Calla kept her voice low. “Could he have been a portent?”
Portents – supernatural warnings of ill tidings to come – were not of particular interest to Calla, mostly because they were usually imaginary. People tended to see portents where there were none: black cats bringing bad luck, a crow promising sadness. But a true portent – an ominous suggestion from a little-understood cosmic presence – was not something to be ignored.
Maura’s voice was also hushed. “Could be. I haven’t shaken this terrible feeling all day. The only thing is, I didn’t think something sentient could be a portent.”
“Is he sentient?”
“Part of him, anyway. We were talking in the car. I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s decayed enough to appear as a mindless portent, but at the same time, there’s a boy in there still. I mean, we had him in the car.”
Both women mused upon this.
Calla said, “He’s the one who died on the ley line? Maybe Cabeswater made him strong enough to stay conscious for all of this, beyond when he should have passed on. If he’s too cowardly to go on, that crazy forest could be giving him enough power to stick it out here.”
Maura gave Calla another withering look. “It’s called scared, Calla Lily Johnson, and he is just a kid. Ish. Remember he was murdered. Remember he’s one of Blue’s best friends.”
“So what’s the plan? You want me to get ahold of him and find things out? Or are we trying to send him on?”
Uneasily, Maura said, “Remember the frogs, though.”
A few years before, Blue had caught two tree frogs while out performing neighbourly errands. She’d triumphantly set up a makeshift terrarium for them in one of Jimi’s largest iced tea pitchers. As soon as she’d gone to school, Maura had immediately divined – through ordinary channels, not psychic ones – that these tree frogs were in for a slow death if tended by a young Blue Sargent. She had set them free in the backyard and thus began one of the largest arguments she and her daughter had yet or since had.
“Fine,” Calla hissed. “We won’t free any ghosts while she’s at a toga party.”
“I don’t want to go.”
Both Maura and Calla jumped.
Of course Noah was standing beside them. His shoulders were slumped and his eyebrows tipped upward. Under it all were threads and black, dust and absence. His words were soft and slurred. “Not yet.”
“You don’t have much time, boy,” Calla told him.
“Not yet,” Noah repeated. “Please.”
“No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do,” Maura said.
Noah shook his head sadly. “They … already have. They … will again. But this … I want to do it for me.”
He held his hand out to Calla, palm up, as if he were a beggar. It was a gesture that reminded Calla of another dead person in her life, one who still hung sadness and guilt around her neck, even after two decades. In fact, now that she considered it, the gesture was too perfectly accurate, the wrist too limply similar, the fingers too delicately and intentionally sprawled, an echo of Calla’s memories —
“I’m a mirror,” Noah said bleakly, responding to her thoughts. He stared at his feet. “Sorry.”
He started to drop his hand, but Calla was finally moved to a reluctant and genuine compassion. She took his cool fingers.
Immediately a blow smashed into her face.
She should have expected it, but still, she barely had time to recover when the next came. Fear spewed up, then the pain, and then another blow – Calla nimbly blocked this one. She did not need to relive Noah’s entire murder.
She moved around it and found … nothing. Ordinarily, her psychometry worked exceptionally well on the past, digging through all recent events to any strong distant events. But Noah was so decayed that his past was mostly gone. All that remained were thready cobwebs of memories. There was more kissing – how did Calla’s day end up involving living through so many Sargents with so many tongues in their mouths? There was Ronan, appearing far more kind through Noah’s memories. There was Gansey, courageous and solid in ways Noah clearly envied. And Adam – Noah was afraid of him, or for him. This fear tangled through images of him in increasingly dark threads. Then there was the future, spreading out with thinner and thinner images and —
Calla took her hand away from Noah and stared at him. For once, she had nothing clever to say.
“OK, kid,” she said finally. “Welcome to the house. You can stay here as long as you can.”