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Blue craned her neck to see what they were looking at It was just Ada light rendering him soft and dusty He had re and lined each of the cards faceup in three long rows Now he leaned on the table and studied the i on his elbows to the next when he was through He looked nothing like the Ada like the Adah -- there’d been no warning

Maura frowned In a low voice, she said, "I think I need to have a conversation with that boy"

"So up the stairs Each stair groaned a protest for which she punished the next with a storown train wrecks"

Blue, alarmed, said, "Is he a train wreck?"

Her ue "Calla likes drao off the tracks, I don’t like to call it a wreck I like to call it a derailhted cackle

"I hate both of you," Blue said as her alloped up the stairs to join Calla "You’re supposed to use your powers for good, you know!"

After ahis eyes, "I could hear y’all, you know"

Blue hoped fervently that he was only talking about Maura and Calla and not about her kitchen conversation with Gansey "Do you think you’re a train wreck?"

"That would oing to Cabeswater when Ronan’s done?"

Gansey appeared beside Blue in the doorway He shook his empty bottle at her

"Fair trade," he told her in a way that indicated he had selected a fair trade coffee beverage entirely so that he could tell Blue that he had selected a fair trade coffee beverage so that she could tell him Well done with your carbon footprint and all that jazz

Blue said, "Better recycle the bottle"

He dazzled a s on the doorja to Cabeswater"

14

You could ask anyone 300 Fox Way, Henrietta, Virginia, was the place to go for the spiritual, the unseen, the mysterious, and the yet-to-occur For a not-unreasonable fee, any of the women under its roof (bar Blue) would read your paly, connect you with deceased relatives, or listen to the dreadful week you had just lived through During the business day, clairvoyance was often work

But on days off, when the aazines, books, cereal boxes, old decks of tarot cards-- anything ords or ie and hid it from the others, and the other two experiuesses They made predictions with their backs to one another, with the cards splayed, with different nu in buckets of water, calling up and down three or seven stairs fro education Calla called it turning tricks Persephone called it that thing we could do if there’s nothing on television?

That day, after Blue and Gansey and Adaone, there was no work to be done Sundays were quiet, even for nonchurchgoers It wasn’t that the women of 300 Fox Way weren’t spiritual on Sunday It was that they were spiritual every day, and so Sunday didn’t particularly stand out After the teens left the house, the woa rooh to be transcendent," Calla said after a space She was not the only psychic drinking, but she was the closest one to transcendence

Persephone peered dubiously into the bottolass In a very small voice (her voice was always small), she said sadly, "I am not drunk at all"

Maura offered, "It’s the Russian in you"

"Estonian," Persephone replied

At thatMaura swore delicately:

one well-chosen and highly specific word Calla swore indelicately: several more words with rather fewer syllables Then Maura went for the front door and reappeared in the living rooray V-neck T-shirt that emphasized the ray His hair was an ashy blond, drained of color, and so was the fashionable week-old facial hair round his ray It escaped none of the women in the room that he was handso sort of way "Gray"

All of the wo

sort of s"

"We’re closed," Calla said, utterly dismissive

"Calla is rude," Persephone said in her doll voice "We are

not closed, but we are busy?"

This was said with a question in her voice and an anxious glance toward Maura

"That’s what I told him," Maura said "However, it turns out that Mr -- Gray -- doesn’t really need a reading He’s a novelist, researching psychics He just wants to observe"

Calla rattled the ice in her glass One of her eyebrows looked exceptionally skeptical "What do you write, Mr Gray?"

He smiled easily at her They noticed he had extraordinarily straight teeth "Thrillers Do you read lass toward him, plum lipmark first

"Do you mind if he stays?" Maura asked "He knows poetry"

Calla sneered "Give htest hesitation or suggestion of selfconsciousness, the Gray Man placed his hands in the pockets of his dark gray slacks and said, "Where has gone the steed? Where has gone the youth? Where has gone the giver of treasure? Where are the feasting seats, where the revelry in the hall? Alas, bright goblet; alas, lory! How that tiht as if it never were"

Calla lifted her lips frolish and I’ll put alcohol in that drink"

He did

Calla went to get him a drink