“Welcome, welcome,” Henry told them, as if he had not just seen Gansey a moment before. “Did you hit the cat?”
He had taken enormous care with his appearance. His toga was tied with more care than any tie Gansey had ever knotted, and Gansey had knotted a lot of ties. He was wearing the most chrome watch Gansey had ever seen, and Gansey had seen a lot of chromed things. His black spiked hair strove frantically upward, and Gansey had seen a lot of things striving frantically upward.
“We zigged,” Blue said tersely. “It zagged.”
“Wendybird came!” Henry exclaimed, as if he had only just noticed her. “I googled lady togas in case you did. Good work on the cat. Mrs Woo would poison us in our sleep if you’d squashed it. What’s your name again?”
“Blue,” Gansey said. “Blue Sargent. Blue, do you remember Henry?”
They eyed each other. At their previous brief meeting, Henry had managed to thoroughly offend Blue through casual self-deprecation. Gansey understood on a basic level that Henry made outrageous and offensive fun of himself because the alternative was storming into a room and flipping tables on to the money changers behind them. Blue, however, had clearly thought that he was merely a callow Aglionby princeling. And in her current mood —
“I remember,” she said coolly.
“It was not my finest moment,” Henry said. “My car and I have since made amends.”
“His electric car,” Gansey inserted with subtlety, in case Blue had missed the environmental ramifications.
Blue narrowed her eyes at Gansey and then pointed out, “You could bike to Aglionby from here.”
Henry wagged a finger. “True, true. But it is important to practise safe bicycling, and they have not yet made a helmet to accommodate my hair.” To Gansey, he said, “Did you see Cheng Two out there?”
Gansey didn’t really know Cheng2 – Henry Broadway, actually, confusingly nicknamed not because he was the second of two Chengs at Aglionby, but rather because he was the second of Henrys – aside from what everyone knew: that he was a high-speed shaker with energy drinks pumping continual voltage to his extremities. “Not unless he got a CaMr y while I wasn’t looking.”
This made Henry laugh mirthfully, as if Gansey had touched upon some previous conversation. “That’s Mrs Woo’s. Our tiny overlord. She’s around here somewhere. Check your pockets. She could be there. Sometimes she falls into these cracks between the floorboards – that’s the hazard of these great old houses. Where are Lynch and Parrish?”
“Both busy, alas.”
“That is incredible. I knew the president did not always have to act in concert with Congress and the Supreme Court; I just never thought I’d live to see the day.”
Gansey asked, “Who else is coming?”
“Just the usual suspects,” Henry said. “No one wants to see a casual acquaintance in a bedsheet.”
“You don’t know me,” Blue pointed out. It was impossible to tell what her facial expression meant. Nothing good.
“Richard Gansey the Third vouches for you, so close enough.”
A door opened at the end of the hallway, and a very small Asian woman of any age stomped out with an armful of folded sheets.
“Hello, auntie,” Henry said sweetly. She glared at him before stomping through another doorway. “Mrs Woo was thrown out of Korea for her bad temper, poor thing; ha, she has the charm of a chemical weapon.”
Gansey had vaguely figured that some sort of authority figure lived at Litchfield House, but he hadn’t thought much harder. Politeness dictated that he should have sourced flowers or food in the case of a small gathering. “Should I have brought something for her?”
“Who?”
“Your aunt.”
“No, she’s Ryang’s,” Henry said. “Come, come, let’s go further in. Koh is upstairs cataloguing beverages. You do not have to get drunk, but I will be getting drunk. I’m told I don’t get loud, but sometimes I can get very philanthropic. Fair warning.”
Now Blue looked properly judgemental, which was about two ticks off from her ordinary expression and one tick off from Ronan’s. Gansey was beginning to suspect that these two worlds were not going to mingle.
A mighty crash sounded as Cheng2 and Logan Rutherford appeared through another door, plastic bags in hands. Rutherford had the sense God gave him to keep his mouth shut, but Cheng2 had never learned that skill.
He said, “Holy fuck, we got girls?”
Beside Gansey, Blue grew four times taller; all the sound sucked in from the room in preparation for the explosion.
This was going to be terrible.
It was 6:21.
No, it was 8:31. Ronan had read the car clock wrong.
The sky was black, the trees were black, the road was black. He pulled up to the kerb in front of Adam’s. Adam lived in an apartment located above the office of St. Agnes Catholic Church, a fortuitous combination that focused most of the objects of Ronan’s worship into one downtown block. Ronan, who had been neglecting his phone as usual, had missed a call from Adam several hours before. The voicemail had been brief: “If you’re not going to Cheng’s with Gansey tonight, would you come help me with Cabeswater?”
Ronan was not going to Henry Cheng’s under any circumstances. All that smiling and activism gave him a rash.
Ronan was certainly going to Adam’s.
So now he climbed out of the BMW, clucking to Chainsaw so that she’d stop trying to worry a seam free in the passenger seat, and scanned the lot beside the church for the tri-coloured Hondayota. He spotted it, the headlights still on, engine off. Adam was crouched in front of it, staring unflinchingly into the headlights’ brilliance. His fingers were spread on the asphalt and his feet braced like a runner waiting for the starting shot. Three tarot cards splayed before him. He’d taken one of the floor mats out of the car to crouch on to keep from dirtying his uniform trousers. If you combined these two things – the unfathomable and the practical – you were most of the way to understanding Adam Parrish.