to Blue. He squared his ordinarily slouching shoulders as if preparing himself for battle. She felt the moment that he stopped pulling energy from her. It was as if she’d dropped a backpack to the ground.
Then he turned to face her.
Every summer, a travelling carnival came to Henrietta. They set up in the big stock sale fields behind the Walmart, and for a few nights it was flattened grass and funnel cakes and lights spasming in the dark. Blue always wanted to like it – she’d gone a few times with people from school (she’d always wanted to like them, too) – but in the end she had just felt like she was still waiting for the real event to happen. Thinking she needed thrills, she’d tried the drop tower. It had lifted them all up – ker-chunk, ker-chunk – and then – nothing. Some sort of malfunction had meant they were not dropped, merely lowered in the same way they’d climbed. Even though they had never plummeted, for a brief moment, Blue’s stomach had dropped as if she had been set free, a feeling made even stranger for the rest of her body not moving an inch.
It was precisely what she felt now.
“Oh,” said Blue.
It was hollow eyes dead and teeth-bared lips and soul threaded through naked bones. It had not been alive for years. It was impossible to not see how decayed the soul was, how removed from humanity, how stretched thin from time away from a pulse.
Noah Czerny had died.
This was all that was left.
That was the truth.
Blue’s body was a riot of shivers. She had kissed this. This thin, cold memory of a human.
Because it was only energy, it read her memories as easily as her words. She felt it haunt her thoughts and then pass out the other side.