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Noah.
The second (and last) time Blue kissed Noah, there were fireworks. The literal kind, muted by the dirty windows of Monmouth Manufacturing.
Summoned home to appear at his parents' annual New Year's Eve party, Gansey had convinced Adam to join him, and Ronan had followed. "Care for a road trip, Jane?" Gansey had asked, but she declined. As tempting as she found the idea of abandoning her mother for a weekend with little more than a hastily written note, Blue doubted she was ready for the Ganseys.
Anyway, 300 Fox Way still brimmed with tension, and a bit of teenage rebellion might tip the entire household into chaos. Grief for Persephone lingered in the house, none of them brave enough to open a proverbial window and let it out, and Blue didn't need to be psychic to see the effect it had on the psychics' readings. Calla didn't blame Maura outright, but she made no effort to absolve Maura either.
Then there was the matter of Artemus and Maura and Mr. Gray: a subject Blue couldn't imagine broaching with her mother but one that Calla had felt pressed to address at year's end.
Sensing a boiling point, Blue opted for a smaller act of rebellion and absconded from the house with a bottle from Orla's minibar.
At Monmouth, Noah watched with joy as Blue worked her way through the bottle. "Ronan will be so disappointed he missed this," he teased. "He may not even believe me."
"Ronan doesn't know everything," Blue laughed, hollow and bitter.
"No, he doesn't," Noah agreed. Somewhere in Monmouth, a clock tick-tocked emphatically, a prelude to: "Happy New Year, I guess?"
"No," Blue said, because that was the crux of it, right? Time was ticking away. Gansey's time was ticking away. January was just a breath from April.
"Yeah," Noah sighed, "I don't think it will be."
Sometimes, Blue wondered how much Noah knew about the corpse road, or if he could see death hovering over Gansey's shoulder.
Outside, the first wave of fireworks lit the sky, and the walls of Monmouth Manufacturing shook with their fury. And Blue — emboldened by both her pilfered alcohol and her teenage rebellion — decided to seize upon a tradition denied to her by fate, or prophecy, or whatever stupid cosmic force had decided she couldn't kiss her true love.
She grabbed Noah by the collar, laughing at his yelp of surprise, and kissed him as a second burst of fireworks exploded.
After, she said, "Happy New Year, anyway." Noah grinned and looked every bit the Aglionby boy he used to be.
Gansey.
January died with the blink of an eye. February bandwagoned, lingering only to throw a dead-end in the way of their search for Glendower.
On March 1, a disagreeably bright Sunday, Blue sat in her backyard under the beech tree with Adam and the Gray Man. Inside, Calla and Maura argued, and the phone rang incessantly. Blue asked, "What if we don't find Glendower?"
Since November, she had kept this fear to herself, but it had finally clawed its way up her throat and out of her mouth. Blue didn't know if she believed that Glendower would grant a favor, but, if he would, she doubted he could save Gansey. But Gansey was saved once, his life traded for Noah's, and if Glendower wasn't power behind that —
She couldn't stomach the thought of Gansey's borrowed time wasted, of him never finishing his quest.
"We will," The Gray Man said, and not for the first time, Blue appreciated the wholehearted way he had taken on their quest.
Still, Blue's fears burned in her throat, and as the days pressed on, they began to choke her. She tried hoping that Gansey had somehow sidestepped his death, that the specter on the corpse road had been a mistake, but she couldn't. She had never known the church watch to be wrong.
Two weeks later, she followed Gansey into Cabeswater, his Aglionby sweater gathering raindrops. Beneath them, the ley line hummed and Glendower waited, but Gansey touched her cheeks with his fingertips and rested his forehead against hers. "It'll be okay," he told her, "it'll be okay."
Blue was determined to fight this, but the tears were already pouring down her face, and the moment unfolded just as she witnessed it. This isn't fair, she wanted to say. She wanted to plead, to beg Gansey to give up Glendower and walk away, although she knew she couldn't. The third sleeper had been woken, and now, Glendower was the only one who could stop what was coming.
But waking Glendower required a sacrifice. Gansey stepped closer, and his hands trembled as he said, "Okay, I'm ready — Blue, kiss me."
"I can't," she wept, glimpsing a future without him. "I can't."
"Please, Blue." He was crying now, too, and Blue gripped the hem of his sweater tighter.
"But Glendower," she protested, "you were supposed to —"
"No, this was never mine. I was only meant to get you here." He cupped her face in his hands. "Kiss me, Jane, and then wake him up."
All the resolve in Blue's shattering heart fell away, and she tipped forward, capturing Gansey's mouth with hers. He kissed her back, one hand on her waist and the other still cupping her face. For a moment, the world was just them; and then there was only Blue.
♔
Hours later, Blue stood over Glendower. "Wake up," she commanded. The king opened his eyes, but he had nothing to offer her.
Adam.
The moon hung full over the corpse road, waiting. Blue sat on the stone wall, her mother to her right. "Are you sure you don't want to go home?" Maura asked for the sixth or seventh time. "I can manage without you, I think, and Mr. Gray will come for you, if you want."
Blue shook her head. Tonight, she needed normalcy, or whatever passed for it in her family. "I'm a mirror, right? So let me be a mirror."
A car approached, one headlight blinking in and out, and its driver parked a few feet from Maura's car. Adam, Blue realized.
He joined them at the wall, hands his pockets. "I didn't know if you would come," he said to Blue. To Maura, he added, "I thought maybe – Can I help?"
"I don't know," Maura said. "Can you?" She nodded toward the corpse road. Adam turned, and Blue knew that he saw what Maura did.
"Oh," he whispered.
"Ask their names," Maura instructed. She took the notebook from Blue's hands. "Be a mirror," she said, squeezing Blue's hand.
Adam stepped forward. "What's your name?" he asked, and for more than an hour, he learned the names of the dead. Maura hunched over the notebook, pausing only when a spirit wouldn't answer Adam. Blue recognized only a few names, grandparents of classmates mostly, but she tried to commit them to memory. After all those Blue had lost in the last year, she hoped to avoid the names on this list.
When the procession ended, just after 1 A.M., Maura slid off the church wall with a sigh. "Ready?" she asked, her hand on Blue's shoulder.
Blue wasn't. She wanted to walk along the corpse road and through the threshold of the church, the path Gansey's spirit had taken last year.
"I could stay for a bit, if you want," Adam offered.
"Yes," Blue agreed, jumping off the stone wall. To her mother, she said, "We won't stay long."
Maura pulled Blue into a hug. "Okay," she whispered. "Be safe."
When the car's taillights disappeared around a bend, Blue stepped onto the corpse road. Adam followed, and although she was only the mirror and not a psychic, Blue felt the ley line reach out for him. They walked toward the ruins of the church. "I know it's the future dead on the church walk, but I wondered if — I hoped we might see Noah," Adam confessed.
Blue swallowed, heart heavy at the thought of Noah. He'd disappeared when Gansey died — perhaps he'd been Gansey's ghost all along. At the entrance to the church, she said, "I followed Gansey's spirit here. This time last year, all I had was his name."
"'Gansey,'" Adam said, remembering the recording Gansey had made. "'That's all there is.'"
"Yeah." She sat on the crumbling threshold. "A year ago, I didn't know any of you."
"I'd seen you before," Adam admitted, sitting beside her. "You just didn't notice me."
"Well, all of you Aglionby boys look alike," Blue joked, biting back a sob. She swallowed, but the lump in her throat wouldn't relent. "I'm sorry," she said, taking his hand. And then — because she was selfish, and because her heart was broken, and because she felt a little like Gansey's ghost herself — she kissed him.
After a pause, Adam broke the kiss. "Blue," he whispered.
"I'm sorry," she said again, drawing her knees to her chest.
Adam put his arm around her. "No, I'm sorry."
Ronan.
"Ronan Lynch," the headmaster repeated a third time, and the room fell silent. Blue thought she heard the fluttering of wings. The headmaster sighed, then moved on to the next name on the list. A boy with blond hair accepted his diploma and sauntered off the stage with a grin.
Blue waited until Adam crossed the stage before abandoning her seat. Outside, she made her way to the back entrance the graduates used. Adam was waiting. "Did he tell you he wasn't coming?" she asked.
Adam shook his head. Of course not. "I'll take the Barns, you take Cabeswater?" Blue hadn't been to Cabeswater since Gansey, but she was less eager to return to the Barns.
"Okay," she agreed. "Call if you find him."
Inside Cabeswater, the air was crisp and cool, and the trees were bathed in late afternoon light. Blue found Ronan sitting with his mother. His graduation robe had been abandoned at the base of a nearby tree. Mrs. Lynch smiled when she approached. Cabeswater was kind to her; she looked nothing like the empty shell she'd been at the Barns.
"Oh," Ronan said, "it's you. I was expecting Parrish."
"He went to the Barns."
"Why would I go there?" Ronan asked.
"I don't know," Blue countered, "why wouldn't you go to graduation?"
He laughed humorlessly. "What would be the point?"
"...to graduate?"
Ronan led her away from his mother. "You graduate even if you don't go to the stupid ceremony."
They sat together at the base of a tree. "It wasn't stupid," she said. "It was important to Adam, you know."
Ronan scowled. "Adam and I don't value all of the same things."
That, she had to give him. Adam had been accepted to two of his top three Ivy League schools. Come August, he was leaving Henrietta — and Ronan and Blue — behind. "They had a memorial slideshow for Kavinsky and Gansey," she told him. "I almost walked out."
"So you see my point."
"Maybe," Blue conceded, "but you should still apologize to Adam."
"Of course," he agreed, although they both knew he wouldn't.
Leaning forward, Blue caught Ronan's eye. "I'm not leaving, you know," she said. She studied him — the barest clench of his jaw, the dip of his shoulders. "And you shouldn't be afraid to ask Adam for more."
Ronan grinned his snake-like grin. "Now I'm afraid?"
But Blue's unease with his snake-like features was long forgotten. "Of course," she told him. "We all are." They sat together for awhile, watching evening settling over Cabeswater. After a time, Blue said, "I kissed Adam."
Ronan laughed — a deep, genuine laugh that sounded foreign on his lips. "He told me." He glanced at her. "You're three-for-four now, aren't you?"
"Oh, god," she groaned, covering her face with her hands.
"No, I think Dick would be proud," Ronan said. "Just don't get any ideas here."
She laughed, falling back against the base of the tree, and her laughter echoed throughout Cabeswater.