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They hadn’t been at the churchyard for ten minutes before Henry started complaining.
Adam had expected the drive out to be an agony, but it wasn’t one. At least, not much. He had been expecting Henry to drive — it was his car, after all — but Blue had been in the driver’s seat when the Fisker trundled into the St. Agnes lot to pick him up, with Henry cheerful in shotgun.
It was a better start to this whole endeavor than Adam had expected, and it left him strangely wrong-footed.
Adam wasn’t completely sure why Henry was there. Blue, he understood: closure, or tradition, or both. She had done this every year. He wasn’t sure whether Blue’s mother just wasn’t up to it, or hadn’t wanted to go, but she had volunteered him to come along, and Adam had agreed.
###
At the churchyard, Henry had taken one look at the wall Blue and Adam were leaning against, and flatly refused to join them.
"Look at it," Henry said. "There's no way that's stable."
"It's lasted this long," Adam said.
"It's overgrown," Henry said. Admittedly, there were a few green tufts clinging to the stone, but they were mostly moss.
Adam said as much.
"No way," Henry said. He pointed past Blue, where some determined grass stalks had in fact found a foothold. "Those are weeds. All weeds turn into poison oak when it gets dark and then you've got a rash. No thank you."
"I've got calamine in my bag," Blue said. She was struggling into a coat with the sleeves cuffed at least twice; it was — or perhaps had been — Gansey's.
Adam finished fiddling with the flowers in his hands. They had pulled over at a gas station, despite the fact that the Fisker was well over half full, and Adam had felt the ley line buzzing, faintly, under his skin. Blue and Henry had gone inside, but Adam had waded into the overgrown lot behind the station shop, and past that into the woods looming past the edge of the lot, until he could feel the ley line bubbling up through his feet.
Then he had picked a few wildflowers. He hadn’t been sure why. It had just felt like the thing to do.
Henry and Blue were waiting for him in the car by the time he reemerged with a fistful of flowers, and neither of them had commented. But now that they had arrived, Adam knew why he’d picked the flowers.
He was trying to arrange them into something like a bouquet. He didn’t have any string with him, to tie them together. Blue gravely handed him a very tiny and sparkly hairclip: a hinged butterfly, with grasping claws.
Adam stared at it, feeling scraped raw. “Thank you,” he said as he fastened the clip around the stalks.
“He always liked those,” Blue said. She sounded gruff, the way she always did when ambushed by unexpected emotion. “I already said hello,” she said, and gestured towards the ruins where they’d buried Noah’s bones.
Adam turned his back towards her, and went inside the ruined church. There wasn’t a marker on the grave, but it wasn’t as though he could forget where they’d buried him. He stood above what was left of Noah, and knelt to put the flowers down. He didn’t know what to say.
He pressed two fingertips into the dirt, next to the tiny spray of wildflowers. The line murmured in his head.
###
Adam stood and headed back outside. Blue had settled against the stone wall, but Henry hadn’t joined her.
Instead, he dragged bundles out of the trunk of his Fisker past them, to set them down in the little patch of packed-down churchyard dirt between the wall and the ex-church.
Blue couldn’t stop watching him, bright and curious, her face peeking out over the turned-up collar of Gansey’s coat and her eyes fixed on Henry.
Adam didn’t care what Henry was doing, except that it was a curiosity: the most physical labour he’d ever seen Henry perform. Adam had more important things to worry about. He nudged the toe of his worn tennis shoes against Blue’s ankle, and she turned her gaze back to his. Her eyebrows were inquisitive.
Adam looked away. He suddenly didn’t know what to say.
“You’re sure this’ll work?” Adam asked, mostly to fill the silence. He wasn’t actually worried; it would work or it wouldn’t. He had made his choices — they all had — and the chips would fall where they may.
Blue must have been able to tell he didn’t need comfort. She just hummed, and pressed her elbow companionably against Adam’s.
Adam felt comforted despite himself, and pressed his elbow back.
Wind ruffled through the leaves, and pushed Adam’s hair into his eyes. It was cool, not bitterly cold as St. Mark’s Eve had been last year, but the sunlight had been weak and thready all day, with cloud cover unwilling to commit to rain. The sky had cleared as Henry drove them out of town, but twilit shade was already chilly. Adam was beginning to wish he’d brought a coat for when night set in.
He found himself watching Henry as he moved from the lych-gate to the car. Something he was wearing glittered in the dying sunlight.
Adam had grown accustomed to keeping an eye out for glimmers of light, first when the ley line might flicker in his peripheral vision to get his attention, and now, still, because both Chainsaw and Opal were liable to pounce on anything sparkly. But it wasn’t Cabeswater, or a potential bribe. It was just Henry’s earring.
