If Blue was to kiss her true love, he would die.
(...)
Until she was eleven, Blue was convinced she would silently contract an infectious disease. One press of her lips to her hypothetical soulmate and he, too, would die in a consumptive battle untreatable by modern medicine. When she was thirteen, Blue decided that jealousy would kill him instead — an old boyfriend emerging at the moment of that first kiss, bearing a handgun and a heart full of hurt.
When she turned fifteen, Blue concluded that her mother’s tarot cards were just a pack of playing cards and that the dreams of her mother and the other clairvoyant women were fueled by mixed drinks rather than otherworldly insight, and so the prediction didn’t matter.
(...)
And by sixteen, Blue had decided she would never fall in love, so it didn’t matter.

It became a game, a challenge, to realize the exact moment that the predictions came true. When a van carrying six people wheeled into a client`s car two hours after his psychic reading, he could nod with a sense of accomplishment and release. When a neighbour offered to buy another client1s old lawnmower if she was looking for a bit of extra cash, she could recall the promise of money coming and sell it with a sense that the transaction had been foretold. Or when a third client heard his wife say, This is a decision that has to be made, he could remember the same words being said by Maura Sargent over a spread of tarot cards and then leap decisively to action.

They stared at him, just feet away from Ronan. Really, he was so much less real than Ronan, Adam thought — it should have been obvious. It was ludicrous that they hadn’t noticed. Ridiculous that they had not thought about his last name, about where he came from, about the classes he did or did not go to. His clammy hands, his pristine room, his unchanging smudgy face. He had been dead as long as they’d known him.
Reality was a bridge breaking beneath Adam.
“Shit, man,” Ronan said, finally. A little desperate. “All those nights you gave me grief about keeping you awake, and you don’t even need to sleep.”

Gansey’s invented apartment was a dreamer’s laboratory. The entire second floor, thousands of square feet, spread out before them. Two of the walls were made up of old windows — dozens of tiny, warped panes, except for a few clear ones Gansey had replaced — and the other two walls were covered with maps: the mountains of Virginia, of Wales, of Europe. Marker lines arced across each of them. Across the floor, a telescope peered at the western sky; at its feet lay piles of arcane electronics meant to measure magnetic activity.
And everywhere, everywhere, there were books. Not the tidy stacks of an intellectual attempting to impress, but the slumping piles of a scholar obsessed. Some of the books weren’t in English. Some of the books were dictionaries for the languages that some of the other books were in. Some of the books were actually Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Editions.
Adam felt the familiar pang. Not jealousy, just wanting. One day, he’d have enough money to have a place like this. A place that looked on the outside like Adam looked on the inside.