Free Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater

expense. That is a fantastic portrait of Steve Martin over there, by the way. Behold how its eyes follow you around the room.”
“Blue, would you get the receipt?” Persephone asked.
Blue, lingering by the door, went for a business card to write the amount on. When she returned, Persephone was saying to Calla, “Oh, we will have to use just yours. I don’t have mine.”
“Don’t have yours!” Calla replied incredulously. “What happened to them?”
“Coca-Cola shirt has them.”
With a mighty snort, Calla retrieved her tarot cards and instructed the man on how to shuffle them. She finished, “Then you pass them back to me, facedown, and I’ll draw them.”
He began.
“As you shuffle them, you should be thinking about what you’d like to know,” Persephone added in her small voice. “That will focus the reading quite a bit.”
“Good, good,” he replied, shuffling the cards more aggressively. He glanced up at Blue. Then, without warning, he flipped the deck so that the cards were faceup. He fanned them out, eyes darting over the selection.
This was not how Calla had instructed him.
Something in Blue’s nerves tingled a warning.
“So, if the question is ‘How can I make this happen?’” — he plucked a card free and set it on the table — “that’s a good start, right?”
There was dead silence.
The card was the three of swords. It depicted a bloody heart stabbed with the aforementioned three swords. Gore dripped down the blades. Maura called it “the heartbreak card.”
Blue needed no psychic perception to feel the threat oozing from it.
The psychics stared at the man. With a cool curl in her stomach, Blue realized that they hadn’t seen this coming.
Calla growled, “What’s your game?”
He kept smiling his cheery, congenial smile. “Here’s the question: Is there another one of you? One that looks more like that one?” He pointed at Blue, whose stomach turned over unpleasantly once more.
Mom.
“Go to hell,” Calla burst out.
He nodded. “That’s what I thought. You expecting her any time soon? I’d love to have a chat with her in particular.”
“Hell,” Persephone said. “I actually agree in this case. Insofar as going there is concerned.”
What does this man want with Mom?
Blue frantically memorized everything about him so that she could describe him later.
The man stood, sweeping up the three of hearts. “You know what? I’m keeping this. Thanks for the info.”
As he turned to go, Calla started after him, but Persephone put a single finger on Calla’s arm, stopping her.
“No,” Persephone said softly. The front door closed. “That one’s not to be touched.”

9
A
    dam was reading and re-reading his first-quarter schedule when Ronan hurled himself into the desk beside him. They were the only two in the navy-carpeted classroom; Adam had arrived very early to Borden House. It seemed wrong that the first day of school should carry the same emotional weight as the anxious afternoon in the cave of ravens, but there was no denying that the gleeful and anticipatory jitter in his veins now was as pronounced as those breathless minutes when birds sang around them.
    One more year, and he had done it.
The first day was the easiest, of course. Before it had really all begun: the homework and the sports, the school-wide dinners and the college counseling, the exams and the extra-credit. Before Adam’s night job and studying until three a.m. conspired to destroy him.
He read his schedule again. It bristled with classes and extracurriculars. It looked impossible. Aglionby was a hard school: harder for Adam, though, because he had to be the best.
Last year, Barrington Whelk had stood at the front of this room and taught them Latin. Now he was dead. Adam knew that he had seen Whelk die, but he couldn’t seem to remember what the event had actually looked like — though he could, if he tried hard enough, imagine what it should have looked like.
Adam closed his eyes for a moment. In the