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Blue’s head ducked to her plate She stabbed another piece of broccoli

Maura hung up the phone She looked narrowly at Blue "Did you two fight again?"

Blue muttered, "Yep Definitely"

"I can have a talk with hiood," she replied "But thanks My mother didn’t raise me to be violent"

"Neither," observed the Gray Man, "did mine"

He ate his broccoli and butter and bacon and Maura ate her butter and Calla ate her bacon

It was another frenzied dance to clean up after dinner and fight for showers and television and who got which chair Maura gently took the Gray Man’s hand and led hi branches of the beech tree, they kissed until the an to fall

Later, as they lay in her bed, his phone buzzed a call, and this time it went to voicemail Somehow, he always kneould end this way

"Hey, Dean," said his brother His voice was slow, easy, patient The Allen brothers were alike, that way "Henrietta is a pretty little place, isn’t it?"

58

Hurry"

Persephone and Adailistic sun rose the next , and when they did, it was usually that word: hurry They had already driven to a dozen other locations to repair the ley line, some as far as two hours away, and now they pushed their way back into Henrietta

Now, Adam knelt beside a diseased rose in another backyard His already grubby hands pressed against the dirt, digging to find the stone he kneas hidden solanced at the rambler on the other side of the yard

"Hurry," she said onceA bank of clouds moved slowly behind the o: The heat would build and build, until it snapped in another cacophonous suers found the stone It was the same at every fray in the line: a stone or a body of water that confused and diffused the ley line’s direction Sometimes Adam had only to turn a stone to feel the ley line iht switch Other tia stone entirely, or digging a trench to redirect a stream Sometimes neither he nor Persephone could understand what they needed to do, and then they would draw out one or two of the tarot cards Persephone helped hi to say Three of wands: build a bridge across the strea out the biggest of the stones and put it in the tricolored car

Using the tarot cards was like when he had begun learning Latin He danced ever closer to thatto translate each word

He was exhausted and awake, euphoric and anxious

Hurry

What was it that made these stones special? He didn’t know Not yet So Soed the energy out of line

"Adan of a car, but she frowned at the road Her fingers were as dirty as his; her delicate gray frock was stained She looked like a doll dug froer than he expected Twelve inches across, et to it without digging up the rose Hurriedly, he snatched a spade lying beside him He spiked the dirt, twisted out the deformed rose, tossed it aside His palested

"Pardon?"

She "

It took hi anyway"

"Dying and dead are different words"

Sha the tip of the spade beneath the stone It ca look to him

"We take this one," he said immediately She nodded It went in the backseat with the others

They had only just headed back down the street when another car pulled into the driveway they’d just abandoned

Close

Multiple stones were stacked in the tri-colored car now, but this latest one pressed into Adam’s consciousness , he thought Forso the ley line into Cabeswater Forate

Hurry

"Why now?" he asked her "Why are all these parts frayed?"

She didn’t look up froy, inked art looked like thoughts instead of i now It’s only that it’s h it Like a wire In the past, priestesses would’ve taken care of the line Maintained it Just like we’re doing now"

"Like Stonehenge," he said

"That’s a very large and cliché exalanced up at the sky The clouds at the horizon had gotten just a little closer since he’d last looked; they were still white, but they were beginning to pile on top of one another

"I wonder," he said, more to himself than to her, "what it would be like if all the ley lines were repaired"