The Raven King (The Raven Cycle #4) - Maggie Stiefvater Page 0,1

exception of Blue Sargent, all of the women at 300 Fox Way were psychic. This might have suggested that the house’s occupants had much in common, but practically, they had as much in common as a group of musicians, or doctors, or morticians. Psychic was not so much a personality type as a skill set. A belief system. A general agreement that time, like a story, was not a line; it was an ocean. If you couldn’t find the precise moment you were looking for, it was possible you hadn’t swum far enough. It was possible that you simply weren’t a good enough swimmer yet. It was also possible, the women grudgingly agreed, that some moments were hidden far enough in time that they really should be left to deep-sea creatures. Like those anglerfish with all the teeth bits and the lanterns hanging off their faces. Or like Persephone Poldma. She was dead now, though, so perhaps she was a poor example.

It was a Monday when the still-living women of 300 Fox Way decided to finally assess Richard Gansey’s impending doom, the disintegration of their lives as they knew them, and what those two things had to do with each other, if anything. Also, Jimi had done a chakra cleansing in exchange for a nice bottle of hot, peaty whiskey and was jonesing to finish it with company.

Calla stepped into the biting October day to turn the sign beside the letter box to read CLOSED COME BACK SOON! Inside, Jimi, a big believer in herb magick, brought out several small pillows stuffed with mugwort (to enhance the projection of the soul into other planes) and set rosemary to burn over charcoal (for memory and clairvoyance, which are the same thing in two different directions). Orla shook a smouldering bundle of sage over the tarot decks. Maura filled a black-glass scrying bowl. Gwenllian sang a gleeful, nasty little song as she lit a circle of candles and let the blinds down. Calla returned to the reading room with three statues cradled in the crook of her arm.

“It smells like a goddamn Italian restaurant in here,” she told Jimi, who did not pause in her humming as she fanned the smoke and wiggled her large bottom. Calla placed the ferocious statue of Oya by her own chair and the dancing statue of Oshun next to Maura’s. She gripped the third statue: Yemaya, a watery Yoruban goddess who had always stood beside Persephone’s place when she wasn’t standing, on Calla’s bedroom dresser. “Maura, I don’t know where to put Yemaya.”

Maura pointed to Gwenllian, who pointed back. “You said you didn’t want to do this with Adam, so it goes by her.”

“I never said that,” Calla said. “I said he was too close to all this.”

The fact of the matter was that they were all too close to the situation. They’d been too close to the situation for months. They were so close to the situation that it was difficult to tell whether or not they were the situation.

Orla stopped chomping her gum for a moment long enough to ask, “Are we ready?”

“MmmmhmmmhmmmmissBluethoughmmmmhmmmm,” offered Jimi, still humming and swaying.

It was true that Blue’s absence was notable. As a powerful psychic amplifier, she would’ve been useful in a case like this, but they’d agreed in whispers the night before that it was cruel to discuss Gansey’s fate in front of her any more than was strictly necessary. They’d make do with Gwenllian, even though she was half as powerful and twice as difficult.

“We’ll tell her the upshot later,” Maura said. “I think I had better get Artemus out of the pantry.”

Artemus: Maura’s ex-lover, Blue’s biological father, Glendower’s adviser, 300 Fox Way’s closet dweller. He had been retrieved from a magical cave just a little over a week before and in that time had managed to contribute absolutely nothing to their emotional or intellectual resources. Calla found him spineless (she was not wrong). Maura thought him misunderstood (she was not wrong). Jimi reckoned he had the longest nose of any man she’d ever seen (she was not wrong). Orla didn’t believe barricading oneself in a supply closet was a sufficient protection against a psychic who hated you (she was not wrong). Gwenllian was, in fact, the psychic who hated him (she was not wrong).

It took Maura quite a bit of doing to persuade him to leave the pantry, and even after he’d joined them at the table, he did not look at all like he belonged.