Calla took her hand away from Noah and stared at him. For once, she had nothing clever to say.

“OK, kid,” she said finally. “Welcome to the house. You can stay here as long as you can.”

Although Gansey liked Henry Cheng, agreeing to go to a party of his felt like a strange shift in power. It was not that he felt threatened by Henry in any way – both Henry and Gansey were kings in their respective territories – but it felt more loaded to meet Henry on his own turf rather than on the neutral ground of Aglionby Academy. The four Vancouver kids all lived off-campus in Litchfield House, and parties there were unheard of. It was an exclusive club. Undeniably Henry’s. To dine in fairyland was to be forced to stay there for ever or to pine for it once you left, and all that.

Gansey wasn’t sure he was in a position to be making new friends.

Litchfield House was an old Victorian on the opposite edge of downtown from Monmouth. In the damp, cooling night, it rose out of curls of mist, turrets and shingles and porches, every window lit with a tiny electric candle. The driveway was double-parked with four fancy cars, and Henry’s silver Fisker was an elegant ghost on the kerb in front, right behind a dutiful-looking old sedan.

Blue was in a terrible mood. Something had clearly happened while she was on shift, but Gansey’s attempts to prise it from her had established only that it was neither about the toga party nor him. Now, she was the one driving the Pig, which had a threefold benefit. For starters, Gansey couldn’t imagine anyone whose mood wouldn’t be marginally lifted by driving a Camaro. Second, Blue said she never got a chance to practise driving in Fox Way’s communal vehicle. And third, most importantly, Gansey was outrageously and eternally driven to distraction by the image of her behind the wheel of his car. Ronan and Adam weren’t with them, so there was no one to catch them in what felt like an incredibly indecent act.

He had to tell them.

Gansey wasn’t sure he was in a position to be falling in love, but he’d done it anyway. He didn’t quite grasp the mechanics of it. He understood his friendship with Ronan and Adam – they both represented qualities that he both lacked and admired, and they liked the versions of himself that he also liked. That was true of his friendship with Blue, too, but it was more than that. The better he got to know her, the more it felt like he did when he was swimming. There stopped being dissonant versions of him. There was only Gansey, now, now, now.

Blue paused the Pig at the quiet stop sign opposite Litchfield House’s corner, assessing the parking situation.

“Mr uh,” she said unpleasantly, eyes on the high-end cars.

“What?”

“I just forgot how Aglionby he was.”

“We really don’t have to go,” Gansey said. “I mean, I just need to stick my head in the door to tell him thanks, but that’s it.”

They both peered across the road at the house. Gansey thought about how strange it was that he felt uncomfortable doing this, a purposeless visit with a crowd he almost certainly knew in its entirety. He was about to admit this out loud when the front door opened. The act created a square of yellow, like a portal to another dimension, and Julius Caesar stepped out on to the wraparound porch. Julius waved a hand at the Camaro and shouted, “Yo, yo, Dick Gansey!”

Because it was not Julius Caesar; it was Henry in a toga.

Blue’s eyebrows disappeared into her bangs. “Are you going to wear one of those?”

This was going to be terrible.

“Absolutely not,” Gansey told her. The toga looked more real than he would have liked now that he was looking right at it. “We’re not staying long.”

“Park around the corner and don’t hit any cats!” Henry shouted.

Blue circled the block, successfully avoided a white cat, and did a slow but credible job of parallel parking, even with Gansey watching closely, even with the power steering belt whining a protest.

Although Henry must have known it would not take them long, he had retreated back inside in order to be able to grandly answer the door when they rang the bell. Now he shut the door behind them, sealing them in a slightly over-warm pocket of garlic-and-rose-scented air. Gansey had expected to find students swinging from chandeliers and skating on alcohol, and although he had not necessarily wanted that, the discrepancy was off-putting. The interior was fussily tidy; a dark hall hung with carved mirrors and cramped with brittle antique furniture stretched dimly into the guts of the house. It did not look remotely like a place that might host a party. It looked like a place old ladies might go to die and remain undiscovered until the neighbours noticed a strange smell. It was utterly at odds with what Gansey knew of Henry.

It was also very quiet.

Gansey had a sudden, terrible thought that it was possible the party might be simply Henry and the two of them in togas in a fancy sitting room.

“Welcome, welcome,” Henry told them, as if he had not just seen Gansey a moment before. “Did you hit the cat?”

He had taken enormous care with his appearance. His toga was tied with more care than any tie Gansey had ever knotted, and Gansey had knotted a lot of ties. He was wearing the most chrome watch Gansey had ever seen, and Gansey had seen a lot of chromed things. His black spiked hair strove frantically upward, and Gansey had seen a lot of things striving frantically upward.

“We zigged,” Blue said tersely. “It zagged.”

“Wendybird came!” Henry exclaimed, as if he had only just noticed her. “I googled lady togas in case you did. Good work on the cat. Mrs Woo would poison us in our sleep if you’d squashed it. What’s your name again?”

“Blue,” Gansey said. “Blue Sargent. Blue, do you remember Henry?”

They eyed each other. At their previous brief meeting, Henry had managed to thoroughly offend Blue through casual self-deprecation. Gansey understood on a basic level that Henry made outrageous and offensive fun of himself because the alternative was storming into a room and flipping tables on to the money changers behind them. Blue, however, had clearly thought that he was merely a callow Aglionby princeling. And in her current mood —

“I remember,” she said coolly.

“It was not my finest moment,” Henry said. “My car and I have since made amends.”

“His electric car,” Gansey inserted with subtlety, in case Blue had missed the environmental ramifications.