Read Blue Lily, Lily Blue for Free Online Page A

Gansey looked at the display.
“Oh,” he said.
The photo showed a badly degraded textile painted with three women, each in simple robes from a time well before Glendower. They stood in identical poses, hands lifted on either side of their heads, palms bloody red, heralding the Mab Darogan .
They each wore Blue Sargent’s face.
    Impossible.
But no. Nothing was impossible these days. He zoomed the photo larger for a better look. Blue’s wide eyes looked back at him. Stylized, yes, but still, the resemblance was uncanny: her dubious eyebrows, her curious mouth. He pressed a knuckle to his lips as hornets hissed in his ears.
He was suddenly overwhelmed, as he had not been in a long time, with the memory of the voice in his head as his life was saved. You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not. He was filled with the need to see Glendower himself, to touch his hand, to kneel before him, to thank him, to be him.
Hands reached from the back; he didn’t know whose they were. He let them take the camera.
Blue murmured something he didn’t catch. Adam whispered, “She looks like you.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.”
“Fuck me,” Ronan said, voicing all of their thoughts.
“The photo is so close,” Gansey said finally. “The quality is excellent.”
“Well, of course,” Malory answered. “Don’t you understand? That is the barn outside my holiday cottage. I was the one who saw the tears. My team found the drapery.”
Gansey struggled to piece this together. “How did you know to look there?”
“That, Gansey, is the thing. I wasn’t looking for anything. I was on a well-deserved holiday. After the summer I had, battling that wretched Simmons neighbor about his beastly sewage issue, I was in desperate need of some time away. I assure you, my presence in Kirtling was a coincidence.”
“Coincidence,” echoed Adam, dubious.
What was this thing, this huge thing? Gansey was alive with anticipation and fear. The enormity of it felt like the black pit in the cave — he could see neither the bottom nor the other side.
“I must say, Gansey,” Malory said brightly. “I am so excited to meet your ley line.”

4
B
    lue couldn’t sleep that night. She couldn’t stop waiting for the sound of the front door. Some ingrained, foolish part of her couldn’t believe that her mother would not come
    home before school began tomorrow. Her mother always had an answer for everything, even if it was wrong, and Blue had taken for granted that she would be unchanging as everything else turned sideways.
    Blue missed her.
She went to the hall and listened. Outside, Orla was conducting a midnight chakra clearing with a few ardent clients. Downstairs, Calla angrily watched television alone. On her floor, she heard nothing, nothing — and then a series of short, purposeful sighs from Persephone’s room at the end of the hall.
When she knocked, Persephone said in her tiny voice, “You might as well.”
Inside, the lamplight reached only to a shoddy little desk and the end of Persephone’s high, elderly twin bed. Persephone sat cross-legged in the Victorian desk chair, her enormous nimbus of curly hair lit golden by the single bulb. She worked away at an old sweater.
As Blue climbed onto the worn mattress, several bobbins of thread raced down to nestle against her bare feet. She tugged her oversized shirt down over her knees and watched Persephone for a few minutes. She seemed to be adding length to the sleeves by sewing on mismatching cuffs. Every so often, she sighed as if she were annoyed with herself or the sweater.
“Is that yours?” Blue asked.
“Is what mine?” Persephone followed her eyes to the sweater. “Oh. Oh, no. I mean, it was. Once. But you see I’m changing it.”
“For someone with giant long arms?”
Persephone held out the garment to verify if this was the case. “Yes.”
Blue slowly lined up the thread by color