Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater Read Free Book Online

the pillow on her legs.
“Shouldn’t,” Gansey said finally. “But I hope you do.”

5
T
    he following morning, Gansey and Malory went out to investigate the ley line. Adam agreed to join them, which surprised Gansey. It wasn’t that the two of
    them had been fighting. It was that they’d been . . . not fighting. Not talking. Not anything. Gansey had kept going on the same road he always had, and Adam had taken a fork onto a second road.
    But for the moment, at least, they were headed in the same direction. Goal: Find another entrance to the raven cave. Method: Retrace steps from previous ley line searches. Resources: Roger Malory.
    It was a good time of year to show off the town. Henrietta and her environs were a paint box of colors. Green hayfields, golden cornfields, yellow sycamores, orange oaks, periwinkle mountains, cerulean cloudless sky. The freshly paved road was black and snaking and inviting. The air was crisp and breathable and insistent on action.
    The three of them moved quickly until Malory’s attention was caught and held at their fourth stop of the morning, Massanutten Mountain. It was not the most mystical of locales. Neighborhoods bubbled from its sides and a ski resort crowned it. Gansey found it coarse, tourist and student fodder, but if he’d said it out loud, Adam would’ve torn out his throat in a minute for being elitist.
    The three of them stood just off the road, avoiding the stares of slowing drivers. Malory was all turtled over behind his tripod, lecturing either Adam or himself. “The procedure of ley hunting is quite different in the States! In England, a true ley must have at least one aligned element — church, barrow, standing stone — every two miles, or it is considered coincidental. But of course here in the Colonies”— both boys smiled good-naturedly — “everything is much farther apart. Moreover, you never had the Romans to build you things in wonderfully straight lines. Pity. One misses them.”
    “I do miss the Romans,” Gansey said, just to see Adam smirk, which he did.
Malory sighted his transit through a gap in the trees, toward the gaping valley down below. “And although your line is now awake and profound — positively profound — with energy, the secondary line we’re looking for today is n— curses!” He had tripped over the Dog.
The Dog looked at Malory. His expression said, Curses!
“Hand me that pencil.” Malory took the pencil from Adam and marked something on the map. “Go sit in the car!”
“Excuse me?” Adam asked, polite and shocked.
“Not you! The Dog!”
The Dog sulkily retreated. Another car slowed down to stare. Malory muttered to himself. Adam absently tapped a finger against his own wrist; a gesture somehow disconcerting and otherworldy. Insects buzzed around them; wings brushed Gansey’s cheek.
A bee, maybe; I could be dead in a minute here, maybe, by the side of this road, before Malory can get his cell phone out of the car, before Adam realizes what’s going on.
He didn’t swat the insect. It buzzed away, but his heart still beat fast.
“Talk me through what you’re doing,” Gansey said. Then he corrected: “ Us . Talk us.”
Malory adopted his professor voice. “Your cave is tied to the ley line, and it has no fixed location. Therefore, if we’re looking for a cave to join up with it, there’s no sense searching for ordinary cave entrances. Only an entrance on a ley will do. And as your cave mapping suggests that you were traveling perpendicular to the ley instead of along it, I believe the cave network in its entirety exists on multiple lines. So we seek a crossroads! Tell me, what is this?”
He indicated something on one of the maps that a younger Gansey had heavily notated. Older Gansey lifted Malory’s finger to look beneath it. “Spruce Knob. Highest peak in West Virginia. Forty-five hundred feet or something like that?”
“Highest peak in Virginia?” echoed Malory.
“West,” said Gansey and Adam at the