The Raven Boys Read Online Free PDF Page B

probably not going to save him, even if he knows. You might keep him from doing something stupid. Or you might just ruin the last few months of his life.”
    “You’re a Pollyanna,” Blue snapped. But she knew Maura was right — at least about the first part. Most everyone who met her thought her mother did parlor tricks for a living. What did Blue think she would do — track down an Aglionby student, tap on the window of his Land Rover or Lexus, and warn him to have his brakes checked and life-insurance policy updated?
    “I probably can’t stop you from meeting him anyway,” Maura said. “I mean, if Neeve is right about why you saw him. You’re fated to meet him.”
    “Fate,” Blue replied, glowering at her mother, “is a very weighty word to throw around before breakfast.”
    “Everyone else,” said Maura, “had breakfast a very long time ago.”
    The stairs creaked as Neeve returned. “Wrong number,” she said in her affectless way. “Do you get many?”
    “We’re one number off from a gentlemen escort company,” Maura replied.
    “Ah,” Neeve said. “That explains it. Blue,” she added, as she settled back down at the table again, “if you’d like, I can try to see what killed him.”
    This got both Maura’s and Blue’s attention in a hurry.
    “Yes,” Blue said.
    Maura started to reply, then merely pressed her lips back together.
    Neeve asked, “Do we have any grape juice?”
    Puzzled, Blue went to the fridge and held up a jug questioningly. “Cran-grape?”
    “That will work fine.”
    Maura, her face still complicated, reached into the cupboard and drew out a dark blue salad bowl. She set it in front of Neeve, not gently.
    “I won’t be responsible for anything that you see,” Maura said.
    Blue asked, “What? What is that supposed to mean?”
    Neither of them answered.
    With a soft smile on her soft face, Neeve poured the juice into the bowl until it reached the edge. Maura turned off the light switch. The outside suddenly seemed vivid in comparison to the dim kitchen. The April-bright trees pressed against the windows of the breakfast area, green leaf upon green leaf upon glass, and Blue was suddenly very aware of being surrounded by trees, of having a sense of being in the middle of a still wood.
    “If you are going to watch, please be quiet,” Neeve remarked, looking at no one in particular. Blue jerked out a chair and sat. Maura leaned on the counter and crossed her arms. It was rare to see Maura upset but not doing something about it.
    Neeve asked, “What was his name again?”
    “He only said Gansey .” She felt self-conscious saying his name. Somehow the idea that she would have a hand in his life or his death made his nominal existence in this kitchen her responsibility.
    “That’s enough.”
    Neeve leaned over the bowl, her lips moving, her dark reflection moving slowly in the bowl. Blue kept thinking of what her mother had said:
    I won’t be responsible for anything that you see.
    It made this thing they did seem bigger than it usually felt. Further away from a trick of nature and closer to a religion.
    Finally, Neeve murmured. Though Blue couldn’t hear any particular meaning in the wordless sound, Maura looked abruptly triumphant.
    “Well,” Neeve said. “This is a thing.”
    She said it like, “This is a thing ,” and Blue already knew how that turned out.
    “What did you see?” Blue asked. “How did he die?”
    Neeve didn’t take her eyes off Maura. She was asking a question, somehow, at the same time that she answered. “I saw him. And then he disappeared. Into absolutely nothing.”
    Maura flipped her hands. Blue knew the gesture well. Her mother had used it to end many an argument after she’d delivered a winning line. Only this time the winning line had been delivered by a bowl of cran-grape juice, and Blue had no idea what it meant.
    Neeve said, “One moment he was there, and the next, he didn’t exist.”
    “It happens,” Maura said. “Here