300 Fox Way, Henrietta, Virginia, Tuesday Evening
Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she'd been told that she would kill her true love.
Her family traded in predictions. These predictions tended to run toward the nonspecific. Things like: Something terrible will happen to you today. It might involve the number six. Or: Money is coming. Open your hand for it. Or: You have a big decision and it will not make itself.
"I should tell you," Maura always advised her new clients, "that this reading will be accurate, but not specific."
It was easier that way.
But this was not what Blue was told. Again and again, she had her fingers spread wide, her palm examined, her cards plucked from velvet-edged decks and spread across the fuzz of a family friend's living room carpet. Thumbs were pressed to the mystical, invisible third eye that was said to lie between everyone's eyebrows. Runes were cast and dreams interpreted, tea leaves scrutinized and seances conducted.
All the women came to the same conclusion, blunt and inexplicably specific. What they all agreed on, in many different clairvoyant languages, was this:
If Blue was to kiss her true love, he would die.
No one in the house ever really doubted that Blue was destined to kill her true love with a kiss. It was a threat, however, that had been around for so long that it it had lost its force. Picturing six-year-old Blue in love was such a far-off thing as to be imaginary.
And by sixteen, Blue had decided that she would never fall in love, so it didn't matter.
But that belief changed when her mother's half sister Neeve came to their little town of Henrietta. Neeve had gotten famous for doing loudly what Blue's mother did quietly. Maura's readings were done in her front room, mostly for residents of Henrietta and the valley around it. Neeve, on the other hand, did her readings on television at five o'clock in the morning. She had a website featuring soft-focus photographs of her staring unerringly at the viewer. Four books on the supernatural bore her name on the cover.
Blue had never met Neeve, so she knew more about her half-aunt from a cursory web search than from personal experience. Blue wasn't sure why Neeve was coming to visit, ut she knew her imminent arrival spurred a legion of whispered conversations between Maura and her two best friends, Persephone and Calla--the sort of conversations that trailed off into sipping coffee and tapping pens on the table when Blue entered the room. But, after it was determined that Blue's room was still her room despite her living in Fandom now and that Neeve would stay in the attic, Blue wasn't particularly concerned about Neeve's arrival; what was one more woman in a house filled to the brim with them?
Neeve finally arrived on a spring evening when the already long shadows of the mountains to the west seemed even longer than usual. When Blue, who had been gathering up her things to start the drive back to school, opened the door for her, she thought, for a moment, that Neeve was an unfamilar old woman, but then her eyes grew used to the stretched crimson light coming through the trees, and she saw that Neeve was barely older than her mother, which was not very old at all.
Outside, in the distance, hounds were crying. Blue was familiar enough with their voices; each fall, the Aglionby Hunt Club rode out with horses and foxhounds nearly every weekend. Blue knew what their frantic howls meant at that moment: they were on the chase.
"You're Maura's daughter," Neeve said, and before Blue could answer, she added, "this is the year you'll fall in love."
[And so it begins. Text abridged and lightly adapted from the prologue of The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater. NFB due to distance.]
Her family traded in predictions. These predictions tended to run toward the nonspecific. Things like: Something terrible will happen to you today. It might involve the number six. Or: Money is coming. Open your hand for it. Or: You have a big decision and it will not make itself.
"I should tell you," Maura always advised her new clients, "that this reading will be accurate, but not specific."
It was easier that way.
But this was not what Blue was told. Again and again, she had her fingers spread wide, her palm examined, her cards plucked from velvet-edged decks and spread across the fuzz of a family friend's living room carpet. Thumbs were pressed to the mystical, invisible third eye that was said to lie between everyone's eyebrows. Runes were cast and dreams interpreted, tea leaves scrutinized and seances conducted.
All the women came to the same conclusion, blunt and inexplicably specific. What they all agreed on, in many different clairvoyant languages, was this:
If Blue was to kiss her true love, he would die.
No one in the house ever really doubted that Blue was destined to kill her true love with a kiss. It was a threat, however, that had been around for so long that it it had lost its force. Picturing six-year-old Blue in love was such a far-off thing as to be imaginary.
And by sixteen, Blue had decided that she would never fall in love, so it didn't matter.
But that belief changed when her mother's half sister Neeve came to their little town of Henrietta. Neeve had gotten famous for doing loudly what Blue's mother did quietly. Maura's readings were done in her front room, mostly for residents of Henrietta and the valley around it. Neeve, on the other hand, did her readings on television at five o'clock in the morning. She had a website featuring soft-focus photographs of her staring unerringly at the viewer. Four books on the supernatural bore her name on the cover.
Blue had never met Neeve, so she knew more about her half-aunt from a cursory web search than from personal experience. Blue wasn't sure why Neeve was coming to visit, ut she knew her imminent arrival spurred a legion of whispered conversations between Maura and her two best friends, Persephone and Calla--the sort of conversations that trailed off into sipping coffee and tapping pens on the table when Blue entered the room. But, after it was determined that Blue's room was still her room despite her living in Fandom now and that Neeve would stay in the attic, Blue wasn't particularly concerned about Neeve's arrival; what was one more woman in a house filled to the brim with them?
Neeve finally arrived on a spring evening when the already long shadows of the mountains to the west seemed even longer than usual. When Blue, who had been gathering up her things to start the drive back to school, opened the door for her, she thought, for a moment, that Neeve was an unfamilar old woman, but then her eyes grew used to the stretched crimson light coming through the trees, and she saw that Neeve was barely older than her mother, which was not very old at all.
Outside, in the distance, hounds were crying. Blue was familiar enough with their voices; each fall, the Aglionby Hunt Club rode out with horses and foxhounds nearly every weekend. Blue knew what their frantic howls meant at that moment: they were on the chase.
"You're Maura's daughter," Neeve said, and before Blue could answer, she added, "this is the year you'll fall in love."
[And so it begins. Text abridged and lightly adapted from the prologue of The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater. NFB due to distance.]