The problem is exposure,” Gansey told the phone, half-shouting to be heard over the engine. “If Glendower really could be found just walking along the ley line, I don’t see how he wouldn’t have already been found in the past few hundred years.”
They were headed back to Henrietta in the Pig, Gansey’s furiously orange-red ancient Camaro. Gansey drove, because when it was the Camaro, he always drove. And the conversation was about Glendower, because when you were with Gansey, the conversation was almost always about Glendower.
In the backseat, Adam’s head was tipped back in a way that gave equal attention to the phone conversation and his fatigue. In the middle, Blue leaned forward to better eavesdrop as she picked grass seed off her crochet leggings. Noah was on her other side, although one could never be sure he’d stay corporeal the farther they got from the ley line. It was a tight fit, even tighter in this heat, with the air-conditioning straining, escaping through every crevice in the crevice-filled vehicle. The Camaro’s air-conditioning had only two settings: on and broken.
To the phone, Gansey said, “That’s the only thing.”
Ronan leaned on the cracked black vinyl of the passenger-side door and chewed on the leather bands on his wrist. They tasted like gasoline, a flavor that struck Ronan as both sexy and summery.
For him, it was only sometimes about Glendower. Gansey needed to find Glendower because he wanted proof of the impossible. Ronan already knew the impossible existed. His father had been impossible. He was impossible. Mostly, Ronan wanted to find Glendower because Gansey wanted to find Glendower. Only sometimes did he think about what would happen if they actually discovered him. He thought it might be a lot like dying. When Ronan had been smaller and more forgiving of miracles, he’d considered the moment of death with rhapsodic delight. His mother had told him that when you looked into the eyes of God at the pearly gates, all the questions you ever had were answered.
Ronan had a lot of questions.
Waking Glendower might be like that. Fewer angels attending, and maybe a heavier Welsh accent. Slightly less judgment.
“No, I understand that.” Gansey was using his Mr. Gansey professorial voice, the one that exuded certainty and commanded rats and small children to get up, get up, follow me! It had worked on Ronan, anyway. “But if we assume Glendower was brought over between 1412 and 1420, and if we assume his tomb was left untended, natural soil accumulation would have hidden him. Starkman suggests that medieval layers of occupation might be under a sediment accumulation of five to seventeen feet…. Well, I know I’m not on a floodplain. But Starkman was working under the assumption that … right, sure. What do you think about GPR?”
Blue looked at Adam. He didn’t lift his head as he translated in a low voice, “Ground-penetrating radar.”
The person on the other end of the phone was Roger Malory, a stunningly old British professor Gansey had worked with back in Wales. Like Gansey, he had studied the ley lines for years. Unlike Gansey, he was not using them as a means to find an ancient king. Rather, he seemed to study them for a weekend diversion when there were no parades to attend. Ronan hadn’t met him in person and didn’t care to. The elderly made Ronan anxious.
“Fluxgrate gradiometry?” Gansey suggested. “We’ve already taken a plane up a few times. I just don’t know if we’ll see much more until winter when the leaves are gone.”
Ronan shifted restlessly. The successful demonstration of the plane had left him hyper-alive. He felt like burning something to the ground. He pressed his hand directly over the air-conditioning vent to prevent heat exhaustion. “You’re driving like an old woman.”
Gansey waved a hand, the universal symbol for Shut up. Beside the interstate, four black cows lifted their heads to watch the Camaro go by.
If I was driving … Ronan thought about that set of Camaro keys he had dreamt into existence, shoved in a drawer in his room. He let the possibilities unwind slowly in his mind. He checked his phone. Fourteen missed calls. He dropped it back into the door pouch.
“What about a proton magnetometer?” Gansey asked Malory. Then he added crossly, “I know that’s for underwater detection. I would want it for underwater detection.”
It was water that had ended their work today. Gansey had decided that the next step in their search was to establish Cabeswater’s boundaries. They’d only ever entered the forest from its eastern side and never made it to any of the other edges. This time, they’d approached the forest from well north of their previous entry points, devices trained to the ground to alert them to when they found the northern electromagnetic boundary of the forest. After a several-hour walk, the group had instead come to a lake.
Gansey had stopped dead in his tracks. It wasn’t that the lake had been uncrossable: It only covered a few acres and the path around lacked treachery. And it wasn’t that the lake had stunned him with its beauty. In fact, it was quite unlovely as far as lakes went: an unnaturally square pool sunk into a drowned field. Cattle or sheep had worn a mud path along one edge.
The thing that stopped Gansey cold was the obvious fact that the lake was man-made. The possibility that parts of the ley line might be flooded should have occurred to him before. But it hadn’t. And for some reason, although it was not impossible to believe that Glendower was still somehow alive after hundreds of years, it was impossible to believe he was able to pull off this feat beneath tons of water.
Gansey had declared, “We have to find a way to look under it.”
Adam had replied, “Oh, Gansey, come on. The odds —”
“We’re looking under it.”
Ronan’s plane had crashed into the water and floated, unreachable. They’d walked the long way back to the car. Gansey had called Malory.
As if, Ronan thought, a crusty old man three thousand miles away will have any bright ideas.
Gansey hung up the phone.
“Well?” Adam asked.
Gansey met Adam’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Adam sighed.
Ronan thought they could probably just go around the lake. But that would mean plunging into Cabeswater headlong. And although the ancient forest seemed like the most likely location for Glendower, the sizzling volatility of the newly woken ley line had rendered it a little unpredictable. Even Ronan, who had little care for whether or not he shuffled off this mortal coil, had to admit that the prospect of being trampled by beasts or accidentally getting stuck in a forty-year time loop was daunting.
The entire thing was Adam’s fault — he’d been the one to wake the ley line, though Gansey preferred to pretend it had been a group decision. Whatever bargain Adam had struck in order to accomplish it seemed to have rendered him a little unpredictable as well. Ronan, a sinner himself, wasn’t as struck by the transgression as he was by Gansey’s insistence that they continue to pretend Adam was a saint.
Gansey was not a liar. This untruth didn’t look good on him.
Gansey’s phone chirruped. He read the message before letting it drop next to the gearshift with a strangled cry. Abruptly melancholy, he lolled his head dismally against the seat. Adam gestured for Ronan to pick up the phone, but Ronan despised phones above almost every other object in the world.
So it sat there with its eyebrows raised, waiting.
Finally, Blue strained forward far enough to snatch it. She read the message out loud: “‘Could really use you this weekend if not too much trouble. Helen can pick you up. Disregard if you have activities.’”
“Is this about Congress?” Adam asked.