Henry lifted a last box out of the trunk, and then pressed his hand flat against the lid to close it. For a moment, tall and lean and strangely gentle with his car, dramatic backlighting casting his face in shadows, he almost reminded Adam of Ronan.
Then Henry smacked his open palm against the closed trunk in a reassuring pat, and turned to them. Blue wolf-whistled, and Henry, grinning, gave her an exaggerated wink.
The resemblance to Ronan, needless to say, was now nonexistent.
With that, Henry strolled past them, and hoisted that last bundle higher under his arm just before he passed under the lych-gate. Adam turned his face up to look at the sky. The sunset was as washed out as the day had been: the sky bleaching to purple, clouds the polite pastel color of Gansey’s shorts, the sun a dull, hard marble in the sky.
“Alright,” Blue said, decisively, pulling one of her feet up onto the stone wall. She leaned forward, shaking her head to untuck her chin from the coat’s turned-up collar. Something in her hair jingled faintly with the movement. She shifted back onto the wall, sitting on it properly instead of in the same half-lean Adam was favoring.
“It’ll be fine,” Adam said. He put his palms against the top of the stone wall, and pushed himself up to sit beside her as the last daylight finally faded out of the sky.
He checked his watch. 8:11 PM. It would be at least three hours before the dead arrived.
###
“I’m bored,” Henry announced, stretching his arms upwards before slouching backwards. Adam and Blue ignored him to keep reviewing the procedure for a successful corpse watch.
Henry had spread a blanket out over the hard-packed dirt, and sat on it with his legs crossed. Now he was sprawled on his back, with his shirt riding up and his sunglasses pushed back onto his forehead.
He repeated himself, for good measure.
This proclamation, too, was roundly ignored. Henry let out a deeply persecuted sigh.
RoboBee lit up and drifted in a lazy, glowing loop above Henry’s chest. Twilight was fading; Adam’s eyes had adjusted, but RoboBee’s electric flickering was bright enough to contrast with the gloaming dark.
Blue peered over her shoulder and paused in her recitation of the night’s sequence of events. “I did tell you this was going to be boring,” she said.
“You did not, you horrible woman,” Henry said, his voice so fond Adam was embarrassed to be near him. “You said there would be ghosts! Drama! This is where you saw Ganseyman before the two of you even met!”
Blue winced minutely. All things considered, Adam figured that wasn’t exactly a romantic memory. When she spoke, her voice was sharp.
“I said there would be ghosts you couldn’t see of people you’d never met, and that it would be freezing and creepy.”
“Freezing and creepy isn’t boring,” Adam pointed out.
“Thank you,” Henry said, affronted. “I think your magic stuff is neat! Even when it’s just sitting around your place while Parrish plays with cards and your moms get drunk. No offense, Parrish,” he tacked on. Adam shrugged: none taken. He didn’t figure it looked like much of anything from the outside.
“I also said we’d be sitting out in the woods all night,” Blue said.
“So?” Henry said, still huffy.
“You hate the woods,” Adam said.
Henry subsided. “This is true,” he said with great equanimity. “But I had the evening available, and I wanted to provide moral support.”
Adam nudged Blue with an elbow, and raised an eyebrow at Henry: he nearly asked what sort of moral support this was supposed to be, but Blue ducked her head. She was nearly smiling.
“It’ll be fine,” Adam said. “Nothing out of the ordinary’s gonna happen.”
Blue wrinkled her nose at him. Her smile had rooted itself in the corner of her mouth, and it unfurled over her face.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” she agreed. “Just ghosts.”
“You’ve got time until the ghosts come,” Henry said, from the blanket. “I came prepared,” he said, gesturing at the bundles he’d unloaded from the Fisker: some utterly generic plastic bags. ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴀ ɴɪᴄᴇ ᴅᴀʏ. “There are snacks. Or, well, an extremely gas station picnic. And,” Henry said, pausing while he reached into one of the bags with a crinkle of plastic and produced a small flat box, which he then presented to them with a flourish. A 99 ¢ sticker obscured the ace of spades. “I brought cards,” Henry finished, beaming.
“Me too,” Adam said, and pulled Persephone’s deck out of his bag.
Blue laughed. The moon rose.
###
They moved to the blanket. The dead wouldn’t arrive for hours yet, and neither Adam nor Blue particularly wanted to stand around waiting for them.
Blue shuffled Adam’s cards, and then ripped the plastic casing off of the playing cards before shuffling those, too.
Adam watched her and Henry play a two-person game of Egyptian Ratscrew, holding his deck in his lap and eating some jerky. It was the good kind, the kind that Adam rarely bought for himself.
“Ow,” Henry said, or perhaps pouted. He rubbed at his fingers while Blue victoriously gathered up the central cards and added them to her hands. “You’re wearing rings!” Henry protested. “That’s not allowed.”
“Don’t be a sore loser,” Blue said. She nudged Adam. “You gonna play? It’s no fun with two people.”
“In a minute,” Adam said, and picked up his deck. He turned the tarot cards over in his hands, cutting the deck and letting the cards drop against his palms. He turned over the card now on top of the deck: sɪx ᴏꜰ ᴄᴜᴘs.
RoboBee landed on the card, obscuring the image on its face. Henry’s phone buzzed.
“The past returning,” Henry read off the screen. “That’s nicely ominous.”
Blue peered at the card, too. “Nostalgia,” she said, softly: she must have seen these cards used in dozens of readings. Hundreds.
Adam tapped a fingertip against the edge of the card, and RoboBee took flight again.
“Old friends,” Adam said, and pushed the card into the middle of the deck, and sighed. His relationship to the ley line was different, since Gansey and Cabeswater. Communication was even less clear than it had been last year, often not just the usual sort of cryptic but also hazy, filtered through static, like a radio station in the mountains. And time was funny on the lines. That was all it meant. He tucked the cards away again.
“Alright,” Adam said, and slapped into their game.
###
An hour or so later, they had exhausted card games: Blue’s rings were sharp, and they didn’t have quite enough people for a satisfying game of Spoons or Mao or President or Rummy.
The moon was full, and it was very bright here, almost drowning out the stars. Night had settled over them, muffling everything. Even Henry had lowered his voice and the brightness on his phone.
Blue was leaning against him, and he had his arm around her; RoboBee was beginning an exploratory crawl from Henry’s shoulder to Blue’s hair. The steel toe of her boots were hooked around Adam’s ankles.
It was quiet: early enough in the spring that bugs were still creakily emerging from the winter, that frogs weren’t yet peeping so loudly it sounded like a roaring in the ears. Maybe nature knew that tonight was a night for the dead. Blue was talking quietly: what it would be like. She had done this before. She didn’t say what it was like to recognize a name among the many it was her job to scribble down, or what it had been like to see Gansey last year.
Adam wondered whether he would recognize more ghosts than she had. Boyd’s serviced most of Henrietta, not just those of its residents who might visit Fox Way.
Headlights lit up the night. A car crunched over gravel. The three of them were tucked behind the churchyard’s low stone wall, invisible from the drive in. Adam sat upright. He wasn’t quite sure what he thought — maybe that Blue’s mothers had driven out to take over after all — but as soon as he could see the approaching car, he recognized those headlights.
He stood. The BMW ground to a stop and the headlights clicked off, leaving Adam blinking back, suddenly aware of the dark.
Ronan unbent his tall head, and slammed the door. Gansey took longer getting out of shotgun, loaded down as he was, but Adam didn’t quite have attention to spare for him: Ronan was clambering over the stone wall.
He threw a bundle of cloth at Adam. Adam caught it automatically, and then Ronan was standing right in front of him. He passed his hand over Adam’s, where it was fisted in whatever he’d thrown, and then pressed his mouth against Adam’s in a brief hello.
“Cheng said you were freezing to death,” he said, and took what he’d thrown at Adam back again, to unfold it into what looked like an army jacket and shake it at Adam: put this on.
Adam shrugged it on.
“He texted?” Adam said, voice teasing, and took Ronan’s hand. “You checked your phone?”
“He texted me,” Gansey said, from the car. Blue, who hadn’t realized he was here, leapt up to let him through the lych-gate. “Sorry it took so long,” Gansey said, and lifted a stack of Nino’s boxes. “We stopped for takeout.”
###
After that, it was difficult to succumb to creeping apprehension, or a sense of the mystical: here, with all of them together, magic felt normal and natural and intrinsic. There was nothing to dread. They were here, together; even Noah was remembered more loudly than usual.
Gansey tucked himself between Henry and Adam. Ronan was warm and solid against Adam’s other side. Blue made fun of Gansey’s pizza order, and Ronan threw pepperoni at her, getting Henry caught in the crossfire. They played cards. Ronan presented them with a bottle of something warming, which they passed around their tangle. Adam didn’t take it when it was handed to him, and Blue only took one sip — both of them had jobs to do — but whatever it was smelled sweet on Ronan’s breath, and left Gansey flushed and giggly.
It was the sort of night that happened more rarely than they wished: Adam and Blue still worked. College deadlines were approaching. Ronan often had inscrutable business of his own. Even with no magic catastrophes, they rarely managed to assemble the whole company for a night.
And they all felt it, Adam thought, when the line shifted. All of them were tied to it, in some way or another. He checked his watch: 11:04. Blue had said the dead weren’t particularly timely.
“I think that’s our cue,” Adam said, and took Blue’s arm to help her when she stood. Blue looked for her notebook, and found it, but her pen had disappeared somewhere. Gansey realized he’d been sitting on it, and dug it out from under his rear.
“Here you are, Jane,” Gansey said, presenting it to her with the sort of born-and-bred dignity Adam still couldn’t replicate.
“Thank you,” Blue said, gravely, and she ran a hand through his hair. Henry was gazing at them, the low light glinting in his eyes, and Blue fluffed her hand against the spikes of his hair as well. She met Adam’s eyes and jerked her head: shall we?
Adam nodded. Blue bumped her knuckles against Ronan’s bare skull as she walked past him, and mirrored Adam’s smirk at his muffled cry of outrage.
###
Blue perched on the stone wall, one leg folded up under the opposite thigh. Adam stood, just barely leaning against the wall. Both of them were wary.
A few minutes passed. Adam wondered if he had misread the line, if it wasn’t time yet, but the night was truly silent, now. The early bugs and frogs out this night had hushed into an echoing silence. Muffled laughter came from behind him, but so did shushing. All he could hear, then, was his own breath, a dizzy tipping in his bad ear. He sucked in a deep breath until the fullness in his chest steadied him, the earth pressing up against his feet.
He exhaled, and the first ghost appeared. He stared.
“I see someone,” he said.
“What’s her name?” Blue said. RoboBee was glowing, perched on the end of her pen.
“I don’t know,” Adam said. He didn’t recognize the ghost: it was a woman, maybe in her sixties. She looked like a Henrietta native: quiet and unremarkable. Another ghost appeared at her shoulder, this one a round-faced man. He could almost feel their lives, not yet ended, the connection between these apparitions and the lives they lived just a few miles away. He could follow them, if he wanted.
“So ask her,” Blue snapped, and put her free hand on his wrist. Adam felt the line crack and sharpen, energy flowing through him, and: yes. This was the job.
“What’s your name?” he asked the woman, and she said it. He echoed it to Blue. He asked the man, too, and then the ghost that appeared after him. Hazy figures faded into view one after the other from the woods and marched past him, through the lych-gate and then disappearing. It was rhythmic. He asked names and repeated them, Blue’s energy zinging through him to keep the ghosts present and then to flow down and ground in the line.
He couldn’t have said how many there were. There could have been anywhere between twelve and sixty.
When the last one disappeared, Adam kept his eyes on it, and exhaled.
“That’s all of them,” he said. He couldn’t recall the names, now that he’d said them. He had recognized one or two as he the words passed through his mouth, but he had been outside of himself as he said them, and now he couldn’t call them back to mind. Blue was mumbling the last few names back to herself as she scribbled them down. She let go of his wrist.
Adam’s gaze swept from the lych-gate back to the woods, and returned. A chin rested on his shoulder, and he narrowly suppressed a jump: Ronan had come up behind him. Adam saw Gansey, too, leaning up against the stone wall, angling to peer at Blue’s notebook over her shoulder. Henry was standing a pace behind Gansey, holding his hand.
Adam closed his eyes, and let himself lean back against Ronan’s chest, to let the stone wall take his weight. He felt drained, like the magic had run through him and taken most of him along with it.
“Do you guys see that?” Henry said. Adam opened his eyes.
Another ghost was forming, out on the corpse road. Adam checked his watch: it was well past midnight. 12:37 am.
This ghost wasn’t hazy, or a faint imprint of future time tied to its present life. It took a long time to solidify, but it came in sharp and clear, like a long-range lens slowly focusing.
It was late. The world hadn’t reawoken, yet, and Adam could feel all of them watching, with bated breath. He wasn’t the only one who could see this ghost.
When the ghost started walking towards them, the moon was shining straight through him. He didn’t say anything until he was close enough that Adam could have reached out to touch.
There was no mistaking him. Gansey’s eyes were suspiciously bright, and Ronan’s fingers were curled so tightly in Adam’s belt loop that the fabric was tearing.
“Hi, Noah,” Blue said, and flung herself at him. An unsteady smile unfurled over the ghost’s face.
“Sorry I’m late,” Noah said, and then, “I missed you guys. But — can we hang out somewhere else? This place still creeps me out.”