The Raven King
Page 58

“Are you going to do this the easy way? Save me the trouble.”
Henry shook his head.
The man sighed. Before Henry had time to react, he closed the distance between the two of them, embraced Henry in a less than friendly way, and perfunctorily performed a manoeuvre that made Henry emit a soft squeak and stagger back holding his shoulder. Some people might have screamed, but Henry was as committed as the man to keeping secrets.
“Do not waste my time,” the man said, “when I began this in a very civil way.”
RoboBee, Henry thought. Come find me.
There had to be a window cracked somewhere in the house; Mrs Woo always turned the heat on too high.
“If you are trying to get a secret out of me,” Henry replied, touching his shoulder gingerly, “you’re wasting your own time.”
“For God’s sake,” the man said. He leaned to pull his pistol out of his ankle holster. “Any other time I’d find this really honourable. But now just get in my car before I shoot you.”
The gun won, as it usually does. Henry cast a last glance at the house before making his way to the car across the road. He recognized the white car, though he didn’t understand what that meant. He began to get into the back.
“The passenger seat is fine,” the man said. “I told you, this is a chat.”
Henry did as he was told, glancing back at the house a third time as the man settled behind the wheel and pulled away from the kerb. The man turned down the radio (they sang Yes, I’m a lover not a fighter) and said, “I just want to know who to expect and if they’re going to be trouble. I have no interest in ever interacting with you again.”
In the passenger seat, Henry looked out the window before buckling the seat belt. He pulled up his knees and put his arms around his bare legs. He was starting to shiver a little. The man turned up the heater.
“Where are you taking me?” Henry asked.
“We’re circling the block like reasonable people do when they are trying to have a conversation.”
Henry thought about a hole in the ground.
“I have never had a reasonable conversation with someone with a pistol.” He looked out the window again, craning his neck to look behind him. It was dark apart from the streetlights. He would be too far away from the RoboBee to communicate with it soon, but he sent out a last plea: Tell someone who can make this stop.
It wasn’t a request that made sense in words, but it made sense in Henry’s thoughts, and that was all that mattered to the bee.
“Look,” said the man. “I regret your shoulder. That was habit.”
A metallic clink sounded at the top of the windshield. As the man craned his neck to see what had hit the car, Henry sat up attentively. Leaning forward, he saw three slender black lines at the edge of the window.
A phone rang.
The man made a noise before flipping the phone over in the centre console. Whoever it was earned his attention, because he picked it up and wedged it on his shoulder in order to allow himself to still use the stick shift. To the phone, he said, “That’s a very strange question to ask.”
Henry took the opportunity to roll down his window an inch. RoboBee immediately whirred off the windshield and through the crack.
“Hey —” the man said.
The bee flew into Henry’s palm. He cupped it gladly to his chest. The weight of it felt like security.
The man frowned at him, and then said to the phone, “I haven’t kidnapped anyone in years, but I do have a student in my car right now.” A pause. “Both of those statements are accurate. I was trying to get some clarification on some rumours. Would you like to talk to him?”
Henry’s eyebrows shot up.
The man handed Henry his phone.
“Hello?” Henry said.
“Well,” Gansey said on the other side of the phone, “I hear you’ve met Mr Gray.”
 
 
Henry was wearing trousers by the time Blue and Gansey met up with him and the Gray Man in the Fresh Eagle. The grocery store was almost completely empty and had the glittering timelessness that such places began to take on after a certain hour of night. Overhead, a song played about getting out of someone’s dreams and into their car. There was only one cashier, and she didn’t look up as they walked through the automatic doors. They found Henry standing in the cereal aisle looking at his phone, while Mr Gray stood at the end of the aisle convincingly reading the back of a tin of steel cut oats. Neither drew attention. Mr Gray blended in because his profession had taught him to blend in. Henry did not blend in – he reeked of money from his snazzy jacket and Madonna shirt down to his black trainers – but he nonetheless failed to stand out in any remarkable way: Henrietta was no stranger to his sort of youthful Aglionby money.
Henry had been holding a box of cereal of the sort that was bad for you but good for marshmallows, but he put it back on the shelf when he spotted them. He seemed far more jittery than he had been at the toga party. Probably, Blue mused, a side effect of being held at gunpoint earlier.
“The question I’m asking myself,” Gansey said, “is why I’m in the Fresh-Fresh-Eagle at eleven P.M.”
“The question I was asking myself,” Henry replied, “was why I was in a thug’s car at I-don’t-even-know P.M. Sargent, tell me you are not part of this sordid ring of thieves.”
Blue, hands in the pockets of her hoodie, shrugged apologetically and gestured with her chin to the Gray Man. “He’s sort of dating my mom.”
“What a tangled web we weave,” Gansey said in an electric, jagged sort of way. He was keyed up after the night at the Barns, and Henry’s presence only encouraged it. “This wasn’t the next step I wanted to take in our friendship, though. Mr Gray?”
He had to repeat Mr Gray’s name, because it turned out that the Gray Man had not been pretending to look at the oatmeal tin; he had actually been reading the back of it.
He joined them. He and Blue exchanged a side hug and then he turned her by her shoulders to examine the stitches above her eyebrow. “Those are neatly done.”
“Are they?”
“You probably won’t have a scar.”
“Damn,” Blue said.
Gansey asked him, “Was the Fresh Eagle your idea or Henry’s?”
Mr Gray replied, “I thought it might be comforting. It’s well-lit, on camera, but not audio-recorded. Safe and secure.”