The afternoon continued.
“What’s this?” said the other psychic.
A mirage had appeared at the end of the exit ramp, only now that they looked a bit harder, it was a real person, behaving like an unreal person. She was walking directly up the middle of the asphalt towards them, gripping an overstuffed butterfly-shaped bag in one hand. She had high, old-fashioned boots laced all the way up beyond where her peculiar dress ended. Her hair was a blond frothy cloud and her skin was chalky. Except for her black eyes, everything about her was as pale as the psychic beside Maura was dark.
Both Maura and the other psychic watched this third person labour up the exit ramp, seemingly unconcerned with the possibility of motorized vehicles.
Just as the pale young woman had nearly reached them, an elderly Cadillac rounded the corner on to the exit ramp. The woman had plenty of time to leap out of the way, but she didn’t. Instead, she paused and tugged up the zipper on her butterfly bag as the Cadillac’s brakes squealed mightily. The car came to a stop inches away from her legs.
Persephone peered at Maura and Calla.
“I think you’ll find,” she told them, “that this lady is going to give us a ride.”
Twenty years had passed since that meeting in West Virginia, and Maura was still a judgmental but gifted clairvoyant with a talent for bad decisions. But in the years between, she’d grown used to being a member of an inseparable three-headed entity that shared decision making equally. They’d let themselves think that would never end.
It was so much harder to see things clearly without Persephone.
“Picked up anything?” Mr Gray asked.
“Go around again,” Maura replied. They headed back through Henrietta as store lights flickered in time with an unseen ley line. The rain had stopped, but evening had come on, and Mr Gray turned on the headlights before rebraiding his fingers with hers. He was acting as driver as Maura tried to solidify an increasingly urgent hunch. It had begun this morning when she woke up, an ominous feeling like one had after waking from a bad dream. Instead of fading as the day went on, however, it only grew more pointed, focusing on Blue, and Fox Way, and a creeping darkness that felt like passing out.
Also her eye hurt.
She’d been doing this for long enough to know that there was nothing wrong with it. There was something wrong with someone else’s eye at some point in time, and Maura was just tuned into the station. It irritated her, but it wasn’t an action item. The hunch was. The problem with pursuing bad feelings was that it was always difficult to tell if one was running towards a problem to fix it, or running to a problem to create it. It would’ve been easier if it had still been the three of them. Usually Maura started a project, Calla made it into a tangible thing, and Persephone sent it flying into the ether. Nothing worked the same with just two.
“Go around again, I guess,” Maura told Mr Gray. She could feel him thinking as he drove. Poetry and heroes, romance and death. Some poem about a phoenix. He was the worst decision she’d made so far, but she couldn’t keep from making it again and again.
“Do you mind if I talk?” he asked. “Will it ruin everything?”
“I’m not having any luck. You might as well. What are you thinking about? Birds rising from ashes?”
He glanced over at her with an appraising nod, and she gave him a cunning smile. It was a parlour trick, the simplest of things she could do – pluck a current thought from an unguarded and sympathetic mind – but it was nice to be appreciated.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Adam Parrish and his band of merry men,” Mr Gray admitted. “And this dangerous world they tread.”
“That’s a strange way of putting it. I would have said Richard Gansey and his band of merry men.”
He inclined his head as if he could see her point of view as well, even if he didn’t share it. “I was just thinking how much danger they’ve inherited. Colin Greenmantle leaving Henrietta doesn’t make it safer; it makes it more perilous.”
“Because he kept the others away.”
“Just so.”
“And now you think others will come here, even though no one is selling anything here? Why would they still be interested?”
Mr Gray indicated a buzzing streetlight as they drove by the courthouse. Three shadows passed over the top of it, cast by nothing Maura could see. “Henrietta is one of those places that looks supernatural even from a distance. It will be a perennial stop for people in the business, poking around for things that might be the cause or effect of it.”
“Which is dangerous for the merry men because there is actually something for them to find? Cabeswater?”
Mr Gray inclined his head again. “Mm. And the Lynch property. I don’t forget my part in this, either.”
Neither did Maura. “You can’t undo that.”
“No. But —” His pause at this point in the conversation was evidence of the Gray Man regrowing his heart. It was a pity that the seedling of it had to erupt into the same torched ground that had killed it in the first place. Consequences, as Calla often said, were a bitch. “What do you see for me? Do I stay here?” When she didn’t answer, he pressed, “Do I die?”
She removed her hand from his. “Do you actually want to know?”
“Simle þreora sum þinga gehwylce, ær his tid aga, to tweon weorþeð; adl oþþe yldo oþþe ecghete fægum fromweardum feorh oðþringeð.” He sighed, which told Maura more about his mental state than his untranslated Anglo-Saxon poetry did. “It was easier to tell hero from villain when the stakes were only life and death. Everything in between gets harder.